The Origin and Goal of the Human Being

GA 53 — 23 March 1905, Berlin

Ibsen's Spiritual Disposition

Before I conclude this winter's series of lectures with a picture of the future of humanity and human ideals, I would like to talk today about the intellectual life of the present, as expressed in one of the most important and significant intellectual heroes of our time.

I would like to speak about Ibsen's intellectual character not from a literary or aesthetic point of view, but from the point of view of worldview; for in fact, everything that the deepest and best minds of the present day feel and think is expressed precisely in Ibsen.

It has often been said that every poet is an expression of his time. Certainly, this statement is true, but it can only be understood if one gives it a very specific meaning. Just as Homer, Sophocles, and Goethe were expressions of their time, so too is Henrik Ibsen undoubtedly an expression of the present, and yet how very differently our time is reflected in him than in those personalities of their time.

To recognize how different the turn of the 18th century was, the time of Goethe, Schiller, and Herder, and how differently our time expresses itself, one need only compare two things. Goethe completes the second part of his “Faust,” seals it, and leaves it behind as a great testament to his life. He leaves behind a legacy that shines brightly into the future, full of power, in the belief that “the trace of my days on earth cannot perish in eons.” A person who is essentially the representative of all humanity stands before us in Faust. We cling to him, we fill ourselves with meaning and vitality through him. Goethe points this out to us beyond his death. Faust cannot become outdated; we find ever deeper truths in it. We perceive him as something that lives on, something we have not exhausted: this is a conclusion to life that points to the future.

Long before his death, Henrik Ibsen consciously concluded his life's work with his drama “When We Dead Awaken.” What has fulfilled people for half a century, what revolutionary and other ideas were present, has passed through the soul of Henrik Ibsen. He has described what moves hearts, what sets them apart, what makes them fight the struggle for existence in an unprecedented way. This drama has the effect of a great retrospective and stands as a symbol for the artist himself. He was a hermit in human life, a hermit in his own life. For half a century, he searched for human happiness and truth, sparing no effort to attain light and truth, to clarify the great mysteries. Now he himself awakens, feels what lies behind him as something dead, something deceased, and decides to write no more. It is a retrospective that points only to the transitory; what he longed for appears to him as something mysterious, something that did not really exist — his ideals collapse behind him. Since he has awakened, he does not know what to do next. — This is the poet who is the representative of our time, the greatest poet. This life balance sheet is a critique of everything we have — a surrender and at the same time an awakening from and to the critique of our time. A powerful overview of modern life is expressed in this drama; if we keep it in mind, we will understand the tragedy in the poet's personality. For Henrik Ibsen is a tragic personality.

If you want to understand him completely, you must see him as a representative of our time. Therefore, do not consider it scholarly cleverness when I first try to grasp the nerve of our time, for Henrik Ibsen is an expression of it. One word characterizes our time and also the whole of Ibsen, and that word is “personality.” Goethe also said: “The highest happiness of earthly children is only personality.” But with Ibsen, it happens in a completely different way. Ibsen is very much a child of our time, and this is where we will best understand him.

Remember how different personality was in ancient Greece. How does Oedipus stand there? Oedipus's fate extends far beyond his entire family. We must look for the threads in completely different regions: fate extends far beyond his individual personality, it is elevated above personality—but what is not yet elevated is the personal from the moral connection with the whole world. That is the difference with today: that we now have to seek the center in the personality, that fate has been transferred to the personality. We can follow this step by step. With the advent of Christianity, the urge of the personality to satisfy itself arises. The personality wants to be free, at least free from the highest, the divine. The connections are torn apart, the personality is left to its own devices. And throughout the Middle Ages, the personality tries to grasp itself.

How deeply connected the whole environment still is to the personality in Greece! How man grows out of his surroundings! He is born out of the whole cosmos. The external configuration of Greek life, however, is like a work of art: Plato creates an idea of the state into which the individual is to fit like a limb into the whole body. Christianity brings forth a different ideal; but this new ideal is bought at the price of closeness to nature; it is sought above nature. The Christian seeks what is to redeem his personality in something that transcends personality. Even the individual Roman felt himself to be a member of the whole state: he is first a citizen, then a human being. In the Middle Ages, there is a mood that looks beyond the environment, looks up to a world beyond, to which one clings. This makes a big difference to the whole of human thinking, feeling, and willing. And this continues into modern times.

The Greek and Roman citizens lived and died for what surrounded them, what lived in their external world. In the Middle Ages, something of a divine world order still lived, not in the environment, but in what flowed over from the divine, in the “Gospel of the Good News,” and expressed it as if in a mirror. This divine world order lived in the best as well as in the simplest souls, in the mystic as well as in the people. It is something that is given from outside, but which lives in the soul as something new. What takes place in the world of the stars as the will of God fills the soul with meaning: one knows what lies beyond birth and death.

Let us take the new era and first look at Shakespeare from an artistic point of view. What is expressed in Shakespeare's plays, and what lives foremost in these plays, is character. There was no such thing in Greece or in the Middle Ages. Shakespeare's plays are character dramas; the main interest is focused on the human being himself, on what is happening in the depths of his soul, as he is placed in the world.

The Middle Ages had no real drama; people were preoccupied with other interests. Now personality begins to emerge—but with it, everything that is indefinite and incomprehensible about personality. Take Hamlet: one can hear so many different interpretations of it from so many scholars! No other work has probably been written about in so many books. And this stems from the fact that this character himself has something indefinite about him. He is no longer a reflection of the outside world, nor is he a mirror of the good news.

The whole worldview of modern times takes on this character. Look at the figure of Kant, how everything is placed in the personality! What he says would not have been possible in the Middle Ages, nor in antiquity. What he represents is something completely indefinite: act in such a way that your actions could become a guideline for the general public. — But this ideal remains completely indefinite. He says: we cannot know, we have limits that we cannot transcend with our reason; we only sense something dark that urges and drives us. — Kant calls it the categorical imperative.

The Greeks and medieval people had specific, clearly defined ideals. Not only did they know that they should live like other people in their sense: they lived in their blood. That had now changed: a categorical imperative with no real content stood before reason; nothing fills this soul with specific ideals. That was the situation in the 18th century.

Something has awakened in our classics that demands certain ideals. It is interesting that Schiller, who was no less a harsh critic of his time than Ibsen — take “The Robbers”: Karl Moor wants something specific, he wants to create people who transform their time, not just criticize it — it is interesting that Schiller has faith in the ideal and says: Whatever the world may be like, I will put people into it who can lift this world out of its hinges.

This is even more evident in Goethe's “Faust.” Goethe appears here like a spirit looking into the new dawn.

But then came the 19th century with its demand for freedom, for individuality. What is freedom? In what should people be free? One must want something specific. But it was freedom itself that people wanted. In addition, the 19th century had become the most rationalistic. People see their surroundings, but no ideal emerges from them; people are no longer carried by ideals. Man stands at the pinnacle of his personality, and personality has become an end in itself. As a result, humanity today can no longer distinguish between two concepts: individuality and personality; it no longer separates what must be separated.

What is individuality? Individuality is that which rises up in the world with substance. When I have a meaningful idea about the future, when I form a picture of what I want to bring into the world, my personality may be strong or weak, but it is the bearer of these ideals, the shell of my individuality. The sum of all these ideals is the individuality that shines forth from the personality. The 19th century does not make this distinction; it sees the mere powerful personality, in what is actually supposed to be a vessel, as an end in itself. Therefore, personality becomes something nebulous, and with it, what used to be crystal clear also becomes something foggy. In the past, mysticism was called mathesis because it was as clear as two plus two. People lived in such spiritual content, they looked within themselves and found something higher than personality: they recognized their individuality. The 19th century cannot understand mysticism; people talk about it as something unclear, incomprehensible. This was something that was necessary: personality had to be felt like a hollowed-out bellows. Today, people talk most about personality, but real personality is least present. Where personality is fulfilled by individuality, people talk least about it because it is taken for granted. People talk most about what is not there. Therefore, when the 19th century talks about mysticism, it talks about something unclear. We understand why this has come about.

As a son of his time, Henrik Ibsen looked deeply into this personality and this era. Like an honest seeker of truth, he strives for the true content of personality, but as someone who was born entirely out of his time. “Ah, my eyes are blinded by the light to which they turn.”

How would an ancient Roman have spoken of justice? It was self-evident to him; just as he would not have denied the light, he would not have denied justice. Ibsen says: “Justice? Where is it still considered justice?” Today, everything is determined by power, for better or worse. — Thus, we see Henrik Ibsen as a thoroughly revolutionary spirit. He looked into the human breast and found nothing there; everything that the 19th century had to offer was worthless to him. He says it outright: Oh, how these old ideals of the French Revolution have lost their power; today we need a revolution of the whole human spirit! — That is the mood expressed in Ibsen's plays.

Let us consider the old days once more. The Greeks felt at home in their polis, the Romans in their state, and medieval people felt themselves to be children of God. How does the son of the new age feel? He finds nothing around him that can sustain him. The Greeks and medieval people did not feel lonely — in Ibsen's work, the strongest man is the loneliest. This feeling of loneliness is something thoroughly modern, and it is from this that Ibsen's art arises. However, this concept, which speaks from Ibsen's dramas—that we must appeal to the human personality—is not clear. These forces in human beings, which must be exposed, are something vague, but we must turn to them. And so Ibsen tries to understand the people around him in this way. — But what else can one see in such a time as the struggle of the personality, which has been torn out of all social context? Yes, there is a second possibility: when people are still connected to the state, to their environment, so that the personality bows down and denies itself. But what can these connections still be for people today? In the past, they were real, but now people stand alone—and disharmony arises between the individual and their environment.

Ibsen has a keen sense of the untruthfulness of these connections between people and their environment. The truth seeker becomes a sharp critic of lies. His heroes therefore become uprooted personalities, and those who want to establish a connection with their environment must resort to lies and can only do so by deceiving their own self-awareness. This attitude lives on in the dramas of the middle period. We see this when we let “Brand,” “Peer Gynt,” “Kaiser und Galiläer.” In the latter drama, we find a reference to three ages. The first is the one we have characterized above, that of the past, where external form was so important. Emperor Julian looks across to the second, that of the Galilean, which shows an internalization of the soul. But a third age is to come, where man once again has ideals and expresses them from the inside out. In the past, fate came from outside. What must be longed for are inner ideals that the strong man can impress upon the world; he should be a messenger — not imitating, but shaping, creating. The third age of the world, in which the ideal comes into its own, has not yet been reached. In solitude, man finds it in his soul, but not in such a way that it has the strength and power to shape the world. This union of Christianity with the ancient ideal is the opposite path. But Ibsen has placed this ideal on a weak soul, which collapses under its weight; Julian is still a man of the past.

Once again, we are dealing with a person who rests on the merely formal, the hollowed-out personality: nothing is more characteristic of Ibsen than the way in which he has placed the hard, gnarled figure of his “Brand” in our time. He is not despotic or autocratic, but torn out of his connection with his environment. He stands there as a clergyman, surrounded by people for whom the connection with the divine has become a lie. Next to him stands a clergyman who believes what he can believe only because he has no strong sense of faith at all.

An ideal that is higher must be able to affect all people. The theosophical ideal of brotherhood immerses human actions in gentleness and kindness and sees every human being as a brother. As long as this ideal has not yet been born and people must rely on the scraps and remnants of old ideals that mix personality and individuality, they will appear hard and unyielding. Those who place such a high value on the ideal of personality become hard and unyielding like Brand, and must be so. Individuality binds, personality separates. However, this passage through personality exposed forces that had to be developed and would not otherwise have emerged. We had to lose the old ideals in order to rebirth them at a higher level. A poet like Ibsen had to delve into this personality and portray it as hollow, as he does so magnificently in “The League of Youth.”

What works on personality, what it is supposed to present as a mental image, he portrayed in his later dramas, in which he becomes a positive critic of the times, as in “The Pillars of Society.”

He shows us the personality in conflict with its surroundings in “Ghosts.” In conflict with her environment, Mrs. Alving must lie where she seeks the truth in order to bring her son into a pure atmosphere. And so fate befalls her as it did the ancient Greeks. Ibsen lives under the sign of Darwin, and this Oswald is not in a spiritual, ethical connection with what has gone before, but in that of heredity. Personality, insofar as it is soul, can only be torn out of its surroundings; physicality is connected to physical heredity, and so a fate that flows purely from physical laws befalls Oswald Alving like a moral, spiritual-divine fate befalls the ancient heroes.

Thus, Ibsen is very much a son of his time. But he also shows what is justified in this personality—the personality that may later become individuality again.

This problem confronts us in a particularly characteristic way in women. “Nora” lives, as it were, in a doll's house and grows out of it, seeking the path to individuality. All ancient worldviews have stated that there is an individual, natural difference between men and women, and this has continued into our time. In order to shed this, it was necessary to find a way through personality. Only as personalities can men and women stand on equal footing; only when they find the same in their personalities can they develop the same individuality, so that they can one day go into the future as comrades. As long as ideals were brought in from outside, they were connected with the natural, and the natural was rooted in the difference between man and woman, which can only be balanced in the soul. This contrast was carried from nature into religion—even in the Middle Ages, when it still had an echo of the natural in the divine itself.

In the ancient religions, you find the male and female principles side by side as something that permeates all of existence, lives and weaves in nature. We find it in Osiris and Isis, even in God the Father and Mary. Only when the basis of nature was stripped away, only when the soul was reached and emancipated, did the personal in human beings struggle to freedom, through that which is not linked to the differentiation between man and woman. Only then was the contrast between male and female overcome. And the poet of personality also had to find the characteristic word for it. Thus, this differentiation grows as a problem in him in dramas such as “Nora,” “Rosmersholm,” and “The Lady from the Sea.”

We see how Ibsen is connected with everything that constitutes the greatness, though perhaps also the emptiness, of our time. The more Ibsen looked to the future, the more he felt how emptiness must ensue when personality is emancipated, detached from its divine-spiritual connections. Thus, in “Master Builder Solness,” Ibsen himself faces the problem of personality with the big question for the future: We have freed personality—but to what end? Something undefined remains in this search for the essential. As a true seeker of truth, he depicts this unknown as in the parable in The Lady from the Sea. She becomes free—from her old duties. But to what end? One must ask further. This is wonderfully symbolically depicted in the drama.

As he seeks to delve even further into the mysteries of life in “Little Eyolf” and “When We Dead Awaken,” something deep in the human heart that he had previously believed in disappears. The sculptor in “When We Dead Awaken,” who sought to grasp the ideal, is seized by despair. He is still unable to shape the free human being: animal faces rise up before him. He seeks something that elevates him above this, he wants to creatively shape a resurrection—but the grotesque always forces itself before his eyes, stands in front of the image. When he realizes that he cannot overcome it, he awakens—and sees what our time lacks, what it does not have. An immensely tragic moment is presented to us in “When We Dead Awaken.”

Thus Henrik Ibsen is a bold prophet of our time: deep in his heart, he feels certain that there must be something that transcends personality; but he remains silent, and this silence has something immensely tragic about it. Those who have familiarized themselves with what transcends the personality itself beyond birth and death, those who have familiarized themselves with the great law of karma, find new meaning even in the personal. They establish a new ideal, they transcend the personality and become confessors and masters of this great law of compensatory justice.

Ancient man trusted in the reality around him; he built the supports of his soul upon it. The Middle Ages experienced the ideal in the innermost part of the soul. Modern man has descended into loneliness in his personality, into egoism. He still feels the categorical imperative, but as something vague and obscure. He strives for personal freedom, but the question arises: What is the purpose of liberating the personality?

The old ideals no longer speak to our time; a new one must arise.

Freedom that is no longer dependent on personal arbitrariness, that is reconnected with divine ideals – bringing this about is the goal of theosophical worldview. Working to build this future is spiritual, theosophical life, theosophical worldview.

Only when the best of our time point to this theosophical, spiritual-scientific worldview rooted in cosmic reality does it have the significance it must have. And when a great man remains silent in tragic modesty, one who has stirred the spirits like Henrik Ibsen, this is such an indication.

In the waning days of the 19th century, he wrote “When We Dead Awaken.” Well then, now is the time for Goethe's words to come true for us dead:

And as long as you do not have this,
This: Die and become! You are but a dull guest

It is time for us to live again, to become personalities again, but emancipated personalities: individualities.