The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XXIII

[ 1 ] With the change of soul I have described, I must conclude my second major phase of life. The paths of destiny took on a different meaning than before. Both during my time in Vienna and in Weimar, the external signs of fate pointed in directions that converged with the content of my inner soul's aspirations. The basic character of my spiritual world view lives on in all my writings, even if an inner necessity demanded that I extend my reflections less to the actual spiritual realm. In my work as an educator in Vienna there were only objectives that came from the insights of my own soul. In Weimar, in the work relating to Goethe, only what I regarded as the task of such work was effective. Nowhere had I had to harmonize the directions coming from the outside world with my own in a difficult way.

[ 2 ] It was precisely from this course of my life that the possibility arose of looking at and presenting the idea of freedom in a way that seemed clear to me. I do not believe that I looked at this idea one-sidedly because it had great significance in my own life. It corresponds to an objective reality, and what one experiences with such a reality cannot, with a conscientious striving for knowledge, change this reality, but only make it possible to see through it to a greater or lesser degree. Make it possible to a greater or lesser degree. The "ethical individualism" of my world view, so misjudged by many, was linked to this view of the idea of freedom. At the beginning of the third phase of my life, it too was transformed from an element of my conceptual world living in my mind into one that had now taken hold of the whole person.

[ 3 ] Both the physical and physiological world view of the time, to which I was opposed in my way of thinking, and the biological world view, which, despite its imperfections, I could see as a bridge to a spiritual one, demanded that I bring my own ideas to ever better shape in both areas of the world. I had to answer the question: can the impulses of man's actions be revealed to him by the outer world? I found that the divine-spiritual forces, which inwardly pervade the human will, have no way out of the outer world into the human interior. A correct physical-physiological as well as a biological way of thinking seemed to me to show this. A natural path that gives rise to external volition cannot be found. Thus no divine-spiritual moral impulse can penetrate by such an external path to that place of the soul where the inherent impulse of the will working in man brings itself into existence. External natural forces can also only entrain the natural in the human being. But then in reality there is no free expression of will, but a continuation of the natural event into the human being and through him. The human being has then not fully grasped his essence, but has remained stuck in the naturalness of his outer side as an unfree agent.

[ 4 ] I kept telling myself that it cannot be a question of answering the question: is man's will free or not? But the entirely other question: what is the path in the life of the soul from the unfree, natural will to the free, i.e. truly moral will? And in order to find the answer to this question, we had to look at how the divine-spiritual lives in every individual human soul. The moral emanates from it; in its entirely individual being, therefore, the moral impulse must come to life.

[ 5 ] Moral laws - as commandments - which come from an external context in which man stands, even if they originally come from the realm of the spiritual world, do not become moral impulses in him by the fact that he orients his will according to them, but solely by the fact that he experiences their thought content as spiritually-substantial entirely individual. Freedom lives in the thinking of man; and it is not the will that is directly free, but the thought that generates the will.

[ 6 ] So in my "Philosophy of Freedom" I already had to speak emphatically of the freedom of thought in relation to the moral nature of the will.

[ 7 ] This idea was also particularly reinforced in the meditative life. The moral world order stood before me ever more clearly as the one manifestation, realized on earth, of such orders of activity that are to be found in superior spiritual regions. It emerged as that which only those who can recognize the spiritual can grasp in their imaginary world.

[ 8 ] All these insights came together for me precisely in the epoch of life described here with the comprehensive truth that the beings and processes of the world are not explained in truth if one uses thinking to "explain" them; but if one is able to see the processes through thinking in the context in which one explains the other, in which one becomes the riddle, the other the solution, and man himself becomes the word for the external world perceived by him.

[ 9 ] Thus, however, the truth of the idea was experienced that the Logos, the Wisdom, the Word rules in the world and its workings.

[ 10 ] I thought I could clearly see through the essence of materialism with these ideas. I did not see the perniciousness of this way of thinking in the fact that the materialist focuses his attention on the material appearance of an entity, but in how he thinks the material. He looks at the substance and does not realize that in truth he has spirit before him, which appears only in material form. He does not know that spirit metamorphoses into matter in order to arrive at modes of action that are only possible in this metamorphosis. Spirit must first give itself the form of a material brain in order to lead the life of the world of imagination in this form, which can give man freely acting self-consciousness in his life on earth. Certainly, the spirit arises in the brain from the material; but only after the material brain has arisen from the spirit.

[ 11 ] I had to reject the physical and physiological mode of conception only for the reason that it makes a conceived, not an experienced substance into the external exciter of the spiritual experienced in man and thereby conceives the substance in such a way that it is impossible to trace it to where it is spirit. Such matter, as this mode of conception claims to be real, is nowhere real. The fundamental error of the materialist-minded natural thinkers consists in their impossible idea of the substance. As a result, they block the path to spiritual existence. A material nature, which only arouses in the soul what man experiences in nature, makes the world "an illusion". Because these ideas entered my soul life so intensely, I then processed them four years later in my work "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert" in the chapter "Die Welt als Illusion". (This work was given the title "Riddles of Philosophy" in later expanded editions)

[ 12 ] In the biological mode of imagination, it is not possible in the same way to fall into characteristics that completely displace the imagined from the realm that man can experience, leaving him with an illusion in his mental life. One cannot go as far as the explanation: apart from man there is a world of which he experiences nothing, which only makes an impression on him through his senses, but which can be quite dissimilar to the impression-giver. One can still believe, if one suppresses the more important aspects of thinking in the life of the soul, that one has said something when one claims that the subjective perception of light corresponds objectively to a form of movement in the ether - this was the idea at the time - but one must be a serious fanatic if one also wants to "explain" what is perceived in the realm of life in this way.

[ 13 ] In no case, I said to myself, does such a conception of ideas about nature penetrate up to ideas about the moral world order. It can only regard this as something that falls into the physical world of man from a realm foreign to knowledge.

[ 14 ] The fact that these questions stood before my soul cannot be regarded as significant for the beginning of my third stage of life. For they had been before me for a long time. - But it became significant to me that my whole world of knowledge, without changing anything essential in its content, became more vital in my soul to a much greater degree than before. The human soul lives in the "Logos"; how does the outer world live in this Logos: this is already the basic question of my "Epistemology of Goethe's World View" (from the mid-eighties); it remains so for my writings "Truth and Science" and "Philosophy of Freedom". This orientation towards the soul dominated everything I created in terms of ideas in order to penetrate the spiritual underground from which Goethe sought to shed light on world phenomena.

[ 15 ] What particularly preoccupied me in the period of life described here was that the ideas that I was so strictly compelled to reject had taken hold of the thinking of the age in the most intense way. One lived so completely in this direction of soul that one was not in a position to feel in any way the implications of that which pointed in the opposite direction. I experienced the contrast between what was clear truth to me and the views of my age in such a way that this experience constituted the basic coloration of my life in general in the years around the turn of the century.

[ 16 ] In everything that appeared as spiritual life, the impression emanating from this contrast had an effect on me. Not as if I rejected everything that this spiritual life produced. But I felt deep pain towards the many good things that I could appreciate, because I believed I saw that the destructive powers were opposing it everywhere as the seeds of development of spiritual life.

[ 17 ] So I experienced the question from all sides: how can a way be found to bring what is seen inwardly as true into forms of expression that can be understood by the age?

[ 18 ] When you experience something like this, it is as if in some way it were necessary to climb a mountain peak that is difficult to access. You try from all sorts of different starting points; you find yourself there again and again, with efforts behind you that you have to regard as futile.

[ 19 ] I once spoke about Goethe's view of nature in Frankfurt am Main in the 1990s. I said in the introduction that I only wanted to talk about Goethe's views on life, because his ideas about light and colors were such that there was no possibility of building a bridge to these ideas in contemporary physics. - For me, however, I had to see in this impossibility a most significant symptom of the spiritual orientation of the time.

[ 20 ] Some time later, I had a conversation with a physicist who was important in his field and who also dealt intensively with Goethe's view of nature, which culminated in him saying: Goethe's idea of colors is such that physics cannot do anything with it, and that I - fell silent.

[ 21 ] As many things said then: what was truth to me is such that the thoughts of the time "can do nothing with it".