The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. The Arena of Thought as a Result of German Idealism in Light of Our Fateful Times

Ladies and gentlemen!

[ 1 ] In this time of tremendous struggle for its very existence that the German people are facing, perhaps a spiritual gaze may also be cast—from the perspective, that is, from the sensibility of a spiritual-scientific worldview—upon that which lies 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 scope of spiritual science proper, for it has become clear from the various reflections I have been able to make here over the years [it will have become clear] just how closely I must regard the spiritual-scientific worldview as connected to that which the German spirit, that which the German national soul, out of its very essence and according to its innermost nature, strives for and has always strived for. And so, while tomorrow’s lecture will indeed also be directed, in accordance with this sensibility, toward what moves us so deeply in our present time, yet in a narrower sense will again be devoted 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 character of German national development by all those who have, in a deeper sense, pondered this character of German national development and its role in the overall development of the German spirit. It will not, I believe, be in the German way to imitate the methods now frequently employed by the enemies of the German people—those methods born of hatred, anger, or the compulsion to justify, in some way, an undertaking for which one does not yet wish to seek the actual reasons and perhaps cannot even seek them immediately in the present.

[ 2 ] Let the starting point, then, not be taken from anything that might hinder a characterization of German Idealism from the immediate present, but rather let it be taken from the thoughts of a German figure who, in a relatively peaceful time and in memory of great and significant experiences with one of the greatest German minds, once sought to give an account of the German essence. The starting point is taken from the words that Wilhelm von Humboldt, in 1830, when he wrote down his reflections on Schiller, which he then incorporated into this reflection on the German essence—from those words in which Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the finest Germans, sought to characterize how the German essence, when it acts spiritually, seeks to exert 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; 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 expressed in the great minds of the past century, constantly seeks to reveal what, in the totality of human existence, stirs the soul most deeply. It was from this frame of mind that Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller’s great friend, sought to characterize the German spirit in 1830. He said:

“No modern nation has succeeded to the same degree as the German in viewing art and all aesthetic endeavors from their true perspective—not even those nations of which the poet boasts that they will be recognized as great and outstanding throughout the ages. The deeper and truer direction in the German spirit lies in its greater inwardness, which brings it closer to the truth of nature; in its inclination toward the contemplation of ideas and the feelings associated with them; and in everything connected with this. This distinguishes it 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 pursuit of philosophy—even of the purest, most abstract philosophy, whose indispensable influence is all too often misunderstood and misinterpreted even among us—continues to live on within 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 achievements 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 one could separate them entirely from poetry and philosophy—would merely show what he possesses and has acquired. Without this focal point, which both illuminates and sparks inspiration, even the vast expanse of 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 inexplicable 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 spirit. And they never wanted 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 actually be understood only within the German worldview.

[ 4 ] This is not to say that idealism is something found only among the German people; that would, of course, be a ridiculous claim. 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 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, it is precisely this German idealism that has elevated the German worldview to the realm of thought, of which one can rightly say—as many of the finest Germans have expressed as their conviction—that life in the realm of thought in this manner is indeed a distinctly German characteristic!

[ 5 ] Just how little one needs to belittle others when discussing this German peculiarity is confirmed in this very analysis by the fact that we will 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 perspective, priority might even be given absolutely to foreign sensibility and foreign creativity.

[ 6 ] I would like to begin with a painting—an ambivalent painting. Imagine standing before the painting—which everyone is familiar with, at least in reproduction—that Michelangelo created in the Sistine Chapel: the “Last Judgment.” And compare the experience one can have standing before this painting with the one one can have when viewing the painting “The Last Judgment” by the German artist Cornelius in Munich’s Ludwigskirche. Standing before Michelangelo’s painting, one has 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 forget yourself completely. You become absorbed in every detail of this painting; you feel yourself merging with every line, every color, 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—drawing on your senses—in such a way that the forms and colors come alive before your eyes.

[ 7 ] 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 the form; one may not feel the spiritual drawn into the eye in the same way, nor the eyes, in turn, resting in what the painter has created through their activity; yet, in the quiet stillness of the soul, one will feel transported before the painting into the sacred realms of an artistic imagination; one will have an experience that does not merge with what one sees in the same way as with 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, but 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 and with one’s soul, transported into 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 in the realm of thought has also contributed to it—if one is able to enter this realm 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 sensuous and the moral, of the sensuous and world events. One must enter the realm of thought through Cornelius’s painting, precisely because Cornelius—who is one of the most quintessentially German painters—had to paint in a German manner by his very nature and essence; 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, but rather that every people 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.

[ 8 ] Let us move from this image to another—one that might also illustrate how one of the most quintessentially German of Germans, from the realm of thought, relates to what the world around him imparts upon him. Let us follow Goethe as he stood before Strasbourg Cathedral. We know from Goethe’s own biography how he experienced an infinite deepening of his soul as he stood before Strasbourg Cathedral. What did he feel at that moment? What he felt then must be characterized—if one wishes to characterize it more precisely—by pointing out the contrast. Goethe’s German worldview—one might say—confronted, in a natural, elemental way, precisely in the sight of Strasbourg Cathedral, the French worldview as it appeared to him at that time—a worldview whose value for general development he, Goethe, certainly did not wish to downplay in the least. A whole wealth of historical impulses played a part in what Goethe felt in his soul at that time upon seeing the 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.

[ 9 ] The following reflection may perhaps illustrate the historical influences that unconsciously shaped Goethe at that time. As the newer nations, in recent centuries—one might say—emerged from the twilight of humanity’s intellectual development to unfold what has given these very nations their present character, so, in this period, we find a French spirit that truly reveals to us the innermost impulse in the French worldview, insofar as it now arises not from the individual but from the individuality of the people—I mean Descartes, who lived from the sixteenth into the seventeenth century. Drawing from the French spirit, Descartes likewise elevates humanity to the stage of thought. As a solitary thinker—arising entirely from what the education of his people and his time could provide him—Descartes stands 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 stream of phenomena, presents itself to the human eye and soul? After all, the French spirit from which Descartes emerged had, only a short time 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 believes, 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, arising from this inner self, thoughts appear that seek to prove themselves. Yet, as Montaigne says, upon closer inspection, 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 ardent 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 asked. He found only one thing in the vast sea of doubt in which the soul initially swims when it enters the world: the certainty of one’s own thinking; for this is something we do ourselves—we can always conjure it up. Therefore, we can believe in thinking; we exist only insofar as we think. In this way, Descartes, in his own manner, elevated humanity to the stage of thought.

[ 11 ] But this is precisely what is peculiar—and truly, without wishing to offer a one-sided, disparaging critique— this is the distinctly French aspect of Descartes’ worldview: that Descartes experiences in his soul everything that this certainty of one’s own thinking can provide, that he seeks to demonstrate in the soul everything the soul can derive from the certainty of its own thinking—how the soul itself finds its way to God through thinking. But from this point of certainty of his, Descartes cannot arrive at that which reigns as truth in the nature surrounding human beings. He does indeed elevate humanity to the realm of thought; but he restricts the realm of thought to the boundaries of inner experience.

[ 12 ] And it is characteristic—very characteristic—that Descartes, in his attempt to examine everything that thought can discover, becomes entangled with this very 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 thought 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 becomes entangled within itself. But this had consequences; it led to France, in more recent times, becoming the classic land 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 mechanisms in the things that surround us in the world and lift our spirits and bring us joy. 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 substituted.

[ 13 ] This is how Goethe felt. This was the sentiment that took root in his soul as he allowed the worldview—which had emerged so characteristically from the French national sentiment of that time—to take hold of him, and it weighed upon his soul, in a sense unconsciously, as he, with his spiritual sensibility, entirely. from his Germanic essence, he turned 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 that strives 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.

[ 14 ] And yet, during that period, we see—precisely within the course of German development—souls emerging from the deepest, most innermost core of the German essence—from the contemplation of nature and of humanity, as we shall characterize it shortly—and pushing their way onto the stage of thought; but not onto the stage of thought in such a way that it would be 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. Two spirits within German development should be highlighted, who, precisely at that time, reveal what the German character is actually like at its innermost core with regard to the search for a worldview. One of these figures, who as an outward personality engages in the quest for a worldview, and another, who does not actually exist as an outward personality but is instead created solely as an ideal figure arising from the German spirit.

[ 15 ] One of them is Kant. Let us try to imagine Kant, specifically during the period from which this image—conceived in connection with Goethe—shines forth at us from the history of German thought. What, essentially, was he concerned with? It is so easy to say that around 1780—that is, roughly at the time when Goethe had that feeling, and when Kant’s *Critique of Pure Reason* was also published—Kant attempted to cast doubt on the existence of any true reality through human cognition. In truth, anyone who delves into the very core of Kant’s endeavor will find in him precisely the opposite of what lies at the heart of Descartes’s endeavor. Kant does not set out to cut off the human soul from the innermost source of the world’s 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 reach the place 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 very 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 these 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 without being 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.

[ 16 ] And Kant, we might say, went to great lengths to establish the validity of ideas and ideals for the human soul. Before embarking on his *Critique of Reason*, he engaged with the spiritualist Swedenborg. What Swedenborg perceived as a spiritual vision of what lies beyond the sensory world, Kant examined—examined it with the intention of gaining insight into whether there is another path through the gates of nature into the sources of nature and spiritual existence besides the one that external intellectual knowledge is capable of attaining. And from his examination of 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 phenomena.

[ 17 ] This Kantian aspiration now appears—I would say—to be deepened and individualized in an ideal figure, in that ideal figure which, for many people, rightly ranks among the greatest poetic and artistic creations of human existence to date: Goethe’s Faust. And as we contemplate Goethe’s Faust, just as Goethe presents him to us, we see directly the path of German Idealism toward the realm of thought. How, then, does this Goethean Faust actually stand before us? — Certainly, it is well known how intensely Goethe has his Faust strive toward the sources of existence, and it seems almost superfluous today to say anything more about Goethe’s Faust. But perhaps it is worth recalling that two traits of human spiritual life are inseparably linked to Goethe’s creation of Faust, traits 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—regardless of one’s personal stance on them—that are inseparably linked to Goethe’s creation of *Faust*?

[ 18 ] One might, so to speak, scoff at these two traits if one considers them in isolation from this work of poetry, from the perspective of a materialist 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 materialist worldview dismisses 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. One 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 knowledge derived from the senses and the intellect, turns to what is referred to as magic. Let us set aside the superstitious notions that are often associated with this word.

[ 19 ] How does this magical quest present itself to us? It presents itself in such a way that we can say: Faust confronts nature in such a way that he feels: Faust feels he has dealt with whatever a human being can immediately experience as a sensory impression, and whatever can be intellectually grasped on the basis of that sensory impression. 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. Human nature must be expanded in such a way that something sprouts within it, creating, from within, living links of mediation into living nature itself: an expansion of the human being beyond what one finds when surveying what the senses provide and what lives in the thinking to which Descartes directed humanity; making this human nature more alive than it is as shaped by its own immediate creative power.

[ 20 ] Thus, what the senses present is, as it were, for Faust merely a bark that appears to cover the true essence of nature. This outer layer must be penetrated, and beneath it 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 there as a living protest against what Descartes describes as the theater of thought.

[ 21 ] And as Faust seeks the spirit that “rises and falls in the tides of life,” shapes everything, acts everywhere, and lives everywhere—as Faust seeks “all creative power and seeds”—he stands in direct opposition to 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, strips it of its soul, 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, might likewise be mocked. 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* epic 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* epic, this evil is not portrayed in the usual anthropomorphic manner, but rather 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 intellect provide, just as he seeks to pierce through the bark to find the living, so must he break through what appears as mere moral law, piercing through to what is experienced in living spirituality behind the surface of soul experiences—like a personality, like a being.

[ 22 ] Just as Faust, on the one hand, seeks—in contrast to nature—the living reality beyond the sensory world, so, on the other hand, he seeks a relationship between the human soul and evil that now also penetrates—I might say—the shell that rises above the deeper soul than the everyday soul. In both directions, Faust seeks a way out of the confines into which, for example, Descartes and his worldview have confined the human soul: out into nature, and into the spiritual depths of the soul! And the fact that this striving for a relationship with evil—not a conceptual or ideal one, but one positively experienced—is deeply rooted in the spiritual development of the German spirit can be seen from the fact that a German philosopher greatly inspired by Goethe, Schelling, 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.” Thus, by raising the question: To what extent is that which presents itself 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 harmony with other thinkers of his time, called the “unfoundations of existence.” Thus did the power of evil come to life—so vividly within the German worldview—that the tragic struggle of the human soul against evil could be understood in all its vitality, rather than merely as abstract concepts.

[ 23 ] And when we combine what Goethe embodied in his *Faust*—drawing on German sensibilities—with what Goethe occasionally expressed when he sought to characterize the course of his own mind, we are repeatedly and time and again directed to that marvelous prose hymn to nature that Goethe wrote in the 1880s:

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

[ 24 ] then the wonderful words in it:

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

[ 25 ] 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 an understanding 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.

[ 26 ] We may now ask: Is such a striving—as we can recognize it 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 in fact arrive at a narrowing of the human soul to the realm of merely human thought, but was raised to the horizon on which the full scope of the ideas and ideals appeared to him—ideas and ideals that give humanity impulses in the course of its human development. One might say: What later found expression in Fichte, the most German of German philosophers, is already alive in Kant; what became so dear to the German worldview, especially from the eighteenth century onward, is already alive in Kant.

[ 27 ] This German worldview came at a high price: it held that a view of the world need not be swayed by what unfolds before the senses, for the absolute validity of what constitutes duty, love, divine devotion, and the moral world for human beings. As man surveys the world and considers the way in which he is situated within it, he does indeed see himself surrounded by the field of sensory impressions and by what he can intuit lies beyond them; but he also sees 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 placed 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 possess the coarse, sensory character that the world of external movement and external revelation possesses. One might say: As the German spirit looks upon the—symbolically speaking—rigidity and smoothness of natural existence, upon the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, so it feels the necessity to recognize: How can 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 within what is so indifferent in nature? How does the reality of moral ideals stand in relation to the reality of external nature?

[ 28 ] This is a question that one can perceive rather casually, but which can also be found to be heart-wrenching in its immense depth. And this is how the greatest German minds perceived it during the period when Kant’s worldview was taking shape. Sensibility, therefore, 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 aloof, causing moral ideas to bounce off it. As moral ideas from the spiritual world are transformed into action through human beings, they must not be repelled by 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 for the moral idea could be conceived, and then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical phrase—which nonetheless sprang from a deep German aspiration: All sensibility—everything we can observe and perceive 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 realizes itself through human beings perceiving it in ideas and ideals. And these are the true reality; they are what pulsates 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. Such words sprang from a worldview that seeks to grant the Spirit full validity—a worldview that must be sought from a natural inclination toward idealism; and while one may find such words one-sided—it does not matter; 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 a word, elevate German identity to the stage of thought precisely out of the idealistic character of the German national spirit.

[ 29 ] To give thought its vitality, human cognition and striving must extend beyond what Descartes was merely able to discover. And Goethe’s *Faust*—this embodiment of the highest human aspiration, this work that one must first bring oneself to understand by allowing many elements of German culture to take root within 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 *Doctor Faust*; and in the simple folk character he already saw the traits that he merely elevated to the stage of thought. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Goethe’s *Faust*, showing how something sublime has emerged from what lives deepest, most elemental, and most intimate 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 he gave it its essence, embodied it in a sense, so that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the highest aspiration of the German spirit toward the realm of thought.

[ 30 ] It is not the striving of isolated individuals arising from their own unique nature, but rather—precisely when it confronts us in all its grandeur, emerging from the entire national character—[then] it is the result of German Idealism. And how does this idea function within German Idealism? — One gains an insight into how it operates precisely by comparing this German-idealistic pursuit of thought with what is also a pursuit of thought—let us take Descartes, for example. In Descartes, thought confines human beings within the narrowest of bounds; it functions as a mere thought and, as such, remains limited 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 interweaves through the universe, that which is spiritual outside of human beings, that which lies above and below the human spirit, of which nature is the outer manifestation and the life of the soul is the inner manifestation.

[ 31 ] Thus, thought becomes a reflection 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, by piercing this veil, man not only brings something to mind but also enters 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 merely outer shells, and for which even thought is but an inner revelation—into that in which human beings live and act, in which they know themselves to be part of a living entity that creates within them the stage for their thoughts.

[ 32 ] And so we can see how, precisely in those times when the German spirit seemed so detached from external reality and external experience as it strove toward a worldview, this German spirit felt itself fully in control and at work within the realm 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 only in that which can emerge in a conceptual manner from the depths of the world and present itself directly to the human soul. This is the essence of his worldview: what counts for him is 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.

[ 33 ] For his successor Schelling, the urge toward nature—the Faustian urge—becomes so vivid within him that any understanding of nature that seeks to express itself solely in concepts about nature is, to him, worthless. 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, yet in keeping with the essence of Germanness, is a statement made by Schelling: “To know nature is actually 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, if it is rightly 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!

[ 34 ] In the work of the third of the German idealist philosophers, Hegel—who is so difficult to understand and so distant from many—this vibrant character of the arena of thought appears in the same way within German idealism. This worldview strikes us as strange in our present age, when the abstract is so frowned upon and the mere thought is so little loved. And yet Hegel feels deeply connected to the direction of Goethe’s nature toward the spirit. The content of his worldview—what is it other than mere thinking, a progression from one thought to the next? A thought-organism is presented to us along with his worldview; this creates for us the necessity of confronting a mere thought-organism—which we can only create ourselves—just as we would confront another organism with our senses. But behind this presentation of a thought organism lies a consciousness, a certain disposition. This is the disposition that, when a person strips away from his worldview all sensory sensation, all sensory perception for a few moments of worldview contemplation—when he strips away everything he wills and feels as an individual, when he surrenders himself to what is at work in Being, as if thought itself were taking one step after another—then the human being 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 World Spirit thinks within me, and I surrender myself as a stage for the World Spirit, so that in what I, as a soul, offer to the all-ruling World Spirit, this Spirit may develop its thoughts from stage to stage and show me how it lays its thoughts at the foundation of the world’s becoming.”

[ 35 ] And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience, wholly and entirely within the soul, only that which this soul can experience when it surrenders, by renouncing all of its own being, to the thought that thinks itself within it. One must also view this Hegelian philosophy—this highly idealistic distillation of the German spirit—in such a way that one does not regard it as a dogma to which one may or may not swear allegiance, but rather as something that can stand before us as a symptom of German striving during a certain period. In Hegel’s worldview, the world spirit appears, as it were, as a mere thinker.

[ 36 ] But just as it is true that much, much more than [mere] thought was necessary to shape the world, so it is true that the path—which once led to to seek logic in this way—is one of those that instills in human beings a sensibility for the living force that governs existence and leads them not to the realm of abstract, intellectual thought, but to that of living thought, which, in the experience of thought, experiences the world. The three idealists—Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—sought to elevate the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different directions: Fichte, by attempting to shine light into the deepest recesses of the human “I” and not 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. It is not through the act of thought, not through mere thinking, that I can arrive at my ‘I,’ but through an act of action. This is a ceaselessly creative process.” It does not depend on gazing at its own being. It leaves behind its previous being, but because it has the power to recreate itself in the very next moment—through the act of action—it is constantly coming into being anew. Fichte grasps the idea not in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the stage of thought itself, where it creates vividly and lives creatively.

[ 37 ] And Schelling—he attempts to understand nature, and with a truly German spirit he immerses himself in nature’s mysteries, even though, of course, one can dismiss his statements as fanciful if one takes them as dogma. Yet he immerses himself with his deepest being in natural processes, 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 one is with a friend. This is a quintessentially German trait in Schelling’s character.

[ 38 ] Goethe sought to approach nature in a similar way from his own perspective—just as his Faust expresses it, as if to the “bosom of a friend.” There, Goethe—to illustrate how far removed any abstract observer of [such] contemplation of nature—he calls what he is to the Earth as an external natural scientist his “friendship with the Earth.” The German spirit in Goethe feels so human, so immediately alive in the spirit reigning in nature through the desire to be scientific, in that he seeks to elevate science itself to the stage of thought.

[ 39 ] And Hegelian logic—abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel—what will become 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 a true sense of the global significance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel, that which seems furthest removed from mysticism—clear, crystal-clear—one might say—crystal-cold thought itself—is felt and experienced in such a way that, while thought indeed reigns 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, the highest clarity and conceptual sobriety become, in Hegel, the warmest, most vibrant mysticism. This magic arises from the way in which, emerging from immediately living idealism, the German spirit rises to the stage of thought. It thereby proves that what matters is not which individual expressions one arrives at, but from which depths of the soul 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 simply dry and cold themselves. Anyone who is able to engage with this logic in the right way can sense how it pulsates forth from German idealism; such a person can sense, in the seemingly abstract ideas that in Hegel appear to be spun one from the other, the most vivid warmth of the soul—the warmth necessary to allow all that is merely human to fall away from the human being and to unite with the Divine, so that in Hegel, logic and mysticism are no longer distinguishable; that while there is nothing nebulous about it, a mystical underlying principle certainly prevails down to the very finest details.

[ 40 ] Right up to our own time, the German spirit has striven—even among the opponents of German Idealism—to repeatedly and persistently probe the idealistic essence of this German character in its significance as an enigmatic question. And when one turns one’s gaze to the finest German minds—even those who oppose Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—one finds that German development consists precisely in assimilating, more and more, the fundamental impulses of this idealism. How these fundamental impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has been discussed often and will be discussed even more often.

[ 41 ] It is worth noting how—one might say—German Idealism, after reaching one of its pinnacles 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 full expression in minds of the very, very highest order—extending into the middle of the nineteenth century and into the last third of the nineteenth century, during which the prevailing view was: Such creative work, as expressed, for example, in Goethe’s *Faust*, where thought truly and directly seizes the imagination and can give rise to dramatic creation—it was believed that this were possible only within poetry, but that the development of humanity showed that, for example, music occupied a different realm; that music, so to speak, was the realm that grasped the highest in human beings without taking the roundabout path sought through 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 experiences one could have had up to that point in the course of human development—for example, by contrasting the Don Juan legend with the Faust legend; it has been argued how misguided it is 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 a person wholly absorbed in sensual experience—represents can be portrayed only through music that immediately stirs and seizes sensuality.

[ 42 ] The way in which the German rises to the realm of thought—not in an abstract sense, but in a living, vibrant way—has also served to refute this view. In Richard Wagner, we see before us in modern times the spirit who has triumphed over the merely externally sensory 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 elements of thought there is nothing that could resist or withstand the vitality that reigns in German thought. Just as 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 comes to live and weave as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself, then, on the other hand, the element that flows in an immediate sensory succession 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 has thereby effected the elevation of an artistic-sensual element into an immediately spiritual atmosphere.

[ 43 ] This aspect of German Idealism—which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the stage of thought—is what I wanted to outline briefly today. This aspect of German idealism—this vivid grasp of thought that would otherwise be lifeless—is a 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 capable of bringing thought to life within himself and placing himself within German national character. Truly, the German can arrive at the fundamental character of his people’s essence only by delving ever deeper into the self-knowledge of human nature. And this, it seems to me, the German can truly sense 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 as arising from the task that appears to have been entrusted to it as a sacred duty by the forces and powers of the world themselves.

[ 44 ] And since today, in a different way than in the times we have mainly been discussing, the German people must fight to achieve their global standing and significance, the very reason for which the German people are now entering into a struggle of world-historical proportions must come vividly to life in our minds. The deeper connection between the German soul—which struggles its way through the course of world history—and the bloody events of our time, which, though born of pain and suffering, nevertheless bring us solace—this deeper connection will have to be established more and more clearly by future history.

[ 45 ] My sole intention in today’s reflection was 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 reason, we may draw attention to it. And we need not—as, unfortunately, happens today among our enemies—invent all sorts of things that might serve to belittle our adversaries; rather, we can highlight the positive qualities at work in the essence 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.

[ 46 ] From this perspective, we need not fall into the same 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, by seeking to characterize the German spirit—in what they consider its barbarism and baseness—seek to elevate themselves; indeed, the French felt they needed, as they believe, a new form of sophistry. And thinkers who, immediately before the war, spoke with high regard of the German spirit—even at renowned institutions of learning, where they spoke with the utmost esteem—such individuals, as we can hear, now find it possible to take the position that, given the very nature of his worldview, the German can do nothing other than conquer, or, as Boutroux says, assimilate what surrounds him; for the German, Boutroux argues, does not wish to ascend modestly to the sources of existence, but rather claims to be connected to these sources, to carry the divinity within himself, and therefore to must 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.

[ 47 ] 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—truly evident from what Germans can experience in the realm of thought that the way Hegel’s students thought—which Schelling (who was still alive) and his students perceived 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 in a living way, 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 that had arisen. A London newspaper wrote at the time what it presumably considered a witty article about this controversy, 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 comes to terms with things most easily 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.

[ 48 ] 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; the [French] philosophers need a new form of sophistry to belittle Germany—a new form of sophistry they have embraced ever since the outbreak of the war. And the Italians? They, too, need something to reassure themselves about their own actions at present. Without arrogance, the German may say: He will be uplifted amid the difficult global situation when he thinks precisely of the duty intended for him by the world spirit, as he gains self-knowledge and this becomes for him an understanding of the German essence. What he is to do flows to him as insight from the understanding of the German essence. When d’Annunzio spoke his resonant words before the Italian war broke out, he truly did not delve as deeply into the Italian national character as he could have. But for us Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in the great things the Roman spirit has created—it is not for us to believe that d’Annunzio’s hollow-sounding words truly stem from the deepest essence of 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 the years leading up to the war, a peculiar justification: they needed a new saint, a saint truly redefined within the profane realm—“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.

[ 49 ] Perhaps it will be precisely the objective, unbiased observer of the German essence who will be able to find his footing within today’s historical events; for it is not from such “sophistry,” such a “mask,” nor even from the “proclamation 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 greatest minds have revealed to the German people out of the national spirit of the German people, and from what these minds also hoped for the people—for this, too, is a distinctive feature of this German character, which might be described as follows: The German has always sought to direct a spiritual gaze 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.

[ 50 ] 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 engage with 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 what 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 widest 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 pondered this: In imagination, in the life of the soul, in idealism, the German sought to rise to the highest heights that he could in any way conceive. There he had a power to unleash that must lie within his very nature and that gives us hope that this power will bear fruit and triumph in action. Let us quote the words of a simple German admirer of *Faust*, an admirer of the poetry that so clearly demonstrates that the German spirit harbors the forces of the future. Pointing to words spoken by Goethe himself—a sixty-five-year-old man who, with a sense of foreboding, projected himself into Germany’s future—this admirer of *Faust* adds his own words and says:

“The solemn style, the sublime art of the ancients,
The primordial mystery of eternal forms,
It is familiar to both humans and gods,
It will turn the pages of rocks as well as 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 come upon it,
It has shattered the greenhouse’s glass.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the world’s delight.
Already I see new rays of sunlight flying.
And when my gray eyelids close,
A gentle light will still pour forth,
From whose reflection—from those stars
My late-born grandchildren will learn to see,
So that in prophetically loftier visions
They may recount what is higher about God and humanity.”

[ 51 ] And the Faust observer from the 1960s continues:

“Let us add the hope that the words of the Master, who looks down upon us with gentle light from better stars, may come true for his people—a people seeking 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 may also find their place and their glorification—no longer as symbolic shadows, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality—alongside German thought and German sentiment!”

[ 52 ] We believe that, out of our times—out of the vitality and the energetic, creative, and courageous spirit of our age—such hopes may be fulfilled, hopes that have been expressed by the finest Germans from the depths of the German national spirit. We believe that in these difficult times, when an atmosphere of hatred looms over the German people, they can draw upon another source of strength: that they can actively embrace, to bolster their resolve, a love for what has been handed down as a sacred legacy in the spirit and strength, in the life and deeds of their forefathers—because they 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 blissful deeds of the present, which the German performs not out of a lust for war, but out of devotion to a necessity imposed upon him by history.

[ 53 ] Thus, in these difficult times, what can sustain the German people, lift them up, and guide them through the arduous struggle in which they find themselves is embedded in German life, in German work, and in German feelings and sensibilities: love for Germany’s past, faith in Germany’s present, and confident hope for Germany’s future!