10. To Rudolf Ronsperger

My dear friend!

I received your kind letter¹ this morning. The fact that I did not return “Der letzte Ritter”² to you long ago is solely due to the embarrassing events of the last few days. Exams have to be taken, and the last two³ took me a few days longer than I had anticipated. I can only assure you that it is a real mental exercise to learn a certain amount of formulaic flourishes in one go. This distracted me from everything else. I am also very grateful that you are willing to lend me the book over the holidays, and I will take advantage of your kindness accordingly. You ask about the Prolegomena.⁴ I am sorry that you have not seen anything for so long, but the matter is not exactly child's play. Please excuse my frankness, but I must confess that your words, asking whether I had abandoned my system altogether, did indeed strike me as strange. Philosophy is an inner need for me, without which life is an empty nothingness, and it is precisely my so-called system that satisfies this need. This need could only disappear with death. So abandoning it can only be spoken of in jest, as you do anyway. August will hopefully give me the peace and quiet I need to put a large part of my beloved “philosophy of freedom”⁵ down on paper. I will not fail to inform you of my progress. I will refrain from any further excursions, all time-consuming pleasures, and devote myself solely to this work. I am no longer in the least bit uncertain about the form; it will be a simple prose style, not in letter or dialogue form, without many paragraphs, without the usual scholarly quotations and academic flourishes. Take a look at Schiller's essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” and imagine a series of such essays strung together, and you will have the form of the philosophy of freedom, which is intended to announce by its very form that it does not want to look like Zimmermann.⁶ Essays written in a completely informal style, expressing a love for the subject matter, with connected content, are simply more pleasant to read than books that are nothing more than a scattered table of contents. Of course, a systematic structure is still necessary, but it should not constantly bother the reader in the sense of “formal aesthetics.” I would be delighted if the form brought the content so close to the reader that philosophical thoughts could be read like an entertaining and instructive novel. I believe that this is possible. All I would ask you regarding the whole matter is not to assume—even jokingly—that I have plucked my philosophy out of thin air and could therefore discard it at any moment. One can do this with a work, but not with a worldview and outlook on life. Wherever I look, I see only new confirmations of my views, and they convince me more and more every day.

I regret that you are unable to copy your piece⁷; I would be delighted if, when we meet again, which will certainly be a great pleasure for me, I could see as much of the piece as you will undoubtedly see of the “Freiheitslehre.”

I am not particularly pleased that you are reading Dr Büchner.⁸ You also seem to misunderstand me completely with regard to this reactionary and anti-progressive man. I have never claimed that what is written in the book Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter) is untrue, but it is also true that two times two is four, without anyone being so silly as to write a thick book about it. Such self-evident, trivial, trite truths, which are peddled everywhere on the daily market, are simply presented to the reader here, and it is truly not worth the effort to waste words on such trivialities, if it were not for the fact that this sort of scientist and, in a hidden way, ultramontane gloomy figures of a different kind produce shallow minds that are as unreceptive to higher truths as a Kotzebuean audience⁹ is to classical drama. These gloomy figures of inferior rank, these Nicolais of the nineteenth century,¹⁰ must be fought simply because they offer goods that taste just as good as Saphir's¹¹ writings after lunch or in the coffee house—they cost no effort of the mind and not the slightest talent—and they sweep away all attention to anything higher. May I therefore offer you some well-meaning, friendly advice: throw this reactionary, light-averse book boldly into the corner. As a young poet, it will only harm you. You need not forget what you have read so far, for there is nothing to be learned from this book. As a poet, you will one day find yourself in a position to fight against such reactionary, un-German, and morally depraved aberrations. So everything that is said there is true, but extremely self-evident, bland, and even rather silly. —

I am even more delighted by your detailed examination of Gervinus, who has also become better known to me, albeit only in the latter parts. The excellent characterization of the main tasks of our time gives me real satisfaction. The appreciation of Schiller¹² is not thorough, but it is written with love for the subject and carried by a certain moral elevation. I do not know if you are aware that I have read Deinhart's “On Schiller's Aesthetic Letters.” If you ever have the opportunity to look at this work, you will see the writing, the style, and the moral standpoint of a true philosopher. I have Dühring's thick book “Cursus der Philosophie” on my desk; I have already read most of it. I have completely formed my opinion of Dühring. His philosophy is the worst example of all philosophical retrogression, his views are thoroughly barbaric and hostile to culture, at times even crude. His writings on the Jews and on Lessing¹³ are the strictest consequences of his limited, egoistic philosophy. Enough has been said. His material situation is pitiful. In his youth he acquired a certain amount of crude knowledge, which he now serves up to the public in various ways. He must write books with all his might, for this is his only means of livelihood; he can learn nothing more to add to his knowledge, for he has no means of supporting himself and his family during this time. Added to this are the actual persecutions and insults he has suffered and continues to suffer; now this is indeed a sad situation. For my part, I have now finished with Dühring in philosophy; the time I have spent on him is purely wasted. —

You also write about talent and genius. You know, I assume, that the human mind consists of several parts: talent, memory, etc., and also genius. Everyone possesses the latter, but the various components of the mind are only more or less developed in different individuals. Where genius is particularly strongly developed, the person is simply called a genius; but even mere talent has a little genius, and if we admit that this is a special predisposition, then every ordinary talent also represents such a predisposition.

External influences are empty nothingness without an internal correlate:

“If the eye were not sun-like,¹⁴
How could we see the light,
If God's own power did not lie within us,
How could divine delight enchant us?”

This characterizes Goethe's view far better than in the quotation you cited.

As much as I would like to continue writing, I must give it up for today. Please excuse me, dear friend; I am leaving for Wr Neustadt¹⁵ tomorrow, and it is already late at night.

I am delighted by every line you write to me. Please give me this pleasure again soon and rest assured that your lines will be received by the noblest of friends:

Rudolf Steiner. Oberlaa near Vienna. —

Source: Photocopy of the lost original (6 pages, 2 double sheets), RSA; original formerly owned by Friedrich Hiebel, Dornach (1967); auction]. A. Stargardt, Berlin, July 7–8, 1998, catalog 670/no. 625; auction J. A. Stargardt – Auction 7 Moirandat Company AG, Basel, Nov. 26–27, 2009, catalog 696/no. 470; Printing: GA 38 <1985>, pp. 18-22; Reply to letter dated: before July 27, 1881 (not available); replied on: before Aug. 3, 1881 (not available) People: Friedrich Schiller; Robert von Zimmermann; Ludwig Büchner; August von Kotzebue; Friedrich Nicolai; Moritz Gottlieb Saphir; Georg Gottfried Gervinus; Heinrich Marianus Deinhardt; Eugen Dühring; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Literature: Friedrich Schiller: “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” in: Die Horen, 1795 (11th and 12th pieces) and 1796 (1st piece), TüDingen; Ludwig Büchner: Kraft und Stoff. Empirisch-naturphilosophische Studien. In allgemein-verständiger Darstellung, Frankfurt a.M, 1855; Heinrich Marianus Deinhardt: “Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” in: Contributions to the Appreciation and Understanding of Schiller. Vol. 1, Stuttgart 1861; Eugen Dühring: Cursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung (Course in Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific Worldview and Way of Life), Leipzig 1875; Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage (The Jewish Question as a Question of Race, Morals, and Culture). With a World-Historical Answer, Karlsruhe and Leipzig 1881; The Overestimation of Lessing and His Advocacy for the Jews, Karlsruhe and 1881; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Wär' nicht das Auge sonnenhaft” (If the Eye Were Not Sunlike); Anastasius Grün [= Anton Alexander Graf von Auersperg]: Der letzte Ritter (The Last Knight), Munich 1830 Places: Oberlaa; Wiener Neustadt

On the correspondence with Rudolf Ronsperger: While only three of Rudolf Ronsperger's letters to Rudolf Steiner have survived – one only because Rudolf Steiner used the blank page for lecture notes, and a second, unsent letter was only handed over to Rudolf Steiner in 1900 by Ronsperger's sister Luise Kautsky – there are nine letters from Rudolf Steiner to Rudolf Ronsperger. These were found by a nephew of Rudolf Ronsperger, the physician Karl Kautsky (1892-1978) in the USA, and were acquired in 1967 by Rudolf Koller, Walther Beck, and Friedrich Hiebel (see also: Friedrich Hiebel: “Rudolf Steiner und sein Jugendfreund Ronsperger” [Rudolf Steiner and his childhood friend Ronsperger], in: Das Goetheanum, No. 9, February 26, 1967, p. 66). All of the letters date from the summer of 1881, when the friends were on vacation and did not see each other every day. That there were probably more letters originally is evident from Rudolf Steiner's remark that he remained “in correspondence with him” even when his friend had already taken up “a position that was indifferent to him” (Mein Lebensgang, 8. 77), which must have been the case soon after his father's death in October 1881.

1. Oberlaa: A place near Inzersdorf, where Rudolf Steiner's father worked at the railway station from 1879 to 1882. However, the Steiner family apparently lived in Oberlaa – letters from the summer of 1881 and January 1882 provide evidence of this.