Goethe as Father of Spiritual Research
Berlin, 21 February 1918
I
would well understand if anybody considered the whole idea of
this talk as an aberration. I would also understand if anybody
said how one can abuse Goethe's
name while making a relationship to spiritual science, because
it is sufficiently known that Goethe's view is typical just
because it is directed to the outer nature, and it regarded it
as rather dubious to raise the lawfulness of the world to ideal
heights, as Schiller
did it. Then one can say how Goethe would have behaved
negatively if one had related his mental pictures to that which
accepts a concrete real spirit from particular inner
experiences that places itself beside the natural world. I know
very well that to the production of such relation such a rich
spirit can be abused like Goethe. Since if one still brings in
so many remarks of Goethe to confirm this or that own view, it
is always possible of course to bring in other remarks of
Goethe to confirm the opposite opinion. However, compared with
all that I am allowed to mention from the start that I never
wanted in case of my really long-standing occupation with
Goethe and the Goethean worldview to state these or those
contents of a Goethean sentence to confirm the worldview meant
here. I always wanted to characterise the whole way, the inner
structure of Goethe's soul life in its relation to the natural
phenomena. Since it seems to me if one goes into the inner
structure of Goethe's nature that one will also gain an
understanding of the fact that such a spirit like Goethe
expressed apparently opposite views about the same. One can
always easily argue something can from the most different sides
against the intention to connect Goethe with the investigation
of spiritual life.
At
first the philosophers feel called because of their ability of
thinking if it concerns the investigation of the supersensible
compared with the sensory. One has always reminded that Goethe
characterised the whole way of his position to the world
repeatedly while he said, he owes everything that he got as
knowledge about the world to the fact that he never thought
about thinking. With it, the whole philosophical attitude of
Goethe seems to be condemned to many philosophically thinking
people.
It
seems necessary to reject Goethe's nature for the investigation
of the world as far as one has to exceed with such an
investigation what it presents immediately to the senses. On
the other side, religious people who want to direct the soul to
a world that is beyond the sensory, of course, are irked by
such a concise sentence as he did. He always felt it unpleasant
to the highest degree to speak of things of another world. He
expresses himself even once about the fact in such a way that
he says, as a spot is in the eye, which sees, actually,
nothing, a cavity is in the human brain. If this hollow place,
which actually sees nothing, dreams all kinds of stuff in the
world, so one speaks of such nullities like of the things of
another world. When Goethe said this, he also pointed to the
fact, that such a person inclined to the spiritual like Johann
Georg Hamann (1730-1788) was worried if one spoke only of the
things of another world. Goethe agrees with Hamann in this
respect completely. In the most vigorous way, Goethe refused to
speak of the things of another world. Yes, the naturalists
themselves, although on them the influence of Goethe has worked
strongly, can refer if they stand quite sincerely on the ground
of modern natural sciences to the fact that Goethe showed, for
example, in his theory of colours that he never could penetrate
into the strictly scientific way of research that this never
was adequate to him, and that he came just thereby to a view
deviating from the ruling theory of colours.
Now
here it cannot be my task to justify the Goethean natural
sciences. I have done this in a number of writings. Today it
should be only my task to attach some connections from
spiritual science to the Goethean natural sciences. Above all,
I would like to go back to something that is exceptionally
typical with this spirit for someone who approaches Goethe: the
refusal of thinking about thinking. One has the sensation with
the Goethean worldview where one only wants to recognise it,
that Goethe himself was afraid instinctively of submitting the
thinking itself to a consideration. He shrank from it as from
something that constitutes, otherwise, the strength of his
worldview. At such a place where Goethe characterises himself,
you have to stop, because you can rather deeply look from here
into the structure of the Goethean mind. If one considers just
philosophically disposed people who have struggled with that
which the thinking means for the human soul, you can realise if
you make the thinking an object of observation like other
objects of our world experience that you always evoke something
in the soul that appears like an insurmountable obstacle. While
you direct the thinking to the thinking itself, you cause a sum
of uncertainties in the human being. Although you have always
to ask yourself if you want to investigate the supersensible
seriously: is this human thinking able to penetrate into the
spiritual world? — You still face doubt, indecision.
As
a single factual proof of it which could be increased a hundred
times I would like to quote the sentence of a thinker who is
less famous, indeed, who, however, is counted by those who know
him among the deepest ones, among the most impressive thinkers
of our time, Professor
Gideon Spicker (1840-1912), the philosopher with the
strange destiny who has worked his way out of a confessional
ecclesiastical worldview to a free philosophical viewpoint. You
can pursue how there once a thinking really soared by own power
from a traditional viewpoint to a free one if you read his book
At the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. The
Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin that appeared
in 1910 as a kind of philosophical autobiography. You find the
following sentence there that describes a self-experience with
the thinking:
“To whichever philosophy you confess — whether to a
dogmatic or skeptical one, to an empiric or transcendental one,
to a critical or eclectic one — any without exception
takes an unproven and unprovable sentence as starting point,
namely the necessity of the thinking. No investigation figures
this necessity out one day, as deeply as it may prospect. One
must accept it and one can reason it with nothing; every
attempt to prove its correctness already requires it. Beneath
it a bottomless abyss yawns, a spooky darkness illuminated by
no beam of light. We do not know where from it comes nor where
to it leads. It is uncertain whether a merciful god or a bad
demon put it in the reason.”
This is a self-experience of a thinking which tried to bring to
mind what is, actually, a thinking which has struggled to grasp
the human being in the point where it thinks to find that in
this point where the temporal, the transient of the human being
is connected with the everlasting. To this point everybody must
come who wants to approach the everlasting nature of the human
being. However, what does Gideon Spicker find? He finds if one
has arrived at the place where one can consider the thinking,
indeed, the necessity of the thinking appears, but there also a
bottomless abyss appears. Since beyond this thinking —
what is there? Is it a merciful god or a bad demon who put the
thinking in the reason? An abyss, a desolate darkness is that
what Gideon Spicker sees. One can find out immediately that
those who cannot get further with the pursuit of thinking than
up to the thinking cannot still satisfy themselves within this
thinking.
All
that is like a spiritually instinctive experience in Goethe's
healthy worldview. One cannot say that he was prepared in his
inside one day to bring the bottomless abyss home to himself of
which Gideon Spicker speaks. However, Goethe felt that such a
thing could happen if one wants to solve the world riddles only
with the mere thinking. Hence, he did not approach at all this
point. We will see immediately which deeper impulses formed the
basis of this Goethean instinct. For the time being I only
wanted to point out that Goethe was very well at that point
where the philosophers are if they want to investigate the
everlasting in the human being and in the world that he
avoided, however, this point, did not approach it.
You
can understand Goethe's character immediately if he does not
defer to things of another world. There just the oppose impulse
appears with him who argued from immediate spiritual
instinctiveness that one does not need to go out of the world
which presents itself immediately to the senses to find the
spirit. Goethe was clear in his mind that someone who is able
to find the spirit does not need to search it in another world,
and vice versa, that someone who feels nature as little filled
with spirit so that he needs to reflect on another world can
only find fantastic, dreamy things in another world but never
really the spirit. Goethe searched the spirit so much within
the things of this world that he had to refuse to search it in
any other world. He already regarded the feeling that one must
leave this world to get to the spirit as something
brainless.
In
particular, you get an impression of the kind of the Goethean
world observation if you look at how Goethe behaved to the
phenomena of nature how he searched the spirit and the
spiritual life really in nature. You know that Goethe did not
study the various fields of natural sciences during his school
years but approached them only later in his life and that he
had to manage the phenomena of nature with mental pictures that
he had compiled in his life. Herman Grimm emphasised rightly as
a significant characteristic feature in the life of Goethe
that, while others are introduced by teachers gradually
methodically in this or that scientific approach, Goethe
approached scientific attempts as a ripe man by life praxis, so
that he had to form own mental pictures of these or those
natural phenomena with a certain maturity.
As
a rule, he got to mental pictures, which deviated significantly
from that what about the same things just the authoritative
scientists of his time meant. One can say that the Goethean
viewpoint is diametrically opposed not only to the natural
sciences of his time but also to the natural sciences of the
present in a certain respect.
It
is inadmissible if from some side single remarks of Goethe are
picked out repeatedly to prove the views of Haeckel or also of
his opponents one-sidedly. One can prove and confirm everything
with Goethe if one wants it. Goethe got to botany because he
wanted to care about the agriculture in the Grand Duchy of
Weimar, so out of life praxis. He got to geology by the
Ilmenau
(little town in Thuringia) mining, to physics because
the scientific collections of the University of Jena had been
assigned to him. Therefore, from necessity of life he tried to
get mental pictures by which he could penetrate into the
secrets of nature. You know that he formed views this way that
found their confirmation partly in the course of the nineteenth
century, as far as they point to outer scientific facts.
However, Goethe did not get these views like other naturalists,
but rather he was urged by his enclosing way of thinking to
think in a way about certain natural processes and
essentialities. You can say that immediately with his first,
epoch-making discovery this is the case.
When Goethe became acquainted with zoology and human biology by
observing the anatomical and physiological collections in Jena,
he also familiarised himself with all kinds of teachings which
were usual in natural sciences at that time about the human
being as sensory being. One looked in those days still for
outer differences of the human being and the animals. One
looked in a way that the modern natural sciences do no longer
understand.
One
linked, for example, the difference to a detail, while one
stated that in the upper jaw of the human being no
intermaxillary existed, while all higher animals would have
this bone. Goethe disliked this, simply because he could not
imagine at first that the remaining skeleton of the human being
would differ in such an unimportant detail. Now Goethe looked,
while he himself became an anatomical researcher, while he
investigated skeleton after skeleton and compared the human
construction to the animals in relation to the upper jaw
whether that had an inner significance what the anatomists
said. Then Goethe could show really that there is no difference
between the human and the animal skeletons in this respect. He
already consulted the embryological research that became
especially important later and showed that with the human being
relatively early during the embryonic development the other
parts of the upper jaw grow together with the intermaxillary so
that it does not seem to exist with the human being. Goethe had
become clear in his mind that it was right what he had felt
first that the human being is different from the animals not by
such an anatomical detail, but only by his whole posture. Of
course, Goethe thereby did not become a materialistic thinker.
However, he could get closer to the ideas that immediately
suggested themselves to him, above all, by his acquaintance
with Herder
(Johann Gottfried H., 1744-1803) who wanted to extend an
enclosing way of thinking to all world phenomena, so that the
evolution of the world shows an inner necessity that finally
generates the human being at its summit.
How
can one imagine, Goethe thought in harmony with Herder, that in
the evolution a big harmony, an inner lawful necessity
prevails, and that then suddenly somewhere a line is drawn so
that on this side of the line the complete animal development
is and beyond this line the human development which should be
different by such an unimportant detail? One can realise from
how Goethe speaks, what was near and dear to him, actually. Not
to make a single scientific discovery, but to behold a
harmonious order in the whole enclosing nature, so that the
details put themselves everywhere in a whole so that jumps are
nowhere to be found in the evolution of the world. You can
notice in a letter to Herder in which he informed his discovery
joyfully with the words: “It is there too, the small
bone!” that Goethe found something like a confirmation of
his worldview in this single fact.
He
continued this view just in relation on the animal forms. There
he got also to single facts that were important, however, for
him not as those, but confirmed his worldview only. He himself
tells that he found an animal skull at his stay in Venice on a
cemetery that showed him clearly that the cranial bones are
nothing but transformed vertebrae. He thought that the
ring-shaped vertebrae contain concealed possibilities of
growth, can be transformed into the cranial bones that surround
the brain. Goethe thereby got to the idea that the human being
and the animal, the different beings of organic life generally,
are built from relatively simple entities that develop in
living metamorphosis into each other or diverge.
One
can immediately receive the sensation with the research
intentions of Goethe that he wanted to apply this idea of
metamorphosis not only to the skeleton, but also to all other
parts of the human being. He could carry out his research only
on a special field because one human being cannot do
everything, and because he worked with limited research means.
Someone who knows Goethe's scientific writings knows that
Goethe carefully indicated the cranial bones as transformed
dorsal vertebrae. However, one can just have the feeling that
Goethe's ideas advanced farther in this field. He would
generally have had to carry the view in his mind that the
complete human brain is only a transformed part of the spinal
cord as a physical-sensory organ that the human formative
forces are able to transform what is only a part of the spinal
cord on a low level into the complex human brain.
I
had this feeling when I received the task in the end of 1889 to
incorporate the handwritten notes in the Weimar Goethe and
Schiller Archive into Goethe's scientific writings published
until then. It was especially interesting to me to pursue
whether such ideas have really lived in Goethe from which one
could have the feeling that they must have been there,
actually, with him. In particular, it interested me whether
Goethe really had the idea to regard the brain as a transformed
part of the spinal cord. Lo and behold, with the examination of
the manuscripts it really resulted that Goethe had written the
following sentence in a notebook with pencil like an intuition:
“The brain is only a transformed cerebral
ganglion.” Then the anatomist Bardeleben
(Karl von B., 1849-1919) revised this part of Goethe's
scientific writings.
Then Goethe applied the same way of thinking to the plant
realm. There his views concerning the outer facts have found
just as little contradiction as in anatomy. Goethe interprets,
actually, the whole plant as composed of a single organ. This
organ is the leaf. Backward and forward, the plant is always
leaf. The coloured petal is the transformed green leaf, also
the stamens and the pistil are to him only transformed leaves,
and everything of the plant is leaf. That what lives in the
plant leaf as formative force can accept all possible outer
forms. Goethe explained this so nicely in his writing
Metamorphosis of
Plants (1790).
Howsoever one may behave now to the details with Goethe, the
way is important how he generally did research. This was and is
to many people something strange. Goethe himself was clear
about that. Imagine how the human soul that looks at the
organic world in Goethe's sense sees such an organ like the
plant leaf changing into the petal, then into the filamentous
stamen, even into the root. Imagine a simple ring-shaped dorsal
vertebra fluffed and flattened by laws of growth, so that it is
qualified for enclosing not only the spinal cord, but also the
brain which itself is transformed from a part of the spinal
cord, and that the inner mobility of his thinking is necessary.
He probably felt what prevents us from looking at the world
phenomena this way. Someone who has a rigid thinking who wants
to develop sharply outlined concepts only forms the firm
concept of the green leaf, of the petal and so on; however, he
cannot go over from one concept to the other. In doing so,
nature breaks into nothing but details. He does not have the
possibility because his concepts have no inner mobility to
penetrate into the inner mobility of nature.
However, thereby you become able to settle down in Goethe's
soul and to convince yourself of the fact that with him
cognition is generally something else than with many other
people. While with many other people, cognition is joining of
concepts which they form apart, cognition is with Goethe
immersing in the world of the beings, pursuing that what grows
and becomes and transforms perpetually, so that his thinking
changes perpetually. Briefly, Goethe sets that in inner motion,
which is mere thinking, otherwise. Then it is no longer a mere
thinking. About that, I will speak in detail in the next talks.
It matters that the human being arouses the only inferring
thinking to the inner living thinking. Then thinking is a life
in thoughts. Then one can also no longer think about the
thinking, but then it generally changes into something
else.
Then the thinking about the thinking changes into a spiritual
view of thinking, then one faces the thinking as usual outer
sensory objects, save that one perceives these with eyes and
ears, while one faces the thinking mentally. Goethe wanted to
go over everywhere from the mere thinking to the inner
spiritual views, to the beholding consciousness as I have
called it in my book
The Riddle of Man. Hence, Goethe is dissatisfied
because Kant said that the human being cannot approach the
so-called “things in themselves” or generally the
secret of existence, and that Kant called it an
“adventure of reason” if the human being wants to
ascend from the usual faculty of judgement up to the
“beholding faculty of judgement.”
Goethe said, if one accepts that the human being can ascend by
virtue and immortality — the so-called postulates of
practical reason with Kant — to a higher region, why one
should not stand the “adventure of reason”
courageously while beholding nature? Goethe demands from the
human being this beholding faculty of judgement. From this
point, one can understand why Goethe avoided the thinking about
the thinking. Goethe knew that if one wants to think about the
thinking one is, actually, in the same position, as if one
wanted to paint the painting. One could imagine that anybody
wants to paint the painting even that he does it. However, then
he exceeds the real painting.
In
the same way, you have to exceed the thinking if it should
become concrete. Goethe knew from a spiritual instinct that the
human being can wake concealed forces and abilities in himself
and get to the beholding consciousness, so that the spiritual
world is around him, just as, otherwise, the sensory world is
around his senses. Then you leave as it were not only your
usual sensory life but also your usual thinking. Then you look
at the thinking as a reality. You cannot think the thinking;
you can behold it. Hence, Goethe always understood if
philosophers approached him who believed to have the ability to
look at the thinking spiritually. He could never understood if
people stated, they could think about the thinking. Only a
higher ability lets the thinking appear before the human being.
Goethe had this ability. This simply shows the kind of his view
of nature. Since the ability to put the thinking in living
motion to pursue the metamorphosis of the things is on a lower
level the same as the beholding consciousness on a higher
level. Goethe felt thinking while looking. However, Goethe had
a special peculiarity.
There are certain persons who have a kind of naive
clairvoyance, a kind of naive beholding consciousness. Now it
is far from my mind to state that Goethe had a kind of naive
beholding consciousness only, but Goethe had a special
disposition by which he differs from someone who only is able
to get to the beholding consciousness by the conscious
development of the deeper abilities of his soul. Goethe had
this beholding consciousness not from the start as the naive
clairvoyants have it, but he could put his thinking, the whole
structure of his soul in such a motion that he could do
research really not only externally and got thereby to physical
laws grasped in thoughts, but he could pursue the inner life of
the natural phenomena in their metamorphoses.
It
is peculiar that this predisposition, if one wants to develop
the ability of the spiritual beholding consciously, is impaired
at first, it is even extinguished. Goethe had this natural
predisposition in himself to develop a certain beholding
consciousness gradually in himself with natural phenomena. He
did not want such rules, as I have described them in my book
How Does
One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Goethe did
not have the beholding consciousness from the start, but in the
course of his development it was to him a self-evident fact to
develop certain abilities unlike other people do. This naive
talent would have been extinguished at first. If the talent
does not exist, one does not want to extinguish it, and then
one can quietly develop these abilities consciously. Because it
existed with Goethe as an inner spiritual desire, he did not
want to disturb it; he wanted that it was left to itself.
Hence, his shyness to look at the thinking, which he only
wanted to behold, with the thinking. Otherwise, one has to try
to go to the point of thinking to grasp the thoughts themselves
and to transform them gradually into forces of beholding.
This is a special peculiarity of Goethe that he felt those
forces growing up which can be also developed artificially. He
did not want to destroy this naive while he spread, I would
like to say, too much consciousness about it. However, this
shows that it is not unjustified to observe not only how his
soul forces work internally, but also how his soul forces
immerse in nature. Then without fail Goethe is a model of the
development of the beholding consciousness, of those spiritual
forces, which really lead into the spiritual world, into the
everlasting.
If
you settle in Goethe's natural sciences in such a way that you
observe them not only externally, but that you try to observe
how you yourself become, actually, if you activate such forces
in yourself, you can also transfer that what Goethe pursued
with his view of nature to the human soul itself. Then comes to
light what Goethe omitted because his senses were directed
outward at first, to nature which he considered spiritually in
her spirituality, namely that one has to look at the human soul
life also under the viewpoint of metamorphosis. Goethe became
aware of nature due to his special predisposition, and because
this predisposition was especially strong, he looked less after
the soul life.
However, you can apply his way of looking at the world to the
soul life. Then you are led beyond the mere thinking. Most
people who deal with these things simply do not believe this.
They believe that one can think about the soul exactly the same
way as one can think about something else. However, one can
direct thoughts only to that what can be perceived outwardly.
If you want to look back at the soul itself, on that what
activates the human thinking, then you cannot do it with the
thoughts. You need the beholding consciousness that exceeds the
mere thinking; you get to the Imaginative knowledge, as I
called it in my book How Does
One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and in other
books. One cannot apply the same abstract, pale thoughts with
which one grasps nature to the human soul life. One simply does
not grasp it with them. Such thoughts are like a sieve, through
which you pass the human soul life.
This occurred once in a great historical moment when Goethe and
Schiller (1759-1805, German poet) met. Just in this point, you
can realise what happens if you want to enter from Goethe's
view of nature into a soul view. Schiller had written an
important treatise, On
the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of
Letters (1794). I want to indicate only briefly,
which soul riddle Schiller had in mind. Schiller wanted to
solve the problem of the artistic. He wanted to answer the
question to himself: what happens, actually, in the human soul
if the human being creates or feels artistically if he puts
himself in the world of beauty? Schiller found, if the human
being is only given away to his sensory drives, he is subject
to the physical necessity.
As
far as the human being is subject to the physical necessity, he
cannot approach beauty and art. Also, not if he dedicates
himself only to the thinking if he follows the logical
necessity only. However, there is a middle state, Schiller
thinks. If the human being impregnates everything that the
sensory gives him with his being so that it becomes like the
pure spirituality, if he raises the sensory to spirituality and
presses the spirituality down into the sensory, so that the
sensory becomes spiritual and the spiritual becomes sensory,
then he is in beauty, then he is in the artistic. The necessity
seems to be reduced by the desire, and the desire seems to be
improved by the spirit. Schiller spoke a lot about his
intention to Goethe to invigorate the human soul forces so that
in the harmony of the single soul forces this middle state
appears which enables the human being to create or feel the
artistic. In the nineties, from the deeper acquaintance of
Goethe and Schiller on, this important life riddle played a big
role in the correspondence and in the conversations of Schiller
and Goethe. In the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of
Man Schiller tried to solve this problem philosophically.
Goethe also dealt with this problem because this problem
occupied Schiller so much. But Goethe had the beholding
consciousness which Schiller did not have; this enabled him to
submerge with his thoughts in the world of the things
themselves, but also to grasp the soul life more
intimately.
He
could realise that the human soul life is much more extensive,
is much more immense than that what one can grasp with abstract
thoughts, as Schiller did in his Letters on the Aesthetic
Education of Man.
Goethe did not want simply to put such dashes, such contours of
thoughts to characterise this richly structured human soul
life. Thus, a little work of quite different nature originated
about the same problem.
It
is very interesting to consider more closely this point of the
acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller. What did Schiller want,
actually? Schiller wanted to show that in every human being a
higher human being lives, as compared with what the usual
consciousness encloses is a lower one. Schiller wanted to
announce this higher human being who carries his desires up to
the spirit and brings the spirit down to the desires, so that
the human being, while he connects the spiritual and sensory
necessities, grasps himself in a new way and appears as a
higher human being in the human being. Goethe did not want to
be so abstract. However, Goethe also wanted to strive for what
lives as a higher human being within the human being. This
higher being in the human being appeared to him so rich in its
single member that he could not grasp it with mere thinking, so
he put it in mighty, important pictures. Thus,
The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful
Lily (1795) originated from forms at the end of
Conversations of German Emigrants.
Someone who symbolises a lot in this fairy tale does not come
close to its deeper sense. The different figures of this fairy
tale, they are about twenty, are the soul forces, personified
in their living cooperation which lift the human being beyond
themselves and to the higher human being. This lives in the
composition of The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the
Beautiful Lily. Only in pictures, Goethe could grasp the
problem that Schiller grasped in thoughts philosophically; but
in pictures which are an entire world.
You
do not need to grasp the soul life pedantically only in
Goethean way, so, actually, only in poetic pictures, but one
realises — just if one goes into the inner structure of
the Goethean worldview if one applies this to the soul life in
same way, as Goethe applied his ramble spirituality in the
metamorphosis — that the metamorphosis of the soul forces
grasps the human being vividly and leads him from the transient
that he experiences in the body to the imperishable that he
experiences as that which is in his inside and goes through
births and deaths. The usual psychology deals a lot with the
question: should one take the one or the other soul force as
starting point? Is the will original, is the imagination, or is
the thinking original? How should one imagine the mutual
relation of imagination, thinking, feeling, and percipience?
One applied a lot of astuteness to grasp the cooperation of the
different soul forces in such a way as the outer natural
sciences grasp the interaction of green leaf and petal or the
interaction of cranial bones and cerebral ones without
considering the inner transformation.
Somebody who can turn his view from the outside inwards with
Goethean sense can behold the soul life; however, he has to do
it even more vividly than to the outer life of nature because
one can rest in the outer life as it were with the spiritual
view. The outer life gives you the material; you can go from
creation to creation. The inner life seems to disappear
perpetually if you want to look at it. However, if you turn the
ramble thinking inwards, which just becomes a beholding one,
then that becomes what appears as thinking, feeling, willing,
and as perceiving, nothing but something intrinsic that changes
into each other. The will becomes a metamorphosis of the
feeling, the feeling a metamorphosis of imagining, the
imagining a metamorphosis of the perceiving and vice versa.
The
development of the forces and abilities slumbering in the human
being, of the meditative thinking, which leads into the
spiritual world, is based on nothing but on the living pursuit
of the inner metamorphoses of the soul forces. On one side that
tries who wants to become a spiritual researcher to develop his
imagination, his percipience in such a way that he leads the
will which only slumbers, otherwise, in percipience and
imagination, into this percipience and imagination repeatedly
in such a way that he brings that consciously to mind what,
otherwise, appears as an involuntary mental picture. Thereby
the usually pale thinking or forced percipience changes into
the pictorial beholding. Since one can behold the spiritual
only in pictures. The will and the feeling that one can imagine
only, otherwise, but not in their real nature are recognised,
are transformed by the meditative life, so that they become an
imagining life, a perceiving life.
Leading the imagination into the will, leading the will into
the imagining, changing the will into imagination and vice
versa, the transformation of the imagining into the will in
inner liveliness, the transformation of the single soul forces
into each other, this is meditative life. If this is pursued,
that announces itself for the inner observation what cannot
announce itself if one looks only at thinking, at feeling and
willing side by side. If one looks at them side by side, only
the temporal of the human being appears. If one learns to
recognise how imagining changes into feeling and the will
changes into imagining and perceiving, one gets to know the
metamorphosis of the inner soul life, as vividly as Goethe
pursued the metamorphoses in the outer nature. Then the
everlasting of the human soul announces itself that goes
through births and deaths. The human being thereby enters the
everlasting.
What did Goethe want while he removed such a prejudice that the
human being differs by a detail like the intermaxillary bone in
the upper jaw from the animal? He did not want that the human
being faces as an isolated being the remaining world, he
wanted, completely in harmony with Herder, to survey nature as
a big whole and to look at the human being arising from the
whole nature. When Schiller had got rid of some prejudices
towards Goethe and had reached a pure free recognition of his
greatness, he wrote to Goethe, how he had to think about
Goethe's way of looking at nature. Among the rest, he wrote the
nice words: “You take together the whole nature to get
light for the single; in the entirety of her phenomena you look
for the explanation of the individual ... A great and really
heroic idea which shows only too well, how much your mind holds
together the rich whole of its mental pictures in a nice
unity.”
It
attracts Schiller's attention that Goethe wanted to understand
the human being while he assembled him from that which is
separated, otherwise, in the different beings of nature but
which can change by inner formative forces so that the human
being appears like a summary of the outer natural phenomena in
his outer figure, the crown of the outer nature.
One
has to form a correct mental picture of that which there Goethe
wanted, actually, if one envisages the other side now that
arises for the soul life. If one envisages the metamorphosis of
the inner soul forces as Goethe envisaged the metamorphosis of
the outer forms of the human being, that arises what appears in
the human being as a summary of the metamorphosing soul forces
from the underlying world of spiritual beings and spiritual
processes, as on the other side if one looks at the human being
as a physical being in the Goethean way, this human physical
being arises as a summary of the physical world. As Goethe's
natural sciences connect the outer human figure to the whole
remaining physical world, a Goethean psychology connects the
human soul to the everlasting, concrete, enclosing spiritual
world and allows it to concentrate in the human being. Not
while you take this or that sentence of Goethe to confirm your
own view you can build a bridge between spiritual science and
the Goethean world consideration, but while you try to solve
the problem internally — vividly, not in the abstract
— logically how does one come close to such a kind to
delve into nature?
Goethe himself possessed this ability to delve into nature
naively. If you search it by deepening in his way to look at
the world, to bring it back to life in yourself, then you get
to the necessity to extend that which Goethe had as disposition
for the view of nature also to the world of the mental. Then
you get by the human soul life to the everlasting spiritual
world as Goethe got by the human natural life to his
consideration of the outer physical world. You have to approach
Goethe internally; you have to try to want that in love what he
wanted concerning nature. Then you get around to wanting the
same concerning the spiritual world whose image is the human
soul world. You get around to looking from the human soul into
the spirit as Goethe looked from the human nature into the
remaining nature. In this sense, one can already say that one
understands Goethe little if one takes him only in such a way
as he behaved at first. Goethe himself did not want to be taken
in such a way. Since Goethe was very close to the whole way
that must appear again with spiritual research, he was close to
it also in the non-scientific areas, in the area of art.
If
you yourself try to settle in the beholding consciousness, you
realise that it is necessary above all that this settling does
not perpetually disturb itself by all kinds of prejudices which
are transferred from the sensory world or from the abstract,
only logical thinking to the spiritual world. An important
viewpoint of the investigation of the spiritual world is that
you are able to wait. The soul can exert itself ever so much to
investigate something in the spiritual world, it wants to
investigate it absolutely, but it will fail, it will fool
itself. It can exert itself ever so much unless in it those
abilities have still matured which are necessary to the view of
certain beings or certain facts, it will not yet be able to
recognise them. Maturing, waiting is necessary until in the
soul that has grown up which faces you in a certain area of the
spiritual world. This is something that is necessary in a
particular way for penetrating into the spiritual world. The
spiritual researcher must have patience and energy to a high
degree. I characterise other rules in later talks. Goethe was
minded by his whole nature to be also as an artist in such a
way that he waited everywhere.
Nothing is more interesting than to pursue those poetries of
Goethe that he could not finish if one pursues how he got stuck
with the Pandora, how he got
stuck with the Natural
Daughter which should have become a trilogy and
became only one part. If you compare it to that which he
finished brilliantly, like the second part of Faust or the
Elective
Affinities, one recognises his innermost nature.
Goethe could not “do” anything, he had always to
form that only to which he had advanced by the maturity of his
being, and if he did not attain this maturity, he left it, and
then he was not able to work on. Someone who creates
artistically only combining can work on. Someone who lets the
spirit create in himself like Goethe cannot advance sometimes
just if he is great as Goethe was. Where Goethe had to stop, he
was of particular interest for that who wants to penetrate into
his inner being. If one pursues something like the Elective
Affinities, one realises that that which lives in it
existed already in relatively early time, but not the
possibility to develop figures really that could embody this
riddle of nature and human being. Goethe left them, and thus he
handed over the Elective Affinities to a time when the
persons did no longer live who could still have understood it
because they had experienced the first youth impulses together
with him.
Thus, Goethe was close to spiritual science by this real
experience of the mental as it were, he was close to it by the
desire not to stop at the abstract thinking but to advance from
the thinking to reality, indeed, as a naturalist, but as a
naturalist who searched the spirit. Therefore, he was so glad
when during the twenties the psychologist
Heinroth (Johann Christian H., 1773-1843, German
anthropologist) said that Goethe had a concrete thinking.
Goethe understood this straight away that he did not have a
thinking that keeps on spinning a thread but that submerges in
the things.
However, the thinking submerges in the things, it does not find
abstract material atoms in them, but the spirit, as well as by
the beholding consideration of the soul life the everlasting
spirit of the human being is recognised. Therefore, Goethe's
view envisaged what reveals itself within the world of the
sensory as something spiritual. You can understand from those
indications that Goethe did not want to think about the
thinking because he only knew too well that one could only look
at the thinking. One can also understand well that Goethe did
not at all mean anything irreligious when he said that it is
antipathetic to him to speak of the things of another world.
Since he knew that these things of another world are in this
world, penetrate it perpetually, and that someone who does not
search these spiritual things and beings in nature who denies
them in nature does not want to recognise the spirit in the
phenomena of nature. Hence, Goethe did not want to look behind
the natural phenomena, but he wanted to search everywhere in
the natural phenomena. Hence, it was unpleasant to him to speak
of an “inside of nature.”
So
about many philosophical minded people look for the
“thing in itself.” They face the world of the outer
sensory perceptions; they recognise that they are only sensory
perceptions, reflections of reality. There they look for the
“things in themselves,” but not, while they
withdraw from the mirror and search in that which the spirit
can grasp as spirit, but while they smash the mirror to reach
for the world of the dead atoms from which one can never grasp
anything living.
This inside of nature was for Goethe completely beyond his
imagination. Hence, with his review on all efforts which he had
to do to penetrate into the spirituality of the natural
phenomena, that severe quotation which he did about the great
naturalist Haller who had become unpleasant to him because he
had said once: “No created mind penetrates into the being
of nature. Blissful is that to whom she shows her appearance
only!” Goethe did not at all want to speak about nature
this way. He answered to it:
“No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.”
O you Philistine!
Do not remind me
And my brothers and sisters
Of such a word.
We think: everywhere we are inside.
“Blissful is that to whom she shows
Her appearance only!”
I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,
I grumble about it, but covertly,
I say to myself thousand and thousand times:
She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;
Nature has neither kernel nor shell,
She is everything at the same time.
Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.
Goethe believes that someone who looks at nature as something
that is an outside of the spirit cannot penetrate into the
spirit of nature. While she shows her shell in her different
metamorphoses to the human being, it reveals the spirit to him
at the same time with her kernel. Spiritual science wants
nothing to be in this respect but a child of Goethe, I would
like to say. It wants to extend that which Goethe applied in
such fertile way to the world of the outer natural phenomena
also to the soul phenomena by which they immediately receive
active life and reveal the internal spiritual, that spiritual
which lives in the human being as his everlasting immortal
essence. We look closer at this in the following talks.
I
wanted to show this today. Not because one grasps Goethe in his
single statements, one can call him a father of spiritual
science — since in this way one could make him the father
of all possible worldviews —, but while one tries to
settle affectionately in that what appeared to him so fertile.
Then one does not repeat what he already said, but then
spiritual science appears rightly as a continuation of the
Goethean worldview. It seems to me that it is in its sense if
one ascends from the physical life to the spiritual life.
Goethe himself showed when he wanted to summarise his worldview
in his essay about Winckelmann
(Johann Joachim W., 1717-1768, German art historian and
archaeologist) the living together of the human being with the
whole universe as an interaction of spirits, while he said:
“If the healthy nature of the human being works as a
whole if he feels in the world as in a big nice and worthy
whole if the harmonious ease grants a pure, free delight to
him, then the universe would shout out and admire the summit of
its own being and becoming if it could feel itself because it
has attained its goal.” Thus, Goethe lively imagined the
essence of the human being together with the essence of nature
in interaction: nature, the world perceiving itself in the
human being, the human being recognising himself as
everlasting, but expressing his eternity in the temporality of
the outer world. Between world and human being, the world
spirit lives, grasping itself, knowing itself, even confirming
itself in the sense of Goethe.
Hence, those who have thought in the sense of Goethe were never
tempted to deny the spirit and to apply the Goethean worldview
to confirm a more or less materialistic worldview. No, those
who have understood Goethe have always thought that the human
being, while he faces the things of nature and lives among
them, lives at the same time in the spirituality into which he
enters if he dies. These human beings have thought in such a
way as for example Novalis
(1772-1801) did.
Novalis, the miraculous genius, who wanted to submerge in
nature in certain phases of his life in quite Goethean way,
knew himself immersed in the spiritual world. His many remarks
about the immediate present of the spirit in the sensory world
go back to the Goethean worldview. Hence, I am allowed, while
Goethe is put as it were as a father of a spiritual worldview,
to close with a remark, which Novalis did completely in the
Goethean sense that summarises that which I briefly outlined
today as Goethean worldview in a way:
“The spiritual world is also not closed to us here. It is
always manifest to us. If we can make our souls as elastic as
it is necessary, we are like spirits among spirits!”
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