The Origin and Goal of the Human Being

GA 53 — 1 December 1904, Berlin

Friedrich Nietzsche in the Light of Spiritual Science

Anyone who sets themselves the task of describing the relationship between modern intellectual life and the theosophical view of life cannot ignore one phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche stands as a great enigma in the cultural development of the present. He has undoubtedly made a deep impression on all our thinking contemporaries. For some he was a kind of leader, for others a personality who must be fought most intensely. He has shaken many people and left behind many powerful results of his work. An extensive literature has been published about Nietzsche, and today it is almost impossible to open a newspaper—a few years ago it was even more so—without coming across the name Nietzsche somewhere or finding his way of thinking directly quoted in his sentences, in his thoughts, or otherwise alluding to him. Friedrich Nietzsche has become deeply rooted in the entire fabric of our age. Even to a mere observer of his life, he stands out as a phenomenon.

He came from a Protestant parsonage. Born in 1844, he already showed a keen interest in all religious questions in the most free and unbiased way at grammar school. Some notes from his high school days reveal not only a precocious boy, but also a person who illuminated many areas of religious questions with flashes of genius. And when he entered university, he was not only interested in his field of study, becoming one of the most outstanding students, but also in the general problems of human development. In his youth, he already achieved a great deal in the field of philology, more than others can achieve in a lifetime. Before he received his doctorate, he was offered a position in Basel. His teacher Ritschl was asked if he could recommend Friedrich Nietzsche for a chair in Basel. The famous philologist replied that he could only recommend Nietzsche, because Nietzsche knew everything he himself knew. And when he was already a professor and wanted to take his doctoral exam, he was told: We can't actually examine you! — Nietzsche, the associate professor, has been awarded a doctorate; that's what it says on the diploma! This is a sign of how deeply his mind was respected. Then he made an acquaintance that was decisive for his entire life. He became acquainted with Schopenhauer's philosophy, which he immersed himself in to such an extent that he made Schopenhauer's personality, rather than his philosophy, his guide and leader, seeing Schopenhauer as his mentor.

A second important acquaintance was Richard Wagner. These two encounters gave rise to the first epoch in Friedrich Nietzsche's intellectual life. This happened in a very personal way. When Nietzsche was a young professor in Basel, he traveled to Triebschen near Lucerne as often as he could—sometimes every Sunday. At that time, Richard Wagner was working on Siegfried. In the spirit of Schopenhauer's philosophy, most of Wagner's works and the deepest problems of intellectual life were discussed with the young Nietzsche. Wagner often said that he could find no better interpreter than Friedrich Nietzsche. If we consider the work “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,” we will find that it sheds such light on Richard Wagner's art that it immediately appears as a cultural-historical achievement that shines across the centuries, even millennia. Rarely has there been such an intimate relationship as that between the younger student and the older master, who rediscovered his ideas, which bubbled up in rich abundance within him, in the most spirited way, so to speak, by encountering them in their entirety in a friendly figure, as if from outside, so that he was able to place them in the right light. It was a phenomenon of an unprecedented kind. Wagner was fortunate to be able to say that he had found someone who understood him, as few in the world did; Nietzsche was no less fortunate, looking back to the primeval times of ancient Greece, when he believed that people still created divinely, unlike in the era he called decadent. In Richard Wagner, he saw a resurrection of the rarest kind, a man who possessed such pure, spiritual content within himself as is rarely found in human life.

It was not until 1889 that much was written about Nietzsche. Those who repeat his words only began to study his works after this time. But those who were already interested in Nietzsche around 1889 knew that he had shone like a comet during the Wagner era, that is, until about 1876, alongside Richard Wagner, but that he had then been almost forgotten. Only in the smallest circles was he still talked about. He then wrote his work “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1883), through which he became known again. Then a writing of his appeared in which he seemed to destroy everything he had previously considered his own. That was “The Case of Wagner” (1888). This made him famous again. Those who studied Nietzsche were divided into two camps. Georg Brandes gave lectures on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen. Nietzsche had not only become a university professor at a very young age, a position he soon had to give up for health reasons, but he was also honored to be the subject of university lectures. This news brought some comfort to his darkened soul, but it could no longer save it from the impending madness. Then came the news that Nietzsche had fallen irretrievably into insanity. Such was the skeleton of his outer life.

As I have already mentioned, his first work was “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.” It was born out of a rare immersion in Schopenhauer's philosophy and out of his immersion in art, as he encountered it in the work of Richard Wagner. Anyone who wants to understand what this work means as the dawn of Nietzsche's career, and also wants to understand his life's journey, must explain it from a threefold perspective. First, they must explain it from the perspective of his time, with which Nietzsche lived intimately. I myself have attempted to portray Nietzsche objectively in this way. Second, one can portray him as a being who emerges from his personality. There he is one of the most interesting psychological, even psychiatric, problems. I have also attempted to portray this in an article about Friedrich Nietzsche in a medical journal. Thirdly, one can portray him from the standpoint of the worldview of the spirit. From this third standpoint, his relationship to theosophy becomes apparent. This is what we want to consider today.

His first work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, already provides important clues from a theosophical point of view, from the standpoint of a spiritual view of the world. Our age is the age of the fifth root race of humanity, preceded by two others that had to develop forces quite different from those of our root race. Our fifth root race has to develop primarily the human life of understanding and thought. The preceding root race is the Atlantean, which lived on the continent that now lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. These people did not yet have to develop understanding or intellectuality, but primarily memory. And one of these preceding root races was the Lemurian race. This race was still at the stage of imaginative life.

Intellectual life is what our root race has to develop. For a number of centuries, European humanity in particular has been developing intellectual power, this power of the intellect. Our great philosophers, up to Kant and Schopenhauer, are the ones who are completely immersed in this developmental movement of our root race. For them, the great problem became the question: What does human thought mean, how can human beings recognize anything? For them, these questions became the great riddles of existence. But now something very peculiar is happening to our root race. The thought that philosophers have brought to its highest development has, so to speak, been detached from its mother soil in our time. In the purest and most wonderful way, our time has developed thought in science in relation to external technical life. But these mental images, or rather these ideas, have torn us away from nature. Human thought is only an image of something much higher, which we have discussed in previous lectures; it is a shadow, an image of the spiritual world. Spiritual being is thought. Modern times have developed the life of thought in a grand and powerful way; but they have forgotten that this thought is nothing other than the shadow image of spiritual life. This life sends spiritual forces into us, so to speak, and then we have the mental image. The origin of thought, of mental images, was therefore a mystery, especially for 19th-century philosophy. For them, thought, the mental image itself, became an illusion. They forgot that thought originates in the spirit, as Jakob Böhme says. When, in more recent times, attempts were made to search for the original sources of existence, to penetrate to that original source that had been lost and of which it was no longer known that it originated in the spirit, it could only be found in the sense of Schopenhauer's philosophy in the unreasonable blind will; while thought, on the other hand, was nothing more than an illusion offered to us by our mental image. Thus, the world became the mental image on the one hand and will on the other. But neither originated in the spirit anymore, only in mere appearance. How could it be otherwise than that this philosophy, running along materialistic lines, sought at least one bearer of the spirit in an element that could be found immediately in the world by any unbiased observer, where the spirit as such exists only in the form of blind will, an impulse of nature? That is precisely personality. People had forgotten that there is something spiritual in personality, but personality as such could not be denied. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, at least one thing, the spiritual human personality, was recognized as the highest; the personality that stands out through its genius or through its piety or holiness and represents, as it were, a stage of development within the rest of humanity. Thus Schopenhauer became harsh and portrayed average people as the factory products of nature; but out of the dark instincts of nature, individual great personalities crystallize. This view had an effect on Nietzsche.

But something else also influenced him. Through thoughts and mental images, we can never learn anything about what flows in the irrational will. In music, Schopenhauer finds the true essence and weaving of the chaos of primal instincts. Thus, it was not possible for Schopenhauer to penetrate through this illusory world of mental images into the essence that expresses itself in the will, but the essence of music became for him a solution to the riddle of the world. Anyone familiar with questions of mysticism knows how someone can come to the view that music offers a solution to the riddle of the world. Music exists not only on the plane we call the physical or sensory world, but also in the higher worlds. When we ascend through the world of souls into the higher spiritual worlds, we hear something of a higher music. Not the music we perceive on the physical plane, for this is not to be understood as an allegory, but as reality: the movement of the stars in space, the growth of every flower, the feelings of humans and animals appear like a sounding word! The occultist therefore says: Man only experiences the secrets of the world when the mystical word that is present in things speaks to him. What Schopenhauer found is an expression of a higher truth, something that has a much higher meaning than what he understood it to be; for with him it only resonates in the physical ear. We call the principle that transcends time and reaches into eternity Manas. This Manas finds its physical expression in the sounds of music that reach us from the outside world. Schopenhauer expressed something quite correct, and Nietzsche took up this idea. He felt with all the richness of his spirit that those who want to express themselves about the secrets of the world with mere language cannot do so in the same way as the master of sounds can express himself about the secrets of the world. And so Friedrich Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, sees in musical expression the expression of the higher secrets of the world. This also showed them the way to the primeval times of the ancient Greeks, when art, religion, and science were still one, when in the mystery temples the mystery priests, who were scientists and artists, presented the fate of man and the whole world to the soul in powerful images. When we look inside the temple, we find the fate of the god Dionysus depicted. This was the solution to the riddle of the world. But Dionysus had descended into matter and been torn to pieces, and the human spirit is called upon to redeem him from his burial in matter and lead him up to new glory. By seeking his divine nature within himself, man awakens the god within himself, and this awakening is the awakening of the god who has found a kind of grave in the lower nature. This great world destiny was presented to the mystics not only sensually, but also in a magnificent spiritual way. That was the primal drama of ancient Greece. We go back to distant times, and from this core came what later became Greek drama. The drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles was merely art; but it had emerged from temple art. Art, science, and religion had branched off from temple art. Looking back to these primeval times, one sees something deeper at the root of it all, from which the human conception of life and the shaping of life emerged. The living god Dionysus was the great figure of the Greek mysteries. Nietzsche did not recognize this within Wagner's circle, but he sensed it.

It was a great dark intuition, and from it arose his conception of the nature of the Greeks before Socrates. At that time, man was not one-sided, but the Dionysian man drew from the fullness of life. And because everything is imperfect, the Greeks created the redeeming religion and wisdom, and later also the redeeming art. Thus, for Nietzsche, what later appeared as art seemed only like a reflection of the ancient art, which he calls Dionysian. This still gripped the whole human being, not just one-sidedly the imagination, but all spiritual powers. Later, art was only a reflection.

Thus, the two concepts of Dionysian and Apollonian appear in his works. Through them, he senses the origin of all artistic life and language, through which the ancient Greeks expressed themselves. It was a language that was also music. The drama was performed in the center, surrounded by the choir, which depicted life and death in powerful sounds.

Others who were also intimately familiar with Wagner's circle portrayed this fate even more profoundly. You will find it depicted above all in the spirit of the Eleusinian mysteries in the book “The Sanctuaries of the Orient” by Schuré. What Nietzsche merely sensed, Edouard Schuré portrayed not only from his imagination, but also from spirituality. It is what Nietzsche wanted but did not achieve. On this basis, the entire materialistic way of thinking of our time became a great mystery for him: How did man come from this time, in which he declared himself to be the mystery of the world, to the dry materialistic time? For others, this may have been a dry puzzle of reason; for Nietzsche, however, it became a problem of the heart, which others sought to address and solve with reason, intellect, and imagination. Nietzsche was fused with his time as parents are fused with their children. But he could not rejoice in the times, only suffer. That is what Nietzsche could do: suffer, but not rejoice. Therein lies the solution to the Nietzsche problem.

In Wagner, he saw the renewer of ancient Greek art, which expresses the highest mysteries in sound. The old man was to ascend to the superman, to the divine man. This required a man who transcended the average measure of men. And Schopenhauer came just at the right time. According to Schopenhauer, the average human being was factory-made. Man became a spiritual and emotional being who was not on earth but hovered above it, and dramatic music was used as a means of transcending humanity. No one wrote as reverently about Richard Wagner as Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay “Wagner in Bayreuth” in 1876. But for him, everyday life had become something deeply despicable. That is why he also fought against what David Friedrich Strauss had expressed in his work “The Old and the New Faith.”

There is another text from the early 1870s, a text without which it is impossible to understand Nietzsche. This text shows that Nietzsche sensed the problem of our time, which we recently called the Tolstoy problem, as well as the great Greek problem. He sensed that something was missing in our time, which is now passing. The external forms are indeed that in which birth and death reign eternally. We have seen how every plant lives in its form between birth and death, how entire peoples pass away between birth and death, how the most magnificent works are subject to birth and death. But we have also seen how one thing remains, something that defeats birth and death, that shapes and constantly reshapes, that allows the old to be reborn in ever new incarnations. Leo Tolstoy depicted this life, which the seed of a plant carries over into a new plant and which reappears there.

And again, our present human race is embodied in forms that have birth and death. We are rushing toward a time that will recognize life itself. Nietzsche had recognized that our time is sick with the contemplation of forms, not only in natural science, but also in history. It was in this spirit that he wrote his important work on the benefits and harms of history, on the historical disease. People go back to the most distant primeval times and want to observe the beginnings of culture, from people to people, from nation to nation, from state to state. And yet birth and death live in all of them. By filling ourselves with historical knowledge, we kill the life that we have within us. We kill what lives in us in eternal presence. The more we fill ourselves with the memory material of history, the more we kill the will to live within us. If we look back and assess what this means, we see that we can only find something by looking directly at human life, by looking at ourselves. This brings us closer to a new future.

Nietzsche points to this new cultural epoch, which we must regard as that of form and shape. This is what weaves and lives in Nietzsche. He believed in Richard Wagner's art, believing it to be a renewal of life, a new renaissance. Wagner was much more realistic than Nietzsche. He was very much of his time; he told himself that an artist cannot take the third step before the first. And when Nietzsche came to Bayreuth in 1876, he saw something strange. He saw that the ideal he had formed of Wagner was too grand, that it was greater than what Wagner could fulfill. Just as Nietzsche had a dark premonition of the emergence of Greek tragedy from the mystery period and of our entire era from primeval times, he also had a premonition that a future culture, one not based solely on reason, must emerge from the spiritual powers still slumbering in human beings today. He sensed this, and he confused it with what already existed. He believed that the great mystery of the future had already been solved in the present. His objection to Socrates was that, through his influence, our culture had become one-sided, that it had split into a culture of reason on the one hand and a sentimental movement on the other. That is why he mocks Socrates and fights against Socratic culture, the culture of reason.

When Wagner's works of art confronted him in Bayreuth, he became disloyal, or rather, not disloyal, because he had never really seen Wagner; he had seen in Wagner what he had dreamed of as his ideal for the future; then Nietzsche said to himself: I have seen something wrong. — Nietzsche as a man thus became unfaithful to the young Nietzsche, and his harsh words are directed not so much against Wagner as against what he himself had been in his youth as an admirer of Wagner. One cannot really be someone else's opponent; one can only be one's own opponent. “I feel all my youthful ideals compromised,” he felt. He stood in the midst of the ruins of a worldview. He had to look for something else. And that became the “new enlightenment.” What he had previously rejected, he now wanted to inspire and enliven. He wanted to strike life out of dead matter, as science treats it. Now he himself became a student of form, of the outer shape that passes us by eternally in birth and death.

And now let us grasp the profound theosophical truth that three things live in the world: the outer form, which is subject to birth and death, which arises and passes away, reappears anew, hurries from form to form in life; then life, which is the expression of the soul. The soul breaks through the form in order to be reborn in a new form. And grasp a third thing: consciousness in its various degrees. Every stone, every plant, and in the higher degrees every human being has consciousness. So we have three things in the world: form, life, and consciousness. This triad is the expression of a world of the physical, a world of the soul, and a world of the spirit.

This is the wisdom that will gradually be rediscovered by the world. It is also the ancient wisdom of the mysteries that Nietzsche had a vague inkling of in his heart, but for which he could find no clear expression, which he suffered from and which he longed for as a new life that should emerge from our culture. Now he himself was entangled in natural science. He had no eye for the fact that it is consciousness that lives in life and ascends to higher and higher forms. That is the way of the world. Consciousness takes from form that which is worthy of being drawn out for higher formation. This gives us a development of things from form to form, from stage of life to stage of life, where life remains and the forms and shapes show increased development. He no longer understood the consciousness that develops and enters into ever higher and higher forms. Nietzsche now saw only the form; he did not understand the moving force that appears in ever higher forms.

Thus it came about that he recognized the return of things and beings, but did not recognize that they reincarnate in ever higher and higher forms. Therefore, he taught the “return of the same.” He no longer knew that consciousness returns at higher levels. This is the idea to which he was influenced by natural science: Just as we are now, just as we sit here, we have been here countless times before and will be here again. This must impose itself on the thinker who does not know that consciousness does not return in the same form, but in an elevated form. That was the second stage of Nietzsche's development.

The third stage is one that must be described as follows: nevertheless, Nietzsche's spiritual life was within his soul, but he was unable to bring it out in such a worldview of mere form. Although he did not know that the higher realms of existence were closed to him, he did have a powerful urge to reach these higher realms of existence. Human beings have evolved from animals to humans. However, this evolution cannot be complete. Just as worms evolved into humans, humans must continue to evolve. This gave rise to the idea of the superhuman. This superhuman is what humans will become in the future. Compare this with the corresponding mystical idea, and you will find that they are very similar. The urge in human nature, which is also expressed in us, is the urge toward spiritualization, so that even now, at the bottom of the soul, one can find the God-man who descends from the future world and who appears to Nietzsche as a great spiritual ideal toward which he strives.

If we consider not only form and shape, but also life and consciousness, soul and spirit, then this superhuman appears in his true form, then he appears as the whole human being who will hasten to the higher spheres of existence. For Nietzsche, this idea was present in its infancy, but he could only express it in the words of a natural scientist. Just as man has developed from a thousand and a thousand forms, so must he also develop into higher forms, into the superhuman. When Nietzsche wrote “The Birth of Tragedy,” he stood before the gate of the Greek mysteries, he stood before the gate of the temple of Dionysus, but he could not unlock the entrance gate. Then he struggled on and wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra: once again he stood before the gates of the temple — and could not unlock them. That is the tragedy of his life, of his fate. So when you stand as an individual human being, as an I, suffering with and feeling with your time, facing the soul-spiritual, then something very special happens to this I. Anyone who is familiar with the phenomena of the astral world knows what must happen to this human I when it stands in this way, full of spirit, before pure riddles and gates that do not open to it: before every question in the spiritual world stands something that is like the shadow of this question, appearing as a persecutor of the soul. This will seem somewhat peculiar to the materialistic thinker at first. But those who stood before Christianity and did not know how it would develop, those who stood before our philosophy, before the materialism of our time, and desired a new Dionysus but could not bring him forth from within themselves, stood there as before the shadows of the past. Thus, for Nietzsche, within what we call the astral world, the figure of Christ stood alongside the figure of the Antichrist, the moralist alongside the immoralist. What he knew as the philosophy of our time stood alongside negation. That was what tormented him like a persecutor of his ego.

Read Nietzsche's last writings, his “Will to Power” and his “Antichrist,” where he depicts the specter, the critique of Christianity, the critique of philosophy in his nihilism. He cannot escape these things; the morality of our time inhibits him, which cannot escape good and evil, which does not want to recognize karma, even though it strives for it. Finally, the eternal change of form appeared to him as the return of the eternally same form. The fourth work was never completed. He wanted to call it “Dionysus or the Philosophy of Eternal Return.” So all that remained was the urge of the solitary ego toward the superhuman.

Nietzsche should have looked into the human self and recognized the divine human being, then what he desired would have dawned on him. But as it was, it seemed unattainable to him. It was only the violent urge within him to grasp this content. He called this his will to power, his striving for the superman. With all the intensity of his being, he found a lyrical expression that is soul-lifting, soul-cheering, and equally soul-consuming, sometimes even paradoxical, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is the cry of modern man for the God-man, for wisdom, but it only leads to the will to wisdom, to the will to power. Lyrical greatness can arise from this urge. But something that can touch people in their deepest innermost being and lead them up to these heights cannot arise from this urge. Thus, the figure of Nietzsche is the last great empathy with materialism, the man who suffered tragically, who tragically perished from the materialism of the 19th century, and who points with all his longing to the new mystical age. Meister Eckhart says that God died so that I too might die to the world and all created things and become God. Nietzsche also says this in a prose saying: “If there were a God, who could bear not to be God?” So Nietzsche says there is no God! He did not understand Goethe's saying:

Were not the eye sunlike,
It could never behold the sun;
Were not God's own power within us,
How could the divine delight us?

That which became so clear in our time and which he perceived as suffering had to consume him. I do not want to say that his illness had anything to do with his spiritual life. What he longed for but could not achieve was the theosophical worldview. He felt a longing for something he could not find. He himself felt this in many tormenting expressions of his life. That is why his last writings also contain a longing for the life he wants to conjure out of form, and then again a lyrical cry for the God-man in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” Then the destruction of everything that the present could not give him, which he wanted to attempt in the writings “Will to Power” or “The Eternal Return,” which remained only fragments and have now been published from his estate. All of this lived in Nietzsche's tragic personality in his final days and shows how one can suffer in our time if one does not rise to a spiritual outlook. He himself expressed this in a poem, “Ecce Homo,” in which he presents us with the riddle of his own life:

Yes, I know where I come from!
Unsatisfied, like a flame
I glow and consume myself.
Everything I touch becomes light,
Everything I leave behind becomes coal:
I am certainly a flame!