The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XXII

[ 1 ] At the end of my time in Weimar, I had thirty-six years of life behind me. A year earlier, a profound change had already begun in my soul. When I left Weimar, it became an incisive experience. It was completely independent of the change in my external living conditions, which was also a major one. Experiencing what can be experienced in the spiritual world was always a matter of course for me; the perceptive grasp of the sensory world presented me with the greatest difficulties. It was as if I could not have poured my spiritual experience into my sensory organs to the extent that I could fully connect what they experienced with my soul.

[ 2 ] This changed completely from the beginning of my thirty-sixth year. My powers of observation of things, beings and processes in the physical world changed in the direction of accuracy and penetration. This was the case both in science and in external life. Whereas before it was the case for me that great scientific connections, which were to be grasped in a spiritual way, became my spiritual property without any effort, and sensory perception and especially its memorization made the greatest effort for me, now everything changed. A previously non-existent attention for the sensually perceptible awoke in me. Details became important to me; I had the feeling that the sensory world had something to reveal that only it could reveal. I regarded it as an ideal to get to know it solely through what it has to say, without man bringing anything into it through his thinking or through any other soul content occurring within him.

[ 3 ] I realized that I was experiencing a human life change at a much later stage of life than others. But I also saw that this had very specific consequences for the life of the soul. I found how people, because they pass early from the soul's weaving in the spiritual world to experiencing the physical, do not achieve a pure grasp of either the spiritual or the physical world. They continually and quite instinctively mix what things tell their senses with what the soul experiences through the spirit and what is then used by it to "imagine" things.

[ 4 ] For me, the precision and forcefulness of sensory observation opened up a whole new world. The objective confrontation of the sensory world, free of all subjectivity in the soul, revealed something about which a spiritual view had nothing to say.

[ 5 ] But this also threw its light back on the world of the spirit. For as the sensory world revealed its essence in sensory perception itself, the opposite pole was there for cognition, in order to appreciate the spiritual in its full nature, unmixed with the sensory.

[ 6 ] This had a particularly incisive effect on the life of the soul because it also manifested itself in the area of human life. My powers of observation were attuned to taking a completely objective, pure view of what a person was experiencing. I anxiously avoided criticizing what people did or expressing sympathy or antipathy in my relationship with them: I wanted to "simply let people affect me as they are".

[ 7 ] I soon found that observing the world in this way truly led me into the spiritual world. In observing the physical world, one goes completely out of oneself; and in doing so, one re-enters the spiritual world with a heightened capacity for spiritual observation.

[ 8 ] So the spiritual and the sensual world had come before my soul in their full contrast. But I did not perceive the contrast as something that had to be balanced out by some kind of philosophical thought - for example, a "monism". Rather, I felt that being fully immersed with the soul in this contrast is synonymous with "having an understanding of life". Where the opposites are experienced as balanced, the lifeless, the dead prevails. Where there is life, there is the unbalanced contrast; and life itself is the continuous overcoming, but at the same time new creation of opposites.

[ 9 ] From all of this, a very intense devotion penetrated my emotional life, not to a thoughtful theoretical grasp, but to an experience of the mysterious in the world. In order to meditatively gain the right relationship to the world, I repeatedly placed before my soul: "The world is full of riddles. Knowledge wants to get at them. But it usually wants to show a thought content as the solution to a riddle. But the riddles - I had to tell myself - are not solved by thoughts. These set the soul on the path of solutions; but they do not contain the solutions. A riddle arises in the real world; it is there as an appearance; its solution also arises in reality. Something appears that is essence or process; and that represents the solution of the other.

[ 10 ] So I also said to myself: the whole world, apart from man, is a riddle, the actual riddle of the world; and man himself is the solution.

[ 11 ] Thus I was able to think: man is able to say something about the riddle of the world at every moment. What he says, however, can only ever give as much content about the solution as he has recognized about himself as a human being.

[ 12 ] Thus, cognition also becomes a process in reality. Questions reveal themselves in the world; answers reveal themselves as realities; cognition in man is his participation in what the beings and processes in the spiritual and physical world have to say to each other.

[ 13 ] All this was already hinted at, in some places even quite clearly, in the writings that I printed up to the time described here. During this time alone, it became the most intense soul experience that filled the hours in which knowledge meditated on the reasons for the world. And the main thing is that this soul experience emerged in its strength at that time from the objective surrender to the pure, unclouded observation of the senses. A new world was given to me in this observation; I had to seek that which was the soul's counter-experience from that which had hitherto been recognizable in my soul in order to bring about a balance with the new.

[ 14 ] As soon as I did not think but sensually observed the entire essence of the sensory world, a riddle was presented as reality. And the solution lies in man himself.

[ 15 ] The enthusiasm for what I later called "realistic knowledge" lived in my entire soul. And in particular, it was clear to me that a person with such "realistic knowledge" could not stand in any corner of the world while being and becoming took place outside of him. Knowledge became for me that which belongs not only to man, but to the being and becoming of the world. Just as the root and trunk of a tree are nothing complete if they do not live on into the blossom, so the being and becoming of the world are nothing truly existing if they do not live on into the content of knowledge. Looking at this insight, I repeated on every occasion when it was appropriate: man is not the being who creates the content of knowledge for himself, but he provides with his soul the arena on which the world experiences its existence and becoming in part. If there were no cognition, the world would remain unfinished. In this kind of cognitive immersion in the reality of the world, I increasingly found the possibility of creating a protection for the essence of human cognition against the view that in this cognition man creates an image or the like of the world. He became a co-creator of the world itself for my idea of cognition, not a re-creator of something that could also remain out of the world without it being unfinished.

[ 16 ] But also towards "mysticism" ever greater clarity was created for my cognition. The co-experience of world events on the part of man was drawn out of the indeterminate mystical feeling and placed in the light in which the ideas reveal themselves. The world of the senses, seen purely in its own nature, is initially devoid of ideas4 just as the root and trunk of the tree are devoid of blossoms. But just as the blossom is not a darkening fading of the plant's existence, but a transformation of this existence itself, so the world of ideas relating to the sense world in man is a transformation of sense existence, not a mystical, dark working of something indeterminate into the world of man's soul. As bright as the physical things and processes appear in the light of the sun, so spiritually bright must appear what lives as knowledge in the human soul.

[ 17 ] It was a very clear soul experience that was present in me at that time in this orientation. But there was something extraordinarily difficult in the transition to giving expression to this experience.

[ 18 ] My book "Goethe's Weltanschauung" and the introductions to the last volume, which I had published for the edition in "Kürschners Deutscher National-Literatur", were written during my last time in Weimar. I am looking in particular at what I wrote as an introduction to Goethe's "Sprüche in Prosa", which I edited, and comparing this with the formulation of the contents of the book "Goethes Weltanschauung". If one only looks at things on the surface, one can construe this or that contradiction between the one and the other in these descriptions of mine, which were written at almost exactly the same time. But if you look at what lives beneath the surface, what wants to reveal itself as a view of the depths of life, soul and spirit in the formulations that only take shape on the surface, you will not find contradictions, but rather a struggle for expression, especially in my works at that time. A struggle to bring into the worldview concepts precisely what I have described here as the experience of knowledge, of man's relationship to the world, of becoming a riddle and solving riddles within true reality.

[ 19 ] When I wrote my book "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert" about three and a half years later, some things had moved on again; and I was able to make my experience of knowledge presented here fruitful for the description of the individual worldviews that appear in history.

[ 20 ] Whoever wants to reject writings because in them the life of the soul struggles to recognize, that is, in the light of the description given here, in them the life of the world continues to unfold in its struggle on the stage of the human soul, cannot - according to my insight - succeed in immersing himself with his recognizing soul in true reality. This is something that just then became fixed in me as a view, while it had long since pulsated through my conceptual world.

[ 21 ] In connection with the turnaround in my spiritual life, I had some profound inner experiences. - I recognized in soul experience the essence of meditation and its significance for insights into the spiritual world. I had also led a meditative life before, but the impetus for it came from the ideal realization of its value for a spiritual world view. Now something arose within me that demanded meditation, like something that became a necessity for my soul life. The acquired soul life needed meditation, just as the organism needs lung breathing at a certain stage of its development.

[ 22 ] How the ordinary conceptual knowledge gained from sensory observation relates to the perception of the spiritual became for me in this phase of my life from a more ideal experience to one in which the whole person is involved. The ideal experience, which nevertheless incorporates the real spiritual, is the element from which my "philosophy of freedom" was born. The experience of the whole person contains the spiritual world in a much more being-like way than the ideal experience. And yet this is already a higher level than the conceptual grasp of the sensory world. In ideal experience, one does not grasp the sensory world, but a spiritual world that to a certain extent directly adjoins it.

[ 23 ] As all this sought expression and experience in my soul at that time, three kinds of cognition stood before my inner being. The first kind is the conceptual knowledge gained from sensory observation. It is appropriated by the soul and then retained within according to the available power of memory. Repetitions of the content to be appropriated only have the meaning that it can be retained well. The second type of cognition is that in which concepts are not acquired through sensory observation, but are experienced internally independently of the senses. Experience then becomes the guarantor, through its own essence, that the concepts are founded in spiritual reality. One arrives at the experience that concepts contain the guarantee of spiritual reality with the same certainty from the nature of experience in this kind of cognition as one attains the certainty in sense cognition that one does not have illusions but physical reality before one.

[ 24 ] With this ideal-spiritual cognition, it is no longer sufficient - as with sensory cognition - to acquire it, which then leads to the fact that one has it for the memory. The process of appropriation must become a continuous one. Just as it is not enough for the organism to have breathed for a while in order to then use the acquired knowledge in the further process of life through breathing, so it is not enough for ideal-spiritual knowledge to be appropriated in a way similar to sensory cognition. For this it is necessary that the soul is in a continuous living interaction with the world into which one is placed through this knowledge. This happens through meditation, which - as indicated above - arises from the ideal insight into the value of meditation. I had been looking for this interaction long before my change of soul (at the age of thirty-five).

[ 25 ] What happened now was meditation as a spiritual necessity of life. And thus the third way of realization stood before my inner self. It not only led into further depths of the spiritual world, but also allowed an intimate coexistence with it. I had to, precisely out of inner necessity, repeatedly bring a very specific type of concept into the center of my consciousness.

[ 26 ] It was this:

[ 27 ] If I immerse myself with my soul in ideas that are formed in the sensory world, then I am only able to speak of the reality of what I experience in direct experience as long as I am sensually observing a thing or process. Sense guarantees me the truth of what I observe as long as I observe.

[ 28 ] Not so when I connect with beings or processes of the spiritual world through ideal-spiritual cognition. In this case, the direct experience of the existence of what is perceived, which goes beyond the duration of perception, occurs in the individual perception. If, for example, one experiences the "I" of the human being as its very own inner essence, one knows in the contemplative experience that this "I" was before life in the physical body and will be after it. What one thus experiences in the "I" reveals this directly, just as the rose reveals its redness in direct perception.

[ 29 ] In such a meditation practiced out of an inner spiritual necessity for life, the awareness of an "inner spiritual man" develops more and more, who can live, perceive and move in the spiritual in complete detachment from the physical organism. This self-sufficient spiritual person came into my experience under the influence of meditation. The experience of the spiritual thereby experienced an essential deepening. The fact that sensory cognition arises through the organism can be sufficiently demonstrated by the self-observation that is possible for this cognition. But ideal-spiritual cognition is also still dependent on the organism. Self-observation shows this: For sense observation, the individual act of cognition is bound to the organism. For ideal-spiritual cognition, the individual act is completely independent of the physical organism; but that such cognition can be developed by man at all depends on the fact that in general life is present in the organism. In the case of the third kind of cognition, it can only come about through the spiritual man if he frees himself from the physical organism as if it did not exist at all.

[ 30 ] An awareness of all this developed under the influence of the meditative life described above. I was able to effectively refute for myself the opinion that through such meditation one is subject to a kind of autosuggestion, the result of which is the subsequent realization of the spirit. For the very first ideal-spiritual realization had already convinced me of the truth of the spiritual experience. And indeed the very first, not merely the one that received its life in meditation, but the one that began its life. How to ascertain truth quite exactly in prudent consciousness, I had already done that for what is in question before there could be any talk of autosuggestion. What the meditation had achieved could therefore only be the experience of something whose reality I was already fully capable of testing before the experience.

[ 31 ] All this, which was connected with my soul-turning, showed itself in connection with a result of possible self-observation, which, just like the one described, took on a content-heavy meaning for me.

[ 32 ] I felt how the ideal of the previous life receded in a certain direction and the volitional took its place. For this to be possible, the will must be able to abstain from all subjective arbitrariness in the unfolding of knowledge. The will increased to the extent that the ideal decreased. And the will also took over spiritual cognition, which had previously been performed almost entirely by the ideal. I had already recognized that the division of the life of the soul into thinking, feeling and willing has only limited significance. In truth, thinking also contains feeling and volition; it is only that thinking predominates over the latter. In feeling lives thinking and willing, in willing thinking and feeling likewise. Now I experienced how the willing absorbed more of the thinking, the thinking more of the willing.

[ 33 ] On the one hand, meditation leads to the realization of the spiritual, on the other hand, the consequence of such results of self-observation is the inner strengthening of the spiritual man, independent of the organism, and the attachment of his being in the spiritual world, just as the physical man has his attachment in the physical world. - Only one becomes aware of how the attachment of the spiritual man in the spiritual world increases immeasurably when the physical organism does not limit this attachment, while the attachment of the physical organism in the physical world - with death - gives way to disintegration when the spiritual man no longer maintains this attachment of his own accord.

[ 34 ] Any form of epistemology that limits human knowledge to a certain area and that "beyond" it presents the "primal causes", the "things in themselves" as inaccessible to human knowledge, is now incompatible with such experiential cognition. Every "inaccessible" was only "at first"; and it can only remain inaccessible as long as man has not developed in his inner being that which is related to the previously unknown and can therefore grow together with it in experiential cognition. This ability of man to grow into every kind of being became something that he who wants to see man's position in the world in the right light must recognize. Whoever cannot bring himself to this recognition, knowledge cannot give him something that really belongs to the world, but only a reproduction, indifferent to the world, of some part of the world's content. With such merely reproductive cognition, however, man cannot seize a being within himself which, as a fully conscious individuality, gives him an inner experience of standing firm in the universe

[ 35 ] I was concerned to speak of knowledge in such a way that the spiritual is not merely recognized, but recognized in such a way that man can reach it with his contemplation. And it seemed more important to me to hold that the "primal grounds" of existence lie within what man can achieve in his overall experience than to mentally recognize an unknown spiritual in some "otherworldly" realm.

[ 36 ] This is why my view rejects the way of thinking that considers the content of sensory perception (color, warmth, sound, etc.) to be only something that an unknown external world evokes in man through sensory perception, while this external world itself can only be imagined hypothetically. The theoretical ideas underlying physical and physiological thinking along these lines were perceived by my experiencing cognition as particularly harmful. This feeling increased to the greatest vividness in the period of my life described here. Everything that was described in physics and physiology as "lying behind subjective sensation" made me, if I may use the expression, uneasy about cognition.

[ 37 ] In contrast, I saw in Lyell's, Darwin's and Haeckel's way of thinking something that, even if it was imperfect as it appeared, was nevertheless capable of development according to a healthy person.

[ 38 ] Lyell's principle of explaining the phenomena in that part of the earth's development which, because it lies in the past, eludes sensory observation, by ideas which arise from the present observation of this development, seemed to me to be fruitful in the direction indicated. Seeking an understanding of the physical structure of man by deriving his forms from those of animals, as Haeckel's "Anthropogeny" does in a comprehensive manner, I considered to be a good basis for the further development of knowledge.

[ 39 ] I said to myself: If man sets himself a limit of knowledge beyond which the "things in themselves" are supposed to lie, he thereby blocks his access to the spiritual world; if he places himself in relation to the world of the senses in such a way that one explains the other within it (that which is presently in the process of becoming earth explains the geological prehistory, the forms of the animal form those of the human), then he can be prepared to extend this explicability of beings and processes to the spiritual as well.

[ 40 ] I can also say for my own feelings in this area: "This is something that just then became fixed in me as a perception, while it had already been pulsating through my conceptual world for a long time."