Cultural Phenomena — Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy

GA 225 — 5 May 1923, Dornach

I. The Nature of the Spiritual Crisis of the Nineteenth Century

Today I would like to look at something from a completely different perspective that has occupied us a great deal here in recent times. I would like to look at the fact, from an historical perspective, that in the last third of the 19th century there was indeed a decisive turning point for human spiritual life. This decisive turning point was expressed in the most diverse facts. And these facts are essentially the underlying causes of all, I might say, the misery that befell humanity in the 20th century, for the underlying causes of all this misery nevertheless lie in the spiritual.

But now I would like to give a brief description of the actual nature of the spiritual crisis of the last third of the 19th century. It was indeed the case during this time that on the one hand there was materialism, the materialism of external life, and behind it the materialism of world view. And one would like to say how bashfully and gradually idealism as a world view completely abandoned its position. I have just tried to point out this contrast between materialism, which often did not want to be one and yet was one, and idealism in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”. There I sketched out how idealistic spirits, certain spirits who continued the idealism of the first half of the 19th century, extended into this last third of the 19th century, but how these spirits, these thinkers, precisely because they only knew the spiritual life in the could not penetrate against everything that could assert itself on that basis, which natural science, so to speak, sovereignly explained, which natural science, against which nothing can be objected, led beyond its scope, as if all world affairs could be decided by pure natural science. This natural science had its great successes in the characterized time, successes in relation to knowledge, successes in relation to the outward practical-technical life. Those who wanted to reject everything that did not follow from the results of this natural science could point to these successes.

And so, I might say, the successful ones who confidently declared natural science and who, after all, represented nothing else and to this day represent nothing else but materialism, were confronted by those thinkers who wanted to be the guardians of idealism. But they knew the spiritual life only in ideas. They saw, so to speak, only ideas behind the material essence of the world, and behind the ideas nothing further, no active spirit. Ideas were the end, the last thing they could arrive at. But these ideas are abstract. They were cultivated as such by these thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century, and remained abstract, even when they were further developed by idealists in the last third of the nineteenth century. And so these idealists could not, with the abstract ideas, which for them was the only spirit, keep up with the, I would say, tangible results of the natural scientific world view.

That is the external history. But the inner history that lies behind it is something else. That is that materialism, if it remains consistent and has spirit - even if it denies spirit, materialism can have a great deal of spirit - is actually not refutable. Materialism cannot be refuted. It is completely in vain to believe that materialism is a worldview that can be refuted. There are no reasons with which one can prove that materialism is incorrect. Hence the completely superfluous talk of those who always want to refute materialism with some theoretical reasons.

Why can't materialism be refuted? Well, you see, it can't be refuted for the following reason. Let us take that part of matter which provides the basis for spiritual activity in man himself, let us take the brain or, in a broader sense, the nervous system. This brain, in the broader sense the nervous system, is truly a reflection of the mind. Everything that occurs in the human spirit can also be demonstrated in some form or other, in some process of the brain or nervous system. So everything that can be cited spiritually as an expression of the human being can simply be found in its material counterpart in the brain, in the nervous system.

So how could someone who points to this nervous system not be able to say: Now you see, everything you say about the soul, everything you say about the spirit, is contained in the nervous system. If someone were to look at a portrait and say: This is the only thing about the person that is depicted, there is no original at all – and one could not find the person of whom the portrait is, one could perhaps not prove that there is an original. You cannot prove that the original exists from the portrait. Nor can you prove that there is a spirit from the material reproduction of the spiritual world. There is no refutation of materialism. There is only one way to point to the will, how to find the spirit as such. You have to find the spirit quite independently of the material, then you will indeed also find it creatively active in the material. But it is never possible to draw conclusions about the spirit through any descriptions of the material, through any conclusions drawn from the material, because everything that is in the spirit is in the material only as an image.

That is the secret of why, in a time like the last third of the 19th century, when people did not have direct access to the spirit, materialism stood there unrefuted, irrefutable, and why those idealistic thinkers could not arise in this time against the materialistic thinkers. The dispute could not take place in proof and counter-proof. It took place, so to speak, under the influence of the opposing greater or lesser power of the contending parties. And in the last third of the 19th century, those who were able to point to the easily understandable, because tangible, progress and successes of natural science and its technical results had the greater power.

Of course, those people who, as idealists, as idealistic thinkers, as I characterized them in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”, preserved the traditions of the first half of the 19th They were the ones whose ideas could touch people much more than the materialists' ideas; but the materialists were the more powerful. And the dispute was not decided by evidence; at that time it was decided as a question of power. We must face this quite disillusioned. One must be clear about the fact that to reach the spirit presupposes the necessity of directly seeking a way to it, not to open it up, to want to prove it from material phenomena. Because everything that is in the spirit is also found in matter. So if someone has no direct path to the spiritual, then he finds everything he can observe in the world somewhere in matter.

Since even the noblest minds in the last third of the 19th century could not open up access to the spirit, they came, because the needs and longings for the spiritual still lived in them, almost into an insecurity of the whole human soul condition. And behind many a truly extraordinary personality of the last third of the 19th century stands, like a background, a sense of instability. People who, despite being extraordinarily intellectual, are often extraordinarily emotional, said to themselves: Yes, there is the material world, there are the ideas. The ideas are the only thing that can be found behind the phenomena of nature and humanity, behind nature and history. But then these people felt that ideas are something abstract, something dead. And so they came to feel insecure and unstable.

I would like to recommend an example to you, an actually quite significant personality, so that you can see in detail what this development of the human spirit, which finally led to our present time, actually was. Today I would like to draw your attention to the so-called Swabian Vischer, also called V-Vischer because he writes his name that way, in contrast to the other learned fishermen. Today I would like to point out the Swabian Vischer, the esthete.

You see, he had completely outgrown the idealism of the first half of the 19th century. He could not profess crude materialism. He saw ideas everywhere behind material entities and behind material processes, and basically also saw a sum of ideas in the moral world order. He was particularly concerned with finding the essence of beauty. In the Hegelian sense, he sought the essence of beauty in the emergence of the idea from sensual matter.

When an artist takes any material and shapes it in such a way that an idea appears through this form, that one is not just looking at a product of nature that does not reveal an idea, but when the artist arranges the material, be it the material of the ore, or the matter of musical tones, or the matter of words, so that one senses an ideal through his arrangement, then it is the appearance of the idea in a sensual form, in a sensual shape, and that is the beauty. It may be that the idea is so powerful that one perceives the sensual appearance as too weak to express the greatness of the idea. If, for example, the sculptor has something so powerful in his idea that no sensual material is sufficient to shape the idea, so that one can only sense the idea as something immeasurably great behind the material, then the beautiful becomes the sublime. If the idea is small, so that one can play with the material, and the idea is expressed in an amiable way throughout the playful treatment of the material, then the beautiful becomes the graceful.

Thus the charming and the sublime are different forms of beauty. Then, when man senses the harmony of the world in what is artistically created, he can turn either to the sublime or to the charming, depending on how the artist presents it. But then one can see, as happened so very often with Jean Paul, for example, how world events are presented in such a way that one never sees harmony, that one only sees contradictions everywhere in the world, that harmony is actually something unattainable that lies behind everything, but that world phenomena appear to one as the nearest thing. For example, you see how, let's say, there is a small schoolmaster who has an extremely idealistic mind, who has a great longing for knowledge, but has no money to buy books, and instead of books, only gets book catalogs from the antiquarian bookshops, and at least now has the book titles instead of the books. He can still buy white paper, and he now writes the books himself for all these titles that he has in the antiquarian bookshop catalog. Yes, but then he notices that there is still harmony in the material that the poet deals with. It is beautifully harmonious, how he balances out the disharmony that money introduces. And then again, the books he writes for himself are not as clever as those in the catalogs. The contradiction remains. You are tossed back and forth between what should be and what is and what should not be.

If you can come to terms with this contradiction in your mind, which cannot be resolved, wherever one contradiction replaces another, where you would not get beyond the contradiction at all, but would have to dissolve into dust yourself , if one nevertheless knows how to calm one's mind, then that is the mood of that beauty that one enjoys in humor.

Yes, it was precisely the case with the Swabian Vischer, the V-Vischer, that he virtually glorified humor as an esthete, that he, because he lived in the age when one was at a loss contradictions, the contradiction between mind and matter, because there was no actual penetration of the world harmonies for human understanding as something achievable, he wanted to help himself through humor over all of this. And so he glorified humor. But again, it is the case with humor that behind it, nevertheless, there must be a harmonization somewhere, otherwise humor does not come about, otherwise one sees in the end that one calms oneself through the mind with something, whereby one should not actually calm oneself if one does not want to become a wishy-washy person. And so, behind all this, there is the striving of the Swabian Vischer to enjoy the world – he is, after all, a leading figure for the second half of the 19th century – behind all this there is a striving, because one cannot enter into the spiritual world, but only into ideas, a striving that in turn has something terribly philistine about it. A laughing humor, but behind which is not really the balance of the mind, but something convulsive, a humor that easily, when it explores the contradictions in the world, instead of humorous balance, only finds the foolish juxtaposition.

All this is connected with the fact that the more noble minds in this second half of the 19th century could not find what was actually behind the world spiritually, that they therefore looked for means of information that ultimately led them into a certain lack of direction, into something convulsive. And yet, out of these convulsions of the last third of the 19th century, only the tragic and the unhealthy of the beginning, of the first half of the 20th century could emerge.

Now, when this Swabian Vischer, one might say, although he resisted it, wanted to present his own self – it is his own self, after all – to the world in this way, he wrote the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One). One can say that the “hero” of this novel, as one would say in philistine aesthetics, or as it is scientifically called, the hero of this novel - in reality his name is Albert Einhart, but V-Vischer abbreviates it: A. E., calls him “Auch Einer” (just “one of many”), and that is also the title of the novel - well, this “Auch Einer”, there is something in him. He would like to be a one as a human being, a real one. He would like to be a “one,” such an individuality, who is something in himself. But now, despite his magnificent, powerful talents, he becomes only “one of the ones,” not “one,” but “one of the ones,” perhaps not exactly twelve, but of which there are still a considerable number in a dozen! Yes, as I said, Vischer resisted the idea that “Auch Einer” is a portrait of his own character. He is not that either, but nevertheless Vischer has mysteriously incorporated into this “Auch Einer” that which lived in him as inner disharmony. At the same time, there are the discrepancies of the soul from the last third of the 19th century.

This novel “Auch Einer” actually consists of three parts. The first describes how V-Vischer becomes acquainted with Albert Einhart, with the “Auch Einer”. It is an interesting travel acquaintance, not exactly an everyday occurrence.

You see, V-Vischer, too, in the end, could see in the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha to earthly evolution nothing but the evolution of an idea. For him, the Christ was actually an abstract idea that has permeated the evolution of mankind. And at Golgotha, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, an abstract idea — Christ — was actually crucified. It does not breathe much reality. It leads back to the time of David Friedrich Strauss and so on, where the actual content of religion was only understood as if religion only contained images for something that is actually meant ideally, abstractly. Thus Christ and the story of Christ could only be understood as images, the absorption of the highest ideas into earthly development, the crucifixion only as the appearance of the idea in a particularly outstanding sensual human form, and so on. All this has indeed been the subject of great intellectual efforts in the 19th century and has been the subject of bitter disappointments for the deeper minds in this 19th century, because behind all this idealism a real spirituality could not be found. And of course people thirst for the spiritual, as they always thirst for the spiritual, and most of all when they do not have it. And those thinkers thirst for it most who believe they can prove that there is no such thing as a spiritual reality, only matter or only ideas. One could say: at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the more outstanding minds had actually already grown tired of this intellectualist quest for an answer to the question: how do ideas actually work in nature? How do abstractions actually work in history? Only at most such mercurial flatworms as Arthur Drews, have again brought forth that which had long been somewhat dismissed among those who could really think. Therefore, in the personality of this mercurial non-thinker, something of this still extends into the 20th century: an idea was crucified, not a real spiritual being.

But from what I say, you can see that ultimately, even for a thinker like Schwaben-Vischer, everything that was spiritual dissolved into ideas. In the end, it was the ideas, in their abstract form, that were the thing that worked through the world as a web. And everything that was told in the mythologies, in the religions up to and including the Christian religion, was, only clothed in material, something that was at most an image for the idea. And ultimately, from this striving to see only the idea in the sensual image, people had to realize that it does not really matter in which sensual image one expresses the weaving and spinning of the idea in matter.

And for a crank like Albert Einhart, who is “just one of those people,” matter asserts itself in a very strange way. It so happens that Albert Einhart wants to ascend to the sublime at every possible opportunity. When he wants to ascend to the highest heights of the spiritual, which for him is only the ideal, then he gets a cold, then he has to sneeze terribly, or he has to clear his throat terribly. That's when matter asserts itself, isn't it, that's matter. He doesn't usually feel matter so strongly as when he gets a cold or when he has a corn. After all, if you are a thinker from the second half of the 19th century, you don't know which end to grasp materialism, which just reflects ideas. It is best to grasp it where matter asserts itself the most, where it always appears in such a way that it even conquers the spirit. And in the end, like Albert Einhart, “one of them”, you even become a critic of what is already there.

For Albert Einhart does eventually come up with the idea that those who have approached the subject in a more neutral way have actually succumbed to an error. Schiller presented Tell completely wrongly, because it cannot be like that; the subject is grasped at a much too high level. You have to go deeper. You have to go into the catarrhal stage if you want to really grasp the subject. And so the correct composition of Tell should be that when he pushes off with the little boat, he doesn't just get across, but capsizes, falls out and is caught by Gesler's men, who give him a good thrashing, but he escapes again, falls into the water a second time and catches a cold. Now he gets a terrible cold, and just as he is about to draw the crossbow, he has to sneeze. And the bailiff cannot say: That is Tell's arrow – but: That is Tell's sneeze! That is how Tell should be, says Albert Einhart, the “Auch Einer” (the “Also Einer” is a play on words with “Auch einer” meaning “another one” and “einer” meaning “one”). No, you have to go deeper, more thoroughly into materialism, if you want to be consistent.

There have been all kinds of interpretations and explanations for Othello, psychological explanations; but one should see, says Einhart, that Othello is constantly trying to get a handkerchief, that he has a bad cold that drives him so crazy that he ends up strangling Desdemona. Nothing but a cold! One must go deeper into the matter, into the actual material. One must find it at the right point.

That is what Vischer seeks through his cozy, humorous approach. He cannot get beyond materialism. He cannot prove it away, and so he wants to at least rise above it in his mind. He cannot humorously ignore hydrogen and oxygen; well, one must humorously ignore catarrh. And that is precisely one point of view that one can take vis-à-vis materiality.

The matter has also led to Vischer being able to point out how he actually makes the acquaintance of this peculiar character. He is staying in a hotel, which – given the various circumstances, one can assume – must not be too far from here, albeit in the High Mountains, and because he already has a cold, he gets into an argument with the hotel servant, becomes somewhat violent, and so all the scruples of life come to his mind from this material affair. And it comes to such a pass that he even wants to end his own life. He throws himself down. But on this occasion the Swabian-Vischer sees him and prepares to save him, and in doing so tumbles down over the precipice. The other man sees this again, and forgets that he actually wanted to commit suicide himself, and comes to the aid of the Swabian-Vischer. That is how they make their acquaintance. It is not an everyday acquaintance. So they both roll down. And there you can still hear the curses of this “one too,” who is now expressing his worldview. You don't really hear it because there is a roar from all possible waters; it is not quiet, only individual parts can be heard like: World – a cold of the absolute – in solitude – spat out and the world was – the world coughed up by the eternal, coughed up – disgraceful jelly – breeding ground of the devil – and so on, you hear it all through. He will have said much more, of course!

Now they have made each other's acquaintance in this way, Vischer the Swabian and “Another One”. But they can't communicate right away because they both get a cold and have to sneeze terribly. And so it takes a little longer to communicate. The first part is about how you make a travel acquaintance in a not-quite-ordinary, everyday way. The second part is a work by “Auch Einer” that is inserted, a pile village story. It describes the life and activities in a pile village. One could talk at length about the age in which this pile village existed and so on, but there is also some information from which one can deduce that the pile village of “Auch Einer” is near the city of Turik. This city is nearby. And about the time – well, the pile-dwellers have to call in a bard boy from Turik. And this bard boy from Turik is called Guffrud Kullur. Yes, you can't really discuss the time in which this pile-dwelling existed.

The details of this pile-dwelling story are now developed in the narrative of “Auch Einer” (Another One), and we are introduced to the way in which, for example, the pile-dwellers take care of their religious needs. This is precisely what Swabian Vischer and his counterpart Albert Einhart describe in their study of religions: This has been the material-figurative expression of the rule of ideas everywhere. And so this religion of the pile dwellers is one that they adopted in a time when no one could catch a cold. It was a completely paradisiacal time when no one could catch a cold. But these paradise pile dwellers were not so comfortable. They felt somewhat irritated by this cold-free, catarrhal time, and so they fell for the temptation of the great god Grippo. This Grippo, who actually dwells in the cold west, but works and creates through fire, through heating. And so it came about that they, the people of the paradise on stilts, succumbed to the temptation of the god Grippo! And they caught cold, had to sneeze all the time, and so they surrendered to the weaver of worlds, who often appears to people as a white cow. They see: material-pictorial expression, elaboration of the spiritual. The World Spinner advises them to found their village on the lake, but the lake sends forth a constant cold, damp fog. The sniffles are properly expelled. The results of the god Grippo come out and are finally cured. This can only happen in pile villages.

Then a kind of heretic also comes to this pile village. But the pile villagers are led in an extraordinarily good way by a druid. A druid who is actually not much smarter than the other pile villagers, but who has learned to properly teach the catarrhal religion, completely dominates these pile villagers. And there is only one thing: The Druids must live celibate, so he does not have a wife, but a mistress, Urhixidur, who again rules him and from whom a lot emanates in this pile village. So now a heretic comes along who wants to teach the pile villagers a kind of enlightened religion, a religion without God. But the stake villagers have not only come to know the good gods, but also the Grippo and all sorts of other things. And the druid, egged on by the Urhixidur, sets up a heretic's court. The stake villagers become a little bit mad at the druid, because they dig up a deeper stake village, and now he can't explain that. And now they call Guffrud Kullur and another scholar, Feridan Kallar, from the neighboring city. But the strange thing is that when pile villages were excavated in a Swiss town other than Turik, one of the experts was Ferdinand Keller, who was not appointed by a town with a present-day name, but by Turik, just as, of course, the reference is not to Gottfried Keller, but to Guffrud Kullur. Well, the battles are taking place between the people with an original religion, with the religion of catarrhal conditions, and a heretic who now wants to teach a religion without God, a religion of the moral world order. They are interesting struggles. They come to a head in particular when the pile dwellers celebrate a festival that corresponds to Catholic confirmation and Protestant confirmation, namely the festival of investiture. This is when children are introduced to the community. But of course, in keeping with the events, they receive a handkerchief, not the things that usually happen at confirmation, but they have to get a proper handkerchief for the road through life.

All kinds of cultural struggles are still taking place there. It seems to “Auch Einer” that the cultural struggles were not only visible in the world during this time, but they also seem to have taken place in the pile villages.

Yes, I would say, the Swabian Vischer develops a humor to represent the inability to come to terms with materialism in this oddball. Whether one finally takes – this is probably what the Swabian Vischer meant in his heart – the concepts that start from the materialist art historians, who tie in with such neutral material, or others that show the material more clearly: perhaps it just depends on whether one takes the clearer concepts.

A man like Gottfried Semper, for example, asserts the working of stone and the workability of wood when explaining this or that architectural style. Yes, but why talk about the extent to which wood or stone can be worked? Why start from this side of the material? It is much more sensible to examine how people were affected by the different architectural styles, and then you have the connection between these architectural styles and the human being and human development. With the Greeks, it will have been the case that their style of building was open on all sides, so that if you spent a good deal of time in the buildings, you would catch a good, strong cold. These are the purely catarrhal architectural styles, the ancient architectural styles. And the Gothic architectural styles, there you were more protected, you only caught a cold now and then when you opened the windows: these are the mixed-catarrhal architectural styles. And the ideal is only in the distant future: these are the buildings in which you don't catch a cold at all. We can make a very nice distinction – and this is how it is done in scholarly writings – between architectural style A: purely catarrhal, architectural style B: mixed catarrhal, and architectural style C: where you no longer catch a cold. This is the classification of architectural styles by “Auch Einer”.

You see, V-Vischer didn't know how to approach materialism. He wanted to approach it humorously, and so he took this side of materialism where man feels matter in him in one way or another. That is, after all, what really underlies this novel, “Auch Einer”.

In a third part, there are also Albert Einhart's aphorisms. You get to know him better, so to speak. You get to know his struggle against nature, his struggle with the spirit, with the moral world order, with pure idealism; very witty remarks that are presented in aphorisms. Sometimes you get the feeling that the somewhat philistine Swabian Vischer has already anticipated the witty ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. There is really something extraordinarily ingenious in this third part of Albert Einhart's aphorisms.

And Albert Einhart is also a very original personality. When you meet him in the novel, he is retired, of course, because he was something of a police director, but even then he was actually already an important personality. So the Swabian Vischer obviously wants to suggest that this in itself must be taken with humor: an important police director. But because he was important, he was also elected as a member of parliament, and there he gave an extraordinarily important speech. In this important speech, one sentence had a rousing effect, then a second sentence had a rousing effect again. But the second inspiring sentence had the same effect on the first as if the first had been poured over with horribly cold water. It is strange that the inspiring effect was as if the first flame of fire were to be extinguished: Now there are people again who belong to the old terrible, barbaric times and would like to introduce corporal punishment in the most diverse forms in the military and in schools. This is something that leads us in the most blatant form to the time when there was no idealism yet, when people did not yet live in pictorial religions, when they still had a purely moral view, religion without God. We must not expose ourselves to this in our time. In our time, there must be no beating, beating must be thoroughly eradicated. In our time, many other damages must be eradicated. We see how much barbarism still extends into our time. For example, we see how animals are tortured on the street by rough people, how these poor horses, who are not designed for it, are beaten with whips. Or we see how dogs, which have other organs on their feet than hooves and are not suited to pulling carts, have to pull carts. In short, we see how the animals are tortured, and I would like to make a motion here in the chamber that all animal abusers be publicly flogged!

These are the things, again, that one can only get over with a certain sense of humor when the second spark of fire pours out like a cold jet of water on the first. Yes, this Albert Einhart, this “Auch Einer,” is really a true creature of the last third of the 19th century! And much of what Vischer felt in terms of his own psychological discrepancies, he brought to light in this “Auch Einer”. But one must not identify Vischer with “Auch Einer”, nor with the person who had come to the village as a heretic and was tried as such, otherwise one would come to strange conclusions.

Not true, the Schwaben-Vischer has, though not in Turik, but in another city, for a time provided a kind of heretic protectorate, and it has done him badly. But it would be taking an overly humorous view of V-Vischer himself to interpret such things. For V-Vischer did not even want to accept the second part of Goethe's “Faust” and ridiculed the commentators and interpreters by calling himself in a third part of “Faust” that he wrote, with allusions to all those who find so many witty things in the second part of “Faust”, Deutobold Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky all those who find so much ingenious things in the second part of “Faust”, Deutobold Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky; Deutobold Symbolizetti Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky and so on he called himself. And as such he wrote the third part of Goethe's “Faust” to mock the commentaries that wanted to see a deeper wisdom in Goethe's “Faust”. One does not want to become an allegoriovitch like that, and since the Swabian Vischer's own fates are expressed or somehow hinted at in his “Auch Einer”.

One would like to say that it is remarkable how, in this last third of the 19th century, on the one hand there is Nietzsche, who is to be taken so deeply tragically, who perished because of the discrepancies that took place in his soul , and this Swabian Vischer, who could not help but express the groundlessness of the worldviews of his time in such a way as he did in the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One). One can only say that there is a certain unity even in this novel, as there is a certain unity in certain natural scientific materialistic views. After all, if you look at hydrogen, look at oxygen, look at zinc, look at gold, they are so different things, but together you find the one atomic unity everywhere. The atoms are everywhere, they are just a little differently collated, so that they look a little different. And here in this novel there is also a very strange unity.

For example, the “Auch Einer” finds the personality, the female personality, that really instilled a great respect in him in life, now as a widow again. It is a great moment for him. He is deeply indebted to the man who died. He finds the personality he deeply admires as a widow in a hotel. She enters into a conversation with him. And this conversation is interrupted because the “one too” is seized by a terrible sneezing fit. This conversation does not end. It is always matter that has a devastating effect, that rebels in this search for a worldview, for the spirit; it is always matter that intervenes and ultimately makes everything material. One can't do anything but ascribe everything to materialism when one wants to express the most sublime revelations of the human soul, and now, isn't it true, not even the word “ideal” comes about, but “ide-” and then comes a long sneeze! One sees how matter asserts itself everywhere and how the ideal simply disappears in the face of matter.

It is an extraordinarily significant cultural-historical phenomenon, this novel “Auch Einer” (i.e., “Just Another”) by Schwaben-Vischer, even though one must also say that there is a lot of philistinism in it. But that is precisely what makes it a particular expression of the time. And it expresses the fact that, as a spiritually minded person, one could no longer find one's way in what had become of spirit and matter, so that one could, like “Auch Einer”, come up with the most abstract ideas with the mind, which killed each other as much as the abolition of corporal punishment and the public flogging of those who tortured animals. So one idea kills the other. And if you turned to matter, you got matter where it was most perceptible to you: in the nasal mucus.

That was not exactly fine, one might say, but the Swabian Vischer also wrote a very interesting book about frivolity and cynicism. He never wanted to be frivolous, hated the ladies' narrow waists, but he found something extraordinarily right in cynicism, which one must apply everywhere if one wants to present this or that properly. And that is why he did not shrink back, one might say, not frivolously, but sometimes somewhat unsavory, from presenting world events in a materialistic sense, but humorously, as he thought.

You have to grasp what is alive in the times not only through abstract thoughts and not only through sentimentality, but you have to grasp it in moods. And I really think that something of the mood of the last third of the 19th century lay in those feelings that permeated this Swabian soul, the Vischersche, when he wrote the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One).