The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XV

[ 1 ] I have important memories of two lectures that I had to give soon after the beginning of my Weimar period. One took place in Weimar and was entitled "The imagination as a creator of culture"; it preceded the discussion with Herman Grimm about his views on the history of the development of the imagination. Before I gave the lecture, I summarized in my soul what I could say from my spiritual experiences about the unconscious influences of the real spiritual world on the human imagination. To me, what lives in the imagination only appeared to be inspired by the experiences of the human senses. What is actually creative in the genuine forms of fantasy showed itself to me as a reflection of the spiritual world that exists outside of man. I wanted to show how the imagination is the gateway through which the entities of the spiritual world have a creative effect on the unfolding of cultures via a detour through man.

[ 2 ] Because I had oriented my ideas towards such a goal for such a lecture, Herman Grimm's discussion made a deep impression on me. He did not feel the need to research the supersensible spiritual sources of fantasy; he accepted what appeared in human souls as fantasy according to its actuality and wanted to consider it according to its development.

[ 3 ] I first presented the one pole of the unfolding of the imagination, the dream life. I showed how external sensory perceptions are not experienced in dreams as in waking life, but in symbolic-pictorial transformation; how inner bodily processes are experienced in just such a symbolization; how experiences do not arise in sober memory, but in a way that indicates a powerful working of the experience in the depths of the soul being.

[ 4 ] In dreams, consciousness is subdued; it immerses itself in the sensual-physical reality and sees the workings of a spiritual being in the senses, which remains hidden in sensual perception, but which also appears to the half-asleep consciousness only like a shimmering out of the depths of the sensual.

[ 5 ] In fantasy, the soul rises above the ordinary level of consciousness by as much as it sinks below it in dream life. It is not the spiritual hidden in the senses that appears, but the spiritual affects the human being; however, he cannot grasp it in its very own form, but he visualizes it unconsciously through a soul content that he borrows from the sensory world. Consciousness does not penetrate as far as the perception of the spiritual world; but it experiences it in images that take their material from the sensory world. Thus the genuine creations of the imagination become products of the spiritual world without this world itself penetrating the consciousness of man.

[ 6 ] I wanted to show through the lecture one of the ways in which the entities of the spiritual world work on the development of life. Thus I endeavored to find means by which I could represent the experienced spiritual world and yet in some way link it to what is familiar to the ordinary consciousness. I was of the opinion that the spirit must be spoken of, but the forms in which one is accustomed to express oneself in this scientific age must be respected.

[ 7 ] The other lecture I gave was in Vienna. The "Scientific Club" had invited me. It dealt with the possibility of a monistic view of the world while maintaining a real knowledge of the spiritual. I explained how man grasps the physical side of reality from the outside through the senses and its spiritual side "from within" through spiritual perception, so that everything that is experienced appears as a unified world in which the sensory depicts the spirit and the spirit reveals itself creatively in the sensory.

[ 8 ] It was at the time when Haeckel had given his monistic view of the world a formulation through his speech on "Monism as a bond between religion and science". Haeckel, who knew of my presence in Weimar, sent me a copy of his speech. I returned the attention shown to me by sending Haeckel the issue of the journal in which my Vienna speech was printed. Anyone who reads this speech must see how hostile I was at that time to the monism put forward by Haeckel, when it was important to me to make it clear what a person had to say about this monism, for whom the spiritual world is something into which he looks. But at that time there was another necessity for me to look at monism in Haeckel's coloring. He stood before me as a phenomenon of the scientific age. Philosophers saw in Haeckel the philosophical dilettante who in reality knew nothing other than the forms of living beings to which he applied Darwinian ideas in the form he had devised, and who boldly declared that nothing else could be used to form a world view than what a Darwinian observer of nature could imagine. Naturalists saw Haeckel as a fantasist who drew arbitrary conclusions from scientific observations.

[ 9 ] Since my work compelled me to depict the inner state of thinking about the world and man, about nature and spirit, as it prevailed in Jena a century earlier, when Goethe threw his scientific ideas into this thinking, it became clear to me with regard to Haeckel what was being thought in this direction at that time. During my work I had to visualize Goethe's relationship to the view of nature of his time in all its details. A century later, Haeckel worked at the same place in Jena that had provided Goethe with the significant impetus to develop his ideas about natural phenomena and natural beings, claiming to be able to say something decisive for a world view based on his knowledge of nature.

[ 10 ] In addition, at one of the first meetings of the Goethe Society, which I attended during my work in Weimar, Helmholtz gave a lecture on "Goethe's premonitions of future scientific ideas". There I was pointed to many things that Goethe had "foreshadowed" through a lucky intuition of later scientific ideas, but it was also indicated how Goethe's aberrations in this field were shown in his theory of colors.

[ 11 ] When I looked at Haeckel, I always wanted to place before my soul Goethe's own judgment of the development of scientific views in the century that had followed the development of his own; when I listened to Helmholtz, the judgment of this development on Goethe stood before my soul.

[ 12 ] I could not help saying to myself at the time that if, from the prevailing state of mind of the time, the essence of nature is thought about, then what Haeckel thinks in perfect philosophical naivety must come out; those who oppose him show everywhere that they remain with the mere sense view and want to avoid the further development of this view through thinking.

[ 13 ] At first I had no desire to get to know Haeckel personally, whom I was forced to think about a lot. Then his sixtieth birthday approached. I was prompted to take part in the splendid festivities that were organized in Jena at the time. I was attracted by the human aspect of this celebration. During the banquet, Haeckel's son, whom I had met in Weimar, where he was at the school of painting, approached me and said that his father wanted me to be introduced to him. So the son did.

[ 14 ] This is how I got to know Haeckel personally. He was an enchanting personality. A pair of eyes that gazed naively into the world, so mildly that one had the feeling that this gaze would have to break if sharpness of thought penetrated it. He could only tolerate sensory impressions, not thoughts that reveal themselves in things and processes. Haeckel's every move was directed towards accepting what the senses expressed, not allowing the dominant thought to reveal itself. I understood why Haeckel liked to paint so much. He was absorbed in the view of the senses. Where he should begin to think, he stopped developing the activity of his soul and preferred to capture what he saw with his brush. Such was Haeckel's own nature. If he had only unfolded it, something immensely appealingly human would have been revealed.

[ 15 ] But in a corner of this soul something was stirring that stubbornly wanted to assert itself as a certain thought content. Something that came from completely different directions in the world than his sense of nature. The direction of an earlier life on earth, with a fanatical touch, directed towards something quite different from nature, wanted to let off steam. Religious politics emerged from the depths of the soul and used the ideas of nature to express themselves.

[ 16 ] Two beings lived in Haeckel in such a contradictory way. A man with a mild, love-filled sense of nature, and behind him something like a shadowy being with unfinished, narrowly defined ideas that breathed fanaticism. When Haeckel spoke, his mildness made it difficult for the fanaticism to flow into the word; it was as if natural gentleness blunted a hidden demonic element in his speech. A human enigma that one could only love when one saw it; about which one could often become enraged when it judged. This is how I saw Haeckel before me when, in the nineties of the last century, he prepared what then led to the fierce intellectual battle that raged around the turn of the century because of his direction of thought.

[ 17 ] Among the visitors to Weimar was Heinrich v. Treitschke. I was able to get to know him because Suphan invited me along when he once had Treitschke over for lunch. I had a deep impression of this controversial personality. Treitschke was completely deaf. People communicated with him by handing him small pieces of paper on which they wrote what they wanted to say to him. As a result, his personality was at the center of the society he was in. Once something had been written down, he would talk about it without any real conversation taking place. He was there for the others in a much more intense way than they were for him. This had passed into his whole attitude of mind. He spoke without having to reckon with the objections that another person would encounter when sharing his thoughts among people. One could clearly see how this had taken root in his self-confidence. Because he could not hear any objections to his thoughts, he strongly felt the value of what he himself thought. The first question Treitschke asked me was where I came from. I wrote on the piece of paper that I was Austrian. Treitschke replied: "Austrians are either very good and ingenious people or scoundrels. He said this, as one realized that the loneliness in which his soul lived due to his deafness urged him on to paradoxes and found inner satisfaction in them. The lunch guests at Suphan's usually stayed together all afternoon. It was the same when Treitschke was among them. You could see this personality unfolding. The broad-shouldered man also had something in his intellectual personality that made him stand out among his fellow men. One cannot say that Treitschke lectured. For everything he said had the character of the personal. A passionate desire to express himself lived in every word. How commanding was his tone, even when he was only talking. He wanted the other person to be moved by his words. His assertions were accompanied by a rare fire that sparkled from his eyes. The conversation then turned to Moltke's world view, as expressed in his memoirs. Treitschke rejected the impersonal way in which Moltke perceived world phenomena, which was reminiscent of mathematical thinking. He could not help but judge things with an undertone of strong personal sympathies and antipathies. People who, like Treitschke, are so completely absorbed in their personality can only make an impression on others if their personalities are both significant and deeply interwoven with the things they say. This was the case with Treitschke. When he spoke of historical matters, he spoke as if everything was present and he was personally present with all his joy and all his anger. One listened to the man, one retained the impression of the personal in an unlimited strength; but one got no relation to the content of what was said.

[ 18 ] I became very friendly with another visitor to Weimar. It was Ludwig Laistner. A fine, harmonious personality who lived in the spiritual realm in the most beautiful way. At the time he was literary advisor to the Cotta publishing house and as such had to work in the Goethe Archive. I was able to spend almost all the free time we had with him. His main work, "The Riddle of the Sphinx", was already available to the world at the time. It is a kind of myth story. He goes his own way in explaining the mythical. Our conversations focused a great deal on the subject dealt with in this important book. Laistner rejects all explanations of the fairy-tale, of the mythical, which adhere to the more or less consciously symbolizing fantasy. He sees the origin of the people's mythicizing conception of nature in dreams, especially nightmares. The oppressive Alp, which shows itself as a tormenting questioning spirit for the dreamer, becomes the nightmare, the elf, the demonic tormentor; for Ludwig Laistner, the whole host of spirits emerges from the dreaming person. The questioning sphinx is another metamorphosis of the simple midday woman who appears to the man sleeping in the field at midday and asks him questions that he has to answer. - Ludwig Laistner pursued everything that the dream creates in terms of paradoxical, sensible and meaningful, tormenting and lust-filled forms, in order to show it again in the fairy tale and myth formations. In every conversation I had the feeling that the man could so easily find the way from the subconscious, which creates in the human being and works in the dream world, to the superconscious, which meets the real spirit world. He listened to my arguments in this regard with the greatest benevolence; he did not object to them, but he did not gain an inner relationship to them. He was also prevented from doing so by the fear, inherent in the spirit of the times, of immediately losing "scientific" ground if one approached the spiritual as such. But Ludwig Laistner had a special relationship to art and poetry in that he brought the mythical to the real dream experiences and not to the abstractly creative imagination. Everything creative in man thus took on a world significance in his view. He was a subtle, poetic personality with a rare inner calm and spiritual unity. His statements about all things had a poetic quality. He didn't really know any terms that were unpoetic. I spent some wonderful hours with him in Weimar and then during a visit to Stuttgart, where I was allowed to stay with him. At his side was his wife, who was completely absorbed in his spiritual being. For her, Ludwig Laistner was actually everything that connected her to the world. He only lived for a short time after his visit to Weimar. The wife followed the deceased in the shortest possible time; the world was empty for her when Ludwig Laistner was no longer in it. She was a woman of rare kindness, truly great in her kindness. She always knew how to be absent when she thought she was disturbing; she was never absent when she had to take care of something. She stood motherly at Ludwig Laistner's side, whose fine mind was contained in a very delicate body.

[ 19 ] I was able to discuss the idealism of the German philosophers Fichte, Hegel and Schelling with Ludwig Laistner as with few other people. He had a vivid sense of the reality of the ideal that lived in these philosophers. When I once told him of my concerns about the one-sidedness of the scientific view of the world, he said: The people have no idea of the importance of the creative in the human soul. They don't know that the content of the world lives in this creativity just as it does in natural phenomena.

[ 20 ] Above the literary and artistic, Ludwig Laistner did not lose his relationship to the directly human. His attitude and demeanor were modest: those who understood this soon felt the significance of his personality after meeting him. The official myth researchers were opposed to his views; they hardly took them into account. Thus a man remained almost unnoticed in intellectual life who, according to his inner value, deserved first place. His book "Riddles of the Sphinx" could have given completely new impulses to the science of myths; it remained almost completely without effect. Ludwig Laistner had to include a complete edition of Schopenhauer and an edition of selected works by Jean Paul in the "Cotta'sche Bibliothek der Weltliteratur". He transferred these two to me. And so I had to incorporate the complete work through of the pessimistic philosopher and the ingenious-paradoxical Jean Paul into my Weimar tasks at the time. I undertook both works with the deepest interest because I loved to immerse myself in mental states that were very different from my own. Ludwig Laistner's motives for making me the editor of Schopenhauer and Jean Paul were not external; the commission arose from the conversations we had had about the two personalities. He also came up with the idea of assigning these tasks to me in the middle of a conversation.

[ 21 ] Hans Olden and Mrs. Grete Olden lived in Weimar at the time. They gathered a convivial circle around them that wanted to live the "present", in contrast to everything that saw the Goethe Archive and Goethe Society as the center of intellectual existence, like the continuation of a past life. I was accepted into this circle; and I think back on everything I experienced in it with great fondness.

[ 22 ] No matter how strongly one's ideas in the archives might have been hardened by the co-experience of the "philological method", they had to become free and fluid when one came to Olden's house, where everything that had taken it into one's head that a new way of thinking must gain ground in humanity found interest; but also everything that painfully felt many an old cultural prejudice with soulful intimacy and thought of future ideals.

[ 23 ] Hans Olden is known to the world as the author of light-hearted plays such as "The Official Wife"; in his Weimar circle at the time, he lived out his life differently. He had an open heart for the highest interests that were present in intellectual life at the time. What lived in Ibsen's dramas, what rumbled in Nietzsche's mind, were the subject of endless but always stimulating discussions in his house.

[ 24 ] Gabriele Reuter, who was writing the novel "Aus guter Familie" at the time, which soon afterward took her literary position by storm, found herself in Olden's circle and filled him with all the serious questions that moved humanity at the time with regard to women's lives.

[ 25 ] Hans Olden could become charming when he immediately stopped a conversation that wanted to lose itself in sentimentality with his slightly skeptical way of thinking; but he could become sentimental himself when others lapsed into frivolity. In this circle, one wanted to develop the deepest "understanding" for everything "human"; but one criticized relentlessly what one did not like about this or that human being. Hans Olden was deeply imbued with the idea that it only made sense for a person to turn to the great ideals in literature and art, of which there was much talk in his circle; but he was too much of a despiser of humanity to realize his ideals in his productions. He believed that ideals could live in a small circle of select people, but that he was a "child's head" who believed he could present such ideals to a larger audience. It was precisely at this time that he made a start on the artistic realization of further interests with his "Kluge Käte". This play was only a "respectable success" in Weimar. This reinforced his view that he should give the audience what it wanted and keep his higher interests in the small circles that understood them.

[ 26 ] Mrs. Grete Olden was imbued with this view to an even greater degree than Hans Olden. She was the most consummate skeptic in her estimation of what the world can absorb spiritually. What she wrote was quite obviously inspired by a certain genius of contempt for humanity.

[ 27 ] What Hans Olden and Grete Olden offered their circle from such a state of mind breathed in the atmosphere of an aestheticizing perception of the world, which could approach the most serious, but which also did not disdain to get over some seriousness with light humour.