Nietzsche in the Light of Spiritual Science
Berlin, 20th March, 1909
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.
|