The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XII

[ 1 ] The time it took me to present Goethe's scientific ideas for the introductions in "Kürschner's German National Literature" was a long one. I began in the early eighties and had not yet finished when I entered the second phase of my life with my move from Vienna to Weimar. The reason for this lies in the difficulty I have described with regard to scientific and mystical expression.

[ 2 ] While I was working on bringing Goethe's position on natural science into the right form of ideas, I also had to make progress in shaping what had presented itself to my soul as spiritual experiences in the view of world processes. Thus I was constantly being urged away from Goethe towards the presentation of my own world view and towards him in order to better interpret his thoughts with the ideas I had gained. Above all, I found Goethe's reluctance to satisfy himself with some easily comprehensible theoretical construct of thought as opposed to recognizing the immeasurable richness of reality. Goethe becomes rationalistic when he wants to depict the manifold forms of plant and animal shapes. He strives for ideas that prove effective in becoming nature when he wants to understand the geological structure of the earth or grasp the phenomena of meteorology. But his ideas are not abstract thoughts, but images living in the soul in a mental way. When I grasped the images he had created in his scientific works, I had something before me that satisfied me in the depths of my soul. I looked at an idea-picture-content of which I had to believe that - in further realization - it represented a real reflection of natural events in the human spirit. It was clear to me that the prevailing scientific way of thinking had to be elevated to this Goethean one.

[ 3 ] At the same time, however, in this conception of Goethe's knowledge of nature lay the requirement to depict the essence of the content of the idea-picture in relation to spiritual reality itself. The idea-pictures only have a justification if they point to such a spiritual reality that underlies the sensory reality. - But Goethe, in his holy fear of the immeasurable richness of reality, avoids approaching the depiction of the spiritual world after he has brought the sensual to a spiritual image-form in his soul.

[ 4 ] I now had to show that Goethe was indeed able to live soulfully by penetrating from sense-nature to spirit-nature through cognition, but that another person can only fully comprehend Goethe's soul-life if, going beyond it, he leads the cognition to the conception of the spiritual world itself in accordance with ideas.

[ 5 ] Goethe stood inside the spirit when he spoke about nature. He was afraid of becoming abstract if he had gone on from this living standing inside to a life in thought about this standing inside. He wanted to feel himself in spirit; but he did not want to think himself in spirit.

[ 6 ] I often felt that I would be unfaithful to Goethe's way of thinking if I now expressed thoughts about his world view. And with almost every detail that I had to interpret in relation to Goethe, I had to conquer the method of speaking about Goethe in Goethe's way again and again.

[ 7 ] My presentation of Goethe's ideas was a years-long struggle to understand Goethe better and better with the help of my own thoughts. Looking back on this struggle, I must say to myself: I owe him a great deal for the development of my spiritual cognitive experiences. This development was much slower than it would have been if Goethe's task had not been fated to interfere with the course of my life. I would then have pursued my spiritual experiences and presented them just as they would have appeared before me. I would have been drawn into the spiritual world more quickly; but I would not have found any reason to dive into my own inner self with a struggle.

[ 8 ] Thus, through my work with Goethe, I experienced the difference between a state of soul to which the spiritual world reveals itself as if by grace and one that, step by step, makes one's own inner being more and more similar to the spirit in order to then, when the soul experiences itself as a true spirit, stand within the spiritual world. In this standing within, however, one only feels how intimately the human spirit and the spirituality of the world can grow together in the human soul.

[ 9 ] When I was working on my interpretation of Goethe, I always had Goethe beside me in my mind like an admonisher who kept calling out to me: He who advances too rapidly on spiritual paths may indeed arrive at a narrowly circumscribed experience of the spirit; but he emerges impoverished in reality content from the richness of life.

[ 10 ] I was able to observe quite clearly in my relationship to Goethe's work "how karma works in human life". Fate is composed of two factual formations that grow together into a unity in human life. One flows out of the urge of the soul from within; the other approaches the human being from the outside world. My own spiritual impulses went towards the contemplation of the spiritual; the external spiritual life of the world brought Goethe's work to me. I had to harmonize the two currents that met in my consciousness. - I spent the last years of the first phase of my life justifying myself alternately to myself and to Goethe.

[ 11 ] What I experienced inwardly was the task I set myself in my doctoral thesis: to bring about "an understanding of human consciousness with itself". For I saw how man could only understand what true reality is in the external world once he had seen this true reality within himself.

[ 12 ] This meeting of the true reality of the outer world with the true reality within the soul must be achieved for the cognizing consciousness in diligent spiritual inner activity; for the willing and acting consciousness it is always present when man feels his freedom in action.

[ 13 ] The fact that freedom lives in unbiased consciousness as something factual and yet becomes a puzzle for cognition is due precisely to the fact that man has not given his own true being, his genuine self-consciousness, from the outset, but must only achieve it after his consciousness has come to an understanding with itself. What constitutes man's highest value: freedom, can only be grasped after appropriate preparation.

[ 14 ] My "philosophy of freedom" is founded in an experience that consists in the understanding of human consciousness with itself. Freedom is exercised in willing; it is experienced in feeling; it is recognized in thinking. Only, in order to achieve this, life must not be lost in thinking.

[ 15 ] While I was working on my "Philosophy of Freedom", my constant concern was to keep the inner experience fully alive in the presentation of my thoughts. This gives the thoughts the mystical character of inner vision, but also makes this vision equal to the external, sensory perception of the world. If one penetrates to such an inner experience, one no longer feels a contradiction between recognizing nature and recognizing the spirit. One realizes that the second is only the metamorphosed continuation of the first. Because this seemed to me to be the case, I was later able to put the motto on the title page of my "Philosophy of Freedom": "Results of spiritual observation according to the scientific method". For, if the scientific method is faithfully adhered to for the spiritual realm, then it also leads cognitively into this realm.

[ 16 ] The in-depth study of Goethe's fairy tale of the "green snake and the beautiful lily", which forms the conclusion of his "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderter", was of great importance to me during this time. This "riddle tale" has found many interpreters. I was not interested in an "interpretation" of the content. I simply wanted to accept it in its poetic-artistic form. I always found it unappealing to atomize the active imagination with reason by way of explanation.

[ 17 ] I saw how Goethe's poetry emerged from his intellectual intercourse with Schiller When he wrote his "Letters for the Promotion of the Aesthetic Education of Man", Schiller's mind was going through the philosophical epoch of his intellectual development. The "communication of human consciousness with itself" was a task of the soul that occupied him most intensely. On the one hand, he saw the human soul as completely devoted to the activity of reason. He felt that the soul reigning in the purely rational is not dependent on the physical-sensual. But he felt something unsatisfactory in this kind of supersensible activity. The soul is "in the spirit" when it is surrendered to the "logical necessity" of reason; but in this surrender it is neither free nor inwardly spiritually alive. It is devoted to an abstract shadow-image of the spirit; but it does not weave and reign in the life and existence of the spirit. - On the other hand, Schiller noted how the human soul, in an opposite activity, is entirely devoted to the physical - sensual perceptions and instinctive impulses. There the workings of the spiritual shadow-image are lost in it; but it is given over to a natural lawfulness that does not constitute its essence.

[ 18 ] Schiller came to the conclusion that in both activities man is not a "true man". But he can bring about through himself what is not given to him by nature and the rational shadow of the mind that emerges without his intervention. He can introduce reason into sensual activity; and he can raise the sensual into a higher sphere of consciousness, so that it acts like the spiritual. Thus he attains a middle mood between the logical and the natural compulsion. Schiller sees man in such a mood when he lives in the artistic. The aesthetic perception of the world looks at the sensual, but in such a way that it finds the spirit in it. It lives in the shadow of the spirit, but in creation or enjoyment it gives the spirit sensual form, so that it loses its shadowy existence.

[ 19 ] This struggle of Schiller for the view of the "true man" had already come before my soul years before; when Goethe's "Riddle Tale" itself became a riddle for me, it presented itself to me anew. I saw how Goethe had received Schiller's depiction of the "truthful man". For him, no less than for his friend, the question was alive: how does the shadowy spiritual in the soul find the sensual-bodily, and how does the natural in the physical body work its way up to the spiritual?

[ 20 ] The correspondence between the two friends, and what else can be known about their intellectual intercourse, testify that Schiller's solution was too abstract, too one-sidedly philosophical for Goethe. He presented the alluring images of the river that separates two worlds, of will-o'-the-wisps that seek the way from one world to the other, of the snake that must give itself up in order to form a bridge between the two worlds, of the "beautiful lily" that "beyond" the river can only be imagined by those who live "on this side", and many other things. He contrasted Schiller's philosophical solution with a fairytale-like, poetic view. He had the feeling that if the riddle of the soul perceived by Schiller was approached with philosophical concepts, man would be impoverished in his search for his true nature; he wanted to approach the riddle in the richness of spiritual experience.

[ 21 ] Goethe's fairy-tale images point back to imaginations that have often been placed before Goethe by seekers after the spiritual experience of the soul. The three kings of the fairy tale can be found in some similarity in the "Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz". Other figures are reappearances of earlier images of the path of knowledge. - In Goethe's work, these images only appear in a beautiful, noble, artistic fantasy form, whereas previously they had a more non-artistic character.

[ 22 ] In this fairy tale, Goethe has brought the creation of fantasy close to the limit at which it merges into the inner process of the soul, which is a recognizing experience of the real spiritual worlds. I thought that one could see most deeply into one's mind if one immersed oneself in this poetry.

[ 23 ] I was not interested in the explanation, but rather in the stimuli for spiritual experience that came to me from studying the fairy tale. These stimuli then continued to have an effect on my subsequent spiritual life right through to the creation of my later mystery dramas. However, I did not gain much from the fairy tale for my works, which were based on Goethe. For it seemed to me as if Goethe, in writing this poetry, had outgrown himself in his view of the world, as if driven by the inner power of a half-unconscious soul. And so a serious difficulty arose for me. I could only continue my interpretation of Goethe for Kürschner's "German National Literature" in the style in which I had begun it, but that was not enough for me. For I told myself that Goethe, while writing the "Fairy Tale", had looked over into the spiritual world as if from the border. What he then wrote about the processes of nature, however, again leaves the insight unnoticed. It is therefore not possible to interpret him from this insight.

[ 24 ] But even if I initially gained nothing for my Goethe writings by immersing myself in the fairy tale, a wealth of inspiration for the soul came from it. The soul content that arose from the fairy tale became important meditation material for me. I returned to it again and again. With this activity, I prepared myself for the mood in which I later entered into my Weimar work.