The Rudolf Steiner Archive

21. Schiller’s Worldview and His Wallenstein

[ 1 ] One cannot speak of Schiller’s worldview in the same sense as one speaks of the philosophical worldviews of other people, for it is in a state of constant flux, of steady ascent. People of limited character find it easy to arrive at a worldview. Greater ones find it very difficult to bring themselves to do so. This is because a small personality is incapable of fathoming the great mysteries. For the greater one, every life experience presents a new mystery; it modifies, on a new foundation, the worldview, which must be reshaped. Goethe went through this process until the end of his life, and Schiller experienced it as well. Schiller, in particular, stated that he was essentially familiar only with a small sphere of his own development, but his mind was constantly working to deepen and harmonize his store of concepts and life experiences. The way Schiller conducted conversations is particularly characteristic. In this regard, he was the polar opposite of Herder, and this contrast sheds a certain light on Schiller.

[ 2 ] When Herder was in the company of people who were interested in the subject, he would expound his views; objections were rarely raised; his position was so firm and clear that he would not have wanted to take a question any further in a dialectical discussion. It was quite different with Schiller; with him, every conversation came alive: he took up every objection, every topic was broached, and in this way he led the conversation down all manner of side paths, with everything being examined from every angle. This is most beautifully expressed in the vitality that Schiller exuded in personal interaction—just as his views were in a constant state of flux. Here we see the same quest for truth that Lessing expressed in these words: “If God were standing before me, holding the full truth in one hand and the quest for truth in the other, I would ask him: Lord, give me the quest for truth, for the full truth is surely reserved for God alone.”

[ 3 ] Thus we see how Schiller, throughout all periods of his life, was engaged in a constant striving for a higher worldview; how, when he took up his professorship in Jena, he was compelled to bring his ideas to life; how he struggled to grasp the great forces at work in the world and to make them fruitful through his lively lectures.

[ 4 ] His shorter essays on the philosophy of history show us how he grappled with these ideas. In addition to the lecture already mentioned, “What Does Universal History Mean, and to What End Is It Studied?”—he attempted to characterize the significance of a lawgiver such as Moses. He then turns to the era of the Crusades; and there is perhaps nothing more beautiful or interesting than the way Schiller describes the property and feudal relationships of the Middle Ages. The great struggles for freedom in the Netherlands are analyzed in such a way that one can learn from them how historical development unfolds internally. Then comes the history of the Thirty Years’ War, in which he is captivated above all by the figure of Wallenstein, who reveals to him the man governed by the law of will within himself—firm in his character, yet afflicted by petty ambition, wavering in his goals, and, full of vague concepts, pondering astrology. Later, he attempted to unravel this figure through poetry. But first, Schiller sought to clarify his own thinking through philosophical studies of Kant’s works. Schiller did not approach Kantianism as a philosopher unprepared. There was something within him at that time that could only emerge through his engagement with Kant.

[ 5 ] One must grasp this aspect of Schiller’s nature deeply in order to truly understand his great personality. There is a series of letters, the “Philosophical Letters,” between Julius and Rafael: the philosophy he develops there is something innate to him. The worldview he has formed from the depths of his personality is embodied by the character named Julius, whereas we must conceive of Rafael as a man characterized, like his friend Körner, by a certain detachment—albeit not to such a profound degree. For in life, the lesser person often appears wiser and more superior than the one who strives higher and struggles. The striver, however, who here still lives unsatisfied amid disharmonies, outlines his worldview in The Theosophy of Julius roughly as follows: “Everything in the world originates from a spiritual primal source. Human beings, too, first emerged from this primal source; they are a convergence of all the forces of the world. He acts as an extract, as a unification of all that is spread out in nature. All existence apart from him is merely a hieroglyph of a force that is similar to him. In the image of the butterfly, which, rejuvenated from the caterpillar, rises into the air, we have an image of human immortality. Only if we could rise to the ideal that is implanted within us could we attain fulfillment.” He calls this worldview “Julius’s Theosophy.” The world is a thought of God; everything lives only in God’s infinite love; everything within me and outside of me is merely a hieroglyph of the supreme Being. Just as Goethe had expressed it in his prose hymn to nature—that man is placed by nature into the cycle of life without being asked or warned, that nature itself speaks and acts within him—so Schiller, in a certain sense, arrives at a similar standpoint in this “Theosophy of Julius.” But at first he feels unsatisfied: only a God, he believes, could view the world from such a standpoint. Can the human soul, so small and limited, truly live with such a vision of the world?

[ 6 ] From Kantianism, Schiller initially derived a new worldview that would remain with him until the mid-1890s. The mystery of the world had become for him the mystery of humanity; it was the problem of freedom that first occupied his mind. The question arose in his mind: How can human beings attain perfection?

[ 7 ] Schiller’s worldview is presented to us in its purest and most beautiful form here in the “Aesthetic Letters”: On the one hand, human beings are subject to their base nature and their instincts; nature here is necessity in the sensory phenomena that assail them. On the other hand, spiritual necessity lies in human thought; there is logic, to which he must submit. He is a slave to natural necessity and, at the same time, a slave to rational necessity. Kant responds to this contradiction by downplaying natural necessity in favor of intellectual necessity. Schiller grasped the gulf between natural and rational necessity in all its depth. He saw here a problem that extends across all human relationships. The laws that govern human beings are derived in part from natural necessity—from the dynamic forces at work within them—and in part from the moral order they carry within themselves. Disharmony and oppression must result from this. Thus we have the dynamic state and the moral state; both operate as an iron necessity.

[ 8 ] Only that person can call himself free who has made the iron laws of reason and logic his own to such an extent that he follows them without compulsion, who has purified his moral sensibility to such a degree that he cannot help but will what is pure, because his inclinations have been elevated to the level of spiritual life. The person who has brought the laws of reason down into the drives and inclinations of the soul, and raised human passions up to the recognition of the moral order, will master the dynamic laws in such a way that harmony arises between his drives and reason. Schiller calls the state of mind in which a person finds himself—one who has thus purified his instincts—the aesthetic state of mind, and the society in which such people act, the aesthetic society. Man must realize what appears to him as his highest dignity.

[ 9 ] In Julius’s theosophy, Schiller had established an ideal worldview. Schiller demands that people and human society be educated toward this ideal. Schiller holds people accountable for their development.

[ 10 ] This is expressed in the poem “The Walk.” To him, the harmony of the world does not appear as something that has already been achieved, but rather as a goal of development. The eternal harmony of nature appears beautiful to him, but as something that human beings, too, should strive for within themselves. It must become humanity’s ideal to bring about a state in which people live in such harmony as nature exemplifies for us. What Schiller had previously sought as the substance of knowledge now became for him a moral and aesthetic ideal. Now, under Goethe’s influence, he became a poet once more: he believed this was the best way to show how the human spirit is in the process of development, how the various forces within it interact, and how it strives from the depths to the heights.

[ 11 ] In Wallenstein, he presented his very own problem in a profoundly significant way through poetry. It became difficult for him to portray human nature—more difficult than it is for those of lesser stature. Schiller did not create his characters from abstract ideas and then, as it were, seek the flesh to clothe his skeletal framework of thought, as has often been claimed. That was not the case with his characters, and it was certainly not the case with Wallenstein. Schiller proceeded from what he called an “inner musical mood,” not from ideas. As it were, the stream of forces entangled within the human being poured into his inner being in melodies, resolving into harmony or sinking into disharmony. Then he sought out the thoughts, the characters, and the individual moods. Thus, the contrasting forces of Wallenstein’s soul stood before his eyes, forces that inevitably lead him to a great catastrophe. — Unfortunately, this mood can be conveyed only through intellectual means. — There is a self-contained personality that meets a tragic end. But it is tragic in the true sense only when it fails because of itself. What Hebbel demands as a necessary prerequisite for the tragic—namely, “that it had to come to this,” that nothing can be tragic that could also have been done differently—how intuitively Schiller has grasped this view, even though he does not yet articulate it!

[ 12 ] But Schiller is also influenced by another tragic idea that cannot be resolved, one that finds its expression above all in the character of Wallenstein himself. It is the awareness that something higher intervenes in human life—something that cannot be resolved within this framework. Only at the end of the world, when humanity has attained perfection, will human vision be able to survey its destiny in its entirety. Until then, there will always be errors—something insoluble, for which Wallenstein seeks a solution in the stars, something imponderable within his own heart. Convinced that his fate is firmly predetermined, Wallenstein believes he can read his destiny in the stars and must now witness how Octavio betrays him, contrary to the stars’ oracle. Yet human freedom remains supreme; an inner necessity compels him to seek the solution in the stars: he faces a new enigma—the stars have lied to him. But no, the stars cannot lie: The person who violates the most sacred laws of feeling and the heart disrupts the harmony of the stars. There can be no order in nature that contradicts the laws of the human spirit. Anyone who views Wallenstein’s character in this way will see Schiller’s own person shining through the character of Wallenstein in a profound sense.

[ 13 ] Schiller wanted to look the contradiction of the world squarely in the eye and show how one can live with this contradiction. There must be a truth in the world, he tells himself, and he sought this truth, just as he does in The Letter of Julius. The contradiction lies in individual phenomena. Here, Schiller comes to recognize what the ancient Indians and other sages recognized as illusion. He wanted to live in the truth, and he regarded art as a gateway through which humanity must pass to reach the dawn of beauty and freedom. In the poem “The Artists,” he directly calls upon artists to take their place on the world stage and to help bring the ideal to fruition. Thus he cries out to them: “The dignity of humanity is entrusted to your hands. Preserve it!”