IN his 1895 work, Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) says of his first encounter with the German philosopher – who, sadly, was already drifting towards insanity – that he

“was lying on a couch. His exceptionally beautiful forehead was that of a thinker and artist. It was early afternoon. His eyes, though dying, still reflected his soul; they took in his physical surroundings, but this no longer reached his mind. One stood there, but Nietzsche was not aware of one’s presence. Observing his intelligent features one could believe they belonged to someone who had spent all morning engaged in thought and now wished to rest awhile.”

If Nietzsche had been in full command of his mental faculties, on the other hand, it seems rather unlikely that the two men would have had much in common. Steiner, ever the optimist, believed that Nietzsche’s philosophy about the evolution of humanity towards a state of power and supremacy was in line with his own Anthroposophical ideas, but it is doubtful whether the German’s dismissal of spirituality and firm emphasis on the ‘here and now’ would have struck a chord with Steiner’s insistence that the spiritual world is accessible through inner development. This, despite the fact that Nietzsche’s famous tale of Zarathustra is itself modelled along quasi-religious lines. Nonetheless, Steiner went on to describe how his meeting with Nietzsche harboured a more transcendent dimension:

“Previously I had read the Nietzsche who had written; now I saw the Nietzsche who, from far distant spirit fields carried within his body ideas which still shimmered in beauty, despite the fact that on the way they had lost their original power of light. I saw a soul which had brought rich gold of enlightenment from earlier earth lives, but which it could not bring to full radiance in this life. I had admired what Nietzsche had written, but now behind my admiration I glimpsed a radiant picture.”

Recounting this episode in his 1925 Autobiography, Steiner pre-empts the unsettled and inquisitive tone of existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Albert Camus (1913-1960) by suggesting that Nietzsche was

“a personality who was compelled by disposition and education to live intensely in the cultural and spiritual life around him, but who also felt: What has all this to do with me? – so much repels me. There must be a different world, a world where I can live.”

Exactly sixty years later, the English philosopher Colin Wilson (1931-2013) remarked that

“what Steiner saw in Nietzsche was largely a reflection of himself. He felt of his OWN age: What has all this to do with me? There must be a different world, a world where I can live.”

Perhaps there was an identification of some kind, particularly between two of the nineteenth-century’s most remarkable and prolific intellectuals, but I personally believe that Steiner – who also claimed that he had witnessed Nietzsche’s soul “as if hovering over his head” – had glimpsed a world in which Nietzsche had been living all along. This is the spirit-world that lies deep inside the sense-world and which forms the ideas that come from within ourselves; that which is hidden from human consciousness by the world of sense perception.

Steiner, therefore, had seen Nietzsche in all his nakedness and it was that which he identified with most of all. These men of ideas, however dissimilar, were united at the highest possible level.