The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XVII

[ 1 ] A branch of the American-based "Society for Ethical Culture" was founded in Germany at this time. It seems self-evident that in the age of materialism one should only agree with a striving for ethical deepening. But at the time, this pursuit was based on a fundamental view that aroused the strongest reservations in me.

[ 2 ] The leaders of this movement said to themselves: we are currently in the midst of many conflicting views of the world and of life with regard to the life of knowledge, to religious and social feelings. People cannot be made to understand each other in the area of these views. It is evil if the moral feelings that people should have for one another are drawn into the area of these conflicting opinions. Where should it lead if religiously or socially different sentiments, or those who differ from each other in their cognitive life, express their differences by shaping their moral behavior towards those who think and feel differently. One must therefore seek out the principles of a purely human ethic, which should be independent of any world view, which everyone can recognize, however they think about the different areas of existence.

[ 3 ] This ethical movement made a profound impression on me. It touched my most important views. For before me stood the deep abyss that the ways of thinking of recent times have created between natural events and the moral-spiritual content of the world.

[ 4 ] One has arrived at a view of nature that seeks to depict the process of becoming without moral-spiritual content. One thinks hypothetically of a purely material original state of the world. One searches for the laws according to which the living, the animated, the spiritual could have gradually emerged from this original state in its present form. If one is consistent with such a way of thinking - as I said to myself at the time - then the spiritual and moral cannot be imagined in any other way than as a result of the workings of nature. Then you have the facts of nature, which are indifferent to the spiritual and moral, which in their becoming bring forth the moral like a side result and finally bury it again in their moral indifference.

[ 5 ] I could, however, keep in mind that the cautious thinkers did not draw this conclusion, that they simply accepted what the facts of nature seemed to tell them and thought that the world significance of the spiritual and moral had to be left alone. But that didn't seem important to me. It was not important to me that they should say that in the sense of natural events one must think in a way that was indifferent to the moral, and that what one thought in this way were simply hypotheses; let everyone form his own thoughts about the moral. I said to myself: anyone who thinks about nature, even in the smallest detail, in the way that was customary at the time, cannot ascribe any independent, self-sustaining reality to the spiritual and moral. If physics, chemistry and biology remain as they are, as they appear to all as untouchable, then the entities that are thought of as reality absorb all reality; and the spiritual-moral could only be the foam rising from this reality.

[ 6 ] I looked into another reality. One that is both moral-spiritual and natural at the same time. It seemed to me to be a weakness of the striving for knowledge not to want to penetrate to this reality. According to my spiritual view, I had to say to myself: above the natural and the spiritual-moral, there is a true reality that reveals itself morally, but which also has the power in moral action to transform itself into an event that is as effective as the natural event. The latter seemed to me to be indifferent to the spiritual-moral only because it has fallen out of its original connection with it, like the corpse of a human being from its connection with the soul-living of the human being.

[ 7 ] I was certain of this: for I did not merely think it, I saw it as truth in the spiritual facts and entities of the world. In the marked "ethicists" people seemed to me to have been born who regarded such an insight as indifferent to them; they more or less unconsciously held the opinion: nothing can be achieved by striving for a world view; let us save ethical principles that do not require any further investigation as to how they are rooted in the reality of the world. The naked despair of all worldview striving seemed to speak to me from this contemporary phenomenon. Unconsciously frivolous seemed to me a person who claimed: let's leave all worldviews alone so that we can spread morality among people again. I took many a walk with Hans and Grete Olden through the Weimar parks, where I spoke out radically about this frivolity. Anyone who penetrates as far as is possible for man, I said, will find a world event from which the reality of the moral as well as that of the natural confronts him. I wrote a sharp article in the then recently founded "Zukunft" against what I called an ethic uprooted from all world reality, which could have no power. The article met with a rather unfriendly reception. How could it be otherwise, since the "ethicists" had to present themselves as the saviors of culture.

[ 8 ] The matter was of unlimited importance to me. I wanted to fight at an important point for the assertion of a world view that reveals the ethical firmly grounded in all other reality. So I had to fight against ethics without a worldview.

[ 9 ] I traveled from Weimar to Berlin to seek out opportunities to express my views in magazines.

[ 10 ] I visited Herman Grimm, whom I greatly admired. I was received with the greatest kindness. But it seemed so strange to Herman Grimm that I, who was full of zeal for my cause, brought this zeal into his house. He listened to me somewhat impassively when I told him of my views on the "ethicists". I thought I could interest him in the cause that seemed so important to me. But I couldn't do that in the slightest. When he heard that "I wanted to do something", he said: "Why don't you go and see these people, I know more or less most of them; they are all very nice people." I felt like I had been doused with cold water. The man I admired so much felt nothing of what I wanted; he said that I would "think quite sensibly" about the matter if I convinced myself by visiting the "ethicists" that they were all quite likeable people.

[ 11 ] I found no more interest in others than in Herman Grimm. And that's how it was for me back then. I had to deal with my views of the spiritual all by myself. I lived in the spiritual world; no one from my circle of acquaintances followed me there. My intercourse consisted of excursions into the worlds of others. But I loved these excursions. My admiration for Herman Grimm was not affected in the least. But I was able to go through a good school in the art of understanding with love that which had no attempt to understand what I myself carried in my soul.

[ 12 ] That was my "loneliness" back then in Weimar, where I was in such widespread social intercourse. But I did not attribute it to the people that they condemned me to such loneliness. I saw in many of them an unconscious urge for a world view that penetrated to the very roots of existence. I felt how a way of thinking, which could occur safely because it only adhered to the obvious, weighed on their souls. "Nature is the whole world" was this way of thinking. It was believed that one must find it right; and one suppressed everything in the soul that felt that one could not find it right. In this light, much of what surrounded me spiritually at that time was revealed to me. It was the time in which my "philosophy of freedom", the essential content of which I had already carried within me for a long time, took its final form.

[ 13 ] Immediately after it was printed, I sent my "Philosophy of Freedom" to Eduard von Hartmann. He read it with great attention, because I soon received his copy of the book with his detailed marginal notes from the beginning to the end. He wrote to me, among other things, that the book should have the title: Epistemological Phenomenalism and Ethical Individualism. He had completely misunderstood the sources of the ideas and my aims. He thought about the sensory world in the Kantian way, even if he modified it. He considered this world to be the effect of something essential on the soul through the senses. In his opinion, this essence should never be able to enter the field of perception that the soul encompasses with consciousness. It should remain beyond consciousness. Only through logical conclusions could one form hypothetical ideas about it. The sensory world therefore does not represent something that exists objectively in itself, but rather a subjective phenomenon that only exists in the soul as long as it encompasses it with consciousness.

[ 14 ] I sought to demonstrate in my book that not behind the sensory world lies an unknown, but within it lies the spiritual world. And of the human world of ideas I sought to show that it has its existence in this spiritual world. The essence of the sense world is therefore only hidden from human consciousness so long as the soul perceives only through the senses. When the ideas are experienced in addition to the sensory perceptions, then the sensory world is experienced by the consciousness in its objective essentiality. Cognition is not a depiction of an essence, but a living of the soul into this essence. Within consciousness, the progression from the still unessential sense world to its essence takes place. Thus the sense world is only an appearance (phenomenon) as long as consciousness has not yet come to terms with it.

[ 15 ] In truth, the sense world is therefore the spiritual world; and the soul lives together with this recognized spiritual world by extending consciousness over it. The goal of the process of cognition is the conscious experience of the spiritual world, before the sight of which everything dissolves into spirit.

[ 16 ] I contrasted phenomenalism with the world of spiritual reality. Eduard von Hartmann said that I wanted to remain within the phenomena and only refrain from drawing conclusions about any objective reality from them. For him, the matter thus presented itself in such a way that with my way of thinking I condemn human cognition to not arrive at any reality at all, but to have to move within an illusory world that only exists in the imagination of the soul (as a phenomenon). Thus my search for the spirit through the expansion of consciousness was confronted with the view that "spirit" initially only lives in the human imagination and can only be thought outside it. This was, basically, the view of the age into which I had to place my "Philosophy of Freedom". For this view, the experience of the spiritual was reduced to the experience of human ideas. And from these, one could not find a way to a real (objective) spiritual world.

[ 17 ] I wanted to show how the subjectively experienced illuminates the objectively spiritual and becomes the true content of consciousness; Eduard von Hartmann countered that anyone who depicts this remains stuck within sense and is not talking about an objective reality at all.

[ 18 ] It was now self-evident that Eduard von Hartmann must also find my "ethical individualism" questionable.

[ 19 ] For what was the basis of this in my "philosophy of freedom"? I saw a perfect union of the soul with the spirit world at the center of human spiritual life. I tried to present the matter in such a way that a supposed difficulty, which disturbs many, dissolves into nothing. It is thought that in order to recognize, the soul - or the "I" - must differentiate itself from the recognized, that is, it must not merge into one with it. However, this differentiation is also possible when the soul moves back and forth like a pendulum between being one with the spiritual being and reflecting on itself. It then becomes "unconscious" when immersed in the objective spirit, but brings the completely essential into consciousness during self-reflection.

[ 20 ] If it is now possible for the personal individuality of man to immerse itself in the spiritual reality of the world, then the world of moral impulses can also be experienced in this reality. Morality acquires a content that reveals itself from the spiritual world within the human individuality; and the consciousness expanded into the spiritual penetrates to the point of seeing this revelation. What stimulates man to moral action is the revelation of the spiritual world to the experience of this spiritual world through the soul. And this experience takes place within the personal individuality of the human being. If the human being sees himself in interaction with the spirit world in moral action, he experiences his freedom. For the spirit world does not work in the soul by necessity, but in such a way that the human being must freely develop the activity that causes him to accept the spiritual.

[ 21 ] In pointing out that the world of the senses is in reality of spiritual essence, and that man as a spiritual being weaves and lives in a spiritual world through true knowledge of the world of the senses, lies one aim of my "philosophy of freedom". The second goal is contained in the characterization of the moral world as one that illuminates its existence in this spiritual world experienced by the soul and thus allows man to approach it in freedom. The moral essence of the human being is thus sought in his completely individual intergrowth with the ethical impulses of the spirit world. I had the feeling that the first part of this "philosophy of freedom" and the second part are like a spiritual organism, a real unity. Eduard von Hartmann had to find that they were arbitrarily coupled together as epistemological phenomenalism and ethical individualism

[ 22 ] The form that the ideas of the book have taken is due to the state of my soul at that time. Through my experience of the spiritual world in direct contemplation, nature showed itself to me as spirit; I wanted to create a science of nature in accordance with the spirit. In the contemplative self-recognition of the human soul, the moral world appeared in it as its completely individual experience.

[ 23 ] The spiritual experience was the source of the form I gave to the ideas of my book. It is first and foremost the presentation of an anthroposophy that is oriented towards nature and towards man's standing in nature with his own individual moral essence.

[ 24 ] For me, with the "Philosophy of Freedom", that which the first phase of my life had demanded of me in terms of shaping ideas through the fateful experience of the scientific riddles of existence was, so to speak, separated from me and placed in the outside world.

[ 25 ] The insights that man receives from outside in sense observation were presented by me as an inner anthroposophical spiritual experience of the human soul The fact that I did not yet use the term "anthroposophy" at that time stems from the fact that my soul initially always urges for views and almost not at all for terminologies. It was up to me to form ideas that could represent the experience of the spirit world itself through the human soul.

[ 26 ] An inner struggle for such a formation of ideas is the content of the episode of my life that I went through from my thirtieth to my fortieth year. At that time, as fate would have it, I was most involved in an external life activity that did not correspond to my inner life in such a way that it could have expressed it.