The Necessary Change in the Intellectual Life of the Present Day

For the way in which characteristic forces in the intellectual life of recent times, which so quickly transform “present” into “history”, have affected an idealistically minded soul, many things in Herman Grimm are - I would almost say - alarmingly indicative. I have experienced many such “alarming” moments while reading Herman Grimm. I would like to highlight a few of them.

In the essay volume Aus den letzten fünf Jahren (Gütersloh 1890), Herman Grimm had the lecture printed that he gave on May 2, 1886 at the first ordinary general assembly of the Goethe Society in Weimar. The title is Goethe in the Service of Our Time. At first, one follows each sentence with deep interest. It comes across ingeniously how Goethe's contemporaries knew little of what people educated in Goethe knew about him in 1886. But the change of feeling is also presented to the soul, which is due to the fact that for the contemporaries, Goethe was a living person, but for those later, he is not. There are sentences such as: “One never needed to have met Goethe or read more of him than was contained in his most distinguished works: the mere knowledge that he was alive filled one with the knowledge of his value and with the feeling of personal connection. ... I have wondered whether what has taken the place of this feeling in us today corresponds to what it could be. It seems to me that, despite the masses of material about Goethe's external and internal experiences that are available to us, our sense of spiritual connection with him is less effective than it should be.

And from such thoughts, Herman Grimm moves on to a discussion of Goethe's relationship with Winckelmann. During the period that can be called the pre-Goethean period, Winckelmann had struggled from a narrow intellectual background to a great, pure enthusiasm for art that drove him to Italy. He ultimately met a tragic death by being murdered. Now, in his writings, Winckelmann has literally resurrected ancient art for the understanding of people. Goethe has now experienced this revival in his own soul in Italy. He relived in his own way what Winckelmann had felt before him. This led him to create not only a literary monument to Winckelmann in his book 'Winckelmann and His Century', but to bring his figure, his entire intellectual activity to life, formed out of his own soul. Herman Grimm has the idea that it is Winckelmann, as created by Goethe, who now lives on in the development of the mind. Without Goethe, the world would have had the memory of the mortal Winckelmann; through Goethe, Winckelmann has been resurrected in such a way that he, as awakened by Goethe, has attained earthly immortality. Now Herman Grimm says that this is how those who seek the right connection with Goethe should do it in relation to him. “Goethe places him (Winckelmann) as a living, active element in the service of the present day of 1805, and it is Goethe's work if Winckelmann still stands among us today, alive and bestowing life. — This is what must now happen to Goethe himself on a larger scale if we are to draw from him what he contains for us."

All this and more of Herman Grimm's lecture is read with increasing excitement. One surrenders to the thoughts of a personality who, steeped in the spirit of her soul, experiences the question: what should happen so that people of the present go the right way in the further development of humanity. One reads by experiencing the emotional heartbeat of the writer. One feels immersed in the atmosphere of a soul striving joyfully towards the spirit.

Then you come to page 7; and you are suddenly as if torn out of the whole mood. There Herman Grimm writes: “No one, as far as I know, believes in Goethe's color lights today: for us today, the content of this book lies in Goethe's explanations of how opinions about the relationship between the human eye and colored phenomena are related to the whole way of life and thinking of those who hold them. Take Goethe's fight against Newton. Note how Goethe begins with the history of natural science in England. Note how he seeks to determine the position that Newton occupied within it. Note how he grasps what he calls Newton's error as a necessary consequence of these external circumstances in connection with his personal character! The achievement as a historical work is so brilliant that it makes the question of whether Goethe was mistaken here a minor matter.

You are on solid ground before you get to this point in the lecture. But then the ground begins to shake. One wonders: can someone treat as a secondary matter what he must make the basis of the judgment that Goethe has done a work of genius historically? One can state that there are two points of view in the theory of colors: Goethe's and Newton's, and can leave undecided which one one considers justified. If one then claims that Goethe has accomplished a work of genius on his, then the matter is quite understandable. But is it also somehow understandable when someone says: I don't care whether Goethe's point of view is erroneous; in fact, I must say that all authoritative people consider it to be such; but Goethe has ingeniously advocated the error? One can only say that if, instead of stopping to talk about the matter, as Herman Grimm does, one now begins to characterize how a genial error was possible with Goethe. And how can one, with such “indifference” to Goethe's genius, find the connection with him “as it should be,” since Goethe himself said in all seriousness that he had achieved much in the poetic sphere, but that he did not value this as highly as the fact that in certain areas of knowledge of nature he alone of his contemporaries knew the right thing?

For someone who admires Herman Grimm as much as I do, the question arises: did this outstanding personality not find that, within the intellectual life of his time, he could only present the spirituality to which he aspired to himself before the eye of his soul, as if it were an illusion, under a certain condition? This condition was that Herman Grimm did not concern himself with those elements in the intellectual life of his time which, if he had taken them seriously, would have had to be rejected by him if he wanted to maintain his own point of view. He did not reject them. He wanted to live with them in peace. But this meant that he was forced to live with his own opinions as if on an island, on which he erected idealistic buildings while the devastating waves of mechanistic-“positivistic” worldviews roared all around. — And if today we cast our eyes on Herman Grimm's “island of ideality,” in its often enchanting beauty, it immediately disappears from this gaze. The “mechanistic-positivistic” sea engulfs it. Such are the paths of the spirit that were trodden by a few select personalities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their spirituality was abstract even when they appeared as soulful and heartfelt as Herman Grimm. The period that followed demands a new relationship between man and “spiritual reality”.

In the next article, we will continue to follow what may “startle” Herman Grimm's admirers when they come across individual passages in his writings, and what reveals the change in spiritual demands in today's world.