The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, the Lonely Fighter, and Contemporary Culture

[ 1 ] [Nietzsche. The Intellectual Stages of the Poet-Philosopher’s Inner Development.] He was an artist of thought. Wisdom loved him, and he loved her. He hated Socrates. He wanted to revive (ancient) Greek civilization. He conjured up Greek art for us. The Greeks attained their greatness because they recognized the pain of the world. They yearned to achieve something that would make life bearable, and that is tragedy—that is art. Nietzsche sought another self in the present, and he found [Richard] Wagner. He then projected all his interpretations of the primal Greek instincts onto Wagner. He projected his self—his better self—onto Wagner. For him, Wagner became a different personality than Wagner actually was. He saw the great ideal of modern culture in Wagner. In 1876, he met the real Wagner in Bayreuth, and it became clear to him that he had seen himself in Wagner. And his former admiration turned into opposition. He turned away from himself. Nietzsche later became his own adversary. Schopenhauer became Nietzsche’s leading philosopher. He revered Schopenhauer’s personality, and he loved him like a father. For a time, Wagner and Schopenhauer became the vehicles [of his desire; he lashed out] against Strauss in the early 1870s. He preferred Christianity to the philistine [reverence] for Strauss.

[ 2 ] He now immersed himself fully in the scientific worldview. From this, he developed the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of all things. Just as humankind has evolved from the lowest forms, nature too must create something beyond itself, and from this arises the Übermensch. Just as humankind rises above the ape, so too can humankind now rise above its present state. He treated the people of the past with contempt, and the Übermensch with equal love. The Übermensch is to become the creator of a new standard of good and evil. Nietzsche had now found himself. He was able to present Zarathustra as an ideal. Man must die so that the Übermensch may live. He wrote: “My works are not for those of today; they are for those of the day after tomorrow.”

Newspaper article

For the benefit of the Pension Fund of the Cooperative of German Stage Artists, Royal Court Actor Dr. Paul Wiecke hosted a “Friedrich Nietzsche Evening” in the Musenhaus Hall the day before yesterday. The event was well attended, and its artistic success was certainly one that did credit to the artist. Not only was the latter able, in support of a worthy cause, to present himself once again as attuned to the contemporary currents of thought, but he also deservedly reaped applause and acclaim as the reciter of poems by the man whom the event was intended to honor. It is another matter entirely, however, to raise the question of whether Friedrich Nietzsche is to be taken so seriously as a poet as to be granted a voice in this manner. Certainly, a poetic vein pulsed through this artistic nature, but just as his musical talent never fully blossomed into an artistically mature and refined form, neither did his poetic talent. These are the outpourings of a poetically inspired but thoroughly sick mind, the reflections of a crumbling soul striving in vain for inner harmony. Even the most formally polished of these—one might call them “fantasies of a mentally ill person”—such as “Alt Mütterlein,” “Der Herbst,” “An den Mistral,” and others, can—measured against the standard set by our true poets—be regarded only as poetic experiments, or, if you will, as “samples of talent.” Woven into a lecture on Nietzsche, they are certainly much more appropriate and effective than when taken out of context. Like the even more tendentious and distinctly philosophical-poetic Zarathustra fantasies, they would help there to bring home to the soul the poignant tragedy of their creator’s fate and to arouse our compassion for the man who, as he said, “tried to make life bearable for his fellow human beings.” One may praise as a particular merit of the introductory lecture delivered by Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin the fact that he specifically drew the audience’s attention to this view of Nietzsche’s personality and intentions as a fighter against pessimism. Unfortunately, the speaker alone lacked the voice and manner of speech that would have allowed for a complete and unbroken understanding of his remarks. Yet at least the intellectual stages of the poet-philosopher’s inner development emerged clearly, above all the emergence of the megalomaniacal Zarathustra ego with all its disheartening consequences. One of Nietzsche’s few—presumably and hopefully—brilliant achievements, which we believe should be duly emphasized in the context of art, was, in our view, unjustly omitted by the speaker. He did emphasize that the poet-philosopher did away with the principle of bleak world-denial—which was already threatening to elevate Buddhist world-renunciation and asceticism to ideals—and established the affirmation of life in its rightful place. But he failed to point out in particular how this—despite the haughty character inherent in it—is in itself a nascent, constructive, and thus art-promoting force that should be joyfully welcomed.