The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Ibsen's Spiritual Disposition

[ 1 ] Before I conclude this winter’s lecture series with a vision of humanity’s future and ideals, I would like to speak today about the spiritual life of the present, as expressed in one of the most significant and emblematic spiritual heroes of our time.

[ 2 ] I would like to discuss Ibsen’s mindset not from a literary or aesthetic perspective, but from a philosophical one; for indeed, everything that the deepest and finest minds of our time feel and think finds its expression precisely in Ibsen.

[ 3 ] It has often been said that every poet is the expression of his time. Certainly, this statement is true; but it can only be understood if one gives it a very specific meaning. Just as Homer, Sophocles, and Goethe were expressions of their time, Henrik Ibsen is undoubtedly an expression of the present; and yet, how differently our time is reflected in him than in those figures of their own era.

[ 4 ] To appreciate just how different the era at the turn of the 18th century—the time of Goethe, Schiller, and Herder—was, and how very different our own era is, one need only compare two things side by side. Goethe completes the second part of his “Faust,” seals it, and leaves it behind as a great testament to his life. A legacy, shining into the future full of power, he leaves it to humanity after his death, in the belief: “The trace of my days on earth cannot perish in the ages.” A man who is, in essence, the representative of all humanity stands before us in Faust. We cling to him; we fill ourselves with meaning and vitality through him. Beyond his death, Goethe points this out to us. “Faust” cannot grow obsolete; we find ever deeper truths within it. We perceive him as something that lives on, something we have not yet exhausted: this is a conclusion to life that points toward the future.

[ 5 ] Long before his death, Henrik Ibsen deliberately brought his life’s work to a close with his play When We Dead Awaken. Everything that had inspired people over the course of half a century—all the revolutionary and other ideas of the time—passed through Henrik Ibsen’s soul. He depicted what moves the heart, what drives it into isolation, and what compels it to wage the struggle for existence in an unprecedented way. This drama serves as a grand retrospective and stands as a symbol of the artist himself. He was a recluse in human life, a recluse in his own life. For half a century he sought human happiness and truth, sparing no effort to reach light and truth, to unravel the great enigmatic questions. Now he himself awakens, feels what lies behind him as something dead, something withered, and he resolves to write no more. It is a retrospective that points only to the transitory; what he longed for appears to him as something enigmatic, not truly having existed—the ideals crumble behind him. Since he has awakened, he does not know what to do next. — This is the poet who is the representative of our time, the greatest in poetry. This life’s reckoning is a critique of all that we have—a surrender and at the same time an awakening from and through the critique of our time. A vast overview of modern life is expressed in this drama; if we hold it before us, we will understand the tragedy in the poet’s personality. For Henrik Ibsen is a tragic personality.

[ 6 ] If one wishes to understand him fully, one must view him as a representative of our time. Therefore, do not regard it as mere scholarly cleverness when I first attempt to capture the spirit of our age; for Henrik Ibsen is an expression of it. One word characterizes our time and also the entire work of Ibsen, and that is the word “personality.” Goethe, too, is said to have remarked: “The highest happiness of the children of Earth is nothing but personality.” But with Ibsen, it happens in a completely different way. Ibsen is a true child of our time, and it is from this perspective that we will best understand him.

[ 7 ] Remember how very different the concept of personality is in ancient Greece. How is Oedipus portrayed there? The forces that shape Oedipus’s fate reach far beyond him, extending to his entire lineage. We must trace the threads into entirely different realms: fate extends far beyond his individual personality; it is elevated above the personality—yet the personal has not yet been separated from its moral connection to the whole world. That is the difference from today: that we must now seek the center in the personality, that fate has been transferred into the personality. We can trace this step by step. With the rise of Christianity, the urge of the personality seeks to satisfy itself. The personality wants to be free, free at least from the Highest, the Divine. The connections are torn apart; the personality is left to its own devices. And throughout the Middle Ages, the personality attempts to grasp itself.

[ 8 ] How deeply, in Greece, is the entire environment still intertwined with the individual! How a person grows out of what surrounds him! He is born out of the entire cosmos. The external structure of Greek life, however, is like a work of art: Plato creates an ideal of the state into which the individual is to fit like a limb into the whole body. Christianity brings forth a different ideal; but this new ideal is purchased at the cost of a connection to nature; it is sought above nature. The Christian seeks that which is to redeem his personality in something that transcends the personality. Even the individual Roman felt himself to be a member of the entire state: he is first a citizen, then a human being. In the Middle Ages, a mood prevails that looks out beyond the environment, looks up toward a world beyond, to which one clings. This makes a great difference for the whole of human thought, feeling, and will. And this continues into modern times.

[ 9 ] The Greek and the Roman citizen lived and died for what surrounded them, for what existed in their external world. In the Middle Ages, something of a divine world order still lived—not in the environment, but in what flowed from the divine, in the “Gospel of the Good News”—and expressed it as if in a mirror. This divine world order lived in the finest as well as the simplest souls, in the mystic as well as in the people. It is something that is given from without, yet lives in the soul as something newly emerging. What takes place in the world of the stars as the will of God fills the soul with meaning: one knows what lies beyond birth and death.

[ 10 ] Let us turn to the modern era and first consider Shakespeare from an artistic perspective. What is expressed in Shakespeare’s plays—and what lives foremost in these plays—is character. There was nothing of the sort in Greece or in the Middle Ages. Shakespeare’s plays are character dramas; the main focus is on the human being himself, on what takes place in the depths of his soul, just as he is situated in the world.

[ 11 ] The Middle Ages had no true drama; people were preoccupied with other interests. Now the personality begins to emerge—but with it, at the same time, everything that is vague and incomprehensible about the personality. Take Hamlet: one can hear so many different interpretations of it from so many scholars! Probably no other work has had so many books written about it. And this stems from the fact that this character himself has something indefinable about him. He is no longer a reflection of the outside world, nor is he a mirror of the good news.

[ 12 ] The entire outlook of the modern era takes on this character. Look at Kant’s approach—how everything is centered on the individual! What he says would not have been possible in the Middle Ages, nor in antiquity. What he advocates is something entirely vague: Act in such a way that your action could serve as a guide for the general public. — But this ideal remains entirely vague. He says: We cannot know; we have limits that we cannot transcend with our reason; it senses only something obscure that urges and drives us. — Kant calls it the categorical imperative.

[ 13 ] The Greeks, the people of the Middle Ages, had certain, clearly defined ideals. Not only did he know that he should live according to the principles of other people: those principles lived in his blood. That had now changed: a categorical imperative, devoid of any real content, stood in the way of reason; nothing fills this soul with specific ideals. Such was the case in the 18th century.

[ 14 ] Something has awakened in our classics that calls for certain ideals. It is interesting that Schiller, who was no less a harsh critic of his time than Ibsen—take The Robbers: Karl Moor wants something specific; he wants to create people who will reshape their time, not merely offer criticism—it is interesting that Schiller has faith in the ideal and says: Whatever the world may be like, I place people in it who can turn this world upside down.

[ 15 ] This is even more evident in Goethe’s Faust. Here, Goethe appears as a spirit gazing into the new dawn.

[ 16 ] But then came the 19th century with its demand for freedom, for individuality. What is freedom? In what sense should a person be free? One must want something specific. But it was freedom itself that people wanted. Added to this was the fact that the 19th century had become the most rationalistic. People see their surroundings; but no ideal flows from them; people are no longer carried by ideals. Man stands at the pinnacle of his personality, and personality has become an end in itself. That is why humanity today can no longer distinguish between two concepts: individuality and personality; it no longer separates what must be separated.

[ 17 ] What is individuality? Individuality is that which stands out in the world with substance. When I have a meaningful vision of the future, when I form a picture of what I am contributing to the world, my personality may be strong or weak, but it is the bearer of these ideals, the shell of my individuality. The sum of all these ideals is the individuality that shines forth from the personality. The 19th century does not make this distinction; it sees in the mere powerful personality—in what is actually meant to be a vessel—an end in itself. Therefore, the personality becomes something nebulous, and with it, what was once ethereally clear also becomes something hazy. In the past, mysticism was called Mathesis because it was as clear as two plus two. People lived within such spiritual content; they turned inward and found something higher than the personality: they recognized their individuality. The 19th century cannot understand mysticism; people speak of it as something unclear, incomprehensible. This was a necessary phase: the personality had to be felt, at some point, like a hollowed-out bellows. Today people speak most of personality, yet true personality is least present. Where personality is filled with individuality, one speaks least of it, because it is taken for granted. People speak most of what is not there. Therefore, when the 19th century speaks of mysticism, it speaks of something obscure. We understand why this has come to be.

[ 18 ] As a son of his time, Henrik Ibsen looked deeply into this personality and this era. Like an honest seeker of truth, he strives to uncover the true essence of the personality, but as someone who is entirely a product of his time. “Ah, my eye is blinded by the light toward which it turns.”

[ 19 ] How would an ancient Roman have spoken of justice? It was a matter of course to him; just as he would not have denied the existence of light, he would not have denied the existence of justice. Ibsen asks: “Justice? Where is it still considered justice?” Today, everything is determined, for better or worse, by power. — Thus we see Henrik Ibsen as a thoroughly revolutionary spirit. He looked into the human heart, and found nothing there; everything the 19th century had to offer meant nothing to him. He puts it this way: “Ah, how those old ideals of the French Revolution have lost their power; today we need a revolution of the entire human spirit!” — That is the mood expressed in Ibsen’s plays.

[ 20 ] Let us once again consider the old days. The Greek felt at home in his polis, the Roman in his state, and the medieval man felt himself to be a child of God. How does the son of the modern age feel? He finds nothing around him that can sustain him. The Greek and the medieval man did not feel like lonely individuals—in Ibsen, the strongest man is the loneliest. This feeling of loneliness is something thoroughly modern, and Ibsen’s art springs from it. However, this concept, which speaks from Ibsen’s dramas—that we must appeal to the human personality—is not a clear one. These forces within man, which must be laid bare, are something indefinite, yet we must turn to them. And so Ibsen attempts to understand the people around him in such ways. — But what else can one see in such a time but the struggle of the personality, torn away from all social context? Yes, there is a second possibility: when the individual is still connected to the state, to his surroundings, so that the personality bends to them, denies itself. But what can these connections still mean to the individual today? They used to be true; now the individual stands alone—and disharmonies arise between the personality and the surroundings.

[ 21 ] Ibsen has a keen sense of the falsity of these connections between human beings and their surroundings. The seeker of truth becomes a sharp critic of falsehood. His heroes therefore become uprooted personalities, and those who wish to establish a connection with their surroundings must succumb to falsehood; they can do so only by deceiving their own self-awareness. This attitude is alive in the dramas of the middle period. We see this when we let “Brand,” “Peer Gynt,” and “The Emperor and the Galilean” pass before our eyes. In the latter drama, we find a reference to three eras. The first is the one we have previously characterized, that of the past, where external form was so highly valued. Emperor Julian looks across to the second, that of the Galilean, which exhibits an internalization of the soul. But a third age is to come, when humanity will once again have ideals and express them from the inside out. In the past, destiny came from the outside. What must be sought are inner ideals that the strong individual can impress upon the world; he is to be a messenger—not to imitate, but to shape and create. The third world age, in which the ideal comes into its own, has not yet been reached. In solitude, people find it in their souls, but not in a way that gives it the strength and power to shape the world. This union of Christianity with the ancient ideal is the reverse path. But Ibsen has placed this ideal upon a weak soul, which collapses under its weight; Julian is still a man of the past.

[ 22 ] Once again, we are dealing with a man who relies solely on the formal, the hollowed-out shell of personality: Nothing is more characteristic of Ibsen than the way in which he has placed the harsh, gnarled figure of his “Brand” in our time. He is not despotic or autocratic, but torn from his connection with the world around him. He stands there as a clergyman, surrounded by people for whom the connection with the divine has become a lie. Beside him stands a clergyman who believes what he can only because he has no strong sense of faith at all.

[ 23 ] An ideal that is higher must be able to influence all people. The theosophical ideal of brotherhood imbues human action with gentleness and kindness and sees every person as a fellow human being. As long as this ideal has not yet been born and humanity must rely on the scraps and remnants of the old ideals, which confuse personality and individuality, it will appear harsh and unyielding. Whoever places the ideal of personality so high becomes as harsh and unyielding as fire, and must be so. Individuality binds; personality divides. This passage through personality, however, laid bare forces that had to be developed and would otherwise never have emerged. We had to lose the old ideals in order to give birth to them again at a higher level. A poet like Ibsen had to delve into this personality and portray it as hollowed out, as he does in a magnificent way in “The League of Youth.”

[ 24 ] He depicted what shapes a person’s character—what it is meant to represent—in his later plays, in which he becomes a positive critic of his time, as in The Pillars of Society.

[ 25 ] In Ghosts, he shows us a character torn between her own personality and her surroundings. In conflict with her surroundings, Mrs. Alving must lie where she seeks the truth in order to bring her son into a pure atmosphere. And so fate descends upon her as it did upon the ancient Greeks. Ibsen lives under the sign of Darwin, and this Oswald stands not in an intellectual or ethical connection with what has gone before, but in that of heredity. Personality can be torn from its surroundings only insofar as it is soul; physicality is connected to physical heredity, and thus a fate flowing purely from physical laws breaks upon Oswald Alving like a moral, spiritual-divine one upon the heroes of antiquity.

[ 26 ] In this way, Ibsen is very much a child of his time. Yet he also reveals what is legitimate about this personality—a personality that may later become an individuality once more.

[ 27 ] This problem presents itself to us in a particularly characteristic way in the woman. “Nora” lives, as it were, in a doll’s house and grows out of it, seeking the path to individuality. All traditional worldviews have posited an inherent, natural difference between men and women, and this has persisted into our own time. To shed this, the point of transition had to be found through the individual. Only as individuals do men and women stand equal before one another; only when they find the same in their individuality can they develop the same individuality, so that they may one day walk into the future as comrades. As long as ideals were imported from the outside, they were linked to the natural, and the natural was rooted in the difference between man and woman, which can only be balanced in the soul. This contrast was carried from nature into religion—even in the Middle Ages, when the divine itself still echoed the natural.

[ 28 ] In the ancient religions, you find the masculine and feminine principles standing side by side as something that permeates all of existence, living and weaving within nature. We find this in Osiris and Isis, and even in God the Father and Mary. Only when the natural foundation had been stripped away, only then, when one penetrated to the soul and emancipated this soul, did the personal in human beings struggle its way to freedom—through that which is not bound to the differentiation between man and woman. Only then was the opposition between male and female overcome. And the poet of the personality also had to find the characteristic word for it. Thus, this differentiation arises as a problem within him in such dramas as “Nora,” “Rosmersholm,” and “The Woman from the Sea.”

[ 29 ] We see how Ibsen is connected to everything that constitutes the greatness—though perhaps also the emptiness—of our time. The more Ibsen looked to the future, the more he sensed how emptiness must set in when the personality is emancipated, detached from its divine-spiritual connections. Thus, in “Master Builder,” Ibsen himself faces the problem of personality with the great question for the future: We have set the personality free—but to what end? - Something indefinable remains in this search for the essential. As a true seeker of truth, he portrays this unknown, as in a parable, in “The Lady from the Sea.” She becomes free—only to return to her old duties. But to what end?—one must ask further. This is depicted in a wonderfully symbolic way in the drama.

[ 30 ] As he seeks to delve even deeper into the mysteries of life in Little Eyolf and When We Dead Awaken, something profound within the human heart—something he had previously believed in—begins to fade from his grasp. The sculptor in When We Dead Awaken, who sought to capture the ideal, is seized by despair. He cannot yet shape the free human being: animal grimaces rise before him. He seeks something that will lift him above this, he wants to creatively shape a resurrection—yet the grotesque always thrusts itself before his eyes, standing in front of the image. When he realizes that he cannot overcome it, he awakens—and sees what our time lacks, what it does not have. An immensely tragic moment is set before us in “When We Dead Awaken.”

[ 31 ] Thus Henrik Ibsen is a bold prophet of our time: deep in his heart, he is surely convinced that there must be something that transcends the personality; yet he remains silent, and this silence contains within it that immense tragedy. Whoever has become acquainted with that which in the personality itself transcends birth and death, whoever has familiarized themselves with the great law of karma, finds new meaning even in the personal. They establish a new ideal, they transcend the personality, and make themselves a confessor and master of this great law of balancing justice,

[ 32 ] People in antiquity trusted the reality around them; they built the pillars of their souls upon it. The Middle Ages experienced the ideal in the innermost depths of the soul. Modern man has descended into isolation within his personality, into egotism. He still feels the categorical imperative, but as something vague and obscure. He strives for personal freedom, but the question presses upon him: For what purpose should the personality be set free?

[ 33 ] The old ideals no longer speak to our times; a new one must emerge.

[ 34 ] Freedom that is no longer subject to personal caprice, but is once again connected to divine ideals—bringing this about is the goal of the theosophical worldview. Working toward this, building this future—that is spiritual, theosophical life, the theosophical worldview.

[ 35 ] Only when the greatest minds of our time point to this theosophical, spiritual-scientific worldview, rooted in cosmic reality, does it take on the significance it must have. And when a great figure remains silent in tragic modesty—one who has stirred the spirits, such as Henrik Ibsen—that is such an indication.

[ 36 ] In the waning days of the 19th century, he wrote his “When We Dead Awaken.” Well then, now is the time for Goethe’s words to come true for us, the dead:

And as long as you don’t have that,
This: Die and Be Reborn!
You are but a gloomy guest

[ 37 ] It is time for us to live again, to become individuals once more—but emancipated individuals: unique beings.