The Rudolf Steiner Archive

18. Robert Hamerling as a Philosopher and Reformer

[ 1 ] It would, of course, go far beyond the narrow confines of a lecture if I were to speak even in a general way about Hamerling’s entire personality. Precisely what the world knows best about him—what has had the greatest impact on the world—Hamerling’s poetry—is to be [completely] excluded from today’s discussion. What defines Hamerling the philosopher—some may be able to form an idea of this who have heard, read, or otherwise learned what Hamerling set forth in the final work of his very prolific career, his Atomistik, as a critique and conception of human knowledge. The existence of this work justifies speaking of him as a philosopher.

[ 2 ] Some of our friends may have wondered how I could call this solitary singer, thinker, and poet—who lived more and more exclusively in the quiet of his home—a reformer. But if, somewhere high up at a suitable altitude, swept by the crisp mountain air, surrounded by the most wondrous views of magnificent landscapes, there stands a house whose windows one closes and never opens, never looking out, and lets the air remain as it is when no window is opened, and says: “I feel nothing of the magnificent Alpine air,” and so on, [gap], [that] does not make it any less true that the landscape and the Alpine air are still there. If an era is incapable of allowing the reformatory aspect of a personality to take full effect upon itself, that cannot prevent one from [not] losing sight of what is inwardly significant about that personality. [I want] to use this image to indicate what I mean when I speak of him as a reformer.

[ 3 ] As a philosopher, Hamerling is—for those who do not wish to be confined by specialized philosophical scholarship—[not only] an extraordinarily interesting figure, but also a significant [major gap] [personality]. The world works [now] just as it did [back then], when Goethe emerged as a naturalist and people were quick to judge: “He should stick to poetry; he’s a poet—how could he possibly have any understanding of nature?” – That is essentially how it was with Hamerling when he surprised people with his “atomism” and they, more or less loudly or quietly, leveled this judgment against him: “What does he want with a worldview?”

[ 4 ] Those who are more firmly grounded in professional philosophy—with very few exceptions—have seen in “Atomism,” in [Hamerling’s] entire philosophy, nothing more than what a poet who is not a philosopher is not permitted to say or write, [and] this is because he, [as] a poet, is condemned from the outset to bear the mark of dilettantism [must]. Here in Austria, a leading philosopher, Knauer, has studied his work and has also done it justice in university lectures from his own perspective.

[ 5 ] There [would be] much to say if I were to trace the entire philosophical impulse of Hamerling back to the philosophical [development] of humanity, and in fact, only in this way [could one] do justice to this impulse. He has not expressed an opinion on how one should respond to those who deny him the profession of a philosopher as such because he is a poet.

[ 6 ] And for those who do not wish to categorize human activity according to this or that discipline and [who] recognize that it must flow from humanity as a whole—that it is the human being who matters above all else—[they] will know precisely what is significant [about Hamerling]: what he intended. A few of his words [are] shared here—what he [considers] to be philosophy and [what] that can be to him.

I did not suddenly take up philosophy some time ago—whether long or short—simply because I happened to feel like it or because I wanted to try my hand at a different field. I have been engaged with the great problems of human knowledge since my early youth, driven by the natural, irresistible urge that compels all human beings to seek the truth and solve the mysteries of existence. I have never been able to view philosophy as a specialized field of study that one can pursue or set aside, like statistics or forestry, but have always regarded it as the exploration of what is closest, most important, and most interesting to everyone.

[ 7 ] Once one has formed firmly held convictions, one cannot help but take sides. And just as he did not want to allow himself to be confined to one side, [as we see in the following sentence]:

I never felt like a “specific,” exclusive poet. Above all, I felt like a human being—a whole, complete human being—and of all my intellectual interests, the great problems of existence and life were closest to my heart.

[ 8 ] I would like to elaborate on these words in two ways: first, that one might wish for as many souls as possible to learn to think in this way—in the context of full, whole humanity—about what constitutes the mystery of philosophy [illegible passage]. The other point is this: one should strive to rise to a view befitting human dignity, drawing from the perspective of a man who was as deeply intertwined with all that can be called human thought as Hamerling was. For it is one thing to cherish such a sentiment, and quite another to lovingly draw close to a great man who can serve as a model for the soul. [Gap]

[ 9 ] One might say: Just as a person in the latter half of the nineteenth century had to stand within that fabric of thought, so he stood. Even if one believed oneself to be approaching things without prejudice, one inevitably faced the great questions of existence through the lens of the impulses of one’s time. And the way an era thinks, the way it feels about the great problems—this weighs on every individual thinker. And it is precisely the thinker who, with bold vigor, seeks to delve into the impulses of human spiritual activity—indeed, [the one] who is meant to solve the riddles—who bears the heaviest burden of the thoughts and feelings that the era has given rise to.

[ 10 ] One can speak of what philosophy is only since thought entered Western culture with the dawn of Greek intellectual life. The more precise justification [is]: With it [came] a new alertness. Any talk of philosophy that suggests a Greek precursor would be amateurish: [Thought] reached its highest peak with Plato. Aristotle: How was he able to reach his highest peak alongside Plato? Because for the Greeks, the experience of thought was something entirely different from the experience of thought in our time. [Indeed], even before the birth of thought, the perception of the world was still largely through symbols, through images. But this immersion in the mysteries of the world in the form of images meant that the soul still felt at home within nature. As thought awakened, the soul began to separate itself and began to grow lonely.

[ 11 ] For the Greeks, the concept was something entirely different than it was for people of the nineteenth century. That was [the very thing] that is usually not taken into account at all, even though it is of infinite importance. Today we can distinguish; [we can] say: The rose is red. I form the concept of the rose; we create that [concept]; [it] is our own product; [the rose] does not reveal it to us in the same way that the rose reveals its redness. – External history knows nothing of the fact that this separation of perception and concept only came about over the course of time. For Plato, the concept was perceived just as much as sensory perception. He felt differently toward the concept than he did toward the redness. He cannot yet feel as isolated with the concept as modern man does, and the Greek lives in the perceived world of thought. The world guarantees him, at the same time, everything that seeks to enter the soul as thought.

[ 12 ] Now that [illegible] has been established, we see [the] struggle to imbue the soul more and more with thought. Perception is regarded as something that reveals itself in things for a long time to come; as for thought, we know that the soul is its own creator. The thought is [an] interesting problem. [This is evident from] how, throughout the centuries up to the eighteenth century, the question had to be posed, as it were, from the deepest impulses of the soul: Yes, we do experience thought within ourselves; what right do we have to seek to [understand] something about the mysteries of the world through thought? [We] cannot say that what we think is given somewhere; after all, we are the ones who create the thoughts.

[ 13 ] This [is] a pivotal point in modern intellectual development. Something [that] shines forth like a flash of lightning, [as if] from another consciousness upon the thought—this is what vividly emerges [in] what Goethe writes from Italy, as he reflects on the primordial animal and [the] primordial plant. He forms the thought, but as he constructs it, he says: This must be an inner structure capable of [enabling thought] with the possibility of life. He had reached a point where the following lived fully and consciously within him: The thought is in the soul, but I can penetrate even deeper; in what I have actively worked out for myself—what I can process into a mental image, what I can bring to life—there I can descend into the deep shafts of being. I descend into the depths of nature and draw out from the caverns of being what it does not reveal to me, but what I sense behind the world of existence. [Gap] He was too much of a positive spirit to be [able] to fully work out [the conclusions]—with all their consequences—from this thought in which all the modern riddles of the world are entangled.

[ 14 ] And then Hegelianism came along. Many philosophical “homunculi” cannot grasp the great achievement of Hegelianism. It is the attempt to enliven thought within the soul in such a way that the soul itself grasps, through thought, what is the center, the original source of life: You stand within the very source of thought. – Hegel accomplished something immensely great by setting forth the entire purity of thought, by showing that in the living fusion with thought one finds the very [illegible] mysticism.

[ 15 ] Where does one stand when confronting Hegel in the history of the development of philosophy? Let us consider a grain husk and assume that we can accurately study the nature of each individual grain, study it as food chemists [and] ask ourselves: What is the essence of the grain that makes it suitable, through this or that which it contains, to be good human food? Let us study everything the grain undergoes as a result of having to be removed from the ear—harvested from the ear—so that it undergoes the transformation into human food. Let’s assume that, in doing so, we would completely forget that at least one grain from this ear could also be used not to be eaten, [but] to follow its own developmental impulses, to remain within its own flow. Note the difference between the two stages of asking the grain: “To what extent are you suited to becoming food?”—and then: “How are you best suited to becoming a new plant?”

[ 16 ] Human thought, [the] concept, has these two aspects. One can look at the concept and ask: How can one use the concept to create images of the external world? And one can formulate many profound ideas in the theory of knowledge. If one develops this concretely, one inquires all the way to the source of existence; in doing so, one treats it like the grain that becomes food. In this regard, Hegel is the greatest who has ever lived. But [he] did not go so far as to ask: Can the concept move forward in a straight line, does it have an inner driving force, can it be a seed?—No, for then he would have had to answer: Then it would not have to be viewed as an image, but rather as something that sinks into the soul and takes effect in meditation, and so on and so forth.

[ 17 ] In the nineteenth century, philosophy was faced with the task of instilling the concept into the human mind, but lacked the means to do so. This task still lies before us today; theosophy is meant to solve it. This task has not been assigned to it arbitrarily, but [out of] necessity. Everything in modern times points to this. Let us imagine the modern philosopher. [We] can picture him saying: Now I see what the concept can give me. – One thus becomes a modern philosopher, a Kantian. Or else a person feels, through the vitality of his soul, that something is now alive—like the germinative power of thought, like a life-awakening force within the whole soul. Whoever wishes to experience this must be a whole person; he need not yet solve the problem, but he can feel it.

[ 18 ] If we take Hamerling from a single perspective, we see in him the urge to find the concept within the self-aware “I” in such a way that the concept comes to life. “Atomism” is a struggle, but because the time was not yet ripe enough, it is a struggle that teaches meaningfully but could not lead to where there is truly hope. [gap]

[ 19 ] Concrete form. Precisely [the question] of pleasure and pain that preoccupied Schopenhauer and Hartmann—the question that led to pessimism. There is a great deal [of pedantry in this], in the way Hartmann insisted that pleasure is far less significant, [and that it] should be classified as displeasure. [I would just like] to point out how Hartmann set out to determine: This is pleasurable, that is unpleasant, and so on and so forth. Like someone who keeps a ledger of debits and credits in human existence, adding or subtracting; displeasure constitutes the surplus, so [therefore] pessimism is justified, and people must strive to lose their lives. The calculation is, after all, difficult to verify.

[ 20 ] Hamerling did not check the calculations; rather, he demonstrated that the calculation cannot be done this way. That is what human thinking does, but this thinking does not reach down into the depths of the self-aware “I,” and this is proven by the fact that, in practice, people do not ask themselves at all: Does life bring me more pleasure or displeasure? If reason were the actual guiding principle, people would not make this calculation. The soul is not wired that way. Hamerling says: There is something in life that makes life a source of pleasure; it does not depend on whether pleasure or displeasure prevails, but rather on the fact that [such a] force—the joy of life—exists within the human being. He poses the question in a way that brings joy: How does one descend into the self-aware “I” of the human being to find there more than what can be attained through thinking?

[ 21 ] This stands as an unspoken, subconscious demand placed upon people to descend ever deeper into the depths of self-awareness. If one is a modern philosopher, then this modern philosophy weighs heavily upon one—and it weighs heavily indeed. One is supposed to descend into one’s own depths of self-consciousness; one is supposed to find something there where the concept of life is kindled, so that one knows oneself to be one with the sources of existence of the soul itself and of all external nature. There, one is confronted with this: Yes, when light waves vibrate in there, they affect our ears [and] eyes. There is something entirely different in there; it is only because it affects the eye that light actually exists; it is only because airwaves strike the ear in there that sound exists. Without this understanding, the world is dark and silent. All of this weighs heavily on souls—and most of all on the finest souls, for they see themselves in a world of sound [and] colors and so on.

[ 22 ] [It is a] long story of how this concept developed over the centuries and was refined by Kant, and how we must take it for granted because we are children of our time. So there stood Hamerling, feeling within himself the impulse to descend deep within and find within himself that which connects him to the primordial source; [but] facing him [was] the modern view of nature, which says that there is only the external effect of the sensory world … [large gap]

[ 23 ] [A] telling remark by Hamerling [is the following]:

Certain stimuli produce the smell in the olfactory organ. Something is happening inside—it has nothing to do with the rose. “How?” someone here exclaims, “Sound cannot exist without an ear,”

[ 24 ] and so on and so on. The spirit of the nineteenth century could not and was not allowed to think otherwise; one was trapped in the world of the senses, one was supposed to descend into the self-conscious “I,” but could not find [the] inner resilience that would enable one to ascend. To someone who has little interest in philosophical questions, this may seem curious, but for philosophers [it is] as if they were spun into a sentence, without the possibility of somehow sprouting out and [entering] the source of existence.

[ 25 ] Of course, ordinary philosophers can say things like that—it’s all part of [development], and so on. People like Hamerling, however, must take such matters seriously. And things do become serious for Hamerling, so profoundly does this outcome of nineteenth-century thought affect the great Hamerling. [These are] beautiful words about what the human being of the nineteenth century could become:

If this does not make sense to you, dear reader, and your mind rebels against it, then do not read a single line further, for you lack the ability to accept a fact impartially and grasp the idea.

[ 26 ] This state of being ensnared has become a matter of course. [And one in ten] individuals would have to ask themselves this question if they believe they could break through the veil of the senses—as if that were the only way—to penetrate the world of reality. Many speak of the subconscious depths of the soul, saying one should descend to the self-aware ego, one should emerge from mere intellectual knowledge [illegible], but when he speaks in this way about how the human soul should take a different path, one always has the sensation of the Chinese man [in Chamisso’s poem] who turned around and wanted his topknot in front, [but] it is always behind [him]. [So] Bergson turns around; reason does not do so—intuition does—he tries to grasp it, but cannot, and “the pigtail hangs behind him.”

[ 27 ] It was a cutting through of the knot, as [with] Hamerling, when the humanities did not yet exist, and thought animated itself through meditation; there he said: Reflection cannot lead us down; rather, it is through self-awareness and will that [one arrives there]. And now he stands at the crucial point. Suppose he had said to himself: “Beneath the flashes lie feeling and will; we must descend”; [he would have] not merely said it, but carried the thought down to where the will reigns, and allowed it to be grasped by the will—what would have happened? Spiritual science would have arisen, like a seed that has been sown. Hamerling stands at many such points; [one] need only take up these thoughts, and then they are just as we would have to take them into the hand of the spirit and say: Just handle them correctly, lock the gate, and spiritual science will emerge from them. He certainly did not want to be understood as someone to be merely parroted, but rather that his concepts take root in souls—something he could not discern under the weight of his circumstances—that they find their way into souls that have allowed themselves to be inspired by his thoughts. He is a living spirit, a spirit that is animated.

[ 28 ] When we laid him to rest [in 1889] and [knew how] for years his body had been a veritable hell, as he struggled so with the problems of existence, one truly had the feeling at the funeral of how tragically the great problems had wrestled to the death within this man. Such was this life. One cannot imagine Hamerling’s soul in this incarnation with a healthy body. One can imagine him just as the herald of thoughts lived in this spirit. If one were to imagine him with the thoughts that “revolted” within him—[as they] had stepped out into the world—one would have to form a different conception of it: The world would have closed in on him from all sides, shutting the windows instead of opening them, and made him as sick as he was. He recognized before his incarnation that this was necessary; that is why he had chosen a sick body—so that he would not have to step out. Yet he thought in a way that others simply do not. This led the nineteenth-century worldview to develop monism, whose leading figures were Haeckel and Field Marshal Ostwald—that monistic materialism which rejects, regardless of whether it is the view held by Huxley, or [images], or everything that extends into the sensory world. It presents human beings as entities in which the soul is merely the result of the physical body, and what the body produces is the soul—just as when a flame is lit, the combustible material that the flame produces [generates smoke], so life and consciousness flicker from the surface; and this view is merely an abstraction.

[ 29 ] The knowledge that [exists] is entirely true, but it is true only in the same way that a small part of the truth is true. It is true that the effects they investigate exist, but these effects themselves are brought about by the soul; the soul is more comprehensive. Is all of this reality?—No, it is an extreme abstraction, a part of reality. The human being conceived by Haeckel and Ostwald does not exist; rather, it is the human being who constructs this for himself and holds onto it between birth and death. And within the mineral aspects of existence, the human soul-spirit pulsates. The worldview will focus precisely on what is entirely real and present a mere abstraction, a mere fantasy; the fact that he had to struggle in this way created within him the sense of this abstraction, of this part of the part of the human being that philosophers call a reality.

[ 30 ] But the poet did not stop there; he was consumed by a reformist impulse. The following thought pulsed within his soul like a feeling, like a sensation: A person can be so foolish as to see only a part of his entire being, and can theoretically conjure up the chimera of a merely material human being. This shows nothing other than that such a person, who believes himself to be particularly enlightened, sees only a small part of what it means to be human. But he has the capacity to relate to this figment of his imagination in a certain way, and he need not remain stuck there; rather, he can take this into his emotional impulse—not merely imagining, “I am a collection of limbs”—but behaving as if only mechanical forces were at work within him. Human beings have the freedom to act on this as well. And he looked at modern people and their archetypes. It is true, of course, that they are not merely mechanical puppets—there is something more behind them—but modern people live as if only mechanical forces were directing them, and they embody this; they are homunculi.

[ 31 ] He—[Hamerling]—imagines that modern human development will truly take such a form that people turn away from what they actually are, and instead act on their impulses in a way that reflects what others believe them to be. This is how the “homunculus” idea—the contemporary idea—came into being, [and] it holds up a mirror to modern humanity: You have already managed to live out the materialistic ideal.

[ 32 ] Where does this ideal lead? Well, it led to the figure of the “Homunkulus” [in Hamerling’s satirical epic poem]. [This] figure must not have emerged from the hidden realm through spiritually connected forces, [but] according to laws established by modern materialism: that he would embody what he had imagined, what a human being is. He is not a complete human being, but he leaps out of the retort. His first act is to reach for a book and review it, and he does indeed manage to do so; yet he is immediately nervous—he is only half a human and must therefore return to the retort to be made into a human embryo, one that may well have a mother but no father. He is half artificially conceived. He is what would have to emerge if what the world imagines to be a human being were to be released into the world. One does not see it, but this human being is particularly well-suited to laying the foundations of modern culture. He begins by writing poetry; he is incapable of learning anything substantial. He cannot find a publisher, but manages to win over one who sells his poems, and since he has established all sorts of connections, they receive favorable reviews. If he sells the poems, he is to marry [the publisher’s] daughter. But the publisher gives his daughter to another newspaper editor.

[ 33 ] If a reformer is someone who envisions the future, then he founds a newspaper just as they are actually founded today. Hamerling could not foresee with his own eyes how newspapers are founded today. A Berlin newspaper founder may not have exactly served as a model, but he was a carbon copy of one. He goes beyond that; he has not only the strength but also the consistency to put into practice what others shy away from—what the homunculi, that is to say, the monists, cannot comprehend.

[ 34 ] [Homunculus] has all the monkeys searched for and raised as humans. The monkeys do this better than any human; it all works out wonderfully—they even appeal to the women who have remained conservative, dressing just like modern women, and one sees that it finally comes to this: humanity has come to look like this to the monkeys—they’re just humans, after all. People used to say “bestial”; now it sounds “human-like” [among those] who mimic him. He draws the logical conclusion of modern homunculism, [that is] monism. Within him live the [most powerful] and [healthiest] ideas of the modern age, and why shouldn’t he become a pessimist? He throws himself into the Rhine, finds his soulless wife, and the couple emerges, retreating to [a] distant island—since life as apes didn’t work out—where everything possible flourishes and thrives—Eldorado. Things unfold there [as if] the ultimate consequences were being drawn from modern [gaps]. Perhaps the only thing left unsaid regarding the party machinery is that it no longer works, [that] governance was carried out according to Paragraph 14; that was not a prophecy, but reality.

[ 35 ] The boldest ideals of the steerable airship, which sets out beyond the earthly spheres, [this] will be struck by lightning and come crashing down as a wreck—[a] significant conclusion. The human being, who can feel within himself only the effect of mechanical forces, belongs to the physical-mechanical cosmos and can himself pass into the mechanical; he cannot stand still; he keeps moving onward.

[ 36 ] You can see it wherever human culture gives rise to grandiose ideas, reformist ideas—even if no one has allowed themselves to be reformed by them, for Kant once said: “Give me matter, and I will build you a world!” – Anyone who understands the world even a little through the science of the spirit knows that one could have given him matter—he had created this world for himself. [For example, in the image of] the ruler with two clocks that were supposed to run in sync. There he realized that the duration of the world is not so easy to determine [gap]. Give the monists everything they can imagine as the essence of the human being, and they would believe they were creating human beings. They might create monkeys, but certainly not human beings. [One is tempted to exclaim:] What would you be, O human, if you were what modern homunculus-making seeks to make of you!

[ 37 ] In a profoundly significant and transformative way, humanity would one day find the courage to face the consequences, to not feel embarrassed or retreat in fear; then modern monists would always be confronted with an image very similar to that of the homunculus, and a sense of shame would arise within them at being such a person. And then he would realize that he need not be a homunculus, but [that he] is something other than what modern imagination makes of him. Hamerling’s homunculus represents a measure of self-knowledge for modern humanity. Hamerling had initial success with this; whether many homunculi were cured is unknown. He reformed, as is commonly believed, but [he is also the one] who instilled powers in the soul that merely needed to be drawn forth [to bring about further character development]. What is the fate of those whom [the] reformer … [gap]. He was a reformer in an age when people had no time for reform; one does that [to] oneself, not [to] another.

[ 38 ] Know thyself! – Hamerling faithfully followed this maxim – you, typical person of the modern age! One need not be a Sunday child to see the ship of homunculi, but once [one has] seen [it], it inspires the will to overcome it; just don’t close your eyes to homunculism! Modern humans must continually practice self-knowledge in order to recognize and seek it out in even the smallest [manifestations]. [It] depends on drawing from the fullness of human nature to overcome some aspect of human knowledge through spiritual science and in a way … [gap]. One might believe that the human being is composed of physical and chemical forces acting upon them; one portrays them in this way with all the decadence of modernity [gap?], but one can also approach this in spiritual science in the following manner: What is the human being? – He consists of the physical-material, life, and so on and so forth, [all the way to] Atman. – It all comes across as a kind of semantic quibbling, and [one] can use it to fabricate a spiritual homunculus. Hamerling described the homunculus, but many theosophists do so as well. And … [gap] what pulsates through his writings—which has a very reformist effect—may [thereby] foster ever greater understanding for him in Austria; may it come to pass that the windows here are opened [and] that the fresh Alpine air is let in. The fresh air and broad perspectives are also present spiritually; Hamerling’s writings and [his] broad spiritual [perspectives] point to this.