Lecture VIII

Friedrich Nietzsche in the Light of Spiritual Science

Berlin

Someone who puts the task to himself to describe the relation of the modern cultural life
to the theosophical view of life must not pass the phenomenon Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–
1900). Like a big riddle Friedrich Nietzsche stands in the cultural development of the
present. Without doubt, he has made a deep impression on all our thinking contemporaries.
For the ones he was a guide, for the others a person against whom one has to fight most
intensively. He stirred up many people, and left many very effective results of his work. An
extensive literature about Nietzsche has appeared, and today one can open almost no
newspaper some years ago this was even more the case without stumbling against the name
Nietzsche or without finding cited his way of thinking directly with his sayings, with his
thoughts, or, otherwise, any echo of him. Friedrich Nietzsche has deeply taken root in the
whole structure of our age. He stands there like a phenomenon, also already for a mere
viewer of his life.

He came from a Protestant parsonage. In 1844 born, he already shows a great interest in
all religious questions on the high school. Some notes of this time show not only a
premature lad, but also a human being illuminating some fields of the religious questions
with brilliant brain waves. During his university studies, he is not only interested in his
professional studies so that he belongs to the most excellent students but also in the general
problems of the human development. He already performs a lot in the field of philology in
his youth, more than others can perform in a whole life. Before he conferred a doctorate, a
chair was offered to him at Basel. His teacher Ritschl (Albrecht R.,1822–1889, German
theologian) was asked whether he could recommend that Friedrich Nietzsche should take
this. The famous philologist answered that he could only recommend Nietzsche, because
Nietzsche knew everything that he himself knew. When he was already a professor and
wanted to confer a doctorate, it was said to him: we are not able to examine you! Nietzsche,
the associate professor, conferred a doctorate; one reads that on the certificate! This is a sign
how deeply one esteemed his mind. Then he made an acquaintance that was decisive for his
whole life. He made acquaintance of Schopenhauer's philosophy, in which he settled in such
a way that he made not the philosophy but the personality of Schopenhauer (1788–1860) his
guide, so that he regarded him as his educator.

The second important acquaintance was that of Richard Wagner (1813–1883). From
these both acquaintances the first epoch of Friedrich Nietzsche's spiritual life developed.
This happened in a quite personal way. When Nietzsche was a young professor in Basel, he
went, so often he was able at times any Sunday , to Triebschen near Lucerne. At that time,
Richard Wagner occupied himself with Siegfried. There the most works of Wagner and the
deepest problems of the cultural life were discussed with the young Nietzsche in the spirit of
Schopenhauer's philosophy. Wagner often said that he could find no better interpreter than
Friedrich Nietzsche.
 Considering the writing The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), we find
that Richard Wagner's art is moved into such a light that it appears directly as a cultural-
historical action which shines for centuries, even for millennia. Seldom such an intimate
relationship existed like that between the younger pupil and the older master who got to
know his ideas, with which he was bubbling over, anew in an intellectually stimulating way,
so to speak. They faced him friendly with their effects like from without, so that he was able
to arrange them in the right light. It was a phenomenon that had never existed before.
Wagner was happy who could say that he found somebody understanding him, as few
people were in the world; Nietzsche was not less happy who looked back at the times of the
ancient Hellenism of which he believed that the human beings still created divine things at
that time, in contrast to that time he calls the decadent one. In Richard Wagner he saw a
resurrection of the rarest kind, a human being who owned such a pure spiritual content in
himself as it is seldom found in life.

Only from 1889 on, a lot was written about Nietzsche. People who repeat his words pay
attention to his works only after this point in time. However, those who already occupied
themselves with Nietzsche about 1889 knew that he had lighted up like a comet beside
Richard Wagner, up to about 1876, that, however, he was nearly forgotten then. Only in the
smallest circles one still spoke of him. Then he wrote his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(1883) by which he became known again. Then a writing appeared by which he seemed to
smash everything that he had considered once as his own. This was The Case of Wagner
(1888). Thereby he became known again. Those who occupied themselves with Nietzsche
separated in two factions. Georg Brandes (1842–1927, Danish critic and scholar) held
lectures on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen. Nietzsche had become not only a
university professor in young years even if he retired soon for reasons of health he also was
accorded the honour of becoming an object of university lectures. This news probably
brought consolation to his darkened soul; however, it could not save him from the menacing
mental derangement. Then the news came that Nietzsche went incurably insane. This is
more or less the outline of his outer life.

As I have already mentioned, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music was his
first writing. This was born from a rare absorption in Schopenhauer's philosophy and from
an absorption in art as it faced him in the work of Richard Wagner. Who wants to
understand what this writing means as Nietzsche's daybreak, and also wants to understand
his life must explain it out of a threefold consideration. First he must explain it out of his
time with which Nietzsche lived intimately. I myself have tried to explain Nietzsche in this
way objectively. One can show him secondly as a being which one allows to arise from his
personality. There he is one of the most interesting psychological, psychiatric problems. I
have also tried to show this in a medicinal magazine in an article about Friedrich Nietzsche.
Thirdly one can show him from the spiritual world view.

His first writing The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music delivers important clues
from the theosophical point of view, from a spiritual world consideration. Our age is the age
of the fifth principal race of humankind of which two others have led the way which had to
develop other forces than our principal race. Our fifth principal race has preferably to
develop thinking and reason. The preceding principal race is the Atlantean one which lived
on the continent that is now on the ground of the Atlantic. These human beings did not yet
have reason, had not yet developed intellectuality, but memory preferably. One of these
preceding principal races was the Lemurian one. This still was on the level of imagination.

Our principal race has to develop the intellectual life. Since some centuries in particular,
the European humanity is developing the intellectual force, intelligence. Our great
philosophers, up to Kant and Schopenhauer, are completely involved in this development of
our principal race.

As to them the big problem became the question: what is the significance of the human
thought, how can the human being recognise anything? These questions became the big
riddles of existence to them. Now, however, something quite peculiar takes place for our
principal race. Thinking which the philosophers have brought to the highest development
was detached for our time, so to speak, from its mother soil. Our time has developed
thinking in the purest and most marvellous way in science concerning the external technical
life. But these thoughts or, actually, these ideas tore us out of nature.

The human thought is only a picture of something much higher that we have discussed
in the preceding talks; it is a shade, an image of the spiritual world. The thought is a
spiritual being. Modern times developed thinking powerfully; however, one has forgotten
that this thought is nothing but the shadow-image of the spiritual life. This life transmits, so
to speak, the spiritual forces to us, and then we get the idea. That is why the origin of the
thought, of the idea was mysterious, in particular for the philosophy of the 19th century.
The thought, the idea itself became appearance. One forgot that the thought has its origin in
spirit as Jacob Böhme says. When one had tried in the modern times to look for the primary
sources of existence, to penetrate to that primary source which one had lost and about which
one did no longer know that it has its origin in the spirit one could find it only according to
Schopenhauer's philosophy in the unreasonable blind will; however, the thought is nothing
but a simulacrum which our imagination offers to us. Thus the world became idea on one
side and will on the other side. But both do no longer have their origin in spirit, only in the
mere appearance. How could it be otherwise that this materialistic philosophy sought for a
support of the spirit in an element which any unbiased observer can find directly in the
world where the spirit exists as such only in the form of a blind will, as a proliferation of
nature? This is just the personality. Indeed, one had forgotten that something spiritual is in
the personality; but one was not able to deny the personality as such.

In Schopenhauer's philosophy, the spiritual human personality was at least accepted as

the highest; the personality that stands out by its ingenuity or devoutness or holiness and
shows as it were a level of development within the rest of humanity. Thus Schopenhauer
became hard and showed the average human being as manufactured goods of nature;
however, from the dark impulses of nature single great personalities emerge. This view had
an effect on Nietzsche.

But something else had an effect on him. By means of thoughts and ideas we can never
experience anything of that which flows in the unreasonable will. Schopenhauer finds the
true being of the chaos of the basic instincts in music. That is why Schopenhauer was not
able to penetrate this simulacrum to the being which expresses itself in the will, but the
being of music became a solution of the riddle of the world to him. Everybody who is
familiar with the questions of mysticism knows how somebody can get to the view that
music offers a solution of the riddle of the world.

There is music not only on the physical plane or the sensuous world but also in the
higher worlds. If we ascend through the soul-world to the higher spiritual worlds, something
of a higher music sounds to us. Not the music which we perceive on the physical plane; for
it is no allegory but reality: the movement of the stars in the world, the growth of plants, the
feeling of the human beings and animals appear like sounding words! That is why the
occultist says: the human being finds out the secrets of the world only if the mystic word
which exists in the things speaks to him. What Schopenhauer found is an expression of a
higher fact, something that is much more significant than what he understood of it; for it
sounds with him only into the physical ear. We call the principle manas that outlasts time
and extends to the eternal. This manas finds its physical expression in the sounds of music
which come toward us from the outside world. Schopenhauer expressed something
absolutely right, and Nietzsche took up this thought. He felt with the whole wealth of his
mind that somebody who wants to express himself about the world's secrets with mere
words is not able to do this in the same way as the master of the sounds can express himself
about the world's secrets. Therefore, Friedrich Nietzsche just as Schopenhauer regards the
musical expression as the expression of the higher world's secrets. Thus the way was shown
to them to the ancient times of the old Greeks where art, religion and science were a whole
where in the mystery temples the mystery priests, who were scientists and artists, arranged
the destiny of the human being and of the whole world in grand pictures before the soul.

If we look into the temple, we find shown the destiny of the god Dionysus. This was the
solution of the riddle of the world. However, Dionysus had descended to the matter and had
been dismembered, and the human mind is destined to release him who is buried in the
matter and to lead him up to the new splendour. While the human being seeks for his divine
nature in himself, he wakes the god in himself, and this awakening is the awakening of the
god who had found a kind of grave in the low nature. This big destiny of the world was
shown to the mystes not only sensually, but also spiritually in a magnificent way. This was
the primal drama of the ancient Greece. We go back to far-off times, and from this core the
later Greek drama comes. The drama of Aeschylus, of Sophocles was only art; however, it
had arisen from the temple art. Art, science and religion had separated from the temple art.
Who looks back at these primeval times sees something more profound from which the
human understanding and conduct of life have come. The living god Dionysus was the great
figure of the Greek mysteries. Nietzsche within the circle of Wagner did not recognise but
suspect this.

It was a big dark inkling, and from it his view of the nature of the Greeks before
Socrates resulted. At that time, the human being was not one-sided, but the Dionysian
human being drew on unlimited resources. Because everything is imperfect, the Greek
created the redeeming religion and wisdom and later also the redeeming art to himself.
Hence, what later appeared as art Nietzsche regarded as an image of the primal art only that
he calls the Dionysian one. This still seized the whole human being not only the imagination
one-sidedly, but all spiritual forces. Later art was only an image.

Thus the concepts Dionysian and Apollonian face us in his works. By means of them he
has an inkling of the origin of all artistic life and the language by which the old Greeks
expressed themselves. This was a language that was music at the same time. In the middle,
the drama was staged, around was the choir, which showed life and death in powerful
sounds.

Then others who were familiar with the circle of Wagner also showed this destiny
intimately. Above all, you find it described out of the spirit of the Eleusinian mysteries in
the book: The Sanctuaries of the East (1898) by Schuré. Edouard Schuré (1841–1929,
French esoteric) not only described what Nietzsche only suspected from imagination but
from spirituality. Nietzsche just wanted that, but he did not achieve it. On this basis, the
whole materialistic way of thinking of our time became a big riddle to him: How did the
human being come from this time in which he expressed himself as a riddle of the world to
the prosaic materialistic time? For others this may be a prosaic riddle of reason; however,
what others want to treat and solve with reason, mind and imagination it became a problem
of the heart to Nietzsche. Nietzsche had merged with his time like parents with their
children. However, he could not be glad about the time, but only suffer from it. Nietzsche
was able to suffer; but not to be glad. The solution of the Nietzsche problem lies therein.

He regarded Wagner as the renovator of the old Greek art which expresses the highest
secrets in sounds. The old human being should ascend to the superman, to the divine human
being. One needed the human being who extended beyond the average human beings. There
Schopenhauer came in the nick of time. According to Schopenhauer the human being was
average manufactured goods. The human being became the psycho-spiritual human being
who is not on the earth but floats above the earth, and the dramatic music was used as
means to get beyond the human being. Nobody wrote so reverentially about Richard
Wagner like Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay: Wagner in Bayreuth in 1876. However, the
everyday had become something deeply detestable to him. Therefore, he also combated
what David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) expressed in his work The Old and the New
Faith (1872).

There exists another writing from the beginning of the seventies, a writing without
whose knowledge one cannot understand Nietzsche at all. From this writing it follows that
Nietzsche suspected that problem of our time which we recently called the Tolstoy problem
also just like the great problem of the Greek culture. He suspected that our time, which just
passes, is lacking something. The external figures are that in which birth and death prevail
forever. We have seen how any plant lives in its figure between birth and death, how whole
nations pass between birth and death, how the most marvellous works are subjected to birth
and death. But we have also seen how one thing remains that defeats birth and death and
makes the old rise again in new incarnations. Tolstoy showed this life which the seed of a
plant carries over to a new plant and appears there again.

And again: our present human race is embodied in forms which have birth and death in
themselves. We rush towards a point in time which will recognise life itself. Nietzsche had
recognised that our time suffers from the consideration of the figures, not only from the
consideration of the figures in the natural sciences, but also in history. From this sense he
wrote his significant writing about the advantage and disadvantage of history, about the
historical illness. The human beings go back to the most distant primeval times and want to
look at the rudiments of culture, from people to people, from state to state. However, birth
and death live in everything. While we stuff ourselves with historical knowledge, we deaden
that life which we have in ourselves. We deaden what lives in eternal present in us. The
more we stuff our brains with history, the more we deaden the will for life in ourselves. If
we look back and estimate what that means, then we see that we can only find anything
considering the human life, considering ourselves directly. Thereby we get closer to a new
future.

Nietzsche points to this new culture-epoch which we have to regard as that of form and
figure. That lives in Nietzsche. He believed in the art of Richard Wagner, he regarded it as
the renewal of life, as a new Renaissance. Wagner was much more realistic than Nietzsche.
He stood completely in his time; he said to himself: the artist cannot do 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 got of Wagner was too big, that it was bigger than what Wagner could
fulfil. As Nietzsche had a dark inkling of the origin of the Greek tragedy from the mystery
time and of our whole time from the primeval times, he also had an inkling of the fact that a
future culture, which is not based only on reason, must come from the spiritual powers
slumbering in the human being even today.

He suspected this, and he confused this with that which was there already. He believed
that the big riddle of the future was already solved in the present. What he had to argue
against Socrates is that our culture had become one-sided by his influence that it had split
on the one hand in a culture of reason and on the other hand in a soul movement. Therefore,
he also mocks Socrates and combats the Socratic culture, the culture of reason.

When Wagner's pieces of art set faced him in Bayreuth, he became disloyal, not really
disloyal, because he had never seen Wagner correctly, he had assumed that Wagner had
realised what he had dreamt of as a future ideal; there Nietzsche said to himself: I have seen
something wrong.

The adult Nietzsche became disloyal to the young Nietzsche, and the hard words are not
directed so much against Wagner than against what he himself had been in his youth as an
admirer of Wagner. One cannot really be an adversary of anybody; one can only be his own
adversary. He said to himself: I feel all my youth ideals compromised. He stood in midst the
ruins of a world view and had to look around at something else. Then this became the “new
Enlightenment.” He wanted now to inspire and enliven what he had rejected once. He
wanted to obtain life out of the dead matter as science treats it. He himself became a student
of the form, of the external figure which passes us by in birth and death forever.

And now understand the profound theosophical truth that three essential conditions exist
in the world: the external figure which is subjected to birth and death which comes into
being and passes, appears again, which rushes from form to form in life. The second is life
which is the expression of the soul. The soul breaks the form to be reincarnated in a new
form. And the third is consciousness of its different degrees. Any stone, any plant and in the
higher degrees any human being has consciousness. So we have three conditions in the
world: form, life and consciousness. These three represent a world of the bodily, a world of
the soul and a world of the spirit.

This is the wisdom that is made gradually accessible to the world again. This is also the
ancient wisdom of the mysteries of which Nietzsche had a dark inkling which he could not
express clearly from which he suffered and which he longed for as a new life that should
arise from our culture. Now he himself was entangled in the natural sciences. He had no eye
for the fact that consciousness lives in life and ascends to higher and higher figures. This is
the course of the world. Consciousness takes that from the form which is worth to be pulled
out to higher formation. Thereby we have a development of the things from form to form,
from one condition of life to another condition of life where life remains and the forms and
figures show higher formation. He did not understand the consciousness that develops and
goes into higher and higher figures. Nietzsche saw the form only; he did not understand the
moving agent that comes to the fore in always higher form.

Thus he realised the return of the things and beings, but did not realise that they re-
embody themselves in higher and higher forms. Hence, he taught the “eternal recurrence of
the self-similar form.” He did no longer know that the consciousness returns on higher
levels. This is the thought to which he was influenced by the natural sciences: as well as we
are here, as we are sitting here, we were there countless times and will be there again. This
must impose on the thinker who does not know that the consciousness does not return in the
same figure, not in the same form, but in a higher figure, in a higher form. This was the
second state of Nietzsche's development.

The third state is that in which still spiritual life was inside of Nietzsche's soul which he
could not get out, however, in such a world view of the mere form. Indeed, he did not know
that the higher fields of existence were closed to his mind; however, the mighty urge lived
in him for these higher fields of existence. The human being developed higher with his
figure, from the animal up to the human being, however, this development cannot be
finished. As the worm developed to the human being, the human being must develop
further. From that his idea of the “superman” (Übermensch) originated. This Übermensch is
the future human being. Compare him with the corresponding mystic idea, and then you
find that they border on each other closely. The urge in the human nature which expresses
itself also in us is the urge for spiritualisation, so that one can even now find the God-man
on the bottom of the soul who appears from the future world as Nietzsche's big spiritual
ideal which he strives for.

If you do not only look at form and figure but also at life and consciousness, at soul and
spirit, this superman appears in his true figure, he appears as the whole human being who
hastens to the higher spheres of existence. As to Nietzsche this thought existed in the
seminal state, but he could express himself only with words of the naturalist. As the human
being has developed from thousand and thousand figures, he must also develop in higher
figures to the superman. 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 front gate. Then he struggled on and wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
once again he stood before the gate of the temple and could not unlock it. This is the tragedy
of his life, his destiny. If the ego of a single human being is suffering vicariously, is
sympathetic to his time, to the psycho-spiritual, then something particular happens to this
ego. Everybody who knows the phenomena of the astral world knows what must ensue to
this human ego if it faces nothing but riddles and gates which do not open themselves to it:
before every question is something in the world of soul and spirit that is like the shade of
this question that appears as a pursuer of the soul. This seems to the materialistic thinker a
little bit peculiar at first. But this man who stood before Christianity and did not know how
it develops, before our philosophy, before the materialism of our time and desired a new
Dionysus and was not able to bear him from himself this man stood there like before shades
of the past. Thus as to Nietzsche, indeed, beside the figure of Christ that of the Antichrist
stood in the astral world, beside the figure of the moralist the immoralist. What he knew as
philosophy of our time stood besides as negation. That tormented him like a pursuer of his
ego.

Read Nietzsche's last writings, his Will to Power (posthumous fragments), and his
Antichrist where he describes the ghost, the criticism of Christianity, the criticism of
philosophy in his nihilism. He does not get out from these matters; the moral of our time
inhibits him which cannot get out from good and evil which does not want to recognise
karma, although it strives for it. Finally, the eternal change of the figure appeared to him
like the recurrence of the eternal similar figure. The fourth work has not come to an end. He
wanted to call it Dionysus or the Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence. Thus only the urge
of the single ego for the superman remained.

Nietzsche would have had to see into the human self and to recognise the divine human
being, then that would have lighted up to him which he longed for. So, however, it seemed
inaccessible to him. It was only the urge of his inside for seizing these contents. He called it
his will to power, his striving for the superman. With the whole intensity of his nature he
found a lyrical expression in Thus Spoke Zarathustra which is soul-raising, is soul-amusing
and soul-consuming as well, also sometimes paradoxical. This is the shout of the present
human being for the God-man, for wisdom who, however, only got to the will to wisdom, to
the will to power. Something lyrically brilliant can arise from this urge. But something that
can seize the human being in his deepest inside and lead up to these heights cannot arise
from this urge. Thus Nietzsche's figure is the last great empathy out of materialism, the
human being, who suffered tragically, perished tragically in the materialism of the 19th
century and points with all longing to the new mystic time. Master Eckhart (1250–1327,
German mystic) says: God has died so that I also die away toward the world and become a
god. Nietzsche also says this in a prose saying: “If there were a God who could stand it to
be no god?” Nietzsche says that there is no God! He did not understand Goethe's saying:

Unless the eyes were like the sun,

How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
 How could delight us the divine?

What brightened up in our time so much and what he felt as grief had to be consumed. I
do not want to say that his illness has to do anything with the cultural life. What he longed
for but could not get was the theosophical world view. He felt longing for something that he
could not find. He himself felt this in some nagging expression of his life. That is why his
last writings also contain a longing for life which he wants to conjure up from the form, and
then still a lyrical outcry for the God-man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Then the destruction
of everything that the present cannot give him which he attempted in the writing The Will to
Power or in The Eternal Recurrence which remained fragments and were published now
from the estate. All that lived in the last time in this tragic personality of Nietzsche and
shows how one can suffer in our time if one does not rise to a spiritual view. He himself
expressed this in a poem Ecce homo in which he shows his riddle of life to us:

Yes, I know where from I hail!

Ever-hungry like the flame
I glow and consume myself.
Light becomes all I can catch,
Coal all that I leave behind:
There's no doubt, a flame I am!

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