The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. Nietzsche's Soul Life and Richard Wagner

On the Development of Contemporary German Worldviews

[ 1 ] Nietzsche’s intellectual life stands out as one of the greatest spiritual tragedies in the development of humanity with regard to intellectual culture in the last third of the nineteenth century, and it shines into the immediate present not only through the nature of its course, but above all through its very special connection to much of what lives spiritually in the present.

[ 2 ] In the lectures I had the privilege of delivering over the course of the winter, I attempted to characterize German intellectual life from various perspectives during what might be called the golden age of German . idealism—a period in which, drawing from immeasurable depths, and perhaps even more so from the powerful forces of the human soul, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others sought to create a worldview that truly serves as a kind of backdrop to that magnificent flowering of modern intellectual life embodied in Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and the others who belong to their circle. In one of my most recent lectures, I sought to show how the tone of German intellectual life, set by these great minds, has lived on right up to the present day; yet one might say: it has lived on more beneath the surface of intellectual life as it has become popular, so that in many ways it has appeared to us like a faded note, like a forgotten aspiration within the development of German intellectual life from the nineteenth century through to the present.

[ 3 ] And indeed, anyone who considers the tremendous upheaval that took place in Central European cultural life around the middle of the nineteenth century can easily understand why the tone that characterized that period essentially continued more or less unnoticed. Drawing upon an intellectual and spiritually related intellectual force, German intellectual life at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and particularly during the first third of the nineteenth century—sought, through the thinkers mentioned, to penetrate the depths of the world’s mysteries. And one can understand Hegel quite well if one considers what lived in his consciousness: that he had succeeded in driving the development of human thought so far that, within this development, a highest point had initially been reached. And the turning point just mentioned shows us how, precisely after the first third of the nineteenth century, thinking—and intellectual life in particular—had reached a point where it became necessary, one might say, to take a kind of respite, to catch one’s breath. Only minds capable of approaching their intellectual work with such energy as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel could engage so intensely, so powerfully, with the innermost—and, if the word is not misunderstood, one might say, the most abstract—forces of the soul. And it was impossible to sustain the deep, sweeping breath required for the vastness of that idealistic worldview. The consequence of this was that a waning set in, which, even to this day, with regard to all that in which precisely these thinkers sought the highest, testifies to a certain lack of understanding—one might even say, a certain paralysis. As high as thinking, feeling, and purely spiritual volition—which is directed not toward the external world but toward the inner life of the soul itself—rose in the works of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, so high could one not ascend within the culture as a whole. The reality of this striving could not be sustained. But people sensed that reality was to be sought through this striving. And, as a continuation of this striving, a thirst for reality arose—a thirst for that upon which a person can stand firmly. This was expressed, at first, by entering into a sharp opposition to everything that the aforementioned thinkers had created. In their abstract trains of thought, one could not find the reality for which one thirsted. And so it came to pass that the thirst for reality sought, above all else, to be quenched by what the external senses offered; that the human spirit initially sought to penetrate all that the strict, certain natural sciences—limited to the senses and the intellect bound to the human brain—could establish as a worldview.

[ 4 ] The leading thinker, whose ideas make it possible to truly grasp what was at stake in this turning point in modern intellectual life, is Feuerbach. One need only outline a few key aspects of his worldview to see what is at stake. Feuerbach took Hegel as his starting point. He began with the idealistic worldview that the German spirit had created. But the question sprang vividly before his soul: What, after all, is all that a thinker like Hegel strove for? What can be found along the path that unfolds in such abstract trains of thought? There is nothing to be found there that leads into the spirit itself. Everything that can be found along this path regarding a spiritual world is nothing other than what the soul creates out of itself—what the human soul finds within itself on the basis of its sensory, bodily reality, and what it struggles to bring about. All that which it has created itself, it projects, as it were, out into the world; this becomes its spiritual world. And so, out of the thirst for reality, there arises a placement of the human being within the worldview, just as he exists directly in the sensory world. One wanted to take the human being as a complete human being, but precisely for that reason one had to omit from what was regarded as reality whatever arose along the path of this spiritual life. And so attention turned to the human being as he presents himself within the realm that could now be designated solely as reality—within the realm of the senses and what the intellect, bound to the brain, could make of this realm of the senses.

[ 5 ] How, then, did human beings stand before themselves with such a worldview? Human beings stood before themselves in such a way that they could indeed know: Within you, a spiritual world is dawning; within you, a world is dawning that you must not forgo if you wish to share in true human dignity. Something lives within you that must go far, far beyond nature. — But how could a human being come to terms with what he had to bring forth within himself, to act upon creatively within himself, and which could no longer appear to him as reality in the same sense as natural existence? This question, translated into the realm of feeling, forms, one might say, a central nerve of the entire quest for a worldview in the second half of the nineteenth century—indeed, right up to the present day. Human beings who cannot justify to themselves what they produce intellectually: this became the great question, this became the anxious enigma of life—not so much in the formulation in which I express it, but in the sensations and feelings in which it welled up from the depths of precisely those souls who were striving the most.

[ 6 ] And the thinkers who emerged in the nineteenth century—who were bound to raise questions of worldview and who could not bring themselves to adopt that faded tone in German intellectual life that was discussed a few weeks ago—initially took this stance toward the question of life and worldview just described. It is as if, for a time, the leading proponents of the worldview could not muster the strength to find—even in the slightest way—anything that could provide an answer to the questions that have just been outlined. This gives rise to a curious phenomenon. Those who are philosophers—leading philosophers—who attempt to construct a worldview out of the natural sciences all feel, in a sense, this very powerlessness that has just been described. And this powerlessness fundamentally permeates nineteenth-century philosophy.

[ 7 ] In a curious way, Feuerbach’s worldview—and thus everything that now set the tone—was countered by a musician, a figure in whom abstract thought did not play such a prominent role, and who initially did not even wish to follow the conventional paths of abstract thought—those usually taken in matters of worldview—in order to arrive at a solution to the riddle of the world. A figure stood in contrast to Feuerbach’s line of inquiry—one who lived, worked, and sought to work musically in his very innermost being: Richard Wagner. It was in the 1840s that Richard Wagner grappled in his soul with Feuerbach’s worldview. Before Richard Wagner’s soul—in which everything lived musically, not in concepts, ideas, and thoughts—stood the human being who had been placed at the center of the worldview and who, for the reasons described earlier, was initially merely a sensory being. But it was precisely this human being who stood opposite a soul that operated musically. The musical element, after all, lives and weaves primarily within the sensory realm. But it cannot weave and live solely in the sensory realm when it is apprehended as it is in Richard Wagner’s soul. Here, in music, the sensory realm itself acts as a spiritual reality—indeed, it must act as a spiritual reality. For whenever we turn our senses toward nature, wherever we may look—what is, in the truest sense of the word, musical content cannot immediately confront us from nature. Goethe says: Music is the purest form and content, for it does not, like the other arts, have an actual model in nature, and yet—it affects the senses entirely; and everything that affects the senses is, in turn, spiritual. Thus, there is an element in music that cannot be attained by following the paths of mere observation of nature, an element that cannot be perceived in the human being whom Feuerbach placed within the picture of nature. And yet there is also an element in music that responded to an extraordinary degree to the zeitgeist’s urge toward sensory perception and sensory comprehension. And since Richard Wagner’s soul lived in that remarkable—one cannot call it a conflict, but rather a dual harmony—of being entirely musical, yet not as a philosopher’s soul but as a musical soul, a soul seeking knowledge, it was inevitable that the aforementioned questions would play a role in Wagner’s musical ideas and musical sensibility in a completely different way than they could have in a philosopher’s soul.

[ 8 ] And another element came into play. It would indeed be fascinating to characterize in greater psychological detail how this second element in Richard Wagner’s soul came to be added to what has just been mentioned. But there is not enough time for that. I will merely hint at what this second element is and how it joined the first. A second element comes into play: the perception of what had been created within Central Europe out of the Germanic spirit, out of the Germanic soul—in terms of myth and the permeation of life with the mythical. Gradually, a contradiction inherent in this stood marvelously before Wagner’s soul—a contradiction that, as it appeared in Central Europe, exists nowhere else in the spiritual development of humanity. And once again, it emerged in Richard Wagner’s soul as a renewal of the Germanic myth. Here we have an intimate coexistence and interweaving of the human soul with all the elemental forces of nature, a loving engagement precisely with the sensuous and living. It is the Germanic view of nature to which we turn with these words—that view of nature which can live only in souls that feel no immediate conflict between the spiritual and the physical in human life, because they perceive the spiritual in such a way that this spiritual element not only weaves within the human being but is one with what blows in the wind, works in the thunderstorm, in everything that works and pulses as the spiritual out there in nature—and, I might say, the human being himself, who can be experienced inwardly, is experienced once more outwardly. And to this feeling, to this knowing feeling and feeling-based knowing of nature—which is contained like a primal impulse in all the dispositions of Germanic culture—is added a looking upward toward a world of gods that is, of course, well known, that can indeed be interpreted in a naturalistic way, but this interpretation is, at the very least, one-sided. This looking upward toward Wotan, this looking upward toward Donar, this looking upward toward Baldur, toward the other Germanic gods, and toward everything that is now connected in Germanic mythology with these Germanic gods—this looking upward is truly what directly reveals interwoven with and permeating the world—that which the spiritual human being finds when he does not merely orient himself toward nature, but when he surrenders himself to his own productivity, to his creative power. This world of Germanic gods, heroes, and heroic geniuses is rich in meaning and alive. But it is not exhausted if one regards it, for example, as mere symbolism of nature.

[ 9 ] Richard Wagner had now adopted the view that human beings are, first and foremost, the culmination of nature’s creative work. Whatever ideas humans form about a higher world arise within them. According to the newer worldview that has just taken shape, such ideas cannot be attributed the same reality as sensory phenomena. This gave rise to an anxious question within him: How, then, can one arrive at anything creative in human life at all? Nature creates. It creates through its various levels of being, all the way up to the human being. The human being becomes aware of itself. The human being experiences what it produces. Yet it appears merely as something created by the human being, having no real value. How can one place trust in what the human being creates within itself? How can one trust in it to such an extent that it forms a foundation enabling a person not merely to place themselves within nature as nature has created them, but to bring something valid into the creative process themselves?

[ 10 ] A figure—a central figure—had to emerge before Wagner’s soul, a figure that places itself within nature in this way, but also, with all the powers that nature itself has given it, endows itself with steadfastness, security, and the capacity for further development beyond natural existence. But Richard Wagner had to accept from Feuerbach that when a human being creates from within, he is, in essence, merely projecting outward the images produced by his imagination—creating an unreal realm alongside the real one. What right does the human soul have—this question of sensation and feeling arose—to create beyond nature? What right exists, even within nature itself—in the blowing wind, in lightning and thunder—to intuit the spiritual, and even more: to create a spiritual realm above all of nature, as in Germanic mythology? How can one find a connecting link between the two? Philosophy of that time could not do so, insofar as it was the dominant philosophy. Richard Wagner’s musical soul undertook the task. It undertook it, in fact, out of an impulse that was at the same time a deeply characteristic trait of the modern Central European spirit in general. In what way? Well, if one compares what Germanic myth—the Germanic way of penetrating the essence of nature—is, with what Greek myth—the Greek penetration into natural life—was, then only a superficial observer would believe that both belong to the same realm. For that is not the case. Here, too, it would be interesting to shed light on the deeper psychological underpinnings, but even here, one can only characterize the matter with a few sketchy strokes.

[ 11 ] The entire Greek spiritual life is inclined to look outward and, through the sculptural shaping that the soul undertakes with what the external world presents, to create myth—to bring myth to life in forms, in sculptural forms. Just as the Greek perceives, just as the Greek feels, so his perception and his feeling pass from his own being into the external world, flowing fully into external existence. And thus arise the wonderfully rounded sculptural forms that live within Greek mythology and, in turn, emerge from Greek mythology into Greek art.

[ 12 ] That is not at all what lives in Germanic mythology. It takes a great deal of effort to, so to speak, “dream” such closed forms—such as those found in Greek mythology, the figures of gods and heroes in Greek mythology—into Germanic mythology. If one does that, this Germanic mythology essentially becomes something entirely different. If one wants to understand Germanic mythology, one must allow that human sensibility—which so lovingly merges with the essence of nature—to wander freely, without shaping it into a concrete form; one must let this essence wander upward toward the divine figures of Wotan, Donar, Baldur, and so on. And one must also refrain from creating firmly defined figures up there. If one truly wishes to immerse oneself in this mythology, everything must remain fluid; only dynamic sculpture—sculptural movement—can convey what was actually alive in the Germanic souls. But how, then, when one delves into the very essence of the matter, can one find a connection between what is sensed in nature—what confronts one directly in the sensory world—and what is perceived above as the world of the gods? One can do so only—and one knows that one can do so only when one has truly internalized the fundamental spirit of the Germanic myth—one can do so only through musical perception. There is no other way to trace those currents that the soul must follow, from Wotan down into the realm of nature, and back up again from natural existence into the life and interplay of the gods in Valhalla—there is no other way than through musical feeling, that musical feeling which, in what it has before it, immediately possesses an inner dimension, a spiritual dimension, a spirituality that expresses itself entirely through the senses.

[ 13 ] And that is, after all, the fundamental difference between that great epoch of human development that we perceive as “Greek” and the one we then perceive as “Germanic.” In Greek spiritual life, the “I” was not yet so vivid, and human self-consciousness was not as developed as it would later become within Germanic spiritual life and ultimately in German spiritual life. The Greeks still lived with their entire inner life directed more toward the outside world. This is what is significant about the progress of humanity: that to this outward-directed Greek life, an inner grasping and an inner strengthening have been added. But the inner world cannot be grasped in a concrete way. If it is to be perceived artistically, it must be perceived musically, just as Greek life must be perceived plastically. And just as a transition takes place from the more self-liberated nature of the Greek worldview to the “I”-imbued nature of the modern worldview, so too does a transition take place from plastic form-giving to musical perception in the progress of humanity.

[ 14 ] What is so immensely significant is that Richard Wagner was a personality who—not out of the whims of his soul, but through his active participation in what was pulsating within the times themselves—was able to experience as his own personal experience precisely what was the experience of the times. The musical element—which therefore had to be present in the worldview—was perceived by Richard Wagner’s thoroughly musical soul. And so it came to pass that Richard Wagner, entirely out of the needs of the age, from the deepest nerve of the spiritual life of the time, was able to unite myth with music. And what ongoing philosophy could not be, could not express in words, concepts, and ideas—that was expressed in the musical. It is there within it. And if we must perceive the philosophical, the purely spiritual-scientific, as a fading note, one might say: The musical, through Richard Wagner, enters the second half of the nineteenth century as a substitute—this musical element that truly becomes a substitute for the path to knowledge, which is otherwise sought in an entirely different way.

[ 15 ] Now, just as such events in human life occur as inevitably as an inner destiny, something else came to pass for Richard Wagner. His acquaintance with Feuerbach remained, after all, somewhat unsatisfying for Richard Wagner. Although, because the musical element was his true lifeblood, he was strong enough to find what could not be found through pure thought alone; yet within him, as is to be expected in the spirit of modern times, there was also the urge to consciously assimilate what he was doing—to consciously gain insight into the relationship between his artistic work, which he certainly perceived as entirely new, and the deepest mysteries of existence. And here Schopenhauer’s philosophy came to his aid. What matters now is not so much to consider this philosophy as it must be taken immediately and objectively, but rather to consider it as it affected Richard Wagner. This Schopenhauerian philosophy showed him that human beings, if they rely solely on their intellect, on their mere imagination, can never truly penetrate the mysteries of existence. He must draw much deeper forces from the depths of his being if he is to live in harmony with the mysteries of the world in any way. Therefore, for Schopenhauer, everything that was merely intellectual—everything that lived solely in thoughts, concepts, and ideas—was something that not only produced mere images of existence but was bound to produce such mere images, which in reality offer only a dream of existence. But if the soul truly wishes to grow together with reality, it must not merely think; it must draw deeper forces from its inner depths. And Schopenhauer found that if a person truly wishes to recognize the forces of existence, he cannot grasp them in thought or in imagination, but must grasp them in the living will, in the weaving of the will—not in intellectuality. Furthermore, Schopenhauer was able to show how everything that is valuable in the individual human being arises from this element of the will: all genius, all devotion and willingness to sacrifice oneself for the world—indeed, compassion itself, which permeates all morality. All of this is connected to deeper forces than mere intellectuality. In short, human beings must go beyond the merely pictorial, the life of the imagination; they must connect with that which can satisfy the thirst for reality—of which we have spoken—more fully than mere intellectuality, which is bound to the physical life of the brain. But in what the will lives out, Schopenhauer found not only the center of the human personality, but also the center of all true art. All other arts, Schopenhauer imagines, must draw ideas out of the will and shape them into images. There is only one art that does not become an image but is capable of revealing the will directly—just as it manifests itself within the human being—to the outside world as well, and that is music. Consequently, for Schopenhauer, musical art takes center stage in the entire realm of modern artistic life, and through this, one might also say, Schopenhauer perceives something of the primal musical character of all genuine philosophical striving. And even if one does not wish to—or perhaps cannot—engage with Schopenhauer’s ideas, one must recognize in what Schopenhauer unconsciously sensed about the human will and its connection to music something that, in turn, stands in the most intimate connection with the lifeblood of intellectual life in modern times.

[ 16 ] How, then, must Richard Wagner—with his profoundly musical soul—have felt toward a worldview such as Schopenhauer’s, which revealed to him what music actually signifies in the life of the world as a whole? Did he not, in essence, find in music that which compelled him to say: No matter how the scientific worldview may take shape, the reality of music will never be made vivid or explicable in human nature by that scientific worldview? For the spirit reigns in man when he becomes musical, and yet there is no need to ascend into abstract intellectuality, into abstract concepts, into a mere world of ideas; rather, one remains within the realm of the tangible. And Richard Wagner felt the urge to shape music itself in such a way that he could perceive it as, in a sense, fulfilling the very ideal that Schopenhauer had struggled to achieve in his view of music. A practicing, productive artist like Richard Wagner was, after all, in a different position with regard to such a truth than Schopenhauer, the philosopher. Schopenhauer, the philosopher, could only contemplate music as it presented itself to him. It appeared to him, as it were, as an object, and in it he sensed the reign and pulsation of the will. In Richard Wagner, the creative artist, something else arose. Within him there now truly arose the urge to develop music in such a way that, in the musical element he expressed, something would take effect that showed precisely how the spiritual and the sensual can—one might say—musically and consciously fuse together.

[ 17 ] And from this perspective, “Tristan,” “Tristan and Isolde,” does indeed appear to be Richard Wagner’s work of art—it was, after all, composed only after “Tannhäuser,” “Lohengrin,” and so on—in which he consciously sought to reshape the musical element so that everything provided musically as a means of expression for the weaving and working of the most sensual element was, at the same time, like a metaphysical, like a supersensual working within the most sensual element. Thus, for Richard Wagner, his ideal of the further development of music was truly something like a modern ideal of knowledge. And once again, this modern ideal of knowledge is most consciously pursued by Richard Wagner in *Tristan*.

[ 18 ] *Tristan* is the work that first sparked Friedrich Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Richard Wagner. The young Nietzsche sought to penetrate the music of *Tristan*. And this penetration into an element that was sensual only to the extent that, in everything purely sensual, a spiritual element simultaneously pulsates everywhere—this penetration into *Tristan* became, for Nietzsche, the catalyst for his experience with Richard Wagner, with Richard Wagner’s art, and with Richard Wagner’s worldview; became the occasion for the experience Nietzsche had with Schopenhauer and with everything that can now be linked to the interplay of the three souls—Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. And for Nietzsche, who had actually started out in philology but, with a brilliantly comprehensive mind, absorbed everything he could from philology, something special now begins—something that, I would say, provides the introduction, the exposition, to the tragedy of his life, which is now actually unfolding with a wondrous inner necessity, despite its apparent contradictions. These apparent contradictions in Nietzsche’s inner life are, in fact, nothing other than the contradictions within a deeply moving, shattering life drama, a life tragedy; they are exactly as contradictions in a tragedy must be, because life itself, as it flows in its depths, cannot exist without contradictions. What, then, is this deepest characteristic of Nietzsche’s inner life? Other minds who have striven in more recent times form, when they feel the need to do so, a certain worldview and philosophy of life—a sum of concepts and ideas, perhaps even another element of the soul— intended to lead into the secret depths of existence; and then, when such minds, such souls, are able to find a certain lack of contradiction in the individual parts of their worldview, they adopt this worldview, reject anything else that contradicts their worldview, and thus live according to the worldview they have developed within themselves.

[ 19 ] Nietzsche’s soul was entirely unsuited to living that way. There is a fundamental difference between Nietzsche and all other thinkers with a worldview. Compared to other thinkers with a worldview, Nietzsche is not a productive mind. Unless one approaches the matter superficially, Nietzsche could never be compared to productive minds or philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or even Feuerbach, or even Schopenhauer himself. Nietzsche is not a soul from which thoughts spring directly—thoughts that appear credible to him, that serve as the foundation for a certain view of the world. In this sense, Nietzsche’s soul is not creative at all, even if this may not appear so at first glance to those who observe him superficially. Nietzsche’s soul seems to be called to something else. While other people with worldviews thus develop worldviews—striving, as it were, to grasp the logic of these worldviews—it becomes necessary for Nietzsche to allow what the most important worldviews of the second half of the nineteenth century offer him to affect his soul in such a way that the question of feeling arises within the soul: How can one live with these worldviews? What do they offer the soul? How can the soul progress by allowing these worldviews to take effect upon it? — The worldviews of others—the worldviews that emerged as the most significant ones in the second half of the nineteenth century—become questions of life. Can the soul happily become aware of its own worth? Can it develop healthily under the influence of this or that worldview? For Nietzsche, this is not the question as it is formulated, but rather the question as he feels it—the inner urge that plays itself out in his soul. Therefore, one can say: It was Nietzsche’s destiny to experience within his own soul the most important, influential worldviews of the second half of the nineteenth century, to test them for their value in life and their fruitfulness, and to live through them inwardly.

[ 20 ] And that is when what had first sparked in him—back when he was still in the prime of his youth and studying philology—began to ignite anew; after all, he had already become a professor at the University of Basel at the age of twenty-four, before he had even earned his doctorate. That is when what was bound to ignite in a mind that kept pace with its time first began to take hold. We have, after all, characterized what was alive and at work and manifesting itself particularly in a mind such as Feuerbach’s, and furthermore in a mind such as Schopenhauer’s. And through the personality of Richard Wagner, it now drew nearer to Nietzsche. What did Wagner come to represent for Nietzsche in the 1860s? As strange as it may sound: Wagner essentially became a problem of knowledge for Nietzsche. How can one reconcile what had become of the musician Richard Wagner—precisely in the sense of the newer intellectual development, the newer worldview—with the life of a human soul that wishes to experience the life-giving forces within itself? This became the fundamental question for Nietzsche. And he had to relate this fundamental question—which for him became a way of experiencing life—to his philology, to what had come alive for him through Greek culture, which was, after all, the primary focus of his studies. At first, the impression that the music in *Tristan* made on Nietzsche was overwhelming, so much so that he had the feeling: Here, something truly new is entering the modern development of the spirit; here is life that must bear fruit. But what are the deeper connections through which this life can bear fruit for all of humanity?

[ 21 ] Starting from this question, Nietzsche now looked back at Greek civilization. And as he came to appreciate Richard Wagner’s musical and artistic work, Greek civilization actually presented itself to Nietzsche in a completely different light than the image that had previously been perceived—in a certain sense—as one-sided. At least Nietzsche viewed what had been said about Greek civilization before him as one-sided. For, as Nietzsche argued, people had repeatedly sought to draw attention to the cheerful element of the Greeks, to their immediate zest for life, as if these Greeks had, at heart, been nothing more than the playing children of humanity. Nietzsche could not accept this view of Greek civilization. Rather, what struck him most deeply was how the greatest minds of ancient Greece had sensed the inner tragedy, the suffering inherent in all physical and sensory existence; how they had realized that a person who lives solely within the realm of physical and sensory existence—even if he harbors higher needs in his soul—must nevertheless remain entirely unsatisfied. Only the “Odling” can find satisfaction within physical-sensual existence. And according to Friedrich Nietzsche’s view, the Greeks were neither “Odlings” nor “Stumpflinge.” Rather, the Greeks perceived—as Nietzsche concluded from a closer examination of Greek culture—the tragic and the painful aspects of immediate existence, and they created, as Nietzsche believed, art—that which they could bring forth from their spirit—precisely in order to transcend the disharmonies of sensory existence. They created art in the spirit in order to have an element that would lift them above the ambivalence of external sensory existence. Art as the harmonization of sensory existence—that is what Greek art became for Nietzsche. And it was clear to him that this striving for a spiritual content that transcends sensory content was intimately connected to the fact that even in their heyday, the Greeks still had at work within them something of what Schopenhauer directly called the “will”—something that acted within the human soul at its deepest level, something that, in the intellect, in reason, and in the imagination, leads only to images.

[ 22 ] And Nietzsche, in particular, liked to look back to ancient Greece. Indeed, in the earliest Greek philosophers—Thales, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus in particular, Anaximenes, and so on—Nietzsche found everywhere that they did not create in the same way as later philosophers—through thinking, thinking, and thinking again—but rather by still carrying deep within their souls something of what was at work in the subconscious element of the will, something that did not dissolve into mere thought and that they incorporated into their worldview. Nietzsche endeavored to set forth all these broad outlines in the beautiful essays he wrote on philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks. In Socrates, however, he perceived the man who, in a sense, had rejected the originally healthy, deeper forces of the will in favor of mere intellectualism. Therefore, for Nietzsche, Socrates was indeed the true bringer of the intellectualist element, but also the one who stifled all the original great predispositions for the spiritual development of humanity. And as the Socratic age was ushered in, continued into modern times, and found expression in worldviews, humanity set the mere dream of intellectualism in opposition to the original, elemental immersion in that which is more than a mere image—that which is inner reality. Nietzsche now saw this effectively reflected in Schopenhauer’s assertion: that the idea is merely an image, but that the reality for which one thirsts lives in the depths, beneath the surface of mere ideas, in the human element of will. In this Schopenhauerian assertion, Nietzsche found something that in turn went back to the very age that had been superseded by the age of intellectuality. And Richard Wagner’s art appeared to Nietzsche as a renewal of humanity’s own primordial art, as something truly entirely new in comparison to what humanity had hitherto cultivated as art—and which could not become fully art because it did not descend all the way to the primordial elements of the human soul itself.

[ 23 ] Thus, for Friedrich Nietzsche—based on his view of Greek culture and his view of the decline of the deeper human qualities in later Greek culture—Richard Wagner became something entirely new, a wholly new phenomenon in the course of human development: a revival of deeper artistic elements than had been possible since the Socratic age. For that which can become a true human worldview and way of life must spring from these deeper foundations. In which art form, then, can it live? In music alone can it live, in Nietzsche’s sense. Therefore, that which otherwise appears as art must, in Nietzsche’s sense, be born out of music, out of a primal musicality. Richard Wagner truly became for him the figure to whom Nietzsche looked, and who, I might say, resolved the great questions of doubt in his worldview. For Richard Wagner was, to him, the one who did not philosophize about the deepest mysteries of the world, but made music. And within the musical element lies the element of will. But if one wishes to find within human development itself that from which all art—including poetry—must have sprung, one must go back to an age in which the musical—albeit in a more naive, more primitive way than in Richard Wagner—nevertheless existed as something musical.

[ 24 ] It was from such feelings that the idea for Nietzsche’s first work arose: *The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music*. For whatever otherwise lived artistically must have emerged from the element of music. And so Nietzsche’s debut work—I would say—transposed onto art Schopenhauer’s worldview of the activity of the will as a real element opposed to mere representation. And Richard Wagner was the fulfillment of what was bound to happen for Nietzsche. One must now imagine these things as they must have lived as the inner experience of a soul as thirsty for knowledge as Nietzsche’s was. All the happiness Nietzsche could experience, all the fulfillment of his longings and hopes that could come to him, were granted to him by the fact that he could say to himself: What had been destroyed by Socratism and intellectualism within the course of human development can be revived. For all art will spring from the musical element, just as Greek tragedy sprang from the musical element. And Richard Wagner is already heralding the dawn. So it will arise.

[ 25 ] Nietzsche’s relationship to Richard Wagner now becomes both a deeply personal matter and a question of insight. And what is significant in Nietzsche’s own inner life is that he does not present what he strives for as his ideals; he does not say: this or that must happen. Thus, what he considers necessary to realize does not initially spring from his own soul; rather, he always looks to Richard Wagner’s soul, and in the way Richard Wagner lives out his art, he simultaneously finds the answers to the questions of knowledge he must ask. This is what is significant in Nietzsche’s life.

[ 26 ] And now Nietzsche becomes a critic of his time—a critic, I would say, above all of what he perceives in German intellectual life during the last third of the nineteenth century. And as such a critic, Nietzsche wrote his four “Untimely Meditations.” There should have been many more. But for reasons that will become clear in our discussion, there were only four. Through vivid perception, through the work of Richard Wagner, and through grasping what was at work in Wagner’s music, Nietzsche saw the reach of the human being and his soul beyond mere nature—the possibility of truly finding something, even if one remains at the level of the sensory element, something that carries the human being beyond mere nature. And now Nietzsche faced the world with this conviction: that human beings, if they only understand themselves deeply enough beneath the mere intellectual element, can truly attain the spiritual. With this sense, Nietzsche turned to what the times had now produced. One must ask: What did Nietzsche find at first? He found that, in essence, the era had been overwhelmed—if not in the narrow sense, then in the broader sense—by Feuerbachianism, by this focus on the purely sensory and on the intellect bound to the brain, in everything that had now developed into the dominant worldview.

[ 27 ] Of course, I know very well that there may be all sorts of philosophers who say: “Oh, philosophy has long since moved beyond materialism.” — But even if one assumes that to be the case, in one’s entire way of thinking, in one’s habits of thought, one is still deeply entrenched in it even today. And Nietzsche looked around and saw how deeply his era was entrenched in it. And he now singled out a characteristic figure: David Friedrich Strauss—Strauss, who had also started out from Hegelianism, who had arrived at a worldview from Hegelianism that he then expressed in his *Old and New Beliefs*, who had completely shifted from Hegelianism to the materialistic hue of Darwinism, who saw nothing in the external world, including now also the world of man, saw nothing but the development of nature, and who believed that man, if he stood firmly on the ground of modern knowledge, could, in essence, no longer be a Christian, because he must not accept within himself the spiritual concepts that Christianity demands of him. Nietzsche, so to speak, took on this David Friedrich Strauss. But Nietzsche did not proceed as a philosopher would normally proceed, but rather differently. For Nietzsche, it was not primarily the image of nature that was present, nor any scientific habit of thought, but rather the intuition: If the development of the worldview continues in immediate spiritual life, then it will proceed as it began—with what emerged from the music and the entire art of Richard Wagner.

[ 28 ] How does something like the view of David Friedrich Strauss—which many regard as the only valid modern philosophical perspective—stand in relation to what might come to be when Richard Wagner’s art permeates the development of the human spirit? This is the question Nietzsche had to ask himself. He did not ask: Is this or that wrong in Strauss’s work; can this or that be refuted? That was not at all the issue for Nietzsche; rather, the issue for Nietzsche was to show what element of humanity—psychic and spiritual—lives in a worldview such as Strauss’s, and what kind of person must produce such a worldview—one that clings solely to the coarse, material, and sensual. What must a person be like in contrast to the spiritual person—the person who allows the spirit to work in everything that lives and stirs within him—in contrast to Richard Wagner? What must a person be like who produces such materialism as David Friedrich Strauss? He must be a philistine! Friedrich Nietzsche sought to demonstrate in his untimely essay “David Friedrich Strauss, the Philistine and Writer” that the worldview of modern times has become so materialistic precisely because the philistine element has poured itself into it. Later, he changed the title to “... Confessor and Writer.”

[ 29 ] And so he demonstrates throughout how a certain trivial way of thinking, how trivial habits of thought, and how a philistine nature prevent David Friedrich Strauss from seeing the spiritual in the sensual at the same time. And Friedrich Nietzsche continued to compare what he perceived as a living sensation in Richard Wagner’s personality with what exists in contemporary thought under the influence of the materialistic way of thinking. And he goes on to ask himself: What is the relationship between a man as productive as Richard Wagner—who brings the inner forces of the human soul to the surface of his work—and what lives on in the ongoing, highly esteemed, and admired cultural tradition of the time? And here Nietzsche finds that this cultural climate has become such that it now gradually gasps and breathes heavily under the weight of its abundance of external knowledge, under its abundance of history. People know, as it were, everything—or at least seek to know everything—and look up every possible detail historically. One can provide historical answers to all questions. But to bring to life within oneself what one knows there—to give birth to something human from the soul—this is paralyzed under the weight of the historical. And so man gnaws at what he absorbs historically—whether he absorbs it historically from history or from the natural sciences makes no difference at all—thus man gnaws at and is suffocated by the historical. And as one shovels the historical into oneself, what should emerge from within—what one should freely bring forth from oneself as spirit—remains stuck in the depths of existence. “The Use and Harm of History for Life”—that will be the second “Untimely Meditation.”

[ 30 ] And then Nietzsche turns his gaze to Schopenhauer himself, to a mind—as Schopenhauer was in Nietzsche’s view—that had come to the point of regard everything that lives externally as mere “dream”—to regard it as mere dream to such an extent that, for Schopenhauer, history itself is nothing other than a sum of repeating life-scenes, which acquire value only when one is able to take into account that which unfolds within them and behind them. Nietzsche regards a mind like Schopenhauer’s—which must see the greatness of humanity entirely in the productive—as the ideal of a human being. In turn, he compares the times with what such an ideal of humanity represents. It becomes clear to him: Let us look at this person, that person; let us look at a third, a fourth person—what are they all, compared to what might emerge from Schopenhauer’s philosophy as the “complete human being”? As I said, one may hold whatever views one wishes on this matter—whether one is a supporter or an opponent—that is not the point; what matters is how Schopenhauer influenced Nietzsche. What are individual human beings—especially the most learned, the most knowledgeable—what are they compared to such a human personality who sought to shape from the soul that which lived as human in all its aspects? They are fragmentary works of life, and therefore the entire culture is fragmentary. That a renewal, a revitalization of the entire culture under the influence of what now lives in Schopenhauer’s philosophy in terms of complete humanity is possible—and that this is urgently necessary—is demonstrated by Nietzsche in the third of his “Untimely Meditations”: “Schopenhauer as Educator.”

[ 31 ] But then, as the Bayreuth Festival drew near, he wanted first to describe the positive aspects. Like the other two “Untimely Meditations,” “Schopenhauer as Educator” is also dedicated to a critique of the times. But what the creative person of the age can offer, how the times should be renewed, and how something new must flow into the times from what lies in the deepest recesses of the human soul—this, Nietzsche saw, was embodied in the art of Richard Wagner. Wagner truly understood how to grasp the sensual directly in such a way that it presented itself as the supersensual. “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”—the fourth “Untimely Meditation,” published in 1876—was intended to show what Wagner could become for the world.

[ 32 ] For Nietzsche, the writing of *Richard Wagner in Bayreuth* marked, in a certain sense, a farewell to his friendship with Richard Wagner. From that point on, the friendship began to cool rapidly and, in essence, soon came to an end.

[ 33 ] And now let us once again consider the entire inner life of Nietzsche’s soul, the entire burden that weighed upon it due to questions of worldview, and add to this the fact that Richard Wagner had become, as it were, the very essence of Nietzsche’s soul—that toward which he had focused all his thinking, feeling, and sensibility. And he must part ways with Richard Wagner! And the separation became complete when Richard Wagner wrote his *Parsifal*. We find various references in Nietzsche’s published works that are meant to point to the actual reason why Nietzsche broke with Wagner. Not even the words that Nietzsche himself conveyed regarding his separation from Richard Wagner seem to me to be convincing. For a personality as artistic as Friedrich Nietzsche—a personality who must have felt that his entire worldview was permeated by the artistic—such a personality could hardly possibly regard *Parsifal* as a work of art entirely unsympathetic to him simply because he believed that Richard Wagner had previously portrayed the pagan pantheon, Siegfried, and the others, and that he had now, as a sort of counter-reformer, swung back toward Christianity. What Nietzsche describes as “falling before the cross”—and which is said to have been unsympathetic to him—does not seem convincing when one looks into the full richness of both Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s intellectual lives. For ultimately, this would boil down to the trivial view that Friedrich Nietzsche could not have accepted the work of art that is *Parsifal* because of its content; he would have turned away from it due to a lack of alignment with his theoretical views. It would actually be terrible if one had to think that way about Friedrich Nietzsche’s break with Richard Wagner. There was something entirely different at play—something that, I believe, can only be discovered by attempting to uncover the true underlying causes through a deeper exploration of the human psyche. However, these can only be sketched out here in this brief lecture.

[ 34 ] What, then, had Richard Wagner essentially achieved? We have seen that Richard Wagner began, in his fundamental spiritual sensibility, with Feuerbach’s materialism, moved on to an understanding of Schopenhauer’s worldview, but was in fact always imbued with the vital element of music. Everything he wrote theoretically merely runs parallel to this musical element. And in music—if I may put it in simple terms—he charted the path by which, through penetration into the sensuous, the supersensuous and the spiritual can be found at the same time. But he also started from the premise that, on the path of the intellectual—I would say, in that diluted human spiritual life that found its full expression in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—one cannot find anything real, not that which the sense of reality thirsts for. One had to place the whole, complete human being within it, and, when it came down to it, only the sensory human being proved to be real. We have seen how only music provided both the sensory and the supersensory at the same time. For Richard Wagner, then, the human being stood at the very center of his worldview. But one had to penetrate into all the depths of the human being, and, in keeping with the very nature of Richard Wagner’s soul, Wagner could only penetrate these depths of the human being through music. Through music he sought to penetrate—I say quite deliberately: through music he sought to penetrate—the depths of the human soul in *Parsifal*. Indeed, in the music of *Parsifal* we have before us a musical work that shows how the human being can be conceived, perceived, and felt at the center of—I would say—an anthroposophically oriented worldview, in such a way that the sensory and the musical become so spiritual that they touch the finest, most intimate aspects of the human soul. For this is what happens in the resolution of the Grail problem in *Parsifal*.

[ 35 ] Richard Wagner could only achieve this by undergoing, within his emotional life—which was entirely permeated by musical elements—a progression from Feuerbach through Schopenhauer to a direct grasp of that which lives within humanity, beneath the purely intellectual and abstract elements of the soul. In his own way—and primarily as a musician—Richard Wagner had arrived at the spiritual human being in his *Parsifal*.

[ 36 ] Richard Wagner was an object of insight for Nietzsche. Until 1876, Nietzsche actually lived much more in Richard Wagner than in himself. Whatever he hoped for and strove toward in terms of the newer development of the spirit, he saw it in Richard Wagner. He did not draw it from his own soul as an ideal. Nietzsche was youthful in his enthusiasm and genius when he encountered Richard Wagner. In Richard Wagner, he encountered a worldview and philosophy of life that was already fully formed at a later stage of development. What Wagner had gone through to bring his soul into a state of feeling that could lead from *Siegfried* to *Parsifal*—what Richard Wagner experienced in his soul at that time, the harrowing ordeal he had to endure—had already been lived through by the time Nietzsche drew closer to Wagner. What was already balanced, already filled with harmony, and already promising the future came to meet Friedrich Nietzsche when he got to know Richard Wagner and, I would say, made him the object of his inquiry. Nietzsche was able to fully grasp what Richard Wagner had gone through in the 1850s—for example, when he wrote words like those he sent to Röckel in 1854 about his deeply sorrowful sense of the nature of the world. This deeply sorrowful sense of the nature of the world had to be transformed into inner spiritual strength, into activity. And when Nietzsche drew closer to Richard Wagner in the 1860s, he was able to experience in Wagner what that soul’s suffering had become. He, Nietzsche, was already able to experience it in the radiance of a light shining with hope. Words such as those written to Uhlig in 1852 also show how Richard Wagner knew the suffering that Nietzsche had sensed in Greek culture—a suffering that Nietzsche, however, had only contemplated and observed in its balance in Richard Wagner. Words such as those Wagner wrote to Uhlig show how Richard Wagner came to know this suffering—how, before he reached the point of sensing in the human soul the power that can lead to the Temple of the Grail, the power that can lead to the Siegfried energy, he first came to know the doubt regarding all that is petty and human, out of which, after all, the great human must first work its way up. Richard Wagner writes: “In general, dear friend, my views on the human race are growing ever darker; for the most part, I feel compelled to believe that this species is destined to perish completely.”

[ 37 ] One need only consider this context to hear the most intimate strings of the human soul resonate: Before the hero, who, “knowing through compassion,” makes his way to the Temple of the Grail, lies everything one can experience in terms of human doubt and human suffering when, especially in a materialistic age, one looks at what surrounds one. Richard Wagner, then, underwent this ascent from suffering to the exercise of the creative. And he was, in essence, already standing before Nietzsche as a radiant victor when Nietzsche first met him. Nietzsche, however, as a youthful, gentle soul, knew how to regard this triumphant nature with understanding—an understanding born of feeling.

[ 38 ] But in Nietzsche’s case, the youthful vigor that lived within him was able to rise to the level of what he encountered in Richard Wagner; this was not the case, however, with his later, matured strength, which had shed its youthful enthusiasm and the breadth of its emotions and now sought to create from within itself. Richard Wagner had gone through Feuerbachianism. Nietzsche had not gone through it; Nietzsche did not suffer from Feuerbachianism; Nietzsche did not first become acquainted with the all-too-human before allowing the lofty, the ideal, and the spiritual-human in Richard Wagner to take effect upon him. And that seems to me to be the psychological reason why Friedrich Nietzsche’s soul now fell back into Feuerbachianism—if we take it in the broader sense—and was overwhelmed by it.

[ 39 ] Well, when Friedrich Nietzsche could no longer keep up, what had stemmed solely from enthusiasm—and what should have come from a deeper power of understanding—fell away from him. He had to fall away and go through for himself what Richard Wagner had already triumphed over. Thus began that second period in Nietzsche’s life, which starts with the publication of the aphorism collection *Human, All Too Human*, continues through *The Wanderer and His Shadow* to *Dawn* and *The Gay Science*, where Nietzsche attempts to come to terms with the scientific worldview—and with all that within the scientific worldview which, in modern times, must now serve as the foundation for any higher philosophical worldview.

[ 40 ] And this is the tragedy in Friedrich Nietzsche’s soul—the terribly tragic thing—that he had previously experienced something of the greatest magnitude in youthful enthusiasm, and now, when he came to his senses, he had to descend—in a sense, consciously descend—in order to recognize, in light of the highest human qualities, the all-too-human in its connections with the facts of nature. But Nietzsche had the courage within himself to undergo this arduous path of insight. He had the courage to truly ask himself: Yes, what does this inner life actually look like when we view it in the light of the natural sciences? When we view it in the light of natural science, we see that human beings have passions. They seem to spring from the depths of the will, but when we investigate more closely, we find all sorts of purely physiological causes—causes rooted in bodily life. We find that human beings live through concepts and ideas. But everywhere we find the mechanical causes underlying these ideas and concepts. Finally, we find ideals in human life. Human beings tell themselves that these ideals are something divine. But when we investigate what human beings actually are, we perceive how they give birth to their ideals out of their physiological element, out of their physical element, and merely dream them up as something that is supposed to have been bestowed upon them by the gods. There is what human beings experience in everyday life as their longings born of the body—what is born of flesh and blood, what presents itself to them as ideals—but which does not originate from higher spiritual worlds; rather, it is like the foam that rises from bodily life—not the highest of the human, but the human, the all-too-human. |

[ 41 ] After experiencing what the second half of the nineteenth century had to offer him through Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, Nietzsche had to incorporate into his own vision of the soul what the natural sciences could provide, and he had to, in particular, go through—his work, with which he begins this phase of his life, was dedicated to Voltaire— he had to go through what might be called a plunge into that dead science—the science of mechanism, of the dead as opposed to the living—which Fichte claimed as the truly German worldview. In the second period of his life, Nietzsche was overwhelmed by the Western worldview. He found himself completely immersed in this Western worldview. But for him, it became more than just an intellectual sensation; he could not assimilate it like a Western mind. He assimilated it only after having stood for so long within the primordial Germanic, German worldview. For him, it became such that, for example, it encompassed all the perspectives that the materialists of the soul would later expel from these worldviews. With a sharp mind, Nietzsche was able to demonstrate how everything that was called “ideals”—and which people believed to be a gift from God—could arise from the needs of human nature, which are connected to flesh and blood. Nietzsche himself put it this way: all his ideals seemed to him as if they had been laid on ice and had grown cold, because they appeared to him to have emerged from the human—all-too-human. Truly, what small minds, what dullards, subsequently produced by taking this course of Nietzsche’s development of his worldview to extremes—that is already present in Nietzsche, but in such a way that while it is genius in Nietzsche, it is the opposite of genius in those who later built upon it. One could even say: The entire narrowness of modern psychoanalysis is already present in Nietzsche’s second period of development, along with everything that was attempted there to be derived from immediate human nature in a psychologically materialistic manner. Small-minded people who say to themselves: Well, we can investigate this, and the truth must be accepted. — Thus, small minds can themselves accept, for example, the conclusion drawn from Schopenhauer that every striving for a worldview, every striving for a spiritual connection with the world that goes beyond mere empirical science—yes, this is no fairy tale I am telling—is a consequence of human sexuality. So that, for certain minds of the present, all philosophy has its foundation in human sexuality, for all intellectual striving is based on human sexuality. Of course, Nietzsche—who saw the fundamental basis, the legitimate fundamental basis for the psychological in the physiological, in the purely natural—was too brilliant and, I would say, too tactful to go beyond the realm of knowledge. But he did not have to merely develop a worldview. Less discerning minds simply tell themselves: This is the truth; one must accept it. So one must also accept as truth that philosophy is merely a consequence of sexuality. - But above all, Nietzsche had to come to see the fruitful aspect of human nature that can be influenced by a truth. Knowledge as a destiny of life—that is the defining feature of Nietzsche’s spiritual tragedy. And so something began to take root in Nietzsche’s soul during this second phase of his spiritual life. Nietzsche was too great to let it go far, but it continued to serve as an underlying source of revulsion toward a purely naturalistic psychology, toward a purely naturalistic explanation of all that is moral—as he himself had attempted—and revulsion toward what can arise if one proceeds further into this realm, which, though it may seem so justified, appears to be a materialistic conception of the soul—that revulsion. Now imagine the tragedy of such a psychological development, which first experiences humanity’s full, fruitful happiness in Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner and is then, through the necessary course of development and in connection with this necessary development of the times—as Nietzsche himself experienced it— is forced to develop within itself a worldview in the face of which the experience begins to evoke revulsion at every point of the soul’s life, and the necessity to save oneself from this revulsion toward life.

[ 42 ] We are now approaching and have entered the 1880s with regard to Friedrich Nietzsche’s inner life. From his scientific worldview, he had gained something for his inner life that revealed to him the budding revulsion, along with all the bitterness with which such revulsion can reign deep within the soul. And what Nietzsche attempted to express in *The Gay Science* is, after all, nothing other than an intoxicating diversion from the revulsion that does not rise to consciousness. For, of course, one suffers from this revulsion, but such things remain in the subconscious. They are not spoken of. Something is expressed in the soul that veils the revulsion, that covers it up: *The Gay Science*—in its sentences, in its expressed content. What I have thus had to characterize as lying in the depths of the soul then forms the transition to a different kind of worldview, which Nietzsche was now compelled to experience further through a certain deeper immersion in the scientific life of the nineteenth century, just as he also carried this immersion into his understanding of the life of the soul.

[ 43 ] And now something began to take shape in Nietzsche’s soul—of which one might say: it had absorbed that primal Germanic element, which lived on in Richard Wagner and Schopenhauer, as if it were a driving force propelling him forward—now something strange was unfolding within Nietzsche. Now comes the final period of his life, which then leads to catastrophe. And at work in this catastrophe—though one might not notice it unless one delves deeper into the underlying currents of his inner life— what he had drawn from Western philosophy—namely, from French moral philosophy, from Guyau, from Stendhal, but also from others with whom he had fully identified—and what he had gained from these in connection with a form of Darwinism he had grasped more deeply, all of this interacted with the Eastern European element. One cannot understand the final period in Friedrich Nietzsche’s life unless one takes into account how, in all his feelings—in everything he felt and thought—the same element shone through, the same element that, for example, in Dostoevsky permeates his art as a psychological element. This distinctive feature of the Russian East—that the whole human being is grasped in the immediately natural, but in such a way that this immediately natural is also viewed and felt as the outliving of the spiritual; that instincts are simultaneously perceived as spiritual; that what lives physiologically is not, as in the West and in Central Europe, perceived physiologically, but is perceived psychically— —this now forced its way into Nietzsche, into his soul, upon which what I have just characterized had settled with shattering force. Into this soul poured everything that converged from the West and the East in terms of worldview enigmas. In the mere scientific and physiological contemplation of the soul, he could see what is all too human. But that would have turned to revulsion if he had pursued it further. Now he derived a deeper understanding from the contemplation of human life itself. It was only now, in fact, that he truly came to understand human life, once this contemplation had been stirred within him, notably through the influence of Dostoevsky.

[ 44 ] And now an urge arose within him, a longing for a spiritual deepening of that which presents itself solely in the sensory world. And this urge, this longing, found its expression in him during this final period of his life—by virtue of his innate dispositions—solely in a lyrical form. And this is connected to the non-creative aspect of Nietzsche. He needed that which had an effect on him; that was what he could experience. Creative spirits could become objects for him, such as Richard Wagner. What the worldview of his time produced could become an object for him. What had flashed and shone forth in the second period of his life—the period of *Human, All Too Human* and so on—as a future creation of the soul now entered the field of vision of Nietzsche’s third period. Humanity became, for him, such that Nietzsche said to himself: This human being must be placed at the center of the worldview—but in much the same sense as anthroposophy appears in Troxler’s work, as outlined in the lecture I was able to give here a few weeks ago—: in humanity, he sought a higher human being. He could have found him, had Nietzsche been what one might call an epic-dramatic nature. If someone is of an epic-dramatic nature, they can step outside themselves to contemplate the spirit; then they develop the spiritual world, and then they present it. Nietzsche was not like that; Nietzsche was of a lyrical nature. In order for what was longing within him—what was urge and impulse within him—to come to life, Nietzsche needed something that would meet him in the external world. A spiritual world did not arise from his soul. And so, when he sought the higher human being within humanity, this human being could only— I might say, emerge within his lyricism, for lyricism—the lyrical element—is the fundamental element of the work *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, in which Nietzsche sought to depict how nature, indeed, rises from its purely natural state to humanity, but also how humanity can transcend nature to become the Übermensch—how humanity can become the Übermensch by continuing the development of nature. But because Nietzsche was, in his very soul, purely lyrical, this Übermensch arose within him as a longing. And when you really think about it, as you go through everything that confronts you in the lyrically so great, so powerful work *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, the Übermensch is nowhere to be found. Where, then, does he live? Where does he confront us in any concrete form? Where do we encounter anything that lived within man as a higher being and could lead man beyond nature? Where do we encounter anything that would depict him? Everywhere we encounter lyrically shaped longings; everywhere we encounter great, powerful lyricism—but nowhere is there anything that one can, so to speak, grasp intellectually. At most, Nietzsche could have encountered an indefinite, misty image of a Superman now, in the third period of his life.

[ 45 ] And another nebulous thought. Nietzsche could say to himself: When I consider this human life, it appears to me in such a way that I must experience it as having been formed out of certain preconditions. But it must contain within itself preconditions that correspond to all real forms of nature and spirit. And the thought was already alive in Nietzsche: The plant develops from the root to the flower and fruit, and within the fruit lies the seed; and the seed is, in turn, the starting point for the root, and from the root the plant emerges once more. A cycle, a becoming that unfolds rhythmically, that returns to itself: the eternal recurrence of human existence is the idea that takes shape in Nietzsche. But where is that which—and this, in turn, could take on an epic-dramatic character—is contained in present human life that truly reveals the spiritual-psychic as a core or seed, as something that would repeat itself in a later earthly life? Abstract eternal recurrence appears in Nietzsche, but not a concrete grasp of what is truly spiritual-psychic in human beings. A longing for that which can take shape beyond the sensory human being, a longing for that rhythm of life that appears in recurring earthly lives, yet an inability to glimpse into these great mysteries of existence: the third period of Nietzsche’s work.

[ 46 ] The first period provides him, for his longings and hopes, for his thirst for knowledge, with a person whom he can set before himself. Ultimately, this person becomes to him—I would say—what the mysteries of nature can become to the observer. One penetrates as far as one possesses within oneself the predispositions for what one seeks. One cannot go any further. Thus Nietzsche was able to penetrate Richard Wagner to the extent that Nietzsche himself possessed within himself the predispositions for Richard Wagner’s worldview and way of life. A person in the first period of his life; contemporary science in the second period of his life, which is now meant to satisfy his hopes and longings. That which lies in store for the future in the present—in the form of spiritual seeds within a spiritual science as we conceive it today—must develop from the general realization that: Within the sensual human lies the higher spiritual human; within a single earthly life lies the consequence of earlier earthly lives and the starting point of later earthly lives—that which is not yet here, and which therefore can only appear as indeterminate, as nebulous. Nietzsche, too, must experience this: a contemporary human being who confronts him as a complete human being; the natural sciences, which satisfy the modern era’s thirst for reality; and the vague longings of the age itself, which he is not yet able to give form to.

[ 47 ] These are the successive external facts that confronted Friedrich Nietzsche—and that were bound to confront him—in an age that, in a sense, sought to catch its breath within the development of German thought, after intellectual development had reached a climax, a point at which thoughts truly penetrate the spiritual world in a mystical way. For it is a Schopenhauerian illusion, a Nietzschean illusion—an illusion shared by all those who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, succumbed to the delusion that Hegel’s ideas were merely intellectualistic. But this belief had to arise because people lacked the breadth of breath to rise to the height and energy of Hegel’s worldview. Yet this need to catch one’s breath had to arise for the simple reason that, although Hegel and the other minds associated with him had indeed ascended to supersensible concepts, there is nothing supersensible within these supersensible concepts. Take a look at Hegel’s entire philosophy: it was decidedly developed through supersensory concepts. It consists of three parts: a logic composed of supersensory concepts, a philosophy of nature, and a philosophy of spirit—which, however, encompasses the human soul only insofar as it exists between birth and death, that is, what plays out in the material world and so on. In short, the spiritual aspect of knowledge is applied only to what surrounds us in the sensory world. Transcendental knowledge exists. But transcendental knowledge does not perceive anything transcendental. Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, this transcendental knowledge—which perceives nothing transcendental—had to lead to it being deemed, so to speak, completely unsatisfactory, and to a turning toward the sensory world itself, and that the musical element could enter and build a bridge to that era which now seeks to grasp, from the spiritual realm and directly through spiritual knowledge itself, the path of which we shall speak again in greater detail tomorrow. This is what is significant for spiritual life in the second half of the nineteenth century and right up to the present day. Nietzsche’s shattering spiritual experiences arose from the underlying supersensible knowledge, from the overwhelming of the human soul by mere sensory knowledge, and from the clinging to that which now entered as a substitute from an entirely different world.

[ 48 ] Nietzsche’s soul reveals how a profound soul was forced to suffer tragically in an era when the dominant ideological currents lacked any depth, and this is, in essence, the tragedy that unfolded within Nietzsche’s soul: the striving for depth, for an experience of depth that should have been there if Nietzsche were to have found satisfaction—a depth that was not there and that ultimately plunged Nietzsche’s spirit into utter despair. I need not go into the physiological and medical causes of his illness, but what took place within his soul is, at least in its broadest strokes, characterized by what I have attempted to describe. And so we see how this worldview, so overwhelmed by the tide of materialism, affects a soul that, by its very nature, aspires beyond materialism; how tragically mere materialism or mere positivism—or, indeed, whatever the second half of the nineteenth century could offer such a soul—must affect a human soul with a deeper need. That is why it seems so tragic to see how Nietzsche, at the outset of his literary career—when, drawing on the great figure of Richard Wagner, he wrote *The Birth of Tragedy*—inscribed in the copy he sent to Richard Wagner himself: “Create the daily work of my hands, great spirit, that I may complete it!” In the intimate dedication he addresses to Richard Wagner, Nietzsche implores the great spirit of the world to bestow upon him a daily work through which he can experience what his soul longs to experience, and through which he can describe to humanity how the spirit is experienced in sensual earthly life—how human beings lead their souls beyond the merely natural so that they, too, may find the path into the spiritual. The fulfillment of the tragedy had to come about because the nineteenth century could not give Nietzsche what he had implored of the Great Spirit. The Spirit could not provide him with the daily work of his hands. This Spirit of the nineteenth century could not provide it, and so it could not be accomplished by him either.

[ 49 ] Thus, particularly in what Nietzsche created later—namely, toward the end of his lucid life on earth, before his mind descended into madness—we find fragments, individual remarks, aphorisms, drafts, and notes on and about questions of worldview. But everywhere, in essence, we find starting points, questions, and riddles that, like a sphinx, peer into humanity’s intellectual future. This must be said in light of the fact that Nietzsche, too, is among those minds who are now so vilified by the enemies of Central Europe: In Friedrich Nietzsche’s soul, questions and philosophical riddles lived in a directly personal way, which will shine forth — whether in connection with Friedrich Nietzsche’s personality or separate from it, since he, after all, drew them solely from the worldview of the nineteenth century that he faithfully experienced firsthand — that will shine not only into the development of the German spirit but into the entire spiritual development of humanity in a future that may still be distant, and that will find satisfactory answers, but only then, when one—which Nietzsche was not yet fully able to do—will intuitively and fully understand the deepest meaning of what Goethe meant when he quoted the saying of an ancient spiritual researcher, intended to point out that while human beings can indeed penetrate the depths of the world, they must first find this depth within themselves in a living, creative way through self-knowledge—indeed, they must shape it within themselves. Nietzsche was on this path in his contemplation of Richard Wagner, but he was unable to follow it to its conclusion. This path will prove, time and again, the truth of this saying—which Goethe attributed to an ancient scholar of the spirit—through which Goethe seeks to express that we can find every depth, every infinite depth in the things of the world, once we have first attained a deepening of self-knowledge. Goethe expresses this in the words with which we wish to conclude this reflection today:

If the eye were not like the sun,
How could we see the light?
If God’s own power did not dwell within us,
How could the divine delight us?

[ 50 ] Indeed, a person sees only as much light in the world as he is able to kindle within himself. A person finds only as much of the divine in the world as he is able to shape within himself through self-knowledge.