The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter V

[ 1 ] I was unable to come up with any thoughts about Austrian public life that would have penetrated my soul in any way. I simply observed the extraordinarily complicated circumstances. I could only have discussions with Karl Julius Schröer that aroused my deeper interest. I was often allowed to visit him during this time. His own fate was closely linked to that of the Germans of Austria-Hungary. He was the son of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, who ran a German lyceum in Bratislava and wrote dramas as well as historical and aesthetic books. The latter were published under the name Chr. Geser and were popular textbooks. Tobias Gottfried Schröer's poems, although undoubtedly important and highly acclaimed in a narrower circle, have not become known. The attitude they exuded was contrary to the prevailing political trend in Hungary. Some of them had to be published in other German countries without the author's name. If the author's spiritual orientation had become known in Hungary, he would not only have been dismissed from office, but would even have faced severe punishment.

[ 2 ] Karl Julius Schröer thus experienced the pressure on Germanism in his own home even in his youth. It was under this pressure that he developed his intimate devotion to German nature and German literature, as well as a great love for everything about Goethe. The "History of German Poetry" by Gervinus had a profound influence on him.

[ 3 ] He went to Germany in the forties of the nineteenth century to study German language and literature at the universities of Leipzig, Halle and Berlin. On his return, he initially worked at his father's lyceum as a teacher of German literature and head of a seminar. He now became acquainted with the popular Christmas plays that were performed every year by the German colonists in the area around Bratislava. German folklore was deeply sympathetic to his soul. The Germans who had immigrated to Hungary from more westerly regions centuries ago had brought these games with them from their old homeland and continued to play them in the same way as they had done around Christmas in the old days in regions that were probably located near the Rhine. The story of paradise, the birth of Christ and the appearance of the three kings came to life in a popular way in these plays. Schröer then published them under the title "German Christmas Plays from Hungary" after listening to them or inspecting the old manuscripts that he had seen among the peasants.

[ 4 ] The loving immersion in German folklore increasingly occupied Schröer's soul. He traveled to study the German dialects in various parts of Austria. Wherever German folklore was scattered in the Slavic, Magyar and Italian parts of the Danube Monarchy, he wanted to get to know its characteristics. This resulted in his dictionaries and grammars of the Spiš dialect, which was native to the south of the Carpathians, the Gortscheer dialect, which was spoken by a small German population in Carniola, and the Heanzen language, which was spoken in western Hungary.

[ 5 ] For Schröer, these studies were never a purely academic task. He lived with his whole soul in the revelations of the folklore and wanted to bring its essence through word and writing to the consciousness of those people who had been torn out of it by life. He then became a professor in Budapest. There he could not feel at ease with the prevailing current of the time. So he moved to Vienna, where he was initially appointed head of the Protestant schools and later became professor of German language and literature. When he already held this position, I had the opportunity to meet him and get to know him better. At the time this happened, his whole life and mind was devoted to Goethe. He was working on the edition and introduction of the second part of "Faust" and had already had the first part published.

[ 6 ] When I visited Schröer's small library, which was also his study, I felt myself in a spiritual atmosphere that did my soul a great deal of good. Even then I was aware of how Schröer's writings, in particular his "Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert" (History of German Poetry in the Nineteenth Century), were the subject of hostility from the proponents of the literary-historical methods that had become dominant. He did not write like the members of the Scherer school, for example, who treated literary phenomena like a natural scientist. He carried within him certain feelings and ideas about literary phenomena and expressed them in a purely human way, without focusing much on the "sources" at the time of writing. It has even been said that he wrote his account "off the cuff".

[ 7 ] I didn't care much about that. I warmed up mentally when I was with him. I was allowed to sit by his side for hours. Christmas plays, the spirit of German dialects and the course of literary life came to life from his enthusiastic heart in his oral presentation. The relationship between the dialect and the language of education became practically clear to me. I was truly delighted when he told me, as he had already done in lectures, about the poet in the Lower Austrian dialect, Joseph Misson, who wrote the wonderful poem "Da Naaz, a Niederösterreichischer Baurnbua, geht ind Fremd". Schröer always gave me books from his library so that I could follow the content of the conversation. Whenever I sat alone with Schröer, I always had the feeling that a third person was present: Goethe's spirit. For Schröer lived so strongly in Goethe's nature and works that he asked himself emotionally with every feeling or idea that arose in his soul: Would Goethe have felt or thought like this?

[ 8 ] I listened mentally with the greatest sympathy to everything that came from Schröer. Nevertheless, I could not help but build up in my own soul, quite independently, what I was striving for spiritually and intimately. Schröer was an idealist; and for him, the world of ideas as such was the driving force behind the creation of nature and mankind. For me, the idea was the shadow of a fully alive spiritual world. At the time, I even found it difficult to put into words the difference between Schröer's and my way of thinking. He spoke of ideas as the driving forces in history. He felt life in the existence of ideas. For me, the life of the spirit was behind the ideas, and these were only its manifestation in the human soul. At the time, I could find no other word for my way of thinking than "objective idealism". I meant to say that for me the essential thing about the idea is not that it appears in the human subject, but that it appears in the spiritual object, like color in the sensory being, and that the human soul - the subject - perceives it there as the eye perceives color in a living being.

[ 9 ] However, Schröer's form of expression met my view to a high degree when we discussed what reveals itself as the "people's soul". He spoke of it as a real spiritual being that lives itself out in the totality of the individual people who belong to a nation. His words took on a character that did not merely refer to an abstract idea. And so we both looked at the structure of the old Austria and the individualities of the people's souls at work within it. - From this perspective, it was possible for me to formulate thoughts about public conditions that had a deeper impact on my mental life.

[ 10 ] So my experience at that time was very strongly connected with my relationship to Karl Julius Schröer. But what was further away from him, and what I was primarily striving for an inner confrontation with, was the natural sciences. I also wanted my "objective idealism" to be in harmony with the knowledge of nature.

[ 11 ] It was at the time of my liveliest contact with Schröer that the question of the relationship between the spiritual and natural world came before my mind in a new way. At first this happened quite independently of Goethe's scientific way of thinking. For even Schröer could not tell me anything decisive about this area of Goethe's work. He was pleased when he found a benevolent recognition of Goethe's observation of plant and animal life from this or that natural scientist. However, Goethe's theory of color met with decisive rejection everywhere among those educated in the natural sciences. He therefore did not develop any particular opinion in this direction.

[ 12 ] My relationship to natural science was not influenced by this side during this period of my life, although I came close to Goethe's intellectual life in my dealings with Schröer. Rather, it was formed by the difficulties I had when I had to think about the facts of optics in the sense of the physicists.

[ 13 ] I found that light and sound were thought of in scientific terms in an analogy that was inadmissible. One spoke of "sound in general" and "light in general". The analogy lay in the following: the individual tones and sounds were regarded as specially modified air vibrations, and the objective of sound, apart from the human experience of the sensation of sound, as a state of vibration of the air. Light was thought of in a similar way. What takes place outside the human being when he perceives a phenomenon caused by light was defined as a vibration in the ether. The colors are then specially formed ether vibrations. At the time, this analogy became a real tormentor of my spiritual life. For I thought I was fully aware that the term "sound" was only an abstract summary of the individual occurrences in the sounding world, while "light" in itself represents something concrete in relation to the phenomena in the illuminated world. - For me, "sound" was a summarized abstract concept, "light" a concrete reality. I told myself that light is not perceived sensually at all; "colors" are perceived through light, which reveals itself everywhere in the perception of color, but is not itself perceived sensually. "White" light is not light, but already a color.

[ 14 ] So light became a real entity in the sensory world, but it is itself extrasensory. The contrast between nominalism and realism now appeared before my soul, as it had developed within scholasticism. The realists claimed that the concepts were essentials that lived in things and were only extracted from them by human cognition. The nominalists, on the other hand, saw concepts only as names formed by man, which summarize the manifold in things but have no existence in these things themselves. I now felt that one had to look at sound experiences in a nominalistic way and the experiences that exist through light in a realistic way.

[ 15 ] I approached the optics of the physicists with this orientation. I had to reject many things. Then I arrived at views that paved the way for me to Goethe's theory of colors. From this side I opened the door to Goethe's scientific writings. At first I brought small treatises to Schröer, which I wrote based on my scientific views. He couldn't do much with them. For they had not yet been worked out from Goethe's way of looking at things, but at the end I only made the brief remark that when people would come to think about nature in the way I had presented it, only then would Goethe's research into nature be done justice in science. Schröer was delighted when I said such things, but it did not go beyond that at first. The situation in which I found myself is probably characterized by the following incident. Schröer told me one day that he had spoken to a colleague who was a physicist. Yes, he said, Goethe had rebelled against Newton, and Newton was "such a genius"; to which he, Schröer, replied: but Goethe was "also a genius". So once again I felt completely alone with a puzzling question that I was wrestling with.

[ 16 ] The insights I gained into physical optics seemed to me to build a bridge from the insights into the spiritual world to those that come from scientific research. At the time, I felt the need to test the thoughts I had formed about the nature of light and color against sensory experience by designing certain optical experiments myself. It was not easy for me to buy the things that were necessary for such experiments. For the means acquired through private tuition were meagre enough. I did what I could to arrive at experimental arrangements for the theory of light that could really lead to an unprejudiced insight into the facts of nature in this field.

[ 17 ] I was familiar with the usual experimental arrangements of physicists through my work in Reitlinger's physical laboratory. I was familiar with the mathematical treatment of optics, as I had carried out detailed studies in this field. - Despite all the objections raised by physicists against Goethe's theory of color, I was driven more and more by my own experiments away from the conventional physical view towards Goethe. I became aware of how all such experimentation was only a production of facts "on light" - to use Goethe's expression - and not experimentation "with light" itself. I said to myself: color is not brought out of light in the Newtonian way of thinking; it appears when light is confronted with obstacles to its free unfolding. It seemed to me that this could be read directly from the experiments.

[ 18 ] Thus, however, light was eliminated from the series of actual physical entities. It presented itself as an intermediate stage between the entities that can be grasped by the senses and those that can be seen in the mind.

[ 19 ] I was reluctant to engage in merely philosophical thought processes about these things. But I was very keen to read the facts of nature correctly. And then it became increasingly clear to me how light itself does not enter the realm of the sensible, but remains beyond it, while colors appear when the sensible is brought into the realm of light.

[ 20 ] I now felt compelled to approach scientific knowledge from various angles. I was led back to the study of anatomy and physiology. I looked at the limbs of the human, animal and plant organism in their forms. This led me to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis in my own way. I became more and more aware of how the image of nature that could be grasped by the senses pushed towards that which was visible to me in a spiritual way.

[ 21 ] When I looked in this spiritual way at the mental activity of the human being, at thinking, feeling and willing, the "spiritual human being" took shape for me to the point of pictorial vividness. I could not stop at the abstractions that one usually thinks of when one speaks of thinking, feeling and willing. I saw in these inner revelations of life creative forces that placed the "human being as spirit" before me in my mind. When I then looked at the sensual appearance of the human being, it was complemented by the spiritual form that reigns in the sensually visible.

[ 22 ] I came upon the sensuous-supersensible form of which Goethe speaks, and which interposes itself both for a truly natural and for a spiritual contemplation between the sensually comprehensible and the spiritually comprehensible.

[ 23 ] Anatomy and physiology pushed step by step towards this sensual-supersensible form. And in this urge my gaze first fell in a still quite imperfect way on the threefold structure of the human being, of which I only began to speak publicly in my book "Von Seelenrätsel" after I had quietly studied it for thirty years. At first it became clear to me that in that part of the human organization in which the formation is most oriented towards the nervous and sensory, the sensual-supersensible form is also most strongly expressed in the sensory-visible. The head organization seemed to me to be the one in which the sensual-supersensible is also most strongly manifested in the sensual form. The organization of the limbs, on the other hand, I had to regard as the one in which the sensual-supersensible is most concealed, so that in it the forces active in extra-human nature continue into human formation. Between these poles of human organization seemed to me to stand everything that lives in a rhythmic way, the respiratory and circulatory organization, etc.

[ 24 ] I found no one at that time to whom I could have spoken of these views. If I hinted at them here or there, they were regarded as the result of a philosophical idea, whereas I was certain that they had revealed themselves to me out of an unprejudiced anatomical and physiological knowledge of experience.

[ 25 ] In the mood that weighed on my soul from such isolation with views, I only found inner relief by reading again and again the conversation that Goethe had had with Schiller when the two left a meeting of the natural history society in Jena together. They both agreed that nature should not be viewed in such a fragmented way as had been done by the botanist Batsch in the lecture they had heard. And Goethe drew his "original plant" before Schiller's eyes with a few strokes. It depicted the plant as a whole through a sensual, supersensible form, from which the leaf, flower etc. emerge, reproducing the whole in detail. Because of his Kantian point of view, which had not yet been overcome at the time, Schiller could only see in this "whole" an "idea" that human reason forms by observing the details. Goethe did not want to accept this. He "saw" the whole spiritually, just as he saw the particulars sensually. And he did not admit any difference in principle between spiritual and sensual perception, but only a transition from one to the other. It was clear to him that both claim to stand in experiential reality. But Schiller could not get away from claiming that the primordial plant was not an experience but an idea. Goethe then replied out of his way of thinking that he then saw his ideas with his eyes before him.

[ 26 ] For me, it was the calming of a long struggle in my soul that came to me from understanding these words of Goethe, which I believed I had penetrated. Goethe's view of nature presented itself to my soul as a spiritual one.

[ 27 ] I now had to work through Goethe's scientific writings in every detail, driven by an inner necessity. At first I did not think of attempting an explanation of these writings, as I soon published in the introductions to them in "Kürschners Deutscher Nationalliteratur". Rather, I was thinking of independently presenting some area of natural science in the way that I now envisioned this science as "spiritually appropriate".

[ 28 ] In order to really achieve this, my external life was not organized at that time. I had to give private lessons in a wide variety of areas. The "pedagogical" situations I had to find my way into were varied enough. Once, for example, a Prussian officer turned up in Vienna who had had to leave the German army for some reason. He wanted to prepare himself to join the Austrian army as a genius officer. By a special twist of fate, I became his teacher in mathematics and the natural sciences. This "teaching" gave me the deepest satisfaction. For my "pupil" was an extraordinarily amiable man, who urged human conversation with me when we had completed the mathematical and mechanical developments he needed for his preparation. - In other cases too, such as with graduating students preparing for their doctoral exams, I had to impart the mathematical and scientific knowledge in particular.

[ 29 ] This compulsion to repeatedly work through the natural sciences of the time gave me ample opportunity to familiarize myself with the views of the time in this field. After all, I could only convey these views of the times in my teaching; I had to keep what was most important to me in terms of knowledge of nature quietly locked away inside me.

[ 30 ] My activity as a private teacher, which was my only opportunity in life at that time, saved me from one-sidedness; I had to learn many things myself in order to be able to teach them. So I familiarized myself with the "secrets" of bookkeeping because I had the opportunity to give lessons in this particular field.

[ 31 ] I also received the most fruitful inspiration from Schröer in the field of pedagogical thinking. He had worked as director of the Protestant schools in Vienna for many years and expressed his experiences in the amiable booklet "Unterrichtsfragen". What I read in it could then be discussed with him. With regard to education and teaching, he often spoke against the mere teaching of knowledge and in favor of the development of the whole, full human being.