The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XXVII

[ 1 ] I envisioned at that time how the turn of the century would have to bring a new spiritual light to humanity. It seemed to me that the isolation of human thought and will from the spirit had reached a climax. A reversal of the course of human development seemed to me a necessity.

[ 2 ] Many spoke in this sense. But they did not have in mind that man would seek to direct his attention to a real spiritual world, as he directs it through the senses to nature. They only thought that the subjective spiritual state of souls would undergo a change. To think that a real new, objective world could reveal itself was beyond the realm of vision at the time.

[ 3 ] With the feelings that arose from my perspective of the future and from the impressions of the environment, I had to keep turning my mind's eye back to the development of the nineteenth century.

[ 4 ] I saw how, with the Goethe and Hegel era, everything that incorporates ideas of a spiritual world into the human way of thinking in a cognitive way disappears. From then on, cognition should not be "confused" by ideas of the spiritual world. These ideas were relegated to the realm of faith and "mystical" experience.

[ 5 ] In Hegel, I saw the greatest thinker of the new age. But he was only a thinker. For him, the spiritual world was in thinking. Precisely because I completely admired how he gave form to all thinking, I nevertheless felt that he had no feeling for the spiritual world that I saw, and which only becomes apparent behind thinking when thinking develops into an experience whose body is, as it were, thinking, and which, as a soul, absorbs the spirit of the world into itself.

[ 6 ] Because in Hegelianism everything spiritual has become thinking, Hegel presented himself to me as the personality who brought a very last dawning of old spiritual light into a time in which the spirit was shrouded in darkness for the cognition of humanity.

[ 7 ] All this stood before me, whether I looked into the spiritual world or whether I looked back in the physical world at the century that was passing. But now a figure appeared in this century whom I could not follow into the spiritual world: Max Stirner.

[ 8 ] Hegel was entirely a thinker who, in his inner development, strove for a way of thinking that simultaneously deepened more and more and, in deepening, expanded over greater horizons. This thinking was ultimately to become one with the thinking of the world spirit in deepening and broadening, which includes all world content. And Stirner, everything that man develops out of himself, he takes entirely from the individual-personal will. What arises in humanity, only in the coexistence of individual personalities.

[ 9 ] I was not allowed to fall into one-sidedness at that time. Just as I was completely immersed in the healing, experiencing it in my soul like my own inner experience, I also had to immerse myself completely in this contrast.

[ 10 ] In contrast to the one-sidedness of endowing the world spirit merely with knowledge, there had to be the other, to assert the individual human being merely as a being of will.

[ 11 ] If the situation had been such that these opposites had only arisen in me, as soul experiences of my development, I would not have allowed any of this to flow into my writings or speeches. I have always kept it that way with such soul experiences. But this contradiction: Hegel and Stirner belonged to the century. The century expressed itself through them. And the fact is that philosophers are essentially not considered by their effect on their time.

[ 12 ] It is true that one can speak of strong effects in the case of Hegel. But that is not the main thing. Philosophers indicate the spirit of their age by the content of their thoughts, just as a thermometer indicates the warmth of a place. In philosophers, what lives subconsciously in the age becomes conscious.

[ 13 ] And so the nineteenth century lives in its extremes through the impulses expressed by Hegel and Stirner: impersonal thinking, which prefers to indulge in a view of the world in which man has no part with the creative forces of his inner being; completely personal will, which has little sense for harmonious cooperation between people. Although all kinds of "social ideals" appear, they have no power to influence reality. This becomes more and more what can arise when the wills of individuals work side by side.

[ 14 ] Hegel wants the idea of morality to take on an objective form in human coexistence; Stirner feels that the "individual" (Einzigen) is disturbed by everything that can thus give harmonized form to human life.

[ 15 ] A friendship connected with my contemplation of Stirner at the time, which had a decisive effect on so many things in this contemplation. It was my friendship with the important Stirner expert and editor J. H. Mackay. It was still in Weimar that Gabriele Reuter brought me together with this personality, who I immediately liked through and through. He had read the sections of my "Philosophy of Freedom" that speak of ethical individualism. He found a harmony between my explanations and his own social views.

[ 16 ] First of all, the personal impression I had of J. H. Mackay was what filled my soul about him. He had "world" in him. His whole outward and inward demeanor spoke of world experience. He had spent time in England, in America. All this was bathed in a boundless kindness. I felt a great love for the man.

[ 17 ] When in 1898 J. H. Mackay came to Berlin for a permanent stay in 1898, a beautiful friendship developed between us. Unfortunately, this too was destroyed by life and in particular by my public advocacy of anthroposophy.

[ 18 ] In this case I may only describe quite subjectively how J. H. Mackay's work appeared to me at the time and still appears to me today, and how it affected me at the time. For I know that he himself would speak quite differently about it. This man deeply detested everything in the social life of mankind that was violence (Archie). He saw the greatest transgression in the intervention of violence in social administration. In "communist anarchism" he saw a social idea that was highly reprehensible because it sought to bring about better conditions for mankind through the use of violence.

[ 19 ] Now the alarming thing was that J. H. Mackay fought this idea and the agitation based on it by choosing the same name for his own social ideas that his opponents had, only with a different proper noun in front of it. He called what he himself advocated "individualist anarchism" as the opposite of what was then called anarchism. This, of course, gave rise to the fact that the public could only form skewed judgments about Mackay's ideas. He was in agreement with the American B. Tucker, who held the same view. Tucker visited Mackay in Berlin, where I got to know him.

[ 20 ] Mackay is also a poet of his view of life. He wrote a novel: "The Anarchists". I read it after meeting the author. It is a noble work of faith in the individual. It vividly and vividly describes the social conditions of the poorest of the poor. But it also describes how out of the end of the world those people will find the way to improvement who, completely devoted to the good forces of human nature, bring them to fruition in such a way that they work socially in the free togetherness of people without making violence necessary. Mackay had the noble confidence in people that they could create a harmonious order of life by themselves. However, he believed that this would only be possible after a long time, when the necessary spiritual change had taken place within mankind. For the present, therefore, he demanded that individuals who were sufficiently advanced to do so should spread the ideas of this spiritual path. A social idea that only wanted to work with spiritual means.

[ 21 ] J. H. Mackay also expressed his view of life in poems. Friends saw in them something didactic and theoretical that was inartistic. I was very fond of these poems.

[ 22 ] Fate had now turned my experience with J. H. Mackay and with Stirner in such a way that I had to immerse myself in a world of thought that became a spiritual test for me. My ethical individualism was perceived as a pure inner experience of man. When I developed it, I had no intention of making it the basis of a political view. At that time, around 1898, my soul was to be torn into a kind of abyss by purely ethical individualism. It was to be turned from something purely humanly internal into something external. The esoteric was to be diverted into the exoteric.

[ 23 ] When, at the beginning of the new century, I was able to give my experience of the spiritual in writings such as "Mysticism on the Rise" and "Christianity as a Mystical Fact", "ethical individualism" was back in its right place after the test. But even then the test proceeded in such a way that externalization played no role in full consciousness. It took place directly under this full consciousness, and precisely because of this proximity it could flow into the forms of expression in which I spoke of social things in the last years of the last century. But here, too, certain statements that seem all too radical must be contrasted with others in order to get the right picture.

[ 24 ] The person looking into the spiritual world always finds his own being externalized when he expresses opinions, views. He does not enter the spiritual world in abstractions, but in living views. Nature, too, which is the sensory image of the spiritual, does not express opinions and views, but presents its forms and its becoming to the world.

[ 25 ] An inner movement that brought all the powers of my soul into waves and ripples was my inner experience at that time.

[ 26 ] My outer private life was made extremely satisfying for me by the fact that the Eunike family moved to Berlin and I was able to live with them under their best care, after having gone through all the misery of living in my own apartment for a short time. The friendship with Mrs. Eunike was soon transformed into a civil marriage. I will only say this about these private relationships. I don't want to mention anything about private life in this "course of life" other than what plays a part in my career. And living in Eunike's house gave me the opportunity at that time to have an undisturbed basis for an inwardly and outwardly eventful life. Incidentally, private relationships do not belong in public. They are none of her business.

[ 27 ] And my spiritual development is completely independent of all private relationships. I am aware that it would have been quite the same if my private life had been organized quite differently.

[ 28 ] The constant worry about the "magazine's" ability to exist now interfered with all the turbulence of life at the time. Despite all the difficulties I had, I would have been able to distribute the weekly magazine if I had had the material means to do so. But a magazine that can only pay extremely modest fees, that gave me almost no material basis for living, for which nothing at all could be done to publicize it: it could not thrive with the small amount of distribution I had taken on.

[ 29 ] I published the "magazine", as it was a constant concern for me.