The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Not long before the conclusion of his full and active life, Rudolf Steiner was asked which of his writings, in his opinion, would last the longest. Without a moment's hesitation he replied, “The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity will outlive all my other works.”

The significance of this statement becomes apparent when the extent of Rudolf Steiner's literary estate is realized.

At the present time the Complete Edition in German of the Works of Rudolf Steiner is being published in Switzerland. When completed, this edition will be composed of approximately three hundred thirty volumes. These will include some fifty volumes of his written works, and the balance will be made up of the transcripts of his nearly six thousand lectures, most of them delivered during the first quarter of the present century.

Therefore, in selecting The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity as the most enduring of all his literary work, Rudolf Steiner was not limited in the range of his possible choice.

Beyond this, however, as its author once wrote, “This book is based on an experience consisting in the fact that man's consciousness comes to an understanding with itself.” Therefore The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is designed to meet one of the most far-reaching and decisive problems confronting each human being today.

If one reads this book simply for information, one will miss its main point. For the work is intended—as Steiner intended all his writings—to awaken in the reader a new experience of the world of ideas, to arouse in him an inner activity, enabling him to come to grips with some of the most fundamental questions anyone can ask. Therefore this book does not offer ready-made answers to the queries it places before the reader. More important, it points the way whereby the reader can build up these answers within himself, for only then will they acquire that deep significance which the reader instinctively seeks.

The architecture, the form of this book in contrast to its content, was carefully worked out by its author, who once wrote, “In writing I subdue to a dry mathematical style what has come out of warm and profound feeling. But only such a style can be an awakener, for the reader must cause warmth and feeling to awaken within himself. He cannot simply allow these to flow into him from the one setting forth the truth, while he remains passively composed.”

In the present translation, therefore, careful effort has been made to preserve as much as possible details of external form such as sentence and paragraph arrangement, italics, and even some of the more characteristic punctuation of the original, regardless of currently accepted English usage.

A word of appreciation is due the translator of this volume of the Centennial Edition of the Major Writings of Rudolf Steiner. Mrs. Stebbing has brought to the work an intimate knowledge of Rudolf Steiner's writings, and a wide experience in presenting the fundamentals of his philosophical ideas to English and German speaking groups over many years. Her translation is the fruit of her earnest effort to render the precise meaning of the original, a task fraught with extraordinary difficulty, which she has solved with remarkable facility.

The introduction by Hugo S. Bergman, internationally known as an author and philosopher, now a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is certain to be appreciated for the light it sheds on Rudolf Steiner's development of his philosophical point of view. Dr. Bergman heard Rudolf Steiner lecture at the fourth International Philosophical Congress at Bologna, 1911, and the present introduction reflects his life-long study and appreciation of one of the really significant thinkers of this century.

When the first English translation of his Die Philosophie der Freiheit was in preparation, Rudolf Steiner suggested that the title should not be translated literally as The Philosophy of Freedom, but should become The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for he felt that in English the latter more accurately characterizes the fundamental theme of this book.

As one comes to a living experience of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, one discovers a new basis for his daily activities and a richer relationship with his fellow human beings. Far from estranging him from others, his enhanced experience of thinking helps him to a deeper, more profound comprehension of humanity, for he has entered the portals leading to “the true communion of man.”

PAUL MARSHALL ALLEN
Alvastra,
South Egremont, Massachusetts
February 1963

1.

In the history of recent Western philosophy, Rudolf Steiner appears as a unique personality because his whole philosophical work is not the result of a thinking effort, but is based on spiritual experiences. In the world of the East it goes without saying that a great thinker is at the same time a great initiate; in the West, however, it never before occurred that a whole philosophical system was based on immediate spiritual experience. For this reason Steiner had to face the greatest mistrust from the world of the “official” philosophers.

It was Eduard von Hartmann whose works Steiner carefully studied, who influenced his early writings, and to whom he dedicated his doctoral thesis, Truth and Knowledge, published in 1892; and that despite the wide difference in their views. Following Kant, Hartmann believed that true reality can never be grasped by means of our consciousness, and that the experiences of our consciousness are nothing but an unreal reflection of reality. In contrast, there was no doubt for Steiner that “the experiences of our consciousness can enter the true realities by means of strengthening of our soul forces, and that the divine spiritual principle manifests itself in man if he makes this manifestation possible by his soul life.” (See Steiner's autobiography, The Course of My Life.) The unconscious realities of the world which, according to Hartmann, are veiled forever from our knowledge, “can be brought to our consciousness again and again, by means of the efforts of our soul lives,” as Steiner expressed it in the book quoted above. We are by no means separated from the realities of the world forever, but only so long as we are perceiving by means of the senses exclusively. Actually, the world of the senses is spiritual. If by enhancing our soul life, we succeed in experiencing the ideas working in the world of the senses, then we are able to experience the world in its reality. Steiner calls his philosophical system, “concrete” or “objective idealism.”

From his early youth on, Steiner felt the kinship between this kind of idealism and Goethe's world conception. In contrast to almost all philosophers, his education was not a classical, but a technical one-as if this were a kind of presentiment of the world in which, and into which, Steiner wanted to work later. He graduated from the Institute of Technology in Vienna where he was strongly influenced by his personal connection with the famous Goethe researcher, Karl Julius Schröer. Upon Schröer's warm recommendation, Steiner was invited to edit, in 1884, the natural scientific writings of Goethe in the great Goethe edition of Kürschner's Nationalliteratur. Four years later he was invited to join the work at the Goethe Archives in Weimar. Here Steiner lived from 1889 to 1897.

As a fruit of this research work, his book, A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, Fundamental Outlines with Special Reference to Schiller, was published already as early as 1886. (Further editions appeared in 1924, 1936, 1949 and 1960 respectively.) Up to then, Goethe's scientific endeavors had been considered as mere poetic presentiments of the truth. It was Steiner who proved that all of Goethe's various individual discoveries and presentiments had their origin in a total view, and that this is what matters.

2.

Goethe's understanding of nature brought him in opposition to Kant. The problem here is the limitation of our knowledge. In this difference of views, Steiner in his interpretation of Goethe took the side of the latter, in opposition to Kant, and thus put himself in opposition to the Neo-Kantians, whose views were taught in all German universities at that time. Otto Liebmann who renewed Kantianism in the second half of the nineteenth century, had proclaimed that the human consciousness cannot be enhanced. The same line of thought was the foundation upon which Johannes Volkelt had based his thesis that the world known to man has to be separated sharply from the other world, that of the “things in themselves” which, as such, is unknown to man. Thus, the follower of Kant believed that man's knowledge is limited, and that man can never cross this limit; however, in his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Steiner makes the statement that with his thinking, man lives in the reality of the world as a spiritual world, and that the world of the senses is, in truth, a manifestation of the spiritual principle.

In this, Steiner was in full agreement with Goethe. Goethe had conceived the great idea of metamorphosis. According to the latter, the world is a manifestation of ideal forces in the world of the senses. All plants, for example, are nothing but materializations of the one, ideal archetypal plant. The archetypal plant is the fundamental design of all plants: the knot and the leaf. We have to think of this fundamental design as a living, working idea which cannot be seen by means of our sense organs but which manifests itself in the world of the senses. Whenever this fundamental design materializes physically, it varies in a manifold manner, and in accordance with any of these variations, the different plants are formed, following the living archetypal pattern. The archetypal plant is the Proteus who hides himself and manifests himself in all these various forms and whoever is able truly to imagine this archetypal plant, can somehow invent new plants which do not, or do not yet, exist in the world of the senses.

Time and again, Steiner pointed to a conversation between Goethe and Schiller which took place in the summer of 1794 during which Goethe claimed to look at nature in such a way that nature is to be thought of as “working and living, and having the tendency from the whole into the single parts.” In the course of this conversation, Goethe drew a sketch of the “archetypal plant” as a physical super-physical form according to which all existing plants are shaped. Schiller, the follower of Kant, answered that this “archetypal plant” is nothing more than an idea which man builds up in order to understand the particulars. Goethe did not agree with this. He said that in the spirit, he saw the whole in the same way as physically he saw the particulars; there was no fundamental difference between the spiritual and the physical view. To him both were parts of the reality. Whereupon Schiller answered, “This is not an experience; this is an idea.” To this Goethe replied, “I am very happy about this, that I do have ideas without my knowledge, and that I even see them with my very eyes.”

This conversation reveals two typical approaches to the problem of the relationship between a spiritual and a sense experience. Schiller, on the one hand, emphasizes the contrast: the two experiences can never be united. In Goethe's view, on the other hand, the idea and the sense perception complete each other, forming two means of knowledge by working together. Man has to let things speak to him in a twofold way: one part of their reality is given him without his cooperation, if only he opens his senses; the other part, however, can be grasped by him by means of his thinking only, and if he is blessed as was Goethe, he is able to see it with his very eyes. However, together the two parts form the complete whole of the object itself.

Schiller considers the ideal part as a subjective addition on the part of man. Though Kant had realized that we have to use the concept of the inner functionality if we really want to understand the various products of nature, and that we cannot grasp the reality without this concept, he still allotted it to the “reflective power of judgment” of man only; or, in other words, he considered this concept to be nothing but an invention of man, though an indispensable one. In contrast to this, the young Schelling in 1797, exclaimed, entirely following Goethe's ideas, “No longer is there any reason to be afraid of statements!” And consistently, he wanted nature explained from the side of the idea. And here are Goethe's words: “By looking at ever-creative nature, we become worthy of spiritually participating in her productions. Didn't I, first unconsciously, and only following an inner urge, time and again insist upon that archetypal, typical principle? I even succeeded in building up a description which follows the formative forces of nature; and nothing was able any longer to prevent me from courageously undergoing the adventure of the reason, as the Old Man from Konigsberg himself calls it.” But for Kant, the “Old Man from Konigsberg,” the postulation of an objectively existent idea still remained an “adventure of the reason.”

But how is man able to grasp this idea which, of its own nature is non-physical, yet working in the physical world of the senses? Goethe considered himself as possessing a power of judgment by looking at an object (an “anschauende Urteilskraft”); he says that the thinking itself must be metamorphosed, must be enhanced, in order to experience the idea of metamorphosis; a spiritual activity is needed, a dynamic thinking.

3.

By adopting Goethe's theory of knowledge, Steiner also answers the question as to what meaning man's activity of knowledge has in the cosmos. The positivistic thinkers consider knowledge nothing but a mere comprising of individual objects into groups; and these groups are for us, then, abstract concepts or names. Thinking as such serves economic purposes exclusively, but it will never create anything new, although the latter might be of great importance for man. In contrast to this, Steiner states that Science is by no means a mere repetition of what is presented to us by our senses, in some abbreviated form, but rather it adds to it something fundamentally new, something which can never be found in the mere perception, or in the experience. This fundamentally new principle, however, is by no means something of a subjective nature which, according to Kant, man projects on the given perception, or on nature, but rather the true essence of the world of the senses itself. The physical phenomena are riddles which the thinking solves; but what this thinking thus brings about, is the objective world itself. For the world is presented to us by two means: by sense perception and by spiritual knowledge. Both are parts of the objective world. According to Kant, the unity of the objects as it is expressed in concepts, is merely loaned to them by man's I; every connection, he says, originates in our “transcendental apperception.” Steiner, on the other hand, says that just the opposite is true: that objects have their ideal content within themselves. The objects, however, are not presented to our senses in their completeness. By thinking about the objects, we develop the ideas which are working in the specific objects, thus adding to the perception what has been missing from it. This missing, however, is not an objective fact but only the consequence of the fact that by means of our senses we perceive the world in a fragmentary manner only.

Consequentially, the idea is, and works objectively; however it is not presented to our sense organs but appears, in our own thinking, on the subjective stage of our consciousness. This is the reason why it seems to us to be subjective only. Man, by means of his thinking, reveals the ideal nucleus of the world. If it were supposed that man's spirit did not exist, the ideas as expressed in natural laws would be working, but they would not be expressed, not grasped as such. Thus, our intellect does not create order in the objective outer world, but restores the order and the unity of this objective world, which has been interfered with by its own means of understanding, subject to two ways of knowledge. This, however, entitles him to grasp the concept as such, thus adding to the already existing form of existence, a completely new form. (Here the question arises as to whether or not Peter Wust was influenced by Steiner when in the former's Dialektik des Geistes, Dialectic of the Spirit, page 293 in the original German edition, he expresses almost the same lines of thought.)

Human thinking frees the ideal pure form as such; thus, man becomes a creator. Without him, thinking would not exist.

4.

Steiner's Anthroposophy—with which we are not dealing here—differs from the “mystical” schools in the extremely high value it accords to thinking. This high evaluation of thinking originates here, in Steiner's philosophy: man has his right place in the cosmos as a thinking being.

Thinking, on the one hand, and perception, on the other, belong together; however, we experience them as separated. Perceptions are presented to us; facing them, we are merely passive; thoughts, again, have to be brought about by the effort of our soul forces. The world insofar as it is perceived, cannot solve any riddles; there, dreams and hallucinations are presented to us in exactly the same way as is the world of the senses. Thoughts, however, are completely familiar to us, and—fundamentally, at least—are transparent. If we wish to find relationships within the world of sense perception, we have to use our thinking forces.

However, what is added to the perception by our thinking is by no means of a merely subjective nature. For it is not we who “have” the thinking, but rather it is the thinking which “has” us. We cannot combine contents of thoughts arbitrarily, but we have to follow their laws. The thinking does not produce the thoughts; it merely receives them, as does the eye the light, and the ear the sound. The only difference is that the senses work automatically while we remain passive, while, insofar as thinking is concerned, we have to activate it ourselves. Perceptions are given to us; concepts we ourselves have to work out.

Let us imagine a spirit to whom the concept is given together with the perception; such a spirit would never achieve the idea that the concept is not an integral part of the subject, but something of a “subjective” nature. Steiner suggests that in earlier times, as a matter of fact, all mankind experienced things in this way.

Therefore it is not the fault of the objects that we first confront them without the corresponding concepts, but of our own spiritual-physical organization. The abyss between perception and concept opens only at the moment when I, the perceiving subject, confront the objects. To explain the object by means of thinking means nothing other than to restore the connection which man's organization has broken up. It is up to man to gain knowledge. The objects themselves require no explanation. We are the ones who ask questions because we face the cleavage between perception and concept.

In this way Steiner has succeeded in building up a truly objective idealism, from Kant back to Plato, or forward to Schelling. What is new in Kant's philosophy—his idealism in contrast to dogmatism—remains in Steiner's world conception. Steiner, however, refuses to accept the subjective nature of this idealism, and with it, the disastrous division of the world into that of human experience and that of the objects in themselves. For Steiner, thinking is neither a mere subjective activity nor a shadowy imitation of the perception, but an independent spiritual reality.

5.

By considering from the outset the nature of the transcendental principle to be conceptual-spiritual, Steiner rejects the dogma of the modern theory of knowledge since Kant: that man is never able to grasp reality. In the thinking process, he himself participates in the transcendental order of laws of the objects. What here leads us constantly in the wrong direction is the fact that we think our I to be somewhere within our physical organization, and that impressions are given to it by the “outside.” The truth however is that our I is living within the order of laws of the objects themselves; but this life of the I in the region of the transcendental principle is not consciously experienced by man. It is rather his physical organization by which he experiences himself.

Steiner frequently uses the example of a mirror which reflects outer events; and this “mirror” is our physical body. The activity of the body represents the living mirror which reflects the life of the I, which in turn is of a transcendental nature. Thus the human I is able to enter the transcendental principle without “forgetting” itself. But the content of our ordinary, empiric, every-day consciousness is to what our I experiences in reality, as the reflection of the mirror is to the original.

This difference between our true life and that which is only “mirrored,” enables Steiner to settle the conflict between natural science tending toward materialism, and spiritual research presupposing the spiritual principle. Natural science studies nothing but the “mirrored reflection” of the reality which is bound to the brain; this “reflection,” of course, depends on the “mirror,” or in other words, on our nervous system. Man's illusion—though necessary for his every-day life—of thinking of his I as an entity living within his physical organization, is relatively justified here. However, the true innermost being of man will never be found within this physical organization, but rather in the transcendental field.

Thus man has to be considered as a being who, on the one hand is living in the spiritual world itself, and on the other, is receiving its experiences “mirrored” by its physical organization. The world of the senses is, in reality, a spiritual world, but it does not appear to us as such.

The training indicated by Steiner in his various anthroposophical books seeks to stimulate man's soul development to the point where he is able to experience this spiritual world consciously; and this training consists of laborious spiritual exercises which require, above all, a great deal of patience and perseverance.

For those of us who are not—or are not yet—in the position to come to spiritual experiences, Rudolf Steiner's philosophy will still be a highly important contribution toward man's understanding of himself and of the world in which he lives—even though this philosophy can be used only to guide the student on his own right way. However, this whole philosophy is by no means meant to be a mere theoretical line of thought; rather does it find its true completion in the realms of its practical effects. Steiner had good reasons for giving his book—in the original German at least—the title, Die Philosophie der Freiheit, that is, literally, The Philosophy of Freedom, and he poses the question: When is an action free? And he answers this question by stating that it is free when it has its origin in pure thinking. At first glance, Steiner's philosophy of ethics may appear intellectualistic. As in the theory of cognition we have to differentiate between subjective perception on the one hand and the objective concept on the other, in the same way, in the realm of ethics we have to differentiate between motives which originate in the perception and those having their origin in pure thinking. In the first instance we cannot call the deed a free one, since this kind of action is prompted by our surroundings, by our feelings and our will, as well as by our personal nature. None of these is truly free. Only the action motivated by our thinking is truly free. For this kind of action is objective; it is not in the least connected with our I; the world of thinking is common to all of us.

Spinoza, the great Dutch philosopher of the 17th century, objected to the doctrine that man's actions are free by saying that if a stone thrown by someone were endowed with consciousness, it would also make the statement that it flies “freely.” To this Steiner replied that it is not the consciousness as such that builds up in people's minds the belief that they are free; rather it is the fact that man is capable of comprehending the rationality of his motives—provided they are rational. Only that action can be called free which has been determined by the rationality of its ideas.

But how does man materialize his rational motives? The answer is, By means of his moral imagination, which enables him to obtain his motives from the world of ideas. The unfree man is determined passively by the motives of his surroundings which also include his innate nature. The free man, on the other hand, acts according to his moral intuition which, though his own, nevertheless lifts him from the level of his limited I to the objective world of thinking.

Now the problem arises, How can objective morality be united with personal initiative? Steiner strongly rejects Kant's ethics which claim his “categorical imperative” to be a general law which extinguishes the personality. He claims just the opposite, namely a purely individual ethic, expressing it thus: “I do not ask anybody, no man and no law; I perform my action according to the idea which guides me. In so doing, my action is my own, and not the execution of the will of an authority. The urging of my desires means nothing to me, nor does that of moral laws; I want simply to do what seems right to me.” In strict opposition to Kant, any action dictated by a general law appears to him as unfree, heteronomous, while only those actions are autonomous which originate in a law given by man's own self. In a letter dated December 5, 1893, addressed to John Henry Mackay, the follower of Max Stirner, Steiner expressly laid stress on the full agreement of his own philosophy of ethics with that of Stirner, presented in the latter's book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, The Individual and His Property.

The moral imagination must, out of necessity, be individual. This is the point which counts. However, here we find no opposition between individuality and the general law; we all share in the world of thinking, we all live in one spiritual world. Thus, despite the fact that every single human being draws from his own personal world of ideas, there cannot be any conflict. People are living together, not there is one spiritual cosmos, common to all. This is one of the most important aspects of the picture of Man. For the idea of man is that of a free being. However, we are still rather far from this goal, which belongs to the future. Man's evolution toward this highest goal is far from completed; Man has not yet become a reality. There is something very special in relation to the idea of Man: while all other ideas have materialized, have become one with their perception, as we have seen above, that of Man is still waiting for its materialization, its incorporation. It is Man alone who is able to complete this. While nature performs the task of completion in the case of the plant and animal, so far as Man is concerned nature can do no more than pave the way toward this completion. But it is only and exclusively Man himself who is able to take the last and the decisive step. Books have been written on the question whether or not Man is free, but the manner of asking the question is wrong, for it can never be answered objectively-theoretically. The answer is given by a process of self-liberation.

Rudolf Steiner enthusiastically follows the theory of evolution as it was developed by Darwin and Haeckel. However, he goes far beyond its mere biological aspect. The moral life of man is the continuation of his biological development. Creating new moral ideas out of our “moral imagination”—as, for instance, Gandhi's “non-violence,” or Albert Schweitzer's “reverence for life”—is a “jump” in evolution comparable to the “jump” which creates a new species in the plant or animal kingdom. In a letter dated August 26, 1902, addressed to Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, Steiner wrote, “Nature achieves the most important moments in evolution every time she makes her typical jumps.”

The evolution of mankind as a whole within the hierarchy of the Spiritual Beings is a process of cosmic importance.

HUGO S. BERGMAN
The Hebrew University,
Jerusalem, 1961

Translated by Stephen Michael Engel

Compiled by

PAUL M. ALLEN

1.David Friedrich Strauss, Der alte und neue Glaube, The Old and New Faith, publ. 1872. Born in 1808, appointed professor at the University of Zurich, Strauss became a center of controversy, the intensity of which has been likened to that of the Thirty Years' War. This began with the appearance of his Life of Jesus (1835), in which he questioned the sources of the New Testament, and continued with his Doctrine of the Christian Faith (1840). From this time until his death in 1874, Strauss became world-famous as one of the most frank critics of Christianity.

2.Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, Part IV, Chapter ix, par. 219. Rudolf Steiner consulted the German edition, translated by Dr. B. Vetter and published at Stuttgart, 1882. Spencer, born 1820, an engineer by training, sought to explain “the phenomena of life, mind, and society in terms of matter, motion, and force.” At first strongly influenced by Coleridge, Spencer placed evolution as the first and most universal principle, influencing all the sciences. To him, evolution was synonymous with progress. In his later development, Spencer championed rugged individualism, and became an outspoken opponent of socialism, upholding what he considered the absolute rights of private enterprise against any form of governmental control. Before his death in 1903, Spencer's optimistic view of human progress collapsed, and he fell prey to marked pessimism regarding the future of mankind.

3.Benedictus de Spinoza (Baruch de Spinoza), born 1632 in Holland of a Jewish family that had been exiled from Spain and Portugal. He early showed great powers as a student, and in 1656 was banned by the Jewish community at Amsterdam because of his views. His chief work, which had a lasting influence upon future generations of thinkers, long after the author's death in 1677, is The Ethics, which has recently appeared in a new edition titled The Road to Inner Freedom, New York, 1957.

4.Eduard von Hartmann, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, German ed. p. 451. Born 1842, von Hartmann was originally an officer in the Prussian army. Because of an illness, he retired from military service and took up an intensive study of philosophy. In 1869 his Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) appeared, and made him famous almost overnight. Of the many other works he wrote, this book remained his most famous. Rudolf Steiner describes a personal impression of von Hartmann, whom he visited in Berlin in 1888 following a philosophical correspondence with him over some years. This account may be found in Chapter IX of Steiner's autobiography. Steiner's Wahrheit und Wissenschaft (Truth and Knowledge), published in this present volume, was dedicated to von Hartmann. The latter died in 1906.

5.In his Atomistik des Willens, Atomic Theory of Will, Ger. ed., Hamburg, 1891, 2 vols. p. 213. Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet-philosopher was born March 24, 1830. He early showed ability in poetry, and although from poor parentage, the generosity of friends enabled him to attend the gymnasium in Vienna, and afterward the University there. In the revolutionary movements which swept Europe in 1848, Hamerling joined the student legion in the Vienna revolt. The collapse of the uprising in 1849 made it necessary for him to hide for a long time in order to escape arrest. Later he studied natural science and philosophy. In 1855 he was appointed master at the gymnasium in Trieste. Many years of ill health caused him finally to retire on a government pension in 1866. In comparatively comfortable circumstances, Hamerling spent the remainder of his life in his home near Gratz, devoting himself to writing until his death on July 13, 1889. He is referred to as “one of the most remarkable poets of the Austrian school; his poems are full of life and color.” His most popular work was Ahasver in Rom, Ahasver in Rome (1866), with Nero as principal character. Der König von Sion, The King of Zion, (1869) is generally considered to be his masterpiece. In 1888 his Homunculus appeared, and was reviewed with extensive comment by Rudolf Steiner. His Amor und Psyche was published in 1882; his novel Aspasia (1876), described Greek life in the age of Pericles. In 1870 his drama concerning the French Revolution, Danton und Robespierre, was published. Rudolf Steiner commented on this drama in his Speech and Drama Course given in 1924, and in fact, many references to Hamerling and his work appear in books and lectures by Rudolf Steiner, including the latter's autobiography.

6.Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit, The Illusion of the Freedom of the Will, by Paul Rée, publ. 1885, p. 5. Paul Rée (1849–1901) was a German positivist philosopher, known widely as an editor of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Rée met Nietzsche in 1876, as Rudolf Steiner relates in his Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom, p. 159–60. Steiner refers to Rée in the preface to this book, written in Weimar, 1895: “Such an average brain as that of Paul Rée could make no important impression on Nietzsche.” (op. cit. p. 40).

7.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). A voluminous literature on Hegel and Hegelian thought exists in English, including biographical studies, translations, and commentaries on his writings. Consult any standard encyclopedia for details.

8.Goethe's Faust, Part I,—

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Burst,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine halt, in derber Liebeslust,
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andere hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zul den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.

(Lines 1112–1117)

The translation is that by George Madison Priest: Faust, Parts One and Two, publ. Alfred Knopf, New York, 1941, one of the best of all English translations of this work.

9.monism: the teaching of one ultimate substance or principle, as mind (idealism) or matter (materialism), or of something which is neither of these, but is the foundation of both; the point of view that there is but one reality.

10.dualism: from a philosophical point of view, the theory which maintains that there are but two fundamental and irreducible principles, for example, mind and body.

11.Here Rudolf Steiner speaks of spiritualism in a philosophical sense, and not in the sense of any relationship or communication with the dead as in mediumism, etc.

12.materialism: the philosophical teaching which sees the entire universe, all creation and its activities, including the human mind, as the result of material causes and powers.

13.Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Born in 1762, Fichte studied at Meissen, Pforta, Jena, and Leipzig with the intention of becoming a clergyman. After a teaching position in Switzerland, and enroute to another in Poland, he met Kant, under whose influence he wrote his Study for a Critique of All Revelation. The printer neglected to place his name on the title-page, and people thought the work had been written by Kant. When the true identity of the author became known, Fichte was hailed as a philosopher of outstanding merit. He lectured at Jena, Berlin and Erlangen. In 1807 he was made Rector of the University of Berlin. His death in 1814 occurred when he was at the height of his fame. Rudolf Steiner made extensive reference to Fichte, basing his doctoral thesis (published in enlarged form in the present volume as Truth and Knowledge) on Fichte's scientific teachings, but perhaps his most memorable study of Fichte's life and thought was contained in a public lecture given in Berlin on December 16, 1915: The Spirit of Fichte Present in Our Midst. See also note 77, below.

14.Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–1875), author of Geschichte des Materialismus, History of Materialism, publ. Iserlohn, 1873–5. When professor at the University of Marburg, 1865, Lange issued his study on the workers' question. This made him famous in the circle of students of social problems in Germany at that time. A friend of the working classes, Lange strove for social justice, betterment of labor conditions, and for universal education. His life, marked by his utter sincerity and devotion to his ideals, is an outstanding example of selfless dedication to the well-being of mankind.

15.Karl Friedrich Hieronymous, Baron von Münchhausen (1720–97). In 1785 a little book of 49 pages appeared in London, titled Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, and an enlarged edition appeared in 1786. A translation into German by G. A. Bürger was published at Göttingen, 1786. Many editions followed in English, and the book was published in numerous languages, illustrated by a number of famous artists. For some time the identity of the author was unknown, but finally it was established that the book was written by Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737–1794), traveler, scholar and professor at Cassel. While at Göttingen, where he was secretary of the university library (1764–7) he made the acquaintance of Freiherr von Münchhausen of Bodenwerder in Hanover. The latter had been in the Russian service, had fought against the Turks, and finally had retired to his estate in 1760, where he became famous for his “tall stories.” Later, Raspe, in poverty in London, recalled the Baron's tales, and wrote the book in English, which appeared in 1785. Tall tales from other sources were added by publishers of later editions, so that the stories as we have them today are really a composite work, for which, however, Raspe provided the original nucleus from his memory of the evenings spent with his erstwhile friend.

16.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born Frankfurt a.M., August 28, 1749. Poet, dramatist, scientist, traveler, state minister, etc., author of Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and many other works. Died in Weimar, March 22, 1832. In August 1781 the Grand Duchess Amalia of Saxe-Weimar founded the Tiefurter Journal, the Journal of Tiefurt, to which Goethe contributed at her invitation. When Rudolf Steiner was active as editor of the natural scientific writings of Goethe at the Goethe-Schiller Archives in Weimar, he published proof that the Fragment über die Natur, The Fragment concerning Nature, which had appeared in the Journal of Tiefurt was definitely to be attributed to Goethe (Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Publications of the Goethe Society, ed. by Bernhard Suphan, Weimar, Vol. VII, 1892, article by Rudolf Steiner). Thus, just 110 years after the Fragment had appeared, Rudolf Steiner showed its importance and its relationship to Goethe's work. In the edition of Goethe's works published by Prof. Joseph Kürschner (1853–1902) (the volumes of Goethe's natural scientific writings edited by Rudolf Steiner), the Fragment appears at the beginning of the essays “On Natural Science in General,” Vol. XXXIV, p. 1. The Fragment appeared in an English translation with notes by George Adams under the title, Nature—An Essay in Aphorisms, Anthroposophical Quarterly, London, Vol. VII, No. 1, Easter, 1932, pp. 2–5. In his Goethe's Conception of the World, Rudolf Steiner describes this Fragment as “the essay in which the seeds of the later Goethean world-conception are already to be found. What is here expressed as dim feeling, later developed into clear, definite thought.” In similar vein, George Witkowski in his well-known biography of Goethe (Leipzig, 1899) describes this Fragment as “the seed from which came all of Goethe's great thoughts about nature.”

17.See Ziehen, Theodore, Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Guide to Physiological Psychology, Jena, 1893, p. 171 of the Ger. ed.

18.Pierre Jean George Cabanis (1757–1808), French physiologist. A precocious child, Cabanis was enrolled at the age of 10 in the College of Brives. Later studied in Paris, afterward traveled widely in Poland and Germany. In 1789 he was appointed administrator of hospitals for Paris, and in 1795 became professor of hygiene and history of medicine in the medical school of that city. In 1799 he was made professor of legal medicine and history of medicine. He was an intimate friend of Mirabeau, and attended him as physician in his last illness. He had a deep interest in medical and psychological problems. Active in the cause of the French Revolution, Cabanis was a member of the Council of Five Hundred. Though Napoleon Bonaparte repeatedly offered him governmental positions, Cabanis declined them, since he was a foe of the former's policies. Cabanis died at Meulan on May 5, 1808, principally honored for his contributions to medical science, and especially for his main work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, a series of papers read to the Institute in 1796–97. The sentence quoted is probably from Cabanis' book, written in 1802, translated into German, 2 vols., 1808, under the title, Verhältnis der Seele zum Körper, Relationship of the Soul to the Body. The thought has also been paraphrased: “Just as the stomach and intestines receive food and digest it, so the brain receives impressions, digests them, and has as its organic secretion, thought.”

19.Renatus Cartesius, Rene Descartes (1596–1650). The father of modern rationalism, soldier of fortune, scholar, pilgrim, traveler, and firm adherent of the Roman Catholic faith. His philosophical work, which has often been summed up in his words, J pense, donc je suis (Cogito ergo sum), “I think, therefore I am,” was given significant impulse by a dream he had on November 10, 1619. This revealed to him the method of philosophical speculation he was to follow, and his subsequent work is said to have stemmed from this experience. An extensive literature on Descartes and his teachings exists in English translation. See any standard encyclopedia for further details.

20.Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854). Often referred to as the Proteus among philosophers, Schelling was noted for his ever-changing alertness and brightness of mind and expression. Goethe (see note 16, above) had a very high regard for him, and spoke of him as “the most congenial philosopher I know.” Schelling had a profound influence among the thinkers of his time, including philosophers of France and England. His last years were dedicated to what he termed “positive philosophy,” radically different from the philosophy of identity, the transcendental idealism, and the pantheistic tendencies of his earlier time. Rudolf Steiner made extensive reference to Schelling in his writings and lectures, on various occasions praising that philosopher's “important inspirations and suggestions for what must afterwards be said by Anthroposophy, directly out of spiritual vision, on many points of Christianity.” Steiner further spoke of Schelling, “who really always made a significant impression whenever he appeared in public—the short, thick-set man, with the extremely impressive head, and eyes which even in extreme old age were sparkling with fire, for from his eyes there spoke the fire of Truth, the fire of Knowledge.” (From a lecture given at Dornach, Switzerland, Sept. 16, 1924) Perhaps Steiner's greatest study of Schelling is to be found in his Die Rätsel der Philosophie, The Riddles of Philosophy, Vol. I, Ch. 7. For English translations of Schelling and further details on his life, see any standard encyclopedia.

21.Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Known as one of the greatest of mathematicians and physicists, Pascal's tame long ago spread far beyond the confines of his native France. His contributions to the establishment of the mathematical theory of probability, to the science of hydrodynamics, to the study of gravity and the vacuum, and his elaboration of the theory of conic sections have given Pascal a lasting place among the great men of science. As a Christian thinker, his devotion to truth and piety, and his acceptance of mystical experience have made his name revered. His philosophical speculations and deep psychological insight, as well as his remarkable gifts as a writer of French prose have secured him a leading position among philosophers and literary historians. Pascal's Pensées, Thoughts, is one of the great books of the world. For details on Pascal's very eventful and highly interesting life, as well as an account of his fundamental ideas, see any standard encyclopedia.

22.Archimedes (c 287–212 B.C.) Greek mathematician and inventor. He was born at Syracuse in Sicily, and studied at the famous university in Alexandria. Archimedes spent the remainder of his life at Syracuse, where he engaged in constant mathematical research. He is noted for his many mechanical inventions, but his first love was mathematics. His work as a pioneer in mechanics is illustrated by his famous remark, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth!” During the sack of Syracuse by the army of the Roman general, Marcellus, Archimedes was discovered drawing a mathematical figure in the sand beside his garden bench. Deep in meditation upon the problem before him, Archimedes was instantly killed when he was run through the body by a sword in the hand of a Roman infantryman. For details on the life of Archimedes, see Plutarch's Life of Marcellus. A complete, standard edition of the Works of Archimedes with valuable notes by T. L. Heath was issued by Cambridge University Press, 1897.

23.See note 2, above.

24.Spencer, First Principles, Part I, Par. 23.

25.Note by the Translator: Just as in English one generally means by “perception” not only the perceived object but also the act of perceiving it, so too, in German the word Wahrnehmung covers both these meanings. Rudolf Steiner, however, as stated in the text, uses this word in the specific sense of meaning the object that has been perceived, and NOT the process of perceiving it. When he refers to the activity, the word used in the original is Wahrnehmen, here translated as perceiving.

25a.Johann Christoph August Franz, M.D., eye surgeon, born 1807, took his medical training at the University of Leipzig. From Germany he emigrated to England, establishing his practice at Brighton, where he worked for some 30 years. He was the author of writings on medicine, particularly on the use of baths in treatment of illness. Two of his works were written for the public: The Eye and a Critique on the Art of Preserving the Organ, London, 1839, and Memoirs of the Case of a Gentleman Born Blind and Successfully Operated at the Eighteenth Year of His Age. Physiological Observations and Experiments. The latter appeared in Philosophical Transactions, Vol. VI, 1841, pp. 59–68. It is probable that Rudolf Steiner's reference to the man who had been born blind is taken from this second work of Dr. Franz.

26.George Berkeley, (1685–1753), Irish bishop and philosopher. Made a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, 1707, he was strongly influenced by the philosophical writings of Descartes, Newton, and Locke. In 1709 his New Theory of Vision appeared, and in 1710 his great work. The Principles of Human Knowledge, was published. In 1712 he visited England and the following year was presented at court by Dean Swift, shortly before the publication of his most popular work, The Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous. Berkeley's literary fame rests upon this latter work, which has been described as “among the finest philosophical writings in the English language” on the basis of its “exquisite facility of style.” In 1728 he emigrated to America, where he lived in Rhode Island for three years, hoping for a government grant of funds for the establishment of a college in Bermuda. His hopes disappointed, he returned to Ireland and shortly afterward was raised to the bishopric of Cloyne. In 1752 he moved with his family to Oxford, where he died suddenly in January of the following year, and was buried in Christ Church.

The reference quoted by Steiner is from Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, sec. 6.

27.Immanuel Kant, German philosopher, was born in Königsburg April 22, 1724. He entered the university there in 1740, enrolled for the study of mathematics and physics. His studies were interrupted by the death of his father, which left him in poverty. After he supported himself by tutoring for 9 years, the kindness of a friend enabled him to resume his studies, to graduate as a doctor and to qualify as a privatdocent. He occupied this position for 15 years. His lectures widened from physics to include much philosophy. Finally, after unsuccessful attempts, in 1770 he was given the chair of logic and metaphysics at Königsburg. In 1781 his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Critique of Pure Reason appeared, and in 1783, his Prolegomena. After the appearance of the 2nd edition of the Kritik in 1787, Kant became famous everywhere in German intellectual circles, and his views were regarded as those of an oracle. From 1792–97 he was engaged in a struggle with the government concerning his religious views. In 1794 he withdrew from society, and gave up all teaching except for one public lecture course on logic. In 1797 Kant terminated a teaching activity that had extended over 42 years. He died in Königsburg on February 12, 1804 near the end of his 80th year. Little more than five feet tall, deformed in his right shoulder, his chest almost concave, Kant had a weak constitution. He never married, and followed an unchanging program of activities from youth to old age. For example, he never failed to rise at 5 o'clock, studied for 2 hours, lectured for 2 more, and spent the rest of the morning at his desk. He dined at a restaurant and spent the afternoon in conversation with friends. He then walked for about an hour—a walk which for years followed exactly the same course—studied for 2 hours more, and retired between 9 and 10. He was a prolific reader, especially in history, science, travel, and philosophy. He knew English history and literature intimately, especially in the period of Queen Anne. He read little of Goethe or Schiller, but often re-read Voltaire and Rousseau. He had little interest in nature, and in 80 years never traveled more than 40 miles from his native Königsburg. For further biographical details, works and translations, consult any standard encyclopedia.

28.Otto Liebmann, Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, Contribution to the Analysis of Reality, Strassburg, 1880, p. 28. Otto Liebmann (1840–1912) was well known for his writings on Kant's philosophical world-view.

29.Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930), Immanuel Kant’s Erkenntnistheorie, Immanuel Kant's Theory of Cognition, Hamburg, 1879.

30.See note 4, above.

31.Hartmann, Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie, The Fundamental Problem of a Theory of Cognition, Leipzig, 1889, p. 16–40.

32.Johannes Peter Müller, German physiologist and comparative anatomist, born in Coblentz, July 14, 1801. He studied at the University of Bonn, and was appointed to a professorship in physiology there in 1826. In 1843 he accepted the call to the chair of anatomy and physiology at Berlin University, which position he held with great honor until his death, April 28, 1858. He did much research in physiology, particularly in relation to human speech and hearing. His great work was the Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, 1833–40. (The English translation was made by Dr. William Baly, publ. London 1842). This work opened a new period in the study of physiology, and Müller is considered the main figure in the developments in this field in the mid-19th century. In his Handbuch Müller developed an entirely new principle which he called “the law of specific energy of sense substances.” This he expressed as follows: “The kind of sensation following stimulation of a sensory nerve does not depend on the mode of stimulation, but upon the nature of the sense organ. Thus, light, pressure, or mechanical stimulation acting on the retina and optic nerve invariably produces luminous impressions.” It is to this law that Steiner refers at this point.

33.Hartmann, Das Grundproblem, p. 37.

34.Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung The World as Will and Representation, Four Books, publ. 1819 by Brockhaus, Leipzig. (English translation by Haldane & Kemp, 1883) Ref. Book I, par. 1, Ger. ed. Biographical data and translations of Schopenhauer's works, as well as extensive commentaries on his ideas have been published in English translation. Consult any standard encyclopedia for details. Rudolf Steiner edited a collected edition of the writings of Schopenhauer, 12 vols. with introduction by Steiner, publ. 1894.

35.J. G. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, The Vocation of Man, Berlin, 1800, “a book which for richness of content, beauty of style, elevation of thought reminds one of Descartes' Meditations.” (For data on Fichte, see note 13, above.)

36.Note by Rudolf Steiner: Transcendental knowledge, in the sense of this world-view, is a knowledge by means of which—although no direct insight into the thing-in-itself is believed to be attainable—indirect inferences are drawn from the subjective which is known, to the unknown which lies beyond the subjective (Transcendental). The thing-in-itself, according to this view, is beyond the sphere of the directly recognizable world, that is, it is transcendent. However, our world can be transcendentally related to the transcendent. Hartmann's view is called realism because it goes beyond the subjective, the ideal, to the transcendent, the real.

37.See Weygandt, Entstehung der Träume, Appearance of Dreams, 1893. (Reference given by Rudolf Steiner.)

38.See note 34, above.

39.Schopenhauer, op. cit. supra, Book II, par. 18.

40.Note by Translator: The reader's attention is called to the fact that the word Erfahrung is in this context translated as “practical experience” to emphasize the activity of thinking implicit in it, as distinct from the word erleben which also is usually rendered as “experience.”

41.See note 27, above, on Kant.

42.Emil DuBois-Reymond, German physiologist and educator. Born Berlin, November 7th, 1818, in 1836 he entered the University of Berlin, where his teacher was Johannes Müller, above). In 1840 he became the latter's assistant in physiology. His great work was the study of animal electricity, and his famous book was Researches on Animal Electricity, 1848–84. For many years he exerted great influence as a teacher. In 1858, upon the death of Müller, he was appointed to the latter's chair in physiology. In 1851 he had been admitted to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin; in 1867 he became its permanent secretary. His closest friend after Müller's death was von Helmholtz, who also had been a student of Müller. DuBois-Reymond died in Berlin on November 26, 1896. Rudolf Steiner makes many references to his work in lectures and writings.

43.Note by Translator: The reader's attention is drawn to the fact that the word experience, in relation to the kind of mysticism and philosophy of will referred to in this chapter, is translated from the word erleben (as distinct from Erfahrung, see note 40, above) Therefore, what the mystic experiences in feeling and the philosopher of will in the will-element, are experiences which have not been formed into clear representations by the activity of thinking.

44.Thelism—Voluntarism, i.e., any theory which conceives will to be the dominant factor in experience or in the constitution of the world.

44a.Ger. Erlebnisse.—Tr.

44b.Note by Rudolf Steiner: The passage from page 161 to this point was added, or rewritten for the Revised Edition, 1918.

45.See note 4—on von Hartmann.

46.The German text here reads Faktor der Erfahrungen.—Tr.

46a.Note by Rudolf Steiner: A complete catalogue of the principles of morality (from the point of view of metaphysical realism) may be found in Eduard von Hartmann's Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness.

47.Ger. Welterfahrung.—Tr.

48.Immanuel Kant: Theory of Ethics, transl. by Abbott, p. 180. The Critique of Practical Reason, Ch. III. On Kant, see note 27, above.

49.Note by Rudolf Steiner: Ziehen, Theodore, Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Guide to Physiological Psychology, 1st ed., p. 207 f.

Concerning the way “materialism” is spoken of here, and the justification for doing so, see the Addition at the end of the chapter.

50.Hartmann, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, p. 871.

50a.Hamerling, Atomistik des Willens, Atomic Theory of Will, Vol. II, p. 201. On Hamerling, see note 5, above.

51.Paulsen, System der Ethik, System of Ethics, 1889, partial English transl. 1899. Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908), German philosopher and educator. Educated at Erlangen, Bonn, and Berlin, where he was made extraordinary professor of philosophy and pedagogy, 1878. In 1896 he followed Zeller as professor of moral philosophy at Berlin. He was a pupil of G. T. Fechner, developing his teaching of panpsychism in his Einleitung in die Philosophie, Introduction to Philosophy, 1892, English transl. 1895. His German Education, Past and Present (English transl. 1907) is well known, as are his writings relative to the philosophy of Kant.

51a.Note by Rudolf Steiner: When Paulsen (p. 15 of his System of Ethics) says, “Different natural dispositions and different conditions of life demand not only different bodily diet but also a different spiritual-moral diet,” he is very near recognition of the truth, but misses the decisive point. Insofar as I am an individual, I need no diet. Dietetic means the art of bringing a particular example of the species into harmony with the general laws. But as an individual I am not an example of a species.

52.proto-amniotes: The original form of the innermost of the embryonic or fetal membranes of reptiles, insects, birds, and mammals. This membrane forms a closed sac surrounding the embryo and contains the amniotic fluid.

53.The Kant-Laplace primordial nebula. Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827), was a French mathematician and astronomer who, at the age of 24 was named “the Newton of France” for certain of his discoveries. In the years 1799–1825 his great work, the Mécanique céleste, which, as its author stated, “offers a complete solution of the great mechanical problem presented by the solar system,” appeared in 5 volumes, published in Paris. In his second great work, the Exposition du système du monde, Paris, 1796, appeared his statement of his famous “nebular hypothesis,” the origins of which he seems to attribute to Buffon, apparently unaware that Immanuel Kant had at least partially anticipated him in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, General History of Nature, published in 1755. Rudolf Steiner's criticism of the Kant-Laplace theory of the primordial nebula may be found in various places in his lectures and writings.

54.Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834–1919), German biologist, originally a physician in Berlin, became Privatdozent at Jena, afterward extraordinary professor of comparative anatomy, later professor of zoology, a chair established for him at Jena. This position he occupied for 43 years with intervals for zoological travels to various parts of the world. When Darwin's Origin of the Species appeared in 1859, Haeckel was deeply influenced by it, so that he became “the apostle of Darwinism in Germany.” Among Haeckel's famous books are his General Morphology (1866), Natural History of Creation (1867) and Die Weltraetsel (1899), English title, The Riddle of the Universe, publ. 1901. By his 60th birthday Haeckel had published 42 works of some 13,000 pages, plus many monographs. Rudolf Steiner knew Haeckel personally, and in his autobiography. Chapter 15, Steiner recorded a very interesting and perceptive impression of the great scientist. The “genealogical tree” of Haeckel to which Steiner refers is set forth in its original form in Haeckel's General Morphology and developed in his later writings.

55.Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist, whose voyage on the Beagle to the Southern Seas, recorded in his Journal of a Naturalist (1837) prepared the way for his famous work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, published November 24, 1859. Next in importance among his books. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, appeared in 1868. The Descent of Man, published in 1871, dealt with “the origin of man and his history” in the light of The Origin of the Species.

56.Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646–1716). For data on their lives and philosophical ideas, consult any standard encyclopedia.

57.For data on Schopenhauer, see note 34, above; on von Hartmann, see note 4, above.

58.See von Hartmann's Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins. The Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, p. 866 f. of the German edition.

59.See von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 7th German ed., Vol. II, p. 290.

60.Hartmann, op. cit. supra. Vol. II, p. 332.

61.Eudaemonism, derived from a Greek word which indicates the condition of being under the protection of a benign spirit, or a “good genius.” In ethics, this name is applied to those theories of morality according to which the main good of man is to be found in some form of happiness. Eudaemonia was one of the keywords in the ethical teachings of Aristotle.

62.German, Erfahrung.

63.Die letzten Fragen der Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik, Ultimate Problems of Epistemology and Metaphysics, publ. in Vol. 108, pp. 55 seq. of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, the Periodical for Philosophy and Philosophical Criticism.

64.For data on Hegel's “universal panlogism,” see any standard encyclopedia.

65.David Hume (1711–1776), Scottish philosopher and historian. Albert Einstein wrote, “If one reads Hume's books, one is amazed that many sometimes highly esteemed philosophers after him have been able to write so much obscure stuff and even to find grateful readers for it. Hume has permanently influenced the development of the best philosophers who came after him.” Among those influenced by Hume may be numbered Immanuel Kant, William James, George Santayana, and Bertrand Russell. Hume's writings and biographical and critical works concerning him and his ideas can be located by consulting any standard encyclopedia.

66.A note on page 71 of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie (Periodical for Philosophy) Vol. 108.

67.Johannes Rehmke, 1848–1930, philosopher. His principal works are Logik oder Philosophie als Wissenslehre (Logic or Philosophy as Theory of Knowledge) and Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff (The World as Percept and Concept), Berlin, 1880.

68.Karl Julius Schröer was born in Pressburg in 1825. In 1867 he was made professor of Literature in the Technical College of Vienna. In addition to his lectures on the history of German poetry as such, he lectured on Goethe and Schiller, on Walther von der Vogelweide, on German Grammar and Speech, etc. Rudolf Steiner was a pupil of Schröer, and refers to him in detail in his autobiography and in lectures. It was Schröer who recommended Steiner to Prof. Kürschner for the position of editor of Goethe's natural scientific writings. (See note 16, above) Schröer died in Vienna in 1900, and Rudolf Steiner has left an unforgettable word portrait and estimate of him in his Vom Menschenrätsel, Riddles of Man, publ. Berlin, 1916.

69.From July 1884 to September 1890, Rudolf Steiner was active as tutor in the home of Ladislaus (1834–1905) and Pauline (1846–1916) Specht at Kolingasse 19, Vienna IX. He taught their four sons, Richard, Arthur, Otto, and Ernst. Richard Specht (1870–1932) became a well-known author of many works including biographical studies of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Franz Werfel, Brahms, and Beethoven. Steiner gives details of this pedagogical activity in his autobiography. Chapter VI.

70.Rosa Mayreder (1858–1938), Austrian writer, also known as a painter. Her entire life was passed in Vienna and surroundings. She was the author of a number of popular novels. In addition, she was active in the movement for woman suffrage in Austria, at one time sharing in the direction of the movement itself, and editing its periodical. She wrote the libretto for Hugo Wolf's only opera, Der Corregidor (1896). Rudolf Steiner refers to Rosa Mayreder in his autobiography. Chapter IX.

71.See Johannes Volkelt's Erfahrung und Denken. Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, Experience and Thinking. Critical Foundation for a Theory of Cognition. Hamburg and Leipzig, 1886. (Johannes Volkelt 1848–1930, philosopher, professor at Leipzig.) See also note 29, above.

72.Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Schiller, publ. in English translation by Olin D. Wannamaker, New York, 1950, under the title, “The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception—Fundamental Outlines with Special Reference to Schiller.” The first German edition published Berlin and Stuttgart, 1886, revised ed., Stuttgart, 1924, with new Foreword by the author. Other editions: Dornach, 1924; Dresden, 1936; Freiburg i. Br., 1949; Dornach, 1960.

73.Aristotle (384–322 B.C.): Physica Auscultatio, On Nature as Cause and Change, and the General Principles of Natural Science.

74.Raimon Lull (Raymond Lully), (0.1235–1315) Catalan author, mystic and missionary. Born Majorca. In 1266 a series of visions led to a marked change in his life and purpose. Spent 9 years studying Arabic in order to refute the heretical teachings current in his time. At Ronda he wrote his famous Ars Major and Ars Generalis. He made many journeys in France, Italy, North Africa in a burning crusade against the teachings of Mohammedanism. At Bougie, North Africa he was stoned outside the city walls and died on June 29, 1315.

75.biogenesis, the teaching that living organisms come from other living organisms, as opposed to abiogenesis. The author of the modern formulation of “the fundamental law of biogenesis” was Fritz Müller (1864). Haeckel (see note 54, above) called Müller's formulation “the biogenetic fundamental law,” which can be stated briefly as the teaching that in its development from the egg to adult stage, the animal tends to pass through a series of stages which recapitulate the stages through which its ancestry passed in the development of the species from a primitive form. In other words, the development of the individual is a condensed expression of the development of the race.

76.The earliest statement of the law of mechanical theory of heat was formulated by the French physicist, Sadi Nicholas Lèonhard Carnot (1796–1832) in notes written about 1830, published by his brother in the latter's Life of Sadi Carnot, Paris, 1878. Further work in this direction was done by Ségun, Paris, 1839, by Julius Robert Mayer, c. 1842, and by J. P. Joule, who (1840–43) placed the mechanical theory of heat on a sound experimental basis.

Julius Robert Mayer (1814–1878), German physician and physicist, is the discoverer of the law of conservation of energy, which—within limits of the data he obtained from experiments and reasoning—he applied “with great power and insight to the explanation of numerous physical phenomena.”

77.On Fichte, see note 13, above. Rudolf Steiner's Inaugural Dissertation for his doctoral degree before the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Rostock (Defense, beginning of May, 1891; Promotion, October 26, 1891) was titled Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre, usw., The Fundamentals of a Theory of Cognition with Special Reference to Fichte's Scientific Teaching. When the thesis was published in book form, as it appears here in English translation, a Foreword and one chapter were added to the original by Rudolf Steiner. These latter are included in the present translation.

78.John Locke (1632–1704), English philosopher, scholar, chemist, student of meteorology, practicing physician, political advisor, traveler, and author. For details on his life and thought, consult any standard encyclopedia.

79.see reference to Volkelt's book in note 71, above, (p. 20)

80.see note 27, on Kant, above.

81.p. 61 ff. of Kirchmann's German edition of Kant's Kritik. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introd. to 2nd edition. Sec. vi.

82.Kant, Prolegomena, Sec. v.

83.Kant, Kritik, p. 53 f. of the German ed. Introduction, Sec. iv.

84.Rehmke, Johannes: Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, usw., The World as Percept and Concept, etc., Berlin, 1880, p. 161 ff. of the German ed.

85.Refer to title given in note 28, above.

86.Note by Rudolf Steiner: This attempt, incidentally, is one which the objections of Robert Zimmermann (Uber Kant's mathematisches Vorurteil und dessen Folgen, On Kant's Mathematical Notions and their Results) show to be, if not altogether in error, at least highly questionable. (Robert Zimmermann, 1824–1898, was Professor of Philosophy in the University of Vienna, 1861–95. His book on Aesthetics was published in 2 volumes, Vienna, 1870. Rudolf Steiner attended lectures by Zimmermann on fundamentals of ethics at the University of Vienna. Steiner's impressions of this great interpreter of Herbart's aesthetics are contained in the 3rd chapter of the former's autobiography.)

87.Kant, Kritik, Introduction to 2nd edition. Sec. ii.

88.See Kant's Theorie der Erfahrung, Theory of Experience, pp. 90, ff. of the German ed.

89.Kant, Kritik, p. 58, Sec. v.

90.Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, Kant's Theory of Experience, Berlin, 1871, pp. 90 ff. of the German ed.

91.August Stadler (1850–1910), Die Grundsätze der reinen Erkenntnistheorie in der Kantschen Philosophie, The Principles of the Pure Theory of Cognition in the Philosophy of Kant, Leipzig, 1876, p. 76 f. of the German ed.

92.Volkelt, op. cit., p. 21, see note 71, above.

93.Otto Liebmann (1840–1912), Analysis, 1880, p. an ff. (see note 28, above); A. Holder, Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie, Kant's Theory of Cognition, Tübingen, 1874, p. 14 ff.; Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) Phasen der Kantschen Lehre, Phases of Kant's Theory, p. 239; F. Ueberweg, System der Logik, System of Logic, p. 380 f.; Eduard v. Hartmann (1842–1906), Kritische Grundlegung, Berlin, 1875, p. 142–172 of the 2nd German ed. (see note 4, above).

94.Note by Rudolf Steiner: Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, History of More Recent Philosophy, 1860, Vol. 5, p. 60. Volkelt is mistaken about Fischer when he says (Kant's Erkenntnistheorie, Kant's Theory of Cognition, p. 198 f.) that “it is not clear from the account by K. Fischer whether, in his opinion, Kant takes for granted only the psychological fact of the occurrence of universal and necessary judgments, but also their objective validity and truth.” For, in the passage cited above, Fischer says that the main difficulty of the Critique of Pure Reason is to be found in the fact that “its basic points rest on certain presuppositions,” which “must be allowed if the remainder is to be valid.” For Fischer, these presuppositions consist in that “first the fact of knowledge is affirmed,” and then analysis reveals the cognitive faculties “by means of which the fact itself is explained.”

95.Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833), Aenesidemus, Helmstädt, 1792.

96.On Schopenhauer, see note 34, above.

97.On von Hartmann, see note 4, above.

98.Kritische Grundlegung, by Hartmann, Berlin 1875, Foreword, p. 10 of the German ed.

99.Liebmann, Zur Analysis, p. 28 ff. of the German ed. See note 28, above.

100.Kant's Erkenntnistheorie, Theory of Knowledge, Sec. 1.

101.A. Dorner, Das menschliche Erkennen, usw., Human Cognition, Berlin, 1887.

102.Julius Heinrich v. Kirchmann (1802–1884), Die Lehre vom Wissen, The Theory of Knowledge, Berlin, 1868.

103.E. L. Fischer, Die Grundfragen der Erkenntnistheorie, Basic Questions of the Theory of Cognition, Mainz 1887, p. 385.

104.C. Göring, System der kritischen Philosophie, System of Critical Philosophy, Leipzig, 1874, Part I, p. 257.

105.Johannes Müller (1801–1858), see note 32, above.

106.Hartmann's Grundproblem, p. 37 (see note 4, above).

107.A. Döring, article in Philosophische Monatshefte, Vol. XXVI, 1890, p. 390. publ. Heidelberg. Philosophical Monthly.

108.Hartmann, Grundproblem, p. 1. See note 4, above.

109.John Stewart Mill (1806–1873). A stern parent, James Mill taught his son Greek at the age of three, and at seven he studied Plato's dialogues. When he was eight he had to teach his sister Latin. His introduction to the utilitarian teachings of Bentham (the greatest happiness to the greatest number) at the age of fifteen was decisive for his life. His great work, System of Logic, 1843, is the analysis of inductive proof. He was a great champion of human rights, and in the second half of the i9th century his influence throughout Europe was very great. Today it is recognized that—to use Mill's description of Bentham—“He was not a great philosopher but a great reformer in philosophy.” For details on Mill's life and thought, consult any standard encyclopedia.

110.Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, P. 71.

111.For fundamentals of the scientific teaching of Fichte, see his Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 97.

112.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.

113.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 178.

114.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.

115.Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibnitz, History of German Philosophy Since Leibnitz, Munich, 1871–75, p. 605. Eduard Zeller studied and taught at Tübingen, later (1847) becoming professor of Theology at Bern, later (1849) professor of Theology, afterward of Philosophy at Marburg. In 1862 he was made professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, afterward at Berlin to his retirement in 1895. His masterwork is the Philosophie der Greichen, Philosophy of the Greeks, 1844–52. He was recognized throughout the academic world for his learning and contributions to scholarship, and received many distinctions and honors. His Philosophie der Greichen has been transl. into English by S. F. Alleyne, 2 vols. 1881. In addition, an abridged version prepared by Zeller (1883) also appeared in English in 1896, as did a number of his other writings.

116.Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 94.

117.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 98.

118.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.

119.J. G. Fichtes nachgelassene Werke, J. G. Fichte's Posthumous Works, Edited by J. H. Fichte, Vol. I, Bonn, 1834, p. 4 and 16. (Einleitungsvorlesungen in die Wissenschaftslehre, Introductory Studies in the Scientific Teachings.)

120.Note by Rudolf Steiner: See his Christliche Dogmatik, Christian Dogmatics, and edition, 1884–85, the epistemological arguments, Vol. 1. A complete discussion of his point of view has been provided by Eduard von Hartmann; see Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart, Critical Survey of Contemporary Philosophy, p. 200 ff.

121.opus cit., see note 120, above.

[ 1 ] Everything discussed in this book centers around two problems which are fundamental to the human soul-life. One of these problems concerns the possibility of attaining such insight into human nature that knowledge of man can become the foundation of all human knowledge and experience of life. We often feel that our experiences and the results of scientific investigations are not self-supporting; further experiences or discoveries may shake our certitude. The other problem is Has man any right to ascribe freedom to his will, or is freedom of will an illusion arising out of his inability to recognize the threads of necessity on which his will depends, just like a process in nature? This question is not artificially created. In a certain disposition it arises quite spontaneously in the human soul. And one feels that the soul lacks in stature if it has not at some time faced in deep seriousness the question of free will or necessity. In this book the intention is to show that the inner experiences caused by the second problem depend upon what attitude man is able to take toward the first problem. The attempt will be made to show that it is possible to attain such an insight into man's nature, that this can support all the rest of his knowledge, and further that this insight completely justifies the concept of freedom of will, provided only that first the region of soul is discovered where free will can unfold.

[ 2 ] This insight in relation to the two problems is such that, once attained, it can become a living content of man's soul life. A theoretical answer will not be given which, once acquired is merely carried about as a conviction, retained by memory. For the whole manner of thinking on which this book is based, such an answer would be no answer. Such a finished, limited answer will not be given, but a region of experiences within the human soul will be pointed to, where, through the soul's own inner activity. living answers to the questions are to be found ever anew and at every moment when man needs them. Once the region of soul is discovered where these questions unfold, a real insight into this region provides man with what he needs for the solution of these two problems of life so that, with what he has then attained, he can penetrate further into the breadth and depth of life's riddles, as need or destiny leads him.—It will be seen that a knowledge has here been outlined, which proves its justification and validity, not only through its own existence, but also through the relationship it has with the entire soul-life of man.

[ 3 ] These were my thoughts about the content of this book when I wrote it twenty-five years ago. To-day, again I must write similarly if I am to characterize the aim of this book. In the first edition I limited myself to saying no more than was in the strictest sense connected with the two fundamental problems described above. If anyone should be surprised at not finding in this book as yet, any reference to that region of the world of spiritual experience described in my later writings, then he must consider that at that time it was not my purpose to describe results of spiritual research, but first to lay the foundation on which such results can rest. This “Philosophy of Freedom” does not contain any special results of this kind, any more than it contains special results of the natural sciences. But what it contains cannot, in my view, be dispensed with by anyone who strives for certainty in such knowledge. What I have said in this book can also be acceptable to many who, for reasons of their own, will have nothing to do with the results of my spiritual scientific research. But one who can regard these results of spiritual scientific research as something to which he is drawn, will recognize as important what is attempted here. It is this: to prove that an open-minded consideration of just the two problems I have indicated, problems which are fundamental to all knowledge, leads to recognition of the fact that man is living within the reality of a spiritual world. In this book the attempt is made to justify knowledge of the realm of spirit before entering upon spiritual experience. And this justification is undertaken in such a way that, for anyone able and willing to enter into this discussion, there is no need, in order to accept what is said here, to cast furtive glances at the experiences which my later writings have shown to be relevant.

[ 4 ] Thus it seems to me that, on the one hand, this book occupies a position completely independent of my writings on actual spiritual scientific matters, and yet, on the other hand, it is also most intimately connected with them. All this has caused me now, after twenty-five years, to republish the content of this book practically unaltered in all essentials. I have, however, made additions of some length to several chapters. The misunderstandings of my argument which have come to my attention seemed to make these detailed extensions necessary. Alterations have been made only where what I said a quarter of a century ago appeared to me clumsily expressed. (Only ill-will could find in these changes occasion to suggest that I have changed my fundamental conviction.)

[ 5 ] The book has been out of print for many years. Nevertheless, and in spite of the fact, apparent from what I have just said, that to me it seems that to-day must be similarly expressed what I did express twenty-five years ago about the problems I have characterized, I hesitated a long time about the completion of this revised edition. Again and again I have asked myself whether at this point or that, I ought not to define my position toward the numerous philosophical views which have been put forward since the publication of the first edition. Yet the heavy demands on my time in recent years, due to purely spiritual scientific research, prevented me doing as I might have wished. Also, a survey, as thorough as possible, of the philosophical literature of the present day has convinced me that such a critical discussion, tempting though it would be in itself, has no place in the context of what this book has to say. All that, from the point of view of the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” it seemed to me necessary to say about recent philosophical tendencies, may be found in the second volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy.”

RUDOLF STEINER
April, 1918

1.

[ 1 ] Friedrich Nietzsche characterizes himself as a lonely ponderer and friend of riddles, as a personality not made for the age in which he lived. The one who follows such paths as his, “meets no one; this is a part of going one's own way. No one approaches to help him; all that happens to him of danger, accidents, evil and bad weather, he must get along with alone,” he says in the preface of the second edition of his Morgenröte, Dawn. But it is stimulating to follow him into his loneliness. In the words in which he expressed his relationship to Schopenhauer, I would like to describe my relationship to Nietzsche: “I belong to those readers of Nietzsche who, after they have read the first page, know with certainty that they will read all pages, and listen to every word he has said. My confidence in him was there immediately ... I understood him as if he had written just for me, in order to express all that I would say intelligibly but immediately and foolishly.” One can speak thus and yet be far from acknowledging oneself as a “believer” in Nietzsche's world conception. But Nietzsche himself could not be further from wishing to have such “believers.” Did he not put into Zarathustra's mouth these words:

[ 2 ] “You say you believe in Zarathustra, but of what account is Zarathustra? You are my believer, but of what account are all believers?

[ 3 ] “You have not searched for yourselves as yet; there you found me. Thus do all believers, but, for that reason, there is so little in all believing. Now I advise you to forsake me and to find yourselves; and only when all of you have denied me will I return to you.”

[ 4 ] Nietzsche is no Messianic founder of a religion; therefore he can wish for friends who support his opinion, but he cannot wish for confessors to his teaching, who give up their own selves to find his.

[ 5 ] In Nietzsche's personality are found instincts which are contrary to the complete gamut of the ideas of his contemporaries. With instinctive aversion he rejects most of the important cultural ideas of those amid whom he developed himself and, indeed, not as one rejects an assertion in which one has discovered a logical contradiction, but rather as one turns away from a color which causes pain to the eye. The aversion starts from the immediate feeling to begin with, conscious thinking does not come into consideration at all. What other people feel when such thoughts as guilt, conscience, sin, life beyond, ideal happiness, fatherland, pass through their heads, works unpleasantly upon Nietzsche. The instinctive manner of rejection of these ideas also differentiates Nietzsche from the so-called “free thinkers” of the present. The latter know all the intellectual objections to “the old illusionary ideas,” but how rarely is one found who can say that his instincts no longer depend upon them! It is precisely the instincts which play bad tricks upon the free thinkers of the present time. The thinking takes on a character independent of the inherited ideas, but the instincts cannot adapt themselves to the changed character of the intellect. These “free thinkers” put just any belief of modern science in place of an old idea, but they speak about it in such a way that one realizes that the intellect goes another way from that of the instincts. The intellect searches in matter, in power, in the laws of nature, for the origin of phenomena; but the instincts misguide so that one has the same feeling toward this being that others have toward their personal God. Intellects of this type defend themselves against the accusation of the denial of God, but they do not do this because their world conception leads them to something which is in harmony with any form of God, but rather because from their forefathers they have inherited the tendency to feel an instinctive shudder at the expression, “the denial of God.” Great natural scientists emphasize that they do not wish to banish such ideas as God and immortality, but rather that they wish to transform them, in the sense of modern science. Their instincts simply have remained behind their intellect.

[ 6 ] A large number of these “free spirits” are of the opinion that the will of man is unfree. They say that under certain circumstances man must behave as his character and the conditions working upon him force him to act. But if we look at the opponents of the theory of “free will,” we shall find that the instincts of these “free spirits” turn away from a doer of an “evil” deed with exactly the same aversion as do the instincts of those who represent the opinion that according to its desires the “free will” could turn itself toward good or toward evil.

[ 7 ] The contradiction between intellect and instinct is the mark of our “modern spirits.” Within the most liberal thinkers of the present age the implanted instincts of Christian orthodoxy also still live. Exactly opposite instincts are active in Nietzsche's nature. He does not need first to reflect whether there are reasons against the acceptance of a personal world leader. His instinct is too proud to bow before such a one; for this reason he rejects such a representation. He says in his Zarathustra, “But that I may reveal to you my heart, to you, my friends: if there were Gods, how could I stand it not to be a God! Therefore, there are no Gods.” Nothing in his inner being compels him to accuse either himself or another as “guilty” of a committed action. To consider such a “guilty” action as unseemly, he needs no theory of “free” or “unfree” will.

[ 8 ] The patriotic feelings of his German compatriots are also repugnant to Nietzsche's instincts. He cannot make his feelings and his thinking dependent upon the circles of the people amid whom he was born and reared, nor upon the age in which he lives. “It is so small-townish,” he says in his Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Schopenhauer as Educator, “to make oneself duty-bound to opinions which no longer bind one a few hundred miles away. Orient and Occident are strokes of chalk which someone draws before our eyes to make fools of our timidity. I will make the attempt to come to freedom, says the young soul to itself; and then should it be hindered because accidentally two nations hate and fight each other, or because an ocean lies between two parts of the earth, or because there a religion is taught which did not exist a few thousand years previously?” The soul experiences of the Germans during the War of 1870 found so little echo in his soul that “while the thunder of battle passed from Wörth over Europe,” he sat in a small corner of the Alps, “brooding and puzzled, consequently most grieved, and at the same time not grieved,” and wrote down his thoughts about the Greeks. And, a few weeks later, as he found himself “under the walls of Metz,” he still was not freed from the questions which he had concerning the life and art of the Greeks. (See Versuch einer Selbstkritik, Attempt at a Self-Critique, in the 2nd edition of his Geburt der Tragödie, Birth of Tragedy.) When the war came to an end, he entered so little enthusiasm of his German contemporaries over the decisive victory that in the year 1873 in his writing about David Strauss he spoke about “the bad and dangerous consequences” of the victorious struggle. He even represented it as insanity that German culture should have been victorious in this struggle, and he described this insanity as dangerous because if it should become dominant within the German nation, the danger would exist of transforming the victory into complete defeat; a defeat, yes, an extirpation of the German spirit in favor of “the German realm.” This was Nietzsche's attitude at a time when the whole of Europe was filled with national fanaticism. It is the thinking of a personality not in harmony with his time, of a fighter against his time. Much more could be added to what has been said to show that Nietzsche's life of feeling and reflection was completely different from that of his contemporaries.

2.

[ 9 ] Nietzsche is no “thinker” in the usual sense of the word. For the deeply penetrating and valid questions which he had to ask in regard to the world and life, mere thinking was not sufficient. For these questions, all the forces of human nature must be unchained; intellectual thinking alone is not sufficient for the task. Nietzsche has no confidence in merely intellectually conceived reasons for an opinion. “There is a mistrust in me for dialectic, even for proofs” he writes to Georg Brandes on the 2nd of December 1887 (see his Menschen und Werke, Men and Works, p. 212). For those who would ask the reasons for his opinions, he is ready with the answer of Zarathustra, “You ask why? I do not belong to those of whom one may ask their why.” For him, a criterion was not that an opinion could be proved logically, but rather if it acted upon all forces of the human personality in such a way that it had value for life. He grants validity to a thought only if he finds it will add to the development of life. To see man as healthy as possible, as powerful as possible, as creative as possible, is his desire. Truth, beauty, all ideals, have value and concern the human being only to the extent that they foster life.

[ 10 ] The question about the value of truth appears in several of Nietzsche's writings. In the most daring form it is asked in his Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil. “The will for truth which has misled us into so many hazards, that famous truthfulness, about which all philosophers have spoken with awe: what questions this will for truth has already put before us! What marvelous, difficult, worthy questions! This is already a long story, yet it seems that it has barely begun. Is it any wonder that we finally become mistrustful, lose patience, turn about impatiently? Is it any wonder that from the Sphinx we ourselves also learn to ask questions? Then who is it who asks questions here? What is it in us that really wants to penetrate ‘to truth?’ In fact, we had to stand for a long time before the question about the cause of will—until we finally remained completely still before a yet more fundamental question. We asked about the value of willing. That is, provided we want truth; why not rather untruth?”

[ 11 ] This is a thought of a boldness hardly to be surpassed. If one places beside it what another daring “ponderer and friend of riddles,” Johann Gottlieb Fichte, said about the striving after truth, then one realizes for the first time from what depths of human nature Nietzsche brings forth his ideas. “I am destined,” said Fichte, “to bear witness to truth; upon my life and my destiny, nothing depends; upon the effects of my life, infinitely much depends. I am a priest of truth; I am in its debt; for it I have bound myself to do all, to dare all, and to suffer all.” (Fichte, Über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten, On the Task of the Scholar, Lecture 4). These words describe the relationship of the most noble spirits of the newer Western culture to truth. In the face of all of Nietzsche's cited expressions, they appear superficial. Against them one can ask, Is it not possible that untruth has more valuable effects upon life than truth? Is it impossible that truth harms life? Has Fichte himself posed these questions? Have others done it who have borne “witness to truth?”

[ 12 ] But Nietzsche poses these questions. And he believes that he can become clear only when he treats this striving after truth not merely as an intellectual matter, but seeks the instincts which bring forth this striving. For it could well have been that these instincts make use of truth only as a medium to accomplish something which stands higher than truth. Nietzsche thinks after he has “looked at the philosophers long enough between the lines and upon the fingers,” that “most thinking of philosophers is secretly led by their instincts, and forced along definite ways.” The philosophers consider that the final impulse to action is the striving after truth. They believe this because they are unable to look into the depths of human nature. In reality, this striving after truth is guided by the will to power. With the help of truth, this power and fullness of life should be increased for the personality. The conscious thinking of the philosopher is of the opinion that the recognition of truth is a final goal; the unconsicous instinct that motivates this thinking strives toward the fostering of life. From this instinct, “the falsity of a judgment is no real objection toward a judgment;” for him only the question comes into consideration, “to what extent is it life furthering, life supporting, species supporting, perhaps even species cultivating.” (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, ¶ 4.)

[ 13 ] Do you call will to truth, you wisest ones, that which impels you and makes you ardent?

[ 14 ] Will for the conceivableness of all being: thus do I name your will!

[ 15 ] All being would you first make conceivable, because you doubt with good reason whether it is already thinkable.

[ 16 ] But it shall yield to you and bend itself to you! So wills your will. Smooth shall it become, and subject to the spirit, as its mirror and reflection.

[ 17 ] That is your entire will, you wisest ones, a Will to Power. (Zarathustra, second part, The Self Surpassing).

[ 18 ] Truth is to make the world subservient to the spirit, and thereby serve life. Only as a life necessity has it value. But can one not go further and ask, what is this life worth in itself? Nietzsche considers such a question to be impossible. That everything alive wants to live as powerfully, as meaningfully as possible, he accepts as a fact about which he ponders no further. Life instincts ask no further about the value of life. They ask only what possibilities there are to increase the strength of its bearers. “Judgments, evaluations of life, either for or against, can never be true, in the final analysis; they have value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms, and in themselves such judgments are nonsense. One must absolutely stretch out one's fingers and try to comprehend the astonishing finesse in the fact that the value of life cannot be measured. It cannot be measured by a living person because he partakes of it; indeed, for him it is even an object of strife: therefore he is no judge; neither can it be appraised by a dead person, for another reason. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life remains, so to speak, an accusation against him, a question concerning his wisdom and lack of wisdom.” (Götzendämmerung, Das Problem des Sokrates, The Twilight of Idols, The Problem of Socrates.) The question about the value of life exists only for a poorly educated, sick personality. A well-rounded personality lives without asking how much his life is worth.

[ 19 ] Because Nietzsche has the point of view described above, he places such little weight upon logical proofs for a judgment. It is of little account to him that a judgment lets itself be proved logically; he is interested in whether one can live well under its influence. Not alone the intellect, but the whole personality of the human being must be satisfied. The best thoughts are those which bring all forces of human nature into an activity adapted to the person.

[ 20 ] Only thoughts of this nature have interest for Nietzsche. He is not a philosophical brain, but a “gatherer of honey of the intellect” who searches for “honey baskets” of knowledge, and tries to bring home what benefits life.

3.

[ 21 ] In Nietzsche's personality, those instincts rule which make man a dominating, controlling being. Everything pleases him which manifests might; everything displeases him which discloses weakness. He feels happy only so long as he finds himself in conditions of life which heighten his power. He loves hindrances, obstacles against his activity, because he becomes aware of his own power by overcoming them. He looks for the most difficult paths which the human being can take. A fundamental trait of his character is expressed in the verse which he has written on the title page of the second edition of his Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Joyful Wisdom:

I live in my own house,
Have never copied anything from anyone,
And have ridiculed every master
Who has not ridiculed himself.

[ 22 ] Every kind of subordination to a strange power Nietzsche feels as weakness. And he thinks differently about that which is a “strange power” than many a one who considers himself to be “an independent, free spirit.” Nietzsche considers it a weakness when the human being; subordinates his thinking and his doing to so-called “eternal, brazen” laws of the intellect. Whatever the uniformly developed personality does, it does not allow it to be prescribed by a moral science, but only by the impulses of its own self. Man is already weak at the moment he searches for laws and rules according to which he shall think and act. Out of his own being the strong individual controls his way of thinking and doing.

[ 23 ] Nietzsche expresses this opinion in the crudest form in sentences, because of which narrow-minded people have characterized him as a downright dangerous spirit: “When the Christian Crusaders in the East came into collision with that invincible order of assassins, those orders of free thinking spirits, par excellence, whose lowest order lived in a state of discipline such as no order of monks ever attained, in some way or other they managed to get an inkling of that symbol and motto that was reserved for the highest grade alone, as their secret: ‘Nothing is true, everything is permissible!’ ... Truly, that was freedom of the spirit; thereby faith itself was giving notice to truth.” (Genealogie der Moral, Genealogy of Morals, 3rd Section, ¶ 24.) That these sentences are the expression of feelings of an aristocratic, of a master nature, which will not permit the individual to live freely according to his own laws, with no regard to the eternal truths and rules of morality, those people do not feel who by nature are adjusted to subordination. A personality such as Nietzsche cannot bear those tyrants who appear in the form of abstract moral commandments. I determine how I am to think, how I am to act, says such a nature.

[ 24 ] There are people who base their justification for calling themselves “free thinkers” upon the fact that in their thinking and acting they do not subject themselves to those laws which are derived from other human beings, but only to “the eternal laws of the intellect,” the “incontrovertible concepts of duty,” or “the Will of God.” Nietzsche does not regard such people as really strong personalities. For they do not think and act according to their own nature, but according to the commands of a higher authority. Whether the slave follows the arbitrariness of his master, the religious the revealed verities of a God, or the philosopher the demands of the intellect, this changes nothing of the fact that they are all obeyers. What does the commanding is of no importance; the deciding factor is that there is commanding, that the human being does not give his own direction for his acting, but thinks that there is a power which delineates this direction.

[ 25 ] The strong, truly free human being will not receive truth, he will create it; he will not let something “be permitted” him; he will not obey. “The real philosophers are commanders and law givers; they say, ‘Thus shall it be,’ they first decide the ‘why’ and ‘wherefore’ and thereby dispose of the preliminary labor of all philosophical workers, all conquerors of the past; they grasp at the future with creative hands and all that is and was becomes for them a means, a tool, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is Will to Power. Are there such philosophers today? Were there once such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?” (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, ¶ 211.)

4.

[ 26 ] Nietzsche sees a special indication of human weakness in every type of belief in a world beyond, in a world other than that in which man lives. According to him, one can do no greater harm to life than to order one's existence in this world according to another life in a world beyond. One cannot give oneself over to greater confusion than when one assumes the existence of beings behind the phenomena of this world, beings which are not approachable by human knowledge, and which are to be considered as the real basis, as the decisive factor in all existence. By such an assumption one ruins for oneself the joy in this world. One degrades it to illusion, to a mere reflection of the inaccessible. One interprets the world known to us, the world which for us is the only real one, as a futile dream, and attributes true reality to an imaginary, fictitious other world. One interprets the human senses as deceivers, who give us only illusory pictures instead of realities.

[ 27 ] Such a point of view cannot stem from weakness. For the strong person who is deeply rooted in reality, who has joy in life, will not let it enter his head to imagine another reality. He is occupied with this world and needs no other. But the suffering, the ill, those dissatisfied with this life, take refuge in the yonder. What this life has taken away from them, the world beyond is to offer them. The strong, healthy person who has well developed senses fitted to search for the causes of this world in this world itself, requires no causes or beings of the world beyond for the understanding of the appearances within which he lives. The weak person, who perceives reality with crippled eyes and ears, needs causes behind the appearances.

[ 28 ] Out of suffering and sick longing, the belief in the yonder world is born. Out of the inability to penetrate the real world all acceptances of “things in themselves” have originated.

[ 29 ] All who have reason to deny the real life say Yes to an imaginary one. Nietzsche wants to be an affirmer in face of reality. He will explore this world in all directions; he will penetrate into the depths of existence; of another life he wants to know nothing. Even suffering itself cannot provoke him to say No to life, for suffering also is a means to knowledge. “Like a traveler who plans to awaken at a certain hour, and then peacefully succumbs to sleep, we philosophers surrender ourselves to sickness, provided that we have become ill for a time in body and soul; we also close our eyes. And as the traveler knows that somewhere something does not sleep, that something counts the hours and will awaken him, so we also know that the decisive moment will find us awake—that then something will spring forth and catch the spirit in the act; I mean, in the weakness or the turning back or the surrendering or the hardening or the beclouding, as all the many sick conditions of the spirit are called, which in days of health had the pride of spirit against them. After such a self-questioning, self-examination, one learns to look with a finer eye at everything which had been philosophized about until now.” (Preface to the second edition of Fröhliche Wissenschalt, Joyful Wisdom.)

5.

[ 30 ] Nietzsche's friendly attitude toward life and reality shows itself also in his point of view in regard to men and their relationships with each other. In this field Nietzsche is a complete individualist. Each human being is for him a world in itself, a unicum. “This marvelously colorful manifoldness which is unified to a ‘oneness’ and faces us as a certain human being, no accident, however strange, could shake together in a like way a second time.” (Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Schopenhauer as Educator, ¶ 1.) Very few human beings, however, are inclined to unfold their individualities, which exist but once. They are in terror of the loneliness into which they are forced because of this. It is more comfortable and less dangerous to live in the same way as one's fellow men; there one always finds company. The one who arranges his life in his own way is not understood by others, and finds no companions. Loneliness has a special attraction for Nietzsche. He loves to search for secrets within his own self. He flees from the community of human beings. For the most part, his ways of thought are attempts to search for treasures which lie deeply hidden within his personality. The light which others offer him, he despises; the air one breathes where the “community of human beings,” the “average man” lives, he will not breathe. Instinctively he strives toward his “citadel and privacy” where he is free from the crowds, from the many, from the majority. (Jenseits van Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, ¶ 26). In his Fröliche Wissenschaft, Joyful Wisdom, he complains that it is difficult for him to “digest” his fellow men; and in Jenseits van Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, ¶ 282, he discloses that at the least he carried away dangerous intestinal disturbances when he sat down at the table where the diet of “ordinary human beings” was served. Human beings must not come too close to Nietzsche if he is to stand them.

6.

[ 31 ] Nietzsche grants validity to a thought, a judgment, in the form to which the free-reigning life instincts give their assent. Attitudes which are decided by life he does not allow to be removed by logical doubt. For this reason his thinking has a firm, free swing. It is not confused by reflections as to whether an assumption is also true “objectively,” whether it does not go beyond the boundaries, of the possibilities of human knowledge, etc. When Nietzsche has recognized the value of a judgment for life, he no longer asks for a further “objective” meaning and validity. And he does not worry about the limits of knowledge. It is his opinion that a healthy thinking creates what it is able to create, and does not torment itself with the useless question, what can I not do?

[ 32 ] The one who wishes to determine the value of a judgment by the degree to which it furthers life, can, of course, only do this on the basis of his own personal life impulses and instincts. He can never wish to say more than, Insofar as my own life instincts are concerned, I consider this particular judgment to be valuable. And Nietzsche never wishes to say anything else when he expresses a point of view. It is just this relationship of his to his thought world which works so beneficially upon the reader who is orientated toward freedom. It gives Nietzsche's writings a character of unselfish, modest dignity. In comparison, how repellent and immodest it sounds when other thinkers believe their person to be the organ by which eternal, irrefutable verities are made known to the world. One can find sentences in Nietzsche's works which express his strong ego-consciousness, for example, “I have given to mankind the deepest book which it possesses, my Zarathustra; soon I shall give it the most independent.” (Götzendämmerung, Twilight of Idols, ¶ 51.) But what do these words indicate? I have dared to write a book whose content is drawn from lower depths of a personality than is usual in similar books, and I shall offer a book which is more independent of every strange judgment than other philosophical writings, for I shall speak about the most important things only in the way they relate to my personal instincts. That is dignified modesty. It would of course go against the taste of those whose lying humility says, I am nothing, my work is everything; I bring nothing of my personal feelings into my books, but I express only what the pure intellect allows me to express. Such people want to deny their person in order to assert that their expressions are those of a higher spirit. Nietzsche considers his thoughts to be the results of his own person and nothing more.

7.

[ 33 ] The specialist philosophers may smile about Nietzsche, or give us their impressions about the “dangers” of his “world conception” as best they can. Of course, many of these spirits, who are nothing but animated textbooks of logic, are not able to praise Nietzsche's creations, which spring from the most mighty, most immediate life impulses.

[ 34 ] In any case, with his bold thought Nietzsche leaps and hits upon deeper secrets of human nature than many a logical thinker with his cautious creeping. Of what use is all logic if it catches only worthless content in its net of concepts? When valuable thoughts are communicated to us, we rejoice in them alone, even if they are not tied together with logical threads. The salvation of life does not depend upon logic alone, but also upon the production of thoughts. At present our specialized philosophy is sufficiently unproductive, and it could very well use the stimulation of the thoughts of a courageous, bold writer like Nietzsche. The power of development of their specialized philosophy is paralyzed through the influence which the thinking of Kant has made upon them. Through this influence it has lost all originality, all courage. From the academic philosophy of his time Kant has taken over the concept of truth which originates from “pure reason,” He has tried to show that through such truth we cannot learn to know things which lie beyond our experience of “things in themselves.” During the last century, infinite, immeasurable cleverness was expended to penetrate into these thoughts of Kant's from all directions, The results of this sharp thinking are unfortunately rather meager and trivial, Should one translate the banalities of many a current philosophical book from academic formulae into healthy speech, such content would compare rather poorly with many a short aphorism of Nietzsche's, In view of present-day philosophy, the latter could speak the proud sentence with a certain justice, “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in one book—what every other person does not say in one book ...”

8.

[ 35 ] As Nietzsche does not want to express anything but the results of his personal instincts and impulses, so to him strange points of view are nothing more than symptoms from which he draws conclusions about the ruling instincts of individual human beings or whole peoples, races, and so on. He does not occupy himself with discussions or arguments over strange opinions. But he looks for the instincts which are expressed in these opinions. He tries to discover the character of the personalities or people from their attitudes. Whether an attitude indicates the dominance of instincts for health, courage, dignity, joy, and life, or whether it originates from unhealthy, slavish, tired instincts, inimical to life, all this interests him. Truths in themselves are indifferent to him; he concerns himself with the way people develop their truths according to their instincts, and how they further their life goals through them. He looks for the natural causes of human attitudes.

[ 36 ] Nietzsche's striving, of course, is not according to the tendencies of those idealists who attribute an independent value to truth, who want to give it “a purer, higher origin” than that of the instincts. He explains human views as the result of natural forces, just as the natural scientist explains the structure of the eye from the cooperation of natural causes. He recognizes an explanation of the spiritual development of mankind out of special moral purposes, or ideals out of a moral world order, as little as the natural scientist of today recognizes the explanation that nature has built the eye in a certain way for the reason that nature had the intention to create an organ of seeing for the organism. In every ideal Nietzsche sees only the expression of an instinct which looks toward satisfaction in a definite form, just as the modern natural scientist sees in the intentional arrangement of an organ, the result of organic formative laws. If at present there still exist natural scientists and philosophers who reject all purposeful creating in nature, but, who stop short before moral idealism, and see in history the realization of a divine will, an ideal order of things, this belief is an incompleteness of the instinct. Such people lack the necessary perspective for the judging of spiritual happenings, while they have it for the observation of natural happenings. When a human being thinks he is striving toward an ideal which does not derive from reality, he thinks this only because he does not recognize the instinct from which this ideal stems.

[ 37 ] Nietzsche is an anti-idealist in that sense in which the modern natural scientist opposes the assumption of purposes which nature is to materialize. He speaks just as little about moral purposes as the natural scientist speaks about natural purposes. Nietzsche does not consider it wiser to say, Man should materialize a moral ideal, than to explain that the bull has horns so that he may gore with them. He considers the one as well as the other expression to be a product of a world explanation which speaks about “divine providence,” “wise omnipotence,” instead of natural causes.

[ 38 ] This world clarification is a check to all sound thinking; it produces a fictitious fog of ideals which prevents that natural power of seeing, orientated to the observation of reality, that ability to fathom world events; finally, it completely dulls all sense for reality.

9.

[ 39 ] When Nietzsche engages in a spiritual battle he doesn't wish to contradict foreign opinions as such, but he does so because these opinions point to instincts harmful and contrary to nature, against which he wishes to fight. In this regard his intention is similar to that of someone who attacks a harmful natural phenomenon or destroys a dangerous creature. He does not count on the “convincing” power of truth, but on the fact that he will conquer his opponent because the latter has unsound, harmful instincts, while he himself has sound, life-furthering instincts. He looks for no further justification for such a battle when his instinct considers his opponent to be harmful. He does not believe that he has to fight as the representative of an idea, but he fights because his instincts compel him to do so. Of course, it is the same with any spiritual battle, but ordinarily the fighters are as little aware of the real motivations as are the philosophers of their “Will to Power,” or the followers of a moral world order of the natural causes of their moral ideals. They believe that only opinions fight opinions, and they disguise their true motives by cloaks of concepts. They also do not mention the instincts of the opponents which are unsympathetic to them; indeed, perhaps these do not enter their consciousness at all. In short, these forces which are really hostile toward each other do not come out into the open at all. Nietzsche mentions unreservedly those instincts of his opponents which are disagreeable to him, and he also mentions the instincts with which he opposes them. One who wishes to call this cynicism may well do so. But he must be certain not to overlook the fact that never in all human activity has there existed anything other than such cynicism, and that all idealistic, illusory webs are spun by this cynicism.

10.

[ 1 ] All striving of mankind, as of every living thing, exists for the satisfying, in the very best way, of impulses and instincts implanted by nature. When human beings strive toward morality, justice, knowledge and art, this is done because morality, justice, and so forth, are means by which these human instincts can develop themselves according to their nature. The instincts would atrophy without these means. Now it is a peculiarity of the human being that he forgets this connection between his life needs and his natural impulses, and regards these means for a natural, powerful life as something with unconditional intrinsic value. Man then says that morality, justice, knowledge, and so on, must be attained for their own sakes. They do not have an intrinsic value in that they serve life, but rather that life first receives value when it strives toward these ideal possessions. Man does not exist to live according to his instincts, like an animal, but that he may ennoble his instincts by placing them at the service of higher purposes. In this way man comes to the point where he worships as ideals what he had first created for the satisfaction of his impulses, ideals which first give his life true inspiration. He demands subjugation to ideals which he values more highly than himself. He frees himself from the mother ground of reality and wishes to give his existence a higher meaning and purpose. He invents an unnatural origin for his ideals. He calls them “God's will,” the “eternal, moral laws.” He wishes to strive after “truth for truth's sake,” “virtue for virtue's sake.” He considers himself a good human being only when he has supposedly succeeded in controlling his egotism, that is, his natural instincts, and in following one ideal goal selflessly. For such an idealist, that man is considered ignoble and “evil” who has not attained such self control.

[ 2 ] Now all ideals originally stem from natural instincts. Also what Christ considers as virtue, which God has revealed to Him, man has originally discovered as satisfying some instinct or other. The natural origin is forgotten, and the divine imagined and superimposed. A similar situation exists in relation to those virtues which the philosophers and preachers of morality set up.

[ 3 ] If mankind had only sound instincts and would determine their ideals according to them, then this theoretical error about the origin of these ideals would not be harmful. The idealists, of course, would have false opinions about the origin of their goals, but in themselves these goals would be sound, and life would have to flourish. But there are unsound instincts which are not directed toward strengthening and fostering life, but rather toward weakening and stunting it. These take control of the so-called theoretical confusion and make it into the practical life purpose. They mislead man into saying, A perfect man is not the one who wants to serve himself and his life, but the one who devotes himself to the realization of an ideal. Under the influence of these instincts, the human being does not merely remain at the point where he erroneously ascribes an unnatural or supernatural origin to his ideals, but he actually makes such ideals part of himself, or takes over from others those which do not serve the necessities of life. He no longer strives to bring to light the forces lying within his own personality, but he lives according to a pattern which has been forced upon him. Whether he takes this goal from a religion or whether he himself determines it on the basis of certain assumptions not lying within his own nature, is of no importance. The philosopher who has in mind a universal purpose for mankind, and from this purpose directs his moral ideals, lays just as many fetters upon human nature as the originator of a religion who says to mankind, This is the goal which God has set for you, and this you must follow. It is also of no importance whether man intends to become an image of God or whether he invents an ideal of the “perfect human being,” and resembles this as much as possible. Only the single human being, and only the impulses and instincts of this single human being are real. Only when he directs his attention to the needs of his own person, can man experience what is good for his life. The single human being does not become “perfect” when he denies himself and resembles a model, but when he brings to reality that within him which strives toward realization. Human activity does not first acquire meaning because it serves an impersonal, external purpose; it has its meaning in itself.

[ 4 ] The anti-idealist of course will also see in unsound human activity an instinctive expression of man's primeval instincts. He knows that only out of instinct can the human being accomplish even what is contrary to instinct. But he will of course attack that which is against instinct, just as the doctor attacks a sickness, although the doctor knows that the sickness has arisen out of certain natural causes. Therefore, we may not accuse the anti-idealist by saying, you assert that everything toward which man strives, therefore all ideals as well, have originated naturally; and yet you attack idealism. Indeed, ideals arise just as naturally as sickness, but the healthy human being fights idealism just as he fights sickness. The idealist, however, regards ideals as something which must be cherished and protected.

[ 5 ] According to Nietzsche's opinion, the belief that man will become perfect only when he serves “higher” goals is something that must be overcome. Man must recollect and know that he has created ideals only to serve himself. To live according to nature is healthier than to chase after ideals which supposedly do not originate out of reality. The human being who does not serve impersonal goals, but who looks for the purpose and meaning of his existence in himself, who makes his own such virtues as serve the unfoldment of his own power, and the perfection of his own might—Nietzsche values this human being more highly than the selfless idealist.

[ 6 ] This it is what he propounds through his Zarathustra. The sovereign individuum which knows that it can live only out of its own nature and which sees its personal goal in a life configuration which fits its own being: for Nietzsche this is the superman, in contrast to the human being who believes that life has been given to him as a gift to serve a purpose lying outside of himself.

[ 7 ] Zarathustra teaches the superman, that is, the human being who understands how to live according to nature. He teaches those human beings who regard their virtues as their own creations; he tells them to despise those who value their virtues higher than themselves.

[ 8 ] Zarathustra has gone into the loneliness to free himself from humility according to which men bow down before their virtues. He reappears among mankind only when he has learned to despise those virtues which fetter life and do not wish to serve life. He moves lightly like a dancer, for he follows only himself and his will, and disregards the lines which are indicated by the virtues. No longer does the belief rest heavily upon him that it is wrong to follow only himself. Now Zarathustra no longer sleeps in order to dream about ideals; he is a watcher who faces reality in freedom. For him the human being who has lost himself and lies in the dust before his own creations, is like a polluted stream. For him the superman is an ocean which takes this stream into itself without becoming impure. For the superman has found himself; he recognizes himself as the master and creator of his virtues. Zarathustra has experienced grandeur in that all those virtues which are placed above the human being have become repugnant to him.

[ 9 ] “What is the greatest which you can experience? It is the hour of great contempt, the hour in which your happiness becomes repugnance, and likewise your intellect and your virtue.”

11.

[ 10 ] The wisdom of Zarathustra is not in accord with the thinking of the “modern cultured person.” The latter would like to make all human beings equal. If all strive after only one goal, they say, then there is contentment and happiness upon earth. They require that man should restrain his special, personal wishes, and serve only the whole, the universal happiness. Peace and tranquility will then reign upon earth. If everyone has the same needs, then no one disturbs the orbits of others. The individual should not regard himself and his individual goals, but everyone should live according to their once-determined pattern. All individual living should vanish, and all become part of a universal world order.

[ 11 ] “No shepherd and one flock! Everyone desires the same, everyone is equal; he who feels otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

[ 12 ] “‘Formerly all the world was insane,’ say the best of them, and blink.

[ 13 ] “People are clever and know all that has happened, so there is no end to their mocking. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled; otherwise it disturbs the digestion.”

[ 14 ] Zarathustra had been a lone-dweller too long to pay homage to such wisdom. He had heard the peculiar tones which sound from within the personality when man stands apart from the noise of the market place where one person merely repeats the words of another. And he would like to shout into the ears of human beings: Listen to the voices which sound forth in each individual among you. For only those voices are in accord with nature which tell; each one of what he alone is capable. An enemy of life, of the rich full life, is the one who allows these voices to resound unheard, and who listens to the common cry of mankind. Zarathustra will not speak to the friends of the equality of all mankind. They can only misunderstand him. For they would believe that his superman is that ideal model which all of them should resemble. But Zarathustra wishes to make no prescriptions of what men should be; he will refer each one only to himself, and will say to him, Depend upon yourself, follow only yourself, put yourself above virtue, wisdom, and knowledge. Zarathustra speaks to those who wish to find themselves, not to a multitude who search for a common goal; his words are intended for those companions who, like him, go their own way. They alone understand him because they know that he does not wish to say, Look, there is the superman, become like him, but, Behold, I have searched for myself; I am as I teach you to be; go likewise and search for your own self; then you have the superman.

[ 15 ] “To the one who dwells alone will I sing my song and to the twain-dweller; and unto him who still has ears for the unheard, his heart will I burden with my happiness.”

12.

[ 16 ] Two animals, the serpent, the wisest, and the eagle, the proudest, accompany Zarathustra. They are the symbols of his instincts. Zarathustra values wisdom because it teaches the human being to find the hidden paths to reality; it teaches him to know what he needs for life. And Zarathustra also loves pride because pride arouses self-estimation in the human being, through which he comes to regard himself as the meaning and purpose of his existence. Pride does not place his wisdom, his virtue, above his own self, in favor of “higher, more sacred” goals. Still, rather than lose pride Zarathustra would lose wisdom.

For wisdom which is not accompanied by pride does not regard itself as the work of man. The one who lacks pride and self-esteem, believes his wisdom has come to him as a gift from heaven. Such a one says, Man is a fool, and he has only as much wisdom as the heavens wish to grant him.

[ 17 ] “And should my wisdom abandon me—Oh, it loves to fly away—may my pride then still fly with my foolishness”

13.

[ 18 ] The human spirit must pass through three metamorphoses until he finds himself. This is Zarathustra's teaching. At first the spirit is reverent. He calls that virtue which weighs him down. He lowers himself in order to raise his virtue. He says, All wisdom comes from God, and I must follow God's paths. God imposes the most difficult upon me to test my power, whether it proves itself to be strong and patient in its endurance. Only the one who is patient is strong. I will obey, says the spirit at this level, and will carry out the commandments of the world-spirit, without asking the meaning of these commandments. The spirit feels the pressure which a higher power exerts upon it. The spirit does not take its own paths, but the paths of him he serves.

The time arrives when the spirit becomes aware that no God speaks to him. Then he wishes to be free, and to become master of his own world. He searches after a thread of direction for his destiny. He no longer asks the world spirit how he should arrange his own life. Rather, he strives after a firm command, after a sacred “you shall.” He looks for a yardstick by which he can measure the worth of things. He searches for a sign of differentiation between good and evil. There must be a rule for my life which is not dependent on me, on my own will: so speaks the spirit at this level. To this rule will I submit myself. I am free, the spirit means to say, but only free to obey such a rule.

[ 9 ] At this level, the spirit conquers. It becomes like the child at play, who does not ask, How shall I do this or that, but who merely carries out his own will, who follows only his own self. “The spirit now demands his own will; he who is lost in the world has now won his own world.”

[ 20 ] “I named for you three metamorphoses of the spirit: How the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last, a child. Thus spake Zarathustra.”

14.

[ 21 ] What do the wise desire who place virtue above man? asks Zarathustra. They say, Only he who has done his duty, he who has followed the sacred “thou shalt,” can have peace of soul. Man shall be virtuous so that he may dream of fulfilled duty, about fulfilled ideals, and feel no pangs of conscience. The virtuous say that a man with pangs of conscience resembles one who is asleep and whose rest is disturbed by bad dreams.

[ 22 ] “Few know it, but one must have all virtues to sleep well. Do I bear false witness, do I commit adultery?

[ 23 ] “Do I lust after my neighbor's wife? All this is incompatible with good sleep.

[ 24 ] “Peace with God and with thy neighbor: this is what good sleep needs. And peace also with thy neighbor's devil! Otherwise it will haunt you at night.”

[ 25 ] The virtuous person does not do what his impulse tells him, but what produces his peace of soul. He lives so that he may peacefully dream about life. It is even more pleasant for him when his sleep, which he calls peace of soul is disturbed by no dreams. This means that it is most pleasant for the virtuous person when from some source or other he receives rules for his actions, and for the rest, he can enjoy his peace. “His wisdom is called, Wake, in order to sleep well. And indeed, if life had no meaning, and I should have to choose nonsense, to me this would be the most worthy nonsense to choose,” says Zarathustra.

[ 26 ] For Zarathustra also there was a time when he believed that a spirit dwelling outside of the world, a God, had created the world. Zarathustra imagined him to be an unsatisfied, suffering God. To create satisfaction for himself, to free himself from his suffering, God created the world; Zarathustra thought this, once upon a time. But he learned to understand that this is an illusion which he himself had created. “O you brothers, this God whom I created, was the work of a man and illusion of man, like all gods!” Zarathustra has learned to use his senses and to observe the world. And he becomes satisfied with the world; no longer do his thoughts sweep into the world beyond. Formerly he was blind, and could not see the world. For this reason he looked for salvation outside of the world. But Zarathustra has learned to see and to recognize that the world has meaning in itself.

[ 27 ] “My ego taught me a new pride, which I teach mankind: not to hide the head in the sand of celestial things, but to carry it freely, a terrestrial head, which carries meaning for the earth.”

15.

[ 8 ] The idealists have split man into body and soul, have divided all existence into idea and reality. And they have made the soul, the spirit, the idea, into something especially valuable in order that they may despise the reality, the body all the more. But Zarathustra says, There is but one reality, but one body, and the soul is only something in the body, the ideal is only something in reality. Body and soul of man are a unity; body and spirit spring from one root. The spirit is there only because a body is there, which has strength to develop the spirit in itself. As the plant unfolds the blossom from itself, so the body unfolds the spirit from itself.

[ 29 ] “Behind your thinking and your feeling, my brother stands a mighty master, an unknown wise one: he is called self. He lives within your body, he is your body.”

[ 30 ] The one with a sense for reality searches for the spirit, for the soul, in and about the real. He looks for intellect in the real; only he who considers reality as lacking in spirituality, as merely “natural,” as “coarse”—he gives the spirit, the soul a special existence. He makes reality merely the dwelling place of the spirit. But such a one also lacks the sense for the perception of the spirit itself. Only because he does not see the spirit in the reality does he search for it elsewhere.

[ 31 ] “There is more intelligence in your body than in your best wisdom.”

[ 32 ] “The body is one great intelligence, a plurality with one meaning, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd.

[ 33 ] “An instrument of your body is also your small intelligence, my brother, which you call spirit, a small instrument and a toy of your great intelligence.”

[ 34 ] He is a fool who would tear the blossom from the plant and believe the broken blossom will still develop into fruit. He is also a fool who would separate the spirit from nature and believe such a separated spirit can still create.

[ 35 ] Human beings with sick instincts have undertaken the separation of spirit and body. A sick instinct can only say, My kingdom is not of this world. The kingdom of a sound instinct is only this world.

16.

[ 36 ] But what ideals have they not created, these despisers of reality! If we look them in the eye, these ideals of the ascetics, who say, Turn your gaze away from this world, and look toward the other world, what then is the meaning of these ascetic ideals? With this question, and the suppositions with which he answers them, Nietzsche has let us look into the very depths of his heart, left unsatisfied by the more modern Western culture. (Genealogie der Moral, Section 3)

[ 37 ] When an artist like Richard Wagner, for example, becomes a follower of the ascetic ideal during his last period of creativity, this does not have too much significance. The artist places his entire life above his creations. He looks down from above upon his realities. He creates realities which are not his reality. “A Homer would not have created an Achilles, nor Goethe a Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles, or if Goethe had been a Faust.” (Genealogy, 3rd Section, ¶ 4). Now when such an artist once begins to take his own existence seriously, wishes to change himself and his personal opinion into reality, it is no wonder when something very unreal arises. Richard Wagner completely reversed his knowledge about his art when he became familiar with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Previously, he considered music as a means of expression which required something to which it gives expression—the drama. In his Opera and Drama, written in 1851, he says that the greatest error into which one can fall with regard to the opera is,

“That a means of expression (the music) is made the purpose, but the purpose of expression (the drama) is made the means.”

[ 38 ] He professed another opinion after he had come to know Schopenhauer's teaching about music. Schopenhauer is of the opinion that through music, the essence of the thing itself speaks to us. The eternal Will, which lives in all things, becomes embodied in all other arts only through images, through the ideas; music is no mere picture of the will: the will reveals itself in it directly. What appears to us in all our reflections only as image, the eternal ground of all existence, the will, Schopenhauer believed he heard directly in the sound of music. A message from the other world is brought to Schopenhauer by music. This point of view affected Richard Wagner. Thus he lets music no longer be a means of expression of real human passions as they are embodied in drama, but as a “sort of mouthpiece for the intrinsic essence of things, a telephone from the other world.” Richard Wagner now no longer believed in expressing reality in tones; “henceforth he talked not only music, this ventriloquist of God, but he talked metaphysics: no wonder that one day he talked ascetic ideals.” (Genealogy, 3rd Section, ¶ 5).

[ 39 ] If Richard Wagner had merely changed his opinion about the significance of music, then Nietzsche would have had no reason to approach him. At most Nietzsche could then say, Besides his art works Wagner has also created all sorts of wrong theories about art. But that during the last period of his creativity Wagner embodied in his an works the Schopenhauer belief in the world beyond, that he utilized his music to glorify the flight from reality, this was distasteful to Nietzsche.

[ 40 ] The Case of Wagner means nothing when it is a question of the significance of the glorification of the world beyond at the expense of this world, when it is a question of the significance of ascetic ideals. Artists do not stand on their own feet. As Richard Wagner is dependent upon Schopenhauer, so “at all times were the artists valets to a morality, a philosophy or a religion.”

[ 41 ] It is quite different when the philosophers represent a contempt of reality, of ascetic ideals. They do this out of a deep instinct.

[ 42 ] Schopenhauer betrayed this instinct through the description which he gives of the creating and enjoying of a work of art. “That the work of art makes the understanding of ideas, in which the aesthetic enjoyment consists, so much easier, depends not merely upon the fact that through emphasis of the material and discarding of the immaterial, art represents the things more clearly and more characteristically, but it depends much more upon the fact that the complete silence of the will, necessary for the objective understanding of the nature of things, is achieved with most certainty through the fact that the object looked upon does not lie at all within the realm of things which are capable of a relationship to will.” (Additions to the third book of Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Reflection, Chapter 30) “When an outer circumstance or an inner soul mood lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, then knowledge takes away the slavish service of the will when attention is no longer directed to the motive of willing, but comprehends the things free from their relationship to will, that is, without interest, without subjectivity, considers them purely objectively, completely surrendered to them insofar as they are mere representations, not insofar as they are motives; then is begun the painless state which Epicurus praised as the highest good and as the state of the gods. Then, during that moment, we are freed from the contemptible pressure of the will; we celebrate the sabbath of the will's hard labor, the wheel of Ixion stands still.” Ibid. ¶ 38)

[ 43 ] This is a description of a type of aesthetic enjoyment which appears only with philosophers. Nietzsche contrasts this with another description “which a real spectator and artist has made—Stendhal,” who calls the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. Schopenhauer would like to exclude all will interest, all real life, when it is a question of the observation of a work of art, and would enjoy it only with the spirit; Stendhal sees in the work of art a promise of happiness, therefore, an indication for life, and sees the value of art in this connection of art with life.

[ 44 ] Kant demanded that a beautiful work of art should please without interest: that is, that the work of art lift us out of the reality of life and give us purely spiritual enjoyment.

[ 45 ] What does the philosopher look for in artistic enjoyment? Escape from reality. The philosopher wants to be transferred into an atmosphere foreign to reality, through works of art. Thereby he betrays his basic instinct. The philosopher feels most satisfied during those moments when he can be freed from reality. His attitude toward aesthetic enjoyment proves that he does not love this reality.

[ 46 ] In their theories the philosophers do not tell us what the spectator whose interests are turned toward life, demands of a work of art, but only what is of interest to themselves. And for the philosopher the turning away from life is very useful. He does not wish to have his hidden thought paths crossed by reality. Thinking flourishes better when the philosopher turns away from life. Then it is no wonder when this philosophical basic instinct becomes a mood almost hostile to life. We find that such a soul mood is cultivated by the majority of philosophers. And a very close connection exists between the fact that the philosopher develops and elaborates his own antipathy toward life into a teaching, and the fact that all men acknowledge such a teaching. Schopenhauer did this. He found that the noise of the world disturbed his thought work. He felt that one could meditate about reality better when one escaped from this reality. At the same time, he forgot that all thinking about reality has value only when it springs from this reality. He did not observe that the withdrawing of the philosopher from reality can occur only when the philosophical thoughts which have arisen out of this separation from life can be of higher service to life. When the philosopher wishes to force the basic instinct, which is only of value to him as a philosopher, upon the whole of mankind, then he becomes an enemy to life.

[ 47 ] The philosopher who does not regard the flight from the world as a means of creating thoughts friendly to the world, but as a purpose, as a goal in itself, can only create worthless things. The true philosopher flees from reality on the one hand, only that he may penetrate deeper into it on the other. But it is conceivable that this basic instinct can easily mislead the philosopher into considering the flight from the world as such to be valuable. Then the philosopher becomes a representative of world negation. He teaches a turning away from life, the ascetic ideal. He finds that “A certain asceticism, a hard and joyous renunciation of the best will, belongs to the favorable conditions of highest spirituality, as well as to their most natural consequences. So from the beginning it is not surprising if the ascetic ideal is never treated, particularly by the philosophers, without some objections.” (Genealogy, Part III, ¶ 9)

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[ 48 ] The ascetic ideals of the priests have another origin. What develops in the philosopher as the luxuriant grow of an impulse he considers justified, forms the basic ideal of the working and creating of the priest. The priest sees error in the surrender of the human being to real life; he demands that one respect this life less in face of another life, which is directed by higher than merely natural forces. The priest denies that real life has meaning in itself, and he challenges the idea that this meaning is given to it through an inoculation of a higher will. He sees life in the temporal as imperfect, and he places opposite to it an eternal, perfect life. The priest teaches a turning away from the temporal and entering into the eternal, the unchangeable. As especially significant of the way of thinking of the priest, I would like to quote a few sentences from the famous book, Die Deutsche Theologie, German Theology, which stems from the fourteenth century, and about which Luther says that from no other book, with the exception of the Bible, and the writings of St. Augustine, has he learned more about what God, Christ, and man are, than from this. Schopenhauer also finds that the spirit of Christianity is expressed more perfectly and more powerfully in this book than elsewhere. After the writer, who is unknown to us, has explained that all things of the world are imperfect and incomplete, in contrast to the perfect, “which in itself and in its essence comprehended all things and decided all things, and without which, and outside of which no true being exists, and in which all things have their being,” he continues that man can penetrate into this being only if he has lost all “creaturedom, creationdom, egodom, selfdom, and everything similar,” nullifying them in himself. What has flowed out of the perfect, and what the human being recognizes as his real world, is described in the following way: “That is no true being, and has no being other than in the perfect, but it is an accident or a radiance, and an illusion which is no being, or has no being other than in the fire from which the radiance streams, or in the sun, or in the light. The book says, as do belief, and truth, sin is nothing but that the creature turns away from the unchangeable good and turns toward the changeable, that is, that it turns away from the perfect to the incomplete and imperfect, and most of all to itself. Now note, If this creature takes on something good as existence, life, knowledge, understanding, possession, in short, all those things which one calls good, and thinks that they are good, or that it itself is good or that good belongs to it, or stems from it, just as often as this happens, so often does it turn itself away. In what way did the devil do anything different—or what was his fall and turning away—than that he thought he was something, and that that something was his, and also that something belonged to him? This acceptance, and his ‘I’ and his ‘me,’ his ‘to me,’ and his ‘mine’—all this was his turning away and his fall. Thus it is still ... For all that one considers good or would call good, belongs to no one, except to the eternal, true Good, who is God alone, and he who takes possession of it does wrong, and is against God.” (Chapters 1, 2, 4, of German Theology, 3rd edition)

[ 49 ] These sentences express the attitude of every priest. They express the particular character of the priesthood. And this character is exactly the opposite of that which Nietzsche describes as the more valuable, more worthy of life. The more highly valued type of man wants to be everything that he is, through himself alone; he wants all that he considers good and calls good to belong to no one but himself.

[ 50 ] But this mediocre attitude is no exception. It is one of “the most widespread, oldest facts that exist. Read from a distant star, perhaps, the writing of our earth existence would lead to the conclusion that the earth is the really ascetic star, a corner of dissatisfied, proud, disagreeable creatures who cannot free themselves from a deep dissatisfaction with themselves, with the earth, and with all life.” (Genealogy, Part III, ¶ 11) For this reason, the ascetic priest is a necessity, since the majority of human beings suffer from an “obstruction and fatigue” of life-forces because they suffer from reality. The ascetic priest is the comforter and physician of those who suffer from life. He comforts them by saying to them, This life from which you are suffering is not the real life; for those who suffer from this life, the true life is much more easily attainable than for the healthy, who depend upon this life and surrender themselves to it. Through such expressions the priest breeds contempt for, and betrayal of the real life. He finally brings forth the state of mind which says that to obtain the true life, the real life must be denied. In the spreading of this mood, the ascetic priest seeks his strength. Through the training of this soul mood, he eliminates a great danger which threatens the healthy, the strong, the ego-conscious, from the unhappy, the suppressed, the broken-down. The latter hate the healthy and the happy in body and soul, who take their strength from nature. This hatred, which must express itself, is that the weak wage a continuous war of annihilation against the strong. This the priest tries to suppress. Therefore, he represents the strong as those who lead a life which is worthless and unworthy of human beings, and, on the other hand, asserts that true life is obtainable only by those who were hurt by the earth life. “The ascetic priest must be accepted by us as the predestined saviour, shepherd, and champion of the sick herd; in this way we understand his tremendous historic mission for the first time. The domination over the sufferers is his kingdom. His instinct directs him toward it. In this he finds his own special art, his mastery, his form of happiness.” (Genealogy, Part III, ¶ 15)

It is no wonder that such a way of thinking finally leads to the fact that its followers not only despise life, but work directly toward its destruction. If it is said to man that only the sufferer, the weak, can really attain a higher life, then in the end the suffering, the weakness will be sought. To bring pain to oneself, to kill the will within oneself completely, will become the goal of life. The victims of this soul-mood are the saints. “Complete chastity and denial of all pleasure are for him who strives toward real holiness; throwing away of all possessions, desertion of every dwelling, of all dependents, deep, complete loneliness, spent in profound, silent reflection, with voluntary penitence and frightful, slow self-torture, to the complete mortification of the will, which finally dies voluntarily by hunger, or by walking toward crocodiles, by throwing oneself from sacred mountain heights in the Himalayas, by being buried alive, or by throwing oneself under the wheels of the Juggernaut driven among the statues of the idols, accompanied by the song, jubilation and dance of the Bajadere,” these are the ultimate fruits of the ascetic state of mind. (Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, World as Will and Representation, ¶ 68).

[ 51 ] This way of thinking has arisen out of the suffering of life, and it directs its weapons against life. When the healthy person, filled with joy of life, is infected by it, then it destroys the sound, strong instincts within him. Nietzsche's work towers above this in that in face of this teaching he brings out the value of another point of view for the healthy, for those of well-being. May the malformed, the ruined, find their salvation in the teaching of the ascetic priests; Nietzsche will gather the healthy about him, and will give them advice which will please them more than all ideals which are inimical to life.

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[ 52 ] The ascetic ideal is implanted in the guardians of modern science also. Of course, this science boasts that it has thrown all old beliefs overboard, and that it holds fast only to reality. It will consider nothing valid which cannot be counted, calculated, weighed, seen or grasped. That through this “one degrades existence to a slavish exercise in arithmetic and a game for mathematicians,” is of indifference to the modern scholar. (Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Joyful Science, ¶ 373). Such a scholar does not ascribe to himself the right to interpret the happenings of the world, which pass before his senses and his intellect, so that he can control them with his thinking. He says, Truth must be independent of my art of interpretation, and it is not up to me to create truth; instead, I must allow the world to dictate truth to me through world phenomena.

[ 53 ] The point to which this modern science finally comes when it contains within itself all arranging of world phenomena, has been expressed by Richard Wahle, a follower of this science, in a book which has just appeared: Das Ganze der Philosophie und ihr Ende, The Totality of Philosophy and its End. “What can the spirit who peers into this world-house and turns over the questions about the nature and goal of happenings, find as an answer at last? It has happened that as he stood so apparently in opposition to the world surrounding him, he became disentangled, and in a flight from all events, merged with all events. He no longer ‘knew’ the world. He said, I am not sure that those who know exist; perhaps there are simply events. They occur, of course, in such a way that the concept of a knowing could develop prematurely and without justification, and ‘concepts’ have sprouted up to bring light into these events, but they are will-o-the-wisps, souls of the desires for knowing, pitiful postulates of an empty form of knowledge, saying nothing in their evidence. Unknown factors must hold sway in the transitions. Darkness was spread over their nature. Events are the veil of the nature of truth.”

[ 54 ] That the human personality, out of its own capacities can instill meaning into the happenings of reality, and can supplement the unknown factors which rule in the transitions of events: modern scholars do not think at all about this. They do not want to interpret the flight from appearances by ideals which stem from their own personality. They want merely to observe and describe the appearances, but not interpret them. They want to remain with the factual, and will not allow the creative fantasy to make a dismembered picture of reality.

[ 55 ] When an imaginative natural scientist, for example, Ernst Haeckel, out of the results of individual observations, formulates a total picture of the evolution of organic life on earth, then these fanatics of factuality throw themselves upon him, and accuse him of transgression against truth. The pictures which he sketched about life in nature, they cannot see with their eyes or touch with their hands. They prefer the impersonal judgment to that which is colored by the spirit of the personality. They would prefer to exclude the personality completely from their observations.

[ 56] It is the ascetic ideal which controls the fanatics of factuality. They would like a truth beyond the personal individual judgment. What the human being can “imagine into” things, does not concern these fanatics. “Truth” to them is something absolutely perfect—a God; man should discover it, should surrender to it, but should not create it. At present, the natural scientists and the historians are enthused by the same spirit of ascetic ideals. Everywhere they enumerate in order to describe facts, and nothing more. All arranging of facts is forbidden. All personal judgment is to be suppressed.

[ 57 ] Atheists are also found among these modern scholars. But these atheists are freer spirits than their contemporaries who believe in God. The existence of God cannot be proven by means of modern science. Indeed, one of the brilliant minds of modern science, DuBois-Reymond, expressed himself thus about the acceptance of a “world-soul:” before the natural scientist decides upon such an acceptance he demands “That somewhere in the world, there be shown to him, bedded in nerve ganglia and nourished with warm, arterial blood under the correct pressure, a bundle of cell ganglia and nerve fibers, depending in size on the spiritual capacity of the soul.” (Grenzen des Naturerkennens, Limits of Natural Science, page 44). Modern science rejects the belief in God because this belief cannot exist beside their belief in “objective truth.” This “objective truth,” however, is nothing but a new God who has been victorious over the old one. “Unqualified, honest atheism (and we breathe only its air; we, the most intellectual human being of this age) does not stand in opposition to that (ascetic) ideal to the extent that it appears to; rather, it is one of its final phases of evolution, one of its ultimate forms, one of its logical consequences. It is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two thousand year training in truth, which finally forbids itself the lie of the belief in God.” (Genealogy, Part III, ¶ 27). Christ seeks truth in God because He considers God the source of all truth. The modern atheist rejects the belief in God because his god, his ideal of truth, forbids him this belief. In God the modern spirit sees a human creation; in “truth” he sees something which has come into being by itself without any human interference. The really “free spirit” goes still further. He asks, “What is the meaning of all will for truth?” Why truth? For all truth arises in that man ponders over the appearance of the world, and formulates thoughts about things. Man himself is the creator of truth. The “free spirit” arrives at the awareness of his own creation of truth. He no longer regards truth as something to which he subordinates himself; he looks upon it as his own creation.

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[ 58 ] People endowed with weak, malformed instincts of perception do not dare to attach meaning to world appearances out of the concept-forming power of their personality. They wish the “laws of nature” to stand before their senses as actual facts. A subjective world-picture, formed by the instrumentality of the human mind, appears worthless to them. But the mere observation of world events presents us with only a disconnected, not a detailed world picture. To the mere observer of things, no object, no event, appears more important, more significant than another. When we have considered it, the rudimentary organ of an organism which perhaps appears to have no significance for the evolution of life, stands there with exactly the same demand upon our attention as does the most noble part of the organism, so long as we look merely at the actual facts. Cause and effect are appearances following upon each other, which merge into each other without being separated by anything, so long as we merely observe them. Only when with our thinking, we begin to separate the appearances which have merged into each other, and relate them to each other intellectually, does a regular connection become visible. Thinking alone explains one appearance as cause and another as effect. We see a raindrop fall upon the earth and produce a groove. A being which is unable to think will not see cause and effect here, but only a sequence of appearances. A thinking being isolates the appearances, relates the isolated facts, and labels the one factor as cause, the other as effect. Through observation the intellect is stimulated to produce thoughts and to fuse these thoughts with the observed facts into a meaningful world-picture. Man does this because he wishes to control the sum of his observations with his thoughts. A thought-vacuum before him presses upon him like an unknown power. He opposes this power and conquers it by making it conceivable. All counting, weighing and calculating of appearances also comes about for the same reason. It is the will to power which lives itself out in this impulse for knowledge. (I have represented a process of knowledge in detail in my two writings, Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, Truth and Science, and Die Philosophie der Freiheit, The Philosophy of Freedom.)

[ 59 ] The dull, weak intellect does not want to admit to himself that it is he himself who interprets the appearances as expression of his striving toward power. He considers his interpretation also as an actual fact. And he asks, How does a man come to find such an actual fact in reality? He asks, for example, How is it that the intellect can recognize cause and effect in two appearances, one following upon the other? All theorists of knowledge, from Locke, Hume, Kant, down to the present time, have occupied themselves with this question. The subtleties which they have applied to this examination, have remained unfruitful. The explanation is given in the striving of the human intellect toward power. The question is not at all, Are judgments, thoughts about appearances, possible? but, Does the human intellect need such judgments? He needs them, hence he uses them, not because they are possible. It depends upon this: “To understand that for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves such judgments must be believed to be true, though naturally they still may be false judgments!” (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, ¶ 11) “And fundamentally we are inclined to assert that the most erroneous judgments are the most indispensable for us; that man could not live without belief in logical fiction, without measuring reality by the purely invented world of the unconditional, likening one's self to one's self, without a constant falsification of the world through number; that renunciation of false judgments would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life.” (Ibid, ¶ 4). Whoever regards this saying as a paradox, should remind himself how fruitful is the use of geometry in relation to reality, although nowhere in the world are really geometric, regular lines, planes, etc., to be found.

[ 60 ] When the dull, weak intellect understands that all judgments about things stem from within him, are all produced by him, and are fused with the observations, then he does not have the courage to use these judgments unreservedly. He says, judgments of this kind cannot transmit knowledge of the “true essence” of things to us. Therefore, this “true essence” remains excluded from our knowledge.

[ 61 ] The weak intellect tries in still another way to prove that no security can be attained through human knowledge. He says, The human being sees, hears, touches things and events. Thereby he perceives impressions of his sense organs. When he perceives a color, a sound, then he can only say, My eye, my ear are determined in a certain way to perceive color and tone. Man perceives nothing outside of himself except a determination, a modification of his own organs. In perceiving, his eyes, his ears, etc., become stimulated to feel in a certain way; they are placed in a certain condition. The human being perceives this condition of his own organs as colors, tones, odors, etc. In all perceiving, the human being perceives only his own conditions. What he calls the outer world is composed only of his own conditions; therefore, in a real sense it is his work. He does not know the things which cause him to spin the outer world out of himself; he only knows the effects upon his organs. In this light, the world appears like a dream which is dreamed by the human being, and is occasioned by something unknown.

[ 62 ] When this thought is brought to its consequential conclusion, it brings with it the following afterthought. Man knows only his own organs, insofar as he perceives them; they are parts of his world of perception. And man becomes conscious of his own self only to the extent that he spins pictures of the world out of himself. He perceives dream pictures, and in the midst of these dream pictures, an “I,” by which these dream pictures pass; every dream picture appears to be an accompaniment of this “I.” One can also say that each dream picture appears in the midst of the dream world, always in relation to this “I.” This “I” clings to these dream pictures as determination, as characteristic: Consequently, as a determination of dream pictures, it is a dream-like being itself. J. G. Fichte sums up this point of view in these words: “What develops through this knowing, and out of this knowing, is but a knowing. But all knowing is merely reflection, and something is always demanded of it which conforms to the picture. This demand cannot be satisfied by knowledge; and a system of knowledge is necessarily a system of mere pictures, without any reality, without significance, and without purpose.” For Fichte, “all reality” is a wonderful “dream without a life, which is being dreamed about, without a spirit who dreams.” It is a dream “which is connected with itself in a dream.” (Bestimmung des Menschen, Mission of Man, 2nd Book)

[ 63 ] What meaning has this whole chain of thoughts? A weak intellect, which does not dare to give meaning to the world out of himself, looks for this meaning in the world of observations. Of course, he cannot find it there because mere observation is void of thoughts.

[ 64 ] A strong, productive intellect uses his world of concepts to interpret the observations. The weak, unproductive intellect declares himself to be too powerless to do this, and says, I can find no sense in the appearances of the world; they are mere pictures which pass by me. The meaning of existence, therefore, must be looked for outside, beyond the world of appearances. Because of this, the world of appearances, that is, the human reality, is explained as a dream, an illusion, a Nothing, and “the true being” of appearances is searched for in a “thing in itself,” for which no observation, no knowledge is sufficient, that is, about which the knower can form no idea. Therefore, for the knower, this “true being” is a completely empty thought, the thought about a Nothing. For those philosophers who speak about the “thing in itself,” a dream is a world of appearances. But this Nothing they regard as the “true being” of the world of appearances. The whole philosophical movement which speaks about the “thing in itself,” and which, in more modern times, leans mainly upon Kant, is the belief in this Nothing; it is philosophical nihilism.

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[ 65 ] When the strong spirit looks for the cause of a human action and achievement, he will always find it in the will power of the individual personality. But the human being with a weak, timid intellect will not admit this. He doesn't feel himself sufficiently strong to make himself master and guide of his own actions. He interprets the impulses which guide him as the commandments of another power. He does not say, I act as I want to act, but he says, I act according to a law which I must obey. He does not wish to command himself; he wishes to obey. At one level of their development, human beings see their impulses to action as commandments of God; at another level, they believe that they are aware of a voice inside them, which commands them. In the latter case they do not dare to say, It is I myself who command; they assert, In me a higher will expresses itself. One person is of the opinion that it is his conscience which speaks to him in each individual case, and tells him how he should act, while another asserts that a categorical imperative commands him. Let us hear what J. G. Fichte says: “Something simply will happen because something just must happen; conscience now demands of me that it happen, and simply for this reason I am here; I am to realize it, and for that I have intellect. I am to achieve it, and for that I have strength.” (Ibid, Third Book) I mention J. G. Fichte's sayings with great pleasure because he maintained with iron consequence his opinion of the “weak and malformed.” He maintained it to the very end. One can only realize where this opinion finally leads when one looks for it where it was thought through to the end; one cannot depend upon those who are incomplete thinkers, who think each thought only to the middle.

[ 66 ] The fount of knowledge is not sought in individual personalities by those who think in the above mentioned way, but beyond personality in a “will in itself.” Just this “will in itself” shall speak to the individual as “God's voice,” as the “voice of conscience,” as categorical imperative, and so on. This is to be the universal leader of human actions, and the fount of all morality, and is also to determine the purpose of moral actions. “I say that it is the commandment to action itself which gives me a purpose through itself. It is the same in me which urges me to think that I should act in such a way, urges me to believe that out of these actions something will result; it opens the view to another world.” “As I live in obedience, at the same time I live in the reflection of its purposes; I live in the better world which it promises me.” (Ibid, Third Book) He who thinks thus, will not set a goal for himself; he will allow himself to be led to a goal by the higher will which he obeys. He will free himself from his own will, and will make himself into an instrument for “higher” purposes in words which express the highest; achievements of obedience and humility known to him. Fichte described the abandonment to this “eternal Will in itself.” “Lofty, living Will, which no name names and no concept encompasses, may I raise my soul to you, for you and I are not separated. Your voice sounds within me; mine resounds in you; and all my thoughts, when they are true and good, are thought within you. In you, the incomprehensible, I become comprehensible to myself, and the world becomes perfectly comprehensible to me. All problems of my existence are solved, and the most complete harmony arises within my spirit” ... “I veil my countenance before you. I lay my hand upon my mouth. As you yourself are, and as you appear to yourself, I can never understand, as certainly as I never could become you. After I have lived a thousand thousand spirit lives, I shall comprehend you as little as I do now in this hut upon earth.” (Ibid, Third Book)

[ 67 ] Where this will is finally to lead man, the individual cannot know. Therefore the one who believes in this will confesses that he knows nothing about the final purposes of his actions. For such a believer in a higher will, the goals which the individual sets for himself, are not “true goals.” Therefore, in place of the positive individual goals created by the individuum, he places a final purpose for the whole of mankind, the thought content of which, however, is a Nothing. Such a believer is a moral nihilist. He is caught in the worst kind of ignorance imaginable. Nietzsche wanted to deal with this type of ignorance in a special section of his incompleted work, Der Wille zur Macht, The Will to Power.

[ 68 ] We find the praise of moral nihilism again in Fichte's Bestimmung des Menschen, Destiny of Man (Third Book): “I shall not attempt what is denied me by the very Being of Limitations, and I shall not attempt what would avail me nothing. What you yourself are, I do not care to know. But your relationships and your connections with me, the Specific, and toward everything Specific, lie open before my eyes; may I become what I must become, and all this surrounds me in more brilliant clarity than the consciousness of my own existence. You create within me the knowledge of my duty, of my destiny, in the order of intelligent beings; how, I know not, nor do I need to know. You know, and you recognize what I think and what I will; how you can know it, through what act you achieve this consciousness, I understand nothing. Yes, I know very well that the concept of an act and of a special act of consciousness is valid only for me, but not for you, Infinite Being. You govern because you will that my free obedience has consequences to all eternity; the act of your willing I do not understand, and only know that it is not similar to mine. Your act and your will itself is a deed. But the way you work is exactly opposite to that way which I alone am able to understand. You live and you are because you know, will, and effectuate, ever present in the limited intellect, but you are not as I conceive a being to be through eternities.”

[ 69 ] Nietzsche places opposite to moral nihilism those goals which the creating individual will places before itself. Zarathustra calls to the teachers of the gospel of submission:

[ 70 ] “These teachers of the gospel of submission. Everywhere where there is smallness and sickness and dirt, there they creep like lice, and only my disgust prevents me from crushing them under foot.

“Attend! This is my gospel for their ears: I am Zarathustra, the godless, who asks, Who is more godless than I, that I may rejoice in his teaching?

“I am Zarathustra, the godless; where do I find my equal? All those are my equals who determine their will out of themselves, and who push all submission away from themselves.”

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[ 71 ] The strong personality which creates goals is disdainful of the execution of them. The weak personality, on the other hand, carries out only what the Divine Will, the “voice of conscience” or the “categorical imperative” says Yes to. That which is in accordance with this Yes, the weak person describes as good, that which is contrary to this Yes, it describes as evil. The strong personality cannot acknowledge this “good and evil,” for he does not acknowledge that power from which the weak person allows his “good and evil” to be determined. What the strong person wills is for him good; he carries it through in spite of all opposing powers. What disturbs him in this execution, he tries to overcome. He does not believe that an “Eternal Will” guides the decisions of all individual wills toward a great harmony, but he believes that all human development comes out of the will-impasses of the individual personalities, and that an eternal war is waged between the expressions of individual wills, in which the stronger will always conquers the weaker.

[ 72 ] The strong personality who lays down his own laws and sets his own goals, is described by the weaker and less courageous as evil, as sinful. He arouses fear, for he breaks through traditional ways; he calls that worthless which the weak person is accustomed to call valuable, and he invents the new, the previously unknown, which he describes as valuable. “Each individual action, each individual way of thinking causes shuddering; it is almost impossible to estimate exactly what those more uncommon, more select, more criminal spirits must have suffered in the course of history so that they were always regarded as bad, as dangerous, yes, even so that they themselves considered themselves in this light. Under the domination of custom, all originality of every kind has evoked a bad conscience. Up to this very time the heaven of the most admirable has become more darkened than it would have had to be.” (Morgenröte, Dawn, p. 9)

The truly free spirit makes original decisions immediately; the unfree spirit decides in accordance with his background. “Morality is nothing more (specifically, nothing more!) than obedience to customs of whatever nature these may be; but customs are the traditional way of acting and evaluating.” (Ibid, p. 9). It is this tradition which is interpreted by the moralists as “eternal will,” as “categorical imperative.” But every tradition is the result of natural impulses, of lives of individuals, of entire tribes, nations, and so on. It is also the product of natural causes, for example, the condition of the weather in specific localities. The free spirit explains that he does not feel himself bound by such tradition. He has his individual drives and impulses, and feels that these are not less justified than those of others. He transforms these impulses into action as a cloud sends rain to the earth's surface when causes for this exist. The free spirit takes his stand opposite to what tradition considers to be good and evil. He creates his own good and evil for himself.

[ 73 ] “When I came to men, I found them sitting there on an old presumption: they all assumed that they had long known what was good and evil for man.

“All debating about virtue seemed to them an old, worn-out affair, and he who wanted to sleep well, still spoke about good and evil before going to sleep.

“This sleepiness I disturbed by my teaching; what is good and what is evil, nobody knows; then let it be the creator.

“But that is he who creates man's goal and who gives meaning to the earth and to the future. It is he who first brings it about that there is something good and evil.” (Zarathustra, 3rd Part, From the Old and New Tablets)

[ 74 ] Besides this, when the free spirit acts according to tradition, he does this because he adopts the traditional motives, and because he does not consider it necessary in certain cases to put something new in place of the traditional.

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[ 75 ] The strong person seeks his life's task in working out his creative self. This self-seeking differentiates him from the weak person who, in the selfless surrender to that which he calls “good,” sees morality. The weak preach selflessness as the highest virtue, but their selflessness is only the consequence of their lack of creative power. If they had any creative self they would then have wished to manifest it. The strong person loves war because he needs war to manifest his creation in opposition to those powers hogstile to him.

[ 76 ] “Your enemy you shall seek, your war you shall wage, and as for your thoughts, if they succumb, then shall your very uprightness nevertheless attain triumph over their collapse!

[ 77 ] “You shall love peace as a means to a new war, and a short peace more than a long one.

[ 78 ] “I do not challenge you to work, but to fight. I do not challenge you to peace, but to victory. Your work be your struggle! Your peace be a victory!

[ 79 ] “You say that the good circumstance may even sanctify war, but I say to you, it is the ‘good’ war which sanctifies every circumstance.

[ 80 ] “War and courage have accomplished more great things than love for one's neighbor. Until now, not your sympathy but your courage has saved the unfortunate.” (Zarathustra, 1st Part, About War and People of War)

[ 81 ] The creative person acts without mercy and without regard for those who oppose. He has no cognizance of the virtue of those who suffer, namely, of sympathy. Out of his own power come his impulses to creativity, not out of his feelings for another's suffering. That power may conquer, for this he fights, not that suffering and weakness may be cared for. Schopenhauer has described the whole world as a hospital, and asked that the actions springing out of sympathy for suffering be considered as the highest virtue. Thereby he has expressed the morality of Christendom in another form than the latter itself has done. He who creates, though, does not feel himself destined to render these nursing services. The efficient ones, the healthy, cannot exist for the sake of the weak, the sick. Sympathy weakens power, courage, and bravery.

[ 82 ] Sympathy seeks to maintain just what the strong wishes to overcome, that is, the weakness, the suffering. The victory of the strong over the weak is the meaning of all human as well as of all natural development. “Life in its essence is a usurping, a wounding, an overcoming of the strange, of all that is misfit and weak. Life is the suppressing, the hardening and forcing through of one's own forms, the embodying, and, in the least and mildest, the erupting in boils.” (Jenseits van Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, ¶ 259).

[ 83 ] “And do you not wish to be a dealer of destiny and unmerciful? How else can you be mine or conquer with me?”

“And if your hardness will not strike as lightning and cleave and cut, how then can you ever create with me?

“For the creators are hard, and it must seem to you a blessing to press your hand upon the millennia as if upon wax.

“A blessing to inscribe upon the will of millennia as if upon bronze, harder than bronze, more precious than bronze. Entirely hard is the most precious alone.

“This new tablet, O my brothers, I raise above you, thou shalt become hard.” (Zarathustra, 3rd Part, From the Old and New Tablets)

[ 84 ] The free spirit makes no demands upon sympathy. He would have to ask the one who would pity him, Do you consider me as weak, that I cannot bear my suffering by myself? For him, each expression of sympathy is humiliating. Nietzsche shows this aversion of the strong person toward sympathy in the fourth part of Zarathustra. In his wanderings Zarathustra arrives in a valley which is called “Snake Death.” No living beings are found here. Only a kind of ugly green snake comes here in order to die. The “most ugly human being” has found this valley. He does not wish to be seen by anyone because of his ugliness. In this valley he sees no one besides God, but even His countenance he cannot bear. The consciousness that God's gaze has penetrated into all these regions becomes a burden for him. For this reason he has killed God, that is, he has killed the belief in God within himself. He has become an atheist because of his ugliness. When Zarathustra sees this human being, he is overcome by what he believed he had destroyed within himself forever: that is, sympathy for the most frightful ugliness. This becomes a temptation for Zarathustra, but very soon he rejects the feeling of sympathy and again becomes hard. The most ugly man says to him, “Your hardness honors my ugliness. I am too rich in ugliness to be able to bear the sympathy of any human being. Sympathy humiliates.”

[ 85 ] He who requires sympathy cannot stand alone, and the free spirit wishes to stand completely on his own.

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[ 86 ] The weak are not content with pointing to the natural will to power as the cause of human actions. They do not merely seek for natural connections in human development, but they seek for the relationship of human action to what they call the “will in itself,” the eternal, moral world order. They accuse the one who acts contrary to this world order. And they also are not satisfied to evaluate an action according to its natural consequences, but they claim that a guilty action also draws with it moral consequences, i.e., punishment. They consider themselves guilty if their actions are not in accord with the moral world order; they turn away in horror from the fount of evil in themselves, and they call this feeling bad conscience. The strong personality, on the other hand, does not consider all these concepts valid. He is concerned only with the natural consequences of actions. He asks, Of what value for life is my way of acting? Is it in accord with what I have willed? The strong cannot grieve when an action goes wrong, when the result does not accord with his intentions. But he does not blame himself. For he does not measure his way of acting by supernatural yardsticks. He knows that he has acted thus in accord with his natural impulses, and at most he can regret that these are not better. It is the same with his judgment regarding the actions of others. A moral evaluation of actions he does not grant. He is an amoralist.

[ 87 ] What tradition considers to be evil the amoralist looks upon as the outstreaming of human instincts, in fact, as good. He does not consider punishment as morally necessary but merely as a means of eradicating instincts of certain human beings which are harmful to others. According to the opinion of the amoralist, society does not punish for this reason but because it has “moral right” to expiate the guilt, and because it proves itself stronger than the individual who has instincts which are antagonistic to the whole. The power of society stands against the power of the individual. This is the natural connection between an “evil” action of the individual and the justification of society, leading to the punishment of the individual. It is the will to power, namely, the acting of these instincts present in the majority of human beings, which expresses itself in the administration of justice in society. Thus, each punishment is the victory of a majority over an individual. Should the individual be victorious over society, then his action must be considered good, and that of others, evil. The arbitrary right expresses only what society recognizes as the best basis of their will to power.

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[ 88 ] Because Nietzsche sees in human action only an outstreaming of instincts, and these latter differ according to different people, it seems necessary to him that their actions also be different. For this reason, Nietzsche is a decided opponent of the democratic premise, equal rights and equal duties for all. Human beings are dissimilar; for this reason their rights and duties also must be dissimilar. The natural course of world history will always point out strong and weak, creative and uncreative human beings. And the strong will always be destined to determine the goals of the weak. Yes, still more: the strong will make use of the weak as the means toward a certain goal, that is, to serve as slaves. Nietzsche naturally does not speak about the “moral” right of the strong to keep slaves. “Moral” rights he does not acknowledge. He is simply of the opinion that the overcoming of the weak by the strong, which he considers as the principle of all life, must necessarily lead toward slavery.

[ 89 ] It is also natural that those overcome will rebel against the overcomer. When this rebellion cannot express itself through a deed it will at least express itself in feeling, and the expression of this feeling is revenge, which dwells steadily in the hearts of those who in some way or other have been overcome by those more fortunately endowed. Nietzsche regards the modern social democratic movement as a streaming forth of this revenge. For him, the victory of this movement would be a raising of the deformed, poorly endowed to the disadvantage of those better equipped. Nietzsche strove for exactly the opposite: the cultivation of the strong, self-dominant personality. And he hates the urge to equalize everything and to allow the sovereign individuality to disappear in the ocean of universal mediocrity.

[ 90 ] Not that each shall have the same and enjoy the same, says Nietzsche, but each should have and enjoy what he can attain by his own personal effort.

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[ 91 ] What the human being is worth depends only upon the value of his instincts. By nothing else can the value of the human being be determined. One speaks about the worth of work, or the value of work, or that work shall ennoble the human being. But in itself work has absolutely no value. Only through the fact that it serves man does it gain a value. Only insofar as work presents itself as a natural consequence of human inclinations, is it worthy of the human being. He who makes himself the servant of work, lowers himself. Only the human being who is unable to determine his own worth for himself, tries to measure this worth by the greatness of his work, of his achievement. It is characteristic of the democratic bourgeoisie of modern times that in the evaluation of the human being they let themselves be guided by his work. Even Goethe is not free from this attitude. He lets his Faust find the full satisfaction in the consciousness of work well done.

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[ 92 ] Art also has value, according to Nietzsche's opinion, only when it serves the life of the individual human being. And in this Nietzsche is a representative of the opinion of the strong personality, and rejects everything that the weak instincts express about art. All German aesthetes represent the point of view of the weak instincts. Art should represent the “infinite” in the “finite,” the “eternal” in the “temporal,” and the “idea” in the “reality.” For Schelling, as an example, all sensual beauty is but a reflection of that infinite beauty which we can never perceive with our senses. The work of art is never there for the sake of itself, nor is beautiful through what it is, but only because it reflects the idea of the beautiful. The sense picture is only a means of expression, only the form for a supersensible content, and Hegel calls the beautiful, “the sense filled appearance of the Idea.” Similar thoughts also can be found among other German aesthetes. For Nietzsche, art is a life-fostering element, and only when this is the case, has it justification. The one who cannot bear life as he directly perceives it, transforms it according to his requirements, and thereby creates a work of art. And what does the one who enjoys it demand from the work of art? He demands heightening of his joy of life, the strengthening of his life forces, satisfaction of his requirements, which reality does not do for him. But in the work of art, when his senses are directed toward the real, he will not see any reflection of the divine or of the superearthy. Let us hear how Nietzsche describes the impression Bizet's Carmen made upon him: “I become a better man when Bizet speaks to me. Also a better musician, a better listener. Is it at all possible to listen still better? I continue to bury my ears beneath this music; I hear its wellsprings. It seems to me that I experience its development, its evolving. I tremble in face of dangers which accompany any daring adventure. I am delighted with happy fortunes for which Bizet is not responsible. And, strange, fundamentally I do not think about it, nor do I even know how much I ponder about it. For, meanwhile, entirely different thoughts run through my head. Has one noticed that music frees the spirit, gives wings to the thoughts, that one becomes more of a philosopher, the more one becomes a musician, that the grey heavens of abstraction are lighted by flashes of lightning, that the light is strong enough for all the tracery of things, the large problems near enough for grasping, and the world is seen as from a mountain? I have just defined philosophical pathos. And, inadvertently, answers fall into my lap, a small hail of ice and wisdom, of solved problems. Where am I? Bizet makes me fruitful. All good makes me fruitful. I have no other gratitude, I also have no other measure for that which is good.” (Case of Wagner, ¶ 1.) Since Richard Wagner's music did not make such an impression upon him, Nietzsche rejected it: “My objections to Wagner's music are physiological objections. ... As a fact, my petit fait vrai is that I no longer breathe easily when this music first begins to work upon me; that soon my foot becomes angry with it and revolts: it desires to beat, dance, march. It demands first of all from the music the pleasures which lie in good walking, striding dancing. But doesn't my stomach also protest? My heart? My circulation? Do not my intestines also grieve? Do I not become unknowingly hoarse? And so I ask myself, ‘What does my entire body really want from this music?’ I believe that it seeks levitation. It is as if all animal functions become accelerated through these light, bold, abandoned, self-sure rhythms; as if the brazen, leaden life would lose its weight through the golden tender flow of oily melodies. My melancholy heaviness could rest in the hide and seek and in the abysses of perfection; but for that I need music.” (Nietzsche contra Wagner)

[ 93 ] At the beginning of his literary career Nietzsche deceived himself about what his instincts demanded from art, and thus at that time he was a disciple of Wagner. He had allowed himself to be lead astray into idealism through the study of Schopenhauer's philosophy. He believed in idealism for a certain time, and conjured up before himself artistic needs, ideal needs. Only in the further course of his life did he notice that all idealism was exactly contrary to his impulses. Now he became more honest with himself. He expressed only what he himself felt. And this could only lead to the complete rejection of Wagner's music, which as a mark of Wagner's last working aim, assumed an ever more ascetic character, as mentioned above.

[ 94 ] The aesthetes who demand that art make the ideal tangible, that it materialize the divine, in this field present an opinion similar to the philosophical nihilist in the field of knowledge and morality. In the objects of art they search for a beyond which, before the sense of reality, dissolves itself into a nothingness. There is also an aesthetic nihilism.

[ 95 ] This stands in contrast to the aestheticism of the strong personality, which sees in art a reflection of reality, a higher reality, which man would rather enjoy than the commonplace.

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[ 96 ] Nietzsche places two types of human beings opposite each other: the weak and the strong. The first type looks for knowledge as an objective fact, which should stream from the outer world into his spirit. He allows himself to have his good and evil dictated by an “eternal world will” or a “categorical imperative.” He identifies each action as sin which is not determined by this world will, but only by the creative self-will, a sin which must entail a moral punishment. The weak would like to prescribe equal rights for all human beings, and to determine the worth of the human being according to an outer yardstick. He would finally see in art a reflection of the divine, a message from the beyond. The strong, on the contrary, sees in all knowledge an expression of the will to power. Through knowledge he attempts to make all things conceivable, and, as a consequence, to make them subject to himself. He knows that he himself is the creator of truth, and that no one but himself can create his good and his evil. He regards the actions of human beings as the consequences of natural impulses, and lets them count as natural events which are never regarded as sins and do not warrant a moral judgment. He looks for the value of a man in the efficiency of the latter's instincts. A human being with instincts of health, spirit, beauty, perseverance, nobility he values higher than one with instincts of weakness, ugliness or slavery. He values a work of art according to the degree to which it enhances his forces.

[ 97 ] Nietzsche understands this latter type of man to be his superman. Until now, such supermen could come about only through the coalescing of accidental conditions. To make their development into the conscious goal of mankind is the intention of Zarathustra. Until now, one saw the goal of human development in various ideas. Here Nietzsche considers a change of perception to be necessary. “The more valuable type has been described often enough, but as a happy fortune, as an exception, never as consciously willed. Moreover, he specifically is most feared; until now he was almost the most terrible one; and out of the terror the reverse type was willed, bred, achieved: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal man—the Christ.” (Antichrist, ¶ 3.)

[ 98 ] Zarathustra's wisdom is to teach about the superman, toward which that other type was only a transition.

[ 99 ] Nietzsche calls this wisdom, Dionysian. It is wisdom which is not given to man from without; it is a self-created wisdom. The Dionysian wise one does not search; he creates. He does not stand as a spectator outside of the world he wishes to know; he becomes one with his knowledge. He does not search after a God; what he can still imagine to himself as divine is only himself as the creator of his own world. When this condition extends to all forces of the human organism, the result is the Dionysian human being, who cannot misunderstand a suggestion; he overlooks no sign of emotions; he has the highest level of understanding and divining instinct, just he possesses the art of communication in the highest degree. He enters into everything, into every emotion; he transforms himself continually. In contrast to the Dionysian wise one, stands the mere observer, who believes himself to be always outside his objects of knowledge, as an objective suffering spectator. The Apollonian stands opposite to the Dionysian human being. The Apollonian is he who, “above all, keeps the eye very active so that it receives the power of vision.” Visions, pictures of things which stand beyond the reality of mankind: the Apollonian spirit strives for these, and not for that wisdom created by himself.

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[ 100 ] The Apollonian wisdom has the character of earnestness. It feels the domination of the Beyond, which it only pictures, as a heavy weight, as an opposing power. The, Apollonian wisdom is serious for it believes itself to be in possession of a message from the Beyond, even if this is only transmitted through pictures and visions. The Apollonian spirit wanders about, heavily laden with his knowledge, for he carries a burden which stems from another world. And he takes on the expression of dignity because, confronted with the annunciation of the infinite, all laughter must be stilled.

[ 101 ] But this laughing is characteristic of the Dionysian spirit. The latter knows that all he calls wisdom is only his own wisdom, invented by him to make his life; easier. This one thing alone shall be his wisdom: namely, a means which permits him to say Yes to life. To the Dionysian human being, the spirit of heaviness is repellent, because it does not lighten life, but oppresses it. The self-created wisdom is a merry wisdom, for he who creates his own burden, creates one which he can also carry easily. With this self-created wisdom, the Dionysian spirit moves lightly through the world like a dancer.

[ 102 ] “But that I am good to wisdom, and often too good, is because she reminds me so very much of life itself. [ 103 ] She has the eye of life, her laughter and even her golden fishing rod; how can I help it that the two are so alike? [ 104 ] Into your eye I gazed recently, O Life: gold I saw flickering in your eyes of night! My heart stood still before such joy.[ 105 ] A golden boat I saw flickering on the waters of night, a sinking, drinking, ever-winking, golden, rocking boat!

[ 106 ] “Upon my foot, so wild to dance, you cast a glance, a laughing questioning, a melting, rocking glance. [ 107 ] Twice only you shook your castanet with tiny hands. Thereupon, my foot rocked with urge to dance.

[ 108 ] “My heels arched themselves, my toes listened to understand you. Indeed, the dancer carries his ear—in his toes!” (Zarathustra – 2nd and 3rd Parts. “The Dance Song.”)

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[ 109 ] Since the Dionysian spirit draws out of himself all impulses for his actions and obeys no external power, he is a free spirit. A free spirit follows only his own nature. Now of course in Nietzsche's works one speaks about instincts as the impulses of the free spirit. I believe that here under one name Nietzsche has collected a whole range of impulses requiring a consideration which goes more into individual differentiations. Nietzsche calls instincts those impulses for nourishment and self preservation present in animals, as well as the highest impulses of human nature, for example, the urge toward knowledge, the impulse to act according to moral standards, the drive to refresh oneself through works of art, and so on. Now, of course, all these impulses are forms of expression of one and the same fundamental force, but they do represent different levels in the development of this power. The moral instincts, for example, are a special level of instinct. Even if it is only admitted that they are but higher forms of sensory instinct, nevertheless they do appear in a special form within man's existence. This shows itself in that it is possible for man to carry out actions which cannot be led back to sensory instincts directly, but only to those impulses which can be defined as higher forms of instinct. The human being himself creates impulses for his own actions, which are not to be derived from his own sensory impulses, but only from conscious thinking. He puts individual purposes before himself, but he puts these before himself consciously, and there is a great difference whether he follows an instinct which arose unconsciously and only afterward was taken into consciousness, or whether he follows a thought which he produced from the very beginning with full consciousness. When I eat because my impulse for nourishment drives me to it, this is something essentially different from my solving a mathematical problem. But the conceptual grasp of world phenomena presents a special form of general perceptability. It differentiates itself from mere sensory perception. For the human being, the higher forms of development of the life of instinct are just as natural as the lower. If both of them are not in harmony, then he is condemned to unfreedom. The case may be that a weak personality, with entirely healthy sense instincts, has but weak spiritual instincts. Then of course he will develop his own individuality in regard to the life of senses, but he will draw the thought impulses of his actions from tradition. Disharmony can develop between both worlds of impulses. The sense impulses press toward a living out of one's own personality; the spiritual impulses are fettered to outer authority. The spiritual life of such a personality will be tyrannized by the sensuous, the sensuous life by the spiritual instincts. This is because both powers do not belong together, and have not grown out of a single state of being. Therefore, to the really free personality belongs not only a soundly developed individualized life of sense impulses, but also the capacity to create for himself the thought impulses for life. Only that man is entirely free who can produce thoughts out of himself which can lead to action, and in my book, Die Philosophie der Freiheit, The Philosophy of Freedom, I have called the capacity to produce pure thought motives for action, “moral fantasy.” Only the one who has this moral fantasy is really free, because the human being must act in accordance with conscious motives. And when he cannot produce the latter out of himself, then he must let himself be given them by outer authority or by tradition, which speaks to him in the form of the voice of conscience. A man who abandons himself merely to sensual instincts, acts like an animal; a human being who places his sensuous instincts under another's thoughts, acts unfreely; only the human being who creates for himself his own moral goals, acts in freedom. Moral fantasy is lacking in Nietzsche's teaching. The one who carries Nietzsche's thoughts to their conclusion must necessarily come to this insight. But in any case, it is an absolute necessity that this insight be added to Nietzsche's world conception. Otherwise one could always object to his conception thus: Indeed the Dionysian man is no slave to tradition or to the “will beyond,” but he is a slave of his own instincts.

[ 110 ] Nietzsche looked toward the original, essential personality of the human being. He tried to separate this essential personality from the cloak of the impersonal in which it had been veiled by a world conception hostile to reality. But he did not come to the point where he differentiated the levels of life within the personality itself. Therefore he underestimated the significance of consciousness for the human personality. “Consciousness is the last and most recent development of the organic, and consequently the least prepared and the weakest. Out of consciousness come innumerable errors, which bring it about that an animal, a human being, disintegrates earlier than otherwise would be necessary—collapses ‘over his destiny,’ as Homer says. If the preserved union of instincts were not so overwhelmingly powerful, if, on the whole it did not serve as a regulator, mankind would go to pieces because of their confused judgment, spinning fantasies with open eyes through their superficiality and gullibility. In short, just because of their consciousness, mankind must be destroyed,” says Nietzsche (Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Joyful Science, ¶ 11.)

[ 111 ] Indeed, this is entirely admitted, but it does not affect the truth that the human being is free only insofar as he can create within his consciousness thought motives for his actions.

[ 112 ] But the contemplation of thought motives leads still further. It is a fact based upon experience, that these thought motives which the human being produces out of himself, nevertheless manifest an overall consistency to a certain degree in single individuals. Also, when the individual human being creates thoughts in complete freedom out of himself, these correspond in a certain way with the thoughts of other human beings. For this reason, the free person is justified in assuming that harmony in human society enters of its own accord when society consists of sovereign individualities. With this opinion he can confront the defender of unfreedom, who believes that the actions of a majority of human beings only accord with each other when they are guided by an external power toward a common goal. For this reason the free spirit is most certainly not a disciple of that opinion which would allow the animal instincts to reign in complete freedom, and hence would do away with all law and order. Moreover, he demands complete freedom for those who do not merely wish to follow their animal instincts, but who are able to create their own moral impulses, their own good and evil.

[ 113 ] Only he who has not penetrated Nietzsche so far as to be able to form the ultimate conclusions of his world conception, granted that Nietzsche himself has not formed them, can see in him a human being who, “with a certain stylized pleasure, has found the courage to unveil what perhaps lurked hidden in some of the most secret depths of the souls of flagrant criminal types.” (Ludwig Stein, Friedrich Nietzsches Weltanschauung und ihre Gefahren, Friedrich Nietzsche's World Conception and its Dangers, p. 5.) Still today the average education of a German professor has not reached the point of being able to differentiate between the greatness of a personality and his small errors. Otherwise, one could not observe that such a professor's criticism is directed toward just these small errors. I believe that true education accepts the greatness of a personality and corrects small errors, or brings incomplete thoughts to conclusion.

[ 1 ] We have presented Nietzsche's opinion about supermen as they stand before us in his last writings; Zarathustra (1883-1884), Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Genealogie der Moral, Genealogy of Morals. (1887), Der Fall Wagner, The Case of Wagner (1888), Götzendämmerung, The Twilight of Idols (1889). In the incomplete work, Der Wille zur Macht, The Will to Power, the first part of which appeared as Antichrist in the eighth volume of the Complete Works, these opinions have been given their most significant philosophical expression. From the text of the appendix to the above-mentioned volume, this becomes quite clear. The work is called 1. The Antichrist, attempt at a criticism of Christendom. 2. The Free Spirit, criticism of philosophy as a nihilistic movement. 3. The Immoralist, criticism of the most ominous type of ignorance: morality.

[ 2 ] At the very beginning of his writing career, Nietzsche did not express his thoughts in their most characteristic form. At first he stood under the influence of German idealism, in the manner in which it was represented by Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. This expresses itself in his first writings as Schopenhauer and Wagner formulas, but the one who can see through these formulations into the kernel of Nietzsche's thoughts, finds in these writings the same purposes and goals which come to expression in his later works.

[ 3 ] One cannot speak of Nietzsche's development without being reminded of that freest thinker who was brought forth by mankind of the new age, namely, Max Stirner. It is a sad truth that this thinker, who fulfills in the most complete sense what Nietzsche requires of the superman, is known and respected by only a few. Already in the forties of the nineteenth century, he expressed Nietzsche's world conception. Of course he did not do this in such comfortable heart tones as did Nietzsche, but even more in crystal clear thoughts, beside which Nietzsche's aphorisms often appear like mere stammering.

[ 4 ] What path might Nietzsche not have taken if, instead of Schopenhauer, his teacher had been Max Stirner! In Nietzsche's writing no influence of Stirner whatsoever is to be found. By his own effort, Nietzsche had to work his way out of German idealism to a Stirner-like world conceptIon.

[ 5 ] Like Nietzsche, Stirner is of the opinion that the motivating forces of human life can be looked for only in the; single, real personality. He rejects all powers that wish; to form and determine the individual personality from outside. He traces the course of world history and discovers the fundamental error of mankind to be that it does not place before itself the care and culture of the individual personality, but other impersonal goals and purposes instead. He sees the true liberation of mankind in that men refuse to grant to all such goals a higher reality, but merely use these goals as a means of their self-cultivation. The free human being determines his own purposes; he possesses his ideals; he does not allow himself to be possessed by them. The human being who does not rule over his ideals as a free personality, stands under the same influence as the insane person who suffers from fixed ideas. It is all the same for Stirner if a human being imagines himself to be “Emperor of China” or if “a comfortable bourgeois imagines it is his destiny to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant, a loyal citizen, a virtuous human being, and so on. That is all one and the same ‘fixed idea.’ The one who has never attempted and dared not to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant, or a virtuous human being, and so on, is caught and held captive in orthodoxy, virtuousness, etc.”

[ 6 ] One need read only a few sentences from Stirner's book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, The Individual and his very Own, to see how his conception is related to that of Nietzsche. I shall quote a few passages from this book which are specially indicative of Stirner's way of thinking:

[ 7 ] “Pre-Christian and Christian times follow opposite goals. The former wish to idealize the real, the latter to realize the ideal. The former looks for the ‘Holy Spirit,’ the latter for the ‘transfigured body.’ For this reason, the former comes to insensitivity toward the real, with contempt for the world; the latter ends with the rejection of ideals, with ‘contempt for the spirit.’

[ 8 ] “As the stream of sanctification or purification penetrates through the old world (the washings, etc.), so the actual incorporation penetrates into the Christian; the God throws Himself into this world, becomes flesh and redeems it, that is, He fills it with Himself; but since He is ‘the idea’ or ‘the spirit,’ therefore in the end one (for example, Hegel) carries the idea into everything of this world and proves ‘that the idea, that intellect, is within all things.’ Him whom the heathen Stoics represented as ‘the wise one,’ compares with the ‘human being’ in today's culture, and each of them is a bodiless being. The unreal ‘wise one,’ this bodiless ‘holy one,’ of the stories becomes a real person, an embodied holy one, in the God who has become flesh; the unreal ‘human being,’ the bodiless I, becomes reality in the embodied I, in me.

[ 9 ] “That the individual himself is a world history and possesses in the rest of world history his essential self, transcends the usual Christian thought. To the Christian, world history is made more important because it is the history of Christ or of ‘man;’ for the egotist, only his own history has value because he wishes to develop himself, not the idea of mankind; he does not wish to develop the divine plan, the intentions of divine providence, freedom, and so on. He does not regard himself as an instrument of the idea or as a vessel of God; he acknowledges no profession, does not claim to be here for the further development of mankind, and to add his little mite, but he lives his life in indifference to this, oblivious of how well or how ill mankind itself is faring. If it would not lead to the misunderstanding that a condition of nature was to be praised, one could recall Lenaus' Drei Zigeuner, Three Gypsies:—‘What am I in the world to realize ideas?’—To bring about the realization of the idea, ‘State,’ by doing my bit for citizenship, or by marriage, as husband and father, to bring into existence the idea of family? What matters such a profession to me? I live according to a profession as little as the flower grows and perfumes the air according to a profession.

[ 10 ] “The ideal of ‘the human being’ is realized when the Christian concept is reversed in the sentence: ‘I, this unique one, am the human being.’ The conceptual question, ‘What is man?’ has then transposed itself into the personal one, ‘Who is man?’ By ‘what,’ one seeks for the concept in order to realize it; with ‘who,’ it is no longer a question at all, but the answer is immediately present within the questioner: the question answers itself.

[ 11 ] “About God one says, ‘Names do not name You.’ That also is valid for the ‘me:’ no concept expresses the ‘me;’ nothing one gives as my being exhausts me; they are only names. Likewise, one says about God that He is perfect and has no obligation to strive for perfection. This also is valid for me alone.

[ 12 ] “I am the possessor of my own power, and I am this when I know myself to be the unique one. Within this unique one the possessor of self returns again into his creative nothingness, out of which he was born. Each higher being above me, be it God or be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and only fades before the sun of the consciousness: If I base my affairs upon myself, upon the individual, then they stand upon the temporal, upon the mortal creator who devours himself, and, I may say: [ 13 ] ‘I have based my affairs upon nothing.’”

[ 14 ] This person dependent only upon himself, this possessor of creativity out of himself alone, is Nietzsche's superman.

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[ 5 ] These Stirner thoughts would have been the suitable vessel into which Nietzsche could have poured his rich life of feeling; instead, he looked to Schopenhauer's world of concepts for the ladder upon which he could climb to his own world of thought.

[ 6 ] Our entire world knowledge stems from two roots, according to Schopenhauer's opinion. It comes out of the life of reflection, and out of the awareness of will, namely, that which appears in us as doer. The “thing in itself” lies on the other side of the world of our reflections. For the reflection is only the effect which the “thing in itself” exercises upon my organ of knowledge. I know only the impressions which the things make upon me, not the things themselves. And these impressions only form my reflections. I know no sun and no earth, but only an eye which sees a sun, and a hand which touches the earth. Man knows only that, “The world which surrounds him is only there as reflection, that is, absolutely in relation to something else: the reflected, which is he himself.” (Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, World as Will and Reflection, ¶ 1.) However, the human being does not merely reflect the world, but is also active within it; he becomes conscious of his own will, and he learns that what he feels within himself as will can be perceived from outside as movement of his body; that is, the human being becomes aware of his own acts twice: from within as reflection, and from outside as will. Schopenhauer concludes from this that it is the will itself which appears in the perceived body motion as reflection. And he asserts further that not only is the reflection of one's own body and movements based upon will, but that this is also the case behind all other reflections. The whole world then, in Schopenhauer's opinion, according to its very essence, is will, and appears to our intellect as reflection. This will, Schopenhauer asserts, is uniform in all things. Only our intellect causes us to perceive a multitude of differentiated things.

[ 17 ] According to this point of view, the human being is connected with the uniform world being through this will. Inasmuch as man acts, the uniform, primordial will works within him. Man exists as a unique and special personality only in his own life of reflection; in essence he is identical with the uniform groundwork of the world.

[ 18 ] If we assume that as he came to know Schopenhauer's philosophy, the thought of the superman already existed unconsciously, instinctively in Nietzsche, then this teaching of the will could only affect him sympathetically. In the human will Nietzsche found an element which allowed man to take part directly in the creation of the world-content. As the one who wills, man is not merely a Spectator standing outside the world-content, who makes for himself pictures of reality, but he himself is a creator. Within him reigns that divine power above which there is no other.

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[ 19 ] Out of these viewpoints within Nietzsche the ideas of the Apollonian and of the Dionysian world conceptions form themselves. He turns these two upon the Greek life of an, letting them develop according to two roots, namely, out of an art of representation and out of an art of willing. When the reflecting human being idealizes his world of reflection and embodies his idealized reflections in works of art, then the Apollonian art arises. He lends the shine of the eternal to the individual objects of reflection, through the fact that he imbues them with beauty. But he remains standing within the world of reflection. The Dionysian artist tries not only to express beauty in his works of art, but he even imitates the creative working of the world will. In his own movements he tries to image the world spirit. He makes himself into a visible embodiment of the will. He himself becomes a work of art. “In singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten the art of walking and speaking, and is about to fly, to dance up into the air. Out of his gestures this enchantment speaks.” Geburt der Tragödie, Birth of Tragedy, ¶ 1.) In this condition man forgets himself, he no longer feels himself as an individuum; he lets the universal world will reign within him In this way Nietzsche interprets the festivals which were given by the servants of Dionysus in honor of the latter. In the Dionysian servant Nietzsche sees the archetpictures of the Dionysian artist. Now he imagines that the oldest dramatic art of the Greeks came into existence for the reason that a higher union of the Dionysian with the Apollonian had taken place. In this way he explains the origin of the first Greek tragedy. He assumes that the tragedy arose out of the tragic chorus. The Dionysian human being becomes the spectator, the observer of a picture which represents himself. The chorus is the self-reflection of a Dionysically aroused human being, that is, the Dionysian human being sees his Dionysian stimulation reflected through an Apollonian work of art. The presentation of the Dionysian in the Apollonian picture is the primitive tragedy. The assumption of such a tragedy is that in its creator a living consciousness of the connection of man with the primordial powers of the world is present. Such a consciousness expresses itself in the myths. The mythological must be the object of the oldest tragedies. When, in the development of a people the moment arrives that the destructive intellect extinguishes the living feeling for myths, the death of the tragic is the necessary consequence.

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[ 20 ] In the development of Greek culture, according to Nietzsche, this moment began with Socrates. Socrates was an enemy of all instinctive life which was bound up with powers of nature. He allowed only that to be valid which the intellect could prove in its thinking, that which was teachable. Through this, war was declared upon the myth, and Euripides, described by Nietzsche as the pupil of Socrates, destroyed tragedy because his creating sprang no longer out of the Dionysian instinct, as did that of Aeschylus, but out of a critical intellect. Instead of the imitation of the movements of the world spirit's will, in Euripides is found the intellectual knitting together of individual events within the tragic action.

I do not ask for the historical justification of these ideas of Nietzsche. Because of them he was sharply attacked by a classical philologist. Nietzsche's description of Greek culture can be compared to the picture a man gives of a landscape which he observes from the summit of a mountain; it is a philological presentation of a description which a traveler could give who visits each single little spot. From the top of the mountain many a thing is distorted, according to the laws of optics.

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[ 21 ] What comes into consideration here is the question: What task does Nietzsche place before himself in his Geburt der Tragödie, Birth of Tragedy? Nietzsche is of the, opinion that the older Greeks well knew the sufferings of existence. “There is the old story that for a long time King Midas had chased the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without being able to catch him. When the latter had finally fallen into his hands, the king asked, ‘What is the very best and the most excellent for the human being?’ Then, rigid and immovable, the demon remained, silent, until, forced by the king he finally broke out into shrill laughter with these words: ‘Miserable temporal creature! Child of accident and misery! Why do you force In to tell you what is most profitable for you not to hear? The very best for you is entirely unattainable, namely, not to be born, not to exist, to be nothing. But the second best is for you to die soon.’” (Geburt der Tragödie, Birth of Tragedy, ¶ 3.) In this saying Nietzsche finds a fundamental feeling of the Greeks expressed. He considers it a superficiality when one presents the Greeks as a continually merry, childishly playful people. Out of the tragic feeling of the Greeks had to arise the impulse to create something whereby existence became bearable. They looked for justification of existence, and found this within the world of the Gods and in their art. Only through the counter image of the Olympic Gods and art could raw reality become bearable for the Greeks. The fundamental question in the Geburt der Tragödie, Birth of Tragedy, and for Nietzsche himself is, To what extent does Greek art foster life, and to what extent does it maintain life? Nietzsche's fundamental instinct in regard to art as a life-fostering power, already makes itself known in this first work.

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[ 22 ] Still another fundamental instinct of Nietzsche's is to be observed in this work. It is his aversion toward the merely logical spirit, whose personality stands completely under the domination of his intellect. From this aversion stems Nietzsche's opinion that the Socratic spirit was the destroyer of Greek culture. Logic for Nietzsche is merely a form in which a person expresses himself. If no further modes of expression are added to this form, then the personality appears as a cripple, as an organism in which the necessary organs are atrophied. Because in Kant's writings Nietzsche could discover only the pondering intellect, he called Kant a “mis-grown concept cripple.” Only when logic is the means of expression of deeper fundamental instincts of a personality does Nietzsche grant it validity. Logic must be the outflow for the super-logical in a personality. Nietzsche always rejected the Socratic intellect. We read in the Götzendämmerung, Twilight of Idols, “With Socrates the Greek taste reverses in the direction of dialectic; what is it that really happens? Above all, an aristocratic taste is overthrown; the common people get the upper hand with dialectic. Before Socrates, the dialectic manners were rejected in good society; they were considered bad manners, they merely posed.” (Problem of Socrates, ¶ 5.) If powerful fundamental instincts do not uphold a position, then the intellect which has to ‘prove’ sets in, and tries to support the matter by legal artifices.

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[ 23 ] Nietzsche believed that in Richard Wagner he recognized a restorer of the Dionysian spirit. Out of this belief he wrote the fourth of his Unzeitgemässen Betrachtungen, Untimely Observations, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, 1875. During this time he was still a strong believer in the interpretation of the Dionysian spirit which he had constructed for himself with the aid of Schopenhauer's philosophy. He still believed that reality was solely human reflection, and that beyond the world of reflection was the essence of things in the form of primordial will. And the creative Dionysian spirit had not yet become for him the human being creating out of himself, but was the human being forgetting himself and arising out of primordial willing. For him, Wagner's music-dramas were pictures of the ruling primordial will, created by one of those Dionysian spirits abandoned to this same primordial will.

[ 24 ] And since Schopenhauer saw in music an immediate image of the will, Nietzsche also believed that he should see in music the best means of expression for a Dionysian creative spirit. To Nietzsche, the language of civilized people appears sick. It can no longer be the simple expression of feelings, because words must gradually be used more and more to express the increasing intellectual conditioning of the human being. But, because of this, the meaning of words has become abstract, has become poor. They can no longer express what the Dionysian spirit feels, who creates out of this primordial will. The Dionysian spirit, therefore, is no longer able to express himself in the dramatic element in words. He must call upon other means of expression to help, above all, upon music, but also upon other arts. The Dionysian spirit becomes a dithyrambic dramatist. This concept “is so all encompassing that it includes at the; same time, the dramatist, the poet, the musician” ... “Regardless how one may imagine the development of the archetypal dramatist, in his maturity and completeness he is a figure without any hindrances whatsoever and without any gaps; he is the really free artist, who can do nothing but think in all the arts at the same time, the mediator and conciliator between apparently separate spheres, the reconstructor of a unity and totality of artistic possibilities which cannot be at all conjectured or inferred, but can be shown only through the deed.” (Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, ¶ 7) Nietzsche revered Richard Wagner as a Dionysian spirit, and Richard Wagner can only be described as a Dionysian spirit as Nietzsche represented the latter in the above mentioned work. His instincts are turned toward the beyond; he wants to let the voice of the beyond ring forth in his music. I have already indicated that later Nietzsche found and could recognize those of his instincts which by their own nature were directed toward this world. He had originally misunderstood Wagner's art because he had misunderstood himself, because he had allowed his instincts to be tyrannized by Schopenhauer's philosophy. This subordination of his own instincts to a foreign spirit power appeared to him later like a sickness. He discovered that he had not listened to his instincts, and had allowed himself to be led astray by an opinion which was not in accord with his, that he had allowed an art to work upon these instincts which could only be to their disadvantage, and which finally had to make them ill.

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[ 25 ] Nietzsche himself described the influence which Schopenhauer's philosophy, which was antagonistic to his basic impulses, had made upon him. He described it when he still believed in this philosophy, in his third Unzeitgemässen Betrachtung, Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Untimely Observations, Schopenhauer as Educator (1874) at a time when Nietzsche was looking for a teacher. The right teacher can only be one who works upon the pupil in such a way that the inmost kernel of the pupil's being develops out of the personality. Every human being is influenced by the cultural media of the time in which he lives. He takes into himself what the time has to offer in educational material. But the question is, how can he find himself in the midst of all that is pressing in upon him from outside; how can he spin out of himself what he, and only he, and nobody else can be. “The human being who does not wish to belong to the masses needs only to stop being comfortable with himself; he should follow his voice of conscience which calls to him, Be yourself! That is not innately you, that which you are now doing, now intending, now desiring! Thus speaks the human being to himself, who one day discovers that he has always been satisfied to take educational material into himself from outside.” (opus cit, ¶ 1) Through the study of Schopenhauer's philosophy, Nietzsche found himself nevertheless, even if not yet in his most essential selfhood. Nietzsche strove unconsciously to express himself simply and honestly, according to his own basic impulses. Around him he found only people who expressed themselves in the educational formulas of their time, who hid their essential being behind these formulas. But in Schopenhauer Nietzsche discovered a human being who had the courage to make his personal feelings regarding the world into the content of his philosophy: “the hearty well being of the speaker” surrounded Nietzsche at the first reading of Schopenhauer's sentences. “Here is an harmonious, strengthening air; this is what we feel; here is a certain inimitable unreservedness and naturalness, as in those people who feel at home with themselves, and indeed are masters of a very rich home, in contrast to those writers who admire themselves most when they have been intellectual and whose writing thereby receives something restless and contrary to nature.” “Schopenhauer speaks with himself, or, if one absolutely must imagine a listener, then one should imagine a son whom the father instructs. It is a hearty, rough, good-natured expressing of one's mind to a listener who listens with love.” (Schopenhauer ¶ 2) What attracted Nietzsche to Schopenhauer was that he heard a human being speak who expressed his innermost instincts.

[ 26 ] Nietzsche saw in Schopenhauer a strong personality who was not transformed through philosophy into a mere intellectual, but a personality who made use of logic merely to express the super-logic, the instinctive in himself. “His yearning for a stronger nature, for a healthier and simpler mankind, was a yearning for himself, and as soon as he had conquered his time within himself, then with astonished eyes, he had to see the genius within himself.” (Schopenhauer ¶ 3.) Already in those days the striving after the idea of the superman who searches for himself as the meaning of his own existence was working in Nietzsche's mind, and such a searcher he found in Schopenhauer. In such human beings he saw the purpose, indeed, the only purpose of, world existence; nature appeared to him to have reached a goal when she brought forth such a human being. Here “Nature, who never leaps, has made her only jump, and indeed a jump of joy, for she feels herself for the first time) at the goal, where she comprehends that she must abandon having goals.” (Schopenhauer ¶ 5) In this sentence lies the kernel of the conception of the superman. When he wrote this sentence Nietzsche wanted exactly the same thing that he later wanted from his Zarathustra, but he still lacked the power to express this desire in his own language. Already at the time when he wrote his Schopenhauer book, he saw in his conception of the superman, the fundamental idea of culture.

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[ 27 ] In the development of the personal instincts of the single human being, Nietzsche sees the goal of all human development. What works contrary to this development appears to him as the fundamental sin against mankind. But there is something within the human being which rebels in a quite natural way against his free development. The human being does not allow himself to be led only by his impulses, which are always active within him at every single moment, but also by all that he has collected in his memory. The human being remembers his own experiences. He tries to create for himself a consciousness of the experiences of his nation, his tribe, yes, of all mankind through the course of history. Man is an historical being. The animals live unhistorically: they follow impulses which are active within them at one single moment. Man lets himself be determined through his past. When he wants to undertake something he asks himself, What have I or someone else already experienced with a similar undertaking? Through the recollection of an experience the stimulus for an action can be completely killed. From the observation of this fact, the question arises for Nietzsche: To what extent does the human being's memory capacity benefit his life, and to what extent does it work to his disadvantage? The recollection which tries to encompass things which the human being himself has not experienced, lives within him as an historical sense, as study of the past. Nietzsche asks, To what extent does the historical sense foster life? He tries to give the answer to this question in his second Unzeitgemässen Betrachtung, Von Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, Untimely Observations, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1873). The occasion for this writing was Nietzsche's perception that the historical sense among his contemporaries, especially among the scholars, had become an outstanding characteristic. To probe deeply into the past: this type of study Nietzsche found praised everywhere. Only through knowledge of the past was man to gain the capacity to differentiate between what is possible and what is impossible for him; this confession of faith drummed itself into his ears. Only the one who knows how a nation has developed can estimate what is advantageous for its future; this cry Nietzsche heard. Yes, even the philosophers wished to think up nothing new, but would rather study the thoughts of their ancestors. This historical sense worked paralysingly upon the creativity of the present. In the one who, with every impulse that stirs within him, has to determine first to what end a similar impulse has led in the past, the forces are lamed before they have become active. “Imagine the extreme example of a human being who simply does not possess the power to forget, who is condemned to see a coming into being everywhere; such a man no longer would believe in his own being, he would no longer believe in himself; he would see everything diffusing in moving fragments, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming. ... Forgetting is a part of all actions, just as not only light, but also darkness is a part of all organic life. A human being who would wish to feel only historically through and through, would be similar to the human being who is forced to do without sleep, or the animal who is compelled to live only by chewing the cud, over and over again.” (History, ¶ 1) Nietzsche is of the opinion that the human being can stand only as much history as is in accordance with his creative forces. The strong personality carries out his intention in spite of the fact that he remembers the experiences of the past; yes, perhaps just because of the recollection of these experiences, he would experience a strengthening of his forces. But the forces of the weak person are erased by this historical sense. To determine the extent, and through that the boundary “where the past must be forgotten if it is not to become the grave-digger of the present, one would have to know exactly the extent of the plastic forces of a human being, of a nation, of a culture; I mean, that power to grow out of oneself in a unique way, to transform and to incorporate the past and the foreign.” (History ¶ 1.)

[ 28 ] Nietzsche is of the opinion that the historical should be cultivated only to the extent that it is necessary for the health of an individual, of a nation, or of a culture. What is important to him is “to learn more about making history of life.” (History, ¶ 1) He attributes to the human being the right to cultivate history in a way that produces, if possible, a fostering of the impulses of a certain moment, of the present. From this point of view he is an opponent of the other attitude toward history which seeks its salvation only in “historical objectivity,” which wants only to see and relate what happened in the past “factually,” which seeks only for the “pure, inconsequential” knowledge, or more clearly, “the truth from which nothing develops.” (History, ¶ 6) Such an observation can come only from a weak personality, whose feelings do not move with the ebb and flow when it sees the stream of happenings pass by it. Such a personality ”has become a re-echoing passivism, which through its resounding, reacts upon other similar passiva, until finally the entire air of an age is filled with a confused mass of whirring, delicate, related after-tones.” (History, ¶ 6) But that such a weak personality could re-experience the forces which had been active in the human being of the past, Nietzsche does not believe: “Yet it seems to me that in a certain way one hears only the overtones of each original and historical chief tone; the sturdiness and might of the original is no longer distinguishable from the spherically thin and pointed sound of the strings. While the original tone arouses us to deeds, tribulations, terrors, the latter lulls us to sleep and makes us weak enjoyers; it is as if one had arranged an heroic symphony for two flutes, and had intended it for the use of dreaming opium smokers.” (History, ¶ 6) Only he can truly understand the past who is able to live powerfully in the present, who has strong instincts through which he can discern and understand the instincts of the ancestors. He pays less attention to the factual than to what can be deduced from the facts. “It would be to imagine a writing of history which contained not the least drop of ordinary empirical truth, and yet could make the highest demands upon the predicate of objectivity.” (History, ¶ 6) He would be the master of such historical writing who had searched everywhere among the historical personages and events for what lies hidden behind the merely factual. But to accomplish this he must lead a strong individual life, because one can observe instincts and impulses directly only within one's own person. “Only out of the strongest power of the present may you interpret the past; only when you apply the strongest exertion of your most noble traits of character will you divine what is worthy to be known and to be preserved from the past, and what is great. Like through like! Otherwise you draw what is passed down to yourselves.” “The experienced and thoughtful writes all history. The one who has not experienced something greater and higher than others also will not know how to interpret something great and high out of the past.” (History, ¶ 6)

[ 29 ] In regard to the growing importance of the historic sense in the present, Nietzsche judges, “That the human being learn above all to live and to use history only in the service of the life which has been experienced.” (History, ¶ 10) He wants above all things a “teaching of health for life,” and history should be cultivated only to the extent that it fosters such a teaching of health.

[ 30 ] What is life-fostering in such an observation of history? This is the question Nietzsche asks in his History, and with this question he stands already at the place which he described in the above-mentioned sentence from Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, page 9.

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[ 31 ] The soul mood of the bourgeois Philistine works especially strongly against the sound development of the basic personality. A Philistine is the opposite of a human being, who finds his satisfactions in the free expression of his native capacities. The Philistine will grant validity to this expression only to the extent that it adapts to a certain average of human ability. As long as the Philistine remains within his boundaries, no objection is to be made against him. The one who wants to remain an average human being will have to settle this with himself. Among his contemporaries Nietzsche found those who wanted to make their narrow-minded soul mood the normal soul mood of all men; who regarded their narrow-mindedness as the only true humanity. Among these he counted David Friedrich Strauss, the aesthete, Friedrich Theodore Vischer, and others. He thinks Vischer, in a lecture which the latter held in memory of Holderlin, set aside this Philistine faith without conquering it. He sees this in these words: “He, (Holderlin) was one of those unarmed souls, he was the Werther of Greece, hopelessly in love; it was a life full of softness and yearning, but also strength and content was in his willing, and greatness, fullness, and life in his style, which reminds one here and there of Aeschylus. However, his spirit had too little hardness: it lacked humor as a weapon; he could not tolerate it that one was not a barbarian if one was a Philistine.” (David Strauss, ¶ 2) The Philistine will not exactly discount the right to existence of the outstanding human beings, but he means that they will die because of reality, if they do not know how to come to terms with the adaptations which the average human being has made regarding his requirements. These adaptations are once and for all the only thing which is real, which is sensible, and into these the great human being must also fit himself. Out of this narrow-minded mood has David Strauss written his book, Der alte und der neue Glaube, The Old and the New Faith. Against this book, or rather, against the mood which comes to expression in this book, is directed the first of Nietzsche's Unzeitgemässen Betrachtungen, David Strauss, der Bekenner und Schriftsteller, Untimely Observations: David Strauss, the Adherer and Writer (1873). The impression of the newer natural scientific achievements upon the Philistine is of such a nature that he says, “The Christian point of view of an immortal heavenly life, along with all the other comforts of the Christian religion, has collapsed irretrievably.” (David Strauss, ¶ 4) He will arrange his life on earth comfortably, according to the ideas of natural science; that is so comfortably that it answers the purposes of the Philistine. Now the Philistine shows that one can be happy and satisfied despite the fact that one knows that no higher spirit reigns over the stars, but that only the bleak, insensate forces of nature rule over all world events. “During these last years we have taken active part in the great national war and the setting up of the German State, and we find ourselves elated in our inmost being by this unexpected, majestic turn of events concerning our heavily-tried nation. We further the understanding of these matters by historical studies which nowadays, through a series of attractive and popular historical books, is made simple for the layman as well; in addition, we try to broaden our knowledge of natural science, for which also there is no lack of generally understandable material; and finally, we discover in the writings of our great poets, in the performances of the works of our great musicians, a stimulation for spirit and soul, for fantasy and humor, which leaves nothing to be desired. Thus we live, thus we travel, full of joy.” (Strauss, Der alte und neue Glaube, The Old and New Faith, ¶. 88)

[ 32 ] The gospel of the most trivial enjoyment of life speaks, from these words. Everything that goes beyond the trivial, the Philistine calls unsound. About the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, Strauss says that this work is only popular with those for whom “the baroque stands as the talented, the formless as the noble” (Der alte und neue Glaube, The Old and New Faith, ¶ 109); about Schopenhauer, the Messiah of Philistinism knows enough to announce that for such an “unsound and unprofitable” philosophy as Schopenhauer's, one should waste no proofs, but quips and sallies alone are suitable. (David Strauss, ¶ 6) By sound, the Philistine means only what accords with the average education.

[ 33 ] As the moral, archetypal commandment, Strauss presents this sentence: “All moral action is a self-determining of the individual according to the idea of species.” (Der alte und neue Glaube, The Old and New Faith, ¶ 74) Nietzsche replies to this, “Translated into the explicit and comprehensible, it means only: Live as a human being and not as a monkey or a seal. This command, unfortunately, is completely useless and powerless, because in the concept, human being, the most manifold concepts are united beneath the same yoke; for example, the Patagonian and Magister Strauss; and because no one would dare to say with equal right, Live as a Patagonian, and, Live as Magister Strauss!” (David Strauss, ¶ 7)

[ 34 ] It is an ideal, indeed, an ideal of the most lamentable kind, which Strauss wishes to set before men. And Nietzsche protests against it; he protests because in him a lively instinct cries out, Do not live like Magister Strauss, but live as is proper for you.

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[ 35 ] Only in the writing, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Human, All Too-Human, (1878), does Nietzsche appear to be free from the influence of Schopenhauer's way of thinking. He has given up looking for supernatural causes for natural events; he seeks natural proofs for understanding. Now he regards all human life as a kind of natural happening; in the human being he sees the highest product of nature. One lives “finally among human beings, and with one's self as in nature, without praise, without reproach, ambition, enjoying one's self in many things, as in a play, before which until now one had been full of fear. One would be free of the emphasis, and would no longer feel the goading of thoughts that one was not only nature or was more than nature ... rather must a human being, from whom the usual fetters of life have fallen away to such an extent that he continues to live on, only to know ever more how to renounce much, Yes, almost everything upon which other human beings place value, without envy and discontent; for him, that most desirable condition, that free, fearless floating above human beings, customs, laws and the usual evaluation of matter, must suffice.” Menschlices Alizumenschliches, Human, All Too Human, ¶ 34. Nietzsche has already given up all faith in ideals; he sees in human action only consequences of natural causes, and in the recognition of these causes he finds his satisfaction. He discovers that one receives an erroneous idea of things when one sees in them merely what is illuminated by the light of idealistic knowledge. What lies in the shadow of things would escape one, Nietzsche now wants to learn to know not only the bright but also the shadow side of things. Out of this striving comes the work, Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, The Wanderer and his Shadow (1879). In this work he wishes to grasp the manifestations of life from all sides. In the best sense of the word, he has become a “philosopher of reality,”

[ 36 ] In his Morgenröte, Dawn (1881), he describes the moral process in the evolution of mankind as a natural event. Already in this writing he shows that there is no super-earthly moral world order, no eternal law of good and evil, and that all morality has originated from the natural drives and instincts ruling within the human being. No the way is cleared for Nietzsche's original journey. When no superhuman power can lay a binding obligation upon man, he is justified in giving his own creativity free reign. This knowledge is the motif of Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Joyful Wisdom (1882). No longer are fetters placed upon Nietzsche's “free” knowledge. He feels destined to create new values, having discovered the origin of the old, and having found that they are but human, not divine values. He now dares to throwaway what goes against his instinct, and to substitute other things which are in accord with his impulses: “We, the new, the nameless, the incomprehensible, we firstlings of a yet untried future, we require for a new purpose a new means, namely a new health, a stronger, sharper, tougher, bolder, more audacious health than any previous states of health. The one whose soul bursts to experience the whole range of hitherto recognized values and wishes, and whose soul thirsts to sail around all shores of this ideal ‘Mediterranean,’ wants to know from his most personal adventures how it feels to be a conqueror and discoverer of ideals ... he requires one thing above all, health ... And now, after having been long on the way, we Argonauts of the ideal, more courageous perhaps than prudent, it will seem to us as recompense for it all that we have before us a still undiscovered land ... After such outlooks and with such a craving in our conscience and consciousness, how can we allow ourselves to be satisfied with the man of the present day?” (Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Joyful Wisdom, ¶ 382)

41.

[ 37 ] Out of the mood characterized in the sentences cited above, arose Nietzsche's picture of the superman. It is the Counter-picture of the man of the present day; it is, above all, the counter-picture of Christ. In Christianity, the opposition to the cultivation of the strong life has become religion. (Antichrist, ¶ 5) The founder of this religion teaches that before God that is despicable which has value in the eyes of man. In the “Kingdom of God” Christ will find everything fulfilled which on earth appeared to be incomplete. Christianity is the religion which removes all care of earthly life from man; it is the religion of the weak, who would gladly have the commandment set before them, “Struggle not against evil, and suffer all tribulation,” because they are not strong enough to withstand it. Christ has no understanding for the aristocratic personality, which wants to create its own power out of its own reality. He believes that the capacity for seeing the human realm would spoil the power of seeing the Kingdom of God. In addition, the more advanced Christians who no longer believe that they will resurrect at the end of time in their actual physical body in order to be either received into Paradise or thrown into Hell, these Christians dream about “divine providence,” about a “supersensible” order of things. They also believe that man must raise himself above his merely terrestrial goals, and adapt himself to an ideal realm. They think that life has a purely spiritual background, and that it is only because of this that it has value. Christianity will not cultivate the instincts for health, for beauty, for growth, for symmetry, for perseverance, for accumulation of forces, but hatred against the intellect, against pride, courage, aristocracy, against self-confidence, against the freedom of the spirit, against the pleasures of the sense world, against the joys and brightness of reality, in which the human being lives. (Antichrist, ¶ 21) Christianity describes the natural as downright “trash.” In the Christian God, a Being of the other world, that is, a nothingness, is deified; the will to be nothing is declared to be holy. (Antichrist, ¶ 18) For this reason, Nietzsche fights against Christianity in the first book of Unwertung aller Werte, Transvaluation of all Values. And in the second and third books he wanted to attack the philosophy and morality of the weak, who only feel themselves comfortable in the role of dependents. The species of human being whom Nietzsche wishes to see trained because he does not despise this life, but embraces this life with love and elevates it in order to believe that it should be lived only once, is “ardent for eternity,” (Zarathustra, Third Part, The Seven Seals) and would like to have this life lived infinite times. Nietzsche lets his Zarathustra be “the teacher of the eternal return.”

“Behold, we know ... that all things eternally return, and ourselves with them, and that we have already existed times without number, and all things with us.” (Zarathustra, Third Part, The Convalescent)

[ 38 ] At present it seems impossible for me to have a definite opinion about what idea Nietzsche connected with the words “eternal return.” It will be possible to say something more specific only when Nietzsche's notes for the incomplete parts of his Willens zur Macht, Will to Power, have been published in the second part of the complete edition of his works.

[ 16 ] We can clearly observe a certain incoherence in. Nietzsche's ideas. Where only logical association of ideas would be in order, thought connections appear in him which rest merely upon external, accidental signs, for example, sound similarity in words, or metaphorical relationships which are completely inconsequential at a point where concepts are used. In one place in Also Sprach Zarathustra, Thus spake Zarathustra, where the man of the future is contrasted with the man of the present, we find this digression of fantasy: “Do like the wind when it rushes forth from its mountain caves: to its own piping will it dance; the seas tremble and leap under its footsteps ... That which giveth wings to asses, that which milketh those lionesses: praise be to that good, unruly spirit, which cometh like a hurricane unto all present and to all the populace ... which is hostile to thistle-heads and puzzle-heads, and to all withered leaves and weeds: praised be this good, free spirit of the storm, which danceth upon fens and afflictions as upon meadows: which hateth the consumptive populace-dogs, and all the ill-constituted, sullen brood: praised be this spirit of all free spirits, the laughing storms, which bloweth dust into the eyes of these melanotic and melancholic ones!” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume VI, p. 429) In the Antichrist is the following thought, in which the word “truth” in a quite external sense gives occasion for an idea-association at a most important point: “Must I still say that in the entire New Testament there is but one single figure which one must revere? Pilate, the Roman Governor. He does not convince himself into taking a Jewish affair seriously. One Jew more or less—what does it matter? ... The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom a disgraceful misuse of the word ‘truth’ has occurred, has enriched the New Testament with the single word which is of value ... which is his criticism, his annihilation itself, ‘What is truth?’ ...” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume VIII, p. 280). It is absolutely a part of this class of incoherent association of ideas when, in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, at the end of a discussion on the value of German culture, the following sentence which should have more value than a matter of style, appears: “It is artful of a people to make themselves be evaluated as deep, awkward, good-natured, honest, lacking in cleverness, or to let themselves be considered so, or, indeed it could be that they are deep! Finally, one should honor one's name; not for nothing is one called the deceiving nation. ...”

[ 17 ] The more intimately one occupies oneself with Nietzsche's thought development, the more one comes to the conviction that everywhere there are digressions from that which is still explainable through psychology. The impulse to isolate himself, to separate himself from the outer world, lies deeply rooted in his spiritual organization. He expresses himself characteristically enough in his Ecce Homo: “I am gifted with an utterly uncanny instinct of cleanliness, so that I can ascertain physiologically, that is to say, that I can smell the proximity of, I may say, the innermost entrails of every human soul. ... This sensitiveness has psychological antennae, with which I feel and handle every secret; the hidden filth at the root of many a human character, which may be the result of base blood, but which may be superficially overlaid by education, is revealed to me at first glance. If my observation has been correct, such people, unbearable to my sense of cleanliness, also become conscious on their part of the cautiousness resulting from my loathing; and this does not make them any more fragrant. ... This is why social intercourse is no small trial to my patience; my humanity does not consist in the fact that I sympathize with the feelings of my fellows, but that I can endure that very sympathy. My humanity is a continual self-mastery. But I need solitude, that is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breathing of free, light, bracing air. ... The loathing of mankind, of the ‘rabble,’ was always my greatest danger.” (M. G. Conrad, Ketzerblut, p. 183) Such impulses are fundamental in his teaching in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, and in quite a number of his other ideas. He wants to educate a caste of prominent people who establish their life aims outside the realm of their complete arbitrariness. And the whole of history is only a means of training a few master natures, who make use of the remaining mass of humanity for their own personal purposes. “One completely misunderstands the predatory animal and the predatory human being (for example, Cesare Borgia), one misunderstands nature so long as one looks for something abnormal at the root of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or, indeed, searches for an inborn ‘hell,’ as almost all moralists have done up to now.” (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 197) Nietzsche regards it as essential that a real artistocracy accept “with good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable human beings, who for their sakes had to be reduced to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to tools, and even had to be degraded.” (Ibid, p. 258). From this comes Nietzsche's criticism of the social question, a criticism bordering upon narrow-mindedness. According to him, workers must remain cattle; they may not be trained to regard themselves as having any purpose. “In the most, irresponsible: and thoughtless way, one has destroyed the instincts which made It possible to be a worker, and to be one's self. One has made the worker militaristically efficient, one has given him the coalition right, the political vote; is it any wonder that today the worker fears his existence as a critical situation (morally expressed as injustice)? But what does one want? is asked again. If one wants a purpose, then one must also want the means; one wants slaves, then one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume VIII, Page 153)

[ 18 ] During the last phase of his creative activity, he placed the true personality in the very center of world events. “This book belongs to the very few; perhaps none of these is yet living. There may be those who understand my Zarathustra; how could I confuse myself with those for whom ears are growing already today? Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some of my readers will be born posthumously ... the conditions under which one understands me, and understands out of necessity, I know only too well. ... New ears for new music. New eyes for the most distant. A new conscience for truths silent until now ... Well These alone are my readers, my true readers, my readers intended for me; what does the rest matter? The rest are mere humanity. One must surpass humanity in strength, in elevation of soul-through contempt. ...” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume VIII, p. 213) It is only an intensification of such ideas when Nietzsche finally identifies himself with Dionysus.

[ 19 ] Nietzsche could think only in this way because in his isolation he lacked all reflection; for this reason his ideas were only nuances of what had worked itself to mastery of the spiritual life of the nineteenth century. He also lacked any understanding for the connections between his ideas and those of the scientific outlook of his age. What for others is the result of certain assumptions stands isolated in his system of ideas, and in this isolation grows to an intensity which gives entirely the character of forced ideas to his favorite points of view. His completely biological understanding of moral concepts bears this character. The ethical concepts should be nothing but expressions of physiological processes. “What is morality? A human being, a nation which has suffered a physiological change, senses this in a community feeling, and interprets it in the language of effects and according to the degree of their knowledge, without noticing that the seat of the change lies in the physical. It is as if someone were hungry and thought that he could satisfy his hunger with concepts and customs, with praise and with blame!” (Nietzsche's Works, German Edition, 1897, Volume XII, p. 35) Such concepts, firmly established as the natural scientific world conception, work upon Nietzsche as forced ideas, and he does not speak about them with the security of the knower who is in the position to measure the extent of his ideas, but rather with the passion of the fanatic and the zealot. The idea of the survival of the fittest in the human “struggle for existence,” quite familiar in the Darwinian literature of the last century, appears in Nietzsche as the idea of the “superman.” The struggle against “the belief in the other world” which Nietzsche wages so passionately in his Zarathustra, is only another form of the struggle which the materialistic and monastic study of nature wages. What is fundamentally new in Nietzsche's ideas is only the tone of feeling in him, which is linked with his reflections. And the intensity of this tone of feeling is to be understood only when one agrees that these ideas, tom, from their systematic connection, work upon him as forced ideas. Thus the frequent repetition of these reflections, the unmotivated manner in which certain thoughts make their appearance, are also to be explained. We can observe this complete lack of motivation particularly in his idea of the “eternal return” of all things and events. Like a comet this idea appears ever and again in his works during the period between 1882 and 1888. Nowhere does it appear in an inner connection with that which he brings forth otherwise. Little or nothing is produced to give it foundation. Nevertheless, it is held up everywhere like a gospel to call forth the deepest emotions of the whole human culture.

[ 20 ] One cannot understand Nietzsche's spiritual constitution with the concepts of psychology; one must call upon psychopathology for help. With this assertion one does not wish to say anything against the quality of his creative genius. Least of all is a decision to be made concerning truth or error in his ideas themselves. Nietzsche's genius has absolutely nothing to do with this examination. The quality of genius appears in him through a pathological medium.

[ 21 ] The genius of Friedrich Nietzsche is not to be explained from his sick constitution; Nietzsche was a genius in spite of the fact that he was ill. It is one thing to explain genius itself as a condition of a sick spirit, still another to understand the entire personality of a man of genius in relation to the morbid in his being. One can be a follower of Nietzsche's ideas and yet be of the opinion that the way Nietzsche discovers these ideas, brings them together, evaluates them, and presents them, is to be understood only through psychopathological concepts. One can admire his beautiful, great character, the strange Physiognomy of his thinking, and yet admit that morbid factors enter into this character, into this physiognomy. The problem of Nietzsche is of particularly great interest, for the reason that a man of talent struggled for years with morbid elements, and because he was able to bring forth great ideas in a connection which is explainable through psychopathology alone. The expression of genius, not the genius itself, is to be explained in this way. Medicine will have much of importance to contribute to the understanding of the spiritual picture of Nietzsche. A light will also fall on the psychopathology of the masses when Nietzsche's spiritual nature is first understood. Of course, it is clear that it is not the content of Nietzsche's teachings that has brought him so many followers, but frequently the effect of his teaching is based precisely upon the unsound, unhealthy way he has presented his ideas. Nietzsche's ideas, first of all, were not a means whereby he understood the world and humanity, but rather a psychic discharge through which he wished to intoxicate himself; this is also true in many of his followers. Let us see how he himself describes the relationship of his ideas and his feelings, in his Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Joyous Wisdom. “Joyous Wisdom means the Saturnalia of a spirit who has patiently, strongly, coldly withstood frightful, long pressure, without being subservient, but without hope, and who is suddenly attacked by hope, the hope for health, the intoxication of convalescence. It is no wonder that much foolishness and nonsense comes to light thereby; that much arbitrary tenderness is wasted even upon problems which have a prickly hide and are no adapted to fondling and teasing. The entire book is really nothing but joyfulness after long denial and impotence; the rejoicing in a returning power, in a newly awakened faith ...” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume V, p. 3). It is not a question of truth in this book, but the discovery of thoughts which a sick spirit could find to be a healing remedy, a means of diversion for himself.

[ 22 ] An intellect who wishes to grasp the evolution of the world and of humanity through his thoughts, needs the gift of imagination, which brings him to these thoughts, as well as self-discipline, self-criticism, through which these thoughts attain their meaning, their importance, their connection. This self-discipline does not exist to any great extent in Nietzsche. The ideas storm in upon him, without being kept in check by his self-criticism. There is no reciprocal relationship between his productivity and logic. No corresponding degree of critical thoughtfulness stands side by side with his intuition.

[ 23 ] Just as it is justified to indicate the psychopathic origin of certain religious ideas and sects, it is also justified to test the personality of a human being on a basis which is not to be explained by the laws of psychology.

[ 9 ] The most noticeable phenomenon in Nietzsche's spiritual life is the always latent, but at times clearly evident, schizophrenic quality of his ego-consciousness. That “two souls live, Alas, within my breast,” bordered upon the pathological in him. He could not bring about the reconciliation between the “two souls.” His polemics are hardly, to be understood except from this point of view. He hardly ever really hits his opponent with his judgments. He first arranges what he wants to attack in the strangest way, and then struggles with the illusion, which is quite remote from reality. One understands this only when one considers that fundamentally he never fights against an external enemy, but against himself. And he fights in a more violent way when at another time he himself has stood at the point which he now regards with antagonism, or when at least this point of view played a definite role in his soul life. His campaign against Wagner is only a campaign against himself. He had half inadvertently united himself with Wagner at a time when he was thrown back and forth between contrary paths of ideas. He became the personal friend of Wagner. In his eyes Wagner grew to the immeasurable. He called him his “Jupiter,” with whom from time to time he breathes, “a fruitful, rich, stirring life, quite different from and unheard of in mediocre mortals! Therefore he stands there, deeply rooted in his own strength, his glance always over and above the ephemeral; eternal in the most beautiful sense.” (E. Foerster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, Volume II, page 16) Nietzsche was now developing a philosophy within himself, about which he could say to himself that it was entirely identical with Wagner's artistic tendencies and conception of life. He identifies himself completely with Wagner. He regards him as the first great renewer of the tragic culture which had experienced an important beginning in ancient Greece, but which was subordinated through the sophisticated, intellectual wisdom of Socrates, and through the one-sidedness of Plato, and in the age of the Renaissance had experienced a brief rejuvenation. Out of what he believed he recognized as Wagner's mission, Nietzsche formed the content of his own creating. But in his posthumous writings one can now see how he completely subordinates his second ego under the influence of Wagner. Among these writings are found dissertations from the time before and during his Wagner enthusiasm, which moved in directions completely opposite to his feelings and thinking. In spite of this he forms for himself an ideal picture of Wagner, which does not live in reality at all, but only in his fantasy. And in this ideal picture, his own ego vanishes completely. Later, in this ego appears a way of reflection which is the opposite of Wagner's method of conception. Now, in the true sense of the word, he becomes the most violent opponent of his own thought world. For he does not attack the Wagner of reality; he attacks the picture of Wagner which previously he had made for himself. His passion, his injustice, is only understandable when one realizes that he became so violent because he fought against something which had ruined him, according to his opinion, and which had taken him away from his own true path. If, like another contemporary of Wagner's, he had faced this objectively, perhaps he also might have become Wagner's opponent. But he would have faced the whole situation in a more quiet, calm attitude. It also comes to his consciousness that he does not wish to be freed from Wagner, but rather from his own “I” as it had developed itself at a certain time. He says: “To turn my back to Wagner was a tribulation for me; to like something again later was a victory for me. No one perhaps was more dangerously ingrown with this Wagner business, no one rebelled against it more strongly, no one rejoiced more to be free of it; it is a long story! Does one want a word for it? Were I a moralist, who knows what I should call it! Perhaps a self-conquering. What is it that a philosopher asks of himself at the beginning and at the end? To overcome his age in himself, to become ‘timeless.’ Against what does he have to wage his hardest struggle? With that in which he is exactly the child of his age. Well I like Wagner as a child of this age; that is to say, a decadent: only that I comprehended it, only that I rebelled against it. The philosopher in me defended himself against it.” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume VIII, page 1)

[ 10 ] In the following words he more clearly describes his inner experience of the dividing of his ego and the immediate contrast of his world of thoughts: “He who attacks his time can only attack himself; what can he see otherwise, if not himself? So in another, one can glorify only one's self. Self-destruction, self-deification, self-contempt: that is our judging, our loving, our hating.” (Nietzsche's Works, German Edition, 1897, Volume XI, page 92)

[ 11 ] In the autumn of 1888, Nietzsche cannot come to any agreement at all with himself about the content of his book, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, other than that he tries to justify himself in that he did not mean Wagner at all, but himself. “A psychologist might add that what I had heard in Wagner's music in my youth had absolutely nothing to do with Wagner; that when I described the Dionysian music, I described that which I had heard; that instinctively I had to translate and transfigure everything into the new spirit which I bore within me. The proof for it, as strong as proof can be, is my book, Wagner in Bayreuth; in all psychologically decisive places the question is only about me; at will, one may put my name, or the name ‘Zarathustra,’ wherever the text mentions the name Wagner. The whole picture of the dithyrambic artist is the picture of the pre-existentialist poet of Zarathustra, drawn with profound depth and without touching the reality of Wagner for a single moment. Wagner himself had an idea of this, for he did not recognize himself in the book.” (E. Foerster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, Volume II, page 259)

[ 12 ] Whenever Nietzsche fights, he almost always fights against himself. When, during the first period of his creative writing, he entered into active warfare against philology, it was the philologist in himself against whom he fought, this outstanding philologist, who, even before completing his doctorate, had already been appointed a Professor at the University. When, from 1876 onward, he began his struggle against ideals, he had his own idealism in view. And, at the end of his writing career, when he wrote his Antichrist, again unparalleled in violence, this was nothing but the secret Christian element in himself through which he was challenged. It had not been necessary for him to wage a special battle in himself in order to free himself from Christianity. But he was freed only in the intellect, in one side of his being; in his heart, in his world of emotions, he remained faithful to the Christian ideals in his practical life. He acted as the passionate opponent of one side of his own being. “One must have seen this doom near by; one must have been almost destroyed with it to understand that here is no joke. The skepticism of our natural scientists and physiologists is a joke in my eyes; they are lacking in passion for these things, in suffering for them.” The extent to which Nietzsche felt the conflict within himself, and the extent to which he recognized himself as powerless to bring the different forces within him into a unity of consciousness, is shown at the end of a poem in the summer of 1888, that is, from the period shortly before the catastrophe. “Now, incarcerated between two nothingnesses, a question mark, a tired riddle, a riddle for predatory birds ... they will ‘free’ you, they are already longing for your ‘freeing,’ they are already fluttering about you, you riddles, about you, the hanged one! ... Oh Zarathustra! ... self-knower! ... self-executioner!” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume VIII, page 424)

[ 13 ] This insecurity in regard to himself is also expressed in Nietzsche in that at the end of his career, he gives an absolutely new interpretation to his entire development. His world conception has one of its sources in ancient Greece. Everywhere in his writing one can point out what great influence the Greeks had upon him. He never tires of continually emphasizing the greatness of Greek culture. In 1875 he writes, “The Greeks are the only talented nation of world history; as learners they are very talented; they understand this best, and do not only know how to decorate and to refine the borrowed, as the Romans do. Genius makes all half-talented, tributary; thus the Persians themselves sent their messengers to the Greek oracle. How those Romans with their dry seriousness contrast with these talented Greeks!” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume X, page 352) And what beautiful words he found in 1873 for the first Greek philosophers: “Every nation is shamed when one points to such a wonderfully idealistic community of philosophers as those of the old Greek masters, Thales and Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, and Socrates. All these people are hewn entirely from one stone. Between their thinking and their character strong necessity reigns. ... Thus together they formed what Schopenhauer called a talent republic in contrast to the scholar republic; one giant calls to the other through the empty halls of the ages, and, undisturbed by the mischievous noisy ways of dwarfs who crawl beneath them, they continue the lofty conversation of spirits. ... The first experience of philosophy on Greek soil, the sanction of the Seven Wise Ones, is at once a clear and unforgettable line in the picture of the Hellenic. Other nations have saints; the Greeks have Wise Ones. ... The judgment of those philosophers about life and existence says altogether so much more than a modern opinion because they had life before them in luxuriant perfection, and because in them the feeling of the thinker did not go astray, as in us, in the conflict between the desire for freedom, beauty, largeness of life, and the impulse for truth, which asks only, What is life really worth?” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume VIII, page 7) This Greek wise one always stood before Nietzsche's eyes as an ideal. He tries to emulate him with the one side of his being, but with the other side he denies him. In the Götzendämmerung, wilight of Idols, 1888 (Nietzsche's Works, Volume VIII, page 167), after his description of what he wishes to owe to the Romans, we read, “To the Greeks I owe absolutely no strong kindred impressions; and, to say it straight out, they can not be for us what the Romans are. One does not learn from the Greeks; their way is foreign, it is also too liquid to work imperatively, ‘classically.’ Whoever would have learned writing from a Greek? Who would have learned it without the Romans! ... The splendid, pliant corporality, and bold realism and immorality, which is part of the Hellenic, was a necessity, not something natural. It came only later; it was not there from the beginning. And from, festivals and arts one wanted nothing more than to feel and act in a buoyant spirit; they are a means to glorify one's self, under certain circumstances, to create fear for one's self. ... To judge the Greeks in the German manner, according to their philosophers, is to use, for example, the honorable gentlemen of the Socratic school for solving solutions which fundamentally are Hellenic! ... The philosophers indeed are the decadents of Greece. ...”

[ 14 ] One will only gain full clarity concerning Nietzsche's arguments when one combines the fact that his philosophical thoughts rest upon self-observation, with the idea that this self is not an harmonious self, but is rather a self split apart. This splitting apart he also brought into his explanation of the world. In looking back upon himself he could say, “Do not we artists have to confess to ourselves that a weird difference exists in us, that our taste, and, on the other hand, our creative power, stand alone in a mysterious way, remain standing alone, and have a force of growth in themselves: I want to say, quite different degrees of tempos, old, young, ripe, dry, rotten? So that, for example, a musician is able to create things for life which contradict what his spoiled listener-ear, listener-heart, values, tastes, prefers; he doesn't even need to know about this contradiction!” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume V, page 323) This is an explanation of the nature of an artist, formed according to Nietzsche's own being. We encounter something similar in him in all his writings.

[ 15 ] There is no doubt that in many cases one goes too far when one connects manifestations of the soul-life with pathological concepts; in a personality like Nietzsche's the world-conception finds full clarification only through such a connection. Useful as it might be in many ways to cling to the sentence of Dilthey's Einbildungskraft und Wahnsinn, Powers of Conceit and Illusion, (Leipzig, 1886), “The genius is no pathological manifestation, but the sound perfect human being,” just as wrong might it be to reject dogmatically such observations about Nietzsche as have been presented here.

Address Given in Berlin on September 13, 1900

[ 1 ] It is strange that with the infatuation for Nietzsche in our day, someone must appear whose feelings, no less than those of many others, are drawn to the particular personality, and yet who, in spite of this, must constantly keep before him the deep contradictions which exist between this type of spirit, and the ideas and feelings of those who represent themselves as adherents of his world conception. Such a one who stands apart must, above all, beware of the contrast between the relationship of those contemporaries to Nietzsche a decade ago as the night of madness broke over the “fighter against his time” and what existed when death took him from us on the 25th of August, 1900. It seems as if the complete opposite has happened from what Nietzsche prophesied in regard to his effect on his contemporaries in the last days of his creative work. The first part of his book, in which he tried to recoin the values of thousands of years, his Antichrist, lay completed at the onset of his illness. He begins with the words, “This book belongs to the very few; perhaps not even one of these is yet living. There may be those who understand my Zarathustra; how could I confuse myself with those for whom ears are growing already today? Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some of my readers will be born posthumously.” At his death it seemed as if the “day after tomorrow” had already come. One must call into this apparent “day after tomorrow” the words of Zarathustra: “You say you believe in Zarathustra? But of what importance is Zarathustra? You are my believers, but of what importance are all believers? Now I exhort you to lose me and to find yourselves; and only when you have denied me will I return to you.” Who would dare to say whether Nietzsche, were he to live today in fresh creativity, would look with greater pleasure upon those who revere him with doubts, or upon others? But it must be permitted, especially today, to look back, beyond these present-day admirers, to the time when he felt himself alone and misunderstood in the midst of the spiritual life surrounding him, when some people lived who felt it blasphemous to be called his “believers,” because he appeared to them to be a spirit whom one could not encounter importunately with a “yes” or “no,” but like an earthquake in the realm of the spirit, which stirs up questions for which premature answers can only be like unripe fruits. But ten years ago, more moving than the news of his death today, two pieces of news which followed closely upon each other, came to the “ears” which had “grown” for the Nietzsche admirers of that time. The first concerned the cycle of lectures which Georg Brandes had held about the world conception of Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen in the year 1888. Nietzsche felt this recognition to be one which had come forth from “single ones” which were “born posthumously.” He felt himself jerked out of his loneliness in a way which was in harmony with his spirit. He did not want to be evaluated; he wanted to be “described,” characterized. And soon upon this news followed the report that his mind, tom from its loneliness, had succumbed to the frightful destiny of spiritual darkness.

[ 2 ] And, while he himself could no longer contribute, his contemporaries had the leisure to sharpen the outlines of his picture. Through the observation of his personality, the picture of the time could imprint itself ever more clearly for them; the picture of the time, from which his spirit rises like a Böcklin figure. The worlds of his soul ideals could be illuminated by the light which the spiritstars of the second half of the nineteenth century cast upon them. In full clarity stood the points in which he was truly great. But these also overshadowed the reason why he had to wander in loneliness. The nature of his being led him over, heights of spirit life. He stepped forth like one to whom only the essentials of mankind's development are of concern. But this essential touched him as much as others are touched in their soul by only the most intimate situations. Just as the souls of others are burdened directly by only the most immediate personal experiences, so the great questions of culture, the mighty needs for knowledge of his age, decisively passed through his soul. What permeated only the heads of many of his contemporaries, became for him a personal affair of the heart.

[ 3 ] Greek culture, Schopenhauer's world conception, Wagner's music dramas, the knowledge of the more recent natural science, aroused in him such personal, deep feelings as would have been aroused in others only by the experiences of a strong, passionate love. What the entire age lived through in hopes and doubts, in temptations and joys of knowledge, Nietzsche experienced in his special way on his lonesome heights. He found no new ideas; but he suffered and rejoiced in the ideas of his time in a way different from that of his contemporaries. It was their task to give birth to the ideas; before him arose the difficult question, How can one live with these ideas?

[ 4 ] His educational path had made Nietzsche a philologist. He had penetrated so deeply into the world of Greek spiritual culture that his teacher, Ritschl, could recommend him with these words to the University of Basel, which engaged the young scholar before he had taken his doctorate: Friedrich Nietzsche is a genius and is able to do whatever he puts his mind to. He may well have achieved excellent results in the sense of the requirements made of philologists. But his relationship to Greek culture was not only that of a philologist. He did not live in ancient Greece in thought alone; with his whole heart he was deeply engrossed in Greek thinking and feeling. The bearers of Greek culture did not remain the object of his studies; they became his personal friends. During the first period of his teaching activity in Basel, he worked out a book about the philosophers of the tragic age before Socrates. It was published among his posthumus works. He does not write like a scholar about Thales, Heraclitus and Parmenides; he converses with these figures of antiquity as with personalities with whom his heart is closely connected. The passion which he feels for them makes him a stranger to the Western culture, which according to his feelings, since Socrates has taken paths other than those of ancient times. Socrates was Nietzsche's enemy because he had dulled the great tragic fundamental moods of his predecessors. The instructive mind of Socrates strove toward an understanding of reality. He desired reconciliation with life through virtue. But there is nothing, according to Nietzsche, which can degrade mankind more than the acceptance of life as it is. Life cannot reconcile itself with itself; man can only bear this life if he creates over and above it. Before Socrates, the Greeks understood this. Nietzsche believed that he found their fundamental mood expressed in these words which, according to legend, the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, gave as answer to the question, What is best for mankind: “Miserable creation of a moment, children of accident and travail, why do you force me to tell you what is not the most profitable for you to hear? What is the very best for you is not attainable by you; that is, not to be born, not to exist, to be nothing. But the second best for you is to die soon.” Ancient Greek art and wisdom sought consolation in the face of life. The servants of Dionysus did not wish to belong to this community of life, but rather to a higher one. For Nietzsche this was expressed in their culture. “In song and dance, the human being expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and how to speak, and he is about to fly, to dance into the air.” There are two paths for man which lead him over and above existence; in a blessed enchantment, as if in an opium dream, he can forget existence and, “singing and dancing,” feel himself at one with a universal soul; or he can look for his satisfaction in an ideal picture of reality as if in a dream which flutters gently above existence. Nietzsche characterizes these two paths as the Dionysian and the Apollonian soul conditions. But the more recent culture since Socrates has looked for reconciliation with existence, and thereby has lowered the value of mankind. It is no wonder that with such feelings, Nietzsche felt lonely in this more recent culture.

[ 5 ] Two personalities seemed to pull him out of this state of loneliness. On his life path he encountered Schopenhauer's conception of the worthlessness of existence, and Richard Wagner. The position he took in relation to these two clearly illuminated the being of his spirit. Toward Schopenhauer he felt a devotion more intimate than can be imagined. And yet Schopenhauer's teachings remained almost without importance for him. The wise one from Frankfurt had innumerable disciples who accepted faithfully what he had to say. But Nietzsche never was one of these believers. At the same time that he sent his pean of praise, Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Schopenhauer as Educator, into the world, he wrote secretly for himself his serious doubts about the philosopher's ideas. He did not look up to him as to a teacher; he loved him like a father. He felt the heroic quality of his thoughts even when he did not agree with them. His relationship to Schopenhauer was too intimate to necessitate an external faith in him or an outer confession. He loved his “educator” so much that he attributed his own thoughts to him in order to be able to revere them in another. He did not want to agree with a personality in his thoughts; he wanted to live in friendship with another. This desire also attracted him to Richard Wagner. What then were all those figures of pre-Socratic Greek culture with whom he had wished to live in friendship? Indeed, they were mere shadows from a far distant past. And Nietzsche aspired to life, to the direct friendship of tragic human beings. Greek culture remained dead and abstract for him, despite all the life his fantasy tried to breathe into it. The Greek intellectual heroes remained for him a yearning; for him Richard Wagner was a fulfillment which tried to re-awaken the old world of Greece within his personality, his art, his world conception. Nietzsche spent most glorious days when from Basel he was allowed to visit the Wagner couple on their Triebschen estate. What the philologist had looked for in spirit, to breathe Greek air, he believed he found here in reality. He could find a personal relationship to a world which previously he had sought in ideas. He could experience intimately what he could otherwise only have conjured before himself in thought. To him the Triebschen idyll was like home. How descriptive are the words with which he describes his feelings in regard to Wagner: “A fruitful, rich, stirring life, quite different and unheard of in more mediocre mortals! For this reason he stands there rooted deeply in his own strength, with his gaze over and above all that is ephemeral; eternal in the most beautiful sense.”

[ 6 ] In Richard Wagner's personality Nietzsche believed he had the higher worlds, which could make life as bearable for him as he imagined it to be in the sense of the ancient Greek world conception. But precisely here did he not commit the greatest error in his sense? Indeed he sought in life for what, according to his assumptions life could not offer. He wanted to be above life; and with all his strength he threw himself into the life that Wagner lived. For this reason it is understandable that his greatest experience had to be his deepest disappointment at the same time. To be able to find in Wagner what he was searching for, he had first to magnify the true personality of Wagner to an ideal picture. What Wagner could never be, Nietzsche had made out of him. He did not see and revere the true Wagner; he revered his image, which towered far above reality. Then when Wagner had achieved what he aspired, when he had reached his goal, Nietzsche felt the disharmony between his impression and the true Wagner. And he separated from Wagner. But only he interprets this separation psychologically correctly who recognizes that Nietzsche did not separate from the true Wagner, because he never was his follower; he only saw his deception clearly. What he had looked for in Wagner, he could never find in him because that had nothing to do with Wagner; it had to be freed from all reality as a higher world. Then Nietzsche later characterized the necessity of his apparent separation from Wagner. He says that what in his younger years he had heard in Wagner's music had absolutely nothing to do with Wagner. “When I described the Dionysian music, I described what I had heard; instinctively I had to translate and transfigure everything into the new spirit which I bore within me. The proof of this, as strong as proof as can be, is my book, Wagner in Bayreuth; in all psychologically decisive places one can place my name, or the name Zarathustra wherever the text uses the name Wagner. The complete picture of the dithyrambic artist is the picture of the pre-existentialist poet of Zarathustra, drawn with profound depth, and without really touching the reality of Wagner for a single moment. Wagner himself had an idea of this; he did not recognize himself in the book.”

[ 7 ] In Zarathustra Nietzsche sketches the world for which he had searched in vain in Wagner, separated from alt reality. He placed his Zarathustra ideal in a different relationship to reality than his own earlier ideals. He had had bad experiences in his direct turning away from existence. He must have done injustice to this existence, and for this reason it had avenged itself so bitterly against him; this idea gained the upper hand within him more and more. The disappointment which his idealism had caused him, drove him into a hostile mood toward all idealism. During the time following his separation from Wagner, his works become accusations against ideals. “One error after another is placed upon ice; the ideal is not refuted—it freezes to death.” Thus in 1888 he expresses himself about the goal of his book which had appeared in 1878, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Human, All Too Human. After this Nietzsche looks for refuge in reality; he deepens himself in the more recent natural science, in order that through it he can gain a true guide to reality. All worlds beyond this world, which lead human beings away from reality, now become abominable, remote worlds for him, conceived out of the fantasy of weak human beings, who do not have sufficient strength to find their satisfaction in immediate, fresh existence. Natural science has placed the human being at the end of a purely natural evolution. Through the fact that the latter has conceived the human being out of itself, all that is below him has taken on a higher meaning. Therefore, man should not deny its significance and wish to make himself an image of something beyond this world. He should understand that he is not the meaning of a super-earthly power, but the “meaning of this earth.” What he wishes to attain above what exists, he should not strive for in enmity against what exists. Nietzsche looks within reality itself for the germ of the higher, which is to make reality bearable. Man should not strive toward a divine being; out of his reality he should bring forth a higher way of existence. This reality extends over and above itself. Humanity has the possibility to become superhumanity. Evolution has always been. The human being should also work at evolution. The laws of evolution are greater, more comprehensive than all that has already been developed. One should not only look upon that which exists, but one must go back to primeval forces which have engendered the real. An ancient world conception questioned how “good and evil” came into the world. It believed that it had to go behind existence in order to discover “in the eternal” the reasons for “good and evil.” But with the “eternal,” with the “beyond,” Nietzsche had also to reject the “eternal” evaluation of “good and evil.” Man has come into existence through the natural; and “good and evil” have come into existence with him. The creation of mankind is “good and evil.” And deeper than the created is the creator. The “human being” stands “beyond good and evil.” He has made the one thing to be good, the other to be evil. He may not let himself be chained through his former “good and evil.” He can follow further the path of evolution which he has taken till now. From the worm he has become a human being; from man he can develop to the superman. He can create a new good and evil. He may “reevaluate” present day values. Nietzsche was torn from his work on Umwertung aller Werte, Transvaluation of All Values, through his spiritual darkness. The evolution of the worm to the human being was the idea which he had gained from the more recent natural science. He himself did not become a scientist; he had adopted the idea of evolution from others. For them it was a matter of the intellect; for him it became a matter of the heart. The others waged a spiritual battle against all old prejudices. Nietzsche asked himself how he could live with the new idea. His battle took place entirely within his own soul. He needed the further development to the superman in order to be able to bear mankind. Thus, by itself, in lonely heights, his sensitive spirit had to overcome the natural science which he had taken into himself. During his last creative period, Nietzsche tried to attain from reality itself what earlier he thought he could gain in illusion, in an ideal realm. Life is assigned a task which is firmly rooted in life, and yet leads over and above this life. In this immediate existence one cannot remain standing in real life, or in the life illuminated by natural science. In this life there also must be suffering. This remained Nietzsche's opinion. The “superman” is also a means to make life bearable. All this points to the fact that Nietzsche was born to “suffer from existence.” His genius consisted in the searching for bases for consolation. The struggle for world conceptions has often engendered martyrs. Nietzsche has produced no new ideas for a world conception. One will always recognize that his genius does not lie in the production of new ideas. But he suffered deeply because of the thoughts surrounding him. In compensation for this suffering he found the enraptured tones of his Zarathustra. He became the poet of the new world conception; the hymns in praise of the “superman” are the personal, the poetic reply to the problems and results of the more recent natural science. All that the nineteenth century produced in ideas, would also have been produced without Nietzsche. In the eyes of the future he will not be considered an original philosopher, a founder of religions, or a prophet; for the future he will be a martyr of knowledge, who in poetry found words with which to express his suffering.