Get started

WorkRudolf Steiner

Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom

A book about a living philosopher who could no longer read it, written by a younger man who found his own views in Nietzsche's.

by Rudolf Steiner159 passages held

  • German, the original language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit
First published
(aged 34)
Original language
German

Report a rights issue

Overview

In the spring of 1895, when Rudolf Steiner wrote this book in Weimar, its subject was alive, fifty years old and beyond reach: Friedrich Nietzsche had collapsed into mental illness in 1889 and lived on in Naumburg in his mother's care, while his reputation grew without him. Steiner, thirty-four, had spent hours in the Nietzsche Archive that Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, had set up there. The book makes no secret of Steiner's sympathy. It presents Nietzsche less as a doctrine than as a character, a man whose instincts recoiled from guilt, sin, the afterlife and the fatherland the way an eye recoils from a painful colour. It reads his superman as the person who stops kneeling before ideals set above life, such as the will of God or an eternal moral law, and lives out their own nature, and it traces how Nietzsche freed himself from his early masters, Schopenhauer and Wagner. A second printing followed within the year, and in January 1896 Steiner met Nietzsche himself. He later fell out with Förster-Nietzsche over who should edit her brother's papers; in 1900 he was among the first to warn publicly against how her archive handled them. The book reached English in 1960 under a changed title, which turned a fighter against his time into a fighter for freedom.

Key concepts

What does the book mean by Nietzsche's instincts?

Judgements made by a whole nature before any argument, the way an eye recoils from a painful colour. Steiner reads Nietzsche's attacks on guilt, sin, the afterlife and a moral law above life as reactions of this kind, and so as signs of health rather than conclusions of logic. On this reading the arguments came afterwards, to put into words what the instincts had already decided.

How does the book read the overman?

As the individual who no longer subordinates life to ideals placed above it and lives out their own nature. In Steiner's reading the overman is neither a biological successor to humanity nor a tyrant, but a person who knows that ideals are human creations and makes their own. The figure is a task any individual can take up, not a species to be bred.

What is the ascetic ideal the book attacks?

The valuing of self-denial as the highest good, which Nietzsche traced through priests, philosophers and moralists. In the book's account it is life turned against itself: weak instincts that cannot affirm existence declare denial holy and make suffering a merit. Steiner follows Nietzsche in treating it not as a mistaken doctrine but as a symptom, a sign of what kind of life needs it.

What does will to power mean in this book?

The drive of every living nature to unfold and increase its own strength, which Nietzsche set in place of Schopenhauer's will to live and its denial. Steiner reads it as the positive side of Nietzsche's critique: once ideals above life are dropped, what remains is the will of each nature to become fully itself, and values are measured by whether they serve that.

Why is Nietzsche called a fighter against his time?

Because his philosophy was a campaign against values his age took as settled: Christian morality with its guilt and its beyond, reverence for the fatherland, and a moral law set above life. Steiner presents the struggle as one character setting its instincts against a whole culture's, which is why the book begins with the man and his temperament rather than with a system of doctrines.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Character Against Its Time

What does it mean to judge an age's highest values by instinct rather than by argument? The book reads Nietzsche less as a doctrine than as a temperament that recoiled from guilt, sin, the beyond and the fatherland.

The first part sets the key for the rest: Nietzsche's objections to his age were not conclusions reached by logic but the reactions of a healthy nature, the way an eye turns from a painful colour. Guilt, sin, an afterlife and a moral law placed above life struck him as signs of decline, and asceticism as life turning against itself. Even truth fell under suspicion, as a value that must show it serves life. Steiner writes as an ally, treats these instincts as the right ones, and asks what sort of person could live by them.

  • instinct
  • morality
  • religion
  • asceticism
  • truth
  • reason
  • knowledge
  • epistemology
  • interpretation
  • conformity
  • suffering
  • naturalism

Enter a dialogue

The Overman and Ideals Above Life

What becomes of a person who stops kneeling before anything set above life, whether God's will or an eternal moral law? The book's answer is Nietzsche's overman, read as someone who lives out their own nature.

In Steiner's reading the overman is neither a future species nor a conqueror but the individual who has taken back the power human beings once handed to ideals outside themselves. Those ideals, he argues, were human creations mistaken for authorities; the overman knows he made them and makes his own. Will to power names the drive of a nature to unfold, and freedom means acting from that nature rather than from command. The figure stands close to the free spirit Steiner himself had described a year earlier in The Philosophy of Freedom.

  • overman
  • will to power
  • individuality
  • individualism
  • freedom
  • autonomy
  • life affirmation
  • creativity
  • will
  • self-knowledge
  • philosophy of life
  • reality
  • idealism
  • metaphysics

Enter a dialogue

Leaving Schopenhauer and Wagner

How does a thinker free himself from the masters who formed him? The book's last part follows Nietzsche from his debt to Schopenhauer and Wagner to the break that made him his own philosopher.

Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, took its metaphysics from Schopenhauer and its hope for a rebirth of tragic culture from Wagner's music drama. Steiner reads what followed as a slow recovery of Nietzsche's own instincts. Schopenhauer's call to deny the will was, he argues, foreign to a nature that wanted to affirm, and Wagner's art, once hailed as the rebirth of tragedy, came to look like a symptom of the decline it claimed to overcome. Human, All Too Human marks the break; from there the thought is Nietzsche's own.

  • aesthetics
  • art
  • music
  • philosophy

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
159
distinct concepts
244
by passages held, corpus-wide
#399

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “asceticism” and “religion”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 93 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
asceticismreligion5
epistemologylife affirmation4
life affirmationmorality4
aestheticslife affirmation3
individualitymorality3
instinctmorality3
asceticisminstinct2
individualitylife affirmation2
instinctlife affirmation2
instinctreligion2
aestheticsepistemology1
aestheticsindividuality1
aestheticsmorality1
asceticismepistemology1
epistemologyinstinct1
epistemologymorality1
epistemologyreligion1
individualityinstinct1
life affirmationreligion1
moralityreligion1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1891 Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie (Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre)

    A doctoral thesis and the groundwork for The Philosophy of Freedom, though most readers know it only through the 1892 book that absorbed it.

     DE
  2. 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit)

    The philosophical centre of Steiner's work, written in his Weimar years before any theosophy, and the book he kept sending later readers back to.

     DE
  3. 1895 Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit) you are here DE
  4. 1897 Goethe's World View (Goethes Weltanschauung)

    The last book of Steiner's Weimar years and the summing-up of his work as Goethe's scientific editor; The Philosophy of Freedom supplied its theory of knowledge.

     DE
  5. 1901 Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens)

    The first book to come out of Steiner's lectures for the theosophists, still written in the voice of the naturalist philosopher of the 1890s; Christianity as Mystical Fact followed from the next course.

     EN
  6. 1902 Christianity as Mystical Fact (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums)

    The book that marks Steiner's turn from philosophy to esoteric Christianity, given first as lectures to the Berlin theosophists in the months before he became their leader.

     EN
  7. 1904 How to Know Higher Worlds (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?)

    The practical companion to Theosophy: that book describes what the trained seer claims to see, this one the training that is meant to lead there.

     DE
  8. 1904 Theosophy (Theosophie)

    Begun two years after Steiner took charge of the German theosophists, and the systematic foundation that his later accounts of initiation and cosmic evolution build on.

     DE
  9. 1910 An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß)

    The fullest single statement of Steiner's cosmology, begun inside the theosophical movement and revised under anthroposophy through four prefaces from 1909 to 1925.

     DE
  10. 1911 The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind (Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit)

    Steiner's second book on the figure of Christ, nine years after Christianity as Mystical Fact, and one that carries the account far deeper into esoteric claims.

     EN
  11. 1919 The Threefold Commonwealth (Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft)

    Composed for the months after the German revolution, and Steiner's chief written statement on society; it reached English readers within a few years as The Threefold Commonwealth.

     DEEN
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works