The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XI

[ 1 ] At the end of this first phase of my life, the need arose within me to gain a clear relationship to certain orientations of the human soul. One of these orientations was mysticism. As it appeared before my soul's eye in the various epochs of humanity's spiritual development, in Oriental wisdom, in Neoplatonism, in the Christian Middle Ages, in Kabbalistic endeavors, I could, due to my particular disposition, only with difficulty gain a relationship to it.

[ 2 ] The mystic seemed to me to be a person who could not come to terms with the world of ideas in which the spiritual was presented to me. I felt that it was a lack of real spirituality if, in order to achieve spiritual satisfaction, one wanted to immerse oneself in the unimaginative inner world with ideas. I could not see this as a path to light, but rather as a path to spiritual darkness. It seemed to me like a powerlessness in cognition when the soul wants to reach the spiritual reality, which does not weave itself in the ideas but which can be experienced by man through the ideas, by fleeing from the ideas.

[ 3 ] And yet something also drew me to the mystical endeavors of humanity. It is the kind of inner experience of the mystics. They want to live together with the sources of human existence inwardly, not merely look at them through idealistic observation as something external. But it was also clear to me that one arrives at the same kind of inner experience when one immerses oneself with the full, clear content of the world of ideas in the depths of the soul, instead of stripping away this content during the immersion. I wanted to introduce the light of the world of ideas into the warmth of inner experience. The mystic seemed to me like a person who cannot see the spirit in the ideas and who therefore freezes inwardly at the ideas. The coldness that he experiences in the ideas forces him to seek the warmth that the soul needs in the liberation from the ideas.

[ 4 ] I was struck by the inner warmth of the soul's experience precisely when I shaped the initially undefined experience of the spiritual world into specific ideas. I often said to myself: how these mystics misjudge the warmth, the soul intimacy that one feels when one lives together with spirit-soaked ideas. For me, this coexistence had always been like a personal contact with the spiritual world.

[ 5 ] The mystic seemed to me to strengthen, not weaken, the position of the materialistically minded observer of nature. The latter rejects a consideration of the spiritual world, either because he does not accept such a consideration at all, or because he assumes that human cognition is only suitable for the sensually perceptible. The ordinary mystic is of the same mind as the materialist with regard to the human cognition of ideas. He maintains that ideas do not reach the spiritual, that therefore one must always remain outside the spiritual with the knowledge of ideas. But since he wants to reach the spirit after all, he turns to an inner experience free of ideas. He thus proves the materialist observer of nature right by restricting the cognition of ideas to the cognition of the merely natural.

[ 6 ] But if one goes into the inner soul without taking the ideas with one, one reaches the inner region of mere feeling. It is then said that the spiritual cannot be reached by a path that in ordinary life is called a path of knowledge. It is said that one must immerse oneself from the sphere of knowledge into that of feelings in order to experience the spiritual.

[ 7 ] The materialistic observer of nature can agree with such a view if he does not regard all talk of the spirit as a fantastic game with words that mean nothing real. He then sees in his world of ideas, which is directed towards the sensible, the only legitimate basis of knowledge and in the mystical education of man towards the spirit something purely personal, to which one is inclined or not inclined, depending on one's disposition, but of which one should in any case not speak in the same way as of the content of a "certain knowledge". Man's relationship to the spiritual must be left entirely to "subjective feeling".

[ 8 ] When I placed this before my soul's eye, the forces in my soul that were in inner opposition to mysticism became stronger and stronger. The perception of the spiritual in the inner experience of the soul was much more certain to me than that of the sensual; it was impossible for me to set limits to my knowledge of this soul experience. I resolutely rejected the mere emotional path to the spiritual.

[ 9 ] And yet - when I looked at how the mystic experienced it, I again felt a distant kinship with my own position in the spiritual world. I sought communion with the spirit through the ideas illuminated by the spirit in the same way as the mystic through communion with an idea-less one. I could also say that my view was based on a "mystical" experience of ideas.

[ 10 ] There was no great difficulty in bringing clarity to this conflict of souls within oneself that would ultimately rise above it. For the real view of the spiritual sheds light on the scope of ideas, and it shows the personal its limits. As an observer of the spiritual, one knows how the personal ceases to work in man when the nature of the soul is transformed into an organ of perception of the spiritual world.

[ 11 ] The difficulty arose, however, from the fact that I had to find the forms of expression for my views in my writings. One cannot immediately find a new form of expression for an observation that is unfamiliar to readers. I had the choice of expressing what I found necessary to say either more in forms that are habitually used in the field of natural observation, or in forms that are used by writers more inclined to mystical feeling. The latter did not seem to me to remove the difficulties that arose. I came to the conclusion that the forms of expression in the field of natural science consisted of ideas with content, even if the content was initially conceived materialistically. I wanted to form ideas that would point to the spiritual in a similar way to the way the natural sciences point to the sensually perceptible. This enabled me to retain the character of ideas for what I had to say. The same seemed impossible to me with the use of mystical forms. For these basically do not point to the essence outside the human being, but only describe the subjective experiences within the human being. I did not want to describe human experiences, but to show how a spiritual world reveals itself through spiritual organs within the human being.

[ 12 ] It was out of such backgrounds that the ideas were formed from which my "Philosophy of Freedom" later grew. I did not want to allow any mystical impulses to prevail in me when forming these ideas, although it was clear to me that the final experience of what was to be revealed in ideas had to be of the same kind within the soul as the inner perception of the mystic. But there was the difference that in my depiction the human being surrenders himself and brings the outer spiritual world within himself to an objective appearance, while the mystic intensifies his own inner life and in this way erases the true form of the objective spiritual.