The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter VI

[ 1 ] In the field of education, fate brought me a special task. I was recommended as an educator to a family with four boys. I only had to give three of them preparatory primary school lessons and then tutoring for secondary school. The fourth, who was about ten years old, was initially handed over to me for his complete education. He was the problem child of his parents, especially his mother. When I came into the house, he had barely acquired the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic. He was considered abnormal in his physical and mental development to such an extent that the family doubted his educational ability. His thinking was slow and sluggish. Even slight mental exertion caused headaches, a reduction in vital activity, paleness and worrying mental behavior.

[ 2 ] After getting to know the child, I formed the judgment that an education appropriate to this physical and mental organism must awaken the dormant abilities; and I suggested to the parents that they leave the education to me. The boy's mother had confidence in this suggestion, and so I was able to take on this special pedagogical task.

[ 3 ] I had to find access to a soul that was initially in a sleep-like state and that could gradually be brought to gain control over the body's expressions. To a certain extent, the soul first had to be switched into the body. I was imbued with the belief that the boy had hidden, but even great spiritual abilities. This made my task a deeply satisfying one. I was soon able to bring the child to a loving attachment to me. This had the effect that the mere contact with him awakened the dormant abilities of his soul. I had to devise special methods for teaching. Every quarter of an hour that went beyond a certain amount of time allotted to teaching had a detrimental effect on my health. It was very difficult for the boy to relate to some subjects.

[ 4 ] This educational task became a rich source of learning for me. The teaching practice that I had to apply gave me an insight into the connection between the spiritual and the physical in people. That's when I did my actual studies in physiology and psychology. I became aware of how education and teaching must become an art based on real knowledge of the human being. I had to carefully implement an economic principle. I often had to prepare for half a lesson for two hours in order to organize the subject matter in such a way that I could reach the boy's maximum potential in the shortest possible time and with the least possible strain on his mental and physical strength. The order of the subjects had to be carefully considered and the entire daily schedule had to be properly determined. I was satisfied that the boy had caught up on his elementary school lessons in the course of two years and was able to pass the grammar school entrance examination. His health had also improved considerably. The hydrocephaly that had been present was in strong remission. I was able to suggest to the parents that the boy should be sent to public school. It seemed necessary to me that he should find his life development in association with other boys. I remained as educator in the family for several years and devoted myself particularly to this boy, who was completely dependent on making his way through school in such a way that his domestic activities were continued in the spirit in which they had begun. I had reason to further my knowledge of Greek and Latin in the way I mentioned earlier, because I had to provide extra tuition for the grammar school lessons of this and another boy in the family.

[ 5 ] I must be grateful to fate for having brought me into such a life situation. For it gave me a vivid knowledge of the human condition, which I believe I could not have acquired so vividly in any other way. I was also accepted into the family in an unusually loving way; a beautiful community of life developed with them. The boy's father worked as an agent for Indian and American cotton. I was able to gain an insight into the business and much of what was involved. This also taught me a lot. I saw into the management of an extremely interesting import business, was able to observe the dealings between business associates, the interlinking of various commercial and industrial activities.

[ 6 ] My fosterling was able to pass through grammar school; I stayed by his side until he was a junior high school student. By then he was so far advanced that he no longer needed me. After finishing grammar school, he went to medical school, became a doctor and as such became a victim of the world war. His mother, who had become a loyal friend to me through my work for her son and who clung to this troubled child with the deepest love, soon died after him. The father had already left the earth earlier.

[ 7 ] A good part of my youthful life is linked to the task that was so important to me. For several years, I went to Lake Attersee in the Salzkammergut with the family of the children I was raising every summer and got to know the beautiful alpine nature of Upper Austria. Gradually, I was able to get rid of the private lessons with others that I had initially continued during this educational activity, leaving me time to continue my studies.

[ 8 ] In my life before I joined this family, I had little opportunity to take part in children's games. And so it was that my "playtime" only came in my twenties. I also had to learn how to play. Because I had to lead the games. And I did it with great satisfaction. In fact, I don't think I played any less in life than other people. It's just that from the age of three to twenty-eight, I made up for what one usually accomplishes in this direction before the age of ten.

[ 9 ] During this time, I was occupied with Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy. I studied his "epistemology", which constantly stirred up contradiction in me. The opinion that the truly real as the unconscious lies beyond the experiences of consciousness, and that these should be nothing more than an unreal, pictorial reflection of the real, was deeply repugnant to me. I countered this with the fact that the experiences of consciousness can submerge into the truly real through the inner strengthening of the soul life. I was clear about the fact that the divine-spiritual reveals itself in man when man makes this revelation possible through his inner life.

[ 10 ] Eduard von Hartmann's pessimism seemed to me to be the result of a completely wrong approach to human life. I had to understand man in such a way that he strives towards the goal of fetching from the source of his inner being that which fulfills life for his satisfaction. If, I said to myself, a "best life" were allotted to man from the outset by the world order, how could he make this source flow within himself? The outer world order reaches a stage of development in which it has assigned good and evil to things and facts. Only then does the human being awaken to self-consciousness and continue its development without receiving the direction to be taken in freedom from things and facts, but only from the source of being. The very raising of the question of pessimism or optimism seemed to me to violate the free nature of man. I often said to myself: how could man be the free creator of his highest happiness if a measure of happiness was assigned to him by the external world order?

[ 11 ] Hartmann's work "Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness", on the other hand, attracted me. There, I found, the moral development of humanity is traced along the lines of what can be observed empirically. It is not, as happens in Hartmann's epistemology and metaphysics, that thought speculation is directed towards an unknown being beyond the conscious, but rather that which can be experienced as morality is grasped in its appearance. And I was clear about the fact that no philosophical speculation can think beyond the appearance if it wants to get to the truly real. The phenomena of the world themselves reveal this truly real when the conscious soul is ready to grasp it. He who takes into consciousness only the sensually tangible can seek the truly existing in something beyond consciousness; he who grasps the spiritual in contemplation speaks of it as something of this world, not of something beyond it in the epistemological sense. I found Hartmann's contemplation of the moral world appealing because he completely relinquishes his otherworldly viewpoint and sticks to the observable. By delving into the phenomena to the extent that they reveal their spiritual essence, I wanted knowledge of the existing to be brought about, not by thinking about what is "behind" the phenomena.

[ 12 ] Since I always strove to perceive a human achievement according to its positive side, Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy became valuable to me, even though I disliked its basic direction and its view of life, because it illuminates many things in phenomena in a penetrating way. And even in the writings of the "philosopher of the unconscious", which I rejected in principle, I found much that was extraordinarily stimulating. And I felt the same way about Eduard von Hartmann's popular writings, which deal with cultural-historical, pedagogical and political problems. I found a "healthy" grasp of life in this pessimist that I could not find in many an optimist. It was precisely towards him that I felt what I needed: to be able to acknowledge, even if I had to disagree.

[ 13 ] I spent many a late evening at the Artersee, when I could leave my boys to their own devices and admire the stars from the balcony of the house, studying the "Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness" and the "Religious Consciousness of Mankind in the Stages of its Development". And as I read these writings, I became more and more certain about my own epistemological viewpoints.

[ 14 ] On Schröer's recommendation, Joseph Kürschner invited me in 1882 to publish Goethe's scientific writings with introductions and continuous explanations as part of the "German National Literature" that he was organizing. Schröer, who had himself taken on Goethe's dramas for this large anthology, was to provide the first of the volumes I was to edit with an introductory preface. In it, he discussed Goethe's position as a poet and thinker within modern intellectual life. He saw in the world view brought about by the scientific age that followed Goethe a fall from the intellectual heights on which Goethe had stood. The task that had fallen to me through the publication of Goethe's scientific writings was characterized in a comprehensive manner in this preface.

[ 15 ] For me, this task included a confrontation with natural science on the one hand, and with Goethe's entire world view on the other. Since I now had to face the public with such an argument, I had to bring everything I had acquired up to that point as a world view to a certain conclusion.

[ 16 ] Until then, I had only written a few newspaper articles. It was not easy for me to write down what lived in my soul in such a way that I could consider it worthy of publication. I always had the feeling that what I had worked out inwardly would appear in a poor form if I were to shape it into a finished representation. Thus all attempts at writing became a perpetual source of inner dissatisfaction for me.

[ 17 ] The way of thinking that had dominated natural science since the beginning of its great influence on the civilization of the nineteenth century seemed to me unsuitable for arriving at an understanding of what Goethe had striven for and, to a high degree, achieved in the knowledge of nature.

[ 18 ] I saw in Goethe a personality who, through the special spiritual relationship in which he had placed man with the world, was also in a position to place knowledge of nature in the right way in the overall field of human creativity. The way of thinking of the age into which I had grown seemed to me only suitable for forming ideas about inanimate nature. I considered it powerless to approach animate nature with the powers of cognition. I told myself that in order to attain ideas that could convey knowledge of organic nature, it was necessary to first revive the concepts of understanding that were suitable for inorganic nature. For they seemed dead to me, and therefore only suitable for grasping the dead.

[ 19 ] How the ideas came to life in Goethe's mind, how they became ideas, that is what I tried to show for an explanation of Goethe's view of nature.

[ 20 ] What Goethe had thought and worked out in detail about this or that area of knowledge of nature seemed to me to be of less importance than the central discovery that I had to attribute to him. I saw this in the fact that he had discovered how one had to think about the organic in order to approach it with knowledge.

[ 21 ] I found that mechanics satisfies the need for knowledge for the reason that it forms concepts in the human mind in a rational way, which it then realizes in the sensory experience of the inanimate. Goethe stood before me as the founder of an organics that relates to the animate in the same way. When I looked at Galileo in the history of modern intellectual life, I had to notice how he gave shape to modern natural science by developing concepts of the inorganic. What he achieved for the inorganic, Goethe strove to do for the organic. For me, Goethe became the Galileo of organics.

[ 22 ] For the first volume of Goethe's scientific writings, I initially had to work on his ideas for Metamorphoses. It was difficult for me to express how the living idea-form, through which the organic can be recognized, relates to the transformed idea, which is suitable for grasping the inorganic. But for my task, it seemed to me that everything depended on making this point clear in the right way.

[ 23 ] In recognizing the inorganic, concept is strung together in order to understand the connection of forces that produce an effect in nature. With regard to the organic, it is necessary to allow one concept to grow out of the other in such a way that in the progressive living transformation of concepts, images of what appears in nature as formed beings arise. Goethe strove to achieve this by trying to capture in his mind an image of the plant leaf that is not a rigid, lifeless concept, but one that can present itself in the most diverse forms. If one allows these forms to emerge from one another in the mind, one constructs the whole plant. One recreates in an ideal way the process in the soul through which nature forms the plant in a real way.

[ 24 ] If one seeks to comprehend the plant being in this way, one is much closer to the natural with the spirit than when grasping the inorganic with formless concepts. One grasps for the inorganic only a spiritual illusion of what is present in nature in a spiritless way. But in the development of the plant lives something that already bears a distant resemblance to that which arises in the human spirit as an image of the plant. One becomes aware of how nature, in producing the organic, itself brings spirit-like essence into effect in itself.

[ 25 ] I wanted to show in the introduction to Goethe's botanical writings that Goethe, with his theory of metamorphosis, took the direction of thinking of the organic effects of nature in a spirit-like way.

[ 26 ] For Goethe's way of thinking, the effects in animal nature and in the natural basis of the human being appear even more spirit-like.

[ 27 ] With regard to the animal-human, Goethe proceeded from seeing through an error that he had noticed in his contemporaries. They wanted to assign the organic basis of the human being a special position in nature by looking for individual distinguishing features between humans and animals. They found one in the intermaxillary bone, which animals have and in which the upper incisors are located. Humans are said to lack such a special intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw. Their upper jaw is said to consist of one piece.

[ 28 ] This appeared to Goethe to be a mistake. For him, the human form is a transformation of the animal to a higher level. Everything that appears in animal formation must also be present in human formation, only in a higher form, so that the human organism can become the bearer of the self-conscious spirit.

[ 29 ] In the elevation of the overall form of man Goethe sees its difference from the animal, not in the individual.

[ 30 ] In stages, one sees the organic creative powers becoming more spirit-like by ascending from the plant being to the various forms of the animal. Spiritual creative forces are active in the organic form of the human being, which bring about the highest metamorphosis of animal formation. These forces are present in the development of the human organism; and they ultimately manifest themselves as human spirit after they have formed a vessel in the natural basis that can receive them in their natural form of existence.

[ 31 ] In this Goethean view of the human organism, everything justified that was later said on Darwin's basis about the relationship of humans to animals seemed to me to have already been anticipated. But it also seemed to me that everything unjustified had been rejected. The materialistic view of what Darwin found leads to the formation of ideas from the kinship of man with the animals that deny the spirit where it appears in its highest form in earthly existence, in man. Goethe's view leads us to see in the animal form a creation of spirit that has not yet reached the stage at which spirit as such can live. What lives in man as spirit creates in the animal form at a preliminary stage; and it transforms this form in man in such a way that it can appear not only as something creating but also as something experiencing itself.

[ 32 ] So viewed, Goethe's view of nature becomes one that, by following the natural development from the inorganic to the organic step by step, gradually transforms natural science into a spiritual science This is what I was primarily concerned with in preparing the first volume of Goethe's natural scientific writings. I therefore concluded my introduction with an explanation of how Darwinism with its materialistic coloring forms a one-sided view that must be healthy in Goethe's way of thinking.

[ 33 ] How one must recognize in order to penetrate the phenomena of life is what I wanted to show in the contemplation of Goethe's organicism. I soon felt that this observation needed a foundation to support it. The nature of cognition was presented by my contemporaries at that time in a way that could not approach Goethe's view. The epistemologists had natural science, as it was at that time, in mind. What they said about the nature of knowledge only applied to the comprehension of inorganic nature. There could be no harmony between what I had to say about Goethe's way of knowing and the common theories of knowledge of the time.

[ 34 ] Therefore, what I had presented on the basis of Goethe's organicism drove me towards epistemology. I was confronted with views such as Otto Liebmann's, which expressed the proposition in the most diverse forms that human consciousness can never get out of itself; it must be content to live in what reality sends into the human soul and what presents itself in it in spiritual form. If one looks at the matter in this way, then one cannot speak of finding spirit-related things in organic nature in Goethe's way. One must look for the spirit within human consciousness and regard a spiritual view of nature as inadmissible.

[ 35 ] I found that there is no epistemology for Goethe's way of knowing. This led me to attempt to develop one, at least in outline. I wrote my "Epistemology of Goethe's World View" out of an inner need before I started working on the other volumes of Goethe's scientific writings. The booklet was finished in 1886.