The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XVIII

[ 1 ] At this time I entered the circles of spiritual experience in which Nietzsche had dwelt.

[ 2 ] My first acquaintance with Nietzsche's writings was in 1889. Before that, I had not read a single line of his work. His writings had no influence on the content of my ideas as expressed in the "Philosophy of Freedom". I read what he had written with the feeling of being attracted by the style that his relationship to life had given him. I perceived his soul as a being who had to listen with inherited and acquired attention to everything that the intellectual life of his time had produced, but who always felt, what is this intellectual life to me: there must be another world in which I can live; in this one so much about life disturbs me. This feeling made him a spiritually fired critic of his time; but a critic who was made ill by his own criticism. He had to experience illness and could only dream of health, of his own health. He first looked for ways to make his dream of health the content of his life; and so he tried to dream with Richard Wagner, with Schopenhauer, with modern "positivism", as if he wanted to make the dream in his soul a reality. One day he discovered that he had only been dreaming. Then he began to search for realities with all the strength his spirit possessed. Realities that had to lie "somewhere"; he did not find "paths" to these realities, but longings. Then the longings became realities in him. He continued to dream: but the powerful force of his soul created inner-human realities from his dreams, which floated freely in a spiritually joyful mood that was disgustingly affected by the "spirit of the age", without the heaviness that had long been inherent in human ideas.

[ 3 ] This is how I felt about Nietzsche. The free-floating, weightlessness of his ideas swept me away. I found that this free-floating had given rise to many thoughts in him that were similar to those that had formed in me along paths quite unlike his own.

[ 4 ] So I was able to write in 1895 in the preface to my book "Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time": "Already in my small book "Erkenntnistheorie der Goethe'schen Weltanschauung", published in 1886, the same attitude is expressed as in some of Nietzsche's works." What particularly attracted me, however, was that one was allowed to read Nietzsche without somehow encountering anything in him that would make the reader his "follower". One could feel his spiritual lights with surrendering joy; one felt completely free in this feeling; for one felt that his words began to make one laugh when one would have expected them to be agreed with, as Haeckel or Spencer presupposed.

[ 5 ] So, in order to express my relationship to Nietzsche, I was also allowed to do so in the aforementioned book with words that he formed about his own to Schopenhauer: "I am one of those readers of Nietzsche who, after reading the first page of him, know with certainty that they will read all the pages and listen to every word he has ever said. My trust in him was immediate ... I understood him as if he had written for me to express myself intelligibly but immodestly and foolishly."

[ 6 ] Shortly before I started writing this book, Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, appeared one day at the Goethe and Schiller Archive. She had just taken the first steps towards founding a Nietzsche Archive and wanted to know how the Goethe and Schiller Archive was organized. Soon afterwards, the editor of Nietzsche's works, Fritz Koegel, also appeared in Weimar, and I got to know him.

[ 7 ] I later came into serious conflict with Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. At the time, her agile, amiable spirit challenged my deepest sympathy. I suffered unspeakably from the conflicts; a complicated situation brought it about: I was forced to defend myself against accusations; I know that it was all necessary, that it covered the beautiful hours I was allowed to spend in the Nietzsche Archive in Naumburg and Weimar with a veil of bitterness in my memory; but I am grateful to Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche that she led me into Friedrich Nietzsche's room during the first of the many visits I was allowed to make to her. There lay the deranged man with the wonderfully beautiful forehead, artist's and thinker's forehead at the same time, on a reclining sofa. It was the early hours of the afternoon. These eyes, which still seemed to be transfixed in their extinguished state, only took in an image of the surroundings that no longer had access to the soul. One stood there and Nietzsche knew nothing of it. And yet one could still have believed from the spiritualized face that it was the expression of a soul that had been forming thoughts within itself all morning and now wanted to rest for a while. An inner shock that gripped my soul might have meant that it would turn into understanding for the genius whose gaze was directed at me but did not meet mine. The passivity of this gaze, which lingered for a long time, triggered the understanding of my own gaze, which was allowed to let the soul power of the eye work without being met.

[ 8 ] And so there stood before my soul: Nietzsche's soul as if hovering above his head, infinitely beautiful in its spiritual light; freely devoted to spiritual worlds that it longed for before the derangement, but did not find; but still bound to the body, which only knew of it as long as this world was still a longing. Nietzsche's soul was still there: but it could only hold the body from the outside, which offered it resistance to unfold in its full light as long as it was inside it.

[ 9 ] I had previously read the Nietzsche who had written; now I had seen the Nietzsche who carried ideas into his body from distant spiritual realms, ideas that still shimmered with beauty, even though they had lost their original luminosity along the way. A soul that brought rich gold of light from earlier lives on earth, but could not make it shine fully in this life. I admired what Nietzsche wrote; but I now saw a brightly shining picture behind my admiration.

[ 10 ] I could only stammer in my thoughts about what I saw then; and that stammering is the content of my book "Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time". The fact that the book remained just such a stammer conceals the true fact that Nietzsche's image inspired it.

[ 11 ] Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche then asked me to organize Nietzsche's library. This allowed me to spend several weeks in the Nietzsche archive in Naumburg. I also became very friendly with Fritz Koegel. It was a wonderful task that brought the books Nietzsche had read before my eyes. His spirit came alive in the impressions that these books made. A copy of one of Emerson's books, completely annotated in the margins and bearing all the traces of the most dedicated workmanship. Guyau's writings with similar traces. Books with passionately critical remarks in his hand. A large number of marginal notes from which one can see the germs of his ideas sprouting.

[ 12 ] I was able to see a pervasive idea of Nietzsche's last creative period light up by reading his marginal note in Eugen Dühring's philosophical magnum opus. Dühring constructs the idea that the universe can be imagined in an instant as a combination of elementary parts. Then world events would be the sequence of all possible such combinations. If these were exhausted, then the very first one would have to return and the whole process would have to repeat itself. If such a thing represented reality, it would have to have happened countless times already and continue to happen countless times into the future. One would arrive at the idea of the eternal repetition of the same states of the universe. Dühring rejects this idea as impossible. Nietzsche reads this; he absorbs an impression of it: it continues to work in the depths of his soul; and it then forms itself in him as "the return of the same", which, together with the idea of the "superman", dominates his last creative period.

[ 13 ] I was deeply moved, indeed shaken, by the impression I got from reading Nietzsche in this way. For I saw what a contrast there was between Nietzsche's way of thinking and that of his contemporaries. Dühring, the extreme positivist, who rejects everything that does not result from a completely soberly oriented, mathematically proceeding schema, finds the idea of the "eternal return of the same" absurd, constructs it only to demonstrate its impossibility: Nietzsche must accept it as his solution to the world puzzle like an intuition coming from the depths of his own soul.

[ 14 ] In this way, Nietzsche stands in complete opposition to much of what storms upon him as the content of the thinking and feeling of his time. He absorbs these storms in such a way that he suffers deeply through them, and in suffering, in unspeakable pain of the soul, creates the content of his own soul. It reached its climax when he wrote the sketches for his last work, the "Will to Power", or the "Revaluation of All Values". Nietzsche was inclined to bring up everything he thought and felt from the depths of his soul in a purely spiritual way. Creating the world view from the spiritual events that the soul experiences was his direction. However, the positivistic world view of his age, the age of natural science, influenced him. In it was only the purely material, spiritless world. What was still thought of in a spiritual way in this picture was the remnant of old ways of thinking that no longer suited him. Nietzsche's unlimited sense of truth wanted to eradicate all that. Thus he came to think positivism in a very extreme way. A spiritual world behind the material one became a lie to him. But he could only create out of his own soul. To create in the way that true creation only makes sense when it presents the content of the spiritual world in ideas. He rejected this content. The scientific content of the world had seized his soul so strongly that he wanted to create it as if through the spirit. Lyrically, in a Dionysian flight of the soul, his soul soars in "Zarathustra". The spiritual weaves wonderfully there, but it dreams in spiritual wonders of material reality. The spirit atomizes in its unfolding because it cannot find itself, but can only experience the dreamed reflection of the material as its illusory essence.

[ 15 ] I lived a lot in my own soul at that time in Weimar in the contemplation of Nietzsche's way of thinking. This way of thinking had its place in my own spiritual experience. This spiritual experience could live with Nietzsche's struggle, with Nietzsche's tragedy; what business was it of Nietzsche's positivistically shaped thought results!

[ 16 ] Others thought I was a "Nietzschean" because I could completely admire even what was contrary to my own school of thought. I was fascinated by how the spirit revealed itself in Nietzsche: I believed that I was close to him precisely because he was not close to anyone through the content of his thoughts: he found himself alone with people and times in the co-experience of the paths of the spirit.

[ 17 ] For some time I had a lot of dealings with the editor of Nietzsche's works, Fritz Koegel. We discussed many things related to the Nietzsche edition. I never had an official position in the Nietzsche Archive or on the Nietzsche edition. When Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche wanted to offer me such a position, this led to conflicts with Fritz Koegel, which from then on made it impossible for me to have any common ground with the Nietzsche Archive.

[ 18 ] My relationship with the Nietzsche Archive turned out to be an episode of strong stimulation in my Weimar life, which ultimately brought me deep suffering in the break-up of the relationship.

[ 19 ] From my extensive preoccupation with Nietzsche, I was left with an impression of his personality, whose fate was to experience the tragedy of the scientific age of the last half of the nineteenth century and to break from contact with it. He searched in this age, but could find nothing in it. Experiencing it could only strengthen my view that all searching in the results of natural science must find the essential not in them, but through them in the spirit.

[ 20 ] So it was precisely through Nietzsche's work that the problem of natural science came before my soul in a renewed form. Goethe and Nietzsche were in my perspective. Goethe's energetic sense of reality was directed towards the essence and processes of nature. He wanted to remain in nature. He kept himself in pure views of plant, animal and human forms. But by moving with his soul in these, he came everywhere to the spirit. He found the spirit reigning in matter. He did not want to go as far as the view of the spirit living and ruling in itself. He developed a "spiritual" knowledge of nature. He stopped short of a pure knowledge of the spirit so as not to lose reality.

[ 21 ] Nietzsche proceeded from a mythical way of looking at the spirit. Apollo and Dionysus were spirit figures that he experienced. The course of human spiritual history appeared to him to be a collaboration, or even a battle between Apollo and Dionysus. But he only managed to imagine such spiritual figures in mythical terms. He did not penetrate to the contemplation of real spiritual beings. From the spirit-myth he advanced to nature. In Nietzsche's soul, Apollo was supposed to represent the material according to the pattern of natural science; Dionysus was supposed to work like natural forces. But then Apollo's beauty darkened; then Dionysus' worldly emotion was paralyzed by the laws of nature.

[ 22] Goethe found the spirit in the reality of nature; Nietzsche lost the spirit-myth in the dream of nature in which he lived.

[ 23 ] I stood between these two opposites. The emotional experiences that had been expressed in my writing "Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time" were not continued at first; in contrast, Goethe once again dominated my contemplation during my last Weimar period. I wanted to characterize the path that the worldview of humanity had taken up to Goethe in order to then depict Goethe's way of looking at things in its emergence from this life. I attempted this in the book "Goethe's Weltanschauung", which was published in 1897.

[ 24 ] I wanted to show how Goethe saw the spirit flashing through pure knowledge of nature wherever he looked; but I left the way in which Goethe viewed the spirit as such completely untouched. I wanted to characterize the part of Goethe's world view that lives in a "spirit-like" view of nature.

[ 25 ] Nietzsche's ideas of the "eternal return" and the "superman" stood before me for a long time. For they reflected what a personality had to experience about the development of humanity and about the nature of man, who was held back from grasping the spiritual world by the fixed thoughts of the view of nature from the end of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche saw the development of humanity in such a way that what happens in one moment has already happened countless times in quite the same form and will happen countless times in the future. The atomistic organization of the universe makes the present moment appear as a certain combination of the smallest entities; this must be followed by another, this by yet another; and when all possible combinations are exhausted, the initial one must reappear. - A human life with all its details has existed innumerable times; it will reappear innumerable times with all these same details.

[ 26 ] The "repeated earth lives" of man dawned in Nietzsche's subconscious. They lead human life through the development of mankind to stages of life in which the ruling fate on spirit-forming paths does not lead man to a repetition of the same experience, but to a multifaceted passage through the course of the world. Nietzsche was bound by the fetters of the view of nature. What this could make of repeated earthly lives conjured up before his soul. And he lived it. For he perceived his life as a tragic one, filled with the most painful experiences, weighed down by suffering. - To experience this life countless more times - that was in front of his soul instead of the perspective of the liberating experiences that such tragedy has to experience in the further unfolding of future lives.

[ 27 ] And Nietzsche felt that in the human being who experiences himself in one earthly existence, another is revealed - a "Ubermensch", who can only develop the fragments of his entire life in his bodily earthly existence. The naturalistic idea of development made him see this "superhuman" not as the spiritually active within the sensual-physical, but as that which forms itself through merely natural development. Just as man has unfolded from the animal, the "superman" will unfold from man. The view of nature snatched away Nietzsche's view of the "spirit man" in the "natural man" and blinded him with a higher natural man.

[ 28 ] What Nietzsche experienced in this direction stood before my soul in full vividness in the summer of 1896. At that time, Fritz Koegel gave me his compilation of Nietzsche's aphorisms on the "eternal return" for my perusal. I wrote down what I thought at the time about the emergence of Nietzsche's ideas in an essay in the "Magazin für Literatur" in 1900. - The individual sentences of this essay record what I experienced in 1896 about Nietzsche and natural science. I will repeat my thoughts from that time here, detached from the polemic in which they were clothed at the time.

[ 29 ] "There is no doubt that Nietzsche wrote down these individual aphorisms in an unconstrained order ... I still have the conviction I expressed then: that Nietzsche conceived the idea on the occasion of reading Eugen Dühring's "Kursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung" (Leipzig 1875) and under the influence of this book. On p. 84 of this work this idea is expressed quite clearly; only there it is fought against just as vigorously as Nietzsche defends it. The book is in Nietzsche's library. As numerous pencil marks in the margins show, Nietzsche read it avidly ... Dühring says: "The deeper logical ground of all conscious life therefore demands, in the strictest sense of the word, an inexhaustibility of entities. Is this infinity, by virtue of which ever new forms are driven forth, possible in itself? The mere number of material parts and elements of force would in itself exclude the infinite accumulation of combinations if the constant medium of space and time did not guarantee an unlimited number of variations. Only an exhaustible number of combinations can follow from that which is countable. But from that which by its very nature cannot be conceived without contradiction as something countable, the unlimited multiplicity of positions and relationships must also be able to emerge. This unlimitedness, which we claim for the fate of the formations of the universe, is now compatible with every change and even with the occurrence of an interval of approximate persistence or complete self-sameness (underlined by me), but not with the cessation of all change. Those who wish to cultivate the idea of a being that corresponds to the original state should remember that temporal development has only one real direction, and that causality is also in accordance with this direction. It is easier to blur the differences than to retain them, and it therefore costs little effort to imagine the end by analogy with the beginning, ignoring the gap. Let us, however, beware of such superficial hastiness; for the existence of the universe, once given, is not an indifferent episode between two states of the night, but the only firm and clear ground from which we make our inferences and anticipations ...> Dühring also finds that a perpetual repetition of states has no charm for life. He says: 'Now it goes without saying that the principles of the stimulus of life are not compatible with eternal repetition of the same forms...'"

[ 30 ] Nietzsche's view of nature is driven into a consistency from which Dühring recoils by the mathematical observation and by the horror it presents to life.

[ 31 ] My essay continues: "... If we make the assumption that a countable number of combinations is possible with the material parts and elements of force, then we have Nietzsche's idea of the "return of the same". We have nothing other than the defense of a counter-idea taken from Dühring's view in aphorism 203 (volume XI in Koegel's edition and aphorism 22 in Horneffer's writing: 'Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Eternal Second Coming"): "The measure of the All-Power is determined, nothing 'infinite': let us beware of such excesses of the concept! Consequently, the number of positions, changes, combinations and developments of this force is indeed immense and practically 'immeasurable', but in any case also determined and not infinite, that is: the force is eternally the same and eternally active: - up to this moment an infinity has already elapsed, that is, all possible developments must already have occurred. Consequently, the instantaneous development must be a repetition, and so the one that gave birth to it, and the one that arises from it, and so on forwards and backwards! Everything has been there countless times, inasmuch as the total situation of all forces always returns..." And Nietzsche's feeling towards this thought is exactly the opposite of Dühring's. For Nietzsche, this thought is the highest formula for the affirmation of life. Aphorism 43 (in Horneffer, 234 in Koegel's edition) reads: 'future history: more and more this thought will triumph - and those who do not believe in it must by their nature finally die out! - Only those who consider their existence capable of eternal repetition remain: among such, however, a state is possible to which no utopian has reached! It is possible to prove that many of Nietzsche's thoughts arose in the same way as the idea of eternal return. Nietzsche formed the counter-idea to some existing idea. Ultimately, the same tendency led him to his main work: 'The Revaluation of All Values'."

[ 32 ] I realized at the time that Nietzsche, with certain of his thoughts striving for the spiritual world, was a prisoner of the view of nature. That is why I strictly rejected the mystical interpretation of his idea of the Second Coming. And I agreed with Peter Gast, who wrote in his edition of Nietzsche's works: "The purely mechanical doctrine of the exhaustibility, i.e. repetition, of cosmic molecular combinations." - Nietzsche believed he had to extract a high thought from the foundations of the view of nature. That was the way he had to suffer from his time.

[ 33] So what one had to suffer from the view of nature at the end of the nineteenth century - looking at the spirit - stood before me in the sight of Nietzsche's soul in 1896.