The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Volume I: Introduction

[ 1 ] If nature treated man in the same way as all other beings, there would be no view of the world and life. He would walk contentedly and happily through life like the rose, of which Angelus Silesius says: "The rose is without care, it blooms because it blooms, it does not care for itself, does not ask whether it is seen." Man cannot be like that. He must not only pay attention to himself; he must also pay attention to the beings around him. He must find his own way in the world if he wants to live in it. He cannot simply let the abundance of its phenomena pass him by, for they pose countless questions to him; and he feels at a loss if he cannot find an answer. He must intervene in the course of the phenomena through his own actions. This raises further questions for him: How should he intervene? And finally, he feels the need to know what results from his interaction with the rest of the world, what ultimate success will result from his actions. All views of the world and of life spring from these three basic drives of human nature. In his "Critique of Pure Reason", Kant expressed these drives in three questions: What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for? Goethe expressed them in the sentence: "If I know my relationship to myself and to the outside world, I call it truth."

[ 2 ] According to the nature and degree of their mental abilities, people answer these questions in a variety of ways. And since the answers are the highest results of spiritual culture, since they are what give man his true value, it is understandable that they have led to the most violent struggles.

[ 3 ] No century has produced such a wealth of answers to these questions as the one at the end of which we stand. Schopenhauer therefore called it the philosophical century. And it is German intellectual life in particular that has played the most outstanding part in this cultural work. Hardly any of the paths that seem to lead to the goal have remained untrodden within this century-long development of the German spirit. The oldest religious ideas entered into a bitter struggle with the latest results of scientific thought. Radical views appeared alongside peaceful attempts to mediate between opposing opinions. The most despondent doubts about the ultimate questions have found their representatives, as has the boldest, proudest flight of ideas, for which there seems to be no unanswered riddle.

[ 4 ] As if between two landmarks, the development of German world and life views lies enclosed between two literary phenomena, one of which falls in the year 1800 like the dawn of the new century: Fichte's "Determination of Man", and the other has just appeared as the conclusion of the same: Ernst Haeckel's "Die Welträtsel. Commonly understood studies on monistic philosophy". It is hard to imagine a greater contrast than the one that exists between these two books. Haeckel builds up a view of the world and life solely by immersing himself in the things and processes of nature. The unbiased observation of phenomena through the senses, their precise examination with the aids of science, and logical thinking, which seeks out the natural connections and laws of processes, are the source of truth for him. Fichte does give a picture of this view, but only to show that it does nothing for the highest needs of the human spirit. In the first book of his "Determination of Man" he characterizes the picture of natural phenomena as it presents itself to thinking contemplation in this way: "In every moment of its duration nature is a coherent whole; in every moment every single part of it must be as it is, because all the rest are as they are; and you could not move a grain of sand from its place without thereby, perhaps invisibly to your eyes, changing something through all the parts of the immeasurable whole. But every moment of this duration is determined by all past moments, and will determine all future moments; and in the present you cannot think of any grain of sand in any other position than it is, without being compelled to think the whole past up into the indefinite, and the whole future down into the indefinite." Haeckel makes such an idea of nature his own. He says: "The mechanical or monistic philosophy maintains that everywhere in the phenomena of human life, as in those of the rest of nature, fixed and unalterable laws prevail, that everywhere there is a necessary causal connection, a causal nexus of phenomena, and that accordingly the whole of nature recognizable to us forms a unified whole, a "monon"." Fichte presents this idea of nature in order to show that it corresponds to a need of the intellect. But he only writes his book in order to refute this understanding through the even deeper needs of the human mind. For reason, he argues, leads us to imagine man himself, with all his doings, only as a being produced by the forces of nature. "I myself, with everything I call mine, am a link in this chain of strict natural necessity." "That my states are now accompanied by consciousness, and that some of them - thoughts, resolutions and the like - even seem to be nothing other than determinations of such consciousness, must not mislead me in my conclusions. It is the natural determination of the plant to form itself regularly, that of the animal to move purposefully, that of man to think." All this is said by reason - is Fichte's opinion. But an inner voice of my mind tells me: If I do this or that, it was not a natural force that did it, but I myself, of my own free will. But if everything that happens in nature happens necessarily, if it only happens because something else has gone before, then my action has also happened necessarily. I did not decide it. It is caused by circumstances that are completely independent of my decision. It is merely a delusion that I indulge in when I believe myself to be the author of my actions. Fichte paints a vivid picture of such a view of the mind in order to make it appear quite absurd: "I do not act at all, but nature acts in me; to make myself into something other than what I am destined to be by nature, I cannot want to undertake this, for I do not make myself at all, but nature makes me myself and everything that I become." Unsatisfied, Fichte turns away from such a world view. "To stand there cold and dead, and only watch the change of events, an inert mirror of passing figures - this existence is unbearable to me, I disdain and despise it." "Dry and heartless, but inexhaustible in explanation" is what our philosopher calls the view of the intellect. And he himself declares this view to be a delusion. For how do we know of all the things and processes of nature that are connected in a chain of strict necessity? Only by imagining them, by our consciousness forming images of them. So I cannot say: There is an outside world, but only: My consciousness has images of such an outside world. Even in dreams I have images that do not correspond to anything real. Why shouldn't the whole outside world be a dream? "All knowledge is only an image, and something is always required in it that corresponds to the image." How can one explain one's own being from things and processes whose reality is guaranteed by nothing other than the fact that this own being represents them? For anyone who sees through the nature of what we call the external world - Fichte believes - truth can never come from this external world. "If you have no other organ, you will never find it." Fichte believes that he has discovered such an organ in man's own inner being. A voice from within tells every human being: Act in the spirit of your duty. This voice cannot be deceptive like the statements of the sensual world. "The mist of delusion falls from my eye; I receive a new organ, and a new world opens up in it." If everything else is illusion and deception: this will of mine to act, which announces itself in my own inner being, must be the truth. Here Fichte finds a firm point. "My will stands alone, separated from everything that it is not itself, merely through itself and for itself its world." Fichte believes that he has grasped existence in its center so firmly and securely in the will that the awareness of it urges him to say: "I lift my head boldly up to the threatening rocky mountains and to the raging torrent of water and to the crashing clouds swimming in a sea of fire and say: I am eternal and defy your power! Break all down upon me, and you earth and you heaven mix yourselves in the wild turmoil, and you elements all, - foam and rage and in the wild fight grind the last little sun dust of the body, which I call mine, - my will alone with its firm plan shall hover boldly and coldly above the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my purpose, and it is more lasting than you; it is eternal, and I am eternal like it." Let us see how Ernst Haceckel counters this statement from the beginning of the century with another at the end of the century. "Through reason alone can we arrive at the true knowledge of nature and the solution to the riddles of the world. Reason is man's highest good and the one virtue that essentially distinguishes him from the animals." "The mind has nothing at all to do with the knowledge of truth. What we call "mind" is an intricate activity of the brain, which is composed of feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of ideas of affection and aversion, of strivings of desire and flight. ... All these states and movements of the mind in no way promote the knowledge of truth; on the contrary, they often disturb reason, which alone is capable of it, and frequently damage it to a sensitive degree. No "world puzzle has yet been solved or even promoted by the brain function of the mind." And on the will, in which Fichte believes to grasp the core of existence, Haeckel states: "We now know that every act of will is just as determined by the organization of the volitional individual and just as dependent on the respective conditions of the surrounding external world as every other activity of the soul." However, Hacckel expresses the fact that he finds the true source of truth precisely where Fichte sees only deception and uncertainty, only a "dry and heartless system", with the words: "The true revelation, i.e. the true source of rational knowledge, can only be found in nature. The rich treasure of true knowledge, which represents the most valuable part of human culture, has arisen solely from the experiences which the inquiring mind has gained through knowledge of nature, and the reason conclusions which it has drawn from the ideas of experience through correct thinking. Every sensible person with a normal brain and normal senses draws this true revelation from nature through unbiased observation." In the preface to his work "Die Welträtsel", Ernst Haeckel describes its aim as answering the question: "What stage in the knowledge of truth have we really reached at the end of the nineteenth century?" He occupies a similar position within intellectual life at the end of the century as Fichte did at the beginning. The way of thinking based on Darwin's scientific research dominates minds today just as Kant's way of thinking did at the beginning of the century. Haeckel drew the final conclusions from Darwin's results just as Fichte drew them from Kant's premises. Both thinkers are also aware that they have given the ripest fruits of their thinking in the aforementioned writings. Fichte wrote to his wife on November 5, 1799: "In the preparation of my writings, I have taken a deeper look into religion than ever before. For me, the movement of the heart only arises from perfect clarity; it could not fail that the clarity I have attained has also taken hold of my heart." And Hacckel remarks on his views in the preface to the "Welträtsel": "This work of natural philosophy has now spanned a full half century, and now, in my 66th year, I may well assume that it is ripe in the human sense."

[ 5 ] So one may well regard a history of German world and life views in the nineteenth century as the development of Fichte's viewpoints into those of Haeckel. The sharp contrast between the two views also indicates the areas in which the main driving forces behind this development are to be found. Fichte regards the processes of nature as a field in which the ultimate truths must not be sought. Hacckel is of the opinion that they can only be found here. This change in the appreciation of the knowledge of nature becomes understandable if one compares the present state of this knowledge with that which prevailed a hundred years ago. For the most important phenomena, those which throw light on the relationship of man to the rest of the world, natural science only found the means and ways to shed light on them in our century. A hundred years ago, natural science and its methods only knew something about one of these questions, namely the position of the earth in the universe. Since the sixteenth century, the teachings of Copernicus and Kepler, which established the movement of our planet around the sun and explained its lawful course, had shaken the medieval conviction that the earth was at the center of the universe and that everything that took place outside it was only there for its sake. All the more reason to grope in the dark when it came to explaining those processes within our earthly life itself that elude the gross impressions of the senses. In this century, improved microscopic methods of investigation made it possible to observe a living being precisely at the beginning of its development. Seven decades ago, Lyell's geological research provided a natural concept of how the formations of the earth's surface gradually came into being. Darwin's discoveries around the middle of the century showed the relationship between everything that lives on earth. What has been established in this way can no longer be treated in the same way as Fichte treated the knowledge of nature. Schiller was right for his time when he called out to the natural scientists and philosophers:

Enmity be between you! The alliance still comes too soon;
when you separate in seeking, only then will the truth be known.

For the natural science of his time only had solid ground under its feet if it was based on the results of astronomy. And his own word certainly applies to this:

Don't talk to me so much about nebulae and suns!
Is nature only great because it gives you something to count?
Your object is of course the most sublime in space;
but, friends, the sublime does not dwell in space.

In the face of contemporary natural science, which has taught man the natural laws of his origins on the basis of Darwin's views, Schiller's statement can no longer be upheld.

[ 6 ] How little natural scientists were able to contribute to our view of the world and life in the last decades of the last century can be seen from the experiences Goethe had with them when he began to study the phenomena of nature. His way of imagining had led him to a process that Schiller characterized in a letter to him on 23 August 1794 with the words: "From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more complex ones, in order to finally build the most complex of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire natural edifice." Goethe did not regard man as a being that had a special origin alongside the other creatures of nature, but was of the opinion that the same forces and laws that produce all other things are also capable of producing man. He expressed this in a wonderful way in his book on Winckelmann: "If the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, if he feels himself in the world as part of a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, if the harmonious comfort grants him a pure, free delight - then the universe, if it could feel itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the peak of its own becoming and being." Herder had already referred to such a view in his "Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind", which he began to record in 1783. We read in them: "From stone to crystal, from crystal to metals, from these to plant creation, from plants to animals, from these to man, we saw the form of organization rise, with it the drives of the creature also become more diverse and finally all unite in the form of man, insofar as this could contain them." Such ideas were among the means by which Goethe and Herder sought to arrive at an overall conception of the world and by which they prophetically placed themselves on the ground on which the natural science of the nineteenth century was built. The world view of these two is expressed in sentences such as these in Herder's "Ideas": "The human race is the great confluence of lower organic forces." "And so we can assume that man is a middle creature among the animals, i.e. the elaborate form in which the traits of all species are gathered around him in the finest embodiment." In contrast to such ideas, the natural sciences of those days were looking for characteristics that distinguished humans from animals. One such difference was that animals have a small bone between the two symmetrical halves of the upper jaw, the inter-maxillary bone, which contains the upper incisors and which is not present in humans, so that the upper jaw is a single piece. This was in line with the views of the naturalists of the time, which Linne expressed in the following sentence: Species "we count as many as different forms have been created in principle"; however, it did not agree with Goethe's and Herder's view of the world, according to which nature created man according to the same laws as the other organisms. For if the forms arose alongside and independently of each other, then each can be based on a different construction plan. But if nature has gradually risen from simple forms to more composite ones, then the same laws that are also observed in other living beings must be found perfected in the most composite, the human being. This is why Goethe sought to prove the existence of an intermaxillary bone in humans. And his painstaking anatomical research led him to discover it. For Goethe, this discovery arose from the need to recognize the natural law connection between humans and other living beings. This can be seen from the words he wrote to Knebel in November 1784: "I have refrained from now" - he means in the treatise in which he communicates his discovery - "making it clear that the difference between humans and animals cannot be found in anything in particular." This is how we are to understand what he writes to Herder: "It should also make you very happy; for it is like the keystone to man, it is not missing, it is also there! But how! I have thought of it in connection with your whole, how beautiful it will be." Huxley first made this view fruitful for natural science in 1863 in his famous statement: "The anatomical differences in bone structure between man and the anthropoid apes are not so great as those between these apes and the less developed species of monkeys. The naturalists of Goethe's time certainly wanted such a difference. Goethe complained in a letter to Merck on February 13, 1785: "From Soemmerring" - one of the most important anatomists - "I have a very light letter. He wants to talk me out of it. Oh dear!" And on May 11, 1785, Soemmerring himself wrote to Merck: "Goethe, as I see from his letter yesterday, does not yet want to abandon his idea regarding the intermaxillary bone." And the most famous anatomist of the end of the last century, Camper, firmly denounced Goethe's observation as a mistake. At that time, natural science was so far removed from being able to meet the needs of those striving for a natural world view.

[ 7 ] For one of the questions in which Kant summarized the goal of the world and life view: "What can I know?", natural science is undoubtedly the driving element of progress within the development of nineteenth-century German intellectual life. Haeckel was therefore allowed to say in the lecture he gave on August 26, 1898 at the fourth international zoological congress in Cambridge: "At the end of the nineteenth century, we look with just pride at the enormous and incomparable progress that human science and culture have made during its course - above all natural science. This fact finds its characteristic expression in the fact that many writings already refer to our century as "the great" or as the age of natural science".

[ 8 ] But what about the other two worldview questions: "What should I do?" and "What can I hope for?". Alexander Tille says in his remarkable book "From Darwin to Nietzsche": "Human life is also a part of natural life; human views on human life and his position in relation to his fellow human beings must also be subject to change, and all the more so because everything that has been thought about them up to the present day has arisen more from man's one-sided demands on himself than from the observation of a given state of affairs." The change in views is expressed today in the struggle for a social world view. Natural science has also exerted its influence in this area. It is its practical results that have broadened human vision and shown new paths for human action. In the age of the telegraph and the telephone, man has to calculate time and space in a different way than in earlier centuries. Steam power and electricity have presented us with completely new tasks. The production, distribution and transportation of goods have changed their forms under such influences. Even modern education could not remain unaffected by them. The man of the nineteenth century, who measures distances in a few hours that took his ancestors days to cover, who is heard in Vienna when he speaks into an apparatus in Berlin, has different ideas about the course of world events than the man who, according to the educational content of his time, would have had to declare such things vain dreams if they had been presented to him as an ideal of the future. Life today makes different demands on man than it did on his ancestor a hundred years ago. It is therefore understandable that he also answers the question: What should I do? differently than he did. The current answer to this question is the content of what is called the "social world view". The more complex conditions that have come into the construction and life of the social body through the achievements of modern technology have not only led people to give this body a new character through social reformatory endeavors, but also to study its nature more closely. Whereas Kant only considered it necessary to question human reason when it came to determining moral tasks, today we examine the social organism if we want to recognize what the individual has to do within it. It is true that Aristotle already said: "Man is a social being." However, it was reserved for our century to place this sentence at the center of considerations about human behavior. Society came before the individual, Herbert Spencer (born 1820) said, and this view currently influences all considerations of human intellectual life. Sociology or social science is one of the youngest sciences. Its concept and name were created in the middle of the century by the French thinker A. Comte. It quickly took root among those concerned with developing a view of the world and life. In the recently published "Introduction to Philosophy" by Wilhelm Jerusalem, only a contemporary view is represented when it is claimed: "High and important tasks are reserved for such a sociology. It will have to show to what extent the mental life of the individual is influenced by social life, by the will as a whole, and it will probably turn out that this is the case to a far greater extent than is still believed today. The social factor in the development of knowledge will become apparent in its effectiveness and significance, and it will be found that psychology and epistemology can only make further progress by taking this factor into account. Even for aesthetics, the most individualistic of the philosophical disciplines, sociology is likely to yield much that is new, in that the audience for which an artistic achievement is intended often unconsciously guides the artist in his work and in that the aesthetic judgment of the individual is strongly influenced by the prevailing taste. The fact that ethics can only be approached from a sociological point of view is almost universally recognized today and will become ever clearer as sociology progresses. - Our whole view of the world and of life will then appear as a product of social development, a development whose most important result is the creation of independently thinking personalities in need of freedom. The sociology of the future will therefore not only be a philosophical science, but may even develop into the basis of all philosophy." If one wanted to determine the direction of human action at the end of the last century, then this was done in the spirit of Schiller, who expressed the following opinion in his "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man": "Every individual human being, one can say, carries within himself, according to his disposition and destiny, a pure, ideal man, with whose unchanging unity in all his variations it is the great task of his existence to agree." And there was no doubt that society had to be gradually transformed into such a state that the pure, ideal man could live out his life in it. Schiller goes on to say: "If the inner man is at one with himself, he will save his peculiarity even in the highest universalization of his conduct, and the state will merely be the interpreter of his beautiful instinct, the clear formula of his inner legislation." People turned to this "inner legislation" when it came to the highest question of life. It was believed that one only needed to immerse oneself in one's own mind in order to recognize the needs of the personality. At present, we ask ourselves: how has "inner legislation" become an achievement of social cultural development? If today an individualistic view of human spiritual life is gaining ground, this does not contradict the main line drawn here in the development of the world view of the nineteenth century, any more than Fichte's social ideas in his "Closed Commercial State", published in 1800, contradict the individualistic view of life of his time. For contemporary individualism sees in the free individual personality a type of human being that gradually develops out of unfree conditions, which has society as its precondition because it can only emerge from it. He examines society and finds that, by its very nature, it produces the free individual. Fichte, however, does not focus on the individual personality insofar as it arises from the development of culture, but derives the nature of this personality from reason and then seeks to devise a form of social life that best corresponds to his idea of reason. This is an individualist from the end of our century, despite starting from sociological premises; Fichte developed a socialist idea of the state, although he derived all duties only from the individual will of the individual.

[ 9 ] Science, technology and sociology are the three driving forces behind the development of world views in the nineteenth century. Of course, this is not to deny that other influences also came into play in individual cases. However, these are side currents which flow into the main river and are absorbed by it, but which do not essentially change its direction. They must be taken into account where we encounter them. Here, only the broad directional line of progression that we have to follow should be outlined and the goal set. - For this purpose, two cross-sections, as it were, had to be drawn through the development of the world view and the main features that characterize these cross-sections had to be examined.