The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. The Arena of Thought as a Result of German Idealism

[ 1 ] In this time of tremendous struggle for its very existence, in which the German people find themselves, perhaps a spiritual gaze may also be cast—from the perspective, that is, from the sensibility of a spiritual-scientific worldview—upon what rests within the German soul, within the German spirit, as the content of the most sacred and highest spiritual task of this soul, of this spirit. I do not, however, believe that I am dealing here with something that lies entirely outside the perspective of spiritual science proper, for it will become clear from the various observations I have been able to make here over the years just how closely I must regard the spiritual-scientific worldview as connected to that which the German spirit—that which the German national soul—strives for and has always strived for, arising from its very essence and innermost nature. And so, while tomorrow’s lecture will indeed be directed, in accordance with my feelings, toward what moves us so deeply in our present time, it will, in a narrower sense, be devoted once again to a purely spiritual-scientific topic—today’s lecture is intended more as a reflection on what has been conceived as connected to the entire distinctive character of German national development by all those who have given deep thought to this distinctive character and to its role in the overall development of the German spirit. It is, I believe, not the German way to imitate the methods commonly employed today by the enemies of the German people—those methods born of hatred, anger, or the compulsion to justify, in some way, a course of action for which one is not yet willing to seek the actual reasons, and perhaps cannot even seek them directly in the present. So let the starting point not be taken from something that might press upon us to characterize German idealism from the immediate present, but let it be taken from a thought of a German figure who, in relatively peaceful times, recalling great and significant experiences with one of the greatest German minds, once sought to reflect on the German essence. Let the starting point be taken from the words that Wilhelm von Humboldt inserted in 1830—when he wrote down his reflections on Schiller—into this very reflection on the German essence, — from those words in which Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the finest Germans, sought to characterize how the German spirit, when it acts intellectually, exerts its influence in all spheres of human activity from the very center of the human soul and the human spirit, from the deepest innermost core of the human soul and the human spirit. wished to; how the German spirit cannot conceive of human beings as fragmented in its spiritual connection with poetry, philosophy, and science, but rather how the German spirit seeks to grasp human beings in their wholeness and, by synthesizing all the forces that find expression in the great minds of the past century, constantly seeks to reveal what, in the totality of human being, moves the soul in its innermost depths. It was from this spirit that Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller’s great friend, sought to characterize the German spirit in 1830. He said:

[ 2 ] “No modern nation has succeeded to the same degree as the German in viewing art and all aesthetic activity from their true perspective—not even those nations of which the poet boasts that they will recognize the great and outstanding figures of all ages. The deeper and truer orientation of the German people lies in their greater inwardness, which brings them closer to the truth of nature; in their inclination toward engagement with ideas and the feelings associated with them; and in everything connected with this. In this, they differ from most modern nations and—to define the concept of inwardness more precisely—also from the Greeks. It seeks poetry and philosophy; it does not wish to separate them, but strives to unite them; and as long as this striving for philosophy—which even among us is not infrequently misunderstood and misinterpreted in its indispensable work—lives on in the nation, the impulse that powerful minds unmistakably imparted in the latter half of the previous century will also endure and gain new strength. Poetry and philosophy, by their very nature, stand at the center of all intellectual endeavors; only they can unite all individual results within themselves; only from them can unity and enthusiasm flow simultaneously into every particular; only they truly represent what man is, since all other sciences and skills—if they could be completely separated from them—would merely show what he possesses and has acquired. Without this focal point, which both illuminates and sparks inspiration, even the most extensive knowledge remains too fragmented, and its impact on the ennoblement of the individual, the nation, and humanity—which is, after all, the sole purpose of all inquiry into nature and humanity and the still-unexplained connection between the two—is hindered and rendered powerless.”

[ 3 ] Such minds have always sought to fathom what it means to be German by immersing themselves in the very core of the German essence, and they never wished to fall into the error of exalting the German essence at the expense of other essences. If one now wishes to identify a characteristic feature—particularly in relation to the spiritual development of humanity and in connection with words such as those just cited—one finds it in what is called idealism; a term that, taken literally, can really only be understood within the German worldview. This is not to claim that idealism is something that exists only within the German people; that would, of course, be a ridiculous assertion. Human nature everywhere strives from the external sensory life into the realm of ideals, and by no one more strongly than by the most German of Germans has this universal trait of idealism been emphasized. But it is quite another matter when one comes to understand that, within German development, idealism is connected not only to the individual’s personal striving—to that by which the individual distinguishes himself from the body of the people—but when one sees that idealism is something connected to the innermost nature and essence of German national character itself, and one comes to understand that German idealism blossoms from German national character itself. Let us offer a few reflections on this today, and furthermore on the fact that, in a quite unique way, this very German idealism has elevated the German worldview to the realm of thought—a realm about which one can rightly say what many of the finest Germans expressed as their conviction: that life in the realm of thought in this manner is thoroughly a German characteristic.

[ 4 ] Just how little one needs to belittle others when discussing this German peculiarity is confirmed in this very analysis by the fact that we shall now take as our starting point a comparison of German sensibility and German creativity with other sensibilities and other forms of creativity in a field where, from a certain point of view, absolute priority might even be given to foreign sensibility and foreign creativity.

[ 5 ] I would like to begin with a painting—a painting that evokes mixed feelings. Imagine standing before the painting—which everyone is familiar with, at least in reproduction—that Michelangelo created in the Sistine Chapel, — the painting of “The Last Judgment”—and compare the experience one might have standing before this painting with that of viewing the painting “The Last Judgment” by the German artist Cornelius in Munich’s Ludwigs Church. When you stand before Michelangelo’s painting, you have the impression of being confronted with a vast, overwhelming sense of humanity’s enigma in its entirety, and as you gaze at the painting, you completely forget yourself. You become absorbed in every detail of this painting; you feel yourself merging with every line, every color scheme; and as you walk away from it, you are left with the feeling, the desire, to be able to stand before this painting again and again. The impression one takes away is this: you can only truly experience this painting if, forgetting yourself, you recreate all its details in your imagination through your senses, so that the forms and colors come alive before you.

[ 6 ] And if one then imagines the relationship of the human soul to the painting that Cornelius created here for the Munich church: One will not receive that dazzling impression of form; one may not feel the spiritual drawn into the eye in the same way, nor the eyes, with their activity, resting in what the painter has created; but one will nonetheless feel, in the quiet stillness of the soul, transported before the painting into the sacred realms of an artistic imagination; one will have an experience that does not merge in the same way with what one sees as in the case of Michelangelo’s painting, but which lives in the soul like a second spiritual experience alongside what the eyes behold, —stirring all the deepest and highest feelings through which human beings are connected to the course of the world. And much of what cannot become visible in the painting surges forth from the depths of the soul, and a wealth of thoughts connects us to those impulses from which the artist created—impulses that come alive through what he has created, yet which may not lie directly within his painting. And one walks away from the painting, taking with one little of the longing to keep bringing this image to mind again and again—by raising its sensuality into the imagination—just as it is painted on the surface; but one feels, through the painting, one’s soul placed in a living connection with the workings of the world spirit; one feels: this picture was not created solely by a dominant artistic imagination; but that which a human being can experience on the stage of thought has also contributed to it—if one is able to enter this stage of thought in such a way that one feels and experiences what connects the soul to the mysteries of the world, what connects the soul to the beginning and end of all becoming—of the sensible and the moral, of the sensible and world events. One must enter the realm of thought through Cornelius’s painting, and this is because Cornelius—who is one of the most quintessentially German painters—had to paint in a German manner in accordance with his entire disposition and very nature; that is to say, he could not help but enter the realm of thought even in his art. As I said, from a purely artistic standpoint, one might place Cornelius’s painting far, far below that of Michelangelo. That is not the point; rather, the point is that every nation has its task in the course of world history, and that even in art—when it is so closely connected to the German national spirit, as was the case with Cornelius—even art itself rises to the realm of thought.

[ 7 ] Let us move from this image to another—one that might also illustrate how one of the most German of Germans, from the realm of thought, responds to the influences of the world around him.

[ 8 ] Let us follow Goethe as he stood before Strasbourg Cathedral. We know from Goethe’s own biography how he felt an infinite deepening of his soul as he stood before Strasbourg Cathedral. What did he feel at that moment? Goethe’s German worldview, one might say, confronted—precisely in the sight of Strasbourg Cathedral—in a natural, elemental way the manner in which the French worldview appeared to Goethe at that time—a worldview whose value for general development he, Goethe, certainly least of all wished to diminish. A whole wealth of historical impulses played a part in what Goethe felt in his soul at that time as he gazed upon Strasbourg Cathedral—at the very place where the German spirit had to fight so hard against the French spirit, at the very site where German blood must once again be shed today to defend the German spirit against the French spirit. The following reflection may perhaps illustrate which historical impulses were unconsciously at work within Goethe at that time.

[ 9 ] When, in recent centuries, the newer nations— one might say, emerged from the twilight of humanity’s intellectual development to unfold what has given these very peoples their present character—it is at this time that we find a French spirit that truly shows us what innermost impulse lives in the French worldview, insofar as it now arises not from the individual but from the individuality of the people; I mean Descartes, whose influence spanned the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing from the French spirit, Descartes likewise elevates humanity to the stage of thought. As a solitary thinker, emerging entirely from what the education of his people and his time could offer him, Descartes stands there at the dawn of modern intellectual development with the question: How does one attain certainty regarding the true grounds of being? What is truly true within that which, in the flow of phenomena, presents itself to human eyes and the soul? After all, the French spirit from which Descartes emerged had, shortly before, produced one of the greatest and most significant skeptics, Montaigne, who made doubt the very essence of healthy, true human feeling. Only a soul, he argues, upon which doubt pours out, is a wise soul—a soul that says to itself: The revelations of the external world of space and time appear to my senses; yet who dares to say that the senses do not deceive? Within me, emerging from this inner self, appear thoughts that seek to prove themselves. Yet, Montaigne says, if one looks more closely, every proof gives rise to the necessity of finding a new proof. There is no source of truth, neither outside nor within. Unwise is the one who believes unconditionally in any truth. Only the one who approaches everything with doubt is wise, for doubt alone is appropriate to what can emerge as the relationship of the thinking and observing human being to the world.

[ 10 ] And it was from this doubt—as an intense advocate for attaining certainty of truth—that Descartes developed his philosophy. He began with doubt. Everything may be doubted: when this sea of doubt pours forth, is there nowhere a point to which one can cling? — he asks. In the vast sea of doubt in which the soul initially swims, he found only one thing: the certainty of one’s own thinking; for this we perform ourselves; we can always conjure it up. Therefore, we can believe in thought; we exist only insofar as we think. Thus, in his own way, Descartes elevated humanity to the arena of thought. But this is the peculiar thing—and truly, without intending to offer a one-sided, disparaging critique — this is the peculiarly French aspect of Descartes’ worldview: that Descartes experiences within his own soul everything that this certainty of one’s own thinking can provide, that he seeks to demonstrate within the soul everything the soul can derive from the certainty of one’s own thinking, and how the soul itself finds its way to God through thinking. But from this point of certainty of his, Descartes cannot reach what reigns as truth in the nature that surrounds human beings. He does indeed elevate humanity to the realm of thought; but he confines the realm of thought within the limits of inner experience. And it is characteristic—very characteristic—that Descartes, in his endeavor to explore everything that thought can discover, becomes entangled with this thought within the purely human inner being; he cannot escape from this inner being and, starting from the soul, finds no path to that which lives and breathes in nature. Even animals, as paradoxical as it may seem to people today, are for Descartes merely walking machines. A soul can be attributed only to that which thinks; but thinking cannot extend beyond the soul, cannot penetrate into what lives and breathes in nature. Animals are mechanisms, as are plants; everything is nothing more than a clockwork mechanism, because the soul is entangled within itself.

[ 11 ] But this had consequences; it led to France, in more recent times, becoming the classic home of the purely materialistic worldview that had taken hold by the time Goethe felt himself drawn into it. At that time, the French worldview was dominated by an inability to see anything other than mechanism in the things in the world that uplift and delight us. Thus arose that materialistic worldview that so thoroughly permeates and underlies Voltaire’s outlook; that materialistic worldview that Goethe had opposed and of which he says: If only it, despite being so barren and desolate, would at least make an attempt to explain, from the moving atoms, anything that the human eye perceives. But not even an attempt has been made. In place of the all-powerful nature, a dry, barren, mechanical fabric is posited. That was Goethe’s feeling. That was the sentiment that took root in his soul as he allowed the worldview—which had emerged so characteristically from the French popular sensibility of the time—to take effect upon him, and he had allowed it, in a sense unconsciously, to weigh upon his soul when, with his spiritual sensibility rooted entirely in the Germanic essence, he directed his gaze toward the skyward-reaching spire of Strasbourg Cathedral and sensed within his soul the human spirit reigning in external, spatial forms—a spirit striving out of space into the spaceless, timeless realm of the spiritual and soulful. One might say: at Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe’s living worldview of Germanic culture stood in contrast to the mechanical worldview that pressed against him from the background, weighing on his soul as the then-newest form of French materialism. And yet, at that time, we see—precisely within German development—souls surging forth from the deepest, innermost core of the German essence, emerging from the contemplation of nature and the contemplation of humanity, as we shall characterize it shortly—surging onto the stage of thought; but not onto the stage of thought in such a way that it would become so restricted for the human soul that it could no longer find its way out into the great, vast reality of nature, but rather in such a way that the soul feels the living possibility of immersing itself of its own accord into everything that creates, lives, acts, and is in nature.

[ 12 ] Two spirits within German development should be highlighted, which, particularly at that time, reveal what the German character is truly like at its very core in relation to the search for a worldview: — one of these spirits, who, as an external personality, throws himself into the quest for a worldview, and another, who does not actually stand as an external personality, but is instead created solely as an ideal figure arising from the German spirit. One is named Kant. Let us try to imagine Kant, specifically during the period from which this image—conceived in connection with Goethe—shines forth from German development. What was he fundamentally engaged in? It is so easy to say that around 1780—roughly the time when Goethe had that insight, and when Kant’s *Critique of Pure Reason* was also published—Kant was attempting to cast doubt on human knowledge regarding any true reality. In truth: anyone who delves into the very core of Kant’s endeavor will find in him precisely the opposite of what constitutes the innermost nature of Descartes’s endeavor. Kant does not set out to cut off the human soul from the innermost source of worldly existence and the world spirit. Kant merely stands before the world, asking himself: By what means do we seek to penetrate the mysteries of the world? — Through what human beings develop in their sensory perception of the world. Kant believes, however, that in this way human beings cannot penetrate to where the true sources of being lie. That is why Kant does not combat knowledge; rather, by seemingly combating knowledge, he is in fact, at the core, combating doubt. To divert the human soul’s doubt away from what must be of paramount value to that soul, Kant seeks access to the sources through a means other than that which can be attained by ordinary knowledge. That is why the following words come from the depths of Kant’s soul: He had to dethrone knowledge in order to make room for faith. But for him, faith is the inflow into the human soul of the intellectual world of the spirit, of ideas and ideals that come from the divine. And so that these may live within the human soul—so that they are not disturbed by external knowledge, so that the human soul may possess an inner certainty—Kant dethrones external knowledge, attributing to it only the possibility of arriving at a revelation, not at true reality. And Kant went to great lengths, we might say, to establish the validity of ideas and ideals for the human soul. Before he embarked on his Critique of Reason, he engaged with the spiritualist Swedenborg. What had dawned on Swedenborg as a spiritual vision of what lies beyond the sensory world, Kant examined—with the intention of gaining insight into whether there is another path through the gates of nature to the sources of nature and spiritual existence besides the one that external intellectual knowledge is capable of conquering. And from his examination of the spiritual visionary Swedenborg, Kant arrived at what he had envisioned as his goal: to open up the realm of thought to ideas and ideals by dethroning the kind of knowledge that can deal only with the external world of appearances.

[ 13 ] This Kantian aspiration now appears, I would say, to be deepened and individualized in an ideal figure—the very ideal figure that many people rightly consider to be among the greatest poetic and artistic creations of human existence to date—in the form of Goethe’s Faust. And as we contemplate Goethe’s Faust, just as Goethe presents him to us, we immediately see the path of German idealism leading to the realm of thought. How, then, does this Goethean Faust actually appear before us? — Certainly, it is well known how forcefully Goethe has his Faust strive toward the sources of existence, and today it seems almost superfluous to say anything more about Goethe’s Faust. But it may be worth recalling that two aspects of human spiritual life are inextricably linked to Goethe’s Faust, aspects that reveal in a very special way a form of human spiritual life which, upon closer examination, emerges—just as it appears there—from the immediate character of the German spirit. What, then, are these two traits—whatever one’s personal stance on them may be—that are inseparably linked to Goethe’s *Faust*? One might, so to speak, scoff at these two traits if one views them in isolation from this work of literature, from the standpoint of a materialistic worldview that holds itself in particularly high regard. But these two traits are so deeply intertwined with Goethe’s worldview and with what Goethe perceived as the German worldview that, despite the often trivial manner in which a materialistic worldview disparages these two traits, one must nevertheless regard them as directly connected to what Goethe perceived as the very core of the impulse toward a worldview. The first is the way Faust approaches the pursuit of knowledge of nature, and connected to this is the fact that Faust, after feeling unsatisfied with all external sensory and intellectual knowledge, turns to what is called magic. Let us set aside the superstitious notions commonly associated with this word. How does this magical quest present itself to us? — It presents itself to us in such a way that we can say: Faust confronts nature in such a way that he feels: With what a human being can immediately experience as a sensory impression, and with what can be attained intellectually on the basis of that sensory impression, Faust feels he is done. But he also feels excluded from the mysteries of nature; he feels the necessity to develop something that is not present in the human being who merely places himself directly within the world, but rather something that must first be developed from the very depths of nature. The human being must be expanded in such a way that something sprouts within him that, from within, creates living links into living nature itself: an expansion of the human being beyond what is found when one surveys what the senses provide and what lives in the thinking to which Descartes directed humanity; to make this human nature more alive than it is placed within nature through its own immediate creative power. Thus, what the senses offer is, for Faust, as it were, merely a bark that appears to be drawn over the true essence of nature. This bark must be penetrated, and beneath this bark there must be something within nature that acts and lives in a soul-spiritual way, just as the soul-spiritual acts and lives within human beings themselves. Thus Faust stands as a living protest against what Descartes describes as the arena of thought, and in seeking the spirit that “surges up and down in torrents of life,” shapes everything, acts everywhere, and lives everywhere—by seeking “all active power and seed”—he is the very antithesis of that Cartesian worldview which, quite consistently of its own accord and entirely out of its folk tradition, looks into nature and thereby, through its folk-like character, de-vitalizes nature, de-souls it, and reduces it to a mechanism. That which could never be found by following Descartes’ path constitutes, for Faust at a certain point in his life, the immediate starting point. And directly connected to this trait—which we might call magical, in that it does not seek concepts, ideas, or thoughts in nature, but rather, through nature, that which lives and acts within it, just as the soul lives and acts within us—is another element in the Faust epic that, when considered in isolation from the work itself, is equally open to ridicule. Directly connected to this is something that can be described as a particular inclination of the human soul toward evil, which confronts us in the form of Mephisto in the *Faust* epic. This evil in the *Faust* cycle is not merely something that enters the human worldview in a conceptual sense, something regarded as a mere law—such as a law of nature—but rather, in the *Faust* cycle, this evil is not presented in the usual anthropomorphic manner; instead, in the way it consciously emerges from human struggles, — this evil is personified, made into a being that dramatically confronts humanity. Just as, on the one hand, Faust strives beyond what the senses and reason provide, just as he seeks to pierce through the bark to find the living, so must he break through what appears as mere moral lawfulness, piercing through to what is experienced in living spirituality behind the surface of soul experiences—as a personality, as a being. Just as Faust, on the one hand, strives—in relation to nature—toward the living reality beyond the sensory world, so, on the other hand, he strives for a relationship between the human soul and evil that now also penetrates—I would say—the shell that rises above the deeper soul to the level of the everyday soul. In both directions, Faust seeks a way out of what, for example, Descartes and his worldview have confined the human soul to: out into nature, and into the spiritual depths of the soul.

[ 14 ] And the fact that this quest for a relationship with evil—not a conceptual or ideal one, but one experienced in a concrete way—is deeply rooted in the spiritual development of the German spirit, can be seen from the fact that Schelling, a German philosopher greatly inspired by Goethe, dealt in depth with the question of the origin of human evil in his 1809 treatise *Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom and Related Subjects*; in doing so, he poses the question: To what extent is that which appears in our world as evil actually compatible with the wise divine governance of the world and divine goodness? — he arrives at the answer: To recognize evil, one must not merely proceed to the foundations of existence, but must proceed to what Schelling, in accord with other thinkers of his time, called the “unfoundations of existence.” Thus the power of evil came to life, so vividly within the German worldview, that the tragic struggle of the human soul with evil could be understood—in all its vitality—not merely through abstract concepts. And when we combine what Goethe embodied in his *Faust*—arising from German sensibility—with what Goethe occasionally expressed when he sought to characterize the course of his own spirit, we are repeatedly and time and again referred back to that marvelous prose hymn to nature that Goethe composed in the 1880s:

“Nature—we are surrounded and embraced by her.... Uninvited and without warning, she draws us into the cycle of her dance”;

[ 15 ] then the wonderful words in it:

“She has thought and continues to ponder; but not as a
human being, but as Nature.” —

[ 16 ] In other words, Goethe is well aware that spinning a mechanical web of concepts about nature does not lead to an understanding of nature. Only such a deeper search within the existence of nature creates knowledge of nature, through which the human soul finds, in the depths of this natural existence, that which is akin to what it is capable of seeking in the depths of its own being when it delves into them. —

[ 17 ] We may now ask: Is such a striving—as we can see it embodied in Kant, or in the ideal figure of Goethe’s Faust—is this striving an isolated, merely individual one, or does it have anything to do with the collective striving of the German national spirit, the German national soul? Even when one considers Kant, the abstract philosopher who scarcely ventured more than a few miles beyond Königsberg and spent his entire life immersed in abstract thought, one can see clearly and distinctly—precisely in the way he works his way from his earlier worldview to his later one—everywhere, how, despite his seclusion, he developed out of all that in the German national spirit strives for certainty, and how, by virtue of this national spirit, he did not actually end up restricting the human soul to the realm of merely human thought, but was raised to a horizon on which the full scope of ideas and ideals appeared to him—ideas and ideals that provide impulses to human beings in the course of their human development.

[ 18 ] One might say: what later found expression in Fichte—the most “German” of German philosophers—was already present in Kant; what became so dear to the German worldview, particularly from the eighteenth century onward, was already present in Kant. This German worldview came to value a way of viewing the world that need not be led astray by what presents itself to the senses, in order to uphold the absolute validity of what constitutes duty, love, divine devotion, and the moral world for human beings, As man surveys the world and reflects on the way he is situated within it, he certainly finds himself surrounded by the field of sensory impressions and by what he can intuit beyond them; but he also finds himself situated in such a way that, in the strictest sense, he cannot conceive of the value of the world without this second aspect of the world; he finds himself situated in such a way that, behind him, the divine ideals—which become his duty and action—work their way into his soul, and these ideals do not bear the coarse, sensual character that the world of external movement and external revelation possesses. One might say: As the German spirit looks upon the—figuratively speaking—rigidity and smoothness of natural existence, upon the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, so it feels the necessity to realize: How can one find a place within what is so indifferent in nature—that which appears in ideals as a demand, as a duty, as a moral life—how can that which appears as the highest value of life, as a moral ideal, find a place there? How does the reality of moral ideals stand in relation to the reality of external nature? — This is a question one can perceive casually, yet one can also find it heart-wrenching in its immense depth. And this is how the greatest German minds perceived it during the time when Kant’s worldview was taking shape. Sensibility thus had to be conceived in such a way that it posed no obstacle to allowing the moral world to flow into the world through human beings. Morality could not be a reality that stands indifferently, causing moral ideas to bounce off it. As moral ideas from the spiritual world are transformed into action through human beings, they must not bounce off the rigid, materialistic surf of the sensory world. One must grasp this as a profound insight; then one understands why Kant sought to dethrone ordinary knowledge so that a real foundation could be conceived for the moral idea; then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical phrase—which nonetheless sprang from a deep German aspiration: All sensibility—everything we can perceive and experience externally and think about the external world—is merely the sensed material of our duty. The true world is the world of the reigning Spirit, which expresses itself as human beings perceive it in ideas and ideals; and these are the true reality—they are what pulses through the world like a current, needing only something upon which they can act and manifest themselves. For Fichte, sensibility has no independent existence; rather, it is the sensed material for the fulfillment of human duty.

[ 19 ] Such words sprang from a worldview that seeks validity for the spirit in all things—a validity that must be sought—and from a natural inclination toward idealism; and while one might find such words one-sided, —that is not the point; the point is not to turn such words into dogma. But to take them as symptoms of an aspiration that lives within a people—that is what is significant; and to recognize that such minds, who create in the spirit of such words, elevate German identity to the stage of thought precisely out of the idealistic character of the German national spirit. To give thought its vitality, human cognition and striving must extend beyond what Descartes could merely discover. And Goethe’s *Faust*, this image of the highest human striving—this image, which one must first bring oneself to understand by allowing many elements of German culture to take effect upon oneself—from what did it emerge? — It was truly not conceived, nor did it come into being in such a way that a single individual created it from within himself; rather, it emerged from legend, from the poetry of the people themselves. Faust lived among the people, and Goethe was even familiar with the “Puppet Play of Dr. Faust”; and in this simple folk figure, he already saw the traits that he merely elevated to the realm of thought. Nothing illustrates more clearly than Goethe’s *Faust* how something sublime has emerged from what lives most deeply, most elementally, and most intimately within the simple folk spirit. One might say: it was not Goethe and his nature alone that created “Faust,” but rather Goethe brought “Faust” forth like a seed that lay within the German national organism, and imbued it with his essence, embodying it in such a way that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the German spirit’s highest aspiration toward the realm of thought. It is not the striving of isolated individuals arising from their own individuality, but precisely when it confronts us in all its grandeur, emerging from the entire national character, that it is the result of German idealism.

[ 20 ] And how does thought function within this German idealism? — One gains an understanding of how it functions precisely by comparing this German-idealistic pursuit of thought with what is also a pursuit of thought—let us say, for example, in Descartes. In Descartes, thought confines human beings within the narrowest of limits; it functions as mere thought and, as such, remains confined to the world in which human beings live directly through their senses and their reason. Within German idealism, the personality does not merely encounter thought as it enters the soul; rather, thought becomes a reflection of that which is alive outside the soul—that which surges and weaves through the universe, that which is spiritual beyond the human being, that which lies above and below the human spirit, of which nature is the outer manifestation and the life of the soul the inner manifestation. Thus, the thought becomes an image of the Spirit itself; and as the German rises to the level of thought, he seeks to rise through thought to the living, active Spirit; he seeks to penetrate that world which lives behind the veil of nature in such a way that, as he pierces this veil, he not only brings something to mind but penetrates with his own life into a life that is akin to his own. And again, because human beings are not satisfied with what they can experience in their souls, they seek to penetrate what lies beyond thinking, feeling, and willing—for which these three are outer shells, and for which even thought is merely an inner revelation—into which human beings live and act, in which they know themselves to be within a living entity that creates within them the stage for thoughts. And so we can see how, precisely in those times when the German spirit, seemingly so detached from external reality and external experience, strove for a worldview, this German spirit felt itself to be fully active and weaving within the arena of thought. And first among them is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who regards external nature merely as an external impetus toward what he actually seeks—for whom, as I said, the entire external sensory world has become nothing more than the sensed material of our duty; who wishes to immerse himself solely in that which can emerge in a conceptual manner from the depths of the world and present itself directly before the human soul. This is the essence of his worldview: for him, only that which emerges in a conceptual manner from the deepest recesses of the soul and reveals itself as originating from the deepest foundations of the world holds any validity.

[ 21 ] For his successor Schelling, the urge toward nature—the Faustian urge—becomes so vivid within him that the understanding of nature, which can express itself only in concepts about nature, counts for nothing. Only when the human soul comes to regard all of nature as the physiognomy of man, only when one regards nature in such a way that nature is the physiognomy of the spirit reigning behind it, does one live in true knowledge of nature; but then, by penetrating through the bark, one feels oneself to be creating within nature. And again, paradoxical though it may seem, yet in keeping with the essence of German culture, is a statement made by Schelling: “To know nature is, in fact, to create nature!” Certainly, this is at first a one-sided statement; yet it is a statement that represents a one-sidedness which need not remain so; rather, when properly understood, this creative understanding of nature will lead the spirit to reflect inwardly on the fact that it can awaken powers slumbering within itself, powers that penetrate to the spiritual sources of nature. The source, the seed of what true spiritual science can be—we can find it precisely within this worldview of German idealism!

[ 22 ] In the case of the third of the German idealist philosophers—Hegel, who is so difficult to understand and so distant from many—this vivid character of the “stage of thought” within German idealism appears in the same way. This worldview certainly strikes us as strange in our present age, when the abstract is so frowned upon and the mere thought is so little cherished. And yet Hegel feels deeply connected to Goethe’s orientation toward the spirit. The content of his worldview—what is it, after all, other than mere thinking, a progression from one thought to the next? A “thought-organism” is presented to us along with its worldview; this creates the necessity for us to confront this mere thought-organism—which we can only create ourselves—in the same way we confront another organism through the senses. But behind this presentation of a thought-organism lies a consciousness, a certain mindset. This is the mindset that, when a person strips away from his worldview all sensory sensation, all sensory perception for a few moments of world-viewing—when he strips away everything he wants and feels as an individual, when he surrenders to what is at work in Being, as if thought were taking one step after another on its own— — that the human being then sinks into a world that is a thinking world, but no longer his own thinking world, so that he no longer says to this world: I think, therefore I am! — but rather: The spirit of the world thinks within me, and I surrender myself as a stage for the spirit of the world, so that in what I, as a soul, offer to the all-ruling spirit of the world, this spirit may develop its thoughts step by step and show me how it lays its thoughts as the foundation for the becoming of the world. And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience in the soul, entirely and completely, only that which this soul can experience when it surrenders itself—by renouncing all of its own being—to the thinking that thinks itself within it. One must also view this Hegelian philosophy, this highly idealistic... Excerpt from the German spirit—in such a way that one does not regard it as a dogma one can or cannot swear by, but rather as something that can stand before us like a symptom of German striving during a certain period. In Hegel’s worldview, the World Spirit appears, as it were, as a mere thinker; but just as it is true that much, much more than thought alone was indeed necessary for the shaping of the world, so it is true that the path that once led to to seek logic in this way is one of those that awaken in human beings a sensibility for the living force that governs existence and that lead them not to the realm of abstract, intellectual thought, but to that of living thought, which experiences the world through the experience of thought.

[ 23 ] The three idealists—Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—sought to elevate the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different ways: Fichte by attempting to shed light on the deepest recesses of the human self, rather than saying, as Descartes did, “I think, therefore I am!” For if Fichte had only been able to arrive at Descartes’s thought, he would have said: “There I encounter within myself a rigid being, a being toward which I must turn my gaze. But that is not an ‘I.’ I am an ‘I’ only if I can secure my own existence myself at any time.” I cannot arrive at my “I” through an act of thought, not through mere thinking, but through an act of action. This is a ceaselessly creative process. It does not depend on looking at its own being; it leaves behind its previous being; but because it has the power to recreate itself in the next moment, out of the act itself, it arises anew constantly. Fichte grasps the idea not in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the very stage of thought itself, where it creates vividly and lives creatively. And Schelling—he attempts to understand nature, and with a truly German spirit he immerses himself in the mysteries of nature, even if, of course, one can dismiss his statements as fanciful if one takes them as dogma. But he immerses himself with his deepest being in the processes of nature, so that he does not merely feel himself to be a passive observer of nature—a being who merely looks at nature—but rather a being who immerses himself in the plant and creates alongside the plant in order to understand the plant’s creative process. He seeks to rise from created nature to creative nature. He seeks to become as intimate with creative nature as with a human being with whom one is friends. This is a quintessentially German trait in Schelling’s nature. Goethe sought, from his own perspective, to approach nature in a similar way—as his Faust truly expresses it, as if to the “bosom of a friend.” To illustrate just how distant any abstract observer is from a contemplation of nature—Goethe refers to what he, as an external natural scientist, is in relation to the earth as his “friendship with the earth.” So human, so immediately alive does the German spirit in Goethe feel the spirit reigning in nature in the very act of striving to be scientific, in that he seeks to elevate science itself to the stage of thought. And Hegelian logic—abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel—what becomes of it? When one considers how mere logic often appears to people, and compares that with what prevails in Hegel’s idealistic worldview, only then does one gain the proper impression of the global significance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel, that which seems furthest removed from mysticism—the clear, the crystal-clear, one might say, crystal-cold thought itself—is felt and experienced in such a way that, while thought does indeed reign in the soul, what the soul experiences in thought is an immediate mystical experience; for what Hegel experiences in thought is a becoming-one with the divine World Spirit, which itself surges through and lives within the world. Thus, in Hegel, the highest clarity and conceptual sobriety become the warmest, most vibrant mysticism. This magic arises from the way in which, emerging from an immediately living idealism, the German spirit rises to the stage of thought. It thereby proves that what matters is not the specific expressions one arrives at, but rather the depths of the soul from which the human soul seeks a worldview. Hegel is said to be a dry logician. In contrast, one might say: Anyone who calls Hegel’s logic that is merely dry and cold themselves. Anyone who is able to approach this logic in the right way can sense how it pulsates from within German idealism; such a person can sense, in the seemingly abstract ideas that Hegel spins out of one another, the most vibrant warmth of the soul—the warmth necessary to shed all human particularity and unite with the Divine, so that in Hegel, logic and mysticism can no longer be distinguished; that while there is nothing nebulous about it, a mystical underlying current certainly prevails down to the very finest details.

[ 24 ] Right up to the present day, the German spirit has striven—even among the opponents of German idealism—to explore, time and again, the idealistic essence of this German character in its significance as an enigma. And the finest German minds—even those who oppose Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—when one turns one’s gaze toward them, one finds that German development consists precisely in assimilating, more and more, the fundamental impulses of this idealism.

[ 25 ] How these fundamental impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has often been discussed and will be discussed even more often. Attention should simply be drawn to how—one might say—German idealism, after having reached one of its high points in the German worldview, continued to exert its influence as a different impulse in German intellectual life. There was a period within this German intellectual life—one that found its expression in minds of the very, very highest order—extending into the middle of the 19th century and into the last third of the 19th century, during which the prevailing view was that creative work such as that exemplified in. exemplified in Goethe’s *Faust*, where thought truly and immediately seizes the imagination and can give rise to dramatic creation, is possible only within poetry; but the development of humanity showed that, for example, music occupied a different realm; that music was, as it were, the realm that grasped the highest in human beings not through the circuitous path sought by such poetry as *Faust*—that music was the realm in which sensibility must be directly engaged. It has been argued—with some justification, given the insights gained thus far regarding human development—for example, by contrasting the Don Juan legend with the Faust legend, that it is misguided to elevate the Don Juan legend to the same level as the Faust legend; it has been claimed that what this other legend—which depicts human beings wholly absorbed in sensual experience—represents can be portrayed only within music that immediately stirs and captures sensuality. —The way in which the German rises to the realm of thought not abstractly but vividly has also refuted this view. In Richard Wagner, we see before us in modern times the spirit who has triumphed over the merely externally sensuous element in music, who sought to deepen the realm of thought to such an extent that thought itself could grasp the element believed to exist only in music. To spiritualize music from the realm of thought, to demonstrate this—that, too, was possible only through German idealism. One might say: Richard Wagner has shown that even in the most arid element for thought there is nothing that could resist or withstand the strength of life that reigns in German thought. While the German sought, through his view of nature and his philosophy, to present external nature to the soul in such a way that what appears mechanical and outwardly rigid loses its mechanical quality, and what otherwise appears formal lives and weaves as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself; on the other hand, the element that flows in an immediate, sensory sequence of tones has been allowed to seek its connection, its union, with that which leads the human soul to the highest heights and depths on the stage of thought—in Wagner’s music, which thereby elevation of an artistic-sensual element into an immediately spiritual atmosphere.

[ 26 ] This aspect of German idealism, which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the stage of thought—this aspect is what I wanted to outline briefly today. This aspect of German idealism—this vivid grasp of what would otherwise be a lifeless thought—is one facet, albeit a remarkable one, of the essence of German national character; it will appear as a remarkable phenomenon to anyone who, I might say, is able to place himself within German national character while himself enlivening the thought within himself. Truly, the German cannot arrive at the fundamental character of his people’s essence except by delving ever deeper into the self-knowledge of the human being. And this, it seems to me, the German can truly feel in our immediate present, where this German essence must truly defend itself in a struggle imposed upon it, where this German essence must become conscious of itself by waging a struggle that it rightly perceives to stem from the task that appears to have been entrusted to it as a sacred one by the very forces and powers of the world themselves. And since today—in a different way than in the times we have mainly discussed—the German must fight to achieve his global standing and significance, what the German is entering into today as a struggle of world-historical proportions must surely emerge vividly before our souls. The deeper connection between the German soul, which struggles its way through the course of world history, and the bloody yet—through pain and suffering—ultimately uplifting events of our time—this deeper connection will have to be increasingly established by future history. My sole intention in today’s reflection was simply to show that the German need not speak out of hatred or indignation when he wishes to compare his nature with that of other peoples. We need not point to the nature of the German soul in order to exalt ourselves, but rather to recognize the duties entrusted to us by world history; for this purpose, we may point to it. And we need not—as, unfortunately, happens today in the camp of our enemies—invent all sorts of things that might serve to belittle the opponent; rather, we can point to the positive qualities at work in the substance of the German people. We can let the facts speak for themselves, and they will tell us that the German does not merely wish, but must—in accordance with the dispositions instilled in him by the world spirit—compare his nature and his abilities—without any arrogance—with the nature of other peoples.

[ 27 ] From this perspective, we need not fall into the trap that, so regrettably, so many of our opponents have fallen into. We look toward the West. We truly need not do as the French do, who, in seeking to characterize the German character—in its barbarism, as they see it, in its baseness—seek to elevate themselves; indeed, the French felt they needed, as they believe, a new form of sophistry. And scholars who, immediately before the war, spoke with high regard for the German spirit—even at renowned institutions of learning, where they spoke with the utmost respect—such scholars today, as we can hear, find it possible to take the position that, given the very nature of his worldview, the German can do nothing else but conquer, to assimilate, as Boutroux says, everything around him; for the German, Boutroux argues, does not wish to ascend in a humble manner to the sources of existence, but rather asserts that he is connected to these sources, that he carries the divinity within himself, and must therefore also carry all other peoples within himself. This German worldview is certainly profound in its conception; yet it is not conceived in an immodest manner.

[ 28 ] Perhaps the German does not need what the British are seeking today when they seek to characterize the German spirit. The British spirit, by emphasizing precisely the distinctive features of its own national character, has never made any particular effort to penetrate the German spirit. As the 1840s unfolded in Germany, it became, I would say, quite evident from what Germans can experience in the realm of thought that the way Hegel’s students thought was perceived by Schelling—who was still alive—and by his own students as too abstract, too logical; and that those on Schelling’s side strove to achieve greater vitality for the ideas themselves within the realm of thought. While people felt that Hegel, with logical rigor, allowed one thought to emerge from another, Schelling wanted people to perceive thoughts as active, living entities that do not need to be proven by logic—just as what happens from person to person in living interaction cannot be encompassed by logic. He wanted to grasp it in something that is more than logic; he wanted to grasp it vividly—and thus a great controversy arose on the stage, which the German sought to illuminate with the light he wished to kindle from his living insight. The English observed this controversy as it unfolded. A London newspaper wrote at the time what it presumably considered a witty article about this dispute, in which it was stated: “These Germans are actually abstruse dreamers. Many are preoccupied with the question of who is right: Schelling or Hegel.” The truth is simply that Hegel is obscure and Schelling even more so; and the one who copes most easily with these matters is the one who discovers this—a wisdom that roughly corresponds to the view that one should not study the world when it is illuminated by the sun, but rather at night, when all cats are black or gray. But anyone who today surveys the British judgment on the necessity of what is taking place within the German essence may well be reminded once again of such “deeply insightful” words as those, especially when these words are intended primarily to conceal what is actually at work—and what one does not even want to admit to oneself. Contemporary British society truly needs a new mask to characterize its relationship to German culture; foreign philosophers need a new form of sophistry to disparage Germany—a new form of sophistry they have adopted precisely since the outbreak of war.

[ 29 ] And the Italians? They, too, need something to reassure themselves about their own actions at this time. Without arrogance, the German may say: he will be uplifted amid the difficult global situation when he reflects on the duty intended for him by the spirit of the world, as this leads him to self-knowledge, which in turn becomes an understanding of the German essence. What he is to do flows to him as insight from the insight into the German essence. When d’Annunzio spoke his resonant words before the Italian war broke out, he had truly not delved as deeply into the Italian national character as he could have. But for us Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in the great achievements of the Roman spirit—it is not for us to believe that d’Annunzio’s hollow-sounding words truly stem from the deepest essence of the Italian national character; rather, they stem from the motives d’Annunzio needs to justify himself. The others resorted to sophistry and pretense, so to speak, to shift the blame for the causes of the war away from themselves; the Italians needed something else—a justification that we had already seen emerging in previous years, a peculiar justification: they needed a new saint, a saint newly designated right within the profane world—“holy egoism.” We see it recurring time and again, and we see the representatives of the Italian spirit invoking it time and again. A new saint was needed to justify what had been done.

[ 30 ] Perhaps it will be precisely the objective, unbiased observer of the German essence who will be able to find a place for himself within today’s historical events; for it is not from such sophistry, such a mask, nor even from the “appointment of a new saint” that German character needs to emerge; rather, it arises from human nature, from what this human nature allows to speak through itself, from what the finest minds have revealed to the German people from within the national spirit of the German people, and from what these minds have also hoped for the people—for that, too, is a distinctive feature of this German character, which might be described something like this: The German has always sought to direct the gaze of his soul toward that which was stirred within him from the vantage point of thought, and from this vantage point he also sought to discern what hope he might harbor for what his people could achieve.

[ 31 ] And today, when we need to develop love—yes, a great deal of love—for what the forebears of the German spirit have established within the German national soul and national strength, — so that, out of this love, we may position ourselves within today’s historical events, today, when we need faith in the power of the present, today, when we need confident hope in the success of that which the German spirit must achieve for the future—today we can look precisely in this way at what the Germans have always loved, believed, and hoped for regarding the connection between their past, present, and future. And so let us conclude with the words of a man who is, indeed, unknown to the broadest circles today, but who, in solitary reflection, sought to fathom the folk-like and the contemplative aspects of Goethe’s *Faust* during those years of German life when Germany had not yet brought forth the German state in its modern form. In those years that preceded the deeds of German strength—the 1860s—a solitary thinker conceived the following idea: in imagination, in the life of the soul, and in idealism, the German sought to rise to the highest level that he could in any way conceive. There he had a power to unfold that must lie within his very being and that gives us hope that this power will bear fruit and triumph in action. Let us quote the words of an ordinary German admirer of *Faust*, a lover of literature that so clearly demonstrates that the German essence harbors forces of the future within itself. Referring to words spoken by Goethe himself—as a 65-year-old man, intuitively projecting himself into Germany’s future—this admirer of *Faust* adds his own words and says:

“The solemn style, the high art of the ancients,
The primal mystery of eternal forms,
It is familiar with both humans and gods,
It will leaf through rocks as it does through books.
For what Homer and the Scipios created,
Will never dwell in the scholarly greenhouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the greenhouse;
But the German oak grew into a whole!
A storm of growth has swept over it,
It has shattered the glass of the greenhouse.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the world’s delight.
Already I see new rays of sunlight flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
A gentle light will still pour forth,
From whose reflection, from those stars,
The late grandchildren will learn to see,
So that in prophetically higher visions
They may report higher things of God and humanity.”

[ 32 ] And the Faust scholar from the 1960s continues:

[ 33 ] “Let us add the wish that the words of the Master—who looks down upon us with gentle light from better stars—may come true for his people, who seek their path to clarity amid darkness, confusion, and strife, yet, God willing, with indomitable strength, and that ‘in those higher accounts of God and humanity,’ which the poet of *Faust* expects from the centuries to come, German deeds, too, may one day find their place and their glorification—not merely as symbolic shadows, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality—alongside German thought and German feeling!”

[ 34 ] We believe that, out of our times—out of the spirit and the energetic, creative, and courageous actions of our day—such hopes may be fulfilled, hopes that have been expressed by the finest Germans from the very depths of the German national spirit. We believe that, in these difficult times when an atmosphere of hatred is spreading, the German people can develop yet another source of strength: that, to strengthen his resolve, he can embrace with living fervor the love for what has been handed down as a sacred legacy in the spirit and strength, in the life and deeds of his forefathers—for he may be convinced that, by imbuing himself with this love for the past, he will find the strength in which he can believe; because in this faith and this love he may find hope for those fruits that must blossom from the German spirit—from blood and suffering, but also from the exalting deeds of the present that the German performs not out of a lust for war, but out of devotion to a necessity imposed upon him by history. Thus, in these difficult times, what may sustain the German people, lift them up, and guide them through the arduous struggle in which they find themselves takes root in German life, in German work, and in German feelings and sensibilities: love for the German past, faith in the German present, and confident hope for the German future.