16. A Forgotten Pursuit of Spiritual Science Within the Development of German Thought

GA 70b/1916-03-17/p125 ·1916-03-17 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
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You see what the background here is – to make Russia Russian and then generously assign to the individual what one wants to assign to him. And seriously: this tone runs through the whole of Russian intellectual life. And in a strange way, it appears in various places in more recent times. For example, in [Michajlovskij] there is a Russian spirit that takes this - as he thinks - strangely decrepit, crippled, brutalized intellectual product of Central Europe, Goethe's “Faust”, and says: What then is this Goethe's “Faust” actually like as a personality? Well, just as in Central Europe one strives for metaphysics, so Faust strives metaphysically. —- He needs the expression, this Michajlovskij: a metaphysician is a person who has gone mad with fat! I don't know how many metaphysicians one has come to know with this characteristic! But he regards Goethe's Faust as such a metaphysician, who has become alien to all human life.

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Cite: GA 70b/1916-03-17/p125 · edition English