Rudolf Steiner

by Colin Wilson

  And then, in 1879, Steiner made the acquaintance of a man to whom he could speak openly about his spiritual insights, and who was able to reply with insights of his own. Suddenly, the eighteen-year-old visionary no longer felt that he was a solitary misfit in a world of blinkered materialists. A new phase in his life was about to begin.

  * * *

  *In The Occult, Chapter 1.

  Three

  The Goethe Scholar

  TRAVELLING daily from Inzersdorf to Vienna by train, Steiner made the acquaintance of a middle-aged factory worker named Felix Koguzki, who spent his spare time gathering herbs which he sold in Vienna. Koguzki was uneducated but obviously intelligent, and he often expressed his deep religious convictions in thoroughly obscure language. Steiner found him interesting, and deliberately cultivated his acquaintance. Steiner said of him: ‘He gave the impression of being simply the mouthpiece for a spiritual content seeking utterance from hidden worlds…gradually it seemed to me as if I were in the company of a soul from bygone ages who, untouched by civilization, science and modern views, brought me an instinctive knowledge of the past.’

  Steiner adds the interesting comment that nothing could be ‘learned’ from Koguzki in the usual sense, but that ‘because he had a firm footing in the spiritual world’ it was possible to obtain through him important glimpses of that world. He often visited Koguzki at his peasant home in the village of Trumau, and felt completely comfortable in its atmosphere of simple piety.

  The real significance of his meeting with Koguzki is that, for the first time, Steiner could speak openly about his own experiences of spiritual insight without fear of ridicule or the danger of being regarded as a faintly embarrassing crank.

  In his autobiography, Steiner does not mention Koguzki's name—it was later discovered through the research of one of his disciples. Unfortunately, this is not true of another acquaintance of the period whose influence on Steiner was crucial. Steiner's friend and follower Edouard Schuré later spoke of this mystery man as ‘the master’, and said that he was ‘one of those potent personalities who are on earth to fulfil a mission under the mask of some homely occupation’. Schuré deduced from Steiner's descriptions that he was an ‘Initiate’. All we know is that this man pointed out to Steiner certain passages in Fichte which helped Steiner to see his way clear to refuting the scientific materialism of his contemporaries. Fichte made him feel that the human ‘I’ is a concrete reality, not an illusion produced by the physical body, and that therefore man has genuine free will, which can be used to penetrate the spiritual reality behind appearances.

  In spite of his obsession with the inner worlds of thought—which he identified with spiritual reality—Steiner was no introvert. He seems to have thrown himself into the student life of Vienna with a passion that seems unusual in such a serious-minded youth. He joined the German Reading Room of the Technical Highschool, and was later elected its librarian, then its chairman. As librarian he wrote begging letters to authors asking for copies of their works; through the library and the university he made the acquaintance of many writers and thinkers. In the Autobiography he is inclined to speak about such encounters with a certain poker-faced gravity, as if they were milestones on his pilgrimage to truth. But it does not take much imagination to place oneself in the shoes of this eighteen-year-old stationmaster's son, with no money and no prospects, and to recognize that what really preoccupied him was the question of getting a ‘start in life’. What could he hope to become? His father wanted him to be an engineer, but he never seriously entertained that idea for a moment. What then? A schoolmaster—perhaps eventually a university lecturer? That was a possibility. But in spite of his intellectual discipline, Steiner lacked the academic temperament; there was too much of the poet in him. Like all talented young men with no money, he faced the world without any clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life. So he seized every opportunity to meet writers, artists, philosophers, or any professor who happened to have written a book. The instinct for self-expression is as powerful as the instinct for self-preservation.

  So Steiner cast out his nets in many directions. He became a regular visitor at the home of Karl Schröer, the man who introduced him to Geothe's ideas. (Steiner said that when he sat alone with Schröer, he always felt there was another present—Goethe.) He made the acquaintance of the brilliant physicist Edmund Reitlinger, who was dying of tuberculosis. He discovered Wagner's music, and had endless discussions with Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians. He even attended debates in the Austrian Chamber of Deputies and the Upper House, and took a lively interest in the issue that was undermining the unity of the Austro-Hungarian empire: the demand by minority nationalities—like the Czechs and Hungarians—for greater recognition, and the bitter opposition to these nationalist movements by German-speaking Austrians. (Steiner was on the side of the Germans.) He spent much of his spare time in Vienna's famous coffee houses, particularly the Griensteidl Kaffee on the Michaelerplatz (known as the Megalomania Café), where eventually he became the intimate of various poets and composers.

  It was Schröer who introduced Steiner to the work of a young poetess, three years Steiner's junior, called Maria Eugenie delle Grazie, who had achieved a degree of fame with her first volume of poems at the age of seventeen. Steiner wrote an article about her in a small newspaper, as a result of which he made her acquaintance and became a member of the literary circle that surrounded her. She lived in the house of a Cistercian priest, Laurenz Müllner, so Steiner found himself once again exposed to the doctrines of Catholiism. It is interesting to note that Maria delle Grazie took a thoroughly pessimistic view of the universe; Steiner wrote: ‘To her, the ideals that arise in the human heart are powerless against the cruel, senseless and merciless effect of nature, a nature that mercilessly cries out to man's idealism: “Thou art but an illusion, a creature of my own fantasy, which ever and again I hurl back into nothingness.”’ Yet although such a view was entirely antipathetic to Steiner, he continued to admire the poetess.’ I was never inclined to withold my admiration and interest from what I considered great, even when I absolutely opposed it.’ And in due course, he came to adopt a version of her view that there is a primal satanic force in the universe.

  The Müllner-delle Grazie circle detested Goethe and admired Dostoevsky, so Steiner was subjected to an interesting clash of ideals. Schröer, who had accompanied Steiner on his first visit to the Müllner household, never went there again when he realized how much they were opposed to Goethe. But Steiner enjoyed these conflicts: ‘Delle Grazie's house was dedicated to pessimism; it was a place of anti-Goetheanism. When I spoke about Goethe, they listened; but Laurenz Müllner thought that what I attributed to Goethe had fundamentally very little to do with the actual Minister of the Grand Duke Karl August.’ And the arguments with the Müllner circle enabled Steiner to formulate his own basic insight. In an article about Maria delle Grazie, he wrote:

  Our ideals are no longer so shallow that they can be satisfied by the all-too-often superficial and empty external reality. Yet I cannot believe that no possibility exists to rise above the deep pessimism this insight can bring. And I find the means to rise above it when I look into man's inner world; that is, when I approach the actual reality of our world of ideas. It is a sphere enclosed and complete in itself…Are not our ideals…realities in their own right, independent of the favours or disfavours of external nature…?

  He goes on to express an idea that makes it sound as if he was reconciled to his own poverty and lack of recognition: ‘Where would our divine freedom be if external nature protected us like helpless children, led by the hand? No, external nature must deny us everything so that the happiness we achieve is wholly our own independent creation.’ This stoical and ascetic attitude explains why, when he came to encounter the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, he was revolted by the notion that a Utopian society is an end in itself.

  Fortunately for Steiner, fate—aided by Karl Schröer—had offered him a me
ans of subsistence. Schröer recommended him as a tutor to the family of Ladislaus and Pauline Specht, and Steiner entered their home in July 1884, when he was twenty-three. They had four children, the youngest of whom, aged ten, was mentally retarded. Steiner soon formed the conviction that the problem with such children is basically physical: the body, not the soul, is undeveloped. This meant that it was a question of trying to draw out the child's mental faculties by slow and patient effort, the first task being to gain his love. Physically speaking, the child's problem was hydrocephaly—'water on the brain’. Mentally speaking, the problem was a certain self-mistrust, the result of his dullness and slowness when compared to his brothers. Steiner saw it basically as a question of giving the child confidence—what modern psychology calls ‘motivation’. It meant considerable effort on Steiner's part; for example, spending two hours preparing an hour-long lesson. But he was spectacularly successful. Within two years, Otto Specht had caught up with the primary school curriculum and passed the entrance examination for the Gymnasium. Moreover, the hydrocephalic condition was steadily improving, supporting Steiner's conviction that the health of the body depends on the health of the mind. Steiner remained the boy's tutor for six years, until Otto was sufficiently developed not to need him. He became a doctor, and was killed when serving in the First World War; his mother, who was deeply attached to him, died soon afterwards.

  The experience in education brought Steiner insights that were to be of use later in the Waldorf schools. For Steiner, education meant the development of the personality—the ego—not the mere acquisition of knowledge. He was to develop the view that man is a fourfold being, consisting of the physical body, the etheric body (also known as the ‘aura’ or life-field), the astral body (which can leave the physical body under certain conditions), and finally, the ego, which orders and co-ordinates the other three. In education, as in health, these four elements must be brought into harmony. So, in a child like Otto Specht, the basic problem was the undeveloped state of the ego, which made it unable to perform its task as ‘conductor’ of the orchestra. Steiner's task, in which he was totally successful, was to nurture the ego until it grew strong enough to take on its proper role. All this explains why Steiner was so struck by Fichte's emphasis on the importance of the ego, and why it assumed the central role in his own philosophy.

  This preoccupation with the importance of the ego also explains why Steiner was aroused to irritation by the philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann, one of the most exciting and influential philosophers of the day. Hartmann had become famous at the age of twenty seven (in 1869) with a book called The Philosophy of the Unconscious. Since Freud, the term ‘unconscious’ has passed into the general vocabulary; but in the mid-nineteenth century it was still a startling and fascinating concept. Hartmann believed that the force behind the world is a deep unconscious will, which appears in animals in the form of instinct. Hartmann was opposed to Darwin's mechanical ideas of evolution—that appealed to Steiner—and offered in its place the idea of an unconscious life force. But, like his master Schopenhauer, he goes on to reach deeply pessimistic conclusions about human existence. In creating consciousness, the unconscious life force made a ghastly mistake, for reason and ‘daylight consciousness’ are profoundly opposed to the great irrational force that drives all living things. Man's intelligence has separated him from his instincts, so he is in a position to recognize the sheer futility and meaninglessness of all this instinctive activity. So life is self-defeating; consciousness and the unconscious cancel one another out…

  It may seem surprising that Steiner was thrown into such a frenzy of opposition by Hartmann's pessimism, which is not, after all, so different from that of Maria delle Grazie, which Steiner had been able to accept quite calmly. We must remember that Hartmann, with his impressive grasp of biology and physics, seemed to be one of the most exciting and up-to-date thinkers of his age, so his philosophy was taken far more seriously than the poems and dramas of a young girl. And Hartmann's view amounted to the belief that life is a ‘tale told by an idiot’, and that evolution is not only going nowhere, but is undermining itself. For Steiner, this raised the most fundamental of all questions: what is consciousness for? According to Hartmann, its purpose is simply to give living creatures more perception; it could be compared to the invention of the electric light. In fact, most of us take such a view for granted. Steiner felt instinctively that consciousness is an active force, whose purpose is to focus and concentrate on problems. It is not a light so much as a hand that grasps. And the hand that grasps can also build and create. It was Hartmann who helped to make Steiner aware that his own philosophy was fundamentally opposed to the whole ‘spirit of the age’. Ten years later, he would give these ideas definitive expression in his first major book, The Philosophy of Freedom.

  In 1883, Schröer had performed another important service for Steiner; he urged an editor named Joseph Kürschner to allow the twenty-two-year-old Steiner to edit Goethe's scientific writings, and Kürschner agreed. It may seem startling that he offered such a task to an unknown student. But we have to bear in mind that the series in which these writings were published—German National Literature—was one of those immense popular compilations of the late nineteenth century, running to 221 volumes; it was a response to the demand of ordinary householders for readily accessible classics. Presenting Goethe's scientific writings was a task that few people would have been eager to undertake; there was a general feeling that they were the absurd aberration of a poet of genius. In effect, Steiner was being tossed a scrap that no one else wanted.

  Fortunately, Steiner's own basic ideas were in opposition to this negative view of Goethe. Like Goethe, he felt that nature is ‘God's living garment’, and was profoundly opposed to the current tendency to treat it as a world of dead matter. Steiner himself had no reservations about science; on the contrary, he regarded himself as a scientist. He could enjoy a textbook of physics or mathematics as much as a poetic drama. But he felt that science needed to be redeemed from its materialism.

  Now Goethe had, in fact, been a very remarkable scientist; his experiments were precise and well planned, and the conclusions he drew from them were usually accurate. Long before Darwin, Goethe was an evolutionist. He rejected the widely held view that man is in some way totally distinct from all the lower animals. One of the main arguments for this view was that man has no intermaxillary bone in his upper jaw—the bone which, in animals, contains the incisors. Goethe studied skulls and pointed out that man does have such a bone, although it is now scarcely visible. His conclusions, now totally accepted, were ignored by contemporary scientists.

  But for Steiner's contemporaries, the intermaxillary bone was not the stumbling block. It was not even Goethe's idea about the Urpflanze, the original primeval plant, from which he believed all subsequent plants developed. The real embarrassment was Goethe's immense Theory of Colour, published in 1810, and describing the results of twenty years of experiment with light. For the purposes of this three-volume work was nothing less than to disprove Newton's theory of light. When he looked at a white door through a prism, Goethe was surprised to find that, instead of turning into an immense rainbow, it remained white, with rainbow colours only around the edges. Goethe jumped to the conclusion that Newton was mistaken in believing that white light is composed of the seven colours of the rainbow. But in that case what causes colour? Goethe replied: the mechanism of the eye. After all, it is the mechanism of the eye that prevents a colour-blind person from seeing certain colours. Goethe also placed great emphasis on the phenomenon of ‘complementary colours’. If you stare fixedly at a bright yellow object, then look away at a wall, a blue after-image will appear. Staring at a red object will cause a green after-image. This proves, according to Goethe, that the mechanism of colour is in the eye itself. He produced an elaborate theory in which orange is simply a ‘darker’ version of yellow, and red a darker version of orange, while indigo is a darker version of blue, and so on. Colour is explai
ned as a function of light and darkness.

  In a sense, Goethe was simply the victim of a misunderstanding. Newton believed that light is a stream of particles—tiny hard balls—and Goethe could not imagine why white light—a stream of white billiard balls—should actually consist of a stream of coloured billiard balls; it seemed illogical. It was easier to believe in one-coloured balls, and some mechanism in the eye that colours them.

  In fact, the Dutch astronomer Huygens had long ago suggested the true solution to the riddle: that light is not made of particles, but waves. Because of Newton's prestige, no one took him seriously. In 1803, seven years before Goethe published his book on colour, the English physicist Thomas Young performed experiments that showed fairly conclusively that light is made up of waves. Unfortunately, Goethe's independent streak inclined him to believe that all the theories so far were nonsense.

  Thirty-two years after Goethe's death, in 1864, James Clerk Maxwell finally put forward the theory that would have provided Goethe with the solution he needed. Maxwell argued that light is simply one of many forms of electromagnetic vibration. There are many forms of this energy, ranging from radio waves with a wavelength of more than a mile, to gamma radiation with a wavelength of less than a thousand millionth of an inch. Our eye is an instrument for detecting a narrow band of radiation whose wavelengths are between sixteen and thirty-two millionths of an inch—light. It cannot distinguish radiation below that—heat—or above it—ultraviolet.

  And how does the eye achieve this miracle of distinguishing between such tiny wavelengths? The answer appears to be: by seeing them as ‘colours’. It sees light of thirty-two millionths of an inch as red, and light of sixteen millionths as violet. We could say that the eye has ‘invented’ colour. And if, for some evolutionary reason, it became necessary for us to perceive wavelengths greater than red or smaller than violet, it would invent new colours that do not at present exist.