The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XIX

[ 1 ] How lonely I was at that time with what I quietly carried within me as my "world view", while my thoughts were directed towards Goethe on the one hand and Nietzsche on the other, I could also feel this in my relationship with many a personality with whom I felt a friendly connection, and who nevertheless energetically rejected my intellectual life.

[ 2 ] The friend I had made when I was young, after our ideas had clashed so much that I had to say to him: "If what you think about the nature of life were true, I would rather be the piece of wood on which my feet stand than a human being", remained devoted to me in love and loyalty. His warm letters from Vienna always took me back to the place that was so dear to me, especially through the human relationships I was allowed to live in there.

[ 3 ] But when the friend came to talk about my spiritual life in his letters, an abyss opened up.

[ 4 ] He often wrote to me that I was alienating myself from the originally human, that I was "rationalizing my soul impulses". He had the feeling that my emotional life was being transformed into a pure thought life; and he perceived this as a coldness emanating from me. Nothing I did could help me, no matter what I said against it. I even noticed that the warmth of his friendship waned at times, because he could not get rid of the belief that I must grow cold in the human, because I was consuming my soul life in the region of thought. He did not want to understand how, instead of growing cold in the life of thought, I had to take the whole of the human into this life in order to grasp spiritual reality with it in the sphere of thought.

[ 5 ] He did not see that the purely human remains, even if it rises into the realm of the spirit; he did not see how one could live in the realm of thought; he supposed that one could merely think there and must lose oneself in the cold region of the abstract.

[ 6 ] And so he turned me into a "rationalist". I found this to be the greatest misunderstanding of what lay on my spiritual path. All thinking that led away from reality and ended in abstraction was repugnant to me at heart. I was in a state of mind that only wanted to lead thought out of the sensual world to the stage where it threatened to become abstract; at that moment, I told myself, it must seize the spirit My friend saw me step out of the world of the physical with my thought; but he did not realize how I entered the spiritual at the same moment. And so, when I spoke of the truly spiritual, it was all an insubstantial thing to him; and he heard in my words only a web of abstract thoughts.

[ 7 ] I suffered greatly from the fact that I was actually speaking of a "nothing" for my friend by expressing what was most meaningful to me. - And so I faced many people.

[ 8 ] I had to see what I encountered in life in my view of the knowledge of nature. I could only recognize the right method of research in nature in the fact that one uses thought to see through the phenomena of the senses in their mutual relationships; but I could not admit that one forms hypotheses through thought, beyond the realm of sensory perception, which then want to point to an extrasensory reality, but which in truth only form a web of abstract thoughts. At the moment when thought has done enough to ascertain what the sensory phenomena, properly viewed, reveal by themselves, I did not want to begin with the formation of hypotheses, but with the view, with the experience of the spiritual, which lives in the sensory world and in the true sense not behind the sensory view.

[ 9 ] What I then, in the mid-nineties, carried intensely within me as my view, I later summarized in an essay that I wrote in 1900 in no. 16 of the "Magazin für Literatur": "A scientific dissection of our cognitive activity leads... to the conviction that the questions we have to ask of nature are a consequence of the peculiar relationship in which we stand to the world. We are limited individualities, and can therefore only perceive the world piecemeal. Each piece, considered in and of itself, is a riddle, or, to put it another way, a question for our cognition. However, the more details we get to know, the clearer the world becomes. One perception explains another. There are no questions that the world poses to us that cannot be answered with the means it offers us. For monism, therefore, there are no fundamental limits to knowledge. This or that can be unresolved at any given time because we have not yet been able to find the things that are involved in it in terms of time or space. But what has not yet been found today may be found tomorrow. The limits imposed by this are only accidental ones that disappear with the progress of experience and thought. In such cases, the formation of hypotheses comes into its own. Hypotheses may not be formed about something that is supposed to be inaccessible to our knowledge in principle. The atomistic hypothesis is a completely unfounded one if it is not to be thought of merely as an aid to the abstracting intellect, but as a statement about real beings lying outside the qualities of sensation. A hypothesis can only be an assumption about a fact that is not accessible to us for accidental reasons, but which by its nature belongs to the world given to us."

[ 10 ] I expressed this view on hypothesis formation at the time by presenting the "limits of knowledge" as unjustified and the limits of natural science as necessary. At the time, I only did this with regard to knowledge of nature. But this shaping of ideas has always paved the way for me to go further with the means of spiritual knowledge where one stands at the necessary "limit" with the means of natural knowledge.

[ 11 ] I experienced a sense of well-being and something deeply satisfying in Weimar through the artistic element that was brought into the city by the art school and the theater with the subsequent music.

[ 12 ] The painting teachers and students at the art school revealed what was then striving for a new, direct view and reproduction of nature and life from older traditions. Quite a few of these painters appeared to be "seekers" in the true sense of the word. How that which the painter has as paint on his palette or in his paint pot is to be brought onto the painting surface so that what the artist creates has a legitimate relationship to the living nature that appears before the human eye: that was the question that was discussed with a stimulating, often pleasantly imaginative, often doctrinaire manner in the most diverse forms, and to whose artistic experience the numerous paintings presented by Weimar painters in the permanent art exhibition in Weimar bore witness.

[ 13 ] My perception of art was not yet as advanced as my relationship to cognitive experiences. But I also sought a spiritual understanding of the artistic in my stimulating contact with the Weimar artists.

[ 14 ] What I felt in my own soul when the modern painters, who wanted to capture and reproduce the atmosphere of light and air in their immediate vision, went up against the "old ones", who "knew" from tradition how to treat this or that, is rather chaotic in retrospect. In many, it was an enthusiastic endeavor, stemming from the most primal forces of the soul, to be "true" in listening to nature.

[ 15 ] But not so chaotically, but in the clearest forms, the life of a young painter stands before my soul, whose artistic way of revealing himself was intimately connected with my own development on the side of artistic imagination. The artist, who was in the full bloom of youth at the time, became closely associated with me for some time. Life took him away from me again, but I often lived in the memory of the hours we spent together.

[ 16 ] The soul life of this young man was all light and color. What others expressed in ideas, he expressed through "colors in light". Even his mind worked in such a way that through it he connected the things and processes of life as colors connect, not as the mere thoughts that the ordinary man forms of the world connect.

[ 16 ] This young artist was once at a wedding party to which I was also invited. The usual speeches were given. The pastor was looking for the content of his speech in the meaning of the names of the bride and groom; I tried to get rid of the speaker's duty, which was incumbent on me because I often frequented the friendly house from which the bride came, by talking about the delightful experiences that the guests of this house could have. I spoke because I was expected to speak. And I was expected to give a wedding table speech, as was "proper". And so I took little pleasure in "my role".

[ 17 ] - The young painter, who had long since become a friend of the house, stood up after me. Nothing was really expected of him. Because we knew that he didn't have the kind of ideas that are used in dinner speeches. He began like this: "The sun's radiance poured lovingly over the red glowing summit of the hill. Clouds over the hill and breathing in the sun's radiance; glowing red cheeks holding out to the sunlight, uniting to form a triumphal arch of spirit and color, escorting the light striving towards the earth. Flowery expanses far and wide, a yellow glowing mood above them, slipping into the flowers, awakening life from them..." He went on like this for a long time. He had suddenly forgotten all the wedding bustle around him and started to paint "in his mind". I don't remember why he stopped talking so painterly; I think someone plucked at his velvet skirt who loved him very much, but who was no less fond of the fact that the guests came to enjoy a quiet wedding roast.

[ 18 ] The young painter's name was Otto Fröhlich. He sat with me a lot in my living room, we went on walks and excursions together. Otto Fröhlich always painted "in spirit" next to me. Next to him, you could forget that the world had any other content than light and color.

[ 19 ] That's how I felt about my young friend. I know how, what I had to say to him, I wrapped myself in a dress of color before his soul to make myself understood to him.

[ 20 ] And the young painter really did manage to wield the brush and apply the paint in such a way that his pictures became to a high degree a reflection of his vivid and lush colorful imagination. When he painted a tree trunk, it was not the lines of the structure on the canvas, but rather what light and colors reveal of themselves when the tree trunk gives them the opportunity to come to life.

[ 21] I searched in my way for the spiritual content of the brightly colored. In him I had to see the secret of the color being. In Otto Fröhlich, I had a man at my side who instinctively carried within himself as his own experience what I was looking for in the human soul's grasp of the world of color.

[ 22 ] I found it gratifying to be able to give my young friend some inspiration through my own research. One such suggestion was the following. I myself experienced to a high degree the intensely colorful things that Nietzsche presents in the Zarathustra chapter on the "ugliest man". This "valley of death", painted in poetry, contained for me much of the life secret of colors.

[ 23 ] I gave Otto Fröhlich the advice that he should now paint Nietzsche's poetically painted picture of Zarathustra and the ugliest man. He did so. The result was actually something wonderful. The colors were concentrated luminously, meaningfully in the Zarathustra figure. It was only not fully realized as such because the color itself could not yet unfold in Fröhlich to the point of creating Zarathustra. But the iridescence of color rippled all the more vividly around the "green snakes" in the valley of the ugliest man. In this part of the picture the whole of Fröhlich lived. But now the "ugliest man". This would have required a line, a painterly characterization. That is where Fröhlich failed. He did not yet know how the secret lives in the color, to let the spiritual arise in the form through its own treatment. And so the "ugliest man" became a reproduction of the model that was known among Weimar painters as the "filling bag". I do not know whether this was really the bourgeois name of the man that the painters always used when they wanted to become "characteristically ugly"; but I do know that "Füllsack's" ugliness was no longer bourgeois-philistine, but had something of the "genial" about it. But to place him in the picture so easily as the "ugly Füllsack", as a model copy, where Zarathustra's soul revealed itself luminously in countenance and dress, where the light conjured up true color from his intercourse with the green snakes, that spoiled Fröhlich's painterly work. And so the picture could not become what I had hoped it would be through Otto Fröhlich.

[ 24 ] Although I must see sociability in the character of my nature, in Weimar I never felt the urge to spend my evenings where artists and all those who were socially connected with them did so to a greater extent.

[ 25 This was in a "Künstlervereinshaus", a romantic conversion of an old smithy opposite the theater. Teachers and students of the painters' academy sat there together in the dim, colorful light, as did actors and musicians. Anyone "looking" to socialize had to feel compelled to go there in the evening. And I didn't feel it because I wasn't looking for socializing, but gratefully accepted it when circumstances brought it to me.

[ 26 ] And so I got to know individual artists in other social contexts, but not "the artistic community".

[ 27 ] And getting to know individual artists in Weimar at that time was already the gain of a lifetime. For the traditions of the court and the extraordinarily likeable personality of Grand Duke Karl Alexander gave the city an artistic attitude that brought almost everything artistic that took place in that period into some kind of relationship with Weimar.

[ 28 ] There was above all the theater with its good old traditions. In its most important performers, it was quite reluctant to allow naturalistic taste to emerge. And where modernity wanted to reveal itself and eradicate some of the braids that are always associated with good traditions, modernity was far removed from what Brahm on stage and Paul Schlenther journalistically propagated as the "modern view". Among these "Weimar modernists" was above all the thoroughly artistic, noble firebrand Paul Wiecke. Seeing such people take the first steps of their "artistry" in Weimar makes an indelible impression and is a broad school of life. Paul Wiecke needed the underground of a theater that, out of its traditions, annoys the elementary artist. The hours I spent in Paul Wiecke's house were stimulating. He was a close friend of my friend Julius Wahle; and so it came about that I entered into a closer relationship with him. It was often delightful to hear Wiecke ranting about almost everything he had to experience when he was rehearsing for a new play. And in connection with this, to see him play the role that he had so rumbled for; but which always offered a rare pleasure through the noble pursuit of style and also through the beautiful fire of enthusiasm.

[ 29 ] Richard Strauss took his first steps in Weimar at that time. He acted as second Kapellmeister alongside Lassen. Richard Strauss' first compositions were performed in Weimar The musical quest of this personality revealed itself like a piece of Weimar's intellectual life itself. Such a joyful and devoted reception of something that became an exciting artistic problem in its reception was only possible in Weimar at that time. All around a calm, traditional, dignified atmosphere: Richard Strauss' "Zarathustra Symphony" or even his music for Eulenspiegel. Everything wakes up from tradition, dignity, dignity; but it wakes up in such a way that the approval is amiable, the rejection harmless - and the artist can thus find the relationship to his own creation in the most beautiful way.

[ 30 ] We sat for so many hours at the first performance of Richard Strauss' music drama "Guntram", where Heinrich Zeller, so lovable, so excellent as a human being, had the leading role and sang himself almost out of tune.

[ 32 ] Yes, this deeply likeable man, Heinrich Zeller, he too had to have Weimar in order to become what he became. He had the most beautiful, elemental talent as a singer. In order to develop, he needed an environment that patiently accepted the gradual development of his talent. And so Heinrich Zeller's development was one of the most humanly beautiful things one can experience. At the same time, Zeller was such an amiable personality that the hours spent with him were among the most delightful.

[ 33 ] And so it came about that, although I didn't often think about going to the artists' association in the evening, when Heinrich Zeller met me and said I should go along, I gladly followed his invitation every time.

[ 34 ] Now the Weimar conditions also had their downsides. The traditional, tranquillity-loving world all too often held the artist back as if in a kind of stupor. Heinrich Zeller became little known to the world outside Weimar. What was initially capable of unfolding his wings then paralyzed them again. And that is probably what happened to my dear friend Otto Fröhlich. Like Zeller, he needed Weimar's artistic soil; but the subdued intellectual atmosphere absorbed him too strongly into its artistic comfort.

[ 35 ] And this "artistic comfort" was felt in the penetration of the spirit of Ibsen and other modernists. The struggle that the actors fought to find the style for a "Nora", for example. Such a search, as could be seen here, only takes place where the reproduction of old stage traditions makes it difficult to portray what comes from poets who, like Schiller, did not come from the stage but, like Ibsen, from life.

[ 36 ] However, the reflection of this modernity from the "artistic comfort" of the theater audience also took place. One should now find one's way through the middle of what was imposed on one by the fact that one was a resident of "classical Weimar", and also by what made Weimar great, namely that it has always had an understanding for the new.

[ 37 ] I think back with pleasure to the performances of Wagner's music dramas that I attended in Weimar. The artistic director v. Bronsart developed the most understanding devotion especially for this side of the theater performances. Heinrich Zeller's voice was shown to its best advantage. An important "force as a singer was Mrs. Agnes Stavenhagen, the wife of the pianist Bernhard Stavenhagen, who was also "Kapellmeister at the theater for a time. Repeated music festivals brought artists representing the period and their works to Weimar. Mahler, for example, was seen as "Kapellmeister at a music festival in his early days. The impression of how he wielded the baton was indelible, not demanding music in the flow of forms, but as an experience of something supernatural and hidden, pointing meaningfully between the forms.

[ 38 ] What presents itself to my soul here from Weimar events, seemingly completely detached from me, is in reality deeply connected to my life. For these were events and conditions that I experienced as something that affected me in the most intense way. Often later, when I encountered a personality or their work that I had witnessed in its beginnings in Weimar, I thought back gratefully to this Weimar period, through which so much could become understandable, because so much had gone there to undergo the germinal state. I experienced the "pursuit of art in Weimar in such a way that I had my own judgment about most things, often very little in agreement with that of others. But besides that, everything that others felt interested me just as much as my own. Here, too, an inner double life of the soul developed in me.

[ 39 ] This was a real exercise of the soul, brought about by life itself according to destiny, in order to get beyond the abstract either/or of intellectual judgment. This judgment establishes boundaries for the soul before the supersensible world. In this world there are no beings and processes that give rise to such an either/or judgment. One must become versatile towards the supersensible. One must not only learn theoretically, but one must habitually incorporate it into the innermost impulses of the soul's life to look at everything from the most varied points of view. Such "points of view" as materialism, realism, idealism, spiritualism, as they are developed into extensive theories by abstractly oriented personalities in the physical world in order to mean something about the things themselves, lose all interest for the cognizer of the supersensible. He knows that materialism, for example, can be nothing other than the view of the world from the point of view from which it shows itself in material appearance.

[ 40 ] It is a practical training in this direction when one sees oneself placed in an existence that brings one as close inwardly to the life that beats its waves outside as one's own judgments and feelings. But that was the case for me with many things in Weimar. It seems to me that this stopped at the end of the century. Before that, the spirit of Goethe and Schiller still reigned over everything. And the old, dear Grand Duke, who walked so nobly through Weimar and its grounds, had still experienced Goethe as a "boy. He truly felt his "nobility" quite strongly; but he showed everywhere that he felt ennobled a second time by "Goethe's work for Weimar".

[ 41 ] It was probably Goethe's spirit that worked so strongly from all sides in Weimar that a certain aspect of the co-experience of what was happening there became a practical exercise for my soul in the correct representation of the supersensible worlds.