Where and How Does One Find the Spirit?
GA 57
20 March 1909, Berlin
Translator Unknown
Nietzsche in the Light of Spiritual Science
The only meeting with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900, German philosopher) belongs to the experiences I do not forget again. At that time, he was quite mad. The sight was very important. Imagine a human being, a man who has dealt with the question the whole morning which immediately suggests itself, and who has the wish to rest some time after dinner and to let go on the thoughts sounding in himself: he lay there this way. I had the impression of a healthy man, and, besides, he was already completely mad; he recognised nobody. His forehead was moulded like that of an artist and a thinker, and, nevertheless, it was the forehead of a maniac. A riddle faced me. Human beings of his kind of insanity would have had to look completely different. Only by means of spiritual science, one can explain this unusual.
The etheric body, the carrier of memory, is connected with the physical body during the whole life, but it is connected different with the different human beings. With some, the relation is not very solid, with others very close. Now Nietzsche's etheric body was very movable from the start. Such human beings can have two qualities: the one is an ingenious, easily movable mental force and imagination, the ability to connect widely separated concepts and to get a synopsis of widely divergent perspectives. Such persons are not as easily restrained as others are by the gravity of the physical body in the conditions given by life.
Before Friedrich Nietzsche had done his doctorate, he was appointed professor of Classics in Basel. From his teacher, Professor Ritschl (Friedrich Wilhelm R., 1806–1876), information was gathered. This answered: Nietzsche is able to do everything he wants. Thus, it happened that he did his doctorate when he already held a chair. Nietzsche had an agile mind. Such a human being does not live in ideas, which are palpable. He lives, so to speak, separated like by a wall from the everyday life.
However, something else is connected with such a mental disposition: he is condemned to a certain life tragedy. He hard finds the way to the immediate things of existence, he easily lives in that which cannot be seen by the eyes, be seized by the hands what can be observed in the everyday life but in that which humanity has acquired as spiritual goods. He lives in certain ways like separated by walls from the sufferings and joys of life. His look wanders into the vast, more in that which humanity has gained and created for itself, than in the everyday. Hence, it could occur that Nietzsche was in a special situation towards the civilisation of the nineteenth century.
Someone who surveys the civilisation of the second half of the nineteenth century sees that an immense jerk forward is done in the conquest of the physical world. We take the year 1858/59. It was the year, which brought the work of Darwin (Charles D., 1809–1882, English naturalist) of the origin of species by which the look of the human beings was banished completely in the physical concerning the evolution idea. This year also brought the work by which the matters of our fixed stars and the most distant sky space were conquered: the spectral analysis by Kirchhoff (Gustav Robert K., 1824–1887, physicist) and Bunsen (Robert Wilhelm B., 1811–1899, German chemist). Only since that time, it was possible to say, the substances, which are found on earth, are also found on the other planets. Then appeared the book about aesthetics by Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887, 1846–1857: Aesthetics or the Science of Beauty) which wanted to found the science of beauty bottom up, while one had once explained beauty top down, from the idea. To complete the picture: that work appeared which wanted to force the social life into the only sensuous world, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1818–1883). Briefly, the time in which Nietzsche grew up was the time in which the human beings directed their look completely to the physical world.
Now imagine which forms all that has accepted in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century: think of Haeckel (Ernst H., 1834–1919, German naturalist) and other researchers who only targeted what presented itself to their sensuous eyes; think of everything that natural sciences and technology have performed in the nineteenth century. It appears to us compared with these currents like an escape of humanity to spirituality if at that time wide circles are seized by the philosophy of Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch., 1788–1860). At that time, the mere interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy shows that the human souls escaped to something that should grant spiritual satisfaction. We see one of the great spirits of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner (1813–1883, composer), attempting to let spirituality flow again into civilisation.
In this cultural trend, Nietzsche positioned himself. How did he do this? The just mentioned persons positioned themselves creatively in it, and creating is something blissful. Working makes the human being young and fresh. This becomes apparent with Haeckel. Somebody who works on the microscope and other instruments and does research can make himself happy and rejuvenate in this work, he is able to do all that also light-heartedly, and he forgets the need for a spiritual world; in him something lives that can animate the human being, creative enthusiasm, which has something divine-spiritual. Nietzsche's destiny was this cultural trend. He was destined to take joy and sorrow from this cultural trend because he was not directly connected with the everyday life. He had the nagging feeling, how can one live with that which the modern civilisation offers? Nietzsche's heart was involved in everything with joy or sorrow. He lived through everything with his soul that happened in the nineteenth century.
We see two spirits intervening early in Nietzsche's life: Schopenhauer whom he got to know not personally who had a deep effect on him by his writings, and Richard Wagner with whom he was tied together by the most tender bond of friendship. Both spirits induced Nietzsche to become engrossed in the riddle of ancient Greece in the beginning of our culture. He had done deep looks in the Greek world, from the oldest time up to those periods which history illumines brighter. The Greek of the oldest time seems to be much closer to divinity than later, when he tries to show pictures of the gods in his pieces of art: he makes them human-like, raises the form of the human being to the ideal image. The Greek was not that way in primeval times. He felt everything vividly flowing into himself what was outdoors what blows in the storm and grumbles with the thunder, what streaks in the flash what as harmonising wisdom has set up the world outdoors. At that time, in his original music the Greek expressed this harmony and created it in his temple dances.
Nietzsche called the ancient Greek the Dionysian human being. The later Greek, the Apollonian human being, reproduced what the original Greek was. He stood there considering and expressed it in his pieces of art. At this development Nietzsche looked like at a riddle, because he had no knowledge of that primeval culture which was the basis of the Greek and even earlier cultures from which it had taken its force. An expression of that primeval culture was also, what was expressed as wisdom in the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries as myth creation and art. Nietzsche did not know this. He thought that everything was instinct, basic instinct with the ancient Greek. He knew nothing about that wisdom which was fostered by initiates originally in the mysteries, which then flowed into the world, illustrated in pieces of art and mystery plays. Nietzsche was not able to look into these mysteries, but he had a premonition of them. Hence, he felt worried, because he could not find the correct answer to his questions. In that primeval wisdom of the human being to which spiritual science goes back, he would have had to search the answer to his Dionysian human being and his Apollonian human being. He would have to get the solution of the riddle from the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries. Then he could have seen how art fosters the beholding, and how science and religion look for that which can penetrate the human heart with devoutness.
Religion, art, and science were not yet separated in the old mysteries from each other. They originated from one root. The ancient mysteries are this root. With the leading peoples of antiquity, they were fostered in secret sites efficiently and were developed to ritual acts. The descent of the primeval wisdom was represented to the neophyte in pictures. This remained concealed to Nietzsche; therefore, he could not find the coherence, which he searched. Only tragically, the development of the Greek spiritual life could present itself to him. He stills sees Aeschylus (525–456 BC), who was close to the mysteries, creating his drama penetrated with inner wisdom. However, he also sees Sophocles (497–406 BC) and in particular Euripides (480–406 BC) already creating their dramas which only show the exterior. He recognises that the Socratics find concepts that are far from the world sources and that they place themselves like considering beyond the world content in the universe. It seemed to him in such a way that in Socrates the world itself does no longer pulsate, but only the concepts of it, that he leads the Greek pulsating life to dry, sober abstraction. Nietzsche was painfully affected by the fact that Socrates put up the sentence that virtue is teachable. He understood it in such a way that the old Greek felt what he should do; he did not ask whether it is right or wrong. Only a time estranged to divinity could ask, can one learn what is good? Hence, Nietzsche considered Socrates as the person of the decline of Greek culture.
Schopenhauer appeared to Nietzsche as a human being who had an idea of that what led to the sources of existence. He built the bridge from the abstract world of human mental pictures to the deeper sources of existence pulsating in the will. This satisfied Nietzsche's pursuit of truth. Richard Wagner appeared to him as a person risen from the old Hellenism. It was blissful for Nietzsche to develop according to such an exceptional person who walked along beside him in flesh and blood. A substitute of that which the external world is to the other human beings was this friendship with Richard Wagner.
As a deposit of his world of thought in this time we have the writing The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, appeared in 1872, in which already the whole Nietzsche is included. There is already found the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Further Schopenhauer as Educator. Nietzsche writes empathically about Schopenhauer like someone who writes about his father. Then Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, it is regarded by everybody as the best writing about Richard Wagner.
No time is so closely related to philistines as the time of materialism. In no book, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874, German theologian) expresses this connection so strongly as in the book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835/36). Nietzsche named and shamed this philistine attitude in his writing about David Friedrich Strauss. Nietzsche who longed for the re-erection of the Dionysian human being could be outraged against the philistine attitude of David Friedrich Strauss. David Friedrich Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer is a redeeming essay.
Then he did something as an academician. He had experienced the time without fire and enthusiasm of the academics. If anybody said, there can be new ideas, one can do this or that, then the others came who said: however, history shows us that nothing can develop by leaps and bounds, everything goes on quietly. One was afraid of what one called a leap in history. Nietzsche wrote a book in which he said, pluck up courage, be a human being, do not only look for history, have the courage to be independent and to act independently! Again a releasing book, of a comprising radicalism in its demand for emancipation from history. He expressed that historical mood is an obstacle of everything original in the impulses of the human beings.
Nietzsche lived up to 1876 in such a way. His development was in such a way that he stood far from the events in the world. The easy mobility of his etheric body caused this. In 1876, when Wagner was at the peak of his creating and had realised in the outside world what lived in his soul, Nietzsche discovered, what faces you does not correspond to the picture, which has lived in you.—This was the case simply because he had built something like a wall against the demands of the external realities.
He could not recognise in the outside what he had formed inside as mental pictures. There Nietzsche became confused. What made him confused? Wagner? Not really. Richard Wagner never made him confused, because he did not know the objective Richard Wagner at all. He was confused by his idea, which he had got of Wagner. Now Nietzsche became confused by the whole perspective, which had led him to Wagner. He was confused by any idealism. With the idealistic Wagner, he lost all ideals which humanity can generally spin out. Thus, the feeling originated in him: idealism and all contemplation about the spiritual is a lie, is untruthfulness, illusion. The human beings have deluded themselves about that what is real, while they have made pictures of the real to themselves. Nietzsche began to suffer from himself.
Now he is engrossed in opposite currents of the spiritual life, in the positive natural sciences and the branches, which are built up on these. He becomes acquainted with an interesting spirit, with Paul Rée (1849–1901, German philosopher) who had written a book about moral sensations and the origin of conscience. This work The Origin of the Moral Sensations, 1877) is typical for the last third of the nineteenth century in which is searched and worked according to the methods of natural sciences. It completely gets the origin of moral sensations and conscience out of the impulses and instincts of the human being. Paul Rée makes this wittily. Nietzsche is delighted by this worldview about which he says to himself, there any illusion is overcome, and one can understand human life only from that which is palpable. Now I feel all ideals like masks of desires and instincts. In Human, All Too Human, a book which appears in aphoristic form, he tries to show how basically all ideals do not lead beyond the human being, but are something that is rooted in the all too human, in the feeling and in the everyday. Nietzsche could never find the way to the everyday immediately. He did not know the general-human from practice. He wanted to experience it now from theory with all joys and sufferings. In addition, life praxis became theory to him. This was wonderfully expressed in Daybreak (1881). Everything appears to him not only disproved, but got cold, as put on ice.
With particular satisfaction, Nietzsche now studies Eugen Dühring's (1833–1921) Philosophy of Reality (1878). In it, he delights himself; however, he is not a parroter of it. He writes many, partly extremely disparaging remarks in his personal copy. However, he tries to experience emotionally what is brought forward there as positive science. The French morality authors who aim at assessing moral of life not by standards, but by events become a stimulating reading for him. This becomes his tragedy or also his bliss. These are the essentials that he lives through all that. It works different on him from those who had created these works. He must always ask himself, how does one live with these things?
Now, however, we see significant ideas originating to him from such conditions, ideas from which we must say that Nietzsche knocked at the gate of spiritual science, just as he had once stood before it with his Dionysian human being, guessing the mysteries. The gates were not opened to him. With one of these ideas, one can prove almost how it has originated. In Dühring's book A Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific Worldview and Way of Life you find a strange passage. There Dühring tries to put the question whether it is possible that the same combination of atoms and molecules, which has been there once, returns one day in the same way.
During three weeks in which I have ordered Nietzsche's library, I myself have seen that he had marked this passage in this book and had added remarks. From then on, at first in the subconsciousness, the idea of the so-called everlasting return worked in him. This idea, which he developed more and more, has imprinted itself on Nietzsche's soul in such a way that it became a creed to him; he has familiarised himself with it that it became his tragedy. It expresses that everything that was there once returns in the same combination and with all details repeatedly, even if after long intervals. As well as we are sitting here now, we would come again heaps of times. This was a feeling, which belonged to the tragedy of his soul, the feeling: with all grief which now you experience you will always return.—Thus, we realise that Nietzsche has become the materialistic thinker by Dühring's idea of return—which Dühring rejects. For him there was only this return of the same a consequence of a materialistic idea.
We see Nietzsche's ideas crystallising from the cultural trend of the nineteenth century. Darwinism shows how the evolution of the imperfect to the perfect takes place how evolution advances from the simple living being to the developed human being. As for Nietzsche, it is not speculation; this becomes a source of bliss for him. It is a satisfaction for him to see the world in its development. However, he cannot stop. He says to himself, the human being has become; should he not develop further? Should the development be concluded with the human being if we see that imperfect beings have developed up to the human being? There we must look at the human being as a transition to a super-human.—Thus, the human being became to him a bridge between worm and super-human.
Nietzsche stood with his idea of the everlasting return with his whole feeling and thinking before the gate of the spiritual-scientific truth of reincarnation. He stood also with the idea of the super-human before the gate of spiritual science, which shows us that in every human being something lives that we have to understand as a divine essence of the human being. This essence is a kind of super-human if we are allowed to use the expression. When the human being has gone through many incarnations and has become more and more perfect, he will ascend to even higher degrees of existence.
Nietzsche knew nothing about all these concrete secrets of spiritual science. He knew nothing about that what we know if we look behind the sensuous, palpable. He could only emotionally grasp what lived in his soul, not with his ego. Instead of the portrayals of the spiritual facts that can fulfil us with bliss, instead of the portrayal of that world of facts which shows us how within the planetary development the human being ascends from stage to stage, all that lived with Nietzsche in the feeling, and sounds lyrically from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885). It is an enthusiastic portrayal of the guessed that he could not behold. Like a question appears to us his hymn on the super-human.
How could this thirsty soul have been satisfied? Only if it had got to know spiritual science as contents. Nietzsche had to bleed out emotionally in his longing for it. Only spiritual science could have brought him what he strove for without being able to grasp it. In the last book, which he wanted to call Will to Power, it is especially clear how he could come to no fulfilment of his soul with the desired spiritual contents. Compare everything that spiritual science says about the higher human being and his affiliation to spiritual worlds with the abstract will to power, which has, actually, no contents. Power is something quite abstract if it is not said what should have power.
Just this posthumous work Will to Power shows Nietzsche's vain and fateful striving that is so great in its notions. Again, you can observe the tragedy, how this striving for an unknown land grows into insanity. Just at the example of Nietzsche, you can see where the civilisation of the nineteenth century had to lead the deeper feeling personalities. Therefore, many people who guessed something beyond the material, the palpable and could not find it because they stopped with this civilisation had to bleed out. That is why Nietzsche's tragedy also shows a big piece of the tragedy of the nineteenth century. This tragedy appears in particular, if we realise how Nietzsche with a boldness which only a human being can have who is not firmly connected with his etheric body, with the inhibitions of the physical body, how Nietzsche criticises Christianity in his Antichrist (1895). For Christianity is that what he says a harsh but comprehensible and extremely urgent criticism. A lot of that which this Antichrist contains is exceptionally worth reading. Nevertheless, the whole standpoint of Nietzsche shows us how a mind must behave to whom all philosophy appears as nihilism, who wants to search the spirit from reality and cannot find this spirit in the modern form of Christianity. It will turn out more and more that humanity recognises the big impulses and the whole deepness of Christianity only by spiritual science, so that one can say, Christianity has been recognised up to now only to a lesser extent. Nietzsche did not have this consciousness; he did not recognise Christianity properly. Why could he not recognise it? Because he could not anticipate the course of development—in the sense of spiritual science. I want to show it with an example.
About 600 years before Christ, Buddha appeared whom one cannot admire and revere enough if one recognises him really. He grows up as a king's son, surrounded by all joys of life. Any grief is kept away from him. It is ensured that he never leaves the gardens of his palace. Nevertheless, once he comes out of the sanctified area of the palaces and temples. He meets an old man, a sick person, a dead person. He sees: age is suffering, illness is suffering, and death is suffering. He recognises that in every rebirth the sufferings must come again. The great truth of the spiritual life reveals itself to Buddha. Therefore, he teaches that one should give up his longing for re-embodiment to be merged in the peace of the spiritual world.
We look at Christ now. We reincarnate in the substances of the earth. Our task is to purify, to internalise and to spiritualise this substance gradually. We carry the fruits of our pilgrimage on earth up to the spirit, and connect them thereby with the spiritual existence. May the earth then be only a vale of tears, which one should leave? No, the earth was blessed, because Christ walked about it, because his body was built from the substances of the earth, and because He permeated the earth with his forces.—The first Christians spoke that way. The human being absorbs something of the Christ principle in every life, purifies himself thereby gradually. Rebirth is not suffering, because only thereby we become able to recognise illness, age, evil as tests, as a means of education of our soul to become good and strong. The soul, which soars this knowledge, is healthy and fosters its surroundings.
Today the fear of hereditary predisposition penetrates humanity. If the human being opened himself or herself to the Christ impulse again, the illnesses would be overcome. On Golgotha, the symbol of death became the symbol of redemption. Being separated from that what one loves is suffering. However, one can be connected with those whom one loves if one is inspired by the Christ principle. One learns bit by bit to experience this union as reality. The Christ principle transforms the sufferings described by Buddha. Overcoming the sufferings one can reach not only by turning away from life, but also by the transformation of the soul. At the sight of the corpse of the crucified, we realise the riddle of the everlasting life going through death.
Nietzsche regards Christianity just as the opposite of that, what lies in its concealed deepness and what should be brought to light by spiritual science. He bleeds out because he could not recognise this. Nietzsche's grief is the deepest, most painful longing for the sources of life. Because his spirit was not firmly tied to his physical body, he does not come to the right solution of the world riddles tormenting him. Thus, it could happen that he did not find the right answer to his question to life which spiritual science could have given him, that he passed by. When the tools of the physical body could no longer serve him, he cast it off, so to speak, he divests himself of the physical body that has become useless for the thinker, and he hovers over it as it were. Thus, he appears to the viewer looking at him as healthy, as someone who only wants to rest from intensive work of thought. In such a way, he lay there like a picture of the tragedy of modern materialistic science, which cannot recognise the spiritual.
Nietzsche im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft
Zu den Erlebnissen, die man nicht wieder vergißt, gehört für mich das einzige Zusammentreffen mit Friedrich Nietzsche, Er war damals schon wahnsinnig. Der Anblick war sehr, sehr bedeutsam. Man stelle sich vor einen Menschen, einen Mann, der den ganzen Vormittag mit der Frage sich beschäftigt hat, die ihm naheliegt, und der den Wunsch hat, nach Tisch sich etwas auszuruhen und die Gedanken in sich nachklingen zu lassen: so lager da. Man hatte den Eindruck eines völlig Gesunden, und dabei war er schon vollständig wahnsinnig; er erkannte niemanden. Seine Stirn war gemodelt wie eine zwischen Künstler- und Denkerstirne liegende, und war doch die Stirn eines Wahnsinnigen. Es war ein Rätsel, was man vor sich zu haben schien. Menschen von seiner Art des Wahnsinns hätten ganz anders aussehen müssen. Nur mittels Geisteswissenschaft ist dies Ungewöhnliche zu erklären.
Der Ätherleib, der Träger des Gedächtnisses, ist zeitlebens verbunden mit dem physischen Leib, aber er ist in verschiedener Art verbunden bei den verschiedenen Menschen. Bei einigen ist die Verbindung nicht sehr fest, bei anderen dagegen eine sehr dichte. Nietzsches Ätherleib war nun von vorneherein sehr beweglich. Die mit einem beweglichen Ätherleib begabten Menschen können zwei Eigenschaften haben: Die eine ist eine geniale, leicht bewegliche Denkkraft und Phantasie, die Fähigkeit, weit auseinanderliegendeBegriffe zu verbinden und weit auseinandergehende Perspektiven zusammenzuschauen. Solche Menschen werden nicht so leicht wie andere durch die Schwere des physischen Körpers in den einmal durch das Leben gegebenen Verhältnissen zurückgehalten.
Noch ehe Friedrich Nietzsche seinen Doktor gemacht hatte, wurde er zum Professor für Alt-Philologie in Basel berufen. Bei seinem Lehrer Professor Ritschl wurden Erkundigungen eingezogen. Dieser antwortete: Nietzsche kann alles, was er will. So kam es denn, daß einer seinen Doktor machte, als er schon eine Professur innehatte. Geistig leichtbeweglich war also Nietzsche. Ein solcher Mensch lebt nicht in Ideen, die handgreiflich sind. Sozusagen wie durch eine Wand getrennt von dem Alltäglichen lebt er.
Aber es ist noch etwas anderes verknüpft mit einer solchen Geistesanlage, etwas von dem man sagen möchte: es ist ein Mensch, der Träger einer solchen Anlage ist, zu einer gewissen Lebenstragik verurteilt. Ein solcher Mensch findet schwer den Weg zu den unmittelbaren Dingen des Daseins, er lebt leicht in dem, was nicht durch die Augen gesehen, mit den Händen gegriffen werden kann, was nicht von der Alltäglichkeit beobachtet werden kann, sondern in dem, was an geistigen Gütern die Menschheit sich erobert hat. Er lebt in gewisser Weise wie durch Wände getrennt von den Leiden und Freuden des Lebens. Sein Blick schweift in die Weite, mehr in das, was die Menschheit sich errungen und geschaffen hat, als in das, was alltäglich ist. Daher konnte es kommen, daß Nietzsche in einer besonderen Lage war zu der Kultur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts.
Wer die Kultur der zweiten Hälfte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts überblickt, der sieht, wie da ein gewaltiger Ruck vorwärts gemacht wird in der Eroberung der physischen Welt. Nehmen wir das Jahr 1858/59. Es war das Jahr, welches derMenschheit brachte das Werk Darwins von der Entstehung der Arten, wodurch der Blick der Menschen in bezug auf die Entwickelungsidee ganz in das Physische gebannt worden ist. Weiter war es das Jahr, welches brachte das Werk, wodurch im Grunde genommen die Materien unserer Fixsterne und des fernsten Himmelsraumes erobert worden sind: Die Spektral-Analyse von Kirchhoff und Bunsen. Erst seit jener Zeit war es möglich zu sagen: Die Stoffe, die auf der Erde sich finden, finden sich auch auf den anderen Planeten. Dann erschien das Buch über Ästhetik von Fr. Th. Vischer, das die Wissenschaft des Schönen von unten herauf begründen wollte, während man früher das Schöne von oben herunter, von der Idee aus, erklärt hatte. Um dasBild zu vervollständigen: Es erschien in jenem Jahre das Werk, welches das soziale Leben hineinzwingen möchte in die bloß sinnliche Welt, Karl Marx’ Werk «Kritik der politischen Ökonomie». Kurz, es war die Zeit, in der Nietzsche aufwuchs, die Zeit in der der Menschenblick ganz hinausgelenkt wurde in die physische Welt.
Und nun denken Sie sich, welche Formen das alles im Laufe der zweiten Hälfte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts angenommen hat: Denken Sie an Haeckel und andere Forscher, welche nur ins Auge faßten dasjenige, was sich ihren sinnlichen Augen darstellte; denken Sie an alles, was die Naturwissenschaft und die Technik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert geleistet haben. Es erscheint uns gegenüber diesen Strömungen wie eine Flucht der Menschheit in die Spiritualität, wenn in der damaligen Zeit weite Kreise ergiffen werden von der Philosophie Schopenhauers. Das bloße Interesse für die Philosophie Schopenhauers damals zeigt, daß die Menschenseelen flüchteten zu irgend etwas, was geistige Befriedigung gewähren sollte. Wir sehen weiter, wie einer der großen Geister des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Richard Wagner, in anderer Art versucht, Spirituelles wieder in die Kultur hineinfließen zu lassen.
In diese Kulturströmung nun stellte sich Nietzsche hinein. Wie tat er das? Die eben Genannten stellten sich ja schöpferisch in sie hinein, und es ist etwas Beseligendes, das Schöpferische. Das Arbeiten macht den Menschen jung und frisch. Das zeigt sich an Haeckel. Wer so am Mikroskop und anderen Instrumenten arbeitet und forscht, wird sich an dieser Arbeit beseligen und verjüngen können, er wird jung und frisch sein, er wird auch gehobenen Herzens das alles machen können, und er wird vergessen das Bedürfnis nach einer spirituellen Welt; in ihm lebt etwas, was den Menschen beleben kann, die Schaffensfreude, die etwas Göttlich-Geistiges hat.
Nietzsches Schicksal war diese Kulturströmung. Ihm war es Schicksal, aus dieser Kulturströmung selbst Lust und Leid herauszuschöpfen, weil er nicht unmittelbar mit dem Leben des Alltags zusammenhing. In ihm bohrte das Gefühl: Wie läßt es sich leben mit dem, was die heutige Kultur bietet? Nietzsches Herz war bei allem dabei, entweder freudvoll oder leidempfindend. Er durchlebte mit seiner Seele alles, was im neunzehnten Jahrhundert geschehen war.
Wir sehen, wie früh in Nietzsches Leben zwei Geister eingreifen: Schopenhauer, den er nicht persönlich kennen lernte, der aber tief durch seine Schriften auf ihn wirkte, und Richard Wagner, mit dem er durch die innigsten freundschaftlichen Bande verknüpft war. Durch diese beiden Geister wurde Nietzsche darauf hingewiesen, sich zu vertiefen in das im Aufgange unserer Kultur sich zeigende Rätsel des alten Griechentums. Er hatte tiefe Blicke in die Griechenwelt getan, von der ältesten Zeit bis dahin, wo die Geschichte schon lichter hineinleuchtet. Der Grieche in der ältesten Zeit scheint ihm der Gottheit viel näher zu stehen als später, da er versucht, Bilder der Götter in seinen Kunstwerken darzustellen: er macht sie menschenähnlich, erhebt die Form des Menschen zum Idealbild. So war der Grieche nicht in der Urzeit. Der Urgrieche fühlte alles lebendig in sich strömen, was draußen war, was in dem Sturme weht und mit dem Donner rollt, dem Blitze zuckt, was als harmonisierende Weisheit die Welt draußen weise eingerichtet hat. In seiner ursprünglichen Musik brachte damals der Grieche diese Harmonie zum Ausdruck und gestaltete sie in seinen Tempeltänzen. Den dionysischen Menschen nannte Nietzsche den Urgriechen. Der spätere Grieche, der apollinische Mensch, schaffte nach, was der Urgrieche war. Betrachtend stand er da und brachte es in seinen Kunstwerken zum Ausdruck. In diesen Werdegang blickte Nietzsche wie in ein Rätsel, denn er hatte keine Kenntnis von dem, was als Urkultur zugrunde lag der griechischen und jenen noch früheren Kulturen, aus denen sie ihre Kraft geschöpft hatte.
Ein Ausdruck jener Urkultur war auch das, was in den orphischen und eleusinischen Mysterien in Mythengestaltung und Kunst an Weisheit zum Ausdruck kam. Das wußte Nietzsche nicht. Er dachte, beim Urgriechen sei alles Instinkt, Urtrieb gewesen. Er hat nichts gewußt von den Weistümern, die ursprünglich in den Mysterien von Eingeweihten gepflegt worden sind, die dann hinausflossen in die Welt, abgebildet in Kunstwerken und Mysterien-Aufführungen. In diese Mysterien konnte Nietzsche nicht hineinschauen, aber er ahnte sie. Er fühlte sich daher beunruhigt, denn er konnte die richtige Antwort auf seineFragen nicht finden. In jener Urweisheit des Menschen, an die die Geisteswissenschaft anknüpft, hätte er suchen müssen die Antwort auf seinen Dionysos-Menschen und seinen ApolloMenschen. Aus den eleusinischen und orphischen Mysterien hätte er holen müssen die Lösung für das, was für ihn Rätsel war. Er hätte dann sehen können, wie die Kunst das Schauen pflegt, und wie Wissenschaft und Religion suchen nach dem, was das Menschenherz durchziehen kann mit Frömmigkeit.
Religion, Kunst und Wissenschaft waren in den alten Mysterien noch nicht voneinander getrennt. Aus einer Wurzel sind sie entsprungen. Die uralten Mysterien sind diese Wurzel. Bei den führenden Völkern des Altertums wurden sie in Geheimstätten wirksam gepflegt und zu Kultushandlungen ausgebaut. Im Bilde wurde in den alten Mysterien für Neophyten das Heruntersteigen der uralten Weisheit dargestellt. Das blieb Nietzsche verborgen, deshalb konnte er den Zusammenhang, den er suchte, nicht finden. Nur auf tragische Art konnte sich ihm die in seinem Sinne abwärtsführende Entwickelung des griechischen Geisteslebens darstellen. Er sieht, wie noch Äschylos, der nahestand den Mysterien, von innerer Weisheit durchzogen sein Drama aufbaut. Aber er sieht auch, wie bei Sophokles und namentlich bei Euripides schon eine Gestaltung gepflegt wird, für die das, was dargestellt wird, nur noch äußerlich ist. Und er sieht, wie bei den Sokratikern Begriffe gefunden werden, die fern sind den Weltenquellen, die sich wie betrachtend hinstellen außerhalb des Weltengehaltes im Kosmos. Es kam ihm so vor, daß in Sokrates nicht mehr die Welt selbst, der Weltinhalt pulsiere, sondern nur noch die Begriffe davon, es kam ihm so vor, daß in Sokrates das im Wesen des Griechen pulsierende Leben in trockene, nüchterne Abstraktion hineinführt. Schmerzlich berührt war Nietzsche dadurch, daß Sokrates den Satz aufstellte, die Tugend sei lehrbar. Er sah es so, daß der alte Grieche fühlte, was er tun sollte; der fragte nicht, ob es richtig oder unrichtig sei. Erst eine gottentfremdete Zeit konnte fragen: Kann man lernen, was gut ist? Daher war Sokrates für Nietzsche der NiedergangsMensch des Griechentums.
In Schopenhauer erschien Nietzsche wiederum ein Mensch, der eine Ahnung hatte von dem, was hinführte zu den Quellen des Daseins. Er schlug wieder die Brücke hinüber von der abstrakt gewordenen Welt menschlicher Vorstellungen zu den im Willen pulsierenden tieferen Quellen des Seins. Dies befriedigte das Wahrheitsstreben Nietzsches. Und Richard Wagner erschien ihm wie ein aus dem Urgriechentum auferstandener Mensch. Es war beseligend für Nietzsche, sich an einem solchen Ausnahmemenschen heranzubilden, der neben ihm herging in Fleisch und Blut. Ein Ersatz für das, was den andern Menschen die äußere Welt ist, war ihm diese Freundschaft mit Richard Wagner.
Als Niederschlag seiner Gedankenwelt in dieser Zeit haben wir die Schrift «Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik», 1872 erschienen, in der schon der ganze Nietzsche enthalten ist. Da findet sich schon das Apollinische und das Dionysische. Ferner «Schopenhauer als Erzieher». Wie man über seinen Vater sprechen würde, schreibt Nietzsche hier empfindungsgemäß über Schopenhauer. Dann folgt «Richard Wagner in Bayreuth», von allen als die beste Schrift über Richard Wagner angesehen.
Keine Zeit ist so eng mit dem Philistertum verbunden wie die Zeit des Materialismus. In keinem Buche kommt diese Verbundenheit so stark zum Ausdruck wie in dem Buche von David Friedrich Strauß: «Das Leben Jesu.» Dieses Philistertum wird in großartiger Weise an den Pranger gestellt in Nietzsches Schrift über David Friedrich Strauß. Nietzsche, der die Wiederaufrichtung des dionysischen Menschen ersehnt, konnte sich empören über das Philistertum des David Friedrich Strauß. «David Friedrich Strauß, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller» ist ein erlösendes Buch.
Dann tat er etwas als Akademiker. Er hatte die feuer- und enthusiasmuslose Zeit des Akademikertums erlebt. Wenn jemand sagte, es könne neue Ideen geben, man könne dies oder jenes tun, dann kamen andere, die sagten: Die Geschichte zeigt uns aber, daß nichts sprunghaft sich entwickeln kann, alles geht ganz ruhig weiter. — Man fürchtete sich vor dem, was man einen Sprung in der Geschichte nannte. Nietzsche schrieb ein Buch, worin er sagte: Ermanne dich, sei ein Mensch, mache Geschichte, suche nicht bloß die Historie, habe den Mut, selbständig zu sein und selbständig zu handeln! —
Wiederum ein befreiendes Buch, von einem umfassenden Radikalismus in seiner Forderung nach Befreiung von der Geschichte. Es brachte zum Ausdruck, daß historische Stimmung ein Hindernis sei für alles Ursprüngliche in den Impulsen der Menschen.
So ungefähr war Nietzsche bis zum Jahre 1876. SeineEntwickelung war so, daß er fern stand dem, was in der Welt vorging. Die leichte Beweglichkeit seines Ätherleibes bewirkte das. Und 1876, als Wagner auf dem Gipfel seines Schaffens war und in der Außenwelt verwirklicht hatte, was in seiner Seele lebte, da stand es um Nietzsche so, daß er gewahr wurde: Was dir entgegentritt, das entspricht nicht dem Bilde, das in dir gelebt hat. — Einfach aus dem Grunde konnte es nicht entsprechen dem Bilde, das in ihm lebte, weil er etwas wie eine Mauer hatte gegenüber den Anforderungen der äußeren Realitäten. Er konnte im Äußeren nicht wiedererkennen das, was er sich im Innern an Vorstellungen gebildet hatte. Da wurde Nietzsche irre. An was wurde er irre? An Wagner? Eigentlich nicht. An Richard Wagner ist er nie irre geworden, denn er hat ja den objektiven Richard Wagner gar nicht gekannt. Er ist irre geworden an seinem eigenen Bild, das er sich von Wagner gemacht hatte. Nietzsche wurde nun gleich irre an der ganzen Perspektive, die ihn zu Wagner hingeführt hatte. Er wurde irre an allem Idealismus. Es gingen ihm mit dem idealistischen Wagner verloren alle Ideale, die die Menschheit überhaupt ausspinnen kann. So entstand in ihm das Gefühl: der Idealismus und alles Nachsinnen über das Geistige ist Lüge, Unwahrheit, Illusion. Die Menschen haben sich getäuscht über dasjenige, was real und wirklich ist, indem sie sich Bilder gemacht haben über das Wirkliche. Nietzsche fing an zu leiden an sich selber.
Und nun versenkt er sich in entgegengesetzte Strömungen des Geisteslebens, in die positiven Naturwissenschaften und die Zweige, die auf dieser aufgebaut sind. Er wird bekannt mit einem interessanten Geist, mit Paul R£e, der ein Buch geschrieben hat über moralische Empfindungen und die Entstehung des Gewissens. Das ist eine für das letzte Drittel des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts charakteristische Schrift, in der nach dem Muster der Naturwissenschaften gesucht und gearbeitet wird, und die die Entstehung moralischer Empfindungen und des Gewissens ganz aus den Trieben und Instinkten des Menschen herausholt. Geistreich geschieht das von Paul Re&e. Nietzsche ist entzückt von dieser Weltanschauung, von der er sich sagt: Da ist alle Illusion überwunden, nur aus dem, was handgreiflich ist, kann man das Menschenleben begreifen. Jetzt werden alle Ideale empfunden wie Masken für das, was Triebe und Instinkte sind. In «Menschliches, Allzumenschliches», ein Buch, das in aphoristischer Form jetzt erscheint, versucht er darzustellen, wie im Grunde genommen alle Ideale nicht etwas sind, was über den Menschen hinausführt, sondern etwas, was im Allzumenschlichen, im Gefühl und im Alltäglichen wurzelt. Nietzsche hat früher niemals finden können den Weg ins Alltägliche hinein in unmittelbarer Weise. Er kannte das Allgemein-Menschliche nicht aus der Praxis. Aus der Theorie heraus wollte er es jetzt mit allen Freuden und Leiden erleben. Auch die Praxis des Lebens wurde ihm zur Theorie. Wunderbar ist das in seinem Schaffen zum Ausdruck gekommen in der «Morgenröte». Alles erscheint ihm da nicht nur widerlegt, sondern kalt geworden, wie auf Eis gelegt.
Mit besonderer Befriedigung studiert Nietzsche nun Eugen Dührings Wirklichkeitsphilosophie. An ihr entzückt er sich, ist aber nicht ein Nachbeter von ihr. Er schreibt dazu viele, zum Teil höchst abfällige Bemerkungen in sein Handexemplar. Aber er versucht das, was da an positiver Wissenschaft vorgebracht wird, seelisch, gefühlsmäßig zu durchleben. Die französischen Moral-Schriftsteller, die darauf ausgehen, die Moral des Lebens nicht nach Normen, sondern nach Geschehnissen zu beurteilen, werden anregende Lektüre für ihn. Das wird für ihn zur Tragik oder auch zur Seligkeit. Das ist das Wesentliche, daß er alles das durchlebt. Anders wirkt es bei ihm, als bei denen, die diese Werke geschaffen hatten. Er muß sich immer fragen: Wie lebt es sich mit diesen Dingen?
Nun sehen wir allerdings, wie ihm aus solchen Voraussetzungen heraus bedeutsame Ideen ersprossen sind, Ideen, von denen wir sagen müssen, daß Nietzsche pochte an dem Tor der Geisteswissenschaft, ebenso wie er einst pochend davorgestanden hatte bei seinem dionysischen Menschen, erahnend die Mysterien. Aufgetan, aufgemacht sind ihm diese Pforten nicht worden. Bei einer dieser Ideen kann man geradezu nachweisen, wie sie entstanden ist. In Dührings Buch «Kursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung» finden Sie eine merkwürdige Stelle. Da versucht Dühring die Frage zu stellen, ob es möglich sei, daß dieselbe Kombination von Atomen und Molekülen, die einmal da gewesen ist, jemals in derselben Art wiederkehrt. Während der .drei Wochen, in denen ich Nietzsches Bibliothek geordnet habe, habe ich selbst gesehen, daß er diese Stelle in seinem Buche angestrichen und seine Bemerkungen dazu gemacht hatte. Von da an, zunächst im Unterbewußtsein, arbeitete in ihm die Idee von der sogenannten ewigen Wiederkunft. Diese Idee, die er dann mehr und mehr ausgestaltete, hat sich in die Seele Nietzsches so hineingemalt, daß sie ihm Glaubensbekenntnis wurde; er hat sich so in sie hineingefunden, daß sie seine Tragik wurde. Sie drückt nichts anderes aus, als daß alles, was einmal da war, in derselben Kombination und mit allen Einzelheiten immer wieder und wieder, wenn auch nach langen Zeiträumen, wiederkehren muß. So wie wir hier jetzt zusammensitzen, so würden wir unzählige Male wiederkommen. Das war ein Gefühl, das zu der Tragik seiner Seele gehörte, das Gefühl: Mit all dem Leid, das du jetzt erlebst, wirst du immer wiederkehren. — So sehen wir, wie Nietzsche durch die Idee Dührings von der Wiederkehr — die Dühring selbst aber abweist — zum materialistischen Denker geworden ist. Für ihn gab es nur diese Wiederkehr des Gleichen als Konsequenz einer materialistischen Idee.
Wir sehen wiederum Nietzsches Ideen sich herauskristallisteren aus der Kulturströmung des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Der Darwinismus zeigt, wie die Entwickelung vom Unvollkommenen zum Vollkommenen sich vollzieht, wie heraufgeschritten ist dieEntwickelung vom einfachen Lebewesen zum entwickelten Menschen. Für Nietzsche ist das nicht Spekulation; für ihn wird dies zu einem Quell der Seligkeit. Es ist für ihn eine Befriedigung, die Welt zu sehen in ihrer Entwickelung. Doch er kann dabei nicht stehen bleiben. Er sagt sich: Der Mensch ist geworden; soll er nicht weiter werden? Soll die Entwickelung abgeschlossen sein mit dem Menschen, wenn wir sehen, daß sich unvollkommene Wesen bis zum Menschen entwickelt haben? Da müssen wir den Menschen als einen Übergang zu einem ÜberMenschen ansehen. — So wurde ihm der Mensch eine Brücke zwischen Wurm und Über-Mensch.
Wie Nietzsche mit seiner Idee der ewigen Wiederkunft mit seinem ganzen Fühlen und Denken vor dem Tore der geisteswissenschaftlichen Wahrheit von der Reinkarnation stand, so stand er auch mit der Idee des Über-Menschen vor dem Tore der Geisteswissenschaft, die uns zeigt, daß in jedem Menschen etwas lebt, was wir als göttlichen Wesenskern des Menschen aufzufassen haben, der wirklich eine Art Über-Mensch ist — wenn wir den Ausdruck gebrauchen dürfen —, der Mensch, der durch viele Verkörperungen gegangen und immer vollkommener und vollkommener geworden ist, und der hinaufsteigen wird zu noch höheren Graden des Daseins.
Von allen diesen konkreten Geheimnissen der Geisteswissenschaft, von alle dem, was wir wissen, wenn wir hinter das Sinnliche, Handgreifliche schauen, wußte Nietzsche nichts. So wurde er von dem, was in seiner Seele lebte, nicht ichhaft, sondern bloß gefühlsmäßig erfaßt. Statt der Schilderungen der geistigen Tatsachen, die uns mit Seligkeit jederzeit aufs Neue erfüllen können, wenn sie geschildert werden, statt der Schilderung jener Tatsachenwelt, die uns zeigt, wie innerhalb der planetarischen Entwickelung der Mensch von Stufe zu Stufe steigt, lebte das alles bei Nietzsche im Gefühl, und lyrisch lebte es sich aus in seinem « Also sprach Zarathustra». Es ist eine feurige Schilderung des Erahnten, das er nicht schauen konnte. Wie eine Frage scheint uns seine Hymne auf den Übermenschen.
Wie hätte diese durstende Seele befriedigt werden können? Nur dann, wenn ihr bekanntgeworden wäre, was die Geisteswissenschaft als Inhalt hat. Verbluten mußte Nietzsche seelisch an seiner Sehnsucht danach. Nur die Geisteswissenschaft hätte ihm das bringen können, nach dem er rang, ohne es fassen zu können. An dem letzten Buche, das er hat nennen wollen «Wille zur Macht», zeigt sich besonders deutlich, wie er zu keiner Erfüllung seiner Seele mit dem ersehnten Geistinhalt hat kommen können. Vergleichen Sie alles dasjenige, was in der Geisteswissenschaft über den höheren Menschen und seine Zugehörigkeit zu geistigen Welten gesagt wird und setzen Sie dagegen den abstrakten Willen zur Macht, die eigentlich keinen Inhalt hat. Macht ist etwas ganz Abstraktes, wenn nicht gesagt wird, was Macht haben soll.
Gerade dieses nachgelassene Werk «Wille zur Macht» zeigt so recht Nietzsches vergebliches und verhängnisvolles, in seiner Ahnung so großartiges, sich überstürzendes Streben. Wiederum ist die Tragik zu beobachten, wie sich hinwächst dieses Streben nach einem unbekannten Land in den Wahnsinn. Und gerade an dem Beispiel von Nietzsche ist es so recht zu sehen, wohin die Kultur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts die tiefer fühlenden Persönlichkeiten führen mußte. Viele, welche etwas erahnten über das Materielle, Handgreifliche hinaus, und es nicht finden konnten, weil sie bei dieser Kultur stehenblieben, haben deshalb an ihr verbluten müssen. Deshalb zeigt auch Nietzsches Tragik ein großes Stück der Tragik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Es zeigt sich uns diese Tragik insbesondere, wenn wir sehen, wie Nietzsche mit einer Kühnheit, die nur ein Menschenwesen hat, das mit seinem Ätherleib nicht fest verbunden ist mit den Hemmungen des physischen Leibes, wie Nietzsche in seinem « Antichrist» das Christentum kritisiert. Für dasjenige, was als Christentum sich auslebt, ist das, was er sagt, eine herbe, aber begreifliche und höchst eindringliche Kritik. Vieles von dem, was dieser «Antichrist» enthält, ist außerordentlich lesenswert. Und doch zeigt uns die ganze Stellung Nietzsches zum Christentum, wie sich ein Geist verhalten muß, dem als Nihilismus erscheint alle Philosophie, der aus der Wirklichkeit den Geist suchen will und auch in der modernen Form des Christentums diesen Geist nicht finden kann.
Es wird sich immer mehr herausstellen, daß die Menschheit die großen Impulse und die ganze Tiefe des Christentums erst durch die Geisteswissenschaft erkennen wird, so daß man sagen kann: Das Christentum ist bisher nur zu einem kleinsten Teil erkannt worden. Dieses Bewußtsein hat Nietzsche nicht gehabt, er hat das Christentum nicht richtig erkannt. Warum konnte er es nicht erkennen? Weil er den Gang der Entwickelung — im Sinne der Geisteswissenschaft — nicht hat ahnen können. Ich will es Ihnen an einem Beispiel zeigen.
Etwa sechshundert Jahre vor Christus trat Buddha auf, für den es keinen genügend großen Ausdruck der verehrenden Bewunderung gibt, wenn man ihn wirklich erkennt. Als Königssohn wächst er heran, von allen Freuden des Lebens umgeben. Jedes Leid wird von ihm ferngehalten. Es wird dafür gesorgt, daß er die Gärten seines Palastes nie verläßt. Da tritt er einmal doch aus dem geheiligten Bezirk der Paläste und Tempel heraus. Er begegnet einem Alten, einem Kranken, einem Toten. Er sieht: Alter ist Leiden, Krankheit ist Leiden, Tod ist Leiden. Er erkennt, daß in jeder Wiedergeburt die Leiden wiederkommen müssen. Die großen Wahrheiten des geistigen Lebens offenbaren sich dem Buddha. Deshalb lehrt er, daß man seine Sehnsucht nach Wiederverkörperung aufgeben solle, um aufzugehen in dem Frieden der geistigen Welt.
Blicken wir nun hin auf Christus. Aus den Stoffen der Erde wird uns das gegeben, worin wir uns wiederverkörpern können. Unsere Aufgabe ist es, diesen Stoff allmählich zu läutern, zu verinnerlichen und zu durchgeistigen. Die Früchte der Erdenpilgerschaft tragen wir dadurch hinauf zum Geiste, verbinden sie dadurch mit dem Geistesdasein. Kann die Erde dann nur ein Jammertal sein, das man verlassen soll? Nein, geheiligt worden ist die Erde dadurch, daß der Christus über sie dahingewandelt ist, daß der von ihm getragene Leib aus den Stoffen der Erde auferbaut war und sich für die Erde hingeopfert hat, sie mit seinen Kräften durchströmend. — So sprachen die ersten Christen. Der Mensch nimmt in jedem Leben etwas vom Christus-Prinzip in sich auf, läutert sich dadurch allmählich hinauf. Wiedergeburt ist nicht Leiden, denn nur dadurch werden wir fähig, die Krankheit, das Alter, die Übel als Prüfungen zu erkennen, als Mittel der Erziehung unserer Seele zum Gutsein und Starkwerden. Die Seele, die sich hinaufschwingt zu dieser Erkenntnis ist eine gesunde und ihre Umgebung fördernde.
Heute durchpulst die Menschheit die Furcht vor der erblichen Belastung. Wenn die Menschen erst wieder den Christus-Impuls in sich wirken ließen, dann würden die Krankheiten überwunden werden. Auf Golgatha wurde das Symbolum des 'Todes zum Symbol der Erlösung. Getrennt zu sein von dem, was man lieb hat, ist Leiden. Doch man kann, wenn einen das Christus-Prinzip durchglüht, vereint sein immerdar mit denen, die man liebt. Man lernt allmählich diese Vereinigung als Wirklichkeit erleben.
So wandeln sich um durch das Christus-Prinzip die von Buddha geschilderten Leiden. Überwindung der Leiden kann erreicht werden nicht nur durch Abkehr vom Leben, sondern durch Umwandlung der Seele. Im Tragen des Kreuzes, im Anblick des Leichnams des Gekreuzigten, geht uns auf das Rätsel des durch den Tod gehenden ewigen Lebens.
Nietzsche sieht im Christentum gerade das Gegenteil von dem, was in dessen verborgenen Tiefen liegt und was durch die Geisteswissenschaft hervorgeholt werden soll. Er verblutet daran, daß er das nicht hat erkennen können. Nietzsches Leid ist die tiefste, schmerzlichste Sehnsucht nach den Quellen des Lebens. Durch die nicht genügend feste Verknüpfung seines Geistes mit dem physischen Leibe kommt er nicht zur richtigen Lösung der ihn quälenden Welträtsel. So konnte es geschehen, daß er die richtige Antwort auf seine Frage an das Leben, welche ihm von der Geisteswissenschaft hätte gegeben werden können, nicht fand, daß er an ihr vorbeiging. Und als ihm das Werkzeug des physischen Leibes nicht mehr dienen konnte, wirft er es sozusagen von sich ab, er entäußert sich dieses für den Denker unbrauchbar gewordenen physischen Leibes, schwebt gleichsam darüber. So erscheint er dem auf ihn blickenden Betrachter wie gesund, wie einer, der nur ausruhen will von intensiver Gedankenarbeit. So lag er da, wie ein Bild der von ihm in ihrer Totalität durchlebten Tragik der heutigen materialistischen Wissenschaft, die das Geistige zu erkennen nicht in der Lage ist.
Nietzsche in the Light of Spiritual Science
One of the experiences I will never forget is my only encounter with Friedrich Nietzsche. He was already insane at the time. The sight was very, very significant. Imagine a person, a man who has spent the entire morning preoccupied with a question that is close to his heart, and who wants to rest a little after lunch and let his thoughts linger: he was lying there like that. He gave the impression of being completely healthy, yet he was already completely insane; he did not recognize anyone. His forehead was shaped like that of an artist or thinker, and yet it was the forehead of a madman. It was a mystery what one seemed to have before one's eyes. People of his kind of madness should have looked completely different. Only spiritual science can explain this unusual phenomenon.
The etheric body, the carrier of memory, is connected to the physical body throughout life, but it is connected in different ways in different people. In some, the connection is not very strong, while in others it is very close. Nietzsche's etheric body was very mobile from the outset. People gifted with a mobile etheric body can have two characteristics: one is a brilliant, easily mobile power of thought and imagination, the ability to connect widely divergent concepts and to see widely divergent perspectives together. Such people are not as easily held back as others by the heaviness of the physical body in the circumstances given by life.
Even before Friedrich Nietzsche had completed his doctorate, he was appointed professor of classical philology in Basel. His teacher, Professor Ritschl, was asked for his opinion. He replied: Nietzsche can do anything he wants. And so it came about that he completed his doctorate while already holding a professorship. Nietzsche was therefore intellectually agile. Such a person does not live in ideas that are tangible. He lives, so to speak, separated from everyday life by a wall.
But there is something else connected with such a disposition, something about which one might say: a person who possesses such a disposition is condemned to a certain tragedy in life. Such a person finds it difficult to find their way to the immediate things of existence; they live easily in what cannot be seen with the eyes or grasped with the hands, what cannot be observed in everyday life, but rather in the intellectual goods that humanity has conquered. In a sense, they live as if separated by walls from the sufferings and joys of life. Their gaze wanders into the distance, more into what humanity has achieved and created than into what is everyday. This may be why Nietzsche was in a special position to understand nineteenth-century culture.
Anyone who surveys the culture of the second half of the nineteenth century can see how a tremendous leap forward was made in the conquest of the physical world. Let us take the year 1858/59. It was the year that brought humanity Darwin's work on the origin of species, which completely captivated people's view of the idea of evolution in relation to the physical world. It was also the year that brought the work that basically conquered the matter of our fixed stars and the farthest reaches of space: the spectral analysis of Kirchhoff and Bunsen. Only since that time has it been possible to say: the substances found on Earth are also found on other planets. Then came the book on aesthetics by Fr. Th. Vischer, which sought to establish the science of beauty from the bottom up, whereas previously beauty had been explained from the top down, from the idea. To complete the picture: that same year saw the publication of the work that sought to force social life into the purely sensual world, Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy. In short, it was the time in which Nietzsche grew up, the time in which human vision was directed entirely toward the physical world.
And now think about the forms all this took in the second half of the nineteenth century: think of Haeckel and other researchers who only considered what presented itself to their sensory eyes; think of everything that science and technology achieved in the nineteenth century. In contrast to these trends, it seems to us like a flight of humanity into spirituality when, at that time, wide circles were taken up with Schopenhauer's philosophy. The mere interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy at that time shows that people's souls were fleeing to something that would provide spiritual satisfaction. We see further how one of the great minds of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner, attempted in a different way to bring spirituality back into culture.
Nietzsche now placed himself within this cultural trend. How did he do this? The aforementioned figures placed themselves creatively within it, and there is something blissful about creativity. Work keeps people young and fresh. This can be seen in Haeckel. Anyone who works and researches with a microscope and other instruments will find joy and rejuvenation in this work, they will be young and fresh, they will be able to do all this with a light heart, and they will forget the need for a spiritual world; something lives within him that can enliven people, the joy of creation, which has something divine and spiritual about it.
Nietzsche's fate was this cultural trend. It was his fate to draw pleasure and suffering from this cultural trend itself, because he was not directly connected to everyday life. He was haunted by the feeling: How can one live with what today's culture has to offer? Nietzsche's heart was involved in everything, either joyfully or with a sense of suffering. He experienced with his soul everything that happened in the nineteenth century.
We see how early in Nietzsche's life two spirits intervened: Schopenhauer, whom he never met in person, but who had a profound influence on him through his writings, and Richard Wagner, with whom he was linked by the most intimate bonds of friendship. Through these two spirits, Nietzsche was led to delve into the mystery of ancient Greece that was emerging at the dawn of our culture. He had taken a deep look into the Greek world, from the earliest times to the point where history already shines more clearly. The Greeks of the earliest times seem to him to have been much closer to the gods than later Greeks, who attempted to depict images of the gods in their works of art: they made them human-like, elevating the human form to an ideal image. The Greeks of ancient times were not like this. The ancient Greeks felt everything that was outside, everything that blew in the storm and rolled with the thunder, everything that flashed with lightning, everything that had wisely arranged the outside world as harmonizing wisdom, flowing alive within them. In their original music, the Greeks expressed this harmony and shaped it in their temple dances. Nietzsche called the ancient Greeks Dionysian people. The later Greeks, the Apollonian man, imitated what the ancient Greeks were. They stood there contemplating and expressed it in their works of art. Nietzsche viewed this development as a mystery, because he had no knowledge of the ancient culture that formed the basis of Greek and earlier cultures, from which they drew their strength.
An expression of that primordial culture was also what was expressed in the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries in myth-making and art. Nietzsche did not know this. He thought that everything in the ancient Greeks was instinct, primal urge. He knew nothing of the wisdom that was originally cultivated in the mysteries by initiates, which then flowed out into the world, depicted in works of art and mystery performances. Nietzsche could not see into these mysteries, but he sensed them. He therefore felt uneasy because he could not find the right answer to his questions. He should have sought the answer to his Dionysian man and his Apollonian man in the ancient wisdom of humanity, which spiritual science draws upon. He should have sought the solution to what was a mystery to him in the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries. He would then have been able to see how art cultivates vision and how science and religion seek what can fill the human heart with piety.
Religion, art, and science were not yet separated from each other in the ancient mysteries. They sprang from a single root. The ancient mysteries are this root. Among the leading peoples of antiquity, they were effectively cultivated in secret places and developed into cult rituals. In the ancient mysteries, the descent of ancient wisdom was depicted in images for neophytes. This remained hidden from Nietzsche, which is why he could not find the connection he was seeking. Only in a tragic way could he see the downward development of Greek intellectual life in his own terms. He sees how Aeschylus, who was close to the mysteries, builds his drama on inner wisdom. But he also sees how Sophocles and especially Euripides already cultivate a form in which what is represented is only external. And he sees how the Socratics find concepts that are far removed from the sources of the world, which stand outside the content of the world in the cosmos as if observing it. It seemed to him that in Socrates it was no longer the world itself, the content of the world, that pulsated, but only the concepts of it; it seemed to him that in Socrates the life pulsating in the essence of the Greek led into dry, sober abstraction. Nietzsche was painfully touched by Socrates' statement that virtue can be taught. He saw it this way: the ancient Greek felt what he should do; he did not ask whether it was right or wrong. Only a time alienated from God could ask: Can one learn what is good? Therefore, for Nietzsche, Socrates was the man of the decline of Greek civilization.
In Schopenhauer, Nietzsche saw a man who had an inkling of what led to the sources of existence. He rebuilt the bridge from the abstract world of human ideas to the deeper sources of being pulsating in the will. This satisfied Nietzsche's quest for truth. And Richard Wagner appeared to him as a man risen from ancient Greece. It was blissful for Nietzsche to educate himself alongside such an exceptional man who walked beside him in flesh and blood. This friendship with Richard Wagner was a substitute for what the outside world was to other people.
The result of his thinking during this period is the work “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,” published in 1872, which already contains the whole of Nietzsche. The Apollonian and the Dionysian can already be found there. Furthermore, “Schopenhauer as Educator.” Nietzsche writes here about Schopenhauer with the same sensitivity with which one would speak about one's father. This is followed by “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” considered by all to be the best essay on Richard Wagner.
No era is as closely associated with philistinism as the era of materialism. No book expresses this connection more strongly than David Friedrich Strauss's “The Life of Jesus.” This philistinism is magnificently pilloried in Nietzsche's essay on David Friedrich Strauss. Nietzsche, who longed for the restoration of the Dionysian man, was outraged by the philistinism of David Friedrich Strauss. “David Friedrich Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer” is a liberating book.
Then he did something as an academic. He had experienced the uninspired and unenthusiastic era of academia. When someone said that there could be new ideas, that one could do this or that, others came along and said: But history shows us that nothing can develop rapidly, everything continues quite calmly. People were afraid of what they called a leap in history. Nietzsche wrote a book in which he said: “Man up, be a human being, make history, don't just seek history, have the courage to be independent and act independently!”
Again, a liberating book, comprehensive in its radicalism in demanding liberation from history. It expressed the view that historical sentiment was an obstacle to everything original in human impulses.
This was roughly how Nietzsche was until 1876. His development was such that he stood aloof from what was happening in the world. The light agility of his ethereal body caused this. And in 1876, when Wagner was at the peak of his creative powers and had realized in the outside world what lived in his soul, Nietzsche found himself in a situation where he realized: What you encounter does not correspond to the image that has lived within you. It could not correspond to the image that lived within him simply because he had something like a wall between himself and the demands of external realities. He could not recognize in the external world what he had formed in his inner world of ideas. That is when Nietzsche went mad. What did he go mad about? Wagner? Not really. He never lost his mind over Richard Wagner, because he didn't even know the real Richard Wagner. He lost his mind over the image he had created of Wagner. Nietzsche then lost his mind over the whole perspective that had led him to Wagner. He lost his mind over all idealism. With the idealistic Wagner, he lost all the ideals that humanity can conceive. This gave rise to the feeling in him that idealism and all contemplation of the spiritual is a lie, untruth, illusion. People have deceived themselves about what is real and true by creating images of reality. Nietzsche began to suffer from himself.
And now he immerses himself in opposing currents of intellectual life, in the positive natural sciences and the branches built upon them. He becomes acquainted with an interesting mind, Paul Rée, who has written a book about moral feelings and the development of conscience. This is a work characteristic of the last third of the nineteenth century, in which the model of the natural sciences is sought and worked on, and which derives the origin of moral feelings and conscience entirely from human drives and instincts. Paul Re&e does this in a witty way. Nietzsche is delighted with this worldview, saying to himself: Here, all illusion is overcome; human life can only be understood from what is tangible. Now all ideals are perceived as masks for what are drives and instincts. In “Human, All Too Human,” a book now appearing in aphoristic form, he attempts to show how, fundamentally, all ideals are not something that transcends human beings, but something that is rooted in the all-too-human, in feelings and in everyday life. Nietzsche had never before been able to find his way into everyday life in a direct way. He did not know the general human condition from practical experience. From theory, he now wanted to experience it with all its joys and sorrows. The practice of life also became theory for him. This is wonderfully expressed in his work “Dawn.” Everything there seems not only refuted to him, but also cold, as if frozen.
Nietzsche now studies Eugen Dühring's philosophy of reality with particular satisfaction. He is delighted by it, but is not a mere parrot of it. He writes many, sometimes highly derogatory, comments in his copy of the book. But he tries to experience what is presented there as positive science emotionally and spiritually. The French moral writers, who set out to judge the morality of life not by standards but by events, become stimulating reading for him. This becomes tragic or even blissful for him. The essential thing is that he experiences all this. It has a different effect on him than it did on those who created these works. He must always ask himself: How does one live with these things?
Now, however, we see how significant ideas sprang from such premises, ideas of which we must say that Nietzsche knocked at the gate of the humanities, just as he had once stood knocking at the gate of his Dionysian man, sensing the mysteries. These gates were not opened or unlocked for him. With one of these ideas, we can actually prove how it came about. In Dühring's book “Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific Worldview and Way of Life,” you will find a curious passage. There, Dühring attempts to ask the question of whether it is possible for the same combination of atoms and molecules that once existed to ever return in the same form. During the three weeks I spent organizing Nietzsche's library, I saw for myself that he had marked this passage in his book and made his own comments on it. From then on, initially in his subconscious, the idea of the so-called eternal recurrence worked within him. This idea, which he then developed more and more, became so ingrained in Nietzsche's soul that it became his creed; he identified with it so much that it became his tragedy. It expresses nothing other than that everything that once existed must return again and again in the same combination and with all the same details, even if after long periods of time. Just as we are sitting here together now, we would return countless times. This was a feeling that belonged to the tragedy of his soul, the feeling that with all the suffering you are now experiencing, you will return again and again. — Thus we see how Nietzsche became a materialist thinker through Dühring's idea of recurrence — which Dühring himself rejects. For him, there was only this recurrence of the same as a consequence of a materialist idea.
Once again, we see Nietzsche's ideas crystallizing out of the cultural currents of the nineteenth century. Darwinism shows how development from the imperfect to the perfect takes place, how advanced the development from simple living beings to developed humans is. For Nietzsche, this is not speculation; for him, it becomes a source of bliss. It is a satisfaction for him to see the world in its development. But he cannot stop there. He says to himself: Man has become; should he not continue to become? Should development be complete with man, when we see that imperfect beings have developed into man? We must therefore regard man as a transition to a superman. — Thus, man became for him a bridge between worm and superman.
Just as Nietzsche, with his idea of eternal recurrence, stood with all his feelings and thoughts at the gates of the spiritual-scientific truth of reincarnation, so too did he stand with the idea of the superhuman at the gates of spiritual science, which shows us that something lives in every human being that we must understand as the divine core of the human being, who is truly a kind of superhuman — if we may use the expression — the human being who has gone through many incarnations and has become more and more perfect, and who will ascend to even higher degrees of existence.
Nietzsche knew nothing of all these concrete mysteries of spiritual science, of all that we know when we look beyond the sensory, the tangible. Thus, he was not grasped by what lived in his soul in an egoistic way, but merely emotionally. Instead of descriptions of spiritual facts that can fill us with bliss again and again when they are described, instead of descriptions of the world of facts that shows us how human beings ascend from stage to stage within planetary evolution, all this lived in Nietzsche's feelings and was lyrically expressed in his “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” It is a fiery description of what he sensed but could not see. His hymn to the superhuman seems to us like a question.
How could this thirsty soul have been satisfied? Only if it had become acquainted with the content of spiritual science. Nietzsche had to bleed to death spiritually from his longing for it. Only spiritual science could have given him what he was striving for without being able to grasp it. His last book, which he wanted to call “Will to Power,” shows particularly clearly how he was unable to fulfill his soul with the spiritual content he longed for. Compare everything that spiritual science says about the higher human being and his belonging to spiritual worlds, and contrast this with the abstract will to power, which actually has no content. Power is something completely abstract if it is not said what power is supposed to have.
It is precisely this posthumous work, “Will to Power,” that so clearly shows Nietzsche's futile and fateful striving, which was so magnificent in its intuition. Once again, we can observe the tragedy of how this striving for an unknown land grows into madness. And it is precisely in the example of Nietzsche that we can see where nineteenth-century culture was bound to lead deeply sensitive personalities. Many who sensed something beyond the material and tangible, and could not find it because they remained stuck in this culture, were therefore doomed to bleed to death. That is why Nietzsche's tragedy also reveals a great deal of the tragedy of the nineteenth century. This tragedy becomes particularly apparent to us when we see how Nietzsche, with a boldness that only a human being whose etheric body is not firmly connected to the inhibitions of the physical body can have, criticizes Christianity in his “Antichrist.” For those who live out Christianity, what he says is a harsh but understandable and highly penetrating criticism. Much of what this “Antichrist” contains is extremely worth reading. And yet Nietzsche's entire position on Christianity shows us how a mind must behave when all philosophy appears to be nihilism, when it seeks the spirit in reality and cannot find this spirit even in the modern form of Christianity.
It will become increasingly clear that humanity will only recognize the great impulses and the whole depth of Christianity through spiritual science, so that one can say: Christianity has so far only been recognized to a very small extent. Nietzsche did not have this awareness; he did not recognize Christianity correctly. Why could he not recognize it? Because he could not foresee the course of development — in the sense of spiritual science. I will show you with an example.
About six hundred years before Christ, Buddha appeared, for whom there is no sufficiently great expression of reverent admiration if one truly recognizes him. As a king's son, he grew up surrounded by all the joys of life. Every suffering was kept away from him. Care was taken to ensure that he never left the gardens of his palace. Then one day he stepped outside the sacred precincts of the palaces and temples. He encountered an old man, a sick man, a dead man. He saw that old age is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering. He realizes that in every rebirth, suffering must return. The great truths of spiritual life are revealed to the Buddha. Therefore, he teaches that one should give up one's longing for reincarnation in order to merge into the peace of the spiritual world.
Let us now look at Christ. From the substances of the earth we are given that in which we can reincarnate. Our task is to gradually purify, internalize, and spiritualize this substance. In this way we carry the fruits of our earthly pilgrimage up to the spirit, connecting them with spiritual existence. Can the earth then be only a vale of tears that one should leave behind? No, the earth has been sanctified by the fact that Christ walked upon it, that the body he wore was built from the substances of the earth and sacrificed itself for the earth, permeating it with its powers. — So spoke the first Christians. In every life, human beings take in something of the Christ principle and are gradually purified by it. Rebirth is not suffering, for only through it do we become able to recognize illness, old age, and evil as trials, as means of educating our souls to be good and strong. The soul that rises to this realization is a healthy one and promotes its environment.
Today, humanity is pulsing with fear of hereditary burdens. If people would only allow the Christ impulse to work within them again, then illnesses would be overcome. On Golgotha, the symbol of death became the symbol of redemption. To be separated from what one loves is suffering. But when the Christ principle permeates us, we can be united forever with those we love. We gradually learn to experience this union as reality.
Thus, through the Christ principle, the sufferings described by Buddha are transformed. Suffering can be overcome not only by turning away from life, but also by transforming the soul. In carrying the cross, in beholding the corpse of the crucified, we are led to the mystery of eternal life passing through death.
Nietzsche sees in Christianity precisely the opposite of what lies in its hidden depths and what spiritual science seeks to bring to light. He bleeds to death because he has not been able to recognize this. Nietzsche's suffering is the deepest, most painful longing for the sources of life. Due to the insufficiently firm connection between his spirit and his physical body, he cannot find the right solution to the world's mysteries that torment him. Thus it came to pass that he did not find the right answer to his question about life, which spiritual science could have given him, that he passed it by. And when the tool of the physical body could no longer serve him, he cast it off, so to speak; he divested himself of this physical body, which had become useless to the thinker, and hovered above it, as it were. Thus, to the observer looking at him, he appears healthy, like someone who just wants to rest from intense mental work. So he lay there, like a picture of the tragedy of today's materialistic science, which he had experienced in its entirety and which is incapable of recognizing the spiritual.