The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Future historians will record these days as among the most significant in European history; for it has become known today that Central Europe is renouncing its own European will. It remains to be seen how events will unfold in the coming days, but however that may happen, it is, after all, an act that—far more than those that preceded it in our catastrophic times—is connected with human volition, with that human volition that arose, in the fullest sense, from the forces of decline within European civilization. On such a day, one may be reminded of those times from which everything within European civilization originated—what I have described here in recent weeks in terms of its origins, which, in a sense, has its starting point in the 4th century A.D., an event so superficially described by history but one that profoundly impacted human civilization.

[ 2 ] We have, in fact, characterized these events from certain perspectives. We have described how, beginning in the 4th century A.D., what might be called a purely legalistic spirit began to permeate both ecclesiastical and secular civilization in the West, becoming increasingly intense over time. We then pointed out the sources from which these developments arose, and we have also previously drawn attention to how, in the mid-19th century, humanity in modern civilization underwent a crisis that, while less widely noticed, can even be described in anatomical and physiological terms, as we saw here a few weeks ago. Everything that took place in the second half—namely, in the last third—of the 19th century, and which then spilled over into the two unfortunate decades of the 20th century, stands under the influence of what unfolded in the middle of the 19th century.

[ 3 ] Today, in particular, provides an occasion to begin these reflections—which we now intend to pursue here over the next few days—in a manner that has indeed been employed many times before, but which is perhaps especially important from the perspective I wish to adopt today: by considering a figure who, in a very intense way, one might say, half as a spectator, half as a tragic figure moving through the events—witnessed the forces of decay that were present within European civilization in the last third of the 19th century. I am referring to Friedrich Nietzsche.

[ 4 ] Our aim today is not to examine Nietzsche’s personality as such—for example, from a biographical perspective—but rather to use Nietzsche to shed light on certain aspects of the last third of the 19th century. His work, after all, falls entirely within this last third of the 19th century. He is the figure who, I would say, with finely attuned sensibilities, experienced firsthand all the intellectual currents that swept across Europe in the last third of the 19th century, and he is the figure who suffered in the most tragic way from these currents, who felt in the most terrible way the forces of decline inherent in them, and who was ultimately broken by this tragedy, by these horrors.

[ 5 ] Of course, one can draw a wide variety of connections to the image we have in mind here. Today, we will explore some of these connections. Friedrich Nietzsche came from a Central German parsonage. From childhood onward, he was thus surrounded by what might be described as the constraints of modern culture—the constraints of civilization. He was surrounded by everything that is philistine and sentimental—that is at once self-satisfied, haughty, and trivially complacent. Self-satisfied and haughty because it believes it carries within itself, in easily aroused emotions, the sum total of the world’s mysteries; trivial and complacent because these feelings are in fact the most mundane of all, arising in philistine sentimentality from the very essence of humanity, and yet regarded within that sentimentality as if they were the voice of God speaking from within the human heart.

[ 6 ] Nietzsche emerged from this narrow-minded civilization, and as a young man he absorbed everything that someone—who, one might say, was a youth out of step with his time and world—could absorb through the contemporary high school education. Through the philistine atmosphere of the gymnasium, he was able to sense the greatness of Greek civilization. Indeed, even in his earliest teenage years, he immersed himself wholeheartedly in everything that emanates from the Greek tragedy of a Sophocles or Aeschylus, he filled himself with all that strives upward from the Greek ideal of the complete human being toward a certain grasp of the spiritual-physical experience of the world, and he wanted, as a complete human being with all his thinking, feeling, and willing, to stand at the very heart of this experience of the totality of the world, of which a human being can feel himself to be a single part, a single member. And it may well be that, time and again, the young Friedrich Nietzsche’s soul was confronted with that great contrast between, on the one hand, what the majority of modern people—in their philistine sentimentality and narrow-minded, trivial self-satisfaction—call reality, and, on the other hand, the aspiration to grandeur of the Greek tragedians and philosophers of the earlier Greek era. Certainly, his soul oscillated back and forth between this philistine “reality” and this quest for sublimity in the Greek spirit, which transcended all trivial human measures. And when he then entered the sphere of modern scholarship, he was particularly repelled by the lack of spirit and artistry in this modern scholarship—the purely intellectualistic pursuits. His beloved Greeks, in whom he had felt this aspiration to sublimity most intensely, had been reduced by modern scholarship to philological and formal trivialities. He had to find his way out of these philological and formal trivialities, and so he developed a profound antipathy toward the spirit he perceived as the origin of modern intellectualism: he was seized by a deep antipathy toward Socrates and all Socratic endeavors.

[ 7 ] Certainly, there are the magnificent, positive aspects of Socrates; there is everything one can learn from him in a profound way. But on the one hand, there is Socrates as he once stood within the Greek world, and on the other, there is the specter of Socrates that haunts the descriptions of modern high school teachers and university philosophers. Who, after all, could the young Nietzsche have come to know by first observing his surroundings? — Only the specter of Socrates! And so he derived his antipathy toward this Socrates from what Socratism had brought to the fore within European civilization. Thus he saw in Socrates the destroyer of the “whole human being,” which had flowed artistically and philosophically through European civilization in the pre-Socratic era; and so, in the end, a reality that had become philistine and desolate appeared to him as that which surveys the world from the very foundation of existence, and from which must emerge that which, as a striving for sovereignty, seeks to ascend to the spiritual spheres of existence.

[ 8 ] He could not see the latter in anything that had emerged, for example, from the pursuit of knowledge; he could see it only in what had emerged from that pursuit which had taken on an artistic character. It shone through the philistine atmosphere into which Socratism had ultimately degenerated—that which had also emerged from ancient Greece as tragic art. He saw it, so to speak, being reborn in the late 1870s and early 1880s in what Richard Wagner sought to create as a “tragedy from the spirit of music.” He saw in this musical drama, which was to be created, something that—by disregarding Socratism—directly connected to the first Greek era of the fully realized human being, and before his soul stood the two artistic directions: on the one hand, the Dionysian-orgiastic one, which seeks to draw the “full human” up from unfathomable depths into the world; and on the other hand, that other movement, which in Europe had gradually become so alienated that it had lost all its luster and thus fallen into the absolute spiritual sclerosis of modern scholarship: the Apollonian movement. And he strove for a new Dionysian art. This spirit pervades his first work: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. And he could not help but see immediately how the typical philistine set out against what had been expressed in this book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, arising from insight inspired by imagination and from imagination sustained by insight. Immediately, the archetypal philistine of modern civilization mobilized—Wilamowitz, who later became the luminary of the University of Berlin, who clothed the Greek tragedians in a modern, trivial guise that was then endlessly admired by all those who have penetrated the Greek word just as deeply as they are estranged from the Greek spirit. Immediately, that clash took place between what, carried by the spirit, sought to enter into the artistic realm of knowledge, and what does not feel at home within this imaginative spirit of knowledge—within this spirit-driven knowledge—and thus flees into philistine pedantry. |

[ 9 ] Everything that Nietzsche’s soul was able to experience in this contrast—he poured it all out in the early 1870s in his four so-called “Untimely Meditations.” The first of these meditations was devoted to the quintessential philistine of modern times. One must simply view these “Untimely Meditations” in the proper light. They were certainly not intended to target individual personalities. For example, in the first “Untimely Meditation,” the otherwise quite respectable and valiant David Strauss was certainly not meant to be targeted as a personality, but rather he was to be understood as the archetype of the modern educated philistine, who is so infinitely content with the trivialities that develop in this modern life. We experience this again and again, for things have, after all, not improved since those times, but have only intensified.

[ 10 ] It’s roughly the same experience one has when attempting to provide an understanding of the world based on spiritual scientific principles. Then all sorts of people come along and say: “Yes, everything that’s said there about an etheric body, an astral body, and spiritual development may well be true; but even if all that is true, it can’t be proven. But there’s one thing that can be proven: two times two is four. And above all, we must grapple with the question of how this unprovable spiritual science relates to the certain truth that two times two is four.” — You hear something like that today in every key—albeit not exactly in this radical form—that there is, after all, an objection to everything said about the realms of the soul and the spirit: Two times two is four! — As if anyone would doubt that two times two is four!

[ 11 ] Friedrich Nietzsche sought to take aim at the educational philistinism of the modern age by describing its archetype, David Friedrich Strauss, the author of The Old and the New Faith, that quintessentially philistine book. And then he wanted to show just how barren modern intellectual life has actually become. One need only recall certain key facts to demonstrate just how barren this modern intellectual life has become. One need only recall how, in the first half of the 19th century, there were still, in a certain sense, fiery spirits—such as Rotteck, who presented history, albeit in a one-sided liberal manner, with a certain fiery spirit. One need only recall how, throughout Rotteck’s History, there is a living presence of—I would say—a fully realized human being, albeit somewhat withered, who sought to infuse the entire earthly course of human development with at least as much spirituality as there is rationality in it. And one need only contrast this with those people who then appeared and said: Oh, come on, wanting to construct a state constitution or the conditions of humanity based on reason—that’s nothing at all. One must study the ancient times, one must delve into history, one must see how everything has unfolded and orient oneself accordingly in order to shape the present.

[ 12 ] This is, after all, the spirit that ultimately bore its barren fruits in political economy and economics—for example, through a certain Lxj/o Brentano—the spirit that sought only to look to history, that is, one that actually believed that only in ancient times could anything productive be contributed to human development, but that in the present day one must essentially hollow out the inner core of human existence and stuff it full—just like a sack—with whatever can be gleaned from history, so that this modern human being may still have skin and, at most, a little of what lies beneath the skin, but that beneath that little bit, he is completely stuffed with what ancient times have produced, so that he can spout off about ancient Greece, ancient Germany, and so on. No one thought about—or wanted to believe in—the productivity or self-fulfillment of the human soul in the present. History became the watchword of the age. This repulsed Nietzsche in the 1870s, and he wrote his book On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, in which he suggested how modern man is suffocating under the weight of history. And he called for a return to productivity.

[ 13 ] The artistic spirit still lived within him. After turning to a “philosopher of sorts”—Wagner—he turned once more to a philosopher: Schopenhauer. In what lived within Schopenhauer, he saw a kind of reality in the otherwise barren, dusty spirit of philosophy. He saw in Schopenhauer a kind of educator of modern humanity—not merely one who had been such, but one who ought to become so. And he wrote his book, Schopenhauer as Educator, followed by Richard Wagner in Bayreuth—once again, I might say, pointing—even in an orgiastic manner—to how art must give rise to a revitalization of modern civilization.

[ 14 ] It is curious to consider the circumstances from which this particular work, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, emerged. Friedrich Nietzsche himself carefully sorted through what he had written in addition to the material that was eventually published under the title Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. One is almost tempted to say: every page of this book, printed in 1876, has a second page containing something entirely different. While the book Richard Wagner in Bayreuth celebrates Bayreuth and its activities in a spirited manner, Nietzsche wrote alongside it—I would say for every such page—another page filled with deeply tragic sentiments about the forces of decline in modern civilization. And he cannot—simply cannot—believe what he himself writes; he cannot believe that Bayreuth possesses the power to truly transform these forces of decline into forces of ascent. This tragedy prevails in the pages set aside at the time and left as a manuscript, which only saw the light of day after Friedrich Nietzsche’s illness. And that was when the great upheaval occurred—actually as early as 1876. This period in Nietzsche’s life ended tragically, marked by anguish over the forces of decline present in modern civilization. In 1876, we already see Nietzsche in such a state that his revulsion at this decline outweighs the sweetness of the forces of ascent he had initially perceived in Bayreuth. And now, above all else, his soul is overwhelmed by the sight of all the untruthful elements—all the modern insincerity—that have crept into modern civilization. And I would like to say: This all coalesces for him into a picture of what is humanly at work in this modern civilization. He can no longer see in this modern civilization anything that truly extends, as it were, like a redemptive spirituality over what is a philistine spirit of reality, and he enters his second epoch, in which he contrasts what modern humanity imagines itself to be in a false form with what he calls the “all-too-human”—that of which modern humanity refuses to be conscious, yet which is the true form.

[ 15 ] One might say: Look at those who have celebrated modern history in such a way—such as the Savignys or Lujo Brentanos, or other historians like the Rankes and so on; look at them all—what are they actually doing? What is actually taking place within the fabric of the spinning World Spirit? — Something is presented as if it were true. Why is it presented as true? — It is presented as true because those minds that speak of such truth are, in reality, impotent minds themselves. They deny the spirit because they do not possess it, because they cannot attain it. They dictate to the world: “This is how you must be”—because they themselves lack the light they are supposed to spread over the world. The all-too-human, the entirely humanly confined—that is what is elevated to the human and presented to humanity as an absolute truth. This lived on as a feeling within Nietzsche from the year 1876 onward, while he was writing his two volumes Human, All-Too-Human; then Dawn; and finally The Gay Science, through which he—I would say—throws himself, intoxicated, into nature in order to escape from everything that had actually surrounded him.

[ 16 ] Yet there is still a tragic sensibility within him. He was influenced by northern Germany—and indeed by northern Europe and Central Europe in general; he embraced all of this, and through Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner he found his way to Voltaireanism, and Voltaire is the subject of the essay “Human, All Too Human.” He attempts to renew Socratism by trying to breathe life into it, but by seeking, behind the lie of modern civilization, the all-too-human truth—human narrowness. He seeks to attain the spirit from within this human narrowness. He does not find it behind what people have produced in modern times. He believes he can find it through a kind of intoxicating plunge into nature. And he tried to live out this intoxicating plunge into nature by traveling south again and again during his vacations, so that, in the warm sun and under the blue sky, he might simply forget what people have produced in modern times. This intoxicating plunge into nature lies as a sensation, as the underlying tone, in his Morgenröte and in The Gay Science. He did not become happy in the process; he remained tragic. And it is a strange sensation that we find in him here. It strikes us particularly when we see him encapsulating this sensation in poetry and hear him say:

The crows are cawing
and swarm toward the city in flight:
soon it will snow,
blessed is he who still—has a home!

[ 17 ] He has no home either. “Fly, bird, sing your song in the voice of a desert bird.” He has no home; for he felt as if the crows were cawing all around him whenever he fled from Germany to Italy time and again. But it soon becomes clear that he must not remain in this mood; there are sayings by Nietzsche in which he immediately objects to taking this mood—expressed in the lines “The crows caw and swarm, fluttering toward the city”—too seriously. He does not want to be taken merely as the tragic figure; at the same time, he wants to laugh at everything that has been unfolding in modern civilization. As I said, read the few lines that follow this “Crows Caw” poem in the current edition of Nietzsche’s works. And so we see, as it were, that there is a spirit within Nietzsche in this final third of the 19th century, predestined to abandon everything that the people of modern civilization have produced, to flee from all that art has produced, from all that knowledge has produced, in order to find something primordial, to find new gods, and to smash the old idols.

[ 18 ] One might say, however, that time has inflicted wounds on this spirit that are too deep for them to have healed—and that nothing more productive could possibly have emerged from them. And so, from these wounds spring creatures devoid of substance, ideas devoid of substance; the “Superman” appears, steeped in bleeding lyricism. It was impossible for Nietzsche, in the final third of the 19th century—drawing on the natural sciences that had obliterated humanity, and on the sociology and social life of the past century, which possessed machines but no longer humanity, only the human being standing at the machine—it was impossible for Nietzsche to penetrate back to humanity at that point. But he experiences the urge: to break free, through negation, from that which is no longer known or felt as human. Instead of understanding humanity from the whole world, instead of a “secret science,” the abstract “Superman,” lyrically suffused, lyrically overheated, morbid, convulsive, appearing before his soul in visions in Zarathustra, in visions that in part touch the deepest aspects of human nature, but which, fundamentally speaking, always resound disharmoniously somewhere, projecting the deliberate disharmony from within themselves.

[ 19 ] And then there is the other negation—or, more accurately, the idea devoid of content. This life between a person’s birth and death cannot be understood unless it is simultaneously conceived as extending beyond this one earthly life. The one who truly has a sense of grasping this one life between birth and death—the one who grasps it with such profound feeling and such lyricism as Friedrich Nietzsche did—ultimately intuits: This life cannot be understood as a single one; one must view it in its development through many lives. — But just as Nietzsche was unable to give human existence any substance—and therefore resorted, desperately, to the negation of the “Superman”—so too was he unable to give any substance to repeated earthly lives. He hollowed them out; these lives became the barren recurrence of the ever-same, the eternal recurrence of the same. Just imagine for a moment what might present itself to our soul in these repeated earthly lives, which are interconnected through karma by the powerful wheel of fate; just imagine how one life pours its content into the next, and now imagine these earthly lives emptied out to the point of becoming insubstantial shells, drained of all content—and there stands the eternal recurrence of the same, the distorted image of the repeated earthly lives.

[ 20 ] And it seemed impossible to Nietzsche to penetrate through what modern denominations offer to the image of the mystery of Golgotha—that which might have been revealed to him through Christianity! It was impossible to penetrate the denominational views that had emerged since the 4th century A.D. to arrive at a picture of what had taken place in Palestine at the beginning of our era. But Nietzsche was filled with a deep thirst for truth. The All-Too-Human had appeared before his soul in a sorrowful form. He did not want to go along with the lie of modern civilization; he would not allow himself to be presented with an image of the Mystery of Golgotha such as the opponents of Christianity—of the ilk of Adolf Harnack—put before the world, in utter deceit. Even within the lie that existed as the actual reality, he wanted to recognize the truth. Hence his distortion of the mystery of Golgotha in The Antichrist. In The Antichrist, he presented the image that one must present when one outgrows modern denominational concepts and when, instead of lying, one wishes to speak the truth from within those concepts—yet at the same time cannot penetrate through “what modern knowledge offers” to what is truly present in the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 21 ] This, then, was Nietzsche’s position in 1886 and 1887. He had abandoned everything that modern civilization’s knowledge had to offer. He had turned to the negation of humanity in the “Superman” because he could not find humanity within modern knowledge, which had erased humanity from its domain. From his sense of this one earthly life, he had received a glimpse of repeated earthly lives, but modern knowledge could offer him no substance for this. So he emptied out what he had sensed; he had no substance left—only the formal unfolding of the eternally same in eternally identical repetition stood before his soul; and the distorted image of the Mystery of Golgotha, as he described it in his Antichtist, because there is no path—if one wishes to hold fast to the truth—from what modern theology offers to what the vision of the Mystery of Golgotha is.

[ 22 ] He had, after all, already read quite a bit about the Christian nature of modern theology in the writings of the Basel theologian Overbeck. Overbeck’s writings on modern theology were intended to prove, in essence, that this modern theology is not Christian. Everything that exists in modern Christianity as un-Christian had taken deep root in Nietzsche’s soul. The hopelessness of this modern insight had robbed him of a true understanding of what one life beget in another, and thus the empty notion of the return of the same arose within him. He had been deprived of the Christian impulse by that which is called Christianity in modern times, and the insincerity of the modern age had become clear to him, so that he could not even believe in the truthfulness of art—in which he had wanted to believe at the beginning of his rising career. And he is already filled with this tragedy when such statements emerge from his soul as: “And poets lie too much…” From the very depths of human nature, however, poets and artists in modern civilization have lied too much and continue to lie too much to this day. For what is most needed for the forces of the future—and what modern civilization lacks most of all—is the spirit of truth.

[ 23 ] Nietzsche strove for this spirit of truth, which alone can place man before other men, which alone, through the unfolding of earthly lives, can give this earthly life a meaning other than the senseless recurrence of the same. Out of a sense of truth, he thirsted for the true form of the one who walked the fields of Palestine. He found only a distorted image within modern theology and within modern Christianity. All of this broke him. And so the personality of Friedrich Nietzsche is the expression of the shattering of the spirit striving for truth within the untruthfulness that had been building up since the crisis point of modern times, since the mid-19th century. So strongly had this untruthfulness taken hold that people do not even suspect how deeply they are entangled in its webs; indeed, they no longer even consider how, at every moment today, truthfulness should take the place of untruthfulness. But it is only by becoming aware of how precisely this fundamental feeling— truth must permeate our soul in place of untruth—it is only through this fundamental feeling that anthroposophical spiritual science can live. Modern civilization has been raised in the spirit of untruth, and it is precisely with the spirit of untruth—one can already say this by way of example—that anthroposophical spiritual science struggles the most. And now the situation is, as I also said at the end of my last reflections here, that we are facing a deep, intense crisis, including with regard to anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and we urgently need action to be taken—and taken intensively—out of an enthusiasm for truth. For ultimately, what happens hour by hour and day by day exemplifies what ails our civilization—and what will lead to its downfall if it does not pull itself together.

[ 24 ] You see, in a weekly magazine—which is usually the expression of widespread public opinion—we observed in the latest issue that sentiment was being stirred up against what is known as “Simons’s politics.” Of course, anthroposophical spiritual science has just as little to do with “Simons’s politics” as “threefold social order” does. But today, out of a deep spirit of insincerity, anthroposophical spiritual science is being lumped together with Simons’s politics. People know what they can achieve with such tactics, and they will achieve a great deal with them. And it truly reveals something of that thoroughly corrupt hypocrisy when one has to read a sentence like this, which appears in quotation marks here in this weekly magazine and is intended to characterize Simons: “He is the favorite student of the theosophist Steiner, who prophesied a great future for him; he stands firmly on the gospel of the threefold social order, but is also, in the spirit of his native Wuppertal, a devout Christian.”

[ 25 ] Well, so many words, so many lies! I’m not saying “so many sentences, so many lies”; rather, I’m saying quite deliberately: “So many words, so many blatant lies”—with the exception of the last sentence—; the first sentences are lies in every word: “He is the favorite student of the theosophist Steiner, who has prophesied a great future for him; he stands firmly on the gospel of the threefold social order”—of course, it’s all a lie!—“but he is also a devout Christian in the spirit of his native Wuppertal.”

[ 26 ] With this final sentence—by adding it to the earlier ones—absolute paralysis is, of course, added to the hypocrisy. For just imagine for a moment this creature that would come into being if it were actually possible for someone to become my favorite student, for me to prophesy a great future for this favorite student, for him to be firmly grounded in the “Gospel of the Threefold Social Order,” and for him to be, in the eyes of the decent people of Wuppertal, a devout Christian! Just imagine this construct of a human being! Yet this is today’s civilization; as insignificant as it may seem, it is nonetheless a clear symptom of modern civilization. For those who very often polemicize against such things do so with the same lie and the same paralysis. And the others do not even notice what strange constructs are “conjured up before their foolish eyes”—forgive me, I am merely quoting what is said about the gnomes in one of my mysteries. They do not even notice what is conjured up before their, well, let’s call them “intelligent” eyes—as intelligence is understood in modern civilization. People actually accept everything today because they lack a sense of truth and sincerity, and they lack the enthusiasm to assert truth and sincerity in the midst of a civilization that is untrue and insincere. Until we take such matters seriously, things cannot move forward. We must present a different picture to the soul today. These days, it is becoming clear to people’s souls that Europe intends to dig the grave of its own civilization and that it—this Europe—wants to summon a non-European force so that, above the buried grave of the old civilization, and indeed above the buried grave of Goetheanism, something entirely different may rise. Well, it remains to be seen whether anything can still emerge from that which politicians intend to bury—something that truly embraces the forces of ascent, that recognizes humanity, that recognizes repeated earthly lives as the only true impulse of the idea of eternity, that recognizes the true mystery of Golgotha as the right impulse, Christianity in the face of everything that appears in this realm as false and insincere.