Why a Hundred-year-old “Anthropology” is Being Republished

The Kommende-Tag-Verlag has republished FTenrik Steffen's “Anthropology”, which was first published a hundred years ago.

This brings a work back to the public that vividly reveals the life of scientific knowledge in Goethe's time. It cannot be said to reflect the generally accepted view of nature in this period. Steffens was far too individual and original a personality to capture the spirit of the times in a book in this way. But what such a personality gains from the knowledge of nature in the spirit of his time in order to approach the riddles of man comes to light.

Henrik Steffens is a Norwegian. He started out by studying mineralogy. At the age of twenty-four, he went to Germany, to the intellectual atmosphere in which Goethe had breathed the creations of his soul. Goethe's spirit became the awakening force for Steffens.

Steffens continued his studies in Jena, where philosophy in one form or another had reached the heights that Goethe sought to scale by other means. Schelling, who expounded natural philosophy as a creative spirit, for whom the comprehension of nature was followed by the comprehension of its secrets, had a profound influence on him. Werner, the geognost, whom Goethe also followed to a certain point, became his guide. Steffens' soul was carried by Fichte's and Schiller's philosophical ideas, and inspired by Novalis' bold penetration into the spirit of natural activity.

And so all the impulses that were at work in German intellectual life at that time converged in this soul. From them he wanted to bring light into the natural scientific insights that had received such powerful stimuli at that time from the burgeoning science of chemistry, from the theory of electricity and much more.

Anyone who allows Schelling's natural philosophy to take effect on them has the impression that a personality is speaking that wants to soar in a daring flight of ideas to the ultimate riddles of existence, and that, in its flight, takes with it, interpreting and combining, whatever scientific results can be grasped from left and right. It seeks to obtain from nature justifications for the flight of ideas. Nature must serve the architectonics of ideas.

Fichte is so completely absorbed in the flight of ideas that he has no eye or interest in natural science at all.

Goethe, with vivid and vivid power of thought, recreates the details of natural things and processes in thought; he will not be moved to a final summary; his respect for the depth of the world's secrets is too great for that.

Novalis strikes sparks of genius out of nature, which he wants to bring together to form his “magical idealism”. He dies much too young to complete the whole of the powerful ideas he has in mind.

All these minds have the one-sidedness that often occurs in people who carry strong a&five souls within them.

In Steffens, the passive, the devoted receptivity of the soul predominates. He absorbs what emanates from Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Novalis; and he develops versatile abilities in which the powers of these spirits flow together. In this harmony of abilities, he approaches natural processes with unlimited love. He gives back to nature in recognition of what he has learned from his great role models in spiritual striving, in that they wanted to rise above nature to the sources of existence.

And so he follows mineralogically and geologically what slate formations and what limestone formations the earth carries in its rock structure. He seeks to fathom the harmony of magnetic and electrical processes. He endeavors to guess the riddles of gravity and light. And from all this he wants to gain a picture of how the earth is born out of the cosmos under the influence of gravity and light, of magnetism and electricity. How these forces shape its slate-limestone-porphyritic body. And in this cosmic birth, which then develops further, he seeks the formative elements of living beings up to the human being.

Thus, in his soul, “anthropology” is born.

This becomes a comprehensive edifice of ideas. The earth's formations form the basis. The unraveling of the human existence forms the uppermost storey. The formations of the human sensory tools are treated with just as much spirit as the gneiss that helps shape the mountain structure. This consideration of 'anthropology' does not stop at the point where the natural foundations of the human being are grasped by the soul and spirit. It penetrates to the temperaments, to the life of love.

Indeed, in this consideration it seems self-evident that the cognitive revelation that man receives from nature leads to the religious state of mind. And so we read on the penultimate page of this “Anthropology”: “This revelation of the eternal personality of God, the Son from eternity, the true archetype, the inner fullness of all law, from the very beginning, was the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. His veiled personality was from the beginning and looks out of nature as a hint of future bliss.”

And for Steffens, it “looks out of nature” because he shapes science in such a way that knowledge is the unveiling of the spirit hidden in nature. He does not anthropomorphically place the spirit into nature; he lets nature itself express its spirit. But this spirit ultimately reveals itself in the way Steffens suggests.

It is certain that this “anthropology” cannot be read like a book written today. Steffens would also write differently according to the scientific discoveries that have been made since then.

But one should read about the relationship between the human soul and nature and its work a century ago in one of its brilliant representatives. One may feel that Steffen's description is outdated, but one should also have a feeling for the fact that the saying should also become outdated: these natural philosophers constructed only out of thin air, without any basis in experience. And it is fortunate that they have been “overcome” and “forgotten”. — One should rather see how these “overcome” and “forgotten” still have a great deal of vitality in them that could also benefit the present and the near future.

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the abundance of what had been discovered in the world of the senses had caused thinkers to lose the courage to seek the spirit in nature. But in return, they have conjured up a state of the sciences, through which they have completely lost sight of the essence of man. For a science that stops at the spirit must lose the human being himself, because nature lives in man as the spirit shapes it.

Steffens has just endeavored to gain a real “anthropology” in which the essence of man lives. He was able to develop such an understanding because he created a natural foundation in his knowledge, into which the human spirit can intervene and continue its laws. But the newer ones have gained such a “nature” from their knowledge that should shape the human being itself, if it wanted to have him. It cannot do that because the human being is not “nature”.

Thus it may well be seen as something that justifies itself, that one of the most brilliant works on man, which was written a century ago, is being brought to mind again today. It will become clear to many as they read that, in response to those who say that a personality like Steffens has been “forgotten” because science has passed him by, one must assert the opposite: No, Steffens must be brought back to memory because he has much that science has lost by stepping over him.