# Anthroposophy: Its Roots of Knowledge and Fruits of Life

## GA 78 — 31 August 1921, Stuttgart

### Third Lecture

Yesterday, I took the liberty of pointing out how I recorded what I attempted to formulate in the 1980s and 1990s against agnostic attitudes from the sources of anthroposophical worldview in my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1893. This Philosophy of Freedom bears the motto on its title page: “Results of spiritual observation according to the scientific method.” Initially, this motto was directed against a worldview that I admired to a certain extent: the worldview of Eduard von Hartmann, whose Philosophy of the Unconscious bore the motto: “Speculative results according to inductive scientific method.”

“Speculative results” was something that seemed to me to be fundamentally contrary to the true meaning of real intellectual and human knowledge, because speculative results, speculative thoughts, can only be understood as something that arises when, through abstract logic, one infers something imperceptible from what one perceives concludes something that cannot be perceived, that is, when one recurs, as it were, through inference to something unknown that can only be reached through thought, not through perception.

Against this whole way of thinking, I had to assert that everything that is to be knowledge and the content of life for human beings in every direction must in some way enter directly into observation and perception. Just as external scientific facts present themselves to consciousness and can be observed, so too must spiritual and mental content come before consciousness and thereby be accessible to observation. For if it were not possible to bring into consciousness everything that in any way concerns human beings, especially in relation to their innermost being, then one would have to assume that human beings are controlled and guided by forces from unknown worlds, worlds that can at best be accessed through abstract thinking, but which can never be experienced. But anyone who carries the phenomenon of freedom, the experience of freedom in the full sense of the word, directly in their consciousness cannot help but reject metaphysical results in the sense I have indicated; they must strive to have as the results of their observation, as the possible present content of their soul, that which can influence them precisely in relation to their most intimate being. The philosophy of freedom seemed to me inseparable from what can be expressed in the sentence: “Spiritual results of observation according to the scientific method,” that is, the method of observation that science had learned to adhere to would also have to be extended to what should become the content of spiritual life for human beings.

The question of a philosophy of freedom became a burning one on such grounds, for what the concept of freedom encompasses is an immediate human experience, and basically all that is needed is enough impartiality to say to oneself: Human freedom is experienced. - There is the experience of the free human being in consciousness. In this case, the view of nature that arises from agnosticism, because it actually rejects everything that points to the spirit, cannot arrive at an unbiased judgment about this immediate experience of freedom; for it sees its ideal in explaining everything according to the so-called causal method, that is, in such a way that every event is conditioned by a cause and proves to be an effect. And this agnostic-scientific attitude believes that it violates the laws of a true explanation of the world if it allows anything to be valid that cannot be explained according to the principle of causal necessity. But no matter how hard one tries to explain the world in terms of causal necessity, precisely when one consistently develops this causal explanation, one cannot use it to approach the experience of human freedom. This immediate experience simply falls outside the scope of the causal explanation.

How has the agnostic-scientific attitude helped? It has simply, I would say, obscured the immediate experience of human freedom through causal explanation. One says: causal explanation does not allow for human freedom; therefore, it does not exist. And so, if on the one hand you cannot help but look impartially at the experience of freedom and on the other hand you are sincere about modern science, you are faced with a dilemma as a human being: either to abolish freedom, which you can only do if you obscure your impartiality, or devise all kinds of means of information so that this freedom can apparently be brought into some conceptual connection with the causal explanation of natural science.

These paths could not be taken for anthroposophical thinking. Precisely when it was serious about the causal explanation of natural science and also about the principle of “impartiality of observation,” it would also have to observe the phenomenon of freedom impartially. And so it became necessary to apply the spirit of scientific observation, the spirit that is trained in observing the physical, biological, and other phenomena of external nature, to the phenomenon, to the manifestation of human freedom. But this could only happen if the whole cognitive disposition of the soul toward this problem of freedom became different from what it is in the scientific approach. The latter had to be retained on the one hand; but in order to move on to the problem of freedom in its sense, it had to be further developed on the other hand. In a sense, what is achieved in natural science through thinking that summarizes and illuminates natural phenomena had to be elevated into free human experience itself.

In observing nature, one relies on external sensory experience. In contrast to sensory experience, one develops the human world of thought, the content of thinking, and what emerges as true reality is that which is composed of the one-sided experiential content of the external world and the one-sided content of thinking. One supplements what, as I said yesterday, confronts man as a half-reality through his organization. If one wants to grasp this freedom, which is an experience directly identical with man, one cannot rely on the external. One must connect thinking itself with what one might call the process of one's ego. One must look at what stands before one in freedom, but in looking, one must at the same time develop thinking as one otherwise develops it in the phenomena of external nature.

What Goethe liked so much when Heinroth called his thinking objective must come to light at an even higher level if one wants to grasp the revelation of freedom, for Goethe connected his thinking with the external sensuality of the plant world. There he succeeded in immersing his thinking in the object, in living with active thinking within the object itself; but the object remained passive. If one wants to apply this, if I may still call it that, concrete thinking to freedom, then one must penetrate in a much more intimate way with the activity of thinking a supersensible spirituality that is in constant activity in the fabric of the human soul. One must not penetrate something external, but rather that which develops within oneself with the activity of thinking. In this way, however, that which now becomes the content of thinking breaks away from any attachment to an object in the ordinary sense.

What thinking accomplishes here becomes itself an act of liberation. Thinking elevates itself, not by becoming contentless, but precisely by being filled with the most intimate flow of the human being itself, to a free flow that allows one thing to flow out of another. The content of the soul is filled with something that it itself produces and that is at the same time objective in its production. The spirit of scientific thinking is carried up into the search for the most important results of the soul for human beings.

But with this, the spiritual scientific method was applied to the realm that underlies human beings as ethical, moral beings, and this consists of nothing other than the experience of a content that is there when the human soul life breaks away from its attachment to an external object. And if the soul can then experience something else, that experience is supersensible. Qualitatively, what has been strived for as results of soul observation is nothing other than what I later asserted with regard to the exploration of the various realms of the supersensible worlds. What was later asserted does indeed lead us into realms other than those that are immediately accessible to human beings in ordinary life; but with regard to the innermost state of the soul, one proceeds in the same way for these supersensible realms as one must proceed when investigating the nature of human freedom, so that one obtains a real understanding of this nature. One initially limits the object of investigation to the human being as a free being within the physical world, but this free being is rooted in the supersensible. In the investigations of freedom, one moves in a stream of supersensible research. Anyone who takes seriously, in the full sense of the word, what they are actually doing, what is actually happening within them as they move in this stream of supersensible research, will gradually find the way to apply what they have now used for the investigation of human freedom to other areas as well. And one thing emerges for them from such investigations with a clearly speaking necessity: that if human beings do not obscure the path to freedom with scientific prejudices, if they impartially investigate what is available to them in their everyday lives in the realm of freedom, then they will come to at least initially to recognize for this area that he is capable of breaking away in his inner soul life from the physicality that is otherwise the tool of thought, because this physicality must provide precisely what external observation offers, to which thought then adds itself as a supplement. And one knows what supersensible research is when one has researched the problem of freedom in the right way. One is already in the spirit of this research, which then also leads up to the heights of the supersensible world. But precisely because the spirit of agnosticism has led to the preference for denying an unbiased observation result such as that which comes from the investigation of freedom, rather than modifying the meaning of the causal explanation, it was indeed necessary to oppose what the scientific worldview had made of the problem of freedom at the end of the 19th century.

What man experiences in his innermost being, what he experiences in relation to his relationship with the world, requires that he come to terms with himself about what in the world and in his nature gives rise to the impulse of freedom. If man cannot come to terms with this, then the consequences arise for him in his immediate life. These consequences manifest themselves in such a way that he becomes an incomprehensible being, one that is not transparent to his own knowledge and thus also to his life. He then feels in the world as if he were not standing on solid ground with his knowledge. He looks inside himself, so to speak, and where he wanted to see his own being shining and glowing, he sees a kind of hollowness. This emptiness can be discussed and philosophized about, but it is impossible to live with. It hollows out life itself, desolates it, kills its most important, its most intense drives, erases what human beings need in terms of inner substance in order to find the connection with the outer substance in the activity that is necessary for them and the world. If one wants to understand human beings in their relationship to action, then one needs a philosophy of freedom. But then, at least for the problem of freedom, one also needs supersensible research.

This problem of freedom shows with great clarity how human beings themselves must oppose the agnostic worldview. If one wanted to advance to anthroposophy, this could weigh heavily on the soul if one was at the same time completely honest about what scientific research has produced in a magnificent way in recent times. For anyone who views knowledge as I described yesterday — as a life process, not just something formal — must, if they strive for knowledge, connect their life with this real process of knowledge itself. And by becoming a person of action, what they are for the world connects with what is revealed to them through their knowledge as their innermost being.

Now, in this age of agnosticism, one could also encounter a human phenomenon that presents itself as the living embodiment of the question: How can one live with what agnostic thinking regards as an absolute, irrefutable truth? For those who wanted to grapple with this significant riddle of life in the last third of the 19th century, this human phenomenon must have seemed in some way like a riddle of the times. By this human phenomenon, I mean Friedrich Nietzsche. For everyone in the last third of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche was a human phenomenon who embodied what came to mind when one searched for the sources of knowledge of anthroposophical life. This is what is unique about Friedrich Nietzsche's personality: that, in a sense, his soul absorbed everything that could be experienced in the most outstanding worlds of thought and feeling that were pushing against agnosticism in the last third of the 19th century.

Friedrich Nietzsche started out with a sound intellectual life, and although he was actually an excellent philologist, so excellent that he obtained a university professorship before he had even completed his doctorate, his soul was drawn to the scientific direction of his time. He could not help but relate to the world in such a way that this world became his perception in the sense of the scientific mindset of his time. Since he had to experience the whole, the full humanity, he needed for this world of perception, which is only half the world, that which must first connect from within the soul with this world of perception to form a complete reality. Nietzsche saw the external world of perception, and he saw it as one had to see it in the spirit of his era. And the impression of this world of perception pained Nietzsche. One need only place the entire psychology of Nietzsche's soul before one's own soul in order to understand the sentence: External observation, tinged with a scientific mindset, became an inner pain for Nietzsche. — What we have here is nothing less than the scientific way of thinking gradually turning the external world of perception into one that causes inner pain when one allows it to affect oneself. For everything that causes pain is that which man would like to see in such a way that it fulfills him, that it gives his soul content, and of which he then nevertheless becomes aware that it does not give him full content, that it leaves him empty. Then the terrible thing arises in his soul that he is hungry for what the world should give him, and that he cannot satisfy this hunger because the world cannot give him full satisfaction.

This is what Nietzsche felt at first when he became a man in the 1860s. He then turned to that which could lead him beyond this pain experienced in the innermost depths of his soul through external perception, beyond this worldly suffering. He searched everywhere for elements in world culture and human development that could help him rise above the great inner pain he experienced in his interactions with the world. And two things came to him: First, he immersed himself in the wonderful musical world and artistic worldview of Richard Wagner. He sought with all his soul to immerse himself in the way Richard Wagner, leaving the outer world behind, rose to a world to be created by man, which makes use of everything that humanity has ever created in its myths and so on in order to transcend immediate outer existence. And for Friedrich Nietzsche, this was connected with the second element, with Schopenhauer's philosophy, of which Richard Wagner himself had become a follower after his Feuerbach period. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, Nietzsche found the confirmation that the perception of the external world can really only inspire pessimism. For him, it confirmed that what the soul must experience cannot be found in the external world, not in the world of blind will, that man must therefore rise above what external observation can provide through something he himself has created. For Friedrich Nietzsche, it was a relief to hear from Schopenhauer, on the one hand, that the human world of ideas, which in accordance with his era could only provide an imperfect, painful picture of the world, was actually only an illusion, and that what is not illusion, the will, has basically no compelling force for man, so that man has a right, as it were, to rise above the blindness and folly of the will in the world through illusion.

Nietzsche associated something else with this second element. He associated it with what he had learned from his philological studies: an immersion in the Greek state of mind, in the way the Greeks helped themselves out of their unsatisfactory existence, as Nietzsche believed. He immersed himself in the true meaning of Greek art, and this meaning struck him as if the Greeks had fully felt all the tragedy and pain of an unsatisfactory sensual existence. He believed that the Greeks had turned to art in order to transcend the otherwise necessary pessimism of existence. Greek art, whose renewal Nietzsche also desired for modern man, was for him a consolation that humanity sought in contrast to the external world of perception, which could only be felt in a pessimistic sense.

According to Nietzsche, humans needed to escape into a world that would take them away from the pain of existence. And it was out of this attitude, this tragedy, this pain of the soul that Nietzsche wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. The spirit from which he wrote it was the belief that the Greeks felt the tragedy of perceptible existence so deeply that they could only overcome this tragedy by creating tragedy in their minds above all reality, in order to find consolation in it for the tragedy of external perceptual reality. Nietzsche was filled with this sense of the world as he understood it when he wrote his “Untimely Meditations,” when he dismissed David Friedrich Strauss, when he wanted to describe the unsatisfactory nature of a merely historical mode of representation that only ever registers, when he wanted to indicate the true spirit of Wagner's music, and when he wanted to speak about Schopenhauer himself. All this took place in the first half of the 1870s.

In these "Untimely Meditations," Nietzsche held up a mirror to his era, which clung to a perception that was unsatisfactory and painful for him, in such a way that he countered everything his contemporaries said with what a complete human being must find and invent within himself in order to endure what, in Nietzsche's opinion, his contemporaries could imagine themselves to be philistinely happy in. He presented David Friedrich Strauss as the very type of philistine who points to the satisfactions of the external world of perception and who, in a homespun manner, does not want to rise above this world of perception to a higher plane of consciousness.

But then, around 1876, Nietzsche realized the pressure that this modern scientific attitude, which basically permeates everything that confronts the mind, can exert on the human soul. Ultimately, the power with which Nietzsche wanted to flee into a world of consolation in the face of the unsatisfactory nature of the external world of perception became crippled. He could no longer surrender to the belief that one could somehow find a way out of human existence itself into a comforting, self-created world, for he gradually came to perceive that which seeks to rise above the external reality of perception as a lie, as a deceitful illusion. And the years 1875 and 1876 became for him years in which, as he himself put it, he put one life lie after another on ice so that they would freeze to death.

This was, in fact, an even more tragic state of mind than the previous one, because in the previous one he believed that he could find comfort in the illusions of life about the world of perception, which imposed itself as reality despite its one-sidedness. Now, however, he could no longer even cling to these illusions as a consolation, and in a certain sense he became a fanatic for truth, telling himself: However deeply this reality presented by the external senses may tear the soul apart with inner pain, it is the reality that is immediately before us. — This enormous burden was exerted on Friedrich Nietzsche by his agnostic attitude. From then on, he could no longer bear this burden, and so he sighed out what he wrote in his book of aphorisms, Human, All Too Human: O you poor human being—that is how Nietzsche felt—O you poor human being, you imagine ideals, illusions, in which you escape from the sensual into a supersensual realm; you want to rise from the human to the divine; by developing powers that seduce you into such illusions, you fall even deeper into the human underworld, and what you initially developed in a naive way as your humanity becomes subhuman, all-too-human. Examine your instincts, examine your egoism, and you will see how you conjure up selflessness as an illusion, as a moral ideal! The truth is that you talk about selfless ideals, but basically you only worship a finer, an all-too-human egoism; in your subconscious there lives an element that is deeply beneath your humanity, not only beneath what you want to raise yourself up to, as to a divine being. — It was from this mood that the writings “Human, All Too Human” arose for a true seeker of truth.

But Nietzsche was not merely a theoretical cognizer; Nietzsche was a soul within which everything that could be experienced in the development of worldviews in the last third of the 19th century was discharged. Nietzsche could not pour this fanaticism for truth into his writings and his thoughts, into his words, in the same way that theorists pour it out. Nietzsche could not speak in the self-sufficient manner of, say, Emil Du Bois-Reymond in his Ignorabimus or Welträtsel speech. Speaking in this manner was unspeakably alien to Nietzsche, for he believed that closeness to the world was that which lives directly in the intimacy of the human soul, which can be experienced when one descends into one's deepest inner self. Therefore, Nietzsche could not appreciate the mood that slithers elegantly from concept to concept in Ignorabimus speeches. One need only observe the style and attitude of such an Ignorabimus speech from a purely human, but fully human, point of view. It is as if the person were speaking in such a way that his heart were not present in his speech, that his whole person were not present in his speech, that the thoughts in his head were running automatically. Something rather vague and insubstantial winds its way smoothly through all the sentence structures that speak of Laplace's world view and the like, and then of the fact that where the scientifically comprehensible world ends, supernaturalism must begin, but that where supernaturalism begins, science must end.

For Nietzsche, what he was able to experience there became a real purpose in life and a tragedy of life. Scientific development itself in the last third of the 19th century became the innermost tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche's life, because now that he had become a fanatic of truth, a positivist, a Voltairean, he had to permeate his whole being with what was unloading in his head; he had to feel the full humanity of it. What he had previously dreamed up in his “Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music” and in his “Untimely Meditations” as consolation for the scientific tragedy of life, based on the spirit of the human head, on intellectual knowledge, he could no longer derive from his system of thought; it no longer yielded thinking for him. In the first epoch of his life, which I characterized yesterday as dark, he wanted to penetrate and illuminate perception, which seemed to come out of a sleep, with human soul content. But this human soul content became for him only what then turned out to be an illusion. And so, in his positivist period, he felt drawn to the one-sided world of perception, which is only part of reality, but not the whole of reality.

Thus Nietzsche had to find fulfillment for his soul from other sources, with content that at least made life bearable for him. What thought no longer illuminated for him had to develop feeling and emotion, as in an inner burning of the soul that became fatal for him, and we see this feeling and emotion burning away thought in his writings from the 1870s, “Morning Twilight” and “The Gay Science,” which arose from his soul as if from an inner inflammation of the soul. As beautiful as these are, what had accumulated in him in morbid soul experiences was discharged in inflammations that poured fiery life through his soul, and this fiery life was now able to lift him above the unsatisfactory for a short time, above what had previously lifted him above that consolation I spoke to you about.

But Nietzsche was still so strong inside that he felt this inflammation of his soul; he was still so strong inside that he felt the urge to add inner experience to his outer perception. And by gathering his last strength, so to speak, to overcome the one-sided world of perception, to arrive at the experience that, together with this external perception, gives full reality, this striving contains what lived out in him in his third epoch, when he wrote his “Zarathustra,” that “Zarathustra” which can be characterized by Nietzsche's statement: Now one has become human, but as a human one is condemned to suffer from the world, for the world gives one a one-sidedness, the world does not fulfill one. One has become human and stands in the world. But what does it mean to be human if the world does not trigger in man that which makes him a being, toward which his deeper powers themselves must strive? — And so the thought pressed out of Nietzsche's soul: Therefore, man must not remain human, for if he remains human, he hollows himself out, he must drown in pain. Man must become superhuman. Man, who cannot communicate with his essence in the world, must overcome himself. There must be a bridge, as there is from worm to man, so from man to superman. Nietzsche wanted to break this human shell, so that from this breaking could emerge what could now live in harmony with the world from the deepest driving forces of humanity. And Zarathustra was to be the teacher and bearer of this superhuman idea.

But Nietzsche could not speak in the forms that the modern spirit of science, the spirit of agnosticism, had brought forth. He had to find another language, a language that pushed into the lyrical-epic-dramatic; he had to find a language that even led out of the state of consciousness in which this modern agnostic spirit of science is conceived. It is as if Nietzsche, everywhere, especially in the most significant parts of his “Zarathustra,” pushed out of ordinary consciousness into a kind of superconsciousness, as if he were seeking a transformation, a metamorphosis of consciousness, in order to be able to live in a world that cannot be reached with ordinary everyday consciousness. It was as if Nietzsche had to overcome the way in which man lives with the world. Zarathustra is not supposed to be a man who follows the pedantic path that modern humanity has become accustomed to, in the measure of time in which the external, one-sided world of perception moves. Zarathustra should become a light-footed spirit who dances away from what otherwise weighs people down in this one-sided world of perception.

Everywhere we see a lyrical, pathetic striving of Nietzsche's consciousness toward a higher, supersensible world, a world in which the superhuman could be found, a world that cannot be found within ordinary consciousness. And in other writings from this last period of Nietzsche's work, we see the emergence of an idea that pushes in the same direction: that enigmatic, mysterious idea of the eternal recurrence of the same.

As Nietzsche contemplated this life, as it is lived between birth and death, it seemed to him, from all that I have now described as deposits in his soul, as if it could not possibly be exhausted in itself, as if it would be nonsense if it proceeded in the same way as it presented itself between birth and death. Then the idea of the return of the same, the idea that the life I am now living between birth and death is not the only one, but always returns and must return, forced its way out of his innermost being. And now, I would say, the most tragic aspect of Nietzsche emerges: the dissatisfaction with one earthly life, but also the inability to rise to a true idea of development in accordance with the world and the spirit, which sees progress, an ascent of humanity, in repeated earthly lives. Nietzsche was unable to give meaning to the repeated earthly lives he accepted from a spiritual concept of development. Thus he clung desperately to the repeated earthly lives, unable to escape such repetition, which always brings about the same thing, no matter how often this earthly life may be repeated. This earthly life carries within it the demand not to stand alone. But it proves incapable of ever producing anything other than what is, in the deepest sense, unsatisfactory and tragic, even in eternal repetitions.

If one takes what I describe here as the content of Nietzsche's soul not as a system of abstract thoughts, but as something that wells up from the full nature of the human being, wells up from the human being in such a way that everything that this human being is in spirit, soul, and body, then one can look at this personality in such a way that one understands its collapse at the end of the 1880s. And it can already make us aware of the special nature of the sources of knowledge we need when we see how such a life collapsed at the sources of knowledge that agnosticism regards as the only ones, as the absolutely correct ones.

Friedrich Nietzsche made a sincere effort to live with his full, whole human being in what knowledge could give people for their lives in the last third of the 19th century. In his experience, Nietzsche became a fighter against his time. That is why I called my book about Nietzsche: “Nietzsche, a fighter against his time.” Nietzsche developed within himself a mindset that was inevitable for a deeply sensitive person in the last third of the 19th century, given the developments in science. He experienced this mindset as it can be experienced by such a personality, and he experienced what makes such a personality a fighter against this era, this era of agnosticism. Nietzsche was predisposed to be a fighter against his time, but he collapsed, and before he collapsed, he felt most comfortable with his inner fighting spirit when he could live as a hermit many meters above the sea, above everything that people of our age participate in with their lives as they have developed. Nietzsche's experience with the sources of knowledge of the 19th century, and indeed of our time, made him a fighter against his time and a hermit.

That is why Nietzsche could not fulfill the demand that is so formidable in our age, especially for those who recognize it. Does this age demand that we retreat to Sils Maria as hermits in order to at least be able to live with our time? No, this age, precisely when it makes us fighters against the epoch, demands that we place ourselves in the midst of social human life, where the great problems must be led toward a solution in a lively manner, not in isolated theories. Nietzsche shows us what a nature that truly experiences and recognizes time must go through; he shows us the tragedy of the life of such a recognizing, fighting nature. But at the same time he shows us—as true as it is that he was formed from his innermost convictions to be a fighter of his time, as true as it is that this struggle against agnosticism is necessary in our time—that he, Friedrich Nietzsche, the tragic fighter against this agnostic epoch, lacked the right weapons for this necessary struggle. We must search for these right weapons; and it is my honest conviction that for our time, these right weapons, these spiritual weapons, can only be provided by the means, the method of research, and the life impulses of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.