# 98. A True “Disciple” of Zarathustra

About nine years ago, I met a man in Vienna from whom I expected some beautiful spiritual fruit for the future. His name was often mentioned in the magazines and newspapers at the time. He had recently received a prize from the Berlin Philosophical Society for the best presentation of Hegel's world view. Other circles took an interest in him, including those who would have been highly indifferent to a book on Hegelian philosophy if the author's life situation had not made it a sensational event. For this author wrote his work in the culturally remote Hungarian village of *Zombor*, where he had worked as a court clerk. The fact that a man who, from early morning to late evening in a corner of the Magyar country, expressed thoughts which a respected German learned society described as the most profound and effective philosophy of the century - that made him a piquant personality in the eyes of many.

I delighted in the germs of the world view that this man carried within him, and which he presented to me with rare eloquence during his visit to Vienna at the time. He was full of promising ideas for the future, and he expressed his views in lively language full of philosophical enthusiasm. I can still see him sitting with us: with the great Austrian poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, the Viennese university professor Laurenz Müllner and myself. An inner joy flashed through me at the feeling that we had such people in our presence.

And now he sends us up from the Hungarian capital a work that surpasses everything he has achieved so far, one of the most brilliant morning stars in the sky of the modern world of thought: " *Friedrich Nietzsche at the boundary between two world ages*." I have not read a book for a long time that has spread such a free, pure spiritual atmosphere around me as this one. Eugen Heinrich Schmitt looks at Nietzsche's world of ideas from the same point of view from which I recently looked at Goethe's (see my book on " *Goethe's World View*"). The fact of this book seems to me like a hand across the miles. E. H. Schmitt has the same opinion as I do about the relationship of modern man to the great riddles of existence. He, too, knows the way by which we present-day people alone can arrive at that harmonious view and way of life, encompassing the universe with a great feeling and a great thought, which was granted to the Greeks of older times in a naive and childlike form. The Greeks of these older times lived in sensual nature, their human essence was a part of nature for them. And when the image of the great creator appeared before their eyes, this image always contained the whole, full human being within it. Then came Socrates, then came Plato. They spoke the great truth that something lives in man that is higher than all nature: the spirit. And this human spirit, which an older generation had perceived in unseparated communion with nature, was torn out of the universe. From then on, this spirit stood before the eyes of mankind as a world of its own, next to and above nature. The Platonic world of ideas is the spirit torn from nature, which now floated above the waters. This spirit became a shadowy entity when it lost its connection with the moist, warm juices of nature. Christianity wanted to give this spirit a real life. But it did not find the path back to nature that Socrates and Plato had taken forwards to the spirit. It placed the spirit in a realm of its own; and what Plato called ideas, the Christians called God and angels. But God and the angels were not natural beings, in the substance of this world. They were added to this world. They were transferred to the hereafter; and this world was slandered as the earthly vale of tears.

We cannot go back to the worldview of the Greeks. For we have learned to see the spirit in its own form. But we can allow this spirit to come to life within us, we can allow it to permeate us. And when we have really seen it and then turn our gaze back to nature: then we will see that the light that shines in our head as spirit is the same as that which nature itself radiates. We look into our inner being, and the spirit shines in it; and our eye becomes sunlike and looks into nature and sees in it the same spirit.

We need to take a detour that the Greeks did not yet need. We must first see the spirit in ourselves in order to see it again in nature. The Greeks knew nothing of the spirit within and could have enough with the spirit that shone towards them from nature. And the human being who knows how to take the detour from nature to spirit and back to nature again: this is the human being that Goethe sensed in his best years; it was from this spirit that he created at the height of his development as a poet and naturalist. And Nietzsche proclaimed this spirit as the "superman". In this insight, E. H. Schmitt again meets with me, who already held the same view of the superman in my book: "Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit".

In the rich Nietzsche literature of the present day, this book is one of the very best; written by a mind that is not a blind follower, and that is not carried away by the whirl of Nietzsche's dithyrambs in an unconscious dance, but one of which Nietzsche, if he could still live to see it, would say: You are a disciple of Zarathustra; for you do not follow his ways, but yours.