The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] I would like to begin today with an assessment of ethics as it developed up to the end of the nineteenth century. Not to prove that philosophical accounts of ethics could somehow have an impulsive effect on people’s morals, but to illustrate to you how that which, arising from entirely different foundations, exerts a morally determining influence on people is symptomatically expressed in philosophical accounts of morality.

[ 2 ] One must, in general, abandon the view that philosophies, if they originate from the intellect, could in any way directly set the course of events. Yet the entire impulse of the times is expressed in what philosophers say. No one, for example, would claim that our sensation of warmth in a room is influenced by the reading on the thermometer, but everyone knows that the reading on the thermometer itself depends on what might be called the thermal conditions of a room. Similarly, I would say, one can see in the philosophers who speak of morality what the general moral state is.

[ 3 ] You can see that I approach philosophical discussions of ethics somewhat differently than is usually the case. I treat them merely as a kind of thermometer reading reflecting the prevailing conditions. But just as one can gauge the temperature conditions of a room by briefly noting the thermometer reading, so too can one learn an immeasurable amount about what lies beneath the surface of general human life in a region or an era by understanding what the philosophers of that era express in their writings.

[ 4 ] So please consider it solely from this perspective as I read you a short passage that appeared in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung in 1893 and deals with Spencer’s Principles of Ethics. There we read: “It contains, I believe, the most comprehensive”—so says the reviewer—“and, supported by overwhelming evidence, proof that there is simply no universally human content to morality, nor any immutable moral precepts; that there exists only a single standard underlying all evaluation of human qualities and actions: the practical appropriateness or inappropriateness of a character or an act in relation to the given state of society in which the judgment takes place; and that, for this very reason, the same things have been evaluated very differently in various cultural contexts. The speaker is of the opinion that this “masterpiece”—that is, Spencer’s principles of ethics—“... represents the final attempts to ground ethical distinctions in intuitions, innate feelings, or self-evident/p>

[ 5 ] “To establish axioms, etc., must at least silence them in science.” I am reading these words to you because they characterize the ethical sentiment of nearly the entire civilized world at the end of the nineteenth century—that ethical sentiment which had developed to such an extent that it could be expressed in philosophical terms.

[ 6 ] Let’s take a moment to clarify what is actually being said here. In that truly extraordinary work, Spencer’s Principles of Ethics, an attempt is made, using overwhelming evidence—as the reviewer rightly points out—to demonstrate that so-called moral intuitions, moral axioms, or the like cannot be derived from the human psyche, and that we must finally stop speaking of such moral intuitions. For the only thing one can say is: People act out of natural disposition. This action is judged by the social environment. People are compelled to align their actions with the judgment of the social environment. From this arise the conventional moral judgments, which change as human society changes from age to age. And a reviewer in the early 1890s stated that it was now finally possible to silence all attempts to speak of ethics and moral views as if there were moral intuitions drawn directly from the soul—at least as far as science is concerned.

[ 7 ] I have singled out this particular phenomenon because it truly characterizes what one was confronted with at that time when reflecting on ethics and moral impulses.

[ 8 ] It was against this backdrop that I sought to present my Philosophy of Freedom, which culminates in the view that now—that is, at the end of the nineteenth century—the time has finally come when, in the most profound sense, it is necessary for people to reflect on how they can find moral impulses more and more by returning to the very essence of the human soul. Even for the moral impulses of everyday life, they must increasingly take refuge in moral impulses, because impulses other than the moral intuitions that can be directly uncovered in the human soul can play an ever-diminishing role. This was the situation I faced at the time. I found myself compelled to say: The entire future of human ethics depends on the power of moral intuition growing stronger with each passing day. This also meant that, with regard to moral education, we can only make progress at all if we increasingly strengthen the power of moral intuition in the human soul, if we increasingly lead each individual to become aware of the moral intuitions that can spring forth within their soul.

[ 9 ] In contrast to this stood the judgment—which was virtually universal, for only something of general validity was expressed here—that the time had now come when it had been proven with overwhelming evidence that all moral intuitions must be scientifically silenced. It was therefore necessary for me to attempt to write a book that vigorously defends precisely the standpoint that was, just as vigorously, designated by the scientific community of that time as the one that must be silenced.

[ 10 ] I am describing this to you because it illustrates, through a single case, what I spoke about yesterday and the day before—namely, the immensely significant turning point in the entire spiritual development of the West at the end of the nineteenth century. All my remarks so far have pointed to the fact that humanity, as it has matured since the end of the nineteenth century, faces a completely new spiritual situation compared to that of the preceding centuries. I have already used the expression that, at the end of the nineteenth century, the human soul, in relation to the spiritual, stands before nothingness. It was already necessary, particularly with regard to morality, to sharply highlight how that which—arising from spiritual foundations—must be described as the most essential thing for the future—moral intuition—stands in contrast to that which emerged from the past: the nothingness that has completed its development. This turning point was expressed in a truly tragic way at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly within German culture, and one need only mention the name Nietzsche to hint at this tragedy.

[ 11 ] For people who consciously and alertly witnessed the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Nietzsche truly represented the experience of a tragedy. One could say that Nietzsche himself was a figure who, throughout the successive phases of his life, experienced in a profound way—through his own soul—the state of being confronted with nothingness, that very nothingness which he initially took to be something.

[ 12 ] It may not be entirely superfluous, in light of what your souls are meant to absorb these days, to say a few words about Friedrich Nietzsche at this very moment. In a certain sense, Nietzsche was already the man whose tragic fate sharply foreshadowed what, in the spiritual development of humanity in the nineteenth century, was drawing toward twilight and necessitated a new dawn with the beginning of the new century.

[ 13 ] Nietzsche, after all, emerged from a mature scholarly perspective. He first became acquainted with this scholarly standpoint in the mid-nineteenth century through philology. With a mind that was extraordinarily agile, Nietzsche truly embraced the philological standpoint of the mid-nineteenth century, and through philology he actually embraced the entire spirit of Greek culture. Yet Nietzsche was not a figure who shut himself off from general culture. He was the opposite of a bookish scholar. Nietzsche therefore also embraced what, in the mid-nineteenth century, must have appealed to him as a philosophical standpoint: Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism. This Schopenhauerian philosophical pessimism made a profound impression on him—an impression that could only have arisen because Nietzsche sensed, more acutely than Schopenhauer himself, the decline of intellectual life in the midst of which he lived. For Nietzsche, the only light pointing toward the future came in the form of Richard Wagner’s music. In terms of his worldview, Wagner was, after all, a Schopenhauerian at the time he met Nietzsche.

[ 14 ] And so, toward the beginning of the last third of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche developed a view that for him was truly not a theory but the very meaning of his life: that even within Greek civilization, an age had already dawned in which intellectualism stifled the full human essence. Nietzsche was certainly mistaken regarding the development and full maturation of intellectualism. For in the form in which Nietzsche experienced intellectualism—as a life-destroying spiritual force—it has actually only emerged since the fifteenth century, as I demonstrated yesterday and the day before. But ultimately, Nietzsche experienced the intellectualism of his immediate present, and he traced it back to late Greek antiquity. He formed the view that what had such an annihilating effect on the living spiritual had in fact already begun with Socrates. Thus Nietzsche became an anti-Socratic thinker. He saw, even in the placement of Socrates within Greek intellectual life, how intellectualism—the rational—had displaced an ancient spirituality.

[ 15 ] Probably very few people have perceived with such fundamental clarity the contrast between the Greek world—as it appears to us in Aeschylus, in Sophocles, in the ancient Greek visual arts, and in the magnificent philosophies of Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and so on, and that other Greek way of life, which gradually stifles what is truly spiritual. For Nietzsche, this began with Socrates—that Socrates who, in the face of all the world’s questions, posed the questions of reason; who, in the face of everything, set forth his art of definition, about which Nietzsche undoubtedly felt: where it begins, man puts on a pair of glasses in the face of the immediately living spirit. — Thus, provided one does not force the concepts and thereby slip back into intellectualism, something very significant has been perceived in Nietzsche.

[ 16 ] You see, the true experience of the spiritual becomes individualism wherever one encounters that spiritual aspect. Definition, on the other hand, becomes something universal. As one goes through life and encounters individual people, one must have an open heart and an open mind toward those individual people. One must, so to speak, be able to develop a completely new sense of humanity toward each and every individual person. One does justice to a person only by seeing a new person in each individual. For this reason, every person has the right to expect us to develop a new sense of humanity toward them. For if we come with a general concept and say, “This is how a person should be in this or that respect,” then we are doing them an injustice. With every definition of a person, we are actually putting on a pair of glasses that prevent us from seeing the individual person.

[ 17 ] This is Nietzsche’s general attitude toward intellectual life, and this is the basis of his opposition to Socratism. And so, during the 1860s—and indeed even into the first half of the 1870s—this view took root in his mind: that truly authentic, living Greek culture was, at the very foundation of its worldview, rooted in a kind of pessimism. The Greeks were, at heart, convinced that immediate life, as it presents itself to humanity in its most elementary form, could offer man no satisfaction, no sense of the fullness of his human dignity. That is why they took refuge in what art meant to them, and for the Greeks, the art they cultivated during the golden age of their development was the great comforter that helped them rise above the inadequacy of a purely materialistic existence. Thus, for Nietzsche, Greek art could only be understood in light of the Greeks’ tragic outlook on life. And this mission of art, Nietzsche initially believed, could be revived through Wagnerian art and through everything that might arise artistically from Wagnerian art.

[ 18 ] Then came the 1870s, and Nietzsche felt that this could not be so, because he missed in his own time the impulse that could truly discover what the Greeks had established as the great “Comforter” above immediate material life. For Nietzsche, the time had come when he asked himself: What was it, actually, that I had been seeking in Wagner’s art as a renewal of Greek art? Those were ideals, after all! — And now he became aware of how these ideals, as he allowed them to affect his soul, bore a resemblance to the ideals of his own age.

[ 19 ] And then, in the mid-1870s, a terribly tragic moment occurred in his life: that moment when he felt his ideals were similar to those of his own time, the moment when he had to say to himself: “In this, I am similar to what our age calls ideals; I am, after all, drawing from the same source from which my age draws its ideals.— This was a particularly painful moment for Nietzsche, for he had experienced precisely these idealistic phenomena of his time all around him. He had, for example, encountered a David Friedrich Strauss, whom the entire age revered as a great man, and whom he had exposed as—a philistine. Now he saw how closely his own ideals—which he had merely whipped up by becoming embroiled in Wagnerianism and Greek art—resembled those of his time. Yet the ideals of the age seemed powerless to him when it came to grasping the true spiritual. And so he said to himself: If I am true to myself, I must not, in fact, share any ideals with my age. — Even if he did not express it in these exact words, this was nonetheless a tragic discovery for him. Anyone who delves deeply into what Nietzsche went through during the years I am now speaking of knows that there came a moment of great tragedy for Nietzsche when he said to himself, in his own way: “When modern man speaks of ideals, and if this still somehow corresponds to what others call ideals, then he is operating in the realm of empty phrases—those phrases that are no longer the living body but the dead corpse of the spirit.”

[ 20 ] It was out of this state of mind that Nietzsche coined the words: “So I must, with vigorous determination, set aside the ideals I have formed for myself thus far.” — And this setting aside of all ideals, in the sense I have just described, began for him in the mid-1870s. This period saw the emergence of his works Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and The Gay Science, in which he pays homage to Voltaire in a certain way, but which are also linked to a particular view of human customs.

[ 21 ] An external catalyst for Nietzsche to break away from his earlier idealism and move toward what would become his worldview during the second period of his life came about when he met Paul Ree at that time, whom I would like to call the purely scientific analyst of human morality and the moral nature of humankind. Paul Ree approached the development of human moral life entirely in the spirit of the natural sciences of his time. He wrote the extraordinarily interesting little book The Origin of Moral Feelings, as well as a book titled The Origin of Conscience. The little book on moral sentiments—which, in fact, everyone who wants to understand the nature of thought in the last third of the nineteenth century should read—had a profound influence on Nietzsche.

[ 22 ] What spirit prevails in this little book? Once again, I am describing this not because I believe that philosophy exerts a direct influence on life, but because I want to point to a “cultural thermometer” by which one can gauge the state of moral impulses, views, and thoughts regarding moral impulses at that time. According to Paul Ree’s view, human beings originally possessed nothing at all other than what, in his view, a child possesses: a life of drives, impulses of unconscious, instinctive activity. As an individual acts upon these impulses, he or she, so to speak, comes into contact with other people in all directions. It turns out that some of these impulses, which a person expresses outwardly, are convenient for others—that is, they are useful to them. Others turn out to be harmful to them. From this, judgments are formed: what flows from a person’s instinctive impulses as something useful is gradually called “good”; what proves harmful to others is labeled “evil.”—Of course, life becomes increasingly complicated. People forget how they came to apply these labels to things. But they then speak of “good” and “evil” and have forgotten that, in the beginning, they designated as “good” only what did them good, and as “evil” what they perceived as harmful. Thus, what arose in this way eventually transformed into instinct. Let’s suppose someone blindly reaches out with their arm: if they stroke someone in the process, we call it good; if they slap someone, we call it evil. These judgments accumulate. What has been condensed from such judgments becomes instinct itself. Just as people do not know why they raise their hand in a certain way, neither do they know where it comes from that a voice emerges from their soul and passes moral judgments on this or that—what they then call the voice of conscience. This “voice of conscience” is nothing other than what has crystallized from such instinctive judgments about what is useful and harmful, has itself become instinct again, and—because its origin has been forgotten—resounds from within as the voice of conscience.

[ 23 ] Nietzsche was certainly capable, thanks to the vitality of his intellectual life, of understanding that not everyone said the same thing as Paul R£&e. But he was also well aware that if one thought about the natural sciences only as people did in his era, one could not think about ethics any differently than Paul Ree did. Nietzsche was simply honest; he drew the ultimate conclusions, just as Paul R&e had done. And Nietzsche did not harbor any resentment simply because a philosopher had appeared who had written such a thing. For Nietzsche, this immediate fact had no more significance than could be exhausted within the events of the room in which Paul Ree wrote, just as a thermometer tells us nothing more than the temperature conditions of the immediate surroundings. But it reveals something that is universal, and Nietzsche sensed this. He sensed the ethical dregs of his time in this book, and in that respect he affirmed it. For him, there was nothing more important than putting the old cliché to rest and saying: When people speak of nebulous ideals, it is nothing but obfuscation. In truth, everything is instinct. — Nietzsche often had moments when he said: When someone steps forward and becomes enthusiastic about this or that ideal and wants to inspire others to be enthusiastic about it as well, it is ultimately because this person is so disposed that, when thinking about these ideals, he can best process his gastric juices, because then the food enters the optimal digestive flow for him. — I’m putting this rather radically, but entirely in the spirit of how Nietzsche felt in the 1870s and 1880s. Nietzsche told himself: People talk about all sorts of spiritual matters and call them ideals. In truth, all of this serves no other purpose than to ensure that this or that person, depending on their constitution, experiences the best possible digestion and other bodily functions precisely by feeling this way toward the so-called ideal. What is called “human” must be stripped of its rhetoric, for it is truly all-too-human.

[ 24 ] It was, I would say, a magnificent commitment to honesty with which Nietzsche declared war on all idealism at that time. I know that this aspect of Nietzsche has not always been emphasized. Yet much of what has been said about Nietzsche was snobbery; it was not something serious. Thus, at the end of his first intellectual period, Nietzsche found himself facing nothingness, and in his second period—which begins with Human, All Too Human and concludes with The Gay Science—he found himself, in a certain sense, consciously facing nothingness with regard to all spirit. Ultimately, he could really only develop one mood; for, fundamentally, one cannot arrive at any intellectual content if one reduces all ideals in this way to human physical functions. One need only consider an example to illustrate how Nietzsche’s view gradually took shape. He said to himself, for instance: There are people who strive toward asceticism, that is, toward the abstention from physical pleasures. Why do they do that? They do it because they have exceptionally poor digestion and because they feel best when they abstain from physical pleasures; therefore, they regard asceticism as the most desirable thing. Subconsciously, however, they desire that which makes them feel best. They want to experience the highest pleasure in the absence of pleasure. This reveals their true nature: that for them, the absence of pleasure is the very highest pleasure.

[ 25 ] In Nietzsche, who was certainly honest, this mood crystallized into moments when he uttered words like these:

I live in my own house,
I’ve never copied anyone,
And—I’ve even laughed at every master
Who didn’t laugh at himself.

[ 26 ] In it, that mood—which actually culminated at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but was already present at that time in such a way that it had to be experienced by a deeper inner life—was described in a magnificent, I would say poetically prescient, manner. Nietzsche then found his way out of this “confrontation with nothingness” of his second period by creating the emotional essence of two ideas, which he expressed poetically: the idea of the Übermensch, because he ultimately had no choice but to appeal to something that had to be born out of humanity but was not yet there; and, after having experienced “confrontation with nothingness” in such a grandiose manner—the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same, which arose for him from the idea of evolution. It was precisely during his scientific era that he immersed himself in the idea of evolution. As he delved into what the ideas of evolution offered him, he found nothing that would advance this evolution. They yielded to him only the idea of a perpetual recurrence of the same. That was then his final period, which we need not characterize further at this time. From a psychological perspective, there would be an extraordinary amount to explore.

[ 27 ] But I do not wish to provide a characterization of Nietzsche; rather, I merely wish to point out how Nietzsche—who, due to his illness, was forced to lay down his pen in the late 1880s—had already sensed the mood that was bound to prevail for every profound soul at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In the last third of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche attempted to express in words a mood that he drew from his own store of ideas, from Greek philosophy and art, from the artistic elements in Wagner, from the philosophical elements in Schopenhauer, and so on. Nietzsche himself repeatedly abandoned the very characterizations he had provided.

[ 28 ] One of his final works is this: “The Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.” He saw himself as a destroyer of old ideas. This was, in fact, quite remarkable, for these old ideas regarding the spirit of cultural development had already been shattered. In Nietzsche’s youth, the treasure trove of ideas had already been shattered. Since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these ideas had been passed down through tradition. However, these traditions came to an end in the last third of the nineteenth century. The shattering of the old spirit had taken place; the treasure trove of ideas lived on only in rhetoric.

[ 29 ] Anyone who had thought in accordance with the spirit of the times in which Nietzsche lived would not have felt as though he had to smash the ideals with a hammer; rather, he would have felt that these had been shattered simply by the necessary and proper development of the human race. Humanity would not have attained freedom if that had not happened. But Nietzsche, who still found ideals flourishing everywhere in mere rhetoric, was under the delusion that he himself was doing what had long since been done. In any case, what had been the inner fuel of spiritual life in earlier times—the force capable of kindling the spirit within human beings, so that with this kindled spirit, people could then shed light on both nature and their own human existence—was now gone. In the specific realm of morality, this is expressed by the statement: “There can be no more moral intuitions.”

[ 30 ] I already had to tell you yesterday: Theoretical refutations of materialism as a worldview are actually nonsense in our age, because materialism is correct for our age. The ideas that our age must regard as correct are products of the brain. Therefore, a refutation of materialism in our age is, in and of itself, mere rhetoric, and anyone who is honest cannot really see much of value in a refutation of materialism, for the theoretical refutation is not what matters at all. Humanity has simply reached that point in its development where it no longer possesses an inner, living spirit, but only that reflex of the spirit that is entirely dependent on the physical brain. For this reflexive spirit, materialism is fully justified as a theoretical worldview. The issue is not whether one holds a false worldview or refutes it, but rather that one has gradually arrived at a spiritless inner attitude toward life and the soul. This is what runs through Nietzsche’s philosophy like a cry, tragically foreshadowed.

[ 31 ] In this situation, the naturally sensitive soul of youth in the twentieth century has encountered the spiritual state of the world. You will not arrive at a clear understanding, at a tangible sense of what is stirring vaguely and subconsciously within your souls—and what you call the “youth experience” of today—unless you look deeply into this upheaval that has necessarily arisen in connection with the entire spiritual life during the present period of human development.

[ 32 ] If you attempt to characterize what you feel in an indefinite way from other perspectives, you will always find, after some time, that you can only repeatedly bid farewell to such a characterization. You do not arrive at a truth, but only ever at empty phrases. For as long as people today do not honestly admit to themselves: “I must turn to the living, active spirit—to that spirit which no longer finds its reality in intellectualism, but only its corpse”—as long as this is the case, there is no escape from the confusion of the age. As long as anyone still believes that they can find the spirit in intellectualism—where intellectualism is now merely the form of the spirit, just as the human corpse is the form of the human being—there can be no self-discovery for humanity.

[ 33 ] A person can only find themselves by honestly admitting to themselves: Just as the human corpse relates to the person who has died, so does intellectualism relate to the essence of the spirit. It still retains the form, but the life of the spirit has departed from intellectualism. And just as a human corpse can be permeated by substances that preserve its form—as Egyptian mummies demonstrate—so too can the corpse of the spirit be preserved by adorning it with the results of observation and experimentation. But this does not yield anything living and spiritual, nothing that can be naturally connected to the living impulses of the human soul; one obtains nothing but something dead. This dead thing can wonderfully reflect what is dead in the world, just as one can still admire the human form in a mummy. But intellectualism yields nothing truly spiritual, just as a mummy cannot be turned into a real human being.

[ 34 ] As long as the aim is to preserve precisely that which is to be preserved through the union of observation and intellect, one can only say: The achievements of modern times are magnificent. The moment a person must set for himself the task of connecting, in the depths of his soul, only with what his spirit holds up to himself internally—at that very moment, there is no connection between intellectualism and the human soul. Then there is only one thing: the human being says to himself, “I thirst for something,” and everything that comes toward me from the world’s intellectualistic depths does not give me water to quench this thirst.

[ 35 ] That is what, of course, doesn’t come across very well when put into words, but which lives on in the feelings of today’s youth. Today’s youth usually say this or that in such a way that, when you get to the bottom of things, you actually get quite annoyed by what is being said. But you quickly get over that annoyance. The annoyance stems solely from the use of hideously bombastic words that fit everything except what the person in question actually feels. The rhetoric runs wild, and what appears as character in the youth movement is, for those who know how to live in the spirit, of such a nature that it seems to them as if they were bubbles constantly bursting; it is, in fact, intellectualism running amok. I do not intend to hurt you with these words, and if I did happen to hurt one or the other, it was not my fault. In that case, I would certainly be sorry, but I would still find it entirely justified. I cannot merely say what pleases; I must also, from time to time, say what one or the other does not like. After all, I must say what I recognize as true. That is why I must tell you: To characterize what is rightfully present in the souls of young people, something entirely different is needed than simply imposing old concepts that tumble over one another like clichés. What is needed for this is an intensely developed sense of truth.

[ 36 ] We need truth in the depths of our souls, my dear friends. Truth is the first and last thing we need today, and when your chairman said here yesterday that we have reached the point where we actually no longer want to utter the word “Spirit,” that is already a kind of confession of the truth. It would actually be much wiser if our age, which has lost the Spirit, were to stop speaking of the Spirit altogether; for then people would once again, in all honesty, develop a thirst for the true Spirit. Instead, today people call all sorts of things “Spirit” and “spiritual.” What we need is truth, and if today’s young people want to admit the truth about the state of their own souls, then they must say nothing other than: This age has taken all spirit from my soul. But my soul thirsts for spirit; it thirsts for something new, for a new conquest of the spirit.

[ 37 ] As long as this is not felt with complete honesty and truth, the youth movement will not find its true self. To all that I have described as characteristics of what we still must seek, I add this today: We must search for light in the deepest, innermost recesses of the soul; above all, we must strive to attain the deepest sense of honesty and the innermost sense of truth. If we build on honesty and truthfulness, then we will make progress, and humanity must make progress. Then we will reach the point where we may once again speak of the spirit, which is, after all, most akin to human nature. The soul is most akin to the spirit; therefore, it can find it if it so desires. In our time, however, it must strive beyond mere phrases, conventions, and routine; beyond mere phrases—to the grasping of truth; beyond convention—to the direct, elemental, heartfelt relationship between human beings; and beyond routine—to that which ensures that spirit is present once again in every single act of life, so that we do not act out of habit, as so often happens today, but so that spirit lives once again in even the most mundane of actions. We must arrive at the spirituality of action; we must arrive at the direct experience of people with one another and at the honest experience of truth.