The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter III

[ 1 ] My father had been promised by the management of the Southern Railway Company that he would be appointed to a small station near Vienna when I graduated from secondary school and went to technical college. This would give me the opportunity to travel to Vienna and back every day. So my family came to Inzersdorf am Wiener Berge. The station stood there, far away from the town, in complete solitude in an unsightly natural setting.

[ 2 ] My first visit to Vienna after arriving in Inzersdorf was used to buy a large number of philosophical books. The one to which my particular love turned was the first draft of Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre". I had got so far with my reading of Kant that I could form an idea, albeit an immature one, of the step Fichte wanted to take beyond Kant. But that didn't interest me too much. What mattered to me at that time was to express the living weaving of the human soul in the form of a strict conceptual image. My efforts to develop scientific concepts had finally led me to see the activity of the human "I" as the only possible starting point for true knowledge. If the ego is active and looks at this activity itself, then one has a spiritual in all immediacy in consciousness, so I said to myself. I thought that all one had to do now was to express what one sees in clear, manageable terms. To find the way to do this, I followed Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre". But I still had my own views. And so I went through the "Wissenschaftslehre" page by page and rewrote it. The result was a long manuscript. Previously, I had struggled to find concepts for natural phenomena from which one could find one for the "I". Now, conversely, I wanted to break into the becoming of nature from the ego. Spirit and nature stood before my soul in full opposition. A world of spiritual beings existed for me. The fact that the "I", which is itself spirit, lives in a world of spirits was a direct observation for me. Nature, however, did not want to enter the spiritual world I experienced.

[ 3 ] Based on the "Wissenschaftslehre", I became particularly interested in Fichte's treatises "Über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten" and "Über das Wesen des Gelehrten". In these writings I found a kind of ideal to which I wanted to aspire myself. I also read the "Speeches to the German Nation". At the time, they captivated me much less than Fichte's other works.

[ 4 ] However, I also wanted to gain a better understanding of Kant than I had been able to so far. However, the Critique of Pure Reason did not provide me with this understanding. So I took it up with the "Prolegomena to any future metaphysics". This book made me realize that it was necessary for me to thoroughly address all the questions that Kant had stimulated in the thinkers. I now worked more and more consciously on casting the immediate view I had of the spiritual world into the form of thoughts. And while this inner work filled me, I tried to orient myself on the paths taken by the thinkers of Kant's time and those of the following epoch. I studied Traugott Krug's dry, sober "transcendental synthetism" just as eagerly as I immersed myself in the epistemology that Fichte had arrived at when he wrote his "Determination of Man". The "History of Philosophy" by the Herbartian Thilo broadened my view of the development of philosophical thought from the time of Kant. I made my way to Schelling and Hegel. The contrast of thought in Fichte and Herbart came before my soul with all its intensity.

[ 5 ] The summer months of 1879, from the end of my secondary school years until I entered the technical college, were spent entirely on such philosophical studies. In the fall I was to decide on the direction of a bread-and-butter course of study. I decided to work towards becoming a secondary school teacher. Studying mathematics and descriptive geometry suited my inclination. I had to give up the latter. Because its study was connected with a number of hours of practice in geometric drawing during the day. But in order to earn some money, I had to have time to give private lessons. This was compatible with listening to lectures whose material you could read up on if you had to miss them, but not with regularly sitting through the drawing lessons at school myself.

[ 6 ] So I initially enrolled in mathematics, natural history and chemistry.

[ 7 ] But the lectures Karl Julius Schröer gave on German literature at the technical college were of particular importance to me. In the first year of my university studies, he lectured on "German Literature since Goethe" and on "Schiller's Life and Works". I was captivated from his very first lecture. He developed an overview of German intellectual life in the second half of the eighteenth century and dramatized Goethe's first appearance in this intellectual life. The warmth of his treatment, the enthusiastic way in which he read from the poets during the lectures, introduced us to the poetry in an internalized way.

[ 8 ] He had also set up "exercises in oral and written presentation". The students were supposed to present or read out what they had worked out themselves. Schröer then gave instructions on style, presentation form etc. based on the students' performance. I first gave a lecture on Lessing's Laocoon. Then I set myself a bigger task. I worked out the topic: To what extent is man a free being in his actions? In the course of this work, I became heavily involved in Herbartian philosophy. Schröer didn't like that at all. He didn't go along with the trend in favor of Herbart, which was the prevailing trend in Austria at the time, both in the philosophical pulpits and in pedagogy. He was completely devoted to Goethe's way of thinking. Everything that followed on from Herbart seemed pedantic and sober to him, even though he recognized the discipline of thought in him.

[ 9 ] I was now also able to listen to individual lectures at the university. I was really looking forward to the Herbertian Robert Zimmermann. He read "Practical Philosophy". I listened to the part of his lectures in which he discussed the basic principles of ethics. I alternated between sitting with him one day and Franz Brentano the next, who was reading on the same subject at the same time. I couldn't continue this for too long because I missed too much at the technical college as a result.

[ 10 ] I was deeply impressed to learn about philosophy not just from books, but to hear it from the mouths of philosophers themselves.

[ 11 ] Robert Zimmermann was a strange personality. He had an unusually high forehead and a long philosopher's beard. Everything about him was measured, stylized. When he came in the door, when he stepped up to the catheter, his steps were as if rehearsed and yet again in such a way that one said to oneself: it is natural for the man to be like this. His posture and movements were as if he had formed himself in long discipline according to Herbartian aesthetic principles. And you could really sympathize with it all. He then sat down slowly on his chair, looked through his glasses at the auditorium for a long time, then slowly took off his glasses, looked again at the audience for a long time without looking back, then began his lecture in free speech, but in carefully formed, artfully spoken sentences. There was something classical about his language. But because of the long periods of listening, it was easy to lose the thread of his presentation. He presented Herbart's philosophy in a somewhat modified form. The rigor of his train of thought made an impression on me. But not on the other listeners. In the first three or four lectures, the large hall in which he lectured was overcrowded. "Practical Philosophy" was a compulsory lecture for first-year law students. They needed the professor's signature in the index. From the fifth or sixth hour onwards, most of them stayed away; listening to the philosophical classic, there were only very few listeners on the front benches.

[ 12 ] These lectures did provide me with a strong stimulus. And I was deeply interested in the differences between Schröer's and Zimmermann's views. I spent the little time I had left from listening to the lectures and the private lessons I had to give either in the court library or in the library of the technical college. There I read Goethe's "Faust" for the first time. I had not actually got as far as this work until my nineteenth year, when I was inspired by Schröer. At that time, however, my interest in the work was immediately aroused. Schröer had already published his edition of the first part. It was from it that I first became acquainted with the first part. In addition, I became acquainted with Schröer after just a few of his lectures. He often took me to his house, said this or that to me in addition to his lectures, gladly answered my questions and left me with a book from his library, which he lent me to read. He also said a few words about the second part of "Faust", which he was currently working on publishing and explaining. I also read this at that time.

[ 13 ] In the libraries, I studied Herbart's "Metaphysics" and Zimmermann's "Aesthetics as a Science of Form", which was written from Herbart's point of view. I also studied Ernst Haeckel's "General Morphology" in depth. I may well say that everything I encountered through Schröer's and Zimmermann's lectures, as well as through the marked reading, became the deepest experience of my soul at that time. Knowledge and worldview puzzles were formed for me.

[ 14 ] Schröer was a mind that was not interested in systematics. He thought and spoke from a certain intuition. He had the greatest possible respect for the way in which he put his views into words. It was probably for this reason that he never spoke freely in his lectures. He needed the peace of writing to satisfy himself in the transformation of his thoughts into the word to be spoken. He then read out what he had written with a strong internalization of the speech. But - once he spoke freely about Anastasius Grün and Lenau. He had forgotten his manuscript. But in the next lesson he read the whole subject again. He was not satisfied with the form he had been able to give it in free speech.

[ 15 ] I got to know many works of beauty from Schröer. Through Zimmermann, I was introduced to a developed theory of beauty. The two did not go well together. Schröer, the intuitive personality with a certain disdain for the systematic, stood for me next to Zimmermann, the strict systematic theorist of beauty.

[ 16 ] In Franz Brentano, with whom I also attended lectures on "practical philosophy", I was particularly interested in his personality at the time. He was sharp-thinking and pensive at the same time. There was something solemn in the way he presented himself as a lecturer. I heard what he said, but had to pay attention to every look, every movement of his head, every gesture of his expressive hands. He was the consummate logician. Every thought had to be absolutely transparent and supported by numerous others. The greatest logical conscientiousness prevailed in the forming of these lines of thought. But I had the feeling that this thinking could not escape from its own weaving; it did not break into reality anywhere. And so was Brentano's whole posture. He held the manuscript loosely in his hand, as if it might slip from his fingers at any moment; he only glanced at the lines. This gesture, too, was only a gentle touch of reality, not a firm grasp. I could understand the nature of his philosophizing even more from his "philosopher's hands" than from his words.

[ 17 ] The inspiration that Brentano gave me had a strong effect on me. I soon began to study his writings and in later years I read most of what he published.

[ 18 ] I considered it my duty at the time to seek the truth through philosophy. I should study mathematics and science. I was convinced that I would not be able to relate to them if I could not place their results on a secure philosophical foundation. But I did see a spiritual world as reality. The spiritual individuality of every human being revealed itself to me with great vividness. This only had its manifestation in the physical body and in the actions in the physical world. It united with that which came from the parents as a physical germ. I continued to follow the deceased person on his path into the spiritual world. After the death of a fellow pupil, I once wrote to one of my former teachers, who remained close to me as a friend even after my time at secondary school, about this side of my spiritual life. He wrote back to me with unusual kindness, but didn't acknowledge what I wrote about the deceased classmate at all.

[ 19 ] And so it was everywhere with my view of the spiritual world. People didn't want to hear anything about it. At most, all sorts of spiritualistic things came from this or that side. Again, I didn't want to hear anything. It seemed tasteless to me to approach the spiritual in such a way.

[ 20 ] Then it happened that I became acquainted with a simple man from the people. He traveled to Vienna every week on the same train that I used. He collected medicinal herbs in the countryside and sold them to pharmacies in Vienna. We became friends. You could talk to him about the spiritual world like someone who had experience of it. He was an inwardly pious personality. He was uneducated in all things scholastic. He had read many mystical books, but what he said was completely uninfluenced by this reading. It was the outpouring of a soul life that carried a completely elementary, creative wisdom. One could soon sense that he only read the books because he wanted to find in others what he knew through himself. But it did not satisfy him. He revealed himself as if he, as a personality, were only the organ of speech for a spiritual content that wanted to speak from hidden worlds. When you were with him, you could look deep into the secrets of nature. He carried his bundle of medicinal herbs on his back; but in his heart he carried the results he had gained from the spirituality of nature during his collecting. I have seen many a person smile, who sometimes joined me as a third person, when I walked with this "initiate" through Vienna's Alleegasse. That was no wonder. Because his way of speaking was not understandable from the outset. You first had to learn his "intellectual dialect", so to speak. I couldn't understand him at first either. But from the first time I met him, I had the deepest sympathy for him. And so, little by little, I felt as if I were with a soul from very ancient times who, untouched by the civilization, science and views of the present, brought me an instinctive knowledge of the past.

[ 21 ] If you take the usual concept of "learning", you could say that you could "learn" nothing from this man. But if one had the perception of a spiritual world oneself, one could gain deep insights into it through another person who was completely established in it.

[ 22 ] And yet this personality was far removed from everything that was rapture. When you entered his home, you were in the company of the most sober, simple country family. Above the door of his house were the words: "Everything is in God's blessing." You were entertained like other villagers. I always had to drink coffee, not from a cup, but from a "mug" that held almost a liter; I also had to eat a piece of bread that was huge. But even the villagers didn't see the man as a crush. The way he conducted himself in his hometown defied all ridicule. He also had a healthy sense of humor and knew how to talk to young and old in the village at every encounter in such a way that people enjoyed his words. Nobody smiled like the people who walked with him and me through the Alleegasse in Vienna and who mostly saw something in him that seemed completely alien to them. Even when life took me away from him again, this man remained close to my soul. You can find him in my mystery dramas in the form of Felix Balde.

[ 23 ] It was not easy for my soul life at that time that the philosophy I heard from others could not be brought close to the view of the spiritual world in its thinking. From the difficulties I experienced in this direction, a kind of "theory of knowledge" began to form in me. Life in thinking gradually appeared to me as the reflection in the physical human being of what the soul experiences in the spiritual world. Thought-experience was to me the existence in a reality that could not be approached as a thoroughly experienced reality. The world of the senses did not seem so tangible to me. It is there, but one does not grasp it like one grasps a thought. There may be an essential unknown in it or behind it. But man is placed within it. The question then arose: is this world a full reality? If man weaves thoughts into it from within himself, which then bring light into this world of the senses, does he actually add something foreign to it? That does not correspond at all to the experience one has when the world of the senses stands before man and he breaks into it with his thoughts. Then the thoughts prove to be that through which the sense world expresses itself. The further pursuit of this contemplation was then an important part of my inner life.

[ 24 ] But I wanted to be careful. It seemed dangerous to rush into a train of thought until I had formed my own philosophical view. This drove me to study Hegel in depth. The way in which this philosopher presents the reality of thought was close to me. I was repelled by the fact that he only penetrates to a world of thought, albeit a living one, and not to a view of a concrete spiritual world. I was attracted by the certainty with which one philosophizes when one progresses from thought to thought. I saw that many felt a contrast between experience and thought. To me, thinking itself was experience, but one in which one lives, not one that approaches a person from the outside. And so Hegel became very valuable to me for a long time.

[ 25 ] In my compulsory studies, which would naturally have had to be neglected under these philosophical interests, I benefited from the fact that I had already dealt a lot with differential and integral calculus, as well as analytical geometry. This allowed me to stay away from many a mathematical lecture without losing the context. Mathematics retained its importance for me as the basis of my entire quest for knowledge. After all, it provides a system of views and concepts that are independent of all external sensory experience. And yet, as I constantly told myself at the time, one approaches sensory reality with these views and concepts and finds its laws through them. Through mathematics one learns to know the world, and yet in order to achieve this, one must first allow mathematics to emerge from the human soul.

[ 26 ] A decisive experience came to me at that time precisely from the mathematical side. The idea of space presented me with the greatest inner difficulties. It could not be conceived in a manageable way as the void running into infinity on all sides, which was the basis of the prevailing scientific theories at the time. Through the newer (synthetic) geometry, which I became acquainted with through lectures and private study, the view came before my soul that a line, which is extended to the right into infinity, returns from the left to its starting point. The infinitely distant point to the right is the same as the infinitely distant point to the left.

[ 27 ] I thought that such ideas of modern geometry could be used to conceptualize space, which would otherwise stare into emptiness. The straight line returning to itself like a circle felt like a revelation to me. I walked out of the lecture in which this first came to my mind as if a hundredweight had been lifted from me. A liberating feeling came over me. Once again, as in my very young boyhood years, geometry gave me something exhilarating.

[ 28 ] After the puzzle of space, there was the puzzle of time for me at this stage of my life. Should it also be possible to imagine a progression into the "infinitely distant" future that contains an idealized return from the past? The happiness about the concept of space brought something deeply unsettling about the concept of time. But at first there was no way out. All attempts at reflection led to the realization that I had to be particularly careful not to introduce the vivid concepts of space into the concept of time. All the disappointments that the pursuit of knowledge can bring occurred with the puzzle of time.

[ 29 ] The inspiration I had received from Zimmermann for aesthetics led me to read the writings of the famous aesthete of the time, Friedrich Theodor Vischer. At one point in his works I found a reference to the fact that modern scientific thinking necessitated a reform of the concept of time. I was always particularly excited when I found a need for knowledge that arose in me in someone else. In this case, it was like a justification of my striving for a satisfactory concept of time.

[ 30 ] I always had to complete the lectures for which I was enrolled at the technical college with the corresponding examinations. This was because I had been granted a scholarship, which I could only continue to receive if I demonstrated certain academic successes every year.

[ 31 ] But this compulsory course of study did little to satisfy my need for knowledge, particularly in the natural sciences. At that time, however, it was possible to attend lectures and even tutorials as a guest student at Viennese universities. I was met with a welcoming attitude everywhere when I wanted to cultivate my academic life in this way, even in medicine.

[ 32 ] I may say that I did not allow my insights into the spiritual to interfere when it came to getting to know the natural sciences as they were developed at the time. I devoted myself to what was being taught, and only in the background did I hope that one day I would be able to unite natural science with spiritual knowledge. I was worried about this hope from only two sides.

[ 33 ] The sciences of organic nature were saturated with Darwinian ideas where I was able to deal with them. At the time, Darwinism in its highest ideas seemed to me to be a scientific impossibility. I had gradually come to form a picture of man's inner self. This was of a spiritual nature. And it was conceived as a member of a spiritual world. It was imagined in such a way that it submerged from the spiritual world into the natural world, integrating itself into the natural organism in order to perceive and act through it in the sensory world.

[ 34 ] The fact that I had a certain respect for the ideas of the organic theory of development meant that I could not be dissuaded from this view. The emergence of higher organisms from lower ones seemed to me a fruitful idea. Their unification with what I knew as the spiritual world was immeasurably difficult.

[ 35 ] The physical studies were completely interspersed with the mechanical theory of heat and the theory of waves for the phenomena of light and color.

[ 36 ] The study of the mechanical theory of heat had a personal appeal for me because I attended lectures on this field of physics given by a person whom I greatly admired. It was Edmund Reitlinger, the author of the beautiful book "Freie Blicke".

[ 37 ] This man was of the most winning amiability. When I became his listener, he was already suffering from a severe lung disease. For two years I attended his lectures on mechanical heat theory, physics for chemists and the history of physics. I worked with him in the physics laboratory in many fields, especially spectral analysis.

[ 38 ] Reitlinger's lectures on the history of physics were of particular importance to me. He spoke in such a way that one had the feeling that every word was difficult for him because of his illness. Nevertheless, his lecture was inspiring in the very best sense. He was a man of strictly inductive research; he liked to quote Whewell's book on inductive sciences for everything methodical in physics. For him, Newton was the pinnacle of physical research. He presented the history of physics in two sections: the first from the earliest times to Newton, the second from Newton to modern times. He was a universal thinker. From the historical consideration of physical problems, he always moved on to general cultural-historical perspectives. Indeed, general philosophical ideas also appeared in his scientific lectures. For example, he dealt with optimism and pessimism and spoke about the justification of scientific hypotheses in an extraordinarily inspiring way. His presentation of Kepler and his characterization of Julius Robert Mayer were masterpieces of scientific lectures.

[ 39 ] I was encouraged at the time to read almost all of Julius Robert Mayer's writings; and it was truly a great pleasure for me to be able to discuss their content with Reitlinger orally on many occasions.

[ 40 ] I was filled with great sadness when, a few weeks after I had taken my last examination in mechanical heat theory with Reitlinger, my beloved teacher succumbed to his serious illness. Shortly before his death, he had given me a legacy of recommendations for people who could provide me with students for private tuition. This was very successful. I had the dead Reitlinger to thank for a not insignificant part of the means of subsistence I received over the next few years.

[ 41 ] Through the mechanical theory of heat and the theory of waves for light phenomena and the effects of electricity, I was pushed into epistemological studies. At that time, the physical external world presented itself as the motion processes of matter. The sensations of the senses only appeared as subjective experiences, as effects of pure motion processes on the human senses. The movement processes of matter take place out there in space; when these processes meet the human sense of warmth, man experiences the sensations of warmth. There are outside the human being wave processes of the ether; if these hit the optic nerve, the perception of light and color arises within the human being.

[ 42 ] I encountered this view everywhere. It made my thinking unspeakably difficult. It drove all spirit out of the objective outside world. The idea stood before my soul that if the contemplation of natural phenomena led to such assumptions, one could not approach these assumptions with a view from the spirit. I saw how seductive these assumptions were for the school of thought that had been trained in natural science at the time. Even now, I could not decide to oppose the prevailing way of thinking even for myself. But it was precisely this that led to difficult struggles of the soul. Again and again, the easily conceivable criticism of this way of thinking had to be defeated inwardly in order to await the time when further sources of knowledge and paths of knowledge would provide greater certainty.

[ 43 ] I received a strong stimulus from reading Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man". The reference to the fact that human consciousness swings back and forth between different states, as it were, provided a link to the image I had formed of the inner workings and weaving of the human soul. Schiller distinguishes between two states of consciousness in which man develops his relationship to the world. If he abandons himself to what works in him sensually, he lives under the compulsion of nature. The senses and the instincts determine his life. If he places himself under the logical laws of reason, he lives in a spiritual necessity. But he can develop a medium state of consciousness within himself. It can develop the "aesthetic mood", which is neither one-sidedly devoted to the necessity of nature nor to the necessity of reason. In this aesthetic mood, the soul lives through the senses; but it carries a spiritual element into sensual perception and into the actions stimulated by sensuality. One perceives with the senses, but as if the spiritual had flowed into the senses. In acting we abandon ourselves to the pleasure of immediate desire, but we have refined this desire in such a way that it likes the good and dislikes the bad. The good becomes instinct; instinct is allowed to give itself direction because it has taken on the character of spirituality. Schiller sees in this state of consciousness the constitution of the soul through which man can experience and produce the works of beauty. In the development of this state, he finds the revival of the true human being in man.

[ 44 ] I was attracted by these Schillerian trains of thought. They spoke of the fact that one must first have consciousness in a certain state in order to gain a relationship to the phenomena of the world that corresponds to the essence of man. This gave me something that brought the questions that arose for me from the observation of nature and the experience of the spirit into greater clarity. Schiller spoke of the state of consciousness that must exist in order to experience the beauty of the world. Could one not also think of such a state of consciousness that conveys the truth in the essence of things? If this is justified, then one cannot look at the initially given human consciousness in the Kantian manner and investigate whether it can approach the true essence of things. Rather, one must first investigate the state of consciousness through which man places himself in such a relationship to the world that things and facts reveal their essence to him.

[ 45 ] And I believed to recognize that such a state of consciousness is reached to a certain degree when man has not only thoughts that depict external things and processes, but those that he experiences as thoughts themselves. This life in thought revealed itself to me as being quite different from that in which one spends ordinary existence and also ordinary scientific research. If one goes further and further in the experience of thought, one finds that this experience is met by spiritual reality. One takes the path of the soul to the spirit. But on this inner path of the soul one arrives at a spiritual reality, which one then also finds again in the interior of nature. One attains a deeper knowledge of nature by confronting nature when one has seen the reality of the spirit in living thought.

[ 46 ] I realized more and more clearly how, by moving beyond ordinary abstract thoughts to those spiritual visions which nevertheless retain the prudence and brightness of thought, man becomes immersed in a reality from which ordinary consciousness distances him. This has the vividness of sense perception on the one hand, and the abstractness of thought-imaging on the other. Spiritual vision perceives the spirit as the senses perceive nature; but it is not distant from spiritual perception with its thinking as ordinary consciousness is from sense perception with its thinking, but it thinks by experiencing the spiritual, and it experiences by bringing the awakened spirituality in man to thought.

[ 47 ] A spiritual vision presented itself to my soul that was not based on a dark mystical feeling. Rather, it proceeded in a spiritual activity that could be fully compared to mathematical thinking in terms of transparency. I approached a state of mind in which I could believe that I could consider the view of the spiritual world that I carried within me to be justified even in the forum of scientific thought.

[ 48 ] I was in my twenty-second year when these experiences passed through my soul.