The Rudolf Steiner Archive

19. Theosophy, Goethe and Hegel

[ 1 ] The heading above was the title of a lecture given by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in Amsterdam on Thursday evening at the “Van het Nut” building.

[ 2 ] The speaker, introduced to his audience as the Secretary-General (Chairperson) of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, began by describing the concept of “Theosophy.” Theosophy aims to be a movement dedicated to deepening our spiritual life. And it is fair to say that, in our time, Theosophy represents what we perceive as a great movement throughout the entire civilized world.

[ 3 ] The speaker then points to growing internationalism and to the fact that, over the centuries, the barriers between people and between nations have been steadily breaking down. In the material realm, we see the banker, the industrialist, and the merchant playing an important role here. But all of these material phenomena are consequences of the existence of shared ideas—the internationalization of ideas.

[ 4 ] What we have seen in past centuries (and even now) in the religious sphere—the divisions separating one person from another and one people from another—is magnificently bridged by theosophy. And this is possible solely because the theosophical spiritual current extends to the very foundations of spiritual life.

[ 5 ] It is not the theosophical attitude that asks, “How is it possible that we have come so far?” and looks back with a certain pity on the old “childlike conception of faith.” We in Theosophy have completely turned away from the delusion that we may look down upon what humanity has accomplished in earlier times. In order to illustrate the relationship between Goethe, the poet, and Hegel, the philosopher, to the Theosophical view of life, the speaker wishes to outline the latter in a few basic points:

[ 6 ] A first principle is that an invisible world underlies this visible world; second, that human beings can come to know a supersensory world beyond the sensory world. But the supersensory world cannot be reached through ordinary sensory perception. Theosophy has nothing to do with magic, superstition, or a relapse into old fantasies. Those who perceive not only the facts of the material world but also the spiritual causes behind it all will become aware of a higher capacity within themselves.

[ 7 ] Dr. Steiner then gives his favorite example of a man who was born blind and underwent surgery. A whole new world of perception opens up for him. An infinite array of light and vibrant colors floods into his eye, which can now see—things he had no concept of before and could not even imagine.

[ 8 ] As a citizen of the lower natural kingdoms by virtue of his lower nature, man, on the other hand, belongs—through his higher nature—to the realm of the higher worlds from which his being is composed. And so, in his innermost being, man stands between two realms.

[ 9 ] Outwardly, we see the life of the individual human being unfold between birth and death, and we see how, through perception of the outer worlds, he becomes ever richer in experience. And we ask ourselves: What is it, and where does it remain, that the human being has absorbed within himself during all this time? What we have absorbed is transformed through death into the seed of a new development. Our soul has acquired the sum total of our life experiences, and at the moment of death, the fruit of life emerges as a seed. In a new life, in a new incarnation, this seed unfolds. We can perceive this in a person’s development from the moment of birth.

[ 10 ] What we perceive here cannot be explained by this one life alone. Just as a plant seed leads us to a previous plant, so this spiritual seed of the soul leads us to a previous spiritual life. This is what is commonly called “reincarnation.”

[ 11 ] Every life enriches the soul with the fruits of that life, and a person enters each new life enriched: Everything we possess within ourselves we have acquired in previous lives. And we also know that the thoughts that exist in this world are the fruit of humanity’s earlier development. But we see that both the ancient fairy tales and myths, as well as what we currently call our science, are merely forms of human development—and that we will later attain other, higher forms of this development.

[ 12 ] When we take a broad view of all this, we are able to build a bridge to the poet Goethe and the philosopher Hegel. From the very beginning, we find a foundation of theosophical sentiments in Goethe’s entire being. As a boy, Goethe sought to discover his own divine-spiritual nature through his spiritual experiences.

[ 13 ] The seven-year-old boy cannot accept the outward forms of religion of his time as his own; he builds himself an altar out of a lectern, and on it he arranges stones and plants from his father’s geological collection. These natural objects, he perceives, are manifestations of divine life. And then he wants to light a sacrificial fire; he focuses the first rays of the rising sun through a magnifying glass and lights the sacrificial candle on the altar he has built himself.

[ 14 ] Even as an artist—for example, during his travels in Italy—he seeks nothing other than the grand life of the supernatural world. He also states explicitly that art is the most worthy interpreter of the spiritual world. One need only look at his letters to Winckelmann, in which he describes his view that everything in nature—order, harmony, and proportion—is reflected in human beings, where it soars to the highest peak of perfection.

[ 15 ] Schiller writes to Goethe:

“For a long time now, though from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have charted for yourself with ever-renewed admiration. You seek the essence of nature, but you seek it by the most arduous path, one that any weaker mind would surely shy away from. You take nature as a whole in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the basis for explaining the individual. From simple organisms, you ascend step by step to the more complex ones, in order to finally construct the most complex of all—human beings—genetically from the building blocks of the entire natural order. By, as it were, recreating him in the image of nature, you seek to penetrate his hidden workings. A grand and truly heroic idea, which amply demonstrates how deeply your mind holds together the rich whole of its concepts in a beautiful unity.”

[ 16 ] From the very beginning, Goethe felt himself to be born of spiritual-cosmic nature.

[ 17 ] That Goethe recognized the spiritual aspect of human nature is demonstrated not only by a poem from the 1780s, “The Mysteries,” in which he discusses the Rosicrucian symbol—the black cross with the red roses—but even more beautifully in his profession of faith in “The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” and in his epic poem Faust.

[ 18 ] The speaker refers to Goethe’s [remark to] Eckermann, in which he says that his Faust can be viewed from two perspectives: First, it is something for people in the theater, but it also contains something for the initiate who sees the spiritual life behind human sensory existence. “Whoever lacks this—this dying and becoming—remains merely a gloomy guest on this dark earth.”

[ 19 ] Then the speaker points out something else—something so well known to most, yet understood by so few, not even by most Goethe commentators: the prologue, in which Goethe speaks of the “harmony of the spheres” and the heavenly choirs; to the reappearance of the figure of Helena in the second part—Helena, who had, after all, already died; and finally to the homunculus, by which he intends to allude to nothing other than that aspect of the human being which passes from one incarnation to the next: the soul. It was all too readily embodied.

[ 20 ] The speaker is more brief when it comes to Hegel, particularly because the meeting is already well underway. Hegel is a contemporary of Goethe’s and, in many respects, his student. He understood everything about Goethe, except for the theosophical foundation. Hegel shows how far someone can go who is unfamiliar with the aforementioned foundations of theosophy.

[ 21 ] Take a glass of water: you can only draw water from it if there is any in it. And human beings can only draw wisdom from a world that is itself built upon wisdom. Hegel sought to prove this.

[ 22 ] Hegel recognizes the world of ideas as a coherent spiritual world, independent of nature, and he calls this world “pure logic.” For Hegel, “Logos” means: the great primordial plan of the world, the sum of the ideas underlying this world.

[ 23 ] The speaker then refers to Hegel’s well-known system and traces how Hegel speaks of the three aspects of ideas: the idea in itself; the Idea in nature, extended through space and time, where it will become conscious of itself, descending into various forms, down to human beings and beyond; then the Idea, returning to its own pure essence, having become conscious of itself.

[ 24 ] Yet, says the speaker, Hegel embodies all the limitations of his time. We must not focus solely on the philosophical lines, nor regard the world of ideas as something absolute. (The speaker gave the impression of meaning: not as a concrete thing.)

[ 25 ] For Hegel, the scientific view of the world had become something absolute, and one always gets the feeling that Hegel believes that once humanity has grasped the world of ideas, it has reached its end.

[ 26 ] Hegel knew nothing of the infinity of forms through which the world of ideas gradually becomes conscious in successive lives, nor that human beings must learn to live and experience both the Logos of feeling and the Logos of the idea. A kind of materialism arose from Hegel’s philosophy. [After he] had spoken tirelessly for nearly two full hours with great intellectual vigor, this extraordinary orator concluded his lecture with Goethe’s most apt words:

Were it not for the sun-like eye,
it could never behold the sun.
Were it not for God’s own power within us,
how could the divine delight us?