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221. Earthly Knowledge and Heavenly Wisdom: The Human Being in Waking and Sleeping I
03 Feb 1923, Dornach Tr. Sabine H. Seiler Rudolf Steiner |
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Although he was a Hegelian, Rosenkranz's understanding of Hegel was colored, first, by his thorough study of Kant—he looked at Hegel through Kantian glasses, so to speak—and, second, by his study of Protestant theology. |
Karl Rosenkranz, 1805-1879, German professor of philosophy. Student of Hegel. See his book Aus einem Tagebuch ("From a Diary"), Leipzig, 1854, p. 328ff.2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831. German philosopher. Last of the great German Idealist system-building philosophers; created monistic system reconciling opposites by means of dialectic process. |
221. Earthly Knowledge and Heavenly Wisdom: The Human Being in Waking and Sleeping I
03 Feb 1923, Dornach Tr. Sabine H. Seiler Rudolf Steiner |
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Today I would like to begin by telling you about an episode in nineteenth century philosophy to give you an idea of the great changes that have taken place in the soul life of Western humanity. As I have often emphasized, people nowadays are convinced that human beings have always thought, felt, and perceived the same way we do now. Any differences corresponded to the childlike level of development in earlier times; of course, our thinking has now reached the level of maturity. To arrive at real insight into the human being we must be able to understand how people thought in former times. Then we will not feel so proud of what fills our souls. When we realize how completely the ideas and thoughts of educated people have changed in the course of just a few decades, we will get an idea of the radical change that has taken place in human soul life over long periods of time. We spoke about this change yesterday. One of the best known Hegelian scholars of the nineteenth century was Karl Rosenkranz.1 After stints in several other places, he was professor of philosophy at the Königsberg University for many years. Although he was a Hegelian, Rosenkranz's understanding of Hegel was colored, first, by his thorough study of Kant—he looked at Hegel through Kantian glasses, so to speak—and, second, by his study of Protestant theology.2 Thus, in this man of the mid-nineteenth century, Protestant theology, Kantianism, and Hegelianism merged. Hegelianism pretty much disappeared from the world view of educated circles in the last third of the nineteenth century in Central Europe; therefore we can hardly imagine how deeply rooted in Hegelianism educated people still were in the 1840s. That is why it will be difficult for us to imagine what a soul such as that of Karl Rosenkranz was like. In the 1840s, Rosenkranz was a person whose thinking conformed to what was then expected of a man who had left behind the old, useless way of thinking, and had fallen in with modern enlightenment—in short, a man who was not superstitious according to the definition of that word in the 1840s. We can think of Rosenkranz, then, as having reached the highest level of education of his time. One day in 1843, Rosenkranz was going for a walk and met a man named Bon with whom he had such an interesting conversation that he later wrote it down.3 Bon was a native of Thuringia, and he was by no means as much a product of his time as Rosenkranz was. For his part, Bon probably thought that Rosenkranz had been taken in by the latest ideas. He probably took Rosenkranz for a man who was in a way unprejudiced yet could no longer understand the good old wisdom that Bon himself still had. In 1843, as I said, these two men had a conversation. Bon had been educated at the University of Erlangen where he had studied mainly with the philosopher Schubert.4 Now Schubert had a touch of pietism, but he was still full of the older wisdom that placed great emphasis on being able to penetrate the essence of the human being by means of special, dreamlike states of consciousness. Schubert had great respect for this traditional wisdom. He believed that if one could not bring to life something of the good old wisdom in one's own inner life, then even the modern wisdom would not really teach one anything about the human being. The works of Schubert are very interesting in this regard. Schubert liked to immerse himself in the many revelations of dream life as well as in abnormal soul conditions, or, as we would say today, in the soul conditions of a genuine medium—one who is not a fraud—and in the kind of clairvoyance that has been preserved from ancient times as an atavism. In short, Schubert liked to study the abnormal and not-fully-awake states of soul. That is how he tried to gain insight into the human being. Well, Bon was one of Schubert's students. After his studies, Bon came here to Switzerland and took up a spiritual stream of which most present-day Swiss probably know nothing at all. I am referring to the philosophy of Gichtel, which Bon then adopted.5 I do not know whether many Swiss people of our time realize that Gichtelianism was fairly widespread not only in the rest of Europe—for instance, in the mid-nineteenth century it had become established in Holland—but was also quite well known here in Switzerland. Gichtelianism was what had remained of the teaching of Jakob Böhme throughout the eighteenth century and even in the nineteenth century.6 Jakob Böhme's teaching spread throughout many countries, including Switzerland, in the form in which Gichtel presented it, and this was how Bon met it. Well, Rosenkranz had read a great deal, and even though his Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Protestant theology did not allow him to find his way in inward activity into something like Jakob Böhme's teaching or even into Gichtel's watered-down version of it, he did at least understand its terminology. He was interested to hear such a strange person as the Gichtelian Bon speak. As I said, Rosenkranz wrote down the conversation that took place in 1843. At first, they spoke about a subject that did not have any unduly incomprehensible aspects for Kantians or for nineteenth-century Hegelians. In the course of their talk, Rosenkranz said it was really unfortunate that all sorts of outer disturbances could keep one from really thinking deeply about a problem. In Rosenkranz's words we can already feel what appeared later to a far greater degree, namely, the nervousness that is so common in our age. We only need to remember that among the many clubs and associations that were formed before the war in Central Europe there was one that originated in Hanover dedicated to the prevention of noise. Its members wanted to lobby for laws against noise so that they could sit quietly and think in the evenings without being disturbed, for example, by a neighboring inn. There were newspaper articles propagating this association for the prevention of noise. The idea of founding such a club is, of course, a typical expression of our nervous age. We can feel from Karl Rosenkranz's comment that all kinds of things going on around them could disturb people when they wanted to think or write a book. You can practically feel the nervousness. It seems Bon had real understanding for the complaint of a man who wants to think without being disturbed. He told Rosenkranz that he could give him some good advice in this matter. And then Bon suggested that Rosenkranz practice unreceptiveness. Rosenkranz was thunderstruck and could not believe his ears: he was supposed to practice unreceptiveness! He did not really understand this. So Bon explained to Rosenkranz what he meant by unreceptiveness. He said that Rosenkranz should strive to become firm in himself so that the "turba" of the other processes around him did not disturb his own constellation, so that he could maintain the "pure tincture" of his own "astrum." Well, Bon had learned from the Swiss Gichtelians to say that one should strive not to be disturbed in one's own constellation by the turba of the processes in one's surroundings so that the pure tincture of one's own astrum could remain intact. As I said, Rosenkranz understood these terms. I think nowadays not everyone understands them, not even all the people who think themselves very learned. What did the Gichtelian Bon actually mean? Well, you have to keep in mind that Bon was rooted in ideas that came down from Jakob Böhme. I told you a bit about Böhme recently; I said that he collected traditional folk wisdom, from which he learned much that people nowadays would refuse to accept. This folk wisdom has been preserved in some contemplative people in expressions such as the one I quoted from Bon. Back then, people still connected something that was in a certain sense inwardly alive with such expressions, because they still had traditions going back to what their ancestors had taken in through ancient clairvoyance. That kind of clairvoyance was based on forces coming from the person's bodily nature. Yet, this should not lead us to say that this ancient clairvoyance lived in the physical body, for then we would fail to realize that everything corporeal is permeated by spirit. Actually, the ancient clairvoyants drew the dreamlike images they saw before their soul out of the forces of their corporeality. The forces pulsating in the blood and the breath and even those living in the changing substances of their body rose up like spiritual steam, so to speak, and gave the ancient clairvoyants the grandiose world pictures I have often described to you. Ancient clairvoyance was actually drawn up out of the body. The ancients gave the name "tincture" to what was revealed when the clairvoyant felt the whole world bathed in a violet light and himself living in a violet cloud in this light, and felt at one with himself. Clairvoyants felt this tincture as their own, as connected to their organism. They felt it as their very own astrum. The Gichtelian Bon called this inwardness, which was drawn up out of the body, the pure tincture of one's own astrum. But the time had already come—actually it had already begun much earlier—when human beings could no longer draw up such things out of their corporeality. The ancient clairvoyance had long since ceased to be suited to people. That is why people like Jakob Böhme or Gichtel felt that it was difficult to bring such old ideas and images to life for oneself. People had lost the ability to live in these old images, since they practically vanished as soon as they appeared. People felt uncertain about them and tried as hard as they could to hold on to these fleeting inner images, which in those days could still be evoked by the inner sound of the old words. Once people experienced this pure tincture of their astrum in themselves, they felt that anything coming from the outside would immediately push away their inner images. The disturbing influence that lived spiritually in things and events around them was called turba. The state of soul people achieved by immersing themselves deeply into the inner sound of the old words was not to be disturbed by this turba—after all, people wanted to hold fast to their human essence by preserving this traditional inner life. This is why they strove not to take in anything from the outside and to live only in themselves. They became unreceptive in order not to have to let in anything from the outside. This unreceptiveness, this living in oneself as I have just explained it, is what Bon recommended to Rosenkranz. You see, here we can get a glimpse of the soul life of a very ancient time, a soul life that existed still in the Gichtelian circles in the middle of the nineteenth century though it was already in decline and fading away. But this soul life had once been an inner participation in the divine-spiritual world through dreamlike, clairvoyant pictures that made people feel more as heavenly beings than earthly ones. This ancient state of soul was possible only because people had not yet developed the clear thinking we now have. Actually, people do not yet have much of a sense for this pure thinking of modern times, which was first developed in the natural sciences and discussed for the first time in The Philosophy of Freedom.7 Let us look at an area of the natural sciences where we can see particularly clearly what I will be talking about, namely, astronomy. Under the influence of Copernicus, astronomy has simply become cosmic mechanics, a kind of description of the world machinery.8 Prior to this, people still believed that spiritual beings were embodied in the stars. Medieval scholasticism spoke of the spiritual being of the stars, of the intelligences inhabiting the stars and being embodied in them, and so on. The idea that everything out there is merely matter, empty of thought, and that human beings alone have thoughts about it all has come only rather recently. In earlier times, people used to form pictures that were connected with what they believed about stars and constellations. They saw them as imbued with inner life. Back then, people related to the world not through pure thinking; they were connected with it through something of a living soul nature. People then gradually developed pure thinking. Of course, in ancient times people also had thoughts, but they received them together with their clairvoyance. They received their clairvoyant pictures from the world around them, and then they derived their thoughts from their clairvoyance. They did not yet derive pure thoughts directly from external objects. The characteristic feature of modern times is that human beings are learning to comprehend the world through their pure thinking, which is developed further in the process. Bon's suggestion can be traced back to people who did not experience sleep as we do. We merely think, and we experience sleep as a state of unconsciousness interrupted by dreams, of which we do not think very highly—and rightly so, for due to the modern constitution of our soul, dreams do not mean much. As a rule, they are only reminiscences of our inner or outer life, and their content is of little value and use. Thus, the main characteristic of sleep is unconsciousness. This was not always the case. Jakob Böhme himself certainly experienced a kind of sleep during which his consciousness was filled with real insights into world mysteries. People like Jakob Böhme and Gichtel were still able to enter into that state of soul through working at it diligently. They realized that when we look at sensory objects with our eyes, then use other senses to perceive the world, and then use our thoughts to further understand what our senses perceive, we can come to many interesting insights into the world. Yet, the true mysteries of the world will not be revealed to us in this way. All we will get is just an outer picture of the world. Both Jakob Böhme and Gichtel knew states of consciousness in which they were neither sleeping nor merely dreaming; rather, their consciousness was filled with insights into the true mysteries of the world that are hidden behind the sense world. In fact, they valued these insights more than what their senses and intellect disclosed to them. Mere thinking was not yet of great significance for these people. They also knew the counterpart to this, namely, that human beings can perceive without using their bodies. For in those states of consciousness that were neither sleeping nor dreaming, they also knew that their essential being had, for the most part, tom itself free of their body but had taken the force of the blood and the breathing with it. Thus, they knew that human beings are inwardly connected with the world, but while they are awake, their body obscures this connection. However, when people become to a certain extent independent of their bodies in the waking state, they can gain insights into the mysteries of the world through the subtler forces of their bodies. These forces were drawn up out of the body by clairvoyance, as I have explained. From such special conditions of sleep, people learned what sleep actually is. Jakob Böhme and Gichtel realized that when they were asleep, the finer members of their being were outside in the subtler elements of nature. They felt themselves immersed in these subtler elements of nature. When they woke up, they realized that their subtler being, which had been in the finer elements of nature during sleep—even during sleep without consciousness—was living in them also when they were awake. They understood that they were filling their body with their subtler being when they were feeling and thinking—of course, back then thinking was not yet pure thinking. They knew that this subtler humanness lived in the pictures they were forming while they were thinking. In brief, in those days people saw real meaning in the statement that what we are in sleep continues to live in us when we are awake. In fact, they felt this state of sleep continue to pulsate in them as a kind of soul blood when they were fully awake and conscious. People like Jakob Böhme and Gichtel realized that even when they were awake they were still continuing to sleep because what happened in them during sleep continued in the waking state. This is a very different feeling from the one we have—we who have moved on to pure thinking, to pure intellectual thinking. When we wake up in the morning, we usually draw a clear line between what we were in sleep and what we are in the waking state. In a sense, we take nothing from sleep into our waking life. What we were in sleep ceases to exist the moment we begin to wake up. Indeed, modern humanity has outgrown the states of consciousness that were still alive for people like Bon. In the process, modern humanity has brought to full realization something that has been present in rudimentary form since the first third of the fifteenth century. This full realization was achieved through the transition to purely intellectual thinking in waking life. That is what dominates all people nowadays. We do not think in pictures anymore. Instead, pictures are generally thought to be mythology, as I explained yesterday. People nowadays think only in thoughts and they sleep in nothingness. In fact, that we nowadays sleep in nothingness has a profound significance. The statement, "I sleep in nothingness," would not have made sense to Jakob Böhme, but it has meaning for us. We are not nothing when we are asleep; we keep our I and our astral body during sleep. So we are not nothing, but we tear ourselves away from the sense-perceptible world, which we comprehend with our intellect when we are awake. At the same time, when we are asleep, we also tear ourselves away from the world Jakob Böhme and others perceived in abnormal states of consciousness with the subtler forces of their physical and etheric bodies, and which they took with them into sleep. In other words, when we are asleep, we tear ourselves away not only from the world of the senses but also from the world of ancient clairvoyance. And the world we then enter between falling asleep and waking up is a world of the future; therefore, we cannot perceive it. It is the world into which our earth will be transformed in those stages of development I have called Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan in my book, An Outline of Occult Science.9 Thus, we modern people who are drilled to think intellectually live in nothingness when we are sleeping. We are not nothing, as I have to stress again and again, but we live in nothingness because we cannot yet experience the world we live in, which is the world of the future; it is as yet a nothing to us. However, it is precisely through our ability to sleep in nothingness that our freedom is guaranteed. For from the moment of falling asleep until we wake up, we are becoming accustomed to being free of the world and living in nothingness. Thus, it is when we are asleep that we become independent. It is very important to realize that the way we sleep guarantees us our freedom. The ancient clairvoyants, who still perceived the old world but not the future one, could not become completely free human beings because the process of perception made them dependent. However, resting in nothingness while being asleep makes people of our times really free. Thus, we have seen two contrasting, complementary pictures of modern humanity. First, when we are awake, we live in thoughts that are purely thoughts and nothing else. These thoughts no longer contain pictures in the old sense (which, in any case, people now regard as myths). Second, when we are asleep, we live in nothingness, and in that way we free ourselves from the world and become conscious of our freedom. The images in our thoughts can no longer compel us because they are mere pictures. Just as mirror images cannot compel us to do anything and cannot cause any events, so the pictures of things we have in our thoughts cannot force us to act. Therefore, when we take hold of moral impulses with our pure thinking, we act upon them as free beings. No emotion, passion, or inner bodily process can compel us to act upon the moral impulses we can understand with our pure thoughts. At the same time, we are able to act on these mental images, these pure thoughts because during sleep we are free from all natural laws in our body. During sleep we become truly free souls that can act on the "unreality" of our thoughts. In contrast, people in ancient times remained dependent on the world even in sleep, and therefore they were not able to act on "unreal" impulses. Let us look more closely at these two aspects of modern humanity. We can have pure thoughts that are purely intellectual, and we live in our sleep in nothingness; there we are real, but the world around us reveals nothing to us. Now comes the crux of the matter: You see, it is inherent in our nature that, as a result of everything we have gone through, we have become inwardly weak-willed. Of course, people nowadays do not want to admit this, but it is nevertheless true that we have become inwardly weak in our willpower. This can be understood from a historical perspective. We need only look at the great spiritual movements that spread in earlier times to see the kind of will impulses the founders of religions, for example, worked with. This kind of inner will impulse has been lost to modern humanity. That is why people nowadays allow the outer world to teach them what to think. They study nature and develop their purely intellectual thoughts based on the natural processes and beings they perceive, as though their inner being were really only a mirror reflecting the world. Indeed, people have become so weak that they are terribly afraid when someone produces thoughts out of himself rather than merely "reading" them in nature. Thus, pure thinking initially developed in modern humanity in a completely passive way. This is not meant as criticism, for if humanity had right away made the transition to actively producing pure thinking, all kinds of impure fantasies from the past would have entered into pure thinking. Humanity has certainly learned a valuable lesson by allowing itself to be seduced by grandiose philistines, such as Bacon of Verulam, into developing concepts and ideas based on the outer world, into letting the outer world dictate everything to them. Gradually, people have become accustomed to not living in concepts, ideas, and thinking, and to letting the outer world hand them their thinking, so to speak. For some people, this process is direct; they study nature or historical documents, for example, and that is where they get their thoughts about nature or history. These thoughts then live in them. But most people get their concepts in school; their concepts are drilled into them. Nowadays, people are flooded from earliest childhood with concepts that have been developed passively on the basis of the outer world. In this respect, modern people are actually like a sack that is open on the side. They take things in from nature and mirror them inside. These mirror images, then, are their ideas. Actually, their soul is merely filled up with concepts of nature. If people nowadays were to trace their concepts to their source, they would soon find that what I told you is true. Ever since the fifteenth century, people have been taught this passivity of thinking, and now they consider it almost a sin to be inwardly active and create one's own thoughts. Of course, we cannot create thoughts about nature by ourselves; we would only pollute nature with all sorts of fantastic ideas if we tried to do that. Yet, we have the source of thinking within us. We can think thoughts of our own; in fact, we can imbue the thoughts we already have with inner reality. This can happen when we have enough will to push our night being into our waking life, to think not merely passively but rather to insert our being, which has become independent during sleep, into our thoughts. This is possible only with pure thoughts. My main reason for writing The Philosophy of Freedom was to explain that we can insert our I-being into our modern thinking. At the time, I could not express it in the same words as I do now, but it really is true that when we are asleep, we free our I-being, and then we can insert it into our pure thinking. We become aware of our I-being in pure thinking when we live actively in our thoughts. Now, let us assume anthroposophy were presented in the same way as the modern sciences. People then would take in anthroposophy in their usual manner, namely, through passive thinking. Of course, all that is needed to understand anthroposophy is sound common sense; one does not have to accept it on faith. Anybody with sound common sense can understand it. Nevertheless, if we presented anthroposophy just like the natural sciences, people would understand it only passively, just as they do in their thoughts about outer nature. Of course, there are people who claim to have derived their thoughts from anthroposophical research. But they say they themselves cannot stand up for these thoughts because they have merely taken them in. Similarly, many people often say they have assimilated some ideas of spiritual science. We often hear people stress that the natural sciences say such and such, while spiritual science says this or that. What does it mean when people claim to have heard something from spiritual science? It means that the persons in question reveal that they are stuck in passive thinking and want to take in spiritual science only with this passive thinking. However, as soon as people decide to create in themselves the thoughts anthroposophical research gives to them, they will become able to defend the truth of these thoughts with their whole personality for, in the process, they will have experienced the first stage of truth. In other words, people nowadays generally are not yet able to use the strength of their will to pour the independent reality they experience during sleep into the thoughts of their waking life. People who want to be anthroposophists—and not simply accept anthroposophical thoughts passively but really assimilate them—must pour what they have been during their dreamless sleep into the pure thoughts of anthroposophy with the help of their strong will. Those people will then have reached the first stage of what we can legitimately call clairvoyance. Then they live clairvoyantly in the thoughts of anthroposophy. Anthroposophical books must be read with a strong will, and we must bring more than just our waking life to them. We must not read anthroposophical books in the way we usually read: intermittently, every day only a little bit. Generally, people read only with their waking life. Of course, that is good enough for reading Gustav Freytag or Dickens or Emerson, but not for reading anthroposophical books.10 To read anthroposophical books, we really must enter into them with our whole being. Since we are unconscious during sleep and have no thoughts then—though our will is, of course, still there—we must put our whole will into the reading of anthroposophical books. If you make the contents of an anthroposophical book the object of your will, then you will become immediately clairvoyant, at least in your thoughts, through this exercise of your will. You see, this will still has to enter those who represent our anthroposophy. If this will completely permeates and electrifies those who represent anthroposophy, then anthroposophy will be presented to the world in the right way. This does not require any magic but only a forceful will that brings more than one's waking life to bear on anthroposophical books. These days people do not even use all of their waking consciousness to read. Of course, it is enough to activate a few small bits and pieces, a few minutes, so to speak, of waking life to comprehend what is contained in newspapers; it does not take a whole day of our waking life. However, anthroposophical books come alive for us only if we immerse ourselves in them with our complete being. This must be kept in mind, especially by those who want to be leading figures in the Anthroposophical Society. For it is extremely detrimental to this society when anthroposophy is proclaimed by people who cannot stand up for it. We need to find the way from a merely passive, intellectual experiencing of anthroposophical truths to an immersion in them with our whole being. Then anthroposophical teaching will no longer be presented in a deadbeat and feeble way with phrases like, "Anthroposophical sources have assured us that ...Instead, people will be able to proclaim anthroposophical truths out of their own experience, at least in the most accessible areas, such as medicine, physiology, biology, and the social sphere. While we cannot yet reach the sphere of the higher hierarchies on that first level of clairvoyance, nevertheless we can make the spirit in our immediate surroundings the subject of our state of soul. It is a matter of will in the most comprehensive sense whether or not there will be people in our Anthroposophical Society who can give testimony—and we need a valid, living testimony based on their own direct experience of a living source of truth—of the inner truth of anthroposophy. In addition, there must be personalities in the Anthroposophical Society who, if I may use the paradoxical expression, have a certain amount of goodwill for the will. These days, people talk about any arbitrary wish as "will," but a wish is not the same as will. Some people wish for a particular matter to turn out in such and such a way. That is not will. Will is an active force, and that is largely lacking nowadays. People of our time generally do not have it. However, it must not be lacking in the Anthroposophical Society. There, a strong will must be anchored in calm enthusiasm. That is one of the necessary conditions for the life of the Anthroposophical Society.
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273. The Problem of Faust: Goethe's Feeling for the Concrete. Shadowy concepts and Ideas filled with Reality
27 Jan 1917, Dornach Tr. George Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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Thus, Fichte tried to penetrate beyond the ordinary, everyday ego to the absolute ego, anchored in the Godhead, and weaving its web in eternity. Thus Schelling and Hegel sought to press through to absolute Being. All this was naturally taken at the time in various ways. |
It looks as if he were right outside the picture I have just given you; however, he represents a caricature of it. He has been infused with all that the Kant-Fichte-Schelling-Hegel philosophy was able to give, and by Schlegel's interpretation of it all; but he takes this in a very narrow, egoistic sense. |
Yes, my dear friends, we may indeed get to know people who take the philosophy of Kant even more egoistically than this scholar. We once knew a man who was so infected with this philosophy of Kant and Fichte that he did actually believe he had created the whole world. |
273. The Problem of Faust: Goethe's Feeling for the Concrete. Shadowy concepts and Ideas filled with Reality
27 Jan 1917, Dornach Tr. George Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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(Representation of a scene from Faust, Part II, Act II High-vaulted, narrow Gothic Room—Laboratory.) It is to be hoped that the scenes just witnessed may have effect and meet with a really intelligent reception in the widest circles today. For these scenes contain many germs of the evolution within which also flows the stream of Spiritual Science. We can say that, in writing these scenes out of his long and varied experience, Goethe foreshadowed much that like a seed will spring up through Spiritual Science. These scenes from the second part of “Faust” stand before our souls not only as a record of cultural history, but also as an expression of deep knowledge. To help us to a full understanding in our approach to this deepest manifestation of Goethe's spirit we may now call to our aid the already familiar ideas of Spiritual Science. For, in these ideas, all that Goethe's inner imagination develop out of the experiences of his time is formulated and brought to full consciousness. In the first of these two scenes, above all, we have an important document of cultural history. Goethe had been matured by all that he had absorbed from natural science, and by the deepening of all his concepts through his studies and mysticism as well as what he received from Grecian art. And, at the very time when he was giving form to the ideas thus living in him, the spirits of men were seeking with infinite enthusiasm for knowledge to grapple with the highest problems of existence. Something that should not, cannot, surprise people in our circle is the fact that a really intensive striving towards the spiritual world should actually promote caricatures of itself. Both mystical striving and the deeper striving after philosophical knowledge produce their caricatures. In Goethe's immediate circle a really important endeavor, that might be described as both philosophical and theosophical, was developing at the time when the scenes were living in unfolding in Goethe's mind. It was then that Johann Gottlieb Fichte was teaching with an immense enthusiasm for knowledge. From the brief account given in my book, and from what is said about Fichte both in the development of the “Riddles of Philosophy” and in the more recent “Riddles of Man,” you can see by all that is said there about him how he strove an elemental way to formulate the divine spiritual dwelling in man's innermost soul, in such a way that, by developing this in his soul, man may become conscious of his divine spiritual origin. Fichte tried to grasp the full life of the ego in the soul of man, the active, creative ego, and also the ego filled with God. By this means he sought to feel the union of the inner human life with the whole life of the cosmos. And out of this enthusiasm he spoke. It is very easy to understand how such a spiritual thrust should meet with opposition. Naturally Fichte could not then speak in the concrete way of Spiritual Science, the time was not yet ripe for this. We might say that he tried by abstract, all-round concepts, to give life to the feeling that can then be wakened to full life in man by the impressions of Spiritual Science. Hence his language has often much about it that is abstract; this is penetrated, however, by living feeling and experience. And for what Fichte had to say to be taken seriously at all, the strong impression was needed that a personality such as his could produce. He often expressed himself strangely and in paradox—to even greater degree than is necessary in Spiritual Science, for, to those unaccustomed to it, what is true often appears foolish. This is why such a great spirit as Fichte, who had at that time to express the truth in abstract form, was thought ridiculous. On the other hand, those who had been strongly impressed by Fichte might easily have exaggerated things, as happens often in life. Then came caricatures of him, caricatures of others as well who, inspired by the same convictions were also teaching in Jena at the time. Among these was Schelling who, striving like Fichte, actually fought his way—as I have often stressed—to a very deep conception of Christianity, even to a very deep conception of the Mystery of Golgotha. This conception gradually developed into a kind of Theosophy then expressed—though without being understood by his contemporaries—in his “Philosophy of Manifestation.” It was embodied too in the treatise on human freedom and other subjects akin to it written round Jakob Boehme. It was already living in his discourse on Bruno, or on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things, and lived especially in his splendid treatise on the Mysteries of the Samothracian Divinities, where he gave a picture of what in his opinion had dwelt in those old Mysteries. Then there were such spirits as Friedrich Schlegel, who energetically applied to the different branches of human knowledge what to those more philosophically constituted natures sought to charm from the heart of the world order. Hegel had begun to formulate his philosophy. And all this had been going on around the Goethe. These men sought to penetrate beyond what is relative in the world, beyond all that controls mankind in day-to-day life, to the Absolute, to what is not merely the background of the relative. Thus, Fichte tried to penetrate beyond the ordinary, everyday ego to the absolute ego, anchored in the Godhead, and weaving its web in eternity. Thus Schelling and Hegel sought to press through to absolute Being. All this was naturally taken at the time in various ways. Today, particularly, when Spiritual Science can penetrate our hearts, we are able to form a very clear idea of the frame of mind of men like Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, when on talking about all that was so vividly before their spiritual eye people remained apathetic—apathetic and hostile. One can understand, too, how the youthful Fichte, meeting antiquated pedants in Jena, who each in their own way of thought they knew everything, might sometimes flare up. Fichte often flared up, not only when he was banished from Jena but also when he saw that, giving of his best, it found no entrance into any heart, any soul; for they all thought themselves wiser with their old traditional knowledge and ideas. So we can understand that when such a spirit as Fichte was faced with the pundits of Jena and had to deal with them, that he was driven to declare that everyone over thirty should be put to death!—It was a spiritual struggle of the first magnitude raging at that time in Jena, and everything going on there was vilified. Kotzebue, a poetaster who nevertheless had his public, wrote a very interesting and witty dramatic pamphlet—witty because it describes a type of young graduate educated at Jena, who when he goes home to his mother speaks in the empty phrases he learnt there. These are all given word-for-word in the pamphlet that is called “Hyperborean Ass or the New Education”. All this appears no doubt, very witty but it is really nothing more than a vulgar attack on a fine effort. We must not, of course, confuse it with what Goethe sought to denounce—the caricaturing of what is great—for we must be clear from the correspondence between Goethe and Fichte and between Goethe and Shelling, that Goethe was well able to appreciate the spirit striving after the Absolute. Although we did not find Goethe elaborating into a system any occult principles, yet we can say that he was a spiritual dwelling wholly within the aura of the occult, and knowing that what lives in the progress of good in world-evolution may incline on the one hand to the ahrimanic, on the other to the luciferic. He does not use these particular expressions but that is of no importance; he knew that actually the pendulum of world-evolution is always swinging between the ahrimanic and the luciferic. And Goethe wished to work everything out from its very depths, and everywhere to show how, fundamentally, even the striving after the highest may at the same time be dangerous. What is there that may not be so? It stands to reason that all that is best may be dangerous. And how dangerous the best may be when Ahriman and Lucifer take a hand in things, was precisely the problem Goethe had so vividly in mind. Thus he had his Faust in mind—the Faust who strove after the deepest secrets of existence, who was to be the realisation of what stood ever before Goethe's soul, namely, the direct perception of the living and spiritual in all nature and in all history. Goethe himself was striving to find again the spiritual secrets of the early Greek days. He wanted to unite himself with all that was alive and creative in a past epoch—in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This is what he wanted to put into form in the striving of his Faust after what was still living in Helen. Goethe sought the paths by which he could lead Faust to Helen. But he was quite conscious of the danger here. However justifiable, however high-minded, the striving might be, because it could so easily lead into luciferic channels it meant danger. Thus Goethe first showed us Faust being drawn into the luciferic channel, paralyzed by the sudden appearance of Helen, paralyzed by association with the spiritual. Faust has called up Helen from the ‘realm of the Mothers’, at first having her before him only as a spiritual force. He is paralyzed by what he experiences spiritually. Inwardly he is filled with what he has absorbed. He lives in a living, spiritual element of ancient Greece but through it becomes paralyzed. And in this condition we find him when Mephistopheles has brought him back to his cell, to his laboratory, paralyzed by his contact with the spiritual element of the past:
as Mephistopheles says. We see, too, how a certain rift has arisen between Faust, who has been drawn into the luciferic channel, and Mephistopheles. Whether the experience is altogether conscious or not, Faust with his soul, through luciferic impulse, has entered a different spiritual channel from that of Mephistopheles. They are now separated as if by the limits of their consciousness. Faust is dreaming—as ordinary language would have it. He knows nothing of his old world in which he is presently living. But Mephistopheles is in it, through him everything ahrimanic also comes to life. Thus, in this sense we have essentially the two worlds clashing, and this is in accordance with truth. This collision is made clear to us, and it is remarkable how deeply Goethe, in his instinctive way, goes deeper than what is Spiritual Science. This collision is made clear to us through the unsuspecting Famulus now introduced, who imperturbably swings like a pendulum between the tremendous dangers surrounding him. We may regard him as representing the type of man who is the victim of an unimaginative, unobservant nature, from which, often, he cannot escape. He sees nothing of what goes on around him. It is in the sense that we must understand all he says. The whole milieu in which we now find ourselves is changed by Mephistopheles meeting with his former pupil who has now taken his degree. It looks as if he were right outside the picture I have just given you; however, he represents a caricature of it. He has been infused with all that the Kant-Fichte-Schelling-Hegel philosophy was able to give, and by Schlegel's interpretation of it all; but he takes this in a very narrow, egoistic sense. We may ask why he does so? This is indeed a pertinent question. Why has the graduate become what we now see? Is it possible that in him Goethe was wishing perhaps to make fun of the Jena philosophy he so much appreciated? Most certainly not! But in his opinion the student who had received from Mephistopheles the precept Eritus sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum, would have been on this philosophical channel:
This impulse of the one-time student received from the Mephistopheles himself. Mephistopheles cannot complain if this old student gives him occasion to say: “How crude thou art, my friend, thou scarcely know'st” for he himself has planted all that in his soul, it is a seed of his sowing. This matured scholar has indeed taken the advice and followed Mephistopheles' cousin, the famous snake. And to begin with he has no qualms; they will come later. He is not made uneasy by the thought of his affinity with God, that he clearly refers to when announcing that he has created the world, it is he who has fashioned it.—This indeed has been accepted as the Kantian philosophy by many caricature-lovers, and even today it is still widely accepted. Yes, my dear friends, we may indeed get to know people who take the philosophy of Kant even more egoistically than this scholar. We once knew a man who was so infected with this philosophy of Kant and Fichte that he did actually believe he had created the whole world. It had become an idée fixe with him that he had created it. I said to him at the time: Why, yes, certainly an an idea, as your idea, you have created the world, but there is something to be added to the idea. You created the idea of your own boots, but it was the shoemaker who made those boots of yours. You cannot say you made your own boots, though you may have created the idea of them.—Fundamentally, every genuine refutation, even Schopenhauer's philosophy of The World as Idea, is based on this problem of the shoemaker. Those things, however, are not always seen in the right light. Thus the scholar meeting Mephistopheles in this way, is to some extent his victim. Philosophers have striven after the Absolute. In this man the striving after the Absolute has become a caricature. Mephistopheles has to caution him:
We see the connection with the spiritual culture of that time represented by Goethe in a very witty way. It is because the scenes are based on living reality that they are so vivid and so extraordinarily dramatic. Goethe strove again and again lead men beyond the ideas that savour rather of the tavern, ideas so often heard, such as: Ah, we should like to keep to what is good and to flee from Lucifer and Ahriman, have nothing to do with them.—It is because Goethe does not like these notions that he sometimes makes Mephistopheles quite sympathetic and kindly. For how pleasant it all is when the scholar, becoming altogether too absolute, the good Mephistopheles turns his chair round from this one scholar to the general public, to the younger pit-goers, looking there, as Goethe imagined it, for sympathy. And he makes Mephistopheles speak not merely like a devil but in a very apt way, because he knows how much of what belongs to Mephistopheles must be mixed with life for life to thrive at all, and how unwholesome are the ideas which, in the way we have shown, smell of the tavern. It is quite worth-while for once to reflect how Goethe himself did not remain cold with the coldness of the apathetic crowd. For this reason he makes his Mephistopheles expressed itself rather heatedly about the people who, as he observes, receive his wise maxims so indifferently. Goethe even then wanted to point out this coldness, though it was a long way from being as cold as the usual opinions and mood of soul today towards all that can penetrate to man from the spiritual life. And now we see a genuine ahrimanic activity developing in the creation of Homunculus. It was not easy for Goethe to write a particular part of his Faust we have had before us here. Poets of a lesser degree can accomplish anything; circumstances permitting, such a poet would easily solve the problem of bringing Faust and Helen together. But Goethe was not a poet of that calibre; poetical creation was to him difficult and harassing. He had to find a way to bring Faust with all reality together with talent, with whom, as we have seen, he lived in another state of consciousness. He had to find some way, but was by no means clear how to find it. Faust had first to be taken down to the underworld, there to beg the help of Persephone in procuring him Helen in bodily form. But when Goethe wish to show Helen being fetched by Persephone, he felt that no ideas or concepts from the scene were forthcoming. For just think what was involved. Faust has got as far as reaching Helen imaginatively, in his soul's subconscious; he had, however, to reach her with those faculties natural to him in life. For that, Helen had to enter this sphere of consciousness. Therefore Goethe had to bring about, to a certain degree, Helen's embodiment. To this end he had recourse to what he knew from Paracelsus, whose works he had really studied, the treatise De Generatione Rerum being especially useful to him. There Paracelsus shows how homunculi may be produced by means of certain processes. It is easy, of course, for the modern man to say: Yes, but that was merely a mediaeval pre-possession of Paracelsus'. It is also easy for him to say: surely no one is asked to believe this phantasy of Paracelsus'.—True, as far as I'm concerned nobody need believe it. But it is well to consider that in this treatise De Generatione Rerum Paracelsus expressly assures us that by means of certain processes it is possible to produce something having indeed no body—mark that, please. Paracelsus expressly says that it has nobody, but faculties similar to those of the human soul, and rising to clairvoyance. Thus, Paracelsus was of the opinion that there were certain devices enabling men to produce a being that, without a physical body, develop a kind of understanding, a kind of intellectuality like human beings, and even something higher. It was of this that Goethe made use. Perhaps he thought to himself: Helen has entered the sphere of Faust's consciousness in a purely spiritual sense, but she must become more substantial. This substantiality he brought about through the kind of being we have in Homunculus, who is as it were a bridge between the purely spiritual and the physical; for he himself has no physical body but a favorable moment originates from physical devices. So that we may say: The presence of Homunculus makes it possible to bring a quite spiritual Helen into the corporeal world where Faust has his home. Now for all this Goethe naturally needed some kind of error, and this error is brought about in a roundabout way through Wagner. Through his materialistic mind Wagner is misled into the belief that Homunculus is entirely a material production. He could not have brought a real homunculus into being; for that, there would be required spiritual forces not at his disposal. These spiritual forces are supplied when Mephistopheles, the ahrimanic element, appears. For the ahrimanic impulse is given when something actually comes into being out of what Wagner has compounded. Had Wagner—either alone or perhaps with the help of the everywhere latent forces—succeeded in his experiment, it might have happened to him as it did to a man who wrote me some time ago saying that, at last, after endless effort, he had really brought little men to life in his room, but then could not get rid of them, he could not escape them. He wanted advice as to how he could save himself from these creatures, these living mechanisms, he had produced. They have since pursued him everywhere. One can well imagine what happens to the mind of such a man. There are, of course, still men today who have these adventures, just as there are still those who scoff at such things. Through a coincidence, but only coincidence, at the time Goethe was writing the scene Johann Jakob Wagner, in Wurzburg, was maintaining that homunculi could be produced, and he gave the method for doing this. But it goes without saying that it is not true that Goethe took the name from him; for the name Wagner come from the old “Faust” then still in existence. This scene was first written down when Johann Jakob Wagner was still an infant. It is due to Mephistopheles that, out of what Wagner has achieved, the Homunculus comes into being. But he does come into being, and is represented in the way Goethe had learnt from Paracelsus' instructions. And Homunculus does in fact immediately become clairvoyant, for he is able to see Faust's dream. he describes what Faust—more or less under the influence of Lucifer—is experiencing in another state of consciousness—how he has actually gained access to the Grecian world. In the description Homunculus we recognise the meeting of Zeus with Leda, the mother of Helen. Thus we see how Goethe places a close juxtaposition the spiritual that lives in Faust, and Homunculus who knows how to grasp and interpret it. We see how Goethe works round to the ordinary physical world so that Helen can then enter it. And for all that is pictured later in the “Classical Walpurgis-night”, we see how Goethe tries to form the physical out of the eternal spiritual in Helen, with whom Faust has lived, while Homunculus traverses all the kingdoms of nature, and now taking to himself a physical body unites with Helen's spiritual element. By dint of Homunculus traversing the rounds of nature Helen becomes, externally on the physical plane, all that we find her in the third Act of the second Part of “Faust”. Thus Helen is born anew through Homunculus, through the metamorphosis is able to bring about in conjunction with all Faust is living through spiritually. This is what Goethe had in mind. This is why he introduces Homunculus and why he shows the relation between what Faust is, in a way, is dreaming, and what Homunculus sees. With all this, Goethe comes very near true Occultism, that through Occultism of which I have often spoken, from which we are led away by abstract thinking and the desire to live in abstract concepts. I have often called attention to the way a certain one-sided cultivation of the principles of Christianity leads to the maturing of unreal, shadowy concepts as world-outlook, that are powerless to come to any understanding of real-life. And men stands to-day at the mercy of such concepts. On the one hand they have a purely mechanical knowledge of nature that, however, is no knowledge but merely a system out of which all life has been driven.
says Mephistopheles. This on the one hand that wants merely to copy down what happens outwardly, and on the other hand concepts drawn from any kind of spiritual source, either represented pantheistically or existing in some cloud-cuckoo-land of shadowy concepts, neither capable of entering right into life, nor of grasping its reality. It is for this reason I have been pointing out how Spiritual Science is able to understand once again the real, actual, human being, for example, and to say: This human head is, from one point of view, only what the anatomist makes of it by describing it purely externally, but it is not merely what is outwardly the body for an abstract concept of a soul floating in cloud-cuckoo-land; this head must be understood as having undergone a transformation, a metamorphosis, from the body of a previous incarnation and is formed, as I have explained in recent lectures, out of the spheres of the entire cosmos. The essential thing for which concrete spiritual science must strive is to fit what is thus formed into the material world by means of concepts—concepts that do not float in the general and abstract. For what is most feared today by many bigotted Christian pastors, and people of that kind, with their unsubstantial abstractions of God and eternity, is precisely this living comprehension of the world, this concrete grasping of the material that is, indeed, at the same time a revelation of the spiritual. This diving into the real world with concepts is what man today will not have. And it is just this to which Goethe wants so vigorously to point. Hence he contrasts the spirit of Homunculus, the real, genuine spiritual that then lives on, though in a different way, in the consciousness of Faust, this way of beholding, he contrasts with the world as Mephistopheles would have it—a world derived from the association-forming tendency of the Christian middle-ages, in which is extinguished everything spiritual that approaches man's soul. Therefore Homunculus sees what is visible neither to Wagner not to Mephistopheles. Hence because Mephistopheles says:
Homunculus answers:
Goethe is consciously striving for a concrete grasp of reality. I have drawn attention to the fact that here, in the passage of course where Homunculus is speaking to Mephistopheles, by some mischance a line has been left out. For in all the editions we read:
The rhyme to ‘home’ is missing.
Now there is no reason why the rhyme here should be missing; it must have happened therefore by some accident in the dictation that a line was missed that must perhaps have run like this:
Thus Homunculus, having seen that Mephistopheles does not understand him, shows him clearly how by living in abstractions men have separated themselves from the concrete, spiritual world. This has arisen through the misty concepts that have been developed and have led to the narrowness in all the affairs of life in which Faust grew up, from which, however, he grew away. But the devil in Mephistopheles feels at home there. This is perhaps why Homunculus says:
By the ‘misty ages’ he means the Middle Ages, but with a play upon the old German name Nivelheim. (The line in German runs Im Nebelalter jung geworden.) Jung geworden (grown young) is an old expression—and a very good one. Just as one grows old in the physical world, so one grows young when one is born into the spiritual world. Thus, in the old German expression, to ‘become young’ meant to ‘be born,’ and is clear evidence that in language there was an understanding of the spiritual. And now he looks about him in the gloom and sees all that is there:
Then:
for he must be brought into a life that is fully living if he has no wish for merely abstract concepts. Faust has no desire, for example, to have ancient Greece pictured according to the humanists or philologists; he wants to live, really live, within ancient Greece, by having Helen, as its representative, appearing bodily before him. Thus throughout this scent we see Goethe's wonderful feeling for the concrete. We may say indeed that every word of the poetry Goethe wrote in his old age came out of a profound experience of the world. And that gives weight to these words, enormous weight, and gives them also immortality. For how fine in this respect are the words here spoken by Mephistopheles—words acquiring their special colouring from this fact:
(By the devil of discord, with whom Mephistopheles feels himself thoroughly akin.) “They fight for freedom—so themselves they flatter.” We feel ourselves transported almost into the present, for now too we fight for freedom. But Goethe retorts:
To sum up, my dear friends, we might say: If only the time might come when all the striving of such a poem, as we find it revealed in Goethe by this scene, might be continued on into what should arise through present-day Spiritual Science, if only what lies in such a story of endeavour might take more hold on men, might find a haven in their souls—then we might indeed go forward as real men. But instead, since the days of Goethe, the abstraction of all endeavour has made infinitely greater progress. Here is the point where the striver after Spiritual Science—whether or not he rises to Goethe's level—should try to become clear as to the difference between concrete spiritual endeavor and the spiritual endeavor that is abstract. You see, the study of Spiritual Science gives us concepts by means of which we can really immerse ourselves in reality and learn to understand it. Materialism gives no real concepts only the shadows of them. So how can materialism understand the difference we have made clear between the human head and the rest of the body? Or how can it understand the following, for example. Let us take a concept that is infinitely important. We know that man has his physical body, his etheric body, his astral body and his ego. The animal has its physical body, etheric body and astral body. Let us look at the animal. It is interesting to watch animals when, having eaten their fill in the meadow, they lie down to digest. It is very interesting to watch this—and why? Because the animal with its astral being has withdrawn entirely into the etheric body. What then is its soul doing while the animal is digesting? The soul is taking part with infinity satisfaction in what is happening to the body. It lies there and watches itself digesting and this gives the animal immense satisfaction. It is interesting to see a cow, for instance, digesting spiritually as she lies there, to see how all the processes involved when foodstuffs are received into the stomach and utilised in the other parts of the body are inwardly visible to her. The animal looks on at these processes with inner satisfaction, because of the intimate correspondence between her astral and ether bodies. The astral is living in what the etheric body reflects of the physico-chemical processes whereby the foodstuffs are introduced into the organism. It is a whole world that the cow sees! True, this world consists only of the cow and the processes taking place within her, but truly, though all that this astral body perceives in the etheric body of the cow consist sonly of the processes within her own horizon, within her sphere, everything is so magnified that it is as large in the consciousness of the cow as our human consciousness when it reaches to the firmament. I should have to draw the processes taking place between the stomach and the rest of the cow's organism as a large sphere growing and expanding to a vast area, since at this moment for the cow there is nothing beyond the cow-cosmos—and this is of a gigantic size. This is no jest but a fact. And the cow has a feeling of exaltation when seeing her cosmos thus, seeing herself as cosmos. Here we have an insight into the concrete nature of animals. For, man having an ego, the astral body is torn by it from that intimate union with the etheric body existing, for example, in the cow. Astral body and etheric body are torn asunder. Hence, when man digests after a meal he is deprived of the capacity to survey the whole digestive process of the cosmos. He remains unconscious of it all. Against that, the ego by its activities so restricts the impulses of the etheric body that they are only grasped by the astral body in the region of the sense organs. So that what in the animal forms a whole with the astral body is in men concentrated in the sense organs. That is why the sense-process in man is as great as in certain moments the animal process is for the animal. It is in a measure a defect in man that, when he begins his afternoon nap, he cannot as he dreams look on at his digestion, for he would then see a whole world. But the ego tears man's astral body away from that world, and only allows him to see as cosmos what is going on in his sense organs. I wanted to refer to this merely as an example, for from it we see that concrete Spiritual Science mut enter into the very essence of things with concepts that are not shadowy but go deep into reality. All concepts of Spiritual Science should be such that they go deep into reality. It is a characteristic phenomenon, however, of the materialistic age that it despises concepts of this nature; it will have nothing to do with them. Where knowledge of nature is concerned this leads in reality to lack of any knowledge at all. In life it leads to a much greater lack. It makes it impossible for man to have any sense of concrete concepts, concepts full of content. Hence, materialistic education is at the same time an education in shadowy concepts, empty of content. The two things run absolutely parallel—not to be able to understand reality in a spiritual way, to lack upon everything as a mechanism; and to be incapableof forming any concepts that can really enter into the connections of the world or of humanity. And it is from this point of view that the present time must be understood, for that is precisely where the difficulties today arise. There are now, certainly, people with idealistic natures, but they are the idealists of a materialistic age, and for that reason talk in shadowy, general concepts, unable to gras reality, or at best grasping it only indirectly through emotion, and these idealists blow their own trumpets in the world as loudly as possible. While on the other hand as regards knowledge of nature the capacity to understand her is lacking, on the other hand we have the inevitable parallel phenomenon—the holding forth of shadowy concepts. And when men talk so, they are indeed not talking of anything that is unreal in itself but of what is connected in the worst possible way with the painful events of the present time. In Goethe's day things had not gone so far, but today we are confronted with a wide-spread lack of power to see any difference at all between a shadowy and a real concept. Wagner, as pictured by Goethe, lives entirely in shadowy concepts, and Homunculus even tries to prove to him that he does so. For instance, when Wagner has anxiously asked:
Homunculus answers:
When I read this passage it always makes me realise anew how it is taken straight from life, particularly the life of the pundits. For I know of a medical examination in which a young student came up before a very learned man, a historian, and as such pre-eminently an authority on old documents, and a professor of Historical Science. It was chiefly under him that the young medical student had studied. Among the questions he asked was this: Now, tell me, Mr X, in which papal Bull was the dot over the i first used? The student knew that at once and answered: Innocent IV's. Now another historian, of a different kind, was present. He wanted to play the part of Mephistopheles a little, so he said: Look here, my dear colleague, as I am the other examiner let me now ask the candidate a question. Tell me, Mr. X, when did this Innocent IV ascend the Papal Chair? The student did not know. Then when did Innocent IV die? The student did not know. Well then, tell me anything else at all you know about Innocent IV beyond the fact that in his Bulls the i was first dotted. But the candidate again could give no answer. Then the Professor who had to do with ancient documents and parchments said: But Mr. X, you seem to be a complete blockhead today. Then the other, still wishing to play Mephistopheles, replied: But, my dear colleague, is not this your favourite pupil? What can have turned him into a blockhead? So then, the good Wagner, being different from Homunculus, was able to discover the dot over the i in his parchment. But since that time, thought that is abstract and purely conceptual has become universal and historic. Thus it has become possible for us to see the spectacle playing a profound part in the whole world-history—that, in an important affair, there appears before the world a document living entirely in shadow concepts. Nothing more unreal and less in conformity with the actual can be imagined thatn the note recently sent by Woodrow Wilson to the Senate of the United States of America. Today when it is only of use to understand the realities of the world, weakness is found in high places. Something different is needed from shadowy concepts, concepts that are mere shadows. And here we may well ask ourselves whether suffering is to continue endlessly because in high places men of a materialistic civilisation flee reality, and can only grasp shadows instead of concepts? I know, my dear friends, that when we are comng up against events of such sadness as those of the present, there is little understanding to be found, for today there are very few men who can grasp the difference between shadowy concepts and reality. For the pure idealist—naturally idealism is always worthy of recognition—not understanding spiritual reality, will think it fine, infinitely fine, when people speak beautifully of Freedom and the Rights of Man, of International Federation and things of the kind. They do not see where the harm lies in these things; the lack of such insight is wide-spread. So little understanding is there, that it makes us see the meaning of what Mephistophleles says after leaving Nicodemus. For, after all, many who rank today as people of importance speak as the scholar spoke, and even if they do not claim to have created the whole world, at any rate wish to govern it according to their dreary shadow concepts. Men have no wish to make progress in such things. They remain children forever, children who can believe that it is possible to rule the world with dummy concepts. Hence we can appreciate the meaning of those words of Mephistopheles:
Those who believe the world can be governed by shadow concepts, do not understand anything of what Goethe is saying through the mouth of the Devil when the Devil speaks the truth. We may take the Homunculus scene in the second Part of Goethe's Faust as a lecture on the understanding of the real, the actual, in our age that is dominated by dummy concepts. But these matters must really be taken very seriously. And for us in particular, my dear friends, it is most important to form really clear concepts about all the various pronouncements so plentiful in the world today and during many past decades, which have finally brought us to the present situation. |
74. The Redemption of Thinking (1956): Lecture III
24 May 1920, Dornach Tr. Alan P. Shepherd, Mildred Robertson Nicoll Rudolf Steiner |
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We have to look into this period if we want to recognise what scholasticism entailed. There Kant's philosophy emerges, influenced by Hume, which influences the philosophers even today. After Kant's philosophy had taken a backseat, the German philosophers took the slogan in the sixties, back to Kant! |
—The question of certainty of knowledge torments Kant more than any contents of knowledge. I mean, one should even feel this if one deals with Kant's Critique that these are not the contents of knowledge, but that Kant strives for a principle of the certainty of knowledge. |
Hence, Fichte, Schelling, and then Hegel immediately reacted against Kant. Thus, Fichte wanted to get everything that Kant had determined as an illusory world or as a world of appearances from the real creative ego that he imagined, however, to be rooted in the being of the world. |
74. The Redemption of Thinking (1956): Lecture III
24 May 1920, Dornach Tr. Alan P. Shepherd, Mildred Robertson Nicoll Rudolf Steiner |
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Yesterday at the end of the considerations about High Scholasticism, I attempted to point out that the most essential of a current of thought are problems that made themselves known in a particular way in the human being. They culminated in a certain yearning to understand: how does the human being attain that knowledge which is necessary for life, and how does this knowledge fit into that which controlled the minds in those days in social respect, how the knowledge does fit into the religious contents of the western church? The scholastics were concerned with the human individuality at first who was no longer able to carry up the intellectual life to concrete spiritual contents, as it still shone from that which had remained from Neo-Platonism, from the Areopagite and Scotus Eriugena. I have also already pointed to the fact that the impulses of High Scholasticism lived on in a way. However, they lived on in such a way that one may say, the problems themselves are big and immense, and the way in which one put them had a lasting effect. These should be just the contents of the today's consideration—the biggest problem, the relationship of the human being to the sensory and the spiritual realities, still continues to have an effect even if in quite changed methodical form and even if one does not note it, even if it has apparently taken on a quite different form. All that is still in the intellectual activities of the present, but substantially transformed by that which significant personalities have contributed to the European development in the philosophical area in the meantime. We also realise if we consider the Franciscan Monk Duns Scotus (~1266-1308) who taught in the beginning of the fourteenth century in Paris, later in Cologne, that as it were the problem becomes too big even for the excellent intellectual technique of scholasticism. Duns Scotus feels confronted with the question: how does the human soul live in the human-body? Thomas Aquinas still imagined that the soul worked on the totality of the bodily. So that the human being is only equipped indeed, if he enters into the physical-sensory existence, by the physical-bodily heredity with the vegetative forces, with the mineral forces and with the forces of sensory perceptivity that, however, without pre-existence the real intellect integrates into the human being which Aristotle called nous poietikos. This nous poietikos now soaks up as it were the whole mental—the vegetative mental, the animal mental—and intersperses the corporeality only to transform it in its sense in order to live on then immortal with that which it has obtained—after it had entered into the human body from eternal heights but without pre-existence—from this human body. Duns Scotus cannot imagine that the active intellect soaks up the entire human system of forces. He can only imagine that the human corporeality is something finished that in a certain independent way the vegetative and animal principles remain the entire life through, then it is taken off at death and that only the actually spiritual principle, the intellectus agens, goes over to immortality. Scotus cannot imagine like Thomas Aquinas that the whole body is interspersed with soul and spirit because to him the human mind had become something abstract, something that did no longer represent the spiritual world to him but that seemed to him to be gained only from consideration, from sense perception. He could no longer imagine that only in the universals, in the ideas that would be given which would prove reality. He became addicted to nominalism—as later his follower Ockham (William of O., ~1288-1347) did—to the view that ideas, as general concepts in the human being are only conceived from the sensory environment that it is, actually, only something that lives as names, as words in the human mind, I would like to say, for the sake of comfortable subsumption of existence. Briefly, he returned to nominalism. This is a significant fact, because one realises that nominalism, as it appeared, for example, with Roscelin of Compiègne—to whom even the Trinity disintegrated because of his nominalism-, is only interrupted by the intensive work of thought of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas and some others. Then the European humanity falls again back into nominalism which is incapable to grasp that which it has as ideas as spiritual reality, as something that lives in the human being and in a way in the things. The ideas become from realities straight away again names, mere empty abstractions. One realises which difficulties the European thinking had more and more if it put the question of knowledge. Since we human beings have to get knowledge from ideas—at least in the beginning of cognition. The big question has to arise repeatedly: how do the ideas provide reality? However, there is no possibility of an answer if the ideas appear only as names without reality. The ideas that were the last manifestations of a real spiritual world coming down from above to the ancient initiated Greeks became more and more abstract. We realise this process of abstracting, of equating the ideas with words increasing more and more if we pursue the development of western thinking. Single personalities outstand later, as for example Leibniz (Gottfried Wilhelm L., 1646-1716) who does not get involved in the question, how does one recognise by ideas, because he is quite traditionally still in the possession of a certain spiritual view and leads everything back to individual monads which are actually spiritual. Leibniz towers above the others, while he still has the courage to imagine the world as spiritual. Yes, the world is spiritual to him; it consists of nothing but spiritual beings. However, I would like to say what was to former times differentiated spiritual individualities are to Leibniz more or less gradually differentiated spiritual points, monads. The spiritual individuality is confirmed, but it is confirmed only in the form of the monad, in the form of a spiritual punctiform being. If we disregard Leibniz, we see, indeed, a strong struggle for certainty of the primal grounds of existence, but the incapacity everywhere at the same time to solve the nominalism problem. This becomes obvious with the thinker who is put rightly at the starting point of modern philosophy, Descartes (1596-1650) who lived in the beginning or in the first half of the seventeenth century. Everywhere in the history of philosophy one gets to know the real cornerstone of his philosophy with the proposition: cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore, I am.—One can note something of Augustine's pursuit in this proposition. Since Augustine struggles from that doubt of which I have spoken in the first talk, while he says to himself, I can doubt everything, but, the fact of doubting exists, and, nevertheless, I live, while I doubt. I can doubt that sensory things are round me, I can doubt that God exists that clouds are there that stars are there, but if I doubt, the doubt is there. I cannot doubt that which goes forward in my own soul. One can grasp a sure starting point there.—Descartes resumes this thought, I think, therefore, I am. Of course, with such things you expose yourself to serious misunderstandings if you are compelled to put something simple against something historically respected. It is still necessary. Descartes and many of his successors have in mind: if I have mental contents in my consciousness if I think, then one cannot deny the fact that I think; therefore, I am, therefore, my being is confirmed with my thinking. I am rooted as it were in the world being, while I have confirmed my being with my thinking. The modern philosophy begins with it as intellectualism, as rationalism that completely wants to work from the thinking and is in this respect only the echo of scholasticism. One realises two things with Descartes. First, one has to make a simple objection to him: do I understand my being because I think? Every night sleep proves the opposite.—This is just that simple objection which one has to make: we know every morning when we wake, we have existed from the evening up to the morning, but we have not thought. Thus, the proposition, I think, therefore, I am, is simply disproved. One has to make this simple objection, which is like the egg of Columbus, to a respected proposition that has found many supporters. However, the second question is, at which does Descartes aim philosophically? He aims no longer at vision, he aims no longer at receiving a world secret for the consciousness, and he is oriented in intellectualistic way. He asks, how do I attain certainty? How do I come out of doubt? How do I find out that things exist and that I myself exist?—It is no longer a material question, a question of the content-related result of world observation; it is a question of confirming knowledge. This question arises from the nominalism of the scholastics, which only Albert and Thomas had overcome for some time, which reappears after them straight away. Thus, that presents itself to the people which they have in their souls and to which they can attribute a name only to find a point somewhere in the soul from which they can get no worldview but the certainty that not everything is illusion, that they look at the world and look at something real, that they look into the soul and look at reality. In all that one can clearly perceive that to which I have pointed yesterday at the end, namely that the human individuality got to intellectualism, but did not yet feel the Christ problem in intellectualism. The Christ problem possibly appears to Augustine, while he still looks at the whole humanity. Christ dawns, I would like to say, in the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages; but He does not dawn with those who wanted to find Him with thinking only which is so necessary to the developing individuality, or with that which would arise to this thinking. This thinking appears in its original state in such a way that it emerges from the human soul that it rejects that which should just be the Christian or the core of the human being. It rejects the inner metamorphosis; it refuses to position itself to the cognitive life so that one would say to himself, yes, I think, I think about the world and myself at first. However, this thinking is not yet developed. This is the thinking after the Fall of Man. It has to tower above itself. It has to change; it has to raise itself into a higher sphere. Actually, this necessity appeared only once clearly in a thinker, in Spinoza (Benedictus Baruch S., 1632-1677), the successor of Descartes. With good reason, Spinoza made a deep impression on persons like Herder and Goethe. Since Spinoza understands this intellectualism in such a way that the human being gets finally to truth—which exists for Spinoza in a kind of intuition, while he changes the intellectual, does not stop at that which is there in the everyday life and in the usual scientific life. Spinoza just says to himself, by the development of thinking this thinking fills up again with spiritual contents.—We got to know in Plotinism, the spiritual world arises again to the thinking as it were if this thinking strives for the spirit. The spirit fulfils as intuition our thinking again. It is very interesting that just Spinoza says, we survey the world existence as it advances in spirit in its highest substance while we take up this spirit in the soul, while we rise with our thinking to intuition, while we are so intellectualistic on one side that we prove as one proves mathematically, but develop in proving at the same time and rise, so that the spirit can meet us.— If we rise in such a way, we also understand from this viewpoint the historical development of that what is contained in the development of humanity. It is strange to find the following sentence with a Jew, Spinoza, the highest revelation of the divine substance is given in Christ.—In Christ the intuition has become theophany, the incarnation of God, hence, Christ's voice is God's voice and the way of salvation.—The Jew Spinoza thinks that the human being can develop from his intellectualism in such a way that the spirit is coming up to meet him. If he can then turn to the Mystery of Golgotha, the fulfilment with spirit becomes not only intuition, that is appearance of the spirit by thinking, but it changes intuition into theophany, into the appearance of God himself. The human being faces God spiritually. One would like to say, Spinoza did not withhold that what he had suddenly realised, because this quotation proves that. It fulfils like a mood what he found out from the development of humanity this way; it fulfils his Ethics. Again, it devolves upon a receptive person. Therefore, one can realise that for somebody like Goethe who could read most certainly between the lines of the Ethics this book became principal. Nevertheless, these things do not want to be considered only in the abstract as one does normally in the history of philosophy; they want to be considered from the human viewpoint, and one must already look at that which shines from Spinozism into Goethe's soul. However, that which shines there only between the lines of Spinoza is something that did not become time dominating in the end but the incapacity to get beyond nominalism. Nominalism develops at first in such a way that one would like to say, the human being becomes more and more entangled in the thought: I live in something that cannot grasp the outside world, in something that is not able to go out from me to delve into the outside world and to take up something of the nature of the outside world.—That is why this mood that one is so alone in himself that one cannot get beyond himself and does not receive anything from the outside world appears already with Locke (John L., 1612-1704) in the seventeenth century. He says, what we perceive as colours, as tones in the outside world is no longer anything that leads us to the reality of the outside world; it is only the effect of the outside world on our senses, it is something with which we are entangled also in our own subjectivity.—This is one side of the matter. The other side of the matter is that with such spirits like Francis Bacon (1561-1626) nominalism becomes a quite pervasive worldview in the sixteenth, seventeenth centuries. For he says, one has to do away with the superstition that one considers that as reality which is only a name. There is reality only if we look out at the sensory world. The senses only deliver realities in the empiric knowledge.—Beside these realities, those realities do no longer play a scientific role for whose sake Albert and Thomas had designed their epistemology. The spiritual world had vanished to Bacon and changed into something that cannot emerge with scientific certainty from the inside of the human being. Only religious contents become that what is a spiritual world, which one should not touch with knowledge. Against it, one should attain knowledge only from outer observation and experiments. That continues this way up to Hume (David H., 1711-1776) in the eighteenth century to whom even the coherence of cause and effect is something that exists only in the human subjectivity that the human being adds only to the things habitually. One realises that nominalism, the heritage of scholasticism, presses like a nightmare on the human beings. The most important sign of this development is that scholasticism with its astuteness stands there that it originates in a time when that which is accessible to the intellect should be separated from the truths of a spiritual world. The scholastic had the task on one side to look at the truths of a spiritual world, which the religious contents deliver of course, the revelation contents of the church. On the other side, he had to look at that which can arise by own strength from human knowledge. The viewpoint of the scholastics missed changing that border which the time evolution would simply have necessitated. When Thomas and Albert had to develop their philosophy, there was still no scientific worldview. Galilei, Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, and Kepler had not yet worked; the intellectual view of the human being at the outer nature did not yet exist. There one did not have to deal with that which the human intellect can find from the depths of his soul, and which one gains from the outer sensory world. There one had to deal with that only which one has to find with the intellect from the depths of the soul in relation to the spiritual truths that the church had delivered, as they faced the human beings who could no longer rise by inner spiritual development to the real wisdoms who, however, realised them in the figure that the church had delivered, just simply as tradition, as contents of the scriptures and so on. Does there not arise the question: how do the intellectual contents relate—that which Albert and Thomas had developed as epistemology—to the contents of the scientific worldview? One would like to say, this is an unconscious struggle up to the nineteenth century. There we realise something very strange. We look back at the thirteenth century and see Albert and Thomas teaching humanity about the borders of intellectual knowledge compared with faith, with the contents of revelation. They show one by one: the contents of revelation are there, but they arise only up to a certain part of the human intellectual knowledge, they remain beyond this intellectual knowledge, there remains a world riddle to this knowledge.—We can enumerate these world riddles: the incarnation, the existence of the spirit in the sacrament of the altar and so on—they are beyond the border of human cognition. For Albert and Thomas it is in such a way that the human being is on the one side, the border of knowledge surrounds him as it were and he cannot behold into the spiritual world. This arises to the thirteenth century. Now we look at the nineteenth century. There we see a strange fact, too: during the seventies, at a famous meeting of naturalists in Leipzig, Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896) holds his impressive speech On the Borders of the Knowledge of Nature and shortly after about the Seven World Riddles. What has become there the question? (Steiner draws.) There is the human being, there is the border of knowledge; however, the material world is beyond this border, there are the atoms, there is that about which Du Bois-Reymond says, one does not know that which haunts as matter in space.—On this side of the border is that which develops in the human soul. Even if—compared to the imposing work of scholasticism—it is a trifle which faces us there, nevertheless, it is the true counterpart: there the question of the riddles of the spiritual world, here the question of the riddles of the material world; here the border between the human being and the atoms, there the border between the human being and the angels and God. We have to look into this period if we want to recognise what scholasticism entailed. There Kant's philosophy emerges, influenced by Hume, which influences the philosophers even today. After Kant's philosophy had taken a backseat, the German philosophers took the slogan in the sixties, back to Kant! Since that time an incalculable Kant literature was published, also numerous independent Kantian thinkers like Johannes Volkelt (1848-1930) and Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) appeared. Of course, we can characterise Kant only sketchily today. We want only to point to the essentials. I believe that someone who studies Kant really can understand him in such a way, as I tried to understand him in my booklet Truth and Science. Kant faces no question of the contents of the worldview with might and main in the end of the sixties and in the beginning of the seventies years of the eighteenth century, not anything that would have appeared in certain figures, pictures, concepts, ideas of the things with him, but he faces the formal question of knowledge: how do we get certainty of something in the outside world, of any existence in the outside world?—The question of certainty of knowledge torments Kant more than any contents of knowledge. I mean, one should even feel this if one deals with Kant's Critique that these are not the contents of knowledge, but that Kant strives for a principle of the certainty of knowledge. Nevertheless, read the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and realise—after the classical chapter about space and time—how he deals with the categories, one would like to say how he enumerates them purely pedantically in order to get a certain completeness. Really, the Critique of Pure Reason does not proceed in such a way, as with somebody who writes from sentence to sentence with lifeblood. To Kant the question is more important how the concepts relate to an outer reality than the contents of knowledge themselves. He pieces the contents together, so to speak, from everything that is delivered to him philosophically. He schematises, he systematises. However, everywhere the question appears, how does one get to such certainty, as it exists in mathematics? He gets to such certainty in a way which is strictly speaking nothing but a transformed and on top of that exceptionally concealed and disguised nominalism, which he expands also to the sensory forms, to space and time except the ideas, the universals. He says, that which we develop in our soul as contents of knowledge does not deal at all with something that we get out of the things. We put it on the things. We get out the whole form of our knowledge from ourselves. If we say, A is connected with B after the principle of causation, this principle of causation is only in us. We put it on A and B, on both contents of experience. We bring the causality into the things. With other words, as paradox this sounds, nevertheless, one has to say of these paradoxes, Kant searches a principle of certainty while he generally denies that we take the contents of our knowledge from the things, and states that we take them from ourselves and put them into the things. That is in other words, and this is just the paradox: we have truth because we ourselves make it; we have truth in the subject because we ourselves produce it. We bring truth only into the things. There you have the last consequence of nominalism. Scholasticism struggled with the universals, with the question: how does that live outdoors in the world what we take up in the ideas? It could not really solve the problem that would have become provisionally completely satisfactory. Kant says, well, the ideas are mere names, nomina. We form them only in ourselves, but we put them as names on the things; thereby they become reality. They may not be reality for long, but while I confront the things, I put the nomina into experience and make them realities, because experience must be in such a way as I dictate it with the nomina. Kantianism is in a way the extreme point of nominalism, in a way the extreme decline of western philosophy, the complete bankruptcy of the human being concerning his pursuit of truth, the desperation of getting truth anyhow from the things. Hence, the dictates: truth can only exist if we bring it into the things. Kant destroyed any objectivity, any possibility of the human being to submerge in the reality of the things. Kant destroyed any possible knowledge, any possible pursuit of truth, because truth cannot exist if it is created only in the subject. This is a consequence of scholasticism because it could not come into the other side where the other border arose which it had to overcome. Because the scientific age emerged and scholasticism did not carry out the volte-face to natural sciences, Kantianism appeared which took subjectivity as starting point and gave rise to the so-called postulates freedom, immortality, and the idea of God. We shall do the good, fulfil the categorical imperative, and then we must be able to do it. That is we must be free, but we are not able to do it, while we live here in the physical body. We reach perfection only, so that we can completely carry out the categorical imperative if we are beyond the body. That is why immortality must exist. However, we cannot yet realise that as human beings. A deity has to integrate that which is the contents of our action in the world—if we take pains of that what we have to do. That is why a deity must exist. Three religious postulates about which one cannot know how they are rooted in reality are that which Kant saved after his own remark: I had to remove knowledge to get place for faith.—Kant does not get place for religious contents in the sense of Thomas Aquinas, for traditional religious contents, but for abstract religious contents that just originate in the individual human being who dictates truth, that is appearance. With it, Kant becomes the executor of nominalism. He becomes the philosopher who denies the human being everything that this human being could have to submerge in any reality. Hence, Fichte, Schelling, and then Hegel immediately reacted against Kant. Thus, Fichte wanted to get everything that Kant had determined as an illusory world or as a world of appearances from the real creative ego that he imagined, however, to be rooted in the being of the world. Fichte was urged to strive for a more intensive, to a more and more mystic experience of the soul to get beyond Kantianism. He could not believe at all that Kant meant that which is included in his Critiques. In the beginning, with a certain philosophical naivety he believed that he drew the last consequence of Kant's philosophy. If one did not draw these last consequences, Fichte thought, one would have to believe that the strangest chance would have pieced this philosophy together but not a humanely thinking head. All that is beyond that which approaches with the emerging natural sciences that appear like a reaction just in the middle of the nineteenth century that strictly speaking understand nothing of philosophy, which degenerated, hence, with many thinkers into crass materialism. Thus, we realise how philosophy develops in the last third of the nineteenth century. We see this philosophical pursuit completely arriving at nullity, and then we realise how—from everything possible that one attaches to Kantianism and the like—one attempts to understand the essentials of the world. The Goethean worldview which would have been so significant if one had grasped it, got completely lost, actually, as a worldview of the nineteenth century, with the exception of those spirits who followed Schelling, Hegel and Fichte. Since in this Goethean worldview the beginning of that is contained which must originate from Thomism, only with the volte-face to natural sciences. Thomas could state only in the abstract that the mental-spiritual really works into the last activities of the human organs. In abstract form, Thomas Aquinas expressed that everything that lives in the human body is directed by the mental and must be recognised by the mental. Goethe started with the volte-face and made the first ground with his Theory of Colours, which people do not at all understand, and with his “morphology.” However, the complete fulfilment of Goetheanism is given only if one has spiritual science that clarifies the scientific facts by its own efforts. Some weeks ago, I tried here to explain how our spiritual science could be a corrective of natural sciences, we say, concerning the function of the heart. The mechanical-materialist view considers the heart as a pump that pushes the blood through the human body. However, it is quite the contrary. The blood circulation is something living—embryology can prove that precisely -, and it is set in motion by the internally moved blood. The heart takes the blood activity into the entire human individuality. The activity of the heart is a result of the blood activity, not vice versa. Thus, one can show concerning the single organs of the body how the comprehension of the human being as a spiritual being only explains his material existence. One can do something real in a way that Thomism had in mind in abstract form that said there, the spiritual-mental penetrates everything bodily. This becomes concrete knowledge. The Thomistic philosophy lives on as spiritual science in our present. I would like to insert a personal experience here. When I spoke in the Viennese Goethe Association about the topic Goethe as Father of a New Aesthetics, there was a very sophisticated Cistercian among the listeners. I explained how one has to imagine Goethe's idea of art, and this Cistercian, Father Wilhelm Neumann (1837-1919), professor at the theological faculty of the Vienna University, said something strange, you can find the origins of your talk already with Thomas Aquinas.—Nevertheless, it was interesting to me to hear from him who was well versed in Thomism that he felt that in Thomism is a kind of origin of that which I had said about the consequence of the Goethean worldview concerning aesthetics. One has already to say, the things, considered according to truth, appear absolutely different than they present themselves to the history of philosophy under the influence of an unconscious nominalistic worldview which goes back largely to Kant and the modern physiology. Thus, you would find many a thing if you referred to spiritual science. Read in my book The Riddles of the Soul which appeared some years ago how I tried there to divide the human being on the basis of thirty-year studies into three systems; how one system of the human physical body is associated with sense-perception and thinking, how the rhythmical system, breathing and heart activity, is associated with feeling, how metabolism is associated with the will. Everywhere I attempted to find the spiritual-mental in its creating in the physical. That is, I took the volte-face to natural sciences seriously. One tries to penetrate into the area of natural existence after the age of natural sciences, as before the age of scholasticism—we have realised it with the Areopagite and with Plotinus—one penetrated from the human knowledge into the spiritual area. One takes the Christ principle seriously as one would have taken the Christ principle seriously if one had said, the human thinking can change, so that it can penetrate if it casts off the original sin of the limits of knowledge and if it rises up by thinking free of sensuousness to the spiritual world—after the volte-face. What manifests as nature can be penetrated as the veil of physical existence. One penetrates beyond the limits of knowledge which a dualism assumed, as well as the scholastics drew the line at the other side. One penetrates into this material world and discovers that it is, actually, the spiritual one that behind the veil of nature no material atoms are in truth but spiritual beings. This shows how one thinks progressively about a further development of Thomism. Look for the most important psychological thoughts of Albert and Thomas in their abstractness. However, they did not penetrate into the human-bodily, so that they said how the mind or the soul work on the organs, but they already pointed to the fact that one has to imagine the whole human body as the result of the spiritual-mental. The continuation of this thought is the work to pursue the spiritual-mental down to the details of the bodily. Neither philosophy nor natural sciences do this, only spiritual science will do it, which does not shy away from applying the great thoughts like those of High Scholasticism to the views of nature of our time. However, for that an engagement with Kantianism was inevitable if the thing should scientifically persist. I tried this engagement with Kantianism first in my writings Truth and Science and Epistemology of Goethe's Worldview and, in the end, in my Philosophy of Freedom. Only quite briefly, I would like to defer to the basic idea of these books. These writings take their starting point from the fact that one cannot directly find truth in the world of sense perception. One realises in a way in which nominalism takes hold in the human soul how it can accept the wrong consequence of Kantianism, but how Kant did not realise that which was taken seriously in these books. This is that a consideration of the world of perception leads—if one does it quite objectively and thoroughly—to the conclusion: the world of perception is not a whole, it is something that we make a reality. In what way did the difficulty of nominalism originate? Where did the whole Kantianism originate? Because one takes the world of perception, and then the soul life puts the world of ideas upon it. Now one has the view, as if this world of ideas should depict the outer perception. However, the world of ideas is inside. What does this inner world of ideas deal with that which is there outdoors? Kant could answer this question only, while he said, so we just put the world of perception on the world of ideas, so we get truth. The thing is not in such a way. The thing is that—if we look at perception impartially—it is not complete, everywhere it is not concluded. I tried to prove this strictly at first in my book Truth and Science, then in my book Philosophy of Freedom. The perception is everywhere in such a way that it appears as something incomplete. While we are born in the world, we split the world. The thing is that we have the world contents here (Steiner draws). While we place ourselves as human beings in the world, we separate the world contents into a world of perception that appears to us from the outside and into the world of ideas that appears to us inside of our soul. Someone who regards this separation as an absolute one who simply says, there is the world, there I am cannot get over with his world of ideas to the world of perception. However, the case is this: I look at the world of perception; everywhere it is not complete in itself, something is absent everywhere. However, I myself have come with my whole being from the world to which also the world of perception belongs. There I look into myself: what I see by myself is just that which the world of perception does not have. I have to unite that which separated in two parts by my own existence. I create reality. Because I am born, appearance comes into being while that which is one separates into perception and the world of ideas. Because I live, I bring together two currents of reality. In my cognitive experience, I work the way up into reality. I would never have got to a consciousness if I had not split off the world of ideas from the world of perception while entering into the world. However, I would never find the bridge to the world if I did not combine the world of ideas that I have split off again with that which is not reality without the world of ideas. Kant searches reality only in the outer perception and does not guess that the other half of reality is just in that which we carry in ourselves. We have taken that which we carry as world of ideas in ourselves only from the outer reality. Now we have solved the problem of nominalism, because we do not put space, time, and ideas, which would be mere names, upon the outer perception, but now we give back the perception what we had taken from it when we entered into the sensory existence. Thus, we have the relationship of the human being to the spiritual world at first in a purely philosophical form. Someone is just overcoming Kantianism who takes up this basic idea of my Philosophy of Freedom, which the title of the writing Truth and Science already expresses: the fact that real science combines perception and the world of ideas and regards this combining as a real process. However, he is just coping with the problem which nominalism had produced which faced the separation into perception and the world of ideas powerlessly. One approaches this problem of individuality in the ethical area. Therefore, my Philosophy of Freedom became a philosophy of reality. While cognition is not only a formal act but also a process of reality, the moral action presents itself as an outflow of that which the individual experiences as intuition by moral imagination. The ethical individualism originates this way as I have shown in the second part of my Philosophy of Freedom. This individualism is based on the Christ impulse, even if I have not explicitly said that in my Philosophy of Freedom. It is based on that which the human being gains to himself as freedom while he changes the usual thinking into that which I have called pure thinking in my Philosophy of Freedom which rises to the spiritual world and gets out the impulses of moral actions while something that is bound, otherwise, to the human physical body, the impulse of love, is spiritualised. While the moral ideals are borrowed from the spiritual world by moral imagination, they become the force of spiritual love. Hence, the Philosophy of Freedom had to counter Kant's philistine principle—“Duty! You elated name, you do not have anything of flattery with yourself but strict submission” -, with the transformed ego which develops up into the sphere of spirituality and starts there loving virtue, and, therefore, practises virtue because it loves it out of individuality. Thus, that which remained mere religious contents to Kant made itself out to be real world contents. Since to Kant knowledge is something formal, something real to the Philosophy of Freedom. A real process goes forward. Hence, the higher morality is also tied together with it to a reality, which philosophers of values like Windelband (Wilhelm, 1845-1915) and Rickert (Heinrich R., 1863-1936) do not at all reach. Since they do not find out for themselves how that which is morally valuable is rooted in the world. Of course, those people who do not regard the process of cognition as a real process do not get to rooting morality in the world of reality; they generally get to no philosophy of reality. From the philosophical development of western philosophy, spiritual science was got out, actually. Today I attempted to show that that Cistercian father heard not quite inaccurately that really the attempt is taken to put the realistic elements of High Scholasticism with spiritual science in our scientific age, how one was serious about the change of the human soul, about the fulfilment of the human soul with the Christ impulse also in the intellectual life. Knowledge is made a real factor in world evolution that takes place only on the scene of the human consciousness as I have explained in my book Goethe's Worldview. However, these events in the world further the world and us within the world at the same time. There the problem of knowledge takes on another form. That which we experience changes spiritual-mentally in ourselves into a real development factor. There we are that which arises from knowledge. As magnetism works on the arrangement of filings of iron, that works in us what is reflected in us as knowledge. At the same time, it works as our design principle, then we recognise the immortal, the everlasting in ourselves, and we do no longer raise the issue of knowledge in only formal way. The issue of knowledge was always raised referring to Kant in such a way that one said to himself, how does the human being get around to regarding the inner world as an image of the outer world?—However, cognition is not at all there at first to create images of the outer world but to develop us, and it is an ancillary process that we depict the outside world. We let that flow together in the outside world in an ancillary process, which we have split off at our birth. It is exactly the same way with the modern issue of knowledge, as if anybody has wheat and investigates its nutritional effect if he wants to investigate the growth principle of wheat. Indeed, one may become a food chemist, but food chemistry does not recognise that which is working from the ear through the root, the stalk, and the leaves to the blossom and fruit. It explains something only that is added to the normal development of the wheat plant. Thus, there is a developmental current of spiritual life in us, which is concerned with our being to some extent as the plant develops from the root through the stalk and leaves to the blossom and the fruit, and from there again to the seed and the root. As that which we eat should not play any role with the explanation of the plant growth, the question of the epistemological value of that which lives in us as a developmental impulse must also not be the basis of a theory of knowledge, but it has to be clear that knowledge is a side effect of the work of the ideal in our human nature. There we get to the real of that which is ideal. It works in us. The wrong nominalism, Kantianism, originated only because one put the question of knowledge in such a way as food chemistry would put the question of the nature of wheat. Hence, one may say, not before we find out for ourselves what Thomism can be for the present, we see it originating in spiritual science in its figure for the twentieth century, and then it is back again as spiritual science. Then light is thrown on the question: how does this appear if now one comes and says, compared with the present philosophy one has to go back to Thomas Aquinas, and to study him, at most with some critical explanations and something else that he wrote in the thirteenth century?—There we realise, what it means, to project our thoughts in honest and frank way in the development current that takes High Scholasticism as starting point, and what it means to carry back our mind to this thirteenth century surveying the entire European development since the thirteenth century. This resulted from the encyclical Aeterni patris of 1879 that asks the Catholic clerics to regard the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as the official philosophy of the Catholic Church. I do not want to discuss the question here: where is Thomism? Since one would have to discuss the question: do I look best at the rose that I face there if I disregard the blossom and dig into the earth to look at the roots and check as to whether something has already originated from the root. Now, you yourselves can imagine all that. We experience what asserts itself among us as a renewal of that Thomism, as it existed in the thirteenth century, beside that which wants to take part honestly in the development of the European West. We may ask on the other hand, where does Thomism live in the present? You need only to put the question: how did Thomas Aquinas himself behave to the revelation contents? He tried to get a relationship to them. We have the necessity to get a relationship to the contents of physical manifestation. We cannot stop at dogmatics. One has to overcome the “dogma of experience” as on the other side one has to overcome the dogma of revelation. There we have really to make recourse to the world of ideas that receives the transforming Christ principle to find again our world of ideas, the spiritual world with Christ in us. Should the world of ideas remain separated? Should the world of ideas not participate in redemption? In the thirteenth century, one could not yet find the Christian principle of redemption in the world of ideas; therefore, one set it against the world of revelation. This must become the progress of humanity for the future that not only for the outer world the redemption principle is found, but also for the human intellect. The unreleased human reason only could not rise in the spiritual world. The released human intellect that has the real relationship to Christ penetrates into the spiritual world. From this viewpoint, Christianity of the twentieth century is penetrating into the spiritual world, so that it deeply penetrates into the thinking, into the soul life. This is no pantheism, this is Christianity taken seriously. Perhaps one may learn just from this consideration of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas—even if it got lost in abstract areas—that spiritual science takes the problems of the West seriously that it always wants to stand on the ground of the present. I know how many false things arise now. I could also imagine that now again one says, yes, he has often changed his skin; he turns to Thomism now because the things become risky.—Indeed, one called the priests of certain confessions snakes in ancient times. Snakes slough their skins. As well as the opponents understand skinning today, it is indeed a lie. Since I have shown today how you can find the philosophically conscientious groundwork of spiritual science in my first writings. Now I may point to two facts. In 1908, I held a talk about the philosophical development of the West in Stuttgart. In this talk, I did not feel compelled to point to the fact that possibly my discussion of Thomism displeased the Catholic clerics, because I did justice to Thomism, I emphasised its merits even with much clearer words than the Neo-Thomists, Kleutgen or others did. Hence, I did not find out for myself in those days that my praise of Thomism could be taken amiss by the Catholic clergy, and I said, if one speaks of scholasticism disparagingly, one is not branded heretical by the so-called free spirits. However, if one speaks, objectively about that, one is easily misunderstood because one often rests philosophically upon a misunderstood Thomism within the positive and just the most intolerant church movement. I did not fear at all to be attacked because of my praise of Thomism by the Catholic clergy, but by the so-called free spirits. It happened different, and people will say, we are the first whom he did a mischief. During these days, I have also pointed to my books that I wrote around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among them also to a book that I dedicated to Ernst Haeckel, Worldviews and Approaches to Life in the Nineteenth Century. There I pointed to the fact that the modern thinking is not astute and logical; and that Neo-Scholasticism tried to rest upon the strictly logical of Thomism. I wrote: “These thinkers could really move in the world of ideas without imagining this world in unsubtle sensory-bodily form.” I spoke about the scholastics this way, and then I still spoke about the Catholic thinkers who had taken the study of scholasticism again: “The Catholic thinkers who try today to renew this art of thinking are absolutely worth to be considered in this respect. It will always have validity what one of them, the Jesuit father Joseph Kleutgen (1811-1889), says in his book An Apology of the Philosophy of the Past: “Two sentences form the basis of the different epistemologies which we have just repeated: the first one, that our reason ...” and so on. You realise, if the Jesuit Joseph Kleutgen did something meritorious, I acknowledged it in my book. However, this had the result that one said in those days that I myself was a disguised Jesuit. At that time, I was a disguised Jesuit; now you read in numerous writings, I am a Jew. I only wanted to mention this at the end. In any case, I do not believe that anybody can draw the conclusion from this consideration, that I have belittled Thomism. These considerations should show that the High Scholasticism of the thirteenth century was a climax of European intellectual development, and that the present time has reason to go into it. We can learn very much for deepening our thought life to overcome any nominalism, so that we find Christianity again by Christianising the ideas that penetrate into the spiritual being from which the human being must have originated, because only the consciousness of his spiritual origin can give him satisfaction. |
200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century: Lecture I
17 Oct 1920, Dornach Tr. Paul King Rudolf Steiner |
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Kant, of course, rejects this. He wants nothing to do with the conclusions drawn by Fichte. We now see how there follows on from Fichte what then flowered as German idealistic philosophy in Schelling and Hegel, and which provoked all the battles of which I spoke, in part, in my lectures on the limits to a knowledge of nature. |
Fichte constructs his philosophy, in a wealth of pure concepts, out of the 'I am'; but in him they are filled with life. So, too, are they in Schelling and in Hegel. So what then had happened with Kant who was the bridge? Now, one comes to the significant point when one traces how Kant developed. |
This is what came to Kant in the form of the philosophy of David Hume. Then the Central region of the earth's culture still set itself against this with all force in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. |
200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century: Lecture I
17 Oct 1920, Dornach Tr. Paul King Rudolf Steiner |
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In the lectures given here during the course on history1 several things were mentioned which, particularly at the present time, it is especially important to consider. With regard to the historical course of humanity's development, the much-debated question mentioned to begin with was whether the outstanding and leading individual personalities are the principal driving forces in this development or whether the most important things are brought about by the masses. In many circles this has always been a point of contention and the conclusions have been drawn, more from sympathy and antipathy than from real knowledge. This is one fact which, in a certain sense, I should like to mention as being very important. Another fact which, from a look at history, I should like to mention for its importance is the following. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt2 appeared with a definite declaration, stipulating that history should be treated in such a way that one would not only consider the individual facts which can be outwardly observed in the physical world but, out of an encompassing, synthesizing force, would see what is at work in the unfolding of history—which can only be found by someone who knows how to get a total view of the facts in what in a sense is a poetic way, but in fact produces a true picture. Attention was also drawn to how in the course of the nineteenth century it was precisely the opposite historical mode of thought and approach which was then particularly developed, and that it was not the ideas in history that were pursued but only a sense that was developed for the external world of facts. Attention was also drawn to the fact that, with regard to this last question, one can only come to clarity through spiritual science, because spiritual science alone can uncover the real driving forces of the historical evolution of humanity. A spiritual science of this kind was not yet accessible to Humboldt. He spoke of ideas, but ideas indeed have no driving force [of their own]. Ideas as such are abstractions, as I mentioned here yesterday3 And anyone who might wish to find ideas as the driving forces of history would never be able to prove that ideas really do anything because they are nothing of real substantiality, and only something of substantiality can do something. Spiritual science points to real spiritual forces that are behind the sensible-physical facts, and it is in real spiritual forces such as these that the propelling forces of history lie, even though these spiritual forces will have to be expressed for human beings through ideas. But we come to clarity concerning these things only when, from a spiritual-scientific standpoint, we look more deeply into the historical development of humanity and we will do so today in such a way that, through our considerations, certain facts come to us which, precisely for a discerning judgement of the situation of modern humanity, will prove to be of importance. I have often mentioned4 that spiritual science, if it looks at history, would actually have to pursue a symptomatology; a symptomatology constituted from the fact that one is aware that behind what takes it course as the stream of physical-sensible facts lie the driving spiritual forces. But everywhere in historical development there are times when what has real being and essence (das eigentlich Wesenhafte) comes as a symptom to the surface and can be judged discerningly from the phenomena only if one has the possibility to penetrate more deeply from one's awareness of these phenomena into the depths of historical development. I would like to clarify this by a simple diagram. Let us suppose that this is a flow of historical facts (see diagram). The driving forces lie, for ordinary observation, below the flow of these facts. And if the eye of the soul observes the flow in this way, then the real activity of the driving forces would lie beneath it (red). But there are significant points in this flow of facts. And these significant points are distinguished by the fact that what is otherwise hidden comes here to the surface. Thus we can say: Here, in a particular phenomenon, which must only be properly evaluated, it was possible to become aware of something which otherwise is at work everywhere, but which does not show itself in such a significant manifestation. Let us assume that this (see diagram) took place in some year of world history, let us say around 800 A.D. What was significant for Europe, let us say for Western Europe, was of course at work before this and worked on afterwards, but it did not manifest itself in such a significant way in the time before and after as it did here. If one points to a way of looking at history like this, a way which looks to significant moments, such a method would be in complete accord with Goetheanism. For Goethe wished in general that all perception of the world should be directed to significant points and then, from what could be seen from such points, the remaining content of world events be recognized. Goethe says of this5 that, within the abundance of facts, the important thing is to find a significant point from which the neighbouring areas can be viewed and from which much can be deciphered. So let us take this year 800 A.D. We can point here to a fact in the history of Western European humanity which, from the point of view of the usual approach to history, might seem insignificant—which one would perhaps not find worthy of attention for what is usually called history—but which, nevertheless, for a deeper view of humanity's development, is indeed significant. Around this year there was a kind of learned theological argument between the man who was a sort of court philosopher of the Frankish realm, Alcuin,6 and a Greek also living at that time in the kingdom of the Franks. The Greek, who was naturally at home in the particular soul-constitution of the Greek peoples which he had inherited, had wanted to reach a discerning judgement of the principles of Christianity and had come to the concept of redemption. He put the question: To whom, in the redemption through Christ Jesus, was the ransom actually paid? He, the Greek thinker, came to the solution that the ransom had been paid to Death. Thus, in a certain sense, it was a sort of redemption theory that this Greek developed from his thoroughly Greek mode of thinking, which was now just becoming acquainted with Christianity. The ransom was paid to Death by the cosmic powers. Alcuin, who stood at that time in that theological stream which then became the determining one for the development of the Roman Catholic Church of the West, debated in the following way about what the Greek had argued. He said: Ransom can only be paid to a being who really exists. But death has no reality, death is only the outer limit of reality, death itself is not real and, therefore, the ransom money could not have been paid to Death. Now criticism of Alcuin's way of thinking is not what matters here. For to someone who, to a certain extent, can see through the interrelations of the facts, the view that death is not something real resembles the view which says: Cold is not something real, it is just a decrease in warmth, it is only a lesser warmth. Because the cold isn't real I won't wear a winter coat in winter because I'm not going to protect myself against something that isn't real. But we will leave that aside. We want rather to take the argument between Alcuin and the Greek purely positively and will ask what was really happening there. For it is indeed quite noticeable that it is not the concept of redemption itself that is discussed. It is not discussed in such a way that in a certain sense both personalities, the Greek and the Roman Catholic theologian, accept the same point of view, but in such a way that the Roman Catholic theologian shifts the standpoint entirely before he takes it up at all. He does not go on speaking in the way he had just done, but moves the whole problem into a completely different direction. He asks: Is death something real or not?—and objects that, indeed, death is not real. This directs us at the outset to the fact that two views are clashing here which arise out of completely different constitutions of soul. And, indeed, this is the case. The Greek continued, as it were, the direction which, in the Greek culture, had basically faded away between Plato and Aristotle. In Plato there was still something alive of the ancient wisdom of humanity; that wisdom which takes us across to the ancient Orient where, indeed, in ancient times a primal wisdom had lived but which had then fallen more and more into decadence. In Plato, if we are able to understand him properly, we find the last offshoots, if I can so call them, of this primal oriental wisdom. And then, like a rapidly developing metamorphosis, Aristotelianism sets in which, fundamentally, presents a completely different constitution of soul from the Platonic one. Aristotelianism represents a completely different element in the development of humanity from Platonism. And, if we follow Aristotelianism further, it, too, takes on different forms, different metamorphoses, but all of which have a recognizable similarity. Thus we see how Platonism lives on like an ancient heritage in this Greek who has to contend against Alcuin, and how in Alcuin, on the other hand, Aristotelianism is already present. And we are directed, by looking at these two individuals, to that fluctuation which took place on European soil between two—one cannot really say world-views—but two human constitutions of soul, one of which has its origin in ancient times in the Orient, and another, which we do not find in the Orient but which, entering in later, arose in the central regions of civilization and was first grasped by Aristotle. In Aristotle, however, this only sounds a first quiet note, for much of Greek culture was still alive in him. It develops then with particular vehemence in the Roman culture within which it had been prepared long before Aristotle, and, indeed, before Plato. So that we see how, since the eighth century BC on the Italian peninsula a particular culture, or the first hints of it, was being prepared alongside that which lived on the Greek peninsula as a sort of last offshoot of the oriental constitution of soul. And when we go into the differences between these two modes of human thought we find important historical impulses. For what is expressed in these ways of thinking went over later into the feeling life of human beings; into the configuration of human actions and so on. Now we can ask ourselves: So what was living in that which developed in ancient times as a world-view in the Orient, and which then, like a latecomer, found its [last] offshoots in Platonism—and, indeed, still in Neoplatonism? It was a highly spiritual culture which arose from an inner perception living pre-eminently in pictures, in imaginations; but pictures not permeated by full consciousness, not yet permeated by the full I-consciousness of human beings. In the spiritual life of the ancient Orient, of which the Veda and Vedanta are the last echoes, stupendous pictures opened up of what lives in the human being as the spiritual. But it existed in a—I beg you not to misunderstand the word and not to confuse it with usual dreaming—it existed in a dreamlike, dim way, so that this soul-life was not permeated (durchwellt) and irradiated (durchstrahlt) by what lives in the human being when he becomes clearly conscious of his 'I' and his own being. The oriental was well aware that his being existed before birth, that it returns through death to the spiritual world in which it existed before birth or conception. The oriental gazed on that which passed through births and deaths. But he did not see as such that inner feeling which lives in the `I am'. It was as if it were dull and hazy, as though poured out in a broad perception of the soul (Gesamtseelenanschauung) which did not concentrate to such a point as that of the I-experience. Into what, then, did the oriental actually gaze when he possessed his instinctive perception? One can still feel how this oriental soul-constitution was completely different from that of later humanity when, for an understanding of this and perhaps prepared through spiritual science, one sinks meditatively into those remarkable writings which are ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite.7 I will not go into the question of the authorship now, I have already spoken about it on a number of occasions. 'Nothingness' (das Nichts) is still spoken of there as a reality, and the existence of the external world, in the way one views it in ordinary consciousness, is simply contrasted against this [nothingness] as a different reality. This talk of nothingness then continues. In Scotus Erigena,8 who lived at the court of Charles the Bald, one still finds echoes of it, and we find the last echo then in the fifteenth century in Nicolas of Cusa9 But what was meant by the nothingness one finds in Dionysius the Areopagite and of that which the oriental spoke of as something self-evident to him? This fades then completely. What was this nothingness for the oriental? It was something real for him. He turned his gaze to the world of the senses around him, and said: This sense-world is spread out in space, flows in time, and in ordinary life world, is spread out in space, one says that what is extended in space and flows in time is something. But what the oriental saw—that which was a reality for him, which passes through births and deaths—was not contained in the space in which the minerals are to be found, in which the plants unfold, the animals move and the human being as a physical being moves and acts. And it was also not contained in that time in which our thoughts, feelings and will-impulses occur. The oriental was fully aware that one must go beyond this space in which physical things are extended and move, and beyond this time in which our soul-forces of ordinary life are active. One must enter a completely different world; that world which, for the external existence of time and space, is a nothing but which, nevertheless, is something real. The oriental sensed something in contrast to the phenomena of the world which the European still senses at most in the realm of real numbers. When a European has fifty francs he has something. If he spends twenty-five francs of this he still has twenty-five francs; if he then spends fifteen francs he still has ten; if he spends this he has nothing. If now he continues to spend he has five, ten, fifteen, twenty-five francs in debts. He still has nothing; but, indeed, he has something very real when, instead of simply an empty wallet, he has twenty-five or fifty francs in debts. In the real world it also signifies something very real if one has debts. There is a great difference in one's whole situation in life between having nothing and having fifty francs' worth of debts. These debts of fifty francs are forces just as influential on one's situation in life as, on the other side and in an opposite sense, are fifty francs of credit. In this area the European will probably admit to the reality of debts for, in the real world, there always has to be something there when one has debts. The debts that one has oneself may still seem a very negative amount, but for the person to whom they are owed they are a very positive amount! So, when it is not just a matter of the individual but of the world, the opposite side of zero from the credit side is truly something very real. The oriental felt—not because he somehow speculated about it but because his perception necessitated it he felt: Here, on the one side, I experience that which cannot be observed in space or in time; something which, for the things and events of space and time, is nothing but which, nevertheless, is a reality—but a different reality. It was only through misunderstanding that there then arose what occidental civilization gave itself up to under the leadership of Rome—the creation of the world out of nothing with `nothing' seen as absolute `zero'. In the Orient, where these things were originally conceived, the world does not arise out of nothing but out of the reality I have just indicated. And an echo of what vibrates through all the oriental way of thinking right down to Plato—the impulse of eternity of an ancient world-view—lived in the Greek who, at the court of Charlemagne, had to debate with Alcuin. And in this theologian Alcuin there lived a rejection of the spiritual life for which, in the Orient, this `nothing' was the outer form. And thus, when the Greek spoke of death, whose causes lie in the spiritual world, as something real, Alcuin could only answer: But death is nothing and therefore cannot receive ransom. You see, the whole polarity between the ancient oriental way of thinking, reaching to Plato, and what followed later is expressed in this [one] significant moment when Alcuin debated at the court of Charlemagne with the Greek. For, what was it that had meanwhile entered in to European civilization since Plato, particularly through the spread of Romanism? There had entered that way of thinking which one has to comprehend through the fact that it is directed primarily to what the human being experiences between birth and death. And the constitution of soul which occupies itself primarily with the human being's experiences between birth and death is the logical, legal one—the logical-dialectical-legal one. The Orient had nothing of a logical, dialectical nature and, least of all, a legal one. The Occident brought logical, legal thinking so strongly into the oriental way of thinking that we ourselves find religious feeling permeated with a legalistic element. In the Sistine Chapel in Rome, painted by the master-hand of Michelangelo, we see looming towards us, Christ as judge giving judgment on the good and the evil. A legal, dialectical element has entered into the thoughts concerning the course of the world. This was completely alien to the oriental way of thinking. There was nothing there like guilt and atonement or redemptinn. For [in this oriental way of thinking] was precisely that view of the metamorphosis through which the eternal element [in the human being] transforms itself through births and deaths. There was that which lives in the concept of karma. Later, however, everything was fixed into a way of looking at things which is actually only valid for, and can only encompass, life between birth and death. But this life between birth and death was just what had evaded the oriental. He looked far more to the core of man's being. He had little understanding for what took place between birth and death. And now, within this occidental culture, the way of thinking which comprehends primarily what takes place within the span between birth and death increased [and did so] through those forces possessed by the human being by virtue of having clothed his soul-and-spirit nature with a physical and etheric body. In this constitution, in the inner experience of the soul-and-spirit element and in the nature of this experience, which arises through the fact that one is submerged with one's soul-and-spirit nature in a physical body, comes the inner comprehension of the 'I'. This is why it happens in the Occident that the human being feels an inner urge to lay hold of his 'I' as something divine. We see this urge, to comprehend the 'I' as something divine, arise in the medieval mystics; in Eckhart, in Tauler and in others. The comprehension of the 'I' crystallizes out with full force in the Middle (or Central) culture. Thus we can distinguish between the Eastern culture—the time in which the 'I' is first experienced, but dimly—and the Middle (or Central) culture—primarily that in which the 'I' is experienced. And we see how this 'I' is experienced in the most manifold metamorphoses. First of all in that dim, dawning way in which it arises in Eckhart, Tauler and other mystics, and then more and more distinctly during the development of all that can originate out of this I-culture. We then see how, within the I-culture of the Centre, another aspect arises. At the end of the eighteenth century something comes to the fore in Kant10 which, fundamentally, cannot be explained out of the onward flow of this I-culture. For what is it that arises through Kant? Kant looks at our perception, our apprehension (Erkennen), of nature and cannot come to terms with it. Knowledge of nature, for him, breaks down into subjective views ( Subjektivitäten); he does not penetrate as far as the 'I' despite the fact that he continually speaks of it and even, in some categories, in his perceptions of time and space, would like to encompass all nature through the 'I'. Yet he does not push through to a true experience of the 'I'. He also constructs a practical philosophy with the categorical imperative which is supposed to manifest itself out of unfathomable regions of the human soul. Here again the 'I' does not appear. In Kant's philosophy it is strange. The full weight of dialectics, of logical-dialectical-legal thinking is there, in which everything is tending towards the 'I', but he cannot reach the point of really understanding the 'I' philosophically. There must be something preventing him here. Then comes Fichte, a pupil of Kant's, who with full force wishes his whole philosophy to well up out of the 'I' and who, through its simplicity, presents as the highest tenet of his philosophy the sentence: `I am'. And everything that is truly scientific must follow from this `I am'. One should be able, as it were, to deduce, to read from this 'I am' an entire picture of the world. Kant cannot reach the 'I am'. Fichte immediately afterwards, while still a pupil of Kant's, hurls the `I am' at him. And everyone is amazed—this is a pupil of Kant's speaking like this! And Fichte says:11 As far as he can understand it, Kant, if he could really think to the end, would have to think the same as me. It is so inexplicable to Fichte that Kant thinks differently from him, that he says: If Kant would only take things to their full conclusion, he would have to think [as I do]; he too, would have to come to the 'I am'. And Fichte expresses this even more clearly by saying: I would rather take the whole of Kant's critique for a random game of ideas haphazardly thrown together than to consider it the work of a human mind, if my philosophy did not logically follow from Kant's. Kant, of course, rejects this. He wants nothing to do with the conclusions drawn by Fichte. We now see how there follows on from Fichte what then flowered as German idealistic philosophy in Schelling and Hegel, and which provoked all the battles of which I spoke, in part, in my lectures on the limits to a knowledge of nature.12 But we find something curious. We see how Hegel lives in a crystal-clear [mental] framework of the logical-dialectical-legal element and draws from it a world-view—but a world-view that is interested only in what occurs between birth and death. You can go through the whole of Hegel's philosophy and you will find nothing that goes beyond birth and death. It confines everything in world history, religion, art and science solely to experiences occurring between birth and death. What then is the strange thing that happened here? Now, what came out in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel—this strongest development of the Central culture in which the 'I' came to full consciousness, to an inner experience—was still only a reaction, a last reaction to something else. For one can understand Kant only when one bears the following properly in mind. (I am coming now to yet another significant point to which a great deal can be traced). You see, Kant was still—this is clearly evident from his earlier writings—a pupil of the rationalism of the eighteenth century, which lived with genius in Leibnitz and pedantically in Wolff. One can see that for this rationalism the important thing was not to come truly to a spiritual reality. Kant therefore rejected it—this `thing in itself' as he called it—but the important thing for him was to prove. Sure proof! Kant's writings are remarkable also in this respect. He wrote his Critique of Pure Reason in which he is actually asking: `How must the world be so that things can be proved in it?' Not 'What are the realities in it?' But he actually asks: 'How must I imagine the world so that logically, dialectically, I can give proofs in it?' This is the only point he is concerned with and thus he tries in his Prologomena to give every future metaphysics which has a claim to being truly scientific, a metaphysics for what in his way of thinking can be proven: `Away with everything else! The devil take the reality of the world—just let me have the art of proving! What's it to me what reality is; if I can't prove it I shan't trouble myself over it!' Those individuals did not, of course, think in this way who wrote books like, for example, Christian Wolff's13 Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt (Reasoned Thoughts an God, the World, and the Soul of Man, and All Things Generally). What mattered for them was to have a clean, self-contained system of proof, in the way that they see proof. Kant lived in this sphere, but there was still something there which, although an excrescence squeezed out of the world-view of the Centre, nevertheless fitted into it. But Kant had something else which makes it inexplicable how he could become Fichte's teacher. And yet he gives Fichte a stimulus, and Fichte comes back at him with the strong emphasis of the 'I am'; comes back, indeed, not with proofs—one would not look for these in Fichte—but with a fully developed inner life of soul. In Fichte there emerges, with all the force of the inner life of soul, that which, in the Wolffians and Leibnitzites, can seem insipid. Fichte constructs his philosophy, in a wealth of pure concepts, out of the 'I am'; but in him they are filled with life. So, too, are they in Schelling and in Hegel. So what then had happened with Kant who was the bridge? Now, one comes to the significant point when one traces how Kant developed. Something else became of this pupil of Wolff by virtue of the fact that the English philosopher, David Hume,14 awoke him, as Kant himself says, out of his dull dogmatic slumber. What is it that entered Kant here, which Fichte could no longer understand? There entered into Kant here—it fitted badly in his case because he was too involved with the culture of Central Europe—that which is now the culture of the West. This came to meet him in the person of David Hume and it was here that the culture of the West entered Kant. And in what does the peculiarity [of this culture] lie? In the oriental culture we find that the 'I' still lives below, dimly, in a dream-like state in the soul-experiences which express themselves, spread out, in imaginative pictures. In the Western culture we find that, in a certain sense, the 'I' is smothered (erdrückt) by the purely external phenomena (Tatsachen). The 'I' is indeed present, and is present not dimly, but bores itself into the phenomena. And here, for example, people develop a strange psychology. They do not talk here about the soul-life in the way Fichte did, who wanted to work out everything from the one point of the 'I', but they talk about thoughts which come together by association. People talk about feelings, mental pictures and sensations, and say these associate—and also will-impulses associate. One talks about the inner soul-life in terms of thoughts which associate. Fichte speaks of the 'I'; this radiates out thoughts. In the West the 'I' is completely omitted because it is absorbed—soaked up by the thoughts and feelings which one treats as though they were independent of it, associating and separating again. And one follows the life of the soul as though mental pictures linked up and separated. Read Spencer,15 read John Stuart Mill16 read the American philosophers. When they come to talk of psychology there is this curious view that does not exclude the 'I' as in the Orient, because it is developed dimly there, but which makes full demand of the 'I'; letting it, however, sink down into the thinking, feeling and willing life of the soul. One could say: In the oriental the 'I' is still above thinking, feeling and willing; it has not yet descended to the level of thinking, feeling and willing. In the human being of the Western culture the 'I' is already below this sphere. It is below the surface of thinking, feeling and willing so that it is no longer noticed, and thinking, feeling and willing are then spoken of as independent forces. This is what came to Kant in the form of the philosophy of David Hume. Then the Central region of the earth's culture still set itself against this with all force in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. After them the culture of the West overwhelms everything that is there, with Darwinism and Spencerism. One will only be able to come to an understanding of what is living in humanity's development if one investigates these deeper forces. One then finds that something developed in a natural way in the Orient which actually was purely a spiritual life. In the Central areas something developed which was dialectical-legal, which actually brought forth the idea of the State, because it is to this that it can be applied. It is such thinkers as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel who, with enormous sympathy, construct a unified image (Gebilde) of the State. But then a culture emerges in the West which proceeds from a constitution of soul in which the 'I' is absorbed, takes its course below the level of thinking, feeling and willing; and where, in the mental and feeling life, people speak of associations. If only one would apply this thinking to the economic life! That is its proper place. People went completely amiss when they started applying [this thinking] to something other than the economic life. There it is great, is of genius. And had Spencer, John Stuart Mill and David Hume applied to the institutions of the economic life what they wasted on philosophy it would have been magnificent. If the human beings living in Central Europe had limited to the State what is given them as their natural endowment, and if they had not, at the same time, also wanted thereby to include the spiritual life and the economic life, something magnificent could have come out of it. For, with what Hegel was able to think, with what Fichte was able to think, one would have been able—had one remained within the legal-political configuration which, in the threefold organism, we wish to separate out as the structure of the State17—to attain something truly great. But, because there hovered before these minds the idea that they had to create a structure for the State which included the economic life and the spiritual life, there arose only caricatures in the place of a true form for the State. And the spiritual life was anyway only a heritage of the ancient Orient. It was just that people did not know that they were still living from this heritage of the ancient East. The useful statements, for example, of Christian theology—indeed, the useful statements still within our materialistic sciences—are either the heritage of the ancient East, or a changeling of dialectical-legal thinking, or are already adopted, as was done by Spencer and Mill, from the Western culture which is particularly suited for the economic life. Thus the spiritual thinking of the ancient Orient had been distributed over the earth, but in an instinctive way that is no longer of any use today. Because today it is decadent, it is dialectical-political thinking which was rendered obsolete by the world catastrophe [World War I]. For there was no one less suited to thinking economically than the pupils of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. When they began to create a State which, above all, was to become great through its economy, they had of necessity (selbstverständlich) to fail, for this was not what, by nature, was, endowed to them. In accordance with the historical development of humanity, spiritual thinking, political thinking and economic thinking were apportioned to the East, the Centre, and the West respectively. But we have arrived at a point of humanity's development when understanding, a common understanding, must spread equally over all humanity. How can this come about? This can only happen out of the initiation-culture, out of the new spiritual science, which does not develop one-sidedly, but considers everything that appears in all areas as a three-foldness that has evolved of its own accord. This science must really consider the threefold aspect also in social life; in this case (as a three-foldness) encompassing the whole earth. Spiritual science, however, cannot be extended through natural abilities; it can only be spread by people accepting those who see into these things, who can really experience the spiritual sphere, the political sphere and the economic sphere as three separate areas. The unity of human beings all over the earth is due to the fact that they combine in themselves what was divided between three spheres. They themselves organize it in the social organism in such a way that it can exist in harmony before their eyes. This, however, can only follow from spiritual-scientific training. And we stand here at a point where we must say: In ancient times we see individual personalities, we see them expressing in their words what was the spirit of the time. But when we examine it closely—in the oriental culture, for example—we find that, fundamentally, there lives instinctively in the masses a constitution of soul which in a remarkable; quite natural way was in accord with what these individuals spoke. This correspondence, however, became less and less. In our times we see the development of the opposite extreme. We see instincts arising in the masses which are the opposite of what is beneficial for humanity. We see things arising that absolutely call for the qualities that may arise in individuals who are able to penetrate the depths of spiritual science. No good will come from instincts, but only from the understanding (that Dr. Unger also spoke of here)18 which, as is often stressed, every human being can bring towards the spiritual investigator if he really opens himself to healthy human reason. Thus there will come a culture in which the single individual, with his ever-deeper penetration into the depths of the spiritual world, will be of particular importance, and in which die one who penetrates in this way will be valued, just as someone who works in some craft is valued. One does not go to the tailor to have boots made or to the shoemaker to be shaved, so why should people go to someone else for what one needs as a world-view other than to the person who is initiated into it? And it is, indeed, just this that, particularly today and in the most intense sense, is necessary for the good of human beings even though there is a reaction against it, which shows how humanity still resists what is beneficial for it. This is the terrible battle—the grave situation—in which we find ourselves. At no other time has there been a greater need to listen carefully to what individuals know concerning one thing or another. Nor has there been a greater need for people with knowledge of specific subject areas to be active in social life—not from a belief in authority but out of common sense and out of agreement based on common sense. But, to begin with, the instincts oppose this and people believe that some sort of good can be achieved from levelling everything. This is the serious battle in which we stand. Sympathy and antipathy are of no help here, nor is living in slogans. Only a clear observation of the facts can help. For today great questions are being decided—the questions as to whether the individual or the masses have significance. In other times this was not important because the masses and the individual were in accord with one another; individuals were, in a certain sense, simply speaking for the masses. We are approaching more and more that time when the individual must find completely within himself the source of what he has to find and which he has then to put into the social life; and [what we are now seeing] is only the last resistance against this validity of the individual and an ever larger and larger number of individuals. One can see plainly how that which spiritual science shows is also proved everywhere in these significant points. We talk of associations which are necessary in the economic life, and use a particular thinking for this. This has developed in the culture of the West from letting thoughts associate. If one could take what John Stuart Mill does with logic, if one could remove those thoughts from that sphere and apply them to the economic life, they would fit there. The associations which would then come in there would be exactly those which do not fit into psychology. Even in what appears in the area of human development, spiritual science follows reality. Thus spiritual science, if fully aware of the seriousness of the present world situation, knows what a great battle is taking place between the threefold social impulse that can come from spiritual science and that which throws itself against this threefoldness as the wave of Bolshevism, which would lead to great harm (Unheil) amongst humanity. And there is no third element other than these two. The battle has to take place between these two. People must see this! Everything else is already decadent. Whoever looks with an open mind at the conditions in which we are placed, must conclude that it is essential today to gather all our forces together so that this whole terrible Ahrimanic affair can be repulsed. This building stands here,19 incomplete though it is for the time being. Today we cannot get from the Central countries that which for the most part, and in addition to what has come to us from the neutral states, has brought this building to this stage. We must have contributions from the countries of the former Entente. Understanding must be developed here for what is to become a unified culture containing spirit, politics and economics. For people must get away from a one:sided tendency and must follow those who also understand something of politics and economics, who do not work only in dialectics, but, also being engaged with economic impulses, have insight into the spiritual, and do not want to create states in which the State itself can run the economy. The Western peoples will have to realize that something else must evolve in addition to the special gift they will have in the future with regard to forming economic associations. The skill in forming associations has so far been applied at the wrong end, i.e. in the field of Psychology. What must evolve is understanding of the political-state element, which has other sources than the economic life, and also of the spiritual element. But at present the Central countries lie powerless, so people in the Western regions—one could not expect this of the Orient—will have to see what the Purpose of this building is! It is necessary for us to consider What must be done so that real provision is made for a new culture that should be presented everywhere in the university education of the future—here we have to show the way. In the foundation of the Waldorf Schools the culture has proved to be capable of bringing light into primary education. But for this we need the understanding support of the widest circles. Above all we need the means. For everything which, in a higher or lower sense, is called a school, we need the frame of mind I have already tried to awaken at the opening of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart.20 I said in my opening speech there: `This is one Waldorf school. It is well and good that we have it, but for itself it is nothing; it is only something if, in the next quarter of a year, we build ten such Waldorf schools and then others'. The world did not understand this, it had no money for such a thing. For it rests on the standpoint: Oh, the ideals are too lofty, too pure for us to bring dirty money to them; better to keep it in our pockets; that's the proper place for dirty money. The ideals, oh, they're too pure, one can't contaminate them with money! Of course, with purity of this kind the embodiment of ideals cannot be attained, if dirty money is not brought to them. And thus we have to consider that, up to now, we have stopped at one Waldorf school which cannot progress properly because in the autumn we found ourselves in great money difficulties. These have been obviated for the time being, but at Easter we shall be faced with them again. And then, after a comparatively short time, we will ask: Should we give up? And we shall have to give up if, before then, an understanding is not forthcoming which dips vigorously into its pockets. It is thus a matter of awakening understanding in this respect. I don't believe that much understanding would arise if we were to say that we wanted something for the building in Dornach, or some such thing—as has been shown already. But—and one still finds understanding for this today—if one wants to create sanatoria or the like, one gets money, and as much as one wants! This is not exactly what we want—we don't want to build a host of sanatoria—we agree fully with creating them as far as they are necessary; but here it is a matter, above all, of nurturing that spiritual culture whose necessity will indeed prove itself through what this course21 I has attempted to accomplish. This is what I tried to suggest, to give a stimulus to what I expressed here a few days ago, in the words 'World Fellowship of Schools' (Weltschulverein).22 Our German friends have departed but it is not a question of depending on them for this 'World Fellowship'. It depends on those who, as friends, have come here, for the most part from all possible regions of the non-German world—and who are still sitting here now—that they understand these words 'World Fellowship of Schools' because it is vital that we found school upon school in all areas of the world out of the pedagogical spirit which rules in the Waldorf School. We have to be able to extend this school until we are able to move into higher education of the kind we are hoping for here. For this, however, we have to be in a position to complete this building and everything that belongs to it, and be constantly able to support that which is necessary in order to work here; to be productive, to work on the further extension of all the separate sciences in the spirit of spiritual science. People ask one how much money one needs for all this. One cannot say how much, because there never is an uppermost limit. And, of course, we will not be able to found a World Fellowship of Schools simply by creating a committee of twelve or fifteen or thirty people who work out nice statutes as to how a World Fellowship of Schools of this kind should work. That is all pointless. I attach no value to programmes or to statutes but only to the work of active people who work with understanding. It will be possible to establish this World Fellowship—well, we shall not be able to go to London for some time—in the Hague or some such place, if a basis can be created, and by other means if the friends who are about to go to Norway or Sweden or Holland, or any other country—England, France, America and so on—awaken in every human being whom they can reach the well-founded conviction that there has to be a World Fellowship of Schools. It ought to go through the world like wildfire that a World Fellowship must arise to provide the material means for the spiritual culture that is intended here. If one is able in other matters, as a single individual, to convince possibly hundreds and hundreds of people, why should one not be able in a short time—for the decline is happening so quickly that we only have a short time—to have an effect on many people as a single individual, so that if one came to the Hague a few weeks later one would see how widespread was the thought that: 'The creation of a World Fellowship of Schools is necessary, it is just that there are no means for it.' What we are trying to do from Dornach is an historical necessity. One will only be able to talk of the inauguration of this World Fellowship of Schools when the idea of it already exists. It is simply utopian to set up committees and found a World Fellowship—this is pointless! But to work from person to person, and to spread quickly the realization, the well-founded realization, that it is so necessary—this is what must precede the founding. Spiritual science lives in realities. This is why it does not get involved with proposals of schemes for a founding but points to what has to happen in reality—and human beings are indeed realities—so that such a thing has some prospects. So what is important here is that we finally learn from spiritual science how to stand in real life. I would never get involved with a simply utopian founding of the World Fellowship of Schools, but would always be of the opinion that this World Fellowship can only come about when a sufficiently large number of people are convinced of its necessity. It must be created so that what is necessary for humanity—it has already proved to be so from our course here—can happen. This World Fellowship of Schools must be created. Please see what is meant by this Fellowship in all international life, in the right sense! I would like, in this request, to round off today what, in a very different way in our course, has spoken to humanity through those who were here and of whom we have the hope and the wish that they carry it out into the world. The World Fellowship of Schools can be the answer of the world to what was put before it like a question; a question taken from the real forces of human evolution, that is, human history. So let what can happen for the World Fellowship of Schools, in accordance with the conviction you have been able to gain here, happen! In this there rings out what I wanted to say today.
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74. The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Thomism in the Present Day
24 May 1920, Dornach Tr. Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner |
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To-day we can, of course, give only a sketch of Kant; we need only point out what is important in him for us. I do not think that anyone who really studies Kant can find him other than as I have tried to depict him in my small paper Truth and Knowledge. |
This accounts for the rapid reaction against Kant which for example, Fichte, and then Schelling, and then Hegel produced, and other thinkers of the nineteenth century. |
Thus we have a real world-content instead of something which remained for Kant merely a faith-content. For Kant the acquisition of knowledge is something formal, for the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, it is something real. |
74. The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Thomism in the Present Day
24 May 1920, Dornach Tr. Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner |
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Yesterday I endeavoured at the conclusion of our consideration of Scholasticism to point out how in a current of thought the most important things are the problems which presented themselves in a quite definite way to the human soul, and which, when you think of it, really all culminated in the desire to know: How does man attain the knowledge which is essential to his life, and how does this knowledge join up with that which at the time governed the dispositions of men in a social aspect? How does the knowledge which can be won join up with the contents of faith of the Christian Church in the West? The militant Scholiasts had to deal first of all with human individuality which, as we have seen, emerged more and more, but which was no longer in a position to carry the experience of knowledge up to the point of real, concrete, spirit-content, as it still flickered in the course of time from what survived of Neoplatonism, of the Areopagite, of Scotus Erigena. I have also pointed out that the impulses set in motion by Scholasticism still continued in a certain way. They continued, so that one can say: The problems themselves are great, and the manner in which they were propounded (we saw this yesterday) had great influence for a long time. And, in point of fact—and this is to be precisely the subject of to-day's study—the influence of what was then the greatest problem—the relationship of men to sensory and spiritual reality—is still felt, even if in quite a different form, even if it is not always obvious, and even if it takes to-day a form entirely contrary to Scholasticism. Its influence still lives. It is still all there to a large extent in the spiritual activities of to-day, but distinctly altered by the work of important people in the meantime on the European trend of human development in the philosophical sphere. We see at once, if we go from Thomas Aquinas to the Franciscan monk who originated probably in Ireland and at the beginning of the fourteenth century taught at Paris and Cologne, Duns Scotus, we see at once, when we get to him, how the problem has, so to speak, become too large even for all the wonderful, intensive thought-technique which survived from the age of the real master-ship in thought-technique—the age of Scholasticism. The question that again faced Duns Scotus was as follows: How does the psychic part of man live in the physical organism of man? Thomas Aquinas' view was still—as I explained yesterday—that he considered the psychic as working itself into the physical. When through conception and birth man enters upon the physical existence, he is equipped by means of his physical inheritance only with the vegetative powers, with all the mineral powers and with those of physical comprehension; but that without pre-existence the real intellect, the active intellect, that which Aristotle called the “nous poieticos” enters into man. But, as Thomas sees it, this nous poieticos absorbs as it were all the psychic element, the vegetative-psychic and the animal-psychic and imposes itself on the corporeality in order to transpose that in its entirety—and then to combine living for ever with what it had won, from the human body, into which it had itself entered, though without pre-existence, from eternal heights. Duns Scotus cannot believe that such an absorption of the whole dynamic system of the human being takes place through the active understanding. He can only imagine that the human bodily make-up exists as something complete; that the vegetative and animal principles remain through the whole of life in a certain independence, and are thrown off with death, and that really only the spiritual principle, the intellectus agens, enters into immortality. Equally little can he imagine the idea which Thomas Aquinas toyed with: the permeation of the whole body with the human-psychic-spiritual element*. Scotus can imagine it as little as his pupil William of Occam, who died at Munich in the fourteenth century, the chief thing about him being that he returned to Nominalism. For Scotus the human understanding had become something abstract, something which no longer represented the spiritual world, but as being won by reflection, by observation of the senses. He could no longer imagine that Reality was the product only of the universals, of ideas. He fell back again into Nominalism, and returned to the view that what establishes itself in man as ideas, as general conceptions, is conceived only out of the physical world around him, and that it is really only something which lives in the human spirit—I might say—for the sake of a convenient comprehension of existence—as Name, as words. In short, he returned again to Nominalism. That is really a significant fact, for we see: Nominalism, as for instance Roscelin expounds it—and in his case the Trinity itself broke in pieces on account of his Nominalism—is interrupted only by the intensive thought activity of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and others, and then Europe soon relapses again into the Nominalism which is really the incapacity of human individuality, ever struggling to rise higher and higher to comprehend as a spiritual reality something which is present in its spirit in the form of ideas; so to comprehend it as something which lives in man and in a certain way also in things. Ideas, from being realities, become again Names, merely empty abstractions. You see the difficulties which European thought encountered in greater and greater degree when it opened up the quest of knowledge. For in the long run we human beings must acquire knowledge through ideas—at any rate, in the first stages of knowledge we are bound to make use of ideas. The big question must always crop up again: How do ideas enable us to attain reality? But, substantially, an answer becomes impossible if ideas appear to us merely as names without reality. And these ideas, which in Ancient Greece, or, at any rate, in initiated Greece were the final demonstration, coming down from above, of a real spirit world, these ideas became ever more and more abstract for the European consciousness. And this process of becoming abstract, of ideas becoming words, we see perpetually increasing as we follow further the development of Western thought. Individuals stand out later, and for example Leibnitz, who actually does not touch upon the question whether ideas lead to knowledge. He is still in possession of a traditional point of view and ascribes everything to individual world-monads, which are really spiritual. Leibnitz towers over the others because he has the courage to expound the world as spiritual. Yes, the world is spiritual; it consists of a multitude of spiritual beings. But I might say that that particular thing which in a former age, with, it is true, a more distinctive knowledge not yet illuminated by such a logic as Scholasticism had, that moreover which meant in such an age differentiated spiritual individuals, was for Leibnitz a series of graduated spiritual points, the monads. Individuality is saved, but only in the form of the monads, in the form, as it were, of a spiritual, indivisible, elemental point. If we exclude Leibnitz, we see in the whole West an intensive struggle for certainty concerning the origins of existence, but at the same time an incapacity everywhere really to solve the Nominalism problem. This is particularly met with in the thinker who is rightly placed at the beginning of the new philosophy, in the thinker Descartes, who lived at the opening or in the first half of the seventeenth century. We learn everywhere in the history of philosophy the basis of Cartesian philosophy in the sentence: Cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. There is something of Augustine's effort in this sentence. For Augustine struggles out of that doubt of which I have spoken in the first lecture, when he says: I can doubt everything, but the fact of doubt remains and I live all the same while I doubt. I can doubt the existence of concrete things round me, I can doubt the existence of God, of clouds and stars, but not the existence of the doubt in me. I cannot doubt what goes on in my soul. There is something certain, a certain starting point to get hold of. Descartes takes up this thought again—I think, therefore I am. In such things one is, of course, exposed to grave misunderstandings, if one has to set something simple against something historically recognized. But it is necessary. Descartes and many of his followers—and in this respect he had innumerable followers—considers the idea: if I have a thought-content in any consciousness, if I think, I cannot get over the fact that I do think. Therefore, I am, therefore my existence is assured through my thinking. My roots are, so to speak, in the world-existence, as I have assured my existence through my thought. So modern philosophy really begins as Intellectualism, as Rationalism, as something which wants to use thought as its instrument, and to this extent is only the echo of Scholasticism, which had taken the turning towards Intellectualism so energetically. Two things we observe about Descartes. First, there is necessarily the simple objection: Is my existence really established by the fact that I think? All sleep proves the contrary. We know every morning when we awake that we must have existed from the evening before to the morning, but we have not been thinking. So the sentence: I think, therefore I am—cogito ergo sum—is in this simple way disproved. This simple fact, which is, I might say, a kind of Columbus' egg, must be set against this famous sentence which found an uncommon amount of success. That is one thing to say about Descartes. The other is the question: What is the real objective of all his philosophic effort? It is no longer directed towards a view of life, or receiving a cosmic secret for the consciousness, it is really turned towards something entirely intellectualistic and concerned with thought. It is directed to the question: How do I gain certainty? How do I overcome doubt? How do I find out that things exist and that I myself exist? It is no longer a material question, a question concerned with the continual results of observing the world, it is a question rather that concerns the certainty of knowledge. This question arises out of the Nominalism of the Schoolmen, which only Albertus and Thomas suppressed for a certain time, but which after them appeared again. And so these people can only give a name to what is hidden in their souls in order to find somewhere in them a point from which they can make for themselves, not a picture or conception of the world, but the certainty that not everything is deception and untruth; that when one looks out upon the world one sees a reality and when one looks inward upon the soul one also sees a reality. In all this is clearly noticeable what I pointed to yesterday in conclusion, namely, that human individuality has arrived at intellectualism, but has not yet felt the Christ-problem. The Christ-problem occurs for Augustine because he still looks at the whole of humanity. Christ begins to dawn in the human soul, to dawn, I might say, on the Christian Mystics of the Middle Ages; but he does not dawn clearly on those who sought to find him by that thought which is so necessary to individuality—or by what this thought would produce. This process of thought as it comes forth from the human soul in its original condition is such that it rejects precisely what ought to have been the Christian idea for the innermost part of man; it rejects the transformation, the inner metamorphosis; it refuses to take the attitude towards the life of knowledge in which one would say: yes, I think and I think first of all concerning myself and the world. But this kind of thought is still very undeveloped. This thought is, as it were, the kind that exists after the Fall. It must rise above itself. It must be transformed and be raised into a higher sphere. As a matter of fact, this necessity has only once clearly flashed up in one great thinker, and that is in Spinoza, follower of Descartes. Spinoza really did make a deep impression on people like Herder and Goethe with good reason. For Spinoza, although he is still completely buried apparently in the intellectualism which survived or had survived in another form from the Scholiasts, still understands this intellectualism in such a way that man can finally come to the truth—which for Spinoza is ultimately a kind of intuition—by transforming the intellectual, inner, thinking, soul-life, not by being content with everyday life or the ordinary scientific life. And so Spinoza reaches the point of saying to himself: This thought replenishes itself with spiritual content through the development of thought itself.. The spiritual world, which we learned to know in Plotinism, yields again, as it were, to thought, if this thought tends to run counter to the spirit. Spirit replenishes thought as intuition. And I consider it is very interesting that this is what Spinoza says: If we survey the existence of the world, how it continues to develop in its highest substance, in spirit, how we then receive this spirit in the soul by raising ourselves by thought to intuition, by being so intellectualistic that we can prove things as surely as mathematics, but in the proof develop ourselves at the same time and continue to rise so that the spirit can come to meet us, if we can rise to this height, then, from this angle of vision we can comprehend the historic process of what lies behind the evolution of mankind. And it is remarkable that the following sentence stands out from the writings of the Jew Spinoza: The highest revelation of divine substance is given in Christ. In Christ intuition has become Theophany, the incarnation of God, and the voice of Christ is therefore in truth the voice of God and the path to salvation. In other words, the Jew Spinoza comes to the conclusion that man can so develop himself by his intellectualism, that the spirit comes down to him. If he is then in a position to apply himself to the mystery of Golgotha, then the filling with the spirit becomes not only intuition, that is, the appearance of the spirit through thought, but intuition changes into Theophany, into the appearance of God Himself. Man is on the spiritual path to God. One might say that Spinoza was not reticent about what he suddenly realized, as this expression shows. But it fills what he had thus discovered from the evolution of humanity with a kind of tune, a kind of undercurrent of sound, it completes his Ethics. And once more it is taken up by a sensitive human being. We can realize that for somebody who could also certainly read between the lines of this Ethics who could sense in his own heart the heart that lives in this Ethics, in short, that for Goethe this book of Spinoza's became the standard. These things should not be looked at so purely abstractly, as is usually done in the history of philosophy. They should be viewed from the human standpoint, and we must look at the spark of Spinozism which entered Goethe's soul. But actually what can be read between Spinoza's lines did not become a dominating force. What became important was the incapacity to get away from Nominalism. And Nominalism next becomes such that one might say: Man gets ever more and more entangled in the thought: I live in something which the outer world cannot comprehend, a something which cannot leave me to sink into the outer world and take upon itself something of its nature. And so it is that this feeling, that one is so isolated, that one cannot get away from oneself and receive something from the outer world, is already to be found in Locke in the seventeenth century. Locke's formula was: That which we observe as colours, as tones in the outer world is no longer something which leads us to reality; it is only the effect of the outer world on our senses; it is something in which we ourselves are wrapped also, in our own subjectivity. That is one side of the question. The other side is seen in such minds as that of Francis Bacon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where Nominalism becomes such a penetrating philosophy that it leads him to say: one must do away with man's false belief in a reality which is, in point of fact, only a name. We have reality only when we look out upon the world of the senses, which alone supply realities through empiric knowledge. By the side of these, those realities on which Albertus and Thomas have built up their theory of rational knowledge play no longer a really scientific part. In Bacon the spiritual world has, so to speak, evaporated into something which can no longer well up from man's inmost heart with the certainty and safety of a science. The spiritual world becomes the subject of faith, which is not to be touched by what is called knowledge and learning. On the contrary, knowledge is to be won only by external observation and by experiment, which is, after all, only a more spiritual kind of external observation. And so it goes on till Hume, in the eighteenth century, for whom the connection between cause and effect becomes something which lives only in human subjectivity, which men attribute to things from a sort of external habit. We see that Nominalism, the heir of Scholasticism, weighs down humanity like a mountain. What is primarily the most important sign of this development? The most important sign is surely this, that Scholasticism stands there with its hard logic, that it arises at a time when the sum of reason is to be divided off from the sum of truth concerning the spiritual world. The Scholiast's problem was, on the one hand, to examine this sum of truth concerning the spiritual world, which, of course, was handed down to him through the faith and revelation of the Church. On the other hand, he had to examine the possible results of man's own human knowledge. The point of view of the Scholiasts overlooked at first the change of front which the course of time and nothing else had made necessary. When Thomas and Albertus had to develop their philosophies, there was as yet no scientific view of the world. There had been no Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Copernicus or Kepler; the forces of human understanding had not yet been directed to external nature. At that time there was no cause for controversy between what the human reason can discover from the depth of the soul and what can be learned from the outer empiric sense-world. The question was only between the results of rational thought and the spiritual truths as handed down by the Church to men who could no longer raise themselves through individual development to this wisdom in its reality, but who saw it in the form handed down by the Church simply as tradition, as Scripture, etc. Does not the question now really arise: What is the relation between the rationalism, as developed by Albertus and Thomas in their theory of knowledge, and the teaching of the natural scientific view of the world? We may say that from now on the struggle was indecisive up to the eighteenth century. And here we find something very remarkable. When we look back into the thirteenth century and see Albertus and Thomas leading humanity across the frontiers of rational knowledge as contrasted with faith and revelation, we see how they show step by step that revelation yields only to a certain part of rational human knowledge, and remains outside this knowledge, an eternal riddle. We can count these riddles—the Incarnation—the filling with the Spirit at the Sacraments, etc.—which lie on the further side of human knowledge. As they see it, man stands on one side, surrounded as it were by the boundaries of knowledge, and unable to look into the spiritual world. This is the situation in the thirteenth century. And now let us take a look at the nineteenth century. We see a remarkable fact: in the seventies, at a famous conference of Natural Scientists at Leipzig, Dubois-Raymond gave his impressive address on the boundaries of Nature-Knowledge and soon afterwards on the seven world-riddles. What has the problem now become? There is man, here is the boundary of knowledge; but beyond the boundary lies the material world, the atoms, everything of which Dubois-Raymond says: We do not know what this is that moves in space as material. And on this side lies that which is evolved in the human soul. Even if, compared with the imposing work which shines as Scholasticism from the Middle Ages, this contribution of Dubois-Raymond, which we find in the seventies is a trifle, still it is the real antithesis: there the search for the riddles of the spiritual world, here the search for the riddles of the material world; here the dividing line between human beings and atoms, there between human beings and angels and God. We must examine this gap of time if we want to see all this that crops up as a consequence, immediate or remote, of Scholasticism. From this Scholasticism the Kantian philosophy comes into being, as something important at best for the history of the period. This philosophy, influenced by Hume, still has to-day a hold on philosophers, since after its partial decline, the Germans raised the cry in the sixties, “Back to Kant!” And from that time an uncountable number of books on Kant have been published, and independent Kantians like Volkelt, Cohen, etc.—one could mention a whole host—have appeared. To-day we can, of course, give only a sketch of Kant; we need only point out what is important in him for us. I do not think that anyone who really studies Kant can find him other than as I have tried to depict him in my small paper Truth and Knowledge. At the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies of the eighteenth century Kant's problem is not the content-problem of world-philosophy in full force, not something which might have appeared for him in definite forms, images, concepts, and ideas concerning objects, but rather his problem is the formal knowledge-question: How do we gain certainty concerning anything in the outer world, concerning the existence of anything? Kant is more worried about certainty of knowledge than about any content of knowledge. One feels this surely in his Critic. Read his “Critic of Pure Reason,” his “Critic of Practical Reason,” and see how, after the chapter on Space and Time, which is in a sense classic, you come to the categories, enumerated entirely pedantically, only, we may say, to give the whole a certain completeness. In truth the presentation of this “Critic of Pure Reason” has not the fluency of someone writing sentence on sentence with his heart's blood. For Kant the question of what is the relation of what we call concepts, of what is in fact, the whole content of knowledge to an external reality, is much more important than this content of knowledge itself. The content he pieces together, as it were, from everything philosophic which he has inherited. He makes schemes and systems. But everywhere the question crops up: How does one get certainty, the kind of certainty which one gets in mathematics? And he gets such certainty in a manner which actually is nothing else than Nominalism, changed, it is true, and unusually concealed and disguised—a Nominalism which is stretched to include the forms of material nature, space and time, as well as universal ideas. He says: that particular thing which we develop in our soul as the content of knowledge has nothing really to do with anything we derive from things. We merely make it cover things. We derive the whole form of our knowledge from ourselves. If we say event A is related to event B by the principle of causation, this principle is only in ourselves. We make it cover A and B, the two experiences. We apply causality to things. In other words, paradoxical though it sounds—though it is paradoxical only historically in face of the vast following of Kant's philosophy—we shall have to say: Kant seeks the principle of certainty by denying that we derive the content of our knowledge from things and assuming that we derive it from ourselves and then apply it to things. This means—and here is the paradox—we have truth, because we make it ourselves, we have subjective truth, because we produce it ourselves. And it is we who instil truth into things. There you have the final consequence of Nominalism. Scholasticism strove with universals, with the question: What form of existence do the ideas we have in ourselves, have in the outer world? It could not arrive at a real solution of the problem which would have been completely satisfactory. Kant says: All right. Ideas are merely names. We form them only in ourselves but we see them as names to cover things; whereby they become reality. They may not be reality by a long way, but I push the “name” on to the experience and make it reality, for experience must be such as I ordain by applying to it a “name.” Thus Kantianism is in a certain way the expansion of Nominalism, in a certain way the most extreme point and in a certain way the extreme collapse of Western philosophy, the complete bankruptcy of man in regard to his search for truth, despair that one can in any way learn truth from things. Hence the saying: Truth can exist only in things if we ourselves instil it into them. Kant has destroyed all objectivity and all man's possibility of getting down to the truth in things. He has destroyed all possible knowledge, all possible search for truth, for truth cannot exist only subjectively. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a consequence of Scholasticism, because it could not acquiesce in the other side, where there appeared another boundary to be crossed. Just because there emerged the age of Natural Science, to which Scholasticism did not adapt itself, Kantianism came on the scene, which ended really as subjectivity, and then from subjectivity in which it extinguished all knowledge, sprouted the so-called Postulates—Freedom, Immortality, and the Idea of God. We are meant to do the good, to obey the categoric imperative, and so we must be able to. That is, we must be free, but as we live here in the physical body, we cannot be. We do not attain perfection so that we may carry out the categoric imperative, till we are clear of the body. Therefore, there must be immortality. But even then we cannot realize it as human beings. Everything we are concerned with in the world, if we do what we ought to, can be regulated only by a Godhead. Therefore, there must be a Godhead. Three postulates of faith, whose source in Reality it is impossible to know—such is the extent of Kant's certainty, according to his own saying: I had to annihilate knowledge in order to make room for faith. And Kant now does not make room for faith-content in the sense of Thomas Aquinas, for a traditional faith-content, but for an abstract one: Freedom, Immortality, and the Idea of God; for a faith-content brought forth from the human individual dictating truth, that is, the appearance of it. So Kant becomes the fulfiller of Nominalism. He is the philosopher who really denies man everything he could have which would enable him to get down to any kind of Reality. This accounts for the rapid reaction against Kant which for example, Fichte, and then Schelling, and then Hegel produced, and other thinkers of the nineteenth century. You need only look at Fichte and see how he was necessarily urged on to an experience of the soul that became more intensive and, one might say, ever more and more mystical in order to escape from Kantianism. Fichte could not even believe that Kant could have meant what is contained in the Kantian Critics. He believed at the beginning, with a certain philosophic naïveté that he drew only the final conclusion of the Kantian philosophy. His idea was that if you did not draw the “final conclusions,” you would have to believe that this philosophy had been pieced together by a most amazing chance, certainly not by a thoughtful human brain. All this is apart from the movement in Western civilization caused by the growth of Natural Science, which enters upon the scene as a reaction in the middle of the nineteenth century. This movement takes no count at all of Philosophy and therefore degenerated in many thinkers into gross materialism. And so we see how the philosophic development goes on, unfolding itself into the last third of the nineteenth century. We see this philosophic effort coming completely to nothing and we see then how the attempt came about, from every possibility which one could find in Kantianism and similar philosophies, to understand something of what is actually real in the world. Goethe's general view of life which would have been so important, had it been understood, was completely lost for the nineteenth century, except among those whose leanings were toward Schelling, Hegel and Fichte. For in this philosophy of Goethe's lay the beginning of what Thomism must become, if its attitude towards Natural Science were changed, for he rises to the heights of modern civilization, and is, indeed, a real force in the current of development. Thomas could get no further than the abstract affirmation that the psychic-spiritual really has its effect on every activity of the human organism. He expressed it thus: Everything, even the vegetative activities, which exists in the human body is directed by the psychic and must be acknowledged by the psychic. Goethe makes the first step in the change of attitude in his Theory of Colour, which in consequence is not in the least understood; in his Morphology, in his Theory of Plants and Animals. We shall, however, not have a complete fulfilment of Goethe's ideas till we have a spiritual science which can of itself provide an explanation of the facts of Natural Science. A few weeks ago I tried here to show how our spiritual science is seeking to range itself as a corrective side by side with Natural Science—let us say with regard to the theory of the heart. The mechanico-materialistic view has likened the heart to a pump, which drives the blood through the human body. It is the opposite; the blood circulation is living—Embryology can prove it, if it wishes—and the heart is set in action by the movement of the blood. The heart is the instrument by which the blood-activity ultimately asserts itself, by which it is absorbed into the whole human individuality. The activity of the heart is a result of blood-activity, not vice-versa. And so, as was shown here in detail in a Course for Doctors we can show with regard to each organ of the body, how the realization of man as a spirit-being really explains his material element. We can in a way make real the thing that appeared dimly in abstract form to Thomism, when it said: The spiritual-psychic permeates all the physical body. That becomes concrete, real knowledge. The Thomistic philosophy, which in the thirteenth century still had an abstract form, by rekindling itself from Goethe continues to live on in our day as Spiritual Science. Ladies and gentlemen, if I may interpose here a personal experience, it is as follows: it is meant merely as an illustration. When at the end of the eighties I spoke in the “Wiener Goethe-Verein” on the subject “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic,” there was in the audience a very learned Cistercian. I can speak about this address, for it has appeared in a new edition. I explained how one had to take Goethe's presentation of Art, and then this Father Wilhelm Neumann, the Cistercian, who was also Professor of Theology at Vienna University, made this curious remark: “The germ of this address, which you have given us to-day, lies already in Thomas Aquinas!” It was an extraordinarily interesting experience for me to hear from Father Wilhelm Neumann that he found in Thomas something like a germ of what was said then concerning Goethe's views on Aesthetics; he was, of course, highly trained in Thomism, because it was after the appearance of Neo-Thomism within the Catholic clergy. One must put it thus: The appearance of things when seen in accordance with truth is quite different from the appearance when seen under the influence of a powerless nominalistic philosophy which to a large extent harks back to Kant and the modern physiology based on him. And in the same way you would find several things, if you studied Spiritual Science. Read in my Riddles of the Soul which came out many years ago, how I there attempted as the result of thirty years' study, to divide human existence into three parts, and how I tried to show there, how one part of the physical human body is connected with the thought and sense organization; how the rhythmic system, all that pertains to the breathing and the heart activity, is connected with the system of sensation, and how the chemical changes are connected with the volition system: the attempt is made, throughout, to recover the spiritual-psychic as creative force. That is, the change of front towards Natural Science is seriously made. After the age of Natural Science, I try to penetrate into the realm of natural existence, just as before the age of Scholasticism, of Thomism—we have seen it in the Areopagite and in Plotinus—human knowledge was used to penetrate into the spiritual realm. The Christ-principle is dealt with seriously after the change of front—as it would have been, had one said: human thought can change, so that it really can press upwards, if it discards the inherited limitation of knowledge and develops through pure non-sensory thought upward to the spiritual world. What we see as Nature can be penetrated as the veil of natural existence. One presses on beyond the limit of knowledge, which a dualism believed it necessary to set up, as the Schoolmen set up the limit on the other side—one penetrates into this material world and discovers that this is in fact the spiritual world, that behind the veil of Nature there are in truth not material atoms, but spiritual beings. This shows you how progressive thought deals with a continued development of Thomism in the Middle Ages. Turn to the most important abstract psychological thoughts of Albertus and Thomas. There, it is true, they do not go so far as to say concerning the physical body, how the spirit or the soul react on the heart, on the spleen, on the liver, etc., but they point out already that the whole human body must be considered to have originated from the spiritual-psychic. The continuation of this thought is the task of really tracing the spiritual-psychic into each separate part of the physical organization. Philosophy has not done this, nor Natural Science: it can only be done by a Spiritual Science, which does not hesitate to bring into our time thoughts, such as those of the high Scholiasts which are looked upon as great thoughts in the evolution of humanity, and apply them to all the contributions of our time in Natural Science. It necessitates, it is true, if the matter is to have a scientific basis, a divorce from Kantianism. This divorce from Kantianism I have attempted first in my small book Truth and Science, years ago, in the eighties, in my Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, and then again in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Quite shortly and without consideration for the fact that things, when they are cursorily presented appear difficult, I should like to put before you the basic ideas to be found in these books. They start from the thought that truth cannot directly be found, at any rate in the observed world which is spread round about us. We see in a way how Nominalism infects the human soul, how it can assume the false conclusions of Kantianism, but how Kant certainly did not see the point with which these books seriously deal. This is, that a study of the visible world, if undertaken quite objectively and thoroughly leads to the knowledge that this world is not a whole. This world emerges as something which is real only through us. What, then, caused the difficulty of Nominalism? What gave rise to the whole of Kantianism? This, the visible world is taken and observed and then we spread over it the world of ideas through the soul-life. Now there we have the view, that this idea-world is to reproduce external observations. But the idea-world is in us. What has it to do with what is outside? Kant could answer this question only thus: By spreading the idea-world over the visible world, we make truth. But it is not so. It is like this. If we consider the process of observation with an unprejudicial mind, it is incomplete, it is nowhere self-contained. I tried hard to prove this in my book Truth and Science, and afterwards in aThe Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. As we have been placed in the world, as we are born into it, we split the world in two. The fact is that we have the world-content, as it were, here with us. Since we come into the world as human beings, we divide the world-content into observation, which appears to us from outside, and the idea-world which appears to us from the inner soul. Anyone who regards this division as an absolute one, who simply says: there is the world, here am I—such a one cannot cross at all with his idea-world to the external world. The matter is this: I look at the visible world, it is everywhere incomplete. Something is wanting everywhere. I myself have with my whole existence arisen out of the world, to which the visible world also belongs. Then I look into myself, and what I see thus is just what is lacking in the visible world. I have to join together through my own self, since I have entered the world, what has been separated into two branches. I gain reality by working for it. Through the fact that I was born arises the appearance that what is really one is divided into two branches, outward perception and idea world. By the fact that I am alive and grow, I unite the two currents of reality. I work myself to reality by my acquiring knowledge. I should never have become conscious if I had never, through my entry into the world, separated the idea-world off from the outer world of perception. But I should never find the bridge to the world, if I did not bring the idea-world, which I have separated off, into unity again with that which, without it, is no reality. Kant seeks reality only in outer perception and does not see that the other half of this reality is in us. The idea-world which we have in us, we have first torn from external reality. Nominalism is now at an end, for now we do not spread Space and Time and ideas, which are only “Nomina” over our external perception, but we return to it in our knowledge what we took from it on entering into our earth existence. Thus is revealed to us the relation of man to the spiritual world in a purely philosophical form. And he who reads my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, which rests entirely on the basis of this knowledge-theory of the nature of reality, of this transference of life into reality through human knowledge, he who takes up this basis, which is expressed already in the title of Truth and Science, that real science unites perceptions and the idea-world and sees in this union not only an ideal but a real process; he who can see something of a world-process in this union of the perception and idea-worlds—is in a position to overthrow Kantianism. He is also in a position to solve the problem which we saw opening up in the course of Western civilization, which produced Nominalism and in the thirteenth century threw out several scholastic lights but which finally stood powerless before the division into perception and idea-world. Now one approaches this problem of individuality on ethical ground, and hence my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has become the philosophy of reality. Since the acquisition of knowledge is not merely a formal act, but a reality-process, ethical, moral behaviour appears as an effluence of that which the individual experiences in a real process through moral fantasy as Intuition; and there results, as set forth in the second part of my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, the Ethical Individualism, which in fact is built upon the Christ-impulse in man, though this is not expressed in the book. It is built upon the spiritual activity man wins for himself by changing ordinary thinking into what I called “pure thinking,” which rises to the spiritual world and there produces the stimulus to moral behaviour. The reason for this is that the impulse of love, which is otherwise bound to the physical man, becomes spiritualized, and because the moral ideals are borrowed from the spiritual world through the moral phantasy, they express themselves in all their force and become the force of spiritual love. Therefore, the Philistine-Principle of Kant had to be resisted. Duty! thou exalted name, that knowest nothing of flattery, but demandest strict obedience—against this Philistine-Principle, against which Schiller had already revolted, the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity had to set the “transformed Ego,” which has developed up into the spheres of spirituality and up there begins to love virtue, and therefore practises virtue, because it loves it of its own individuality. Thus we have a real world-content instead of something which remained for Kant merely a faith-content. For Kant the acquisition of knowledge is something formal, for the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, it is something real. It is a real process. And therefore the higher morality is linked to a reality—but a reality to which the “Wertphilosophen” like Windelband and Rickert do not attain at all, because they do not see how what is morally valuable is implanted in the world. Naturally those people who do not regard the process of knowledge as a real process, also fail to provide an anchorage for morality in the world, and arrive, in short, at no kind of Reality-Philosophy. The philosophical basic principles of what we call here Spiritual Science have really been drawn from the whole course of Western philosophical development. I have to-day tried really to show you how that Cistercian Father was not altogether wrong, and in what way the attempt lies before us to reconcile the realistic elements of Scholasticism with this age of Natural Science through a Spiritual Science, how we laid stress on the transformation of the human soul and with the real installation of the Christ-impulse into it, even in the thought-life. The life of knowledge is made into a real factor in world-evolution and the scene of its fulfilment is the human consciousness alone—as I explained in my book, Goethe's Philosophy. But this, which is thus fulfilled is at the same time a world-process, it is an occurrence in the world, and it is this occurrence that brings the world, and us within it, forward. So the problem of knowledge takes on quite another form. Now our experience becomes a factor of spiritual-psychic development in ourselves. Just as magnetism functions on the shape of iron filings, so there functions on us that which is reflected in us as knowledge; it functions at the same time as our form-principle, and we grow to realize the immortal, the eternal in ourselves, and the problem of knowledge ceases to be merely formal. This problem used always, borrowing from Kantianism, to be put in such a way that one said: How does man come to see a reproduction of the external world in this inner world? But knowledge is not in the least there for the purpose of reproducing the external world, but to develop us, and such reproduction of the external world is a secondary process. In the external world we suffer a combination in a secondary process of what we have divided into two by the fact of our birth, and with the modern problem of knowledge it is exactly as when a man has wheat or other products of the field and examines the food value of the wheat in order to study the nature of the principle of growth. Certainly one can become a food-analyst, but what function there is in wheat from the ear to the root, and still further, cannot be known through the chemistry of food values. That investigates only something which follows the continuous growth which is inherent in the plant. So there is a similar growth of spiritual life in us, which strengthens us, and has something to do with our nature, just like the development of the plant from the root through the stem, through the leaf to the bloom and the fruit, and thence again to the seed and the root. And just as the fact that we eat it must not affect the explanation of the nature of plant growth, so also the question of the knowledge-value of the growth-impulse we have in us may not be the basis of a theory of knowledge; rather it must be clear that what we call in external life knowledge is a secondary result of the work of ideas in our human nature. Here we come to the reality of that which is ideal; it works in us. The false Nominalism and Kantianism arose only because the problem of knowledge was put in the same way as the problem of the nature of wheat would be from the point of view of bio-chemistry. Thus we can say: when you once realize what Thomism can be in our time, how it springs up from its most important achievement in the Middle Ages, then you see it springing up in its twentieth century shape in Spiritual Science, then it re-appears as Spiritual Science. And so a light is already thrown on the question: How does it look now if one comes and says: We must go back to Thomas Aquinas, he must be studied, possibly with a few critical comments, as he wrote in the thirteenth century. We see what it means sincerely and honestly to take our place in the chain of development which started with Scholasticism, and also what it means to put ourselves back into the thirteenth century, and to overlook everything that has happened since then in the course of European civilization. This is, after all, what has really happened as a result of the Papal Encyclical of 1879, which enjoins the Catholic clergy to regard the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as the official one of the Catholic Church. I will not here discuss the question: Where is Thomism? for one would have to discuss, ladies and gentlemen, the question: Is the rose which I have before me, best seen if I take no notice of the bloom, and only dig into the earth, to look at the roots, and overlook the fact that from this root something is already sprung—or if I look at everything which is sprung from this root? Well, ladies and gentlemen, you can answer that for yourselves. We experience all that which is of value among us as a renewal of Thomism, as it was in the thirteenth century, by the side of all that which contributes honestly to the development of Western Europe. We may ask: Where is Thomism to be found to-day? One need only put the question: What was Thomas Aquinas' attitude to the Revelation-content? He sought a relationship with it. Our need is to adapt ourselves to the revelation-content of Nature. Here we cannot rest on dogma. Here the dogma of experience, as I wrote already in the eighties of last century, must be surmounted, just as on the other side must the dogma of revelation. We must, in fact, revert to the spiritual-psychic content of man, to the idea-world which contains the transformed Christ-principle, in order again to find the spiritual world through the Christ in us, that is, in our idea-world. Are we then to rest content to leave the idea-world on the standpoint of the Fall? Is the idea-world of the Redemption to have no part? In the thirteenth century the Christian principle of redemption could not be found in the idea-world; and therefore the idea-world was set off against the world of revelation. The advance of mankind in the future must be, not only to find the principle of redemption for the external world, but also for human reason. The unredeemed human reason alone could not raise itself into the spiritual world. The redeemed human reason which has the real relationship with Christ, this forces itself upward into the spiritual world; and this process is the Christianity of the twentieth century,—a Christianity strong enough to enter into the innermost recesses of human thinking and human soul-life. This is no Pantheism; this is none of those things for being which it is to-day calumniated. This is the most serious Christianity, and perhaps you can see from this study of Thomas Aquinas' philosophy, even if in certain respects it was bound to digress into the realm of the abstract, how seriously Spiritual Science concerns itself with the problems of the West, how Spiritual Science always will stand on the ground of the Present, and how it can stand on no other, whatever else can be brought against it. These remarks have been made to demonstrate that a climax of European spiritual evolution took place in the thirteenth century with High Scholasticism, and that the present age has every reason to study this climax, that there is a vast amount to be learnt from such a study, especially with regard to what we must call in the highest sense the deepening of our idea-life; so that we may leave all Nominalism behind, so that we may find again the ideas that are permeated with Christ, the Christianity which leads to the spiritual Being, from whom man is after all descended; for if man is quite honest and open with himself, nothing else can satisfy him but the consciousness of his spiritual origin. |
322. The Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture II
28 Sep 1920, Dornach Tr. Frederick Amrine, Konrad Oberhuber Rudolf Steiner |
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It drew on the one hand certain materialistic and on the other hand certain positive theological conclusions from Hegel's thought. And even if one considers the Hegelian center headed by the amiable Rosenkranz, even there one cannot find Hegel's philosophy as Hegel himself had conceived it. |
In two phenomena above all we notice the uselessness of Hegelianism for social life. One of those who studied Hegel most intensively, who brought Hegel fully to life within himself, was Karl Marx. And what is it that we find in Marx? A remarkable Hegelianism indeed! Hegel up upon the highest peak of the conceptual world—Hegel upon the highest peak of Idealism—and the faithful student, Karl Marx, immediately transforming the whole into its direct opposite, using what he believed to be Hegel's method to carry Hegel's truths to their logical conclusions. |
322. The Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture II
28 Sep 1920, Dornach Tr. Frederick Amrine, Konrad Oberhuber Rudolf Steiner |
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It must be answered, not to meet a human “need to know” but to meet man's universal need to become fully human. And in just what way one can strive for an answer, in what way the ignorabimus can be overcome to fulfil the demands of human evolution—this shall be the theme of our course of lectures as it proceeds. To those who demand of a cycle of lectures with a title such as ours that nothing be introduced that might interfere with the objective presentation of ideas, I would like, since today I shall have to mention certain personalities, to say the following. The moment one begins to represent the results of human judgment in their relationship to life, to full human existence, it becomes inevitable that one indicate the personalities with whom the judgments originated. Even in a scientific presentation, one must remain within the sphere in which the judgment arises, within the realm of human struggling and striving toward such a judgment. And especially since the question we want above all to answer is: what can be gleaned from modern scientific theories that can become a vital social thinking able to transform thought into impulses for life?—then one must realize that the series of considerations one undertakes is no longer confined to the study and the lecture halls but Stands rather within the living evolution of humanity. Behind everything with which I commenced yesterday, the modern striving for a mathematical-mechanical world view and the dissolution of that world view, behind that which came to a climax in 1872 in the famous speech by the physiologist, du Bois-Reymond, concerning the limits of natural science, there stands something even more important. It is something that begins to impress itself upon us the moment we want to begin to speak in a living way about the limits of natural science. A personality of extraordinary philosophical stature still looks over to us with a certain vitality out of the first half of the nineteenth century: Hegel. Only in the last few years has Hegel begun to be mentioned in the lecture halls and in the philosophical literature with somewhat more respect than in the recent past. In the last third of the nineteenth century the academic world attacked Hegel outright, yet one could demonstrate irrefutably that Eduard von Hartmann had been quite right in claiming that during the 1880s only two university lecturers in all of Germany had actually read him. The academics opposed Hegel but not on philosophical grounds, for as a philosopher they hardly knew him. Yet they knew him in a different way, in a way in which we still know him today. Few know Hegel as he is contained, or perhaps better said, as his world view is contained, in the many volumes that sit in the libraries. Those who know Hegel in this original form so peculiar to him are few indeed. Yet in certain modified forms he has become in a sense the most popular philosopher the world has ever known. Anyone who participates in a workers' meeting today or, even better, anyone who had participated in one during the last few decades and had heard what was discussed there; anyone with any sense for the source of the mode of thinking that had entered into these workers' meetings, who really knew the development of modern thought, could see that this mode of thinking had originated with Hegel and flowed through certain channels out into the broadest masses. And whoever investigated the literature and philosophy of Eastern Europe in this regard would find that the Hegelian mode of thinking had permeated to the farthest reaches of Russian cultural life. One thus could say that, anonymously, as it were, Hegel has become within the last few decades perhaps one of the most influential philosophers in human history. On the other hand, however, when one perceives what has come to be recognized by the broadest spectrum of humanity as Hegelianism, one is reminded of the portrait of a rather ugly man that a kind artist painted in such a way as to please the man's family. As one of the younger sons, who had previously paid little attention to the portrait, grew older and really observed it for the first time, he said: “But father, how you have changed!” And when one sees what has become of Hegel one might well say: “Dear philosopher, how you have changed!” To be sure, something extraordinary has happened regarding this Hegelian world view. Hardly had Hegel himself departed when his school fell apart. And one could see how this Hegelian school appropriated precisely the form of one of our new parliaments. There was a left wing and a right wing, an extreme left and an extreme right, an ultra-radical wing and an ultra-conservative wing. There were men with radical scientific and social views, who felt themselves to be Hegel's true spiritual heirs, and on the other side there were devout, positive theologians who wanted just as much to base their extreme theological conservatism on Hegel. There was a center for Hegelian studies headed by the amiable philosopher, Karl Rosenkranz, and each of these personalities, every one of them, insisted that he was Hegel's true heir. What is this remarkable phenomenon in the evolution of human knowledge? What happened was that a philosopher once sought to raise humanity into the highest realms of thought. Even if one is opposed to Hegel, it cannot be denied that he dared attempt to call forth the world within the soul in the purest thought-forms. Hegel raised humanity into ethereal heights of thinking, but strangely enough, humanity then fell right back down out of those heights. It drew on the one hand certain materialistic and on the other hand certain positive theological conclusions from Hegel's thought. And even if one considers the Hegelian center headed by the amiable Rosenkranz, even there one cannot find Hegel's philosophy as Hegel himself had conceived it. In Hegel's philosophy one finds a grand attempt to pursue the scientific method right up into the highest heights. Afterward, however, when his followers sought to work through Hegel's thoughts themselves, they found that one could arrive thereby at the most contrary points of view. Now, one can argue about world views in the study, one can argue within the academies, and one can even argue in the academic literature, so long as worthless gossip and Barren cliques do not result. These offspring of Hegelian philosophy, however, cannot be carried out of the lecture halls and the study into life as social impulses. One can argue conceptually about contrary world views, but within life itself these contrary world views do not fight so peaceably. One must use just such a paradoxical expression in describing such a phenomenon. And thus there stands before us in the first half of the nineteenth century an alarming factor in the evolution of human cognition, something that has proved itself to be socially useless in the highest degree. With this in mind we must then raise the question: how can we find a mode of thinking that can be useful in social life? In two phenomena above all we notice the uselessness of Hegelianism for social life. One of those who studied Hegel most intensively, who brought Hegel fully to life within himself, was Karl Marx. And what is it that we find in Marx? A remarkable Hegelianism indeed! Hegel up upon the highest peak of the conceptual world—Hegel upon the highest peak of Idealism—and the faithful student, Karl Marx, immediately transforming the whole into its direct opposite, using what he believed to be Hegel's method to carry Hegel's truths to their logical conclusions. And thereby arises historical materialism, which is to be for the masses the one world view that can enter into social life. We thus are confronted in the first half of the nineteenth century with the great Idealist, Hegel, who lived only in the Spirit, only in his ideas, and in the second half of the nineteenth century with his student, Karl Marx, who contemplated and recognized the reality of matter alone, who saw in everything ideal only ideology. If one but takes up into one's feeling this turnabout of conceptions of world and life in the course of the nineteenth century, one feels with all one's soul the need to achieve an understanding of nature that will serve as a basis for judgments that are socially viable. Now, if we turn on the other hand to consider something that is not so obviously descended from Hegel but can be traced back to Hegel nonetheless, we find still within the first half of the nineteenth century, but carrying over into the second half, the “philosopher of the ego,” Max Stirner. While Karl Marx occupies one of the two poles of human experience mentioned yesterday, the pole of matter upon which he bares all his considerations, Stirner, the philosopher of the ego, proceeds from the opposite pole, that of consciousness. And just as the modern world view, gravitating toward the pole of matter, becomes unable to discover consciousness within that element (as we saw yesterday in the example of du Bois-Reymond), a person who gravitates to the opposite pole of consciousness will not be able to find the material world. And so it is with Max Stirner. For Max Stirner, no material universe with natural laws actually exists. Stirner sees the world as populated solely by human egos, by human consciousnesses that want only to indulge themselves to the full. “I have built my thing on nothing”—that is one of Max Stirner's maxims. And on these grounds Stirner opposes even the notion of Providence. He says for example: certain moralists demand that we should not perform any deed out of egoism, but rather that we should perform it because it is pleasing to God. In acting, we should look to God, to that which pleases Him, that which He commands. Why, thinks Max Stirner, should I, who have built only upon the foundation of ego-consciousness, have to admit that God is after all the greater egoist Who can demand of man and the world that all should be performed as it suits Him? I will not surrender my own egoism for the sake of a greater egoism. I will do what pleases me. What do I care for a God when I have myself? One thus becomes entangled and confused within a consciousness out of which one can no longer find the way. Yesterday I remarked how on the one hand we can arrive at clear ideas by awakening in the experience of ideas when we descend into our consciousness. These dreamlike ideas manifest themselves like drives from which we cannot then escape. One would say that Karl Marx achieved clear ideas—if anything his ideas are too clear. That was the secret of his success. Despite their complexity, Marx's ideas are so clear that, if properly garnished, they remain comprehensible to the widest circles. Here clarity has been the means to popularity. And until it realizes that within such a clarity humanity is lost, humanity, as long as it seeks logical consequences, will not let go of these clear ideas. If one is inclined by temperament to the other extreme, to the pole of consciousness, one passes over onto Stirner's side of the scale. Then one despises this clarity: one feels that, applied to social thinking, this clarity makes man into a cog in a social order modeled on mathematics or mechanics—but into that only, into a mere cog. And if one does not feel oneself cut out for just that, then the will that is active in the depths of human consciousness revolts. Then one comes radically to oppose all clarity. One mocks all clarity, as Stirner did. One says to oneself: what do I care about anything else? What do I care even about nature? I shall project my own ego out of myself and see what happens. We shall see that the appearance of such extremes in the nineteenth century is in the highest degree characteristic of the whole of recent human evolution, for these extremes are the distant thunder that preceded the storm of social chaos we are now experiencing. One must understand this connection if one wants at all to speak about cognition today. Yesterday we arrived at an indication of what happens when we begin to correlate our consciousness to an external natural world of the senses. Our consciousness awakens to clear concepts but loses itself. It loses itself to the extent that one can only posit empty concepts such as “matter,” concepts that then become enigmatic. Only by thus losing ourselves, however, can we achieve the clear conceptual thinking we need to become fully human. In a certain sense we must first lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again out of ourselves. Yet now the time has come when we should learn something from these phenomena. And what can one learn from these phenomena? One can learn that, although clarity of conceptual thinking and perspicuity of mental representation can be won by man in his interaction with the world of sense, this clarity of conceptual thinking becomes useless the moment we strive scientifically for something more than a mere empiricism. It becomes useless the moment we try to proceed toward the kind of phenomenalism that Goethe the scientist cultivated, the moment we want something more than natural science, namely Goetheanism. What does this imply? In establishing a correlation between our inner life and the external physical world of the senses we can use the concepts we form in interaction with nature in such a way that we try not to remain within the natural phenomena but to think on beyond them. We are doing this if we do more than simply say: within the spectrum there appears the color yellow next to the color green, and on the other side the blues. We are doing this if we do not simply interrelate the phenomena with the help of our concepts but seek instead, as it were, to pierce the veil of the senses and construct something more behind it with the aid of our concepts. We are doing this if we say: out of the clear concepts I have achieved I shall construct atoms, molecules—all the movements of matter that are supposed to ex-ist behind natural phenomena. Thereby something extraordinary happens. What happens is that when I as a human being confront the world of nature [see illustration], I use my concepts not only to create for myself a conceptual order within the realm of the senses but also to break through the boundary of sense and construct behind it atoms and the like I cannot bring my lucid thinking to a halt within the realm of the senses. I take my lesson from inert matter, which continues to roll on even when the propulsive force has ceased. My knowledge reaches the world of sense, and I remain inert. I have a certain inertia, and I roll with my concepts on beyond the realm of the senses to construct there a world the existence of which I can begin to doubt when I notice that my thinking has only been borne along by inertia. It is interesting to note that a great proportion of the philosophy that does not remain within phenomena is actually nothing other than just such an inert rolling-on beyond what really exists within the world. One simply cannot come to a halt. One wants to think ever farther and farther beyond and construct atoms and molecules—under certain circumstances other things as well that philosophers have assembled there. No wonder, then, that this web one has woven in a world created by the inertia of thinking must eventually unravel itself again. Goethe rebelled against this law of inertia. He did not want to roll onward thus with his thinking but rather to come strictly to a halt at this limit [see illustration: heavy line] and to apply concepts within the realm of the senses. He thus would say to himself: within the spectrum appear to me yellow, blue, red, indigo, violet. If, however, I permeate these appearances of color with my world of concepts while remaining within the phenomena, then the phenomena order themselves of their own accord, and the phenomenon of the spectrum teaches me that when the darker colors or anything dark is placed behind the lighter colors or anything light, there appear the colors which lie toward the blue end of the spectrum. And conversely, if I place light behind dark, there appear the colors which lie toward the red end of the spectrum. What was it that Goethe was actually seeking to do? Goethe wanted to find simple phenomena within the complex but above all such phenomena as allowed him to remain within this limit [see illustration], by means of which he did not roll on into a realm that one reaches only through a certain mental inertia. Goethe wanted to adhere to a strict phenomenalism. If we remain within phenomena and if we strive with our thinking to come to a halt there rather than allow ourselves to be carried onward by inertia, the old question arises in a new way. What meaning does the phenomenal world have when I consider it thus? What is the meaning of the mechanics and mathematics, of the number, weight, measure, or temporal relation that I import into this world? What is the meaning of this? You know, perhaps, that the modern world conception has sought to characterize the phenomena of tone, color, warmth, etc. as only subjective, whereas it characterizes the so-called primary qualities, the qualities of weight, space, and time, as something not subjective but objective and inherent in things. This conception can be traced back principally to the English philosopher, John Locke, and it has to a considerable extent determined the philosophical basis of modern scientific thought. But the real question is: what place within our systematic science of nature as a whole do mathematics, do mechanics—these webs we weave within ourselves, or so it seems at first—what place do these occupy? We shall have to return to this question to consider the specific form it takes in Kantianism. Yet without going into the whole history of this development one can nonetheless emphasize our instinctive conviction that measuring or counting or weighing external objects is essentially different from ascribing to them any other qualities. It certainly cannot be denied that light, tones, colors, and sensations of taste are related to us differently from that which we could represent as subject to mathematical-mechanical laws. For it really is a remarkable fact,a fact worthy of our consideration: you know that honey tastes sweet, but to a man with jaundice it tastes bitter—so we can say that we stand in a curious relationship to the qualities within this realm—while on the other hand we could hardly maintain that any normal man would see a triangle as a triangle, but a man with jaundice would see it as a square! Certain differentiations thus do exist, and one must be cognizant of them; on the other hand, one must not draw absurd conclusions from them. And to this very day philosophical thinking has failed in the most extraordinary way to come to grips with this most fundamental epistemological question. We thus see how a contemporary philosopher, Koppelmann, overtrumps even Kant by saying, for example—you can read this on page 33 of his Philosophical Inquiries [Weltanschauungsfragen]: everything that relates to space and time we must first construct within by means of the understanding, whereas we are able to assimilate colors and tastes directly. We construct the icosahedron, the dodecahedron, etc.: we are able to construct the standard regular solids only because of the organization of our understanding. No wonder, then, claims Koppelmann, that we find in the world only those regular solids we can construct with our understanding. One thus can find Koppelmann saying almost literally that it is impossible for a geologist to come to a geometer with a crystal bounded by seven equilateral triangles precisely because—so Koppelmann claims—such a crystal would have a form that simply would not fit into our heads. That is out-Kanting Kant. And thus he would say that in the realm of the thing-in-itself crystals could exist that are bounded by seven regular triangles, but they cannot enter our head, and thus we pass them by; they do not exist for us. Such thinkers forget but one thing: they forget—and it is just this that we want to indicate in the course of these lectures with all the forceful proofs we can muster—that the natural order governing the construction of our head also governs the construction of the regular polyhedrons, and it is for just this reason that our head constructs no other polyhedrons than those that actually confront us in the external world. For that, you see, is one of the basic differences between the so-called subjective qualities of tone, color, warmth, as well as the different qualities of touch, and that which confronts us in the mechanical-mathematical view of the world. That is the basic difference: tone and color leave us outside of ourselves; we must first take them in; we must first perceive them. As human beings we stand outside tone, color, warmth, etc. This is not entirely the case as regards warmth—I shall discuss that tomorrow—but to a certain extent this is true even of warmth. These qualities leave us initially outside ourselves, and we must perceive them. In formal, spatial, and temporal relationships and regarding weight this is not the case. We perceive objects in space but stand ourselves within the same space and the same lawfulness as the objects external to us. We stand within time just as do the external objects. Our physical existence begins and ends at a definite point in time. We stand within space and time in such a way that these things permeate us without our first perceiving them. The other things we must first perceive. Regarding weight, well, ladies and gentlemen, you will readily admit that this has little to do with perception, which is somewhat open to arbitrariness: otherwise many people who attain an undesired corpulence would be able to avoid this by perception alone, merely by having the faculty of perception. No, ladies and gentlemen, regarding weight we are bound up with the world entirely objectively, and the organization by means of which we stand within color, tone, warmth, etc. is powerless against that objectivity. So now we must above all pose the question: how is it that we arrive at any mathematical-mechanical judgment? How do we arrive at a science of mathematics, at a science of mechanics? How is it, then, that this mathematics, this mechanics, is applicable to the external world of nature, and how is it that there is a difference between the mathematical-mechanical qualities of external objects and those that confront us as the so-called subjective qualities of sensation, tone, color, warmth, etc.? At the one extreme, then, we are confronted with this fundamental question. Tomorrow we shall discuss another such question. Then we shall have two starting-points from which we can proceed to investigate the nature of science. Thence we shall proceed to the other extreme to investigate the formation of social judgments. |
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Necessity and Chance in Historical Events
28 Aug 1915, Dornach Tr. Marjorie Spock Rudolf Steiner |
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Hegel thus bases his approach on the unity of the human spirit with the spirit of the world. The world spirit must allow us thoughts about the course of art's evolution. |
You can see from one of Hegel's remarks that there was one such. As you've seen, Hegel followed the principle of first lifting himself into the world of ideas and then rediscovering in the world around him what he had come to know in the ideal world. |
Krug remarks that Hegel with his “idea” is not convincing in his assertions about the development of art from Egyptian to Greek to modern times, but if Hegel could “deduce” Krug's pen from his idea of it, that would impress him. |
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Necessity and Chance in Historical Events
28 Aug 1915, Dornach Tr. Marjorie Spock Rudolf Steiner |
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I want, as I've said, to use these days to lay the foundation we will need to bring the right light to bear on the concepts chance, necessity, and providence. But today that will require me to introduce certain preparatory concepts, abstract counterparts, as it were, of the beautiful concrete images we have been considering.1 And to do the job as thoroughly as we must, a lecture will have to be added on Monday. That will give us today, tomorrow (after the eurythmy performance), and Monday at seven. The performance tomorrow will be at three o'clock, and a further lecture will follow immediately. For contemporary consciousness as it has come into being and gradually evolved up to the present under the influence of materialistic thought the concepts necessity and chance are indistinguishable. What I am saying is that many a person whose consciousness and mentality have been affected by a materialistic outlook can no longer tell necessity and chance apart. Now there are a number of facts in relation to which even minds muddled by materialism can still accept the concept of necessity, in a somewhat narrow sense at least. Even individuals limited by materialism still agree that the sun will rise tomorrow out of a certain necessity. In their view, the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow is great enough to be tantamount to necessity. Facts of this kind occurring in the relatively great expanse of nature and natural happenings on our planet are allowed by such people to pass as valid cases of Necessity. Conversely, their concepts of necessity narrow when they are confronted with what may be called historical events. And an outstanding example is Fritz Mauthner, whose name has often been mentioned here; he is the author of Critique of Language, written for the purpose of out-Kanting Kant, as well as of a Philosophical Dictionary. An article on history appears in the latter. It is extremely interesting to see how he tries there to figure out what history is. He says, “When the sun rises, I am confronted with a fact.” To take an example, we have been able today, the 28th of August 1915, to witness the fact that the sun has risen. That is a fact. And now he concludes that we can ascribe this rising of the sun to a law, to necessity, only because it happened yesterday and the day before yesterday, and so on, as long as people have been observing the sun. It was not just a case of a single fact, but of a whole sequence of identical or similar facts in outer nature that brought about this recognition of necessity. But when it comes to history, says Mauthner, Caesar, for example, was here only once, so we can't speak of necessity in his case. It would be possible to speak of necessity in his existence only if such a fact were to be repeated. But historical facts are not repeated, so we can't talk of necessity in relation to them. In other words, all of history has to be looked upon as chance. And Mauthner, as I've said, is an honest man, a really honest man. Unlike other less honest individuals, he is a man who draws the conclusions of his assumptions. So he says of historical “necessity,” for example, “That Napoleon outdid himself and marched to Russia or that I smoked one cigar more than usual in the past hour are two facts that really happened, both necessary, both—as we rightly expect in the case of the most grandiose as well as the most absurdly insignificant historical facts—not without consequences.” To his honest feeling, something that may be termed historical fact, like Napoleon's campaign against Russia (though it could equally well be some other happening) and the reported fact that he smoked an extra cigar, are both necessary facts if we apply the term “necessity” to historical facts at all. You will be amazed at my citing this particular sentence from Mauthner's article on history. I cite it because we have here an honest man straightforwardly admitting something that his less honest fellows with a modern scientific background refuse to admit. He is admitting that the fact that Caesar lived cannot be distinguished from the fact of Mauthner himself having smoked an extra cigar by calling upon the means available to us and considered valid by contemporary science. No difference can be ascertained by the methods modern science recognizes! Now he takes a positive stand, declaring his refusal to recognize a valid difference, to be so foolish as to represent history as science, when, according to the hypotheses of present-day science, history cannot qualify as a science. He is really honest; he says with some justification, for example, that Wundt set up a systematic arrangement of the sciences.2 History was, of course, listed among them. But no more objective reason for Wundt's doing this can really be discovered than that it had become customary, or, in other words, it happens to be a fact that universities set up history faculties. If a regular faculty were provided to teach the art of riding, asserts Mauthner—and from his standpoint rightly—professors like Wundt would include the art of riding in their system of the sciences, not from any necessity recognized by current scientific insight, but for quite other reasons. We really have to say that the present has parted ways to a very considerable extent with what we encounter in Goethe's Faust: this can be quite shattering if we take it seriously enough.3 There is much, very much in Faust that points to the profoundest riddles in the human soul. We simply don't take things sufficiently seriously these days. What does Faust say right at the beginning, after he has spoken of how little philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology were able to give him as a student, after expressing himself about these four fields of learning? What science and life in general have given him as nourishment for his soul has brought him to the following conviction:
What is it Faust wants to know, then? “Germs and productive powers”! Here, the human heart too senses in its depths a questioning about chance and necessity in life. Necessity! Let us picture a person like Faust confronting the question of necessity in the history of the human race. Such an individual asks, Why am I present at this point in evolution? What brought me here? What necessity, running its course through what we call history, introduced me into historical evolution at just this moment? Faust asks these questions out of the very depths of his soul. And he believes that they can be answered only if he understands “productive powers and germs,” understands, in other words, how outer experience contains a hidden clue to the way the thread of necessity runs through everything that happens. Now let us imagine a personality like Faust's having, for some reason or other, to make an admission similar to Fritz Mauthner's. Mauthner is, of course, not sufficiently Faustian to sense the consequences Faust would experience if he had to admit one day that he could distinguish no difference between the fact that Caesar occupied his place in history and the fact of having smoked an extra cigar in the past hour. Just imagine transferring into the mind of Faust the reflection on the nature of historical evolution voiced by Mauthner from his particular standpoint. Faust would have had to say, I am as necessary in ongoing world evolution as smoking an extra cigar once was to Fritz Mauthner. Things are simply not given their due weight. If they were, we would realize how significant it is for human life that an individual who embraces the entire scientific conscience of the present admits the impossibility of distinguishing, with the means currently available to science, between the fact that Caesar lived and the fact that Mauthner smoked an extra cigar, in other words, admits that the necessity in the one case is indistinguishable from the necessity in the other. When the time comes that people sense this with a truly Faustian intensity, they will be mature enough to understand how essential it is to grasp the element of necessity in historical facts, in the way we have tried to do with the aid of spiritual science in the case of many a historical fact. For spiritual science has shown us how the facts relative to the successive historical epochs have been injected, as it were, into the sphere of external reality by advancing spiritual evolution. And what we might state about the necessity of this or that happening at some particular time differs very sharply indeed from the fact of Fritz Mauthner smoking his extra cigar. We have stressed the connection between the Old and the New Testaments, between the time preceding and the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, and stressed too how the various cultures succeeded one another in the post-Atlantean epoch and how the various facts occurring during these cultural periods sprang from spiritual causes. The angle from which we view things is tremendously important. We should be aware of the consequences of the assumptions presently held to have sole scientific validity. Days like yesterday, which was Hegel's birthday, and today, which is Goethe's, should be festive occasions for realizing how necessary it is to recall the great will-impulses of earlier times, to recall Hegel's and Goethe's impulses of will, in order to perceive how deeply humanity has become implicated in materialism. There have always been superficial people. The difference between our time and Goethe's and Hegel's is not that there were no superficial people then, but rather that in those days the superficial people could not manage to get their outlook recognized as the only valid one. There was that slight difference in the situation. Yesterday was Hegel's birthday; he was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770. Since it was impossible for him, living at that time, to penetrate into truly spiritual life as we do today with the aid of spiritual science, he sought in his way to lay hold on the spiritual element in ideas and concepts; he made these his spiritual foothold. When we look at the phenomena surrounding us, we seek the spiritual life, the truly living life of the spirit that underlies them, whereas Hegel, since he could go no further, sought the invisible idea, the fabric of ideas, first the fabric of ideas in pure logic, then that behind nature, and finally that underlying everything that happens as a spiritual element. And he approached history too in such a way that he really accomplished much of significance in his historical studies, even if in the abstract form of ideas rather than in the concrete form of the spiritual. Now what does a person who honestly adopts Fritz Mauthner's standpoint do if, let us say, he sets about describing the evolution of art from Egyptian and Grecian times up to the present? He examines the documented findings, registers them, and then considers himself the more genuinely scientific the less ideas play into the proceedings and the more he keeps—objectively, as he thinks—to the purely external, factual evidence. Hegel based his attempt to write the history of art on a different approach. And he said something, among other things, that we are of course able to express more spiritually today: If we conceive, behind the outer development of art, the flowing, evolving world of the ideal, then and then only will the idea that has, so to speak, been hiding itself, try to issue forth in the material element, to reveal itself mysteriously in the material medium. In other words, the idea will not at first have wholly mastered matter, but expresses itself symbolically in it, a sphinx to be deciphered, as Hegel sees it. Then, in its further development, the idea gains a further mastery over matter, and harmony then exists between the mastering idea and its external, material expression. That is its classic form. When, finally, the idea has worked its way through the material and mastered it completely, the time will come when the overflowing fullness of the world of ideas will run over out of matter, so to speak; the ideal will be paramount. At the merely symbolic level, the idea cannot as yet wholly take over the material. At the classic stage, it has reached the point of union with matter. When it has achieved romantic expression, it is as though the idea overflowed in its fullness. And now Hegel says that we should look in the surrounding world to see where these concepts are exemplified: the symbolic, sphinx-like form of art in Egypt, the classic form in Greece, the romantic form in modern times. Hegel thus bases his approach on the unity of the human spirit with the spirit of the world. The world spirit must allow us thoughts about the course of art's evolution. Then we must rediscover in the outer world what the world spirit first gave to us in thought form. This, says Hegel, is the way external history too is “constructed.” He looks first for the progressive evolution of ideas, and then confirms it at hand of external events. That is what the Philistines, the superficial people, have never been able to grasp, and it is their reason for reproaching Hegel so bitterly. A person who is superficial despite his belonging to a spiritual scientific movement wants above all to know about his own incarnation, and there were of course people in Hegel's time too who were superficial in their own way. You can see from one of Hegel's remarks that there was one such. As you've seen, Hegel followed the principle of first lifting himself into the world of ideas and then rediscovering in the world around him what he had come to know in the ideal world. Now the superficial critics had of course risen up in arms against this, and Hegel had to make the following comment: “In his many-sided naivete Herr Krug has challenged natural philosophy to perform the sleight of hand of deducing his pen only.” “Deducing” was the term used to denote a rediscovering in the outer world of everything that had first been discovered in the inner world. The person referred to in this remark was Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who was teaching at Leipzig at that time.4 Oddly enough, Krug was the predecessor of Mauthner in having written a philosophical dictionary, though he did not succeed in becoming a leading authority in his day. But he said, “If individuals like Hegel search for reality in ideas and then want to show, from the idea's necessity, how external reality coincides with it, then someone like Hegel had better come and demonstrate that he first encountered my pen as an idea.” Krug remarks that Hegel with his “idea” is not convincing in his assertions about the development of art from Egyptian to Greek to modern times, but if Hegel could “deduce” Krug's pen from his idea of it, that would impress him. Hegel comments in the passage mentioned above, “It would have been possible to give him the hope of seeing this deed accomplished and his pen glorified if science had progressed so far and so cleared up everything of importance in heaven and on earth in the past and present as to leave nothing of greater importance in doubt” than Herr Krug's pen. But in today's world the mentality characteristic of superficial people is really dominant. And Fritz Mauthner would have to say honestly that there is no possibility of distinguishing between the necessity of Greek art coming into being at a certain time and the necessity involving Herr Krug's pen or his own extra cigar. Now I have already called your attention to the prime importance of finding the proper angle from which to illuminate these lofty concepts of human life. We need to find the right angles from which to study necessity, chance, and providence. I suggested that you picture Faust in such relation to the world that he would have to despair of the possibility of discovering any element of necessity. But now let's imagine just the opposite and picture Faust conceiving of himself in relation to a world where nothing but necessity exists, a world where he would have to regard every least thing he did as conditioned by necessity. Then he would indeed have to say that if there were no chance happenings, if everything had to be ruled by necessity, “no dog would endure such a curst existence,” and this not because of what he had been learning but because of the way the world had been arranged. And what would a person amount to if there were truth in Spinoza's dictum that everything we do and experience is every bit as necessitated as the path of a billiard ball which, struck by another, has no choice but to move in a way determined by the particular laws involved?5 If that were true, nobody could endure such a world order, and it would be even less bearable for natures aware of “productive powers and germs!” Necessity and chance exist in the universe in such a way that they correspond to a certain human yearning. We feel that we couldn't get along without both of them. But they have to be properly understood, to be judged from the right angle. To do that in the case of the concept of chance naturally requires abandoning any prejudices or preconceptions we may have on the subject. We will have to examine the concept very closely so that we can replace the cliche that this or that “chanced” to happen—as we are often forced to say—with something more suitable. We will have to search out the fitting angle. And we will find it only if we go a bit further in the study we began yesterday. You are familiar with the alternating states of sleeping and waking. But we recognize that waking consciousness too has its nuances, and that it is possible to distinguish between varying degrees of awakeness. But we can go further in a study of that state. It is basically true that from the moment we awaken until we fall asleep again, our waking consciousness takes in nothing but objects in the world around us, senses their action, and produces our own images, concepts, and ideas. Sleeping consciousness, which has remained at the level of plant consciousness, then lets us behold ourselves as described yesterday, and, since our consciousness in this state is plantlike, this is a pleasurable absorption in ourselves. Now if we penetrate fully into the nature of human soul life, we come upon something that fits neither day nor night consciousness. I am referring to distinct memories of past experiences. Consider the fact that sleeping consciousness doesn't involve remembering anything. If you were to sleep continuously, you wouldn't need to remember previous experiences; there would be no such necessity, in any case. We do remember to some extent when we are dreaming, but in the plant consciousness of sleep we remember nothing of the past. It is certainly clear that memory plays no special part in sleep. In the case of ordinary day-waking consciousness we must say that we experience what is around us, but experiencing what we have gone through in the past represents a heightening of waking consciousness. In addition to experience of our present surroundings we experience the past, but now in its reflection in ourselves. So if I draw a horizontal line (see drawing) to represent the level of human consciousness, we may say that we look into ourselves in sleep. I will write “Looking into ourselves” here; we can call it a subconscious looking. Day-waking consciousness can be set down as “Looking out consciously into the world.” Then a third kind of inner experiencing that doesn't coincide with looking into the world is the conscious “Looking into ourselves in memory.” So we have “Conscious looking into ourselves” = memory“Consciousness looking into the world around us” = day-waking consciousness “Subconsciousness looking into ourselves” = sleep The fact is, then, that we have not just two sharply different states of consciousness, but three of them. Remembering is actually a deepened and more concentrated form of waking consciousness. The important thing about remembering is more than just being aware of something; we recapitulate awareness of it. Remembering makes sense only if we are aware of something all over again. Think a moment: if I encounter one of you whom I have seen before, but merely see him without recognizing him, memory isn't really involved. Memory, then, is recognition. And spiritual science teaches us too that whereas our ordinary day-waking consciousness, our consciousness of the world outside us, has reached the very peak of perfection, our remembering is actually only just beginning its evolution; it must go on and on developing. Metaphorically speaking, memory is still a very sleepy attribute of human consciousness. When it has undergone further evolution, another element of experience will be added to our present capacity, namely, the inner experiencing of past incarnations. That experiencing rests upon a heightening of our ability to remember, for no matter what else is involved, we are dealing here with recognition, and it must first travel the path of interiorization. Memory is a soul force just beginning its development./ Now let us ask, “What is the nature of this soul-force, this capacity to remember? What really happens in the remembering process?” Another question must be answered first, and that is, “How do we arrive, at this point in time, at correct concepts?” You get an idea of what a correct concept is if you are not satisfied with a meager picturing of it; in most cases people have their own opinion of things rather than genuine concepts. Most individuals think they know what a circle is. If someone asks, Well, what is it? they answer, Something like this, and draw a circle. That may be a representation of a circle, but that is not what matters. A person who only knows that this drawing approximates a circle and remains satisfied with that has no concept of what a circle is. Only someone who knows enough to say that a circle is a curved line every point of which is equidistant from the center has a correct concept of a circle. An endless number of points is of course involved, but the circle is inwardly present in conceptual form. That is what Hegel was pointing out: that we must get down to the concept underlying external facts, and then recognize what we are dealing with in outer reality on the basis of our familiarity with the concept. Let us explore what the difference is between the “half-asleep” status of the mere mental images with which most people are satisfied and the active possession of a concept. A concept is always in a process of inner growth, of inner activity. To have nothing more than the mental image of a table is not to have a concept of it. We have the concept “table” if we can say that it is a supported surface upon which other objects can be supported. Concepts are a form of inner liveliness and activity that can be translated into outer reality. Nowadays one is tempted to resort to some lively movement to explain matters of this sort to one's contemporaries. One really has an impulse to jump about for the sake of demonstrating how a true concept differs from the sleepy holding onto a mental image. One is strongly prompted to go chasing after concepts as a means of bringing people slightly into motion and enlivening the dreadfully lazy modern holding of mental images that now prevails; one wants to devote one's energies to clarifying the distinction between entertaining ordinary mental images and working one's way into the real heart of a matter. And why is one thus prompted? Because we know from spiritual science that the moment something reaches the level of the concept, the etheric body has to carry out this movement; it is involved in this movement. So we really must not shy away from rousing the etheric body if we intend to construct concepts. What, then, is memory? What is remembering? If I have learned that a circle is a curved line every point of which is equidistant from the center, and am now to recall this concept, I must again carry out this movement in my etheric body. From the aspect of the etheric body, something becomes a memory when carrying out the movement in question has become habitual there. Memory is habit in the etheric body; we remember a thing when our etheric body has become used to carrying out the corresponding movement. We remember nothing except what the etheric body has taken on in the form of habits. Our etheric bodies must take it upon themselves, under the stimulus of re-approaching an object, being repeatedly brought into motion by us and thus given the opportunity of remembering, to repeat the motion they carried out in first approaching that object. And the more often the experience is repeated, the firmer and more ingrained does the habit become, so that memory gradually strengthens. Now if we are really thinking instead of merely forming mental images, our etheric bodies take on all sorts of habits. But these etheric bodies are what the physical body is based on. You will notice that a person who wants to clarify a concept often tries to make illustrative gestures, even as he is talking about it. Of course we all have our own individual gestures anyway. Differences between people are seen in their characteristic gestures, that is, if we conceive the term “gesture” broadly enough. A person with a feeling for gesture learns a good deal about others from observing their gestures and seeing, for example, how they set their feet down as they walk. And the way we think when remembering something is thus really a habit of the etheric body. This etheric body is a lifelong trainer of the physical body—or perhaps I had better say that it tries to train the latter, but not entirely successfully. We can say, then, that the physical body, for example, the hand, is here: When we think, we constantly try to send into the etheric body what then becomes habit there. But the physical body presents a barrier. Our etheric bodies can't manage to get everything into the physical body, and they therefore save up the forces thus prevented from entering the physical body. They are saved up and carried through the entire period of life between death and rebirth. The way we think and the way we imprint our memories upon the etheric body then comes to the fore in our next incarnation as our instinctive play of gesture. And when we see a person exhibiting habitual gestures from childhood on, we can attribute them to the fact that in his previous incarnation his thinking imprinted certain quite distinct mannerisms on his etheric body. If, in other words, I study a person's inborn gestures, they can become clues to the way he managed his thinking in past incarnations. But just think what this means! It means that thoughts so impress themselves upon us that they resurface as the next incarnation's gestures. We get an insight here into the way the thinking element evolves into external manifestation: what began as the inwardness of thought becomes the outwardness of gesture. Modern science, in its ignorance of what distinguishes necessity from chance, looks upon history as happenstance. In a list of words dating back to 1482, which Mauthner refers to, we read the words, “geschicht oder geschehcn ding, historia res gesta.” “Res gesta” is what history used to be called. All that is left of this today is the abstract remnant “regeste.” When notes are taken on some happening, they are called the “register.” Why is this? The word is based on the same root as “gesture.” The genius of speech responsible for the creation of these words was still aware that we have to see something brought over from the past in historical events. If what we observe in individual gesture is to be understood as the residue of past lives on earth, born with the individual into an incarnation, surely it is not complete nonsense to assume something like gestures in what we encounter in the facts of history. A series of facts surfaces in the way we walk, and these are the gestures of our thinking in past incarnations. Where, then, must we look for the facts underlying history? That is the question now confronting us. In the case of individual lives we have to look for the thoughts underlying gesture. If we regard historical events as gestures, where must we look for the thoughts behind them? We will take up the study of this matter tomorrow.
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189. The Social Question as a Question of Consciousness: Lecture VIII
16 Mar 1919, Dornach Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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Ideas for Hegel are in a way forces working in the things themselves. And for the being of things Hegel goes no farther back than to the ideas, so that he wishes in his logic as it were the sum of all ideas contained in things. |
But this perception and imagination of Hegel's sometimes endanger the understanding of what he actually wanted. I once tried to vindicate Hegel to a university professor, a philosopher with whom I was an friendly terms. |
Here Karl Marx has been thinking exactly after Hegel's model, only Hegel in his thinking moved in an element of ideas while Marx lived in a weaving and living of external economic reality. |
189. The Social Question as a Question of Consciousness: Lecture VIII
16 Mar 1919, Dornach Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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Yesterday I set about to show how far from reality present-day thinking is, when in circles working on international questions it is already forgotten that the founding of a League of Nations was, in accordance with Wilson's ideas at the time, deemed possible only if peace were concluded without victory on either side. That you may see how exactly Wilson, on 22nd January, 1917, set out these conditions for the League, I should like today to read you the relevant passage from his speech. He said: “The chief thing in what has been said is that there must be peace without victory. It is not pleasant to have to say this. I may perhaps be allowed to state my own views about it and to emphasise that no other conception has entered my mind. I am trying merely to face the facts and to do this without shielding myself by hiding anything. A victory would mean that peace would be forced upon the vanquished, that the vanquished have to bow to the conditions of their conquerors. Such conditions could be accepted only with profound humility in circumstances of necessity and with insufferable sacrifice, and there would remain a smarting wound, a feeling of resentment, a bitter memory. A peace resting on such foundations could not be lasting, it would be like the house built on sand. The only lasting peace is a peace established between equals, a peace that in its whole essence rests on equality and the common benefit derived from a common act of good-will. The right attitude, the right mood of feeling, is as necessary between the different nations for enduring peace as for the just settlement of obstinate strife over questions of countries, races or peoples.” [ Note 1 ] At that time this was held to be the condition for the founding of a League of Nations. And if we think clearly, it must be said that the moment this peace without victory is not forthcoming, all talk at present of founding a League ought to be abandoned, for it can no longer offer any prospect of success. But this has not happened. People do not think in accordance with reality, they think abstractly, letting their thoughts run on in the way they have begun, quite indifferent as to whether these thoughts have been based on suppositions likely to come true or not. This is simply an outstanding example of the thinking that has brought the world so much misery. And unless we see that in place of this thinking estranged from reality there must be one that can penetrate reality, the situation will certainly not change in a way that is healing for mankind. This must be understood both in the great concerns of the world and also in the ordering of everyday life. For the measures affecting the daily life of individuals are closely connected with the most important affairs of mankind. The mention, therefore, must continually come before our souls: What then, today, could produce real change? We know that what we call men's acceptance of Spiritual Science, is not merely a question of being convinced that there is a supersensible world. That is the what. But the important thing is that whoever in the true sense takes into his thinking what today can be told in the right way about the supersensible world, out of present spiritual revelation, should arrive at a certain how in his thinking. By this his thinking should gradually be transformed, in such a way that he really gets a sense for, an interest in, what truly and actually takes place in the world. It does not merely depend on what we acknowledge through Spiritual Science, but on how through it our thinking is transformed. The question therefore must touch us particularly closely why at present there is so strong an opposition to Spiritual Science. Now yesterday I asked you to notice how everything that can be said about this opposition has to be related at the sane time to all that can arise under the influence of the threefold social organism. I said that once it has come about that the spiritual sphere has been placed on its own feet, so that it becomes independent of the economic sphere and of the life of the State, then in a comparatively short time Spiritual Science will become widespread. But one might go deeper into the question and ask: Why are people so little inclined to recognise necessity for the proper emancipation, of the life of the spirit and for its being placed on its own foundation? The reason is that this spiritual life has in recent times taken on a certain form that holds men back from directing their gaze to the supersensible world. One might say that the present sad experiences are in a certain way a kind of punishment for the necessary misunderstanding of spiritual life which has recently arisen. It must be realised that unless future human thought is led in a social direction, man will never get anywhere. We are taught this by facts against which it is foolish to contend. On the other hand it must be realised by penetrating deeply into things that any kind of socialism that is not at the same time spiritualised will prove the undoing rather than the salvation of mankind. The best groundwork for this penetration is a thorough understanding of the fact that socialistic thinking has proceeded out of modern thinking as a whole. I have already given indications of this. Today we will gather up many of the things we have already heard. I have pointed out that there is something lurking in spirits like Fichte, when they direct their thoughts to the social sphere, that leads to an outlook quite similar to what is found today in Bolshevism. I tried to express this by saying that Johann Gottlieb Fichte would have actually been a genuine Bolshevist had he put his social theory into practice. He himself had so much spirituality that he could let his Bolshevist ideas appear in print (Der Geschlossene Handelsstaat) without becoming dangerous for mankind. So little inclination exists today to penetrate into the real content of things that it is never noticed how in this book Fichte is a true Bolshevist. Nevertheless it is in Hegel that modern thinking comes to expression with its particular characteristics. And Karl Marx isis again dependent upon Hegel though in a most remarkable way. Even if it leads us into the heights of abstraction I should like just to speak of what is characteristic in Hegel's mode of thinking. In the confusion of the last four-and-a-half years many inapt things have been said about Hegel. Why should we not for once be able to go objectively into the matter of his thinking? Now let us consider how Hegel thought about the world, how he tried to direct his gaze to the revelations of the mysteries of the world. Hegel put what he had to say about his actual fundamental being of the world quite distinctly in various places—most distinctly of all in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Knowledge. Let us observe in a quite ordinary way what sort of world-outlook we here find expressed. Hegel's world-outlook falls into three parts. The first part he called Logic. Logic for him, however, is not the art of subjective human thinking but the sum of all ideas active in the world itself. Hegel sees indeed in these ideas not only what flits ghostlike through human heads. That for him is only the perception of the idea. Ideas for Hegel are in a way forces working in the things themselves. And for the being of things Hegel goes no farther back than to the ideas, so that he wishes in his logic as it were the sum of all ideas contained in things. The ideas not appearing creatively in nature, the ideas that do not come to reflection in man and are not recognised by man, are ideas in themselves which are working in the world as ideas. I know quite well that perhaps you may not become much wiser from what I am saying; but people have long been maintaining that they do not gain much wisdom from Hegel, for they are unable to imagine the existence of a pure tissue of ideas. In this pure tissue of ideas, however, Hegel sees God before the creation of the world. For Hegel, God is a sum, or better, an organism, of ideas in the form in which these ideas existed before nature arose and before man was evolved on the foundation of nature. Thus Hegel tried to represent ideas in pure logic—that is, God before the creation of the world. God before the creation of the world is therefore pure logic. Now we might say that it would be very profitable for man's life were someone to set forth all the ideas there were, irrespective of whether they are ideas of a living God or ideas only hovering in the air like a spider's web—but at that time there was no such thing as a web—that this would be of great advantage to the human soul. If, however, you take this pure Hegelian logic, you again find nothing but a web of ideas; and this is the reason it is so seldom done. A beginning is made with the most meagre concept, that of pure being. Then it rises to the non-being, then to existence, and so on. You come therefore to the sum of all ideas man has had about the world, about which he does not usually reflect. He finds it tedious to place before his soul all that follows from pure being up to the appropriate building-up of the organism, apart from any external world. You then get a sum of ideas but only of abstract ideas. And man's living feeling will naturally take up a certain attitude towards this sum or this organism of abstract ideas. How anyone might protest that this is a pantheistic prejudice of Hegel's, this belief that ideas as such are there. I take up the standpoint that before the creation of the world a God would have been there who might have had these ideas and created the world in accordance with them. Try, however, for once to imagine the reason and the soul-life of a God who would have nothing in Him but these Hegelian ideas, and would have reflected only about what lived between being and suitable organisation, who would have had in Himself only ideas of the most external abstractions. What would you say on being expected thus to picture the soul-life of a God? You would never be able to understand how a God could be so poor in His divine reasoning as to think only in such abstractions! Nevertheless for Hegel the sum of these abstract ideas is God Himself, not merely God is understanding but God Himself before the creation of the world. The essential thing is that Hegel in reality never gets beyond abstract ideas, but looks upon these abstractions as divine. Then he goes on to his second point—nature. Here too, I might give you certain opinions as a kind of definition of the way Hegel progresses from the idea, that is, God before the creation, to nature. Probably, however, you would not gain much here either, were you to keep to your ordinary way of thinking. According to Hegel, logic contains the idea in itself; nature contains the idea in its external form. What therefore you contemplate as nature is also idea, actually nothing but what is contained in logic, in the form, however, of being outside itself or having a different being. Then Hegel examines nature in its pure mechanism to the point where it displays its biological, plant, animal relations. He tries everywhere, as far as nature is an open book to man, to point to ideas in her, in the light, in warmth, and in other forces, that of gravity and so forth. Hegel makes up for the significance lost through his abstractions, by his own powers of perception and imagination. But this perception and imagination of Hegel's sometimes endanger the understanding of what he actually wanted. I once tried to vindicate Hegel to a university professor, a philosopher with whom I was an friendly terms. I defend Hegel, you know, because I count it fruitful to defend everything positive rather than always to swear by one's own opinion, roundly criticizing everything else. Anything at all good I always defend. That is the positivism of Spiritual Science. But that time, in the defence of Hegel, I went to work the wrong way. The friend in question said: “O leave me in peace about Hegel. One can't take a man seriously who has nothing to say about the comets except that they are an eruption in the sky!”—Naturally such a statement, that the comets are some sort of rash in the heavens rather like measles, must be taken in its whole context. Now after Hegel has given a sort of catalogue of all the concepts and ideas incorporated in nature, he goes on to his third point, the spirit. In the spirit he sees the idea in its own being, that is, not only as it was before the creation of the world, not only in itself, but as it is apart from all else. The idea lives in the human soul, then objectively outside, and then for itself apart, for man. Since man is the idea because all is idea, this is the idea for itself alone. Hegel again tries to follow up the idea as it is present first in the souls of single human individuals, then—if I skip over something—in the State. In human souls the idea is inwardly active; in the State it is again objectified, living in laws and administration. In all this the idea lives, having become objective. It then goes on developing objectively in world-history, State, world-history. Thus in world-history everything is registered as ideas which brings about the further evolution of mankind on the physical plane. Nothing living as ideas in souls, in the State, in world-history, goes beyond the physical plane, nor does it make man aware of there being a spiritual world. For the spiritual world is for Hegel only the sum total of the ideas living in everything, first in the being in itself before the creation of the world., then apart in nature, and in the separateness of the human soul, in the State and in world-history. After this the idea is developed to its greatest height, in the last moment of its development comes, as it were, to itself, in art, religion and philosophy.
When the three, art, religion, and philosophy, arise in the life of man they stand above the State and world-history; nevertheless they are simply the embodiment of pure logic, the embodiment of abstract ideas. Those ideas existing before the creation of the world are represented in art in a physical image; in religion through a conception in accordance with feeling; and in philosophy the idea in its pure form appears finally in the human spirit. Man comes to fulfillment in philosophy, looks back on everything else that mankind and nature have produced in the way of ideas. He now feels himself filled with the God who is indeed the idea that looks back on the whole of its previous becoming. God sees Himself in men. Actually in man the idea is contemplating itself. Abstraction contemplates abstraction. Nothing more ingenious can be imagined than these thoughts about human abstraction, if one bears in mind that this ingenuity is in the sphere of abstraction. And one can conceive nothing more inwardly daring than what holds good in the following—Ideas are what is highest, there is no God beyond ideas, ideas are God, and you, O soul of man, you are also an idea, only in you the idea is brought to its separateness, it contemplates itself. Thus you see that we swim in ideas, we are ourselves ideas, everything is idea—the world in its extremest form of abstraction! It is of very great importance that just at the turn of the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, there should have arisen a spirit who had the courage to say: It is only one who grasps the abstract idea who grasps reality; there is no higher reality than the abstract idea. In the whole of Hegel's philosophy, from beginning to and, there is no path that leads into the supersensible world. For Hegel there is no such path; and if amen dies, because he is actually idea, in the sense of Hegelian philosophy he goes into the universal stream of world ideas. It is only about this stream of world ideas that anything can be said. There is no single concept that deals with the supersensible—this is just what is so great-minded about the Hegelian philosophy. Everything that meets us in Hegel's philosophy—in icy abstraction, it is true—is itself supersensible, even though abstractly supersensible. This proves itself entirely unsuited. to take up anything supersensible; it shows itself to be fitted only to enter into what is physical. The physical is spiritualised by the superphysical but only in a truly abstract form. At the same time everything supersensible is rejected because the sum of ideas given from beginning to end is related only to the physical world. Thus, I might say, the supersensible character of Hegel's ideas does not become very apparent, for this superphysical is not related to what is superphysical but only to what is physical. I should particularly like to draw your attention to how the tendency of modern thinking is expressed. in its fundamental rejection of the supersensible; not, however, in superficial materialism but in the highest force of spiritual thinking. Hegel is therefore no materialist; he is an objective idealist. His objective idealism upholds the view that the objective idea is itself God, the founder of the world, the founder of everything. Whoever thinks out a spiritual impulse of this kind, experiences in his thinking a certain inner satisfaction, which makes him overlook what is lacking. But what is lacking is felt all the more strongly by anyone who is not the original conceiver of the system but only reflects upon it. I have indicated this in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (The Riddle of Man). Now imagine that a man—not like Hegel—spins thoughts in this way, with an inner supersensible impulse, but that this thinking is taken up by a different head having a sense only for the material—as was the case with Karl Marx. Then this idealistic philosophy of Hegel's becomes the motive for rejecting everything supersensible, and with it everything idealistic. And so it happened with Karl Marx. Karl Marx adopted the form of Hegel of thought. But he did not consider the idea in the reality; he considered the reality as it goes on shinning itself out as mere external material reality. He continued Hegel's impulse and materialised it. Thus the basic nerve of modern socialistic thought has its roots in the very pinnacle of modern idealistic thought. This personal contact that at the same time had to do with the history of the world, this contact of the most abstract thinker with the most material of all thinkers, was an inner necessity but also the tragedy of the nineteenth century; it has been in a certain way the change over of the spiritual life into its opposite. Hegel continues in abstract concepts. Being is changed into non-being, cannot reconcile itself with non-being and therefore merges into becoming. Thus the concept progresses through thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to a certain inner triad, dealt with by Hegel in a grandiose way in the field of pure idea. Karl Marx carries over this inner triad, sought by Hegel for logic, nature and spirit in the inner flexibility of ideas, into outer material reality. He says, for example: Out of the modern economic and capitalistic form of human community, under private ownership, there has developed, as there developed with Hegel nothingness, non-being out of being, the formation of trusts, the capitalistic socialisation of the economy of private capital. With the increased amassing of industrial plant by the trusts, the private ownership of capital changes into its opposite. There arise associations that are the reverse of individual economy. This is a changing over into the opposite, the antithesis. Then comes synthesis. Once again the whole is changed as nothingness is changed into becoming; and the merging of private economy into the economy of trusts changes into something still greater—the trust economy ands in the communal ownership of the means of production. This purely external economic reality progresses in the triad. Here Karl Marx has been thinking exactly after Hegel's model, only Hegel in his thinking moved in an element of ideas while Marx lived in a weaving and living of external economic reality. So, side-by-side we find the extremes, one might say like being and non-being. Now you can argue as long as you like about idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism, but nothing comes of it, you get nowhere. What sustains man can be found only by thinking in the sense of the modern trinity, with man in the centre, the luciferic extreme on the one side, on the other the ahrimanic extreme. Ahrimanic materialism, luciferic spiritualism, as the two extremes, man keeping the balance. If you wish for the truth you can neither be idealist nor realist; you must be one just as much as the other. You must seek the spirit with such intensity that you find spirit even in the material; you must penetrate what is material so that through the material you find the spirit. That is the task of the modern age; no longer to wrangle about spiritualism and materialism but to find the balance between the two. For the two extremes of the luciferic in Hegel and the ahrimanic in Marx are outlived. They were there, they were manifested. Now there must be found what will bring agreement, and this can be done just by Spiritual Science. Here, it is true, we have to rise as did Hegel to the heights of pure thought, but this pure thought must be used for breaking through to the supersensible. We do not have to find logic, that is, an organism of ideas, which can be related only to the world of the senses; but at the point where logic has been found we must pierce through what belongs to the senses and reach the supersensible. Hegel was unable to succeed in thus breaking through, and because of this men was thrown back. In a certain way it depends upon the heights and purity reached by modern thinking that socialism should have appeared without any reference to what is to any degree spiritual. And the present—day difficulty in adding spiritual thinking to socialistic thinking is bound up with the very ground of mankind's inner path of development. The whole connection must be seen into, however, for us to gain the strength to find the way out of the situation. The pursuit of science as it is now carried on in our universities has certainly not led to this. Not physically, but where thinking is concerned, Hegel has squeezed out man as a lemon is squeezed till it is dry; and this squeezed out lemon of a man is then only another idea. You sit there in your chairs; in the sense of Hegel's philosophy you are pure ideas; there are not bodies sitting there, not souls, but ideas, for each of you bears en idea within him. And this was already there an abstract idea before the creation of the world. Then each one of you in yourself is body, nature—the idea outside itself is sitting there on those chairs. Then again within you is the idea in its separateness. You yourself grasp this idea that id you. Think what a shadow you are: Only think how squeezed out you are while you sit there as the idea in itself, outside itself, and apart from itself—but always just idea! Now in the sense of Karl Marx you are quite different from ideas. Just because he has passed through Hegel's method of idealism you are for him an animal that has become two-legged, as you appear outwardly in the order of nature. The other extreme! In face of what exists in man's evolution must we not make an attempt to give him back his manhood again even in our outward view of him? This means not taking man's nature to be merely universal idea nor animal-men, but really individual man in his own envelope, man who stands at the highest point in nature, who has within him a soul-being and is the goal of a spiritual world. The conception of man must be brought back to this real man. I have tried to do this in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. That is the actual historical statement of the problem which I had before me when I was constrained to write The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The most highly developed animal enveloping man cannot be free, neither can there be freedom for the shadowy man—the idea in itself, outside itself, the idea in its separate being, for that is built up by the necessity of logic. Neither of these is free. Only the real man is free, the man who is the balance between the idea that breaks through to the actual spirit, and external materiel reality. Therefore in the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an attempt was even made to base moral life not upon any kind of abstract principle, but upon inner moral experience, which at the time I called moral imagination, that is, upon what, expressed figuratively, individual man draws from the well of intuition. Kant set up the categorical imperative that runs: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be a guiding line for all men: Put on a coat that will fit every man.—The maxim of the philosophy of freedom runs: Let your action be such that it flows to you in a precise concrete moment, in an individual concrete moment, out of your highest human forces, out of the spirit. Through moral philosophy in this roundabout way we arrive at spirituality. And for modern mankind it might be a way of coming to an understanding of the spiritual world, were men first to see into something that, after all, is not hard to grasp, namely, that what is moral has no support if it is not conceived as part of the supersensible and spiritual. From beginning to end Hegel's logic is a sum of abstract ideas. But ultimately what harm is there in my looking upon the whole of nature, upon every visible thing, as simply a scheme of ideas? It becomes harmful, however, when what spurs us on as an impulse to the moral, does not come from the spiritual world. For if it does not come from the spiritual world it has no true reality and is more noise and smoke issuing from animal-man. When animal-man dies nothing is left. In Hegel's philosophy there is no single concept related to anything that would still be there for man when he has gone through the gate of death, or that could have been there before he came through the gate of birth. Hegel's philosophy is great, but great as a point of transition for the nineteenth century. To recognise Hegel in his greatness leads us to carry him further, to make a passage through what stands in our way when we come to pure thought, to pure logic, to the idea in the abstract—a passage through to the supersensible world. Being still a follower of Hegel, can only be represented as the personal enjoyment of a few twisted minds who, at the beginning of the twentieth century set out to prove their great spirituality by going as far as it was permissible to go in the first decade of the nineteenth century. For we have to learn not only to wish to live abstractly as men, but to live wholly with the times, to live in the evolution of the time. We come to what is really living by refusing, to be absolute, otherwise we cannot cooperate in the sense of human evolution. The important thing is that we should work together for human evolution. Raphael was great. The Sistine Madonna is a very important artistic creation. Actually it could be estimated justifiably only by someone who, if a painter produced a Sistine Madonna today, would consider it a bad picture. For it is a question of not taking anything as absolute, but of understanding how to place oneself into the great association of all mankind. And the necessity lies before us today of not simply taking up an absolute attitude in the world, as might be done formerly, but of feeling ourselves consciously in the epoch into which we are placed in a certain incarnation. Strange as it may sound, a right estimation of the Sistine Madonna could be made only by someone who was able to condemn the picture out of the modern attitude of mind, had it been painted today. For nothing has an absolute value; things derive their value from the place where they stand in the world. Up to now people have been able to make do without this insight; but from now on it is essential. It is not so particularly profound. In his epoch the discoverer of the Pythagorean theorem was a great man. Today should anyone invent or discover this theorem it would be interesting but nothing more. It would also be interesting were anyone to paint the Sistine Madonna today. It is however not the time for this; it in not what must happen at the point of evolution in which we now stand. You see what a new form thinking must take, what a socialising of thought there must be to experience jointly with other men is the important thing for today. To most people this will seem distinctly strange. Today however we find ourselves compelled to make a fundamental change in our thinking, to come to really new thoughts. We are no longer able to live with the old thoughts. If men go on spinning these old thoughts, the world will simply tumble about their ears. The salvation of mankind depends on men being able to free themselves from the old thinking and really wish for new thinking. Spiritual Science is a new thinking. The very reason it is so shunned is that fundamentally it is at variance with the old habits of thought. It is only those men who perceive the necessity for a new thinking who will be able to have a true feeling for Spiritual Science generally, and also for its revelations concerning individual spheres of the life of soul, for example, concerning the social question. Something else is making the present age unhealthy, namely that men have come to think differently in their subconscious, but out of historic obstinacy they suppress this different thinking sitting in their subconscious, and for this they will have to suffer the consequences. Present historical evolution is in many respects the punishment for man's obstinacy in suppressing what lies in his subconscious and clinging in an artificial way to what for centuries he has maintained. We should not take those thinkers who are illogical and love the easy way, we should take the logical thinker of the epoch that is past and gone and learn from him where we have gone astray. It is not the thinker who makes concessions who is characteristic of this period that is past, but the thinker who clings fast to the standpoint of what is old. When, many years ago in the Austrian Upper Chamber, all the lovers of abstraction and the advanced Liberals were speaking of progress and liberalism, and of how religion was to be transformed to suit modern demands—when they used the cliches of all those who take up the cudgels, from Gladstone down to the valiant parliamentarians of the continent—the following rejoinder was made by Cardinal Rauscher, a Churchman keeping fast to the old, with nothing modern about him. He said: The Catholic Church knows no progress; what was once true is true for all time; nothing opposing it in the way of innovation that claims validity, has any right to it!—This was no modern spirit but a finished product of bygone times. And the same is true of Pobedonosceff (Russian Jurist and Statesmen) the only man who in an intelligent way partaking of genius has condemned the whole modern culture of the west, because in his opinion it really led to nothing. It was only possible to uphold the old order to which the bourgeoisie of today have become accustomed if people were willing to believe the world to be formed as Cardinal Rauscher, and Pobedonosceff himself, would have it. Had the world not been fed on the twaddle of Nicolas II but with the stark Principles of Pobedonosceff, it goes without saying that the present war would not have taken place. But on the other hand there is this to be said: One could no have built on Pobedonosceff's ideas, because the reality went in another direction. And now it is a question of following the reality, not by making concessions, not by behaving in the way most spirits have behaved during the second half of the nineteenth century or in the first two decades of the twentieth, but by resolving to think something as different from the earlier thought as the devastation of the world war, in its other negative side, is different from what went before. From this terrible calamity, of which it is constantly said that there has never been anything like it in the course of history, we should learn to grasp thoughts of which we can say that there has never been anything like these in the course of history. Thus you see it is incumbent upon man to make a great resolution. What out of instinct will unconsciously bring this resolution to fruition makes itself felt as socialism. The world will never get out of chaos till a sufficient number of men combine material socialism with the socialism that is ideal and spiritual. This is the existing condition of things. Salvation cannot come to historical social evolution so long as man fails to reach the point of being able to see the immediate reality beneath his nose. This should become the inner practice, as it were, of the soul which can originate from the impulses of Spiritual Science. I should like to try to point you continually to this inner practice of the soul. The more strongly you feel the importance for our time of what I have been trying to put forward in these considerations, the more freely will you move in the spiritual stream which receives its life from the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy. Notes: 1. Not Wilson's original English. Translated from the German. |
194. The Mysteries of Light, of Space, and of the Earth: The Old Mysteries of Light, Space, and Earth
15 Dec 1919, Dornach Tr. Frances E. Dawson Rudolf Steiner |
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An illustration of it is the Central European philosophy, of which really nothing is known in England. Actually, Hegel cannot be translated into the English language; it is impossible. Hence, nothing is known of him in England, where German philosophy is called Germanism, by which is meant something an intelligent person cannot be bothered with. In just this German philosophy, however—with the exception of one incident, namely, when Kant was completely ruined by Hume, and there divas brought into German philosophy that abominable Kant-Hume element, which has really caused such devastation in the heads of Central European humanity—with the exception of this incident, we have later, after all, the second blossoming of this struggle in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; and we already have the search for a free spiritual life in Goethe, who would have nothing to do with the final echo of the Roman Catholic jurisprudence in what is called the law of nature. |
One I have often characterized in the words of Herman Grimm—the Kant-Laplace theory, in which many people still believe. Herman Grimm said so finely in his Goethe: People will some day have difficulty in comprehending that malady now called science, which makes its appearance in the Kant-Laplace theory, according to which all that we have around us today arose through agglomeration, out of a universal world-mist; and this is supposed to continue until the whole thing falls back again into the sun. |
194. The Mysteries of Light, of Space, and of the Earth: The Old Mysteries of Light, Space, and Earth
15 Dec 1919, Dornach Tr. Frances E. Dawson Rudolf Steiner |
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The tasks assigned to the humanity of the present and of the immediate future are great, significant, and peremptory; and it is really necessary to bring forth a strong soul courage in order to do something toward their accomplishment. Anyone who today examines these tasks closely, and tries to get a true insight into the needs of humanity, must often reflect how superficially so-called public affairs are treated. We might say that people today talk politics aimlessly. From a few emotions, from a few entirely egotistic points of view—personal or national—people form their opinions about life, whereas a real desire to gain the factual foundations for a sound judgment would be more in conformity with the seriousness of the present time. In the course of recent months, and even years, I have inquired into the most varied subjects, including the history and the demands of the times, and have given lectures here on such subjects, always with the purpose of furnishing facts which will enable people to form a judgment for themselves—not with the purpose of placing the ready-made judgment before them. The longing to know the realities of life, to know them more and more fundamentally, in order to have a true basis for judgment—that is the important thing today. I must say this especially because the various utterances and written statements which I have made regarding the so-called social question, and regarding the threefold structure of the social organism, are really taken much too lightly, as anyone can clearly see, for the questions asked about these things are concerned far too little with the actual, momentous, basic facts. It is so difficult for people of the present time to arrive at these basic facts, because they are really theoreticians in all realms of life, although they will not acknowledge it. The people who today most fancy themselves to be practical are the most decidedly theoretical, for the reason that they are usually satisfied to form a few concepts about life, and from these to insist upon judging life; whereas it is possible today only by means of a real, universal, and comprehensive penetration into life to form a relevant judgment about what is necessary. One can say that in a certain sense it is at least intellectually frivolous when, without a basis of facts, a man talks politics at random, or indulges in fanciful views about life. It makes one wish for a fundamentally serious attitude of soul toward life. When in the present time the practical side of our spiritual scientific effort, the Threefold Social Order, is placed before the world as the other side has been, it is a fact that the whole mode of thought and conception employed in the elaboration of this Threefold Social Order is met with prejudices and misgivings. Where do these prejudices and misgivings originate? Well, a man forms concepts about truth (I am still speaking of the social life), concepts about the good, the right, the useful, and so forth, and when he has formed them, he thinks they have absolute value everywhere and always. For example, take a man of western, middle, or eastern Europe with a socialistic bias. He has quite definite socialistically-formulated ideals; but what kind of fundamental concepts underlie these ideals? His fundamental concept is that what satisfies him must satisfy everyone everywhere, and must possess absolute validity for all future time. The man of today has little feeling for the fact that every thought that is to be of value to the social life must be born out of the fundamental character of the time and the place. Therefore he does not easily come to realize how necessary it is for the Threefold Social Order to be introduced with different nuances into our present European culture, with its American appendage. If it is adopted, then the variations suited to the peoples of the different regions will come about of themselves. And besides, when the time comes, on account of the evolution of humanity, that the ideas and thoughts mentioned by me in The Threefold Commonwealth are no longer valid, others must again be found. It is not a question of absolute thoughts, but of thoughts for the present and the immediate future of mankind. In order, however, to comprehend in its full scope how necessary is this three-membering of the social organism in an independent spiritual life, an independent rights and political life, and an independent economic life, one must examine without prejudice the way in which the interaction of the spiritual, the political, and the economic has come about in our European-American civilization. This interweaving of the threads—the spiritual threads, those of rights or government, and the economic threads—is by no means an easy matter. Our culture, our civilization, is like a ball of yarn, something wound up, in which are entangled three strands of entirely different origins. Our spiritual life is of essentially different origin from that of our rights or political life, and entirely different again from that of our economic life; and these three strands with different origins are chaotically entangled. I can naturally give only a sketchy idea to-day, because I shall briefly follow these three streams, I might say, to their source. First, our spiritual life, as it presents itself to one who regards as real the external things, the obvious, is acquired by people through the influence of what still persists of the ancient Greek and Latin cultural life, the Greco-Latin spiritual life, as it has flowed through what later became our high schools and universities. All the rest of our so-called humanistic culture, even down to our elementary schools, is entirely dependent upon that which, as one stream let us say, flowed in first from the Greek element (Diagram 13. orange); for our spiritual life, our European spiritual life, is of Greek origin; it merely passed through the Latin as a sort of way-station. It is true that in modern times something else has mingled with the spiritual life which originated in Greece: namely, that which is derived from what we call technique in the most varied fields, which was not yet accessible to the Greek, the technique of mechanics, the technique of commerce, etc., etc. I might say that the technical colleges, the commercial schools, and so forth, have been annexed to our universities, adding a more modern element to what flows into our souls through our humanistic schools, which reach back to Greece—and by no means flows only into the souls of the so-called educated class; for the socialistic theories which haunt the heads even of the proletariat are only a derivative of that which really had its origin in the Grecian spiritual life; it has simply gone through various metamorphoses. This spiritual life reaches back, however, to a more distant origin, far back in the Orient. What we find in Plato, what we find in Heraclitus, in Pythagoras, in Empedocles, and especially in Anaxagoras, all reaches back to the Orient. What we find in Aeschylus, in Sophocles, in Euripides, in Phidias, reaches back to the Orient. The entire Greek culture goes back to the Orient, but it underwent a significant change on its way to Greece. Yonder in the Orient this spiritual life was decidedly more spiritual than it was in ancient Greece; and in the Orient it issued from what we may call the Mysteries of the Spirit—I may also say the Mysteries of Light (Drawing). The Grecian spiritual life was already filtered and diluted as compared with that from which it had its origin: namely, the spiritual life of the Orient, which depended upon quite special spiritual experiences. Naturally, we must go back into prehistoric times, for the Mysteries of Light, or the Mysteries of the Spirit, are entirely prehistoric phenomena. If I am to represent to you the character of this spiritual life, the manner of its development, I must do so in the following way: We know, of course, that if we go very far back in human evolution, we find increasingly that human beings of ancient times had an atavistic clairvoyance, a dream-like clairvoyance, through which the mysteries of the universe were revealed to them; and we speak with entire correctness when we say that over the whole civilized Asiatic earth, in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, there dwelt people to whom spiritual truths were revealed through clairvoyance—a clairvoyance that was completely bound to nature, to the blood, and to the bodily organization. This was true of a widely dispersed population; but this atavistic clairvoyance was in a state of decline, and became more and more decadent. This “becoming decadent” of the atavistic clairvoyance is not merely a cultural-historical phenomenon, but is at the same time a phenomenon of the social life of mankind. Why? Because from various centers of this wide-spread population, but chiefly from a point in Asia, there arose a special kind of human being, so to speak, a human being with special faculties. Besides the atavistic clairvoyance, which still remained to these people in a certain sense—for there still arose out of their inner soul-life a dream-like comprehension of the mysteries of the world—besides this they also had what we call the thinking faculty; and indeed they were the first in the evolution of humanity to have this power. They were the first to have dawning intelligence. That was a significant social phenomenon when the people of those ancient times, who had only dream-like visions of the mysteries of the world arising within them, saw immigrants enter their territories whom they could still understand, because they also had visions, but who had besides something which they themselves lacked: the power of thought. That was a special kind of human being. The Indians regarded that caste which they designated as Brahman as the descendants of these people who combined the thinking power with atavistic clairvoyance; and when they came down from the higher-lying regions of northern Asia into the southern regions, they were called Aryans. They formed the Aryan population, and their primal characteristic is that they combined the thinking-power with—if I may now use the expression of a later time—with the plebeian faculties of atavistic clairvoyance. And those mysteries which are called the Mysteries of the Spirit, or particularly, the mysteries of Light, were founded by those people who combined atavistic clairvoyance with the first kindling of intelligence, the inner light of man; and our spiritual culture derives from that which entered humanity at that time as an illuminating spark—it is nothing but a derivative of it. Much has been preserved in humanity of what was revealed at that time; but we must consider that even the Greeks—just the better educated personalities among them—had seen the ancient gift of atavistic clairvoyance gradually wane and become extinguished, and the thinking-power remained to them. Among the Romans the power of thought alone remained. Among the Greeks there was still a consciousness that this faculty comes from the same source as the ancient atavistic clairvoyance; and therefore Socrates still clearly expressed something which he knew as experience when he spoke of his Daemon as inspiring his truths, which were of course merely dialectic and intellectual. In art, as well, the Greeks significantly represented the pre-eminence of the intelligent human being, or better, the development of the intelligent human being from the rest of humanity; for the Greeks have in their sculpture (one need only study it closely) three types differing sharply from one another. They have the Aryan type, to which the Apollo head, the Pallas Athene head, the Zeus head, the Hera head belong. Compare the ears of the Apollo with those of a Mercury head, the nose of the Apollo with that of a Mercury head, and you will see what a different type it is. The Greek wanted to show in the Mercury-type that the ancient clairvoyance, which still persisted as superstition and was a lower form of culture, had united with intelligence in the Greek civilization; that this existed at the bottom of Greek culture; and that towering above it was the Aryan whose artistic representation was the Zeus head, the Pallas Athene head, and so forth. And the very lowest races, those with dim remnants of ancient clairvoyance—who also still lived in Greece but were especially to be observed near the borders—are plastically preserved in another type, the Satyr-type, which in turn is quite different from the Mercury-type. Compare the Satyr nose with the Mercury nose, the Satyr ears with the Mercury ears, and so forth. The Greek merged in his art what he bore in his consciousness concerning his development. What gradually filtered through Greece at that time, by means of the Mysteries of the Spirit or of the Light, and then appeared in modern times, had a certain peculiarity as spirit-culture. It was possessed of such inner impulsive force that it could at the same time, out of itself, establish the rights life of man. Therefore we have on the one hand the revelation of the gods in the Mysteries bringing the spirit to man, and on the other, the implanting of this spirit acquired from the gods into the external social organism, into the theocracies. Everything goes back to the theocracies; and these were able not only to permeate themselves with the legal system, the political system, out of the very nature of the Mysteries, but they were able also to regulate the economic life out of the spirit. The priests of the Mysteries of Light were at the same time the economic administrators of their domains; and they worked according to the rules of the Mysteries. They constructed houses, canals, bridges, looked after the cultivation of the soil, and so forth. In primitive times civilization grew entirely out of the spiritual life, but it gradually became abstract. From being a spiritual life it became more and more a sum of ideas. Already in the Middle Ages it had become theology, that is, a sum of concepts, instead of the ancient spiritual life, or it had to be confined to the abstract, legalistic form, because there was no longer any relation to the spiritual life. When we look back at the old theocracies we find that the one who ruled received his commission from the gods in the Mysteries. The last derivative is the occidental ruler, but he no longer gives any evidence of having originated from the ruler of the theocracy, with his commission from the gods of the Mysteries. All that remains is crown and coronation robe, the outer insignia, which in later times became more like decorations. If one understands such things it may often be observed that titles go back to the time of the Mysteries; but everything is now externalized. Scarcely less externalized is that which moves through our secondary schools and universities as spiritual culture, the final echo of the divine message of the Mysteries. The spiritual has flowed into our life, but this has now become utterly abstract, a life of mere ideas. It has become what the socialistically-orientated groups latterly call an ideology, that is, a sum of thoughts that are only thoughts. That is what our spiritual life has really become. Under its influence the social chaos of our time has developed, because the spiritual life that is so diluted and abstract has lost all impulsive force. We have no choice but to place it again on its own foundation, for only so can it thrive. We must find the way again from the merely rational to the creative spirit, and we shall be able to do so only if we seek to develop out of the spiritual life prescribed by the State the free spiritual life,1 which will then have the power to awake to life again. For neither a spiritual life controlled by the Church, nor one maintained and protected by the State, nor a spiritual life panting under economic burdens, can be fruitful for humanity, but only an independent spiritual life. Indeed the time has come for us to find the courage in our souls to proclaim quite frankly before the world that the spiritual life must be placed on its own foundation. Many people are asking: Well, what are we to do? The first thing of importance is to inform people about what is needed: to get as many people as possible to comprehend the necessity, for example, of establishing the spiritual life on its own foundation; to comprehend that what the pedagogy of the 19th century has become can no longer suffice for the welfare of mankind, but that it must be built anew out of a free spiritual life. There is as yet little courage in souls to present this demand in a really radical way; and it can be thus presented only by trying to bring to as many people as possible a comprehension of these conditions. All other social work today is provisional. The most important task is this: to see that it is made possible for more and more people to gain insight into the social requirements, one of which has just been characterized. To provide enlightenment concerning these things through all the means at our disposal—that is now the matter of importance. We have not yet become productive with regard to the spiritual life, and we must first become productive in this field. Beginnings have been made in this direction, of which I shall speak presently—but we have not yet become productive with regard to the spiritual life; and we must become productive by making the spiritual life independent. Everything that comes into being on earth leaves remnants behind it. The Mysteries of Light in the present-day oriental culture, the oriental spiritual life, are less diluted than in the Occident, but of course they no longer have anything like the form they had at the time I have described. Yet if we study what the Hindus, the oriental Buddhists, still have today, we shall be much more likely to perceive the echo of that from which our own spiritual life has come; only in Asia it has remained at another stage of existence. We, however, are unproductive; we are highly unproductive. When the tidings of the Mystery of Golgotha spread in the West, whence did the Greek and Latin scholars get the concepts for the understanding of it? They got them from the oriental wisdom. The West did not produce Christianity. It was taken from the Orient. And further: When in English-speaking regions the spiritual culture was felt to be very unfruitful, and people were sighing for its fructification, the Theosophists went to the subjugated Indians to seek the wellsprings for their modern Theosophy. No fruitful source existed among themselves for the means to improve their spiritual life: so they went to the Orient. In addition to this significant fact, you could find many proofs of the unfruitfulness of the spiritual life of the West; and each such proof is at the same time a proof of the necessity for making the spiritual life an independent member in the threefold social organism. A second strand in the tangled ball is the political or rights current. There is the crux of the cultural problem, this second current. If we look for it today in the external world, we see it when our honorable judges sit on their benches of justice with the jurors and pass judgment upon crime or offence against the law, or when the magistrates in their offices rule throughout the civilized world—to the despair of those thus ruled. All that we call jurisprudence or government, and all that results as politics from the interaction of jurisprudence and government, constitutes this current (see drawing, white). I call that (orange) the current of the spiritual life, and this (white) the current of rights, or government. Where does this come from? As a matter of fact this too goes back to the Mystery-culture. It goes back to the Egyptian Mystery-culture, which passed through the southern European regions, then through the prosaic, unimaginative Roman life, where it united with a side branch of the oriental life, and became Roman Catholic Christianity, that is, Roman Catholic ecclesiasticism. Speaking somewhat radically, this Roman Catholic ecclesiasticism is also fundamentally a jurisprudence; for from single dogmas to that great and mighty Judgment, always represented as the Last Judgment throughout the Middle Ages, the utterly different spiritual life of the Orient, which had received the Egyptian impulse from the Mysteries of Space (see drawing), was really transformed into a society of world-magistrates with world-judgments and world-punishments, and sinners, and the good and the evil: it is a jurisprudence. That is the second element existing in our spiritual tangle which we call civilization, and it has been by no means organically combined with the other. That this is the case anyone can learn who goes to a university and hears one after the other, let us say a juridical discourse on political law, and then a theological discourse even on canonical law, if you like, for these are found side by side. Such things have shaped mankind; even in later times, when their origins have been forgotten, they are still shaping human minds. The rights life caused the later spiritual life to become abstract; but externally it influenced human customs, human habits, human systems. What is the last social offshoot in the decadent oriental spiritual current, whose origin has been forgotten? It is feudal aristocracy. You could no longer recognize that the aristocrat had his origin in the oriental, theocratic spiritual life, for he has stripped off all that; only the social configuration remains (drawing). The journalistic intelligence often has very strange nightmarish visions. One such it had recently when it invented a curious phrase of which it was especially proud: “spiritual aristocracy”—this could be heard now and then. What is that which passed through the Roman Church system, through theocratising jurisprudence, juridical theocracy, became secularized in the civic systems of the Middle Ages, and completely secularized in modern times—what is it in its ultimate derivative? It is the bourgeoisie (drawing). And thus are these spiritual forces in their ultimate derivatives actually jumbled up among men. And now still a third stream unites itself with the other two. If you would observe it today in the external world, where does this third current appear in an especially characteristic way? Well, there actually was in Central Europe a method of demonstrating to certain people where these final remnants of something originally different were to be found. It happened when the man of Central Europe sent his son to an office in London or New York to learn the methods of the economic system. In the methods of the economic life, whose roots are to be found in the popular customs of the Anglo-American world, the final consequence is to be seen of that which has been developed as outgrowths from what I might call the Mysteries of the Earth, of which, for example, the Druid Mysteries are only a special variety. In the times of the primitive European people the Mysteries of the Earth still contained a peculiar kind of wisdom-filled life. That European population, which was quite barbaric, which knew nothing regarding the revelations of oriental wisdom, or of the Mysteries of Space, or of what later became Roman Catholicism—that population which advanced to meet the spreading Christianity possessed a strange kind of life-steeped-in-wisdom, peculiar to it, which was entirely physical wisdom. Of this one can at best study only the most external usages, which are recorded in the history of this current: namely, the festivals of those people from whom have come the customs and habits of England and America. The festivals were here brought into entirely different relations from those in Egypt, where the harvest was connected with the stars. Here the harvest as such was the festive occasion; and the highest solemn festivals of the year were connected with other things than was the case in Egypt: namely, with things that belong entirely to the economic life. We have here without doubt something which goes back to the economic life. If we wish to comprehend the whole spirit of this matter, we must say to ourselves: Over from Asia and up from the South men transplanted a spiritual life and a rights life which they had received from above and brought down to earth. Then, in the third current, an economic life sprang up which had to develop of itself and work its way up, which really was originally so completely economic in its legal customs and in its spiritual adaptations that, for example, one of the yearly festivals consisted in the celebration of the fructification of the herds as a special festival in honor of the gods; and there were similar festivals all derived from the economic aspect of life. If we go through the regions of northern Russia, middle Russia, Sweden, Norway, or into those regions which until a short time ago were parts of Germany, or to France, at least northern France, and to what is now Great Britain—if we go through these regions, we find dispersed everywhere a population which, before the spread of Christianity in ancient times, undoubtedly had a pronounced economic life. And what ancient customs can still be found, such as festivals of legal practices and festivals in honor of the gods, are an echo of this ancient economic culture. This economic culture met what came from the other side. At first it did not succeed in developing an independent rights life and spiritual life. The primitive legal customs were discarded because Roman law flowed in, and the primitive spiritual customs were cast aside because the Greek spiritual life had entered. And so this economic life becomes sterile at first, and only gradually works its way out of this sterility; it can succeed in this, however, only by overcoming the chaotic condition created by the introduction of the spiritual life and rights life from outside. Consider the present Anglo-American spiritual life. In this you have two things very sharply differentiated from one another. First, you have everywhere in the Anglo-American spiritual life, more than anywhere else on earth, the so-called secret societies, which have considerable influence, much more than people know. They are undoubtedly the keepers—and are proud to be the keepers—of the ancient spiritual life, of the Egyptian or oriental spiritual life, which is completely diluted and evaporated into mere symbols,—symbols no longer understood but having a certain great power among those in authority. That, however, is ancient spiritual life, not spiritual life grown in its own soil. Side by side with this there is a spiritual life which does grow entirely in economic soil, but hitherto it has produced only very small blossoms, and these in abundance. Anyone who studies such things and is able to understand them knows very well that Locke, Hume, Mill, Spencer, Darwin, and others, are nothing but these little blossoms springing from the economic life. You can get quite exactly the thoughts of a Mill or a Spencer from the economic life. Social democracy has elevated this to a theory, and considers the spiritual life as a derivative of the economic life. That is what we encounter first: everything is brought forth from the so-called practical—actually from life's routine, not from its real practice. So that going along side by side are such things as Darwinism, Spencerism, Millism, Humeism—and the diluted Mystery teachings, which are perpetuated in the various sectarian developments, such as the Theosophical Society, the Quakers, and so forth. The economic life has the will to rise, but has not yet made much progress, having produced thus far only these small blossoms. The spiritual life and the rights life are exotic plants and—I beg you to note this well—they are more and more exotic the farther we go toward the West in the European civilization. There has always been in Central Europe something—I might say like a resistance, a struggling against the Greek spiritual life on the one hand and against the Roman Catholic rights life on the other. An opposition has always been there. An illustration of it is the Central European philosophy, of which really nothing is known in England. Actually, Hegel cannot be translated into the English language; it is impossible. Hence, nothing is known of him in England, where German philosophy is called Germanism, by which is meant something an intelligent person cannot be bothered with. In just this German philosophy, however—with the exception of one incident, namely, when Kant was completely ruined by Hume, and there divas brought into German philosophy that abominable Kant-Hume element, which has really caused such devastation in the heads of Central European humanity—with the exception of this incident, we have later, after all, the second blossoming of this struggle in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; and we already have the search for a free spiritual life in Goethe, who would have nothing to do with the final echo of the Roman Catholic jurisprudence in what is called the law of nature. Just feel the legal element in the shabby robes and the strange caps which the judges still have from ancient times, and feel it likewise in the science of nature, the law of nature—the legal element is still there! The expression “law of nature” has no sense in connection, for example, with the Goethean science of nature, which deals only with the primordial phenomenon, the primordial fact. There for the first time is radical protest made; but naturally it remained only a beginning. That was the first advance toward the free spiritual life: the Goethean science of nature; and in Central Europe there already exists the first impulse even toward the independent rights life, or political life. Read such a work as that of Wilhelm van Humboldt, who was even Prussian minister of public instruction—read The Sphere and Duties of Government,2 and you will see the first beginning toward the construction of an independent rights life, or political life, of the independence of the true political realm. It is true it has never gone beyond beginnings, and these are found as far back as the first half of the 19th century, even at the end of the 18th century. It must be borne in mind, however, that there are nevertheless in Central Europe important impulses in this very direction, impulses which can be carried on, which must not be left unconsidered, and which may flow into the impulse of the Threefold Social Organism. In his first book Nietzsche wrote that passage that I have quoted in my book on Nietzsche3 in the very first pages, a premonition of something tragic in the German spiritual life. Nietzsche tried at that time in the foreword to his work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, to characterize the events of 1870–71, the founding of the German Empire. Since then this strangulation of the German spirit has been thoroughly accomplished; and when in the last five or six years three-fourths of the world fell upon this former Germany (I do not wish to speak about the causes or the guilty, but only to sketch the configuration, the world situation), it was really then already the corpse of the German spiritual life. But when anyone speaks as I did yesterday, characterizing the facts without prejudice, no one should infer that there is not still in this German spiritual life much that must come forth, that must be considered, that intends to be considered, in spite of the future gypsy-like condition. For what was the real cause of the ruin of the German people? This question must also be answered without prejudice. They were ruined because they too wanted to share in materialism, and they have no talent for materialism. The others have good talents for it. The Germans have in general that quality which Herman Grimm characterized excellently when he said: The Germans as a rule retreat when it would be beneficial for them to go boldly forward, and they storm ahead with terrific energy when it would be better for them to hold back. That is a very good description of an inner quality of character of this German people; for the Germans have had propulsive force throughout the centuries, but not the ability to sustain this force. Goethe was able to present the primordial phenomenon, but he could not reach the beginnings of spiritual science. He could develop a spirituality, as, for example, in his Faust, or in his Wilhelm Meister, which could have revolutionized the world if the right means had been found; but the outer personality of this gifted man achieved nothing more than that in Weimar he put on fat and had a double chin, became a stout privy counselor, who was also uncommonly industrious as minister, but still was obliged at times to wink at certain things, especially in political life. The world ought to understand that such phenomena as Goethe and Humboldt represent everywhere beginnings, and that it would really be a loss to the world and not a profit, to fail to take into account what lives in the German evolution in an unfinished state, but to which must come forth. For after all, the Germans do not have the predisposition which the others have in such remarkable degree the farther we go toward the West: namely, to rise on all occasions to ultimate abstractions. What the Germans have in their spiritual life is called “abstractions” only by those who are unable to experience it; and because they themselves have squeezed out the life, they believe others lack it too. The Germans have not the talent for pressing on to ultimate abstractions. This was shown in their political life, in their most unfortunate political life! If the Germans had had from the beginning the great talent for monarchy which the French have preserved so brilliantly to this day, they would never have become the victims of “Wilhelmism”; they would neither have countenanced this strange caricature of a monarch, nor have needed him. It is true that the French call themselves republicans, but they have among them a secret monarch who firmly holds together the structure of the state, who keeps a terribly tight rein on the people's minds; for in reality the spirit of Louis XIV is everywhere present. Naturally, only a decadent form remains, but it is there. There is no doubt that a secret monarch is there among the French people; for it is really shown in every one of their cultural manifestations. And the talent for abstraction demonstrated in Woodrow Wilson is the ultimate talent for abstraction in the political field. Those fourteen points of the world's schoolmaster, which in every word bear the stamp of the impractical and unachievable, could only originate in a mind wholly formed for the abstract, with no discernment whatever for true realities. There are two things which the cultural history of civilization will doubtless find it difficult to understand. One I have often characterized in the words of Herman Grimm—the Kant-Laplace theory, in which many people still believe. Herman Grimm said so finely in his Goethe: People will some day have difficulty in comprehending that malady now called science, which makes its appearance in the Kant-Laplace theory, according to which all that we have around us today arose through agglomeration, out of a universal world-mist; and this is supposed to continue until the whole thing falls back again into the sun. A putrid bone around which a hungry dog circles is a more appetizing morsel than these fanciful ideas, this fantastic concept of world-evolution. So thinks Herman Grimm. Naturally, there will some day be great difficulty in explaining this Kant-Laplace theory from the standpoint of the scientific insanity of the 19th and 20th centuries! The second thing will be the explanation of the unbelievable fact that there ever could be a large number of people to take seriously the humbug of the fourteen points of Woodrow Wilson—in an age that is socially so serious. If we study the things that stand side by side in the world we find in what a peculiar way the economic life, the political rights life, and the spiritual life are entangled. If we do not wish to perish because of the extreme degeneration which has come into the spiritual life and the rights life, we must turn to the Threefold Social Order, which from independent roots will build an economic life now struggling to emerge, but unable to do so unless a rights life and a spiritual life, developed in freedom, come to meet it. These things have their deep roots in the whole of humanity's evolution and in human social life; and these roots must be sought. People must now be made to realize that way down at the bottom, on the ground I might say, crawls the economic life, managed by Anglo-American habits of thought; and that it will be able to climb up only when it works in harmony with the whole world, with that for which others also are qualified, for which others also are gifted. Otherwise the gaining of world dominion will become a fatality for it. If the world continues in the course it has been taking under the influence of the degenerating spiritual life derived from the Orient, then this spiritual life, although at one end it was the most sublime truth, will at the other rush into the most fearful lies. Nietzsche was impelled to describe how even the Greeks had to guard themselves from the lies of life through their art. And in reality art is the divine child which keeps men from being swallowed up in lies. If this first branch of civilization is pursued only one-sidedly, then this stream empties into lies. In the last five or six years more lies have been told among civilized humanity than in any other period of world history; in public life the truth has scarcely been spoken at all; hardly a word that has passed through the world was true. While this stream empties into lies (see drawing), the middle stream empties into self-seeking; and an economic life like the Anglo-American, which should end in world-dominion—if the effort is not made to bring about its permeation by the independent spiritual life and the independent political life, it will flow into the third of the abysses of human life, into the third of these three. The first abyss is lies, the degeneration of humanity through Ahriman; the second is self-seeking, the degeneration of humanity through Lucifer; the third is, in the physical realm, illness and death; in the cultural realm, the illness and death of culture. The Anglo-American world may gain world dominion; but without the Threefold Social Order it will, through this dominion, pour out cultural death and cultural illness over the whole earth; for these are just as much a gift of the Azuras as lies are a gift of Ahriman, and self-seeking, of Lucifer. So the third, a worthy companion of the other two, is a gift of the Azuric powers! We must get the enthusiasm from these things which will fire us now really to seek ways of enlightening as many people as possible. Today the mission of those with insight is the enlightenment of humanity. We must do as much as possible to oppose to that foolishness which fancies itself to be wisdom, and which thinks it has made such marvellous progress—to oppose to that foolishness what we can gain from the practical aspect of anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science. My dear friends, if I have been able to arouse in you in some measure the feeling that these things must be taken with profound seriousness, then I have attained a part of what I should very much like to have attained through these words. When we meet again in a week or two, we shall speak further of similar things. Today I wished only to call forth in you a feeling that at the present time the really most important work is to enlighten people in the widest circles.
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194. The Mission of the Archangel Michael: The Culture of the Mysteries and the Michael Impulse.
28 Nov 1919, Dornach Tr. Lisa D. Monges Rudolf Steiner |
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Whenever such human beings appeared that have felt this discrepancy between what they must think and what external nature says, they have been ridiculed. Hegel, for instance, is a classical example for this. He has expressed certain thoughts about nature—and not all of Hegel's thoughts are foolish! |
Then the philistines came and said: Well, these are your ideas concerning nature; but just look at this or that process in nature: it does not agree with your ideas. Then Hegel answered: Too bad for nature! Naturally, this seems paradoxical; nevertheless, subjectively this feeling is well founded. |
And, again, that which exists here below and which is so much beloved by modern scientists and was so much beloved by Kant that he said: in regard to nature, science exists only in as far as it contains mathematics—this is the purely Ahrimanic element, which arises from below through our human nature. |
194. The Mission of the Archangel Michael: The Culture of the Mysteries and the Michael Impulse.
28 Nov 1919, Dornach Tr. Lisa D. Monges Rudolf Steiner |
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IN PURSUANCE of the considerations I placed before you in the lectures of last week I should like today to prepare the ground for what I shall develop in detail tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. It will be a matter of calling back to your memory, in a way different from the one heretofore employed, of much that we shall need in order to pursue our present theme. If we try to make clear to ourselves the way in which Earth evolution unfolded we can do so best by considering and arranging the various events in relation to the central point of Earth evolution; for through such an arrangement we arrive at a certain structure in man's own evolution. This central point, this center of gravity is, as you know, the Mystery of Golgotha through which the whole Earth evolution received its meaning, its true inner content. If we go back in the evolution of occidental humanity which received the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha from the orient, we must say: approximately in the fifth century before the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha there begins, out of Greek culture, a kind of preparation for this Mystery of Golgotha. This uniform trend is introduced through the figure of Socrates, finds its continuation in Greek culture in its entirety—also in art the same trend is discernible—it is continued by the mighty and outstanding personality of Plato and receives a more scholarly character, as it were, in Aristotle. You know from various lectures I delivered before you that the Middle Ages, mainly in the time after St. Augustine, were especially bent on using the guidance that could be gained from the Aristotelian mode of thinking in order to comprehend what prepared the Mystery of Golgotha and what followed it. Greek thinking became of such great importance precisely for the Christian evolution of the occident up to the end of the Middle Ages through the fact that it was used for the comprehension of the real nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is well that we should realize what it was that took place in Greece during these last centuries prior to the event of the Mystery of Golgotha. What took place in the thinking, feeling and willing of the Greek was the last echo of a primeval culture of mankind no longer appreciated today. Historical considerations can no longer see these things in their proper light, for our historical considerations do not reach back to those times in which a Mystery culture that extended over the civilized earth of that age permeated all human willing and feeling. We must go back into those millennia into which history does not reach, we must go back with the methods which you find indicated in my book, Occult Science, an Outline, (Anthroposophic Press, New York) in order to see what was the nature of this human primeval culture. It had its origin in the ancient Mysteries into which those human beings who were found to be objectively suited for direct initiation were admitted by great leading personalities. The knowledge which was thus imparted to those initiates in the Mysteries flowed, through them, out to other human beings. One cannot understand ancient culture in its entirety if one does not focus one's attention upon the maternal soil of the Mysteries. If one is willing to do so, this maternal soil of the Mysteries can be clearly discerned in the works of Aeschylos. It can be sensed in Plato's philosophy. But the revelations concerning the Divine which mankind received from the Mysteries have been lost historically. Only in the most primitive fashion are they still contained in that which has become historically demonstrable culture. We can best judge what has happened here if we make clear to ourselves what it is that has remained, in the post-Socratean age of Greek civilization, of the primeval Mystery culture in which Greek civilization was rooted. What has remained is a certain mode of thinking, a certain way of visualizing. As you know, outer history relates how Socrates founded dialectics, how he was the great teacher of thinking, of that thinking which, later on, Aristotle developed in a more scientific way. But this Greek mode of thinking is only the last echo of the Mystery culture, for this culture of the Mysteries was rich in content. Spiritual facts which are the fundamental causes for our cosmic order were adopted into man's entire view of things. These sublime and mighty contents were gradually lost. But the way of thinking developed by the Mystery pupils has remained and has become historical, first, in Greek thinking, then, again, in Medieval thinking, in the thinking of the Christian theologians who acquired this Greek thinking in order to grasp with the thought forms, with the ideas and concepts which were a continuation of Greek thinking, that which has flowed into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. Medieval philosophy, so-called scholasticism, is a confluence of the spiritual truths of the Mystery of Golgotha and Greek thinking. The elaboration, the thought-penetration of the Mystery of Golgotha has been carried out—if I may use the trivial expression—with the tool of Greek thinking, of Greek dialectics. Up to the Mystery of Golgotha, about four and one half centuries elapsed from the time when the content of the Mysteries was lost and the merely formal element, the mere thought element of the ancient Mysteries was retained. We may say, approximately, four and one half centuries. Thus we have to visualize the following: In a pre-historical age, the culture of the Mysteries extends over the civilized earth of that time. In the course of evolution only a distillate of it remains, namely, Greek dialectics, Greek thinking. Then the Mystery of Golgotha takes place. In the occident this is, at the outset, comprehended by means of this Greek dialectics. Anyone who wishes to familiarize himself with the science, let us say, even of the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth century, which still comprises theology, must employ his thinking in a way that is quite different from the present-day natural-scientific mode of thought. Most human beings who today pass an opinion on scholasticism cannot do it justice because they only have a natural-scientific training, and scholasticism requires a training of thought that is different from modern natural-scientific training. Now, my dear friends, today we live at a point of time in which again four and one half centuries have elapsed since this natural-scientific mode of thinking took hold of mankind. In the middle of the fourteenth century, human beings of the Occident begin to think in the way we find developed, already to the degree of brilliancy, in Galileo or in Giordana Bruno. This, then, is carried over into our age. Indeed, my dear friends, it is, seemingly, the same logic as that of the Greeks; yet, in reality, it is a completely different logic. It is a logic which is gradually derived from the nature processes in the way the Greek logic was derived from that which the Mystery pupils beheld in the Mysteries. Let us now try to make clear to ourselves the difference that exists between the four and one half centuries prior to the event of the Mystery of Golgotha in the civilized world of that time, which was almost limited to Greece, and the four and one half centuries in which humanity was trained for natural-scientific thinking. It is easiest for me to describe this to you graphically. Visualize the culture of the Mysteries like a kind of mountain summit of human spiritual culture in very ancient times. This culture of the Mysteries—I shall proceed step by step—then becomes logic in Greece, up to the Mystery of Golgotha. This, then, finds its continuation in the Middle Ages through scholasticism. During four and one half centuries prior to the Mystery of Golgotha we have the last ramification, the echo of the ancient Mystery culture. With the fifteenth century A.D. a new way of thinking begins which we might call thinking in the style of Galileo. The period of time that elapsed between this starting point and our present day is of the same length as that which elapsed between the appearance of the Greek way of thinking and the Mystery of Golgotha. But while the latter period is a final echo, an evening glow, as it were, the former is a prelude, something that has to be evolved, that has to be brought to a certain height. Greek culture stood at an end. We stand at a beginning. We shall only gain a complete understanding of this placing, side by side, of an end and a beginning if we observe the evolution of mankind from a certain spiritual-scientific point of view. I have repeatedly stated that it is not without reason that in the present age the attempt toward self-knowledge of mankind is made, the tools for which are offered by the anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. For the large majority of mankind confronts a significant future possibility. In this connection it is important that we take seriously the fact that the evolving historical humanity is an organism that develops continuously. Just as in the case of the single organism we have puberty, and also later epochal transitions, so likewise, in human history, we have epochal transitions. Today, human beings still meet the doctrine of repeated earth lives with the objection that human beings do not remember their previous earth lives. Anyone who, in a factual manner, conceives of the evolutionary history of mankind as of an organism, as I have just indicated, should not be surprised that human beings do not today, in their ordinary knowledge, remember their former earth lives. For I ask you: what does man remember in ordinary life? That which he first has thought. What he has not thought he cannot remember. Just think how many events of a day remain unobserved by you. You do not remember them because you did not think them in spite of their having taken place in your surroundings. You can only remember what you have thought. Now, in the former centuries and millennia of mankind's evolution, human beings did not attain to any factual clarity about their own nature. To be sure, since the appearance of Greek thinking the “know thyself” exists like a longing, but this “know thyself” will only be fulfilled through real spiritual cognition. Only through the fact that human beings once employ one life in order to comprehend in thought their own self—and humanity has only become ripe for this in our age—is memory prepared for the next earth life. For we must first have thought about that which we are to remember later. Only those who, in earlier ages, through initiation (which need not have been acquired in the Mysteries) could look factually upon their own self are able in the present age to look back upon former earth lives. And there are not so few human beings who are able to do this. Nevertheless, the situation is such that man, also with respect to his purely bodily evolution, undergoes a transformation. These things cannot be observed externally in physiology, but they can be observed spiritual-scientifically. Mankind today does not have the same bodily constitution it had two thousand years ago, and in two thousand years from today it will again have a different constitution. I have talked to you about this subject repeatedly. Human beings live toward a time in the future in which their brains will be constructed in a way that is quite different from the way their brains are constructed today in an external sense. The brain will have the possibility of remembering former earth lives. But those who have not prepared themselves today through reflection upon their own self will sense this faculty—which will be theirs mechanically—merely as an inner nervousness, if I may use the current expression, as an inner deficiency. They will not find what they are lacking, because mankind in the meantime will have become ripe, in regard to its corporeality, to look back upon its previous earth lives, but if it has not prepared this retrospect, it cannot look back; it then will sense this faculty only as a deficiency. Therefore, proper knowledge of the present-day powers of transformation of mankind indicates by its very nature that human beings are brought to self-knowledge through the anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. Now, it is possible, and today I shall only indicate this, it is possible to point out the nature of this special experience which will suggest to human beings to take into account previous earth lives. Today we live in an age in which those shades of feeling which will become more and more prevalent are indicated only in a few human beings; but still, they are indicated in these few human beings. Not much attention is paid to them yet. I shall describe them to you in the way in which they will appear eventually. Human beings will be born into the world and they will say to themselves: by living with other human beings, I am educated, consciously or unconsciously, for a certain way of thinking. Thoughts arise in me. I am born into and educated for a certain way of thinking, of visualizing. But at the same time I look at my outer surroundings: my thinking, my visualizing does not properly fit this outer surrounding world.—this shade of feeling is already present today in individual human beings. They must think in a direction which makes it appear to them as if outer nature said something entirely different, as if outer nature demanded something completely different from them. Whenever such human beings appeared that have felt this discrepancy between what they must think and what external nature says, they have been ridiculed. Hegel, for instance, is a classical example for this. He has expressed certain thoughts about nature—and not all of Hegel's thoughts are foolish!—and has arranged them systematically. Then the philistines came and said: Well, these are your ideas concerning nature; but just look at this or that process in nature: it does not agree with your ideas. Then Hegel answered: Too bad for nature! Naturally, this seems paradoxical; nevertheless, subjectively this feeling is well founded. It is absolutely possible that one surrenders, without prejudice, to one's innate thinking and says: if nature were really to correspond to this thinking, she would have to take on a different form. To be sure, after some time one will also become accustomed to that which nature teaches. Most people who find themselves in such a position do not notice that by having acquired nature observation they really bear two souls within themselves, two truths, as it were. Those who do notice it may suffer greatly from this discrepancy brought into their soul life. What I am describing to you here and which is present in some human beings today although they are not aware of it will become ever more present. Human beings will say to themselves more and more: through what I am by birth, my head really forces me to form a picture about nature. But this does not coincide with nature herself. Then, as I become more familiar with life, I also acquire in the course of time what nature herself teaches. I must find a way out of this. These discordant sensations will arise in our souls when they return again to earth. A source of inner thoughts and sensations will arise in us which will cause us to say: you sense clearly how the world ought to be; it is, however, different. Then, again, we shall familiarize ourselves with this world; we shall learn to know a second kind of law, and we shall have to seek a balance between the two. Let us assume the human being enters physical existence through birth. He brings with him in his thinking and feeling the result of his previous earth life. While he was not united with the life of the earth, this external earth life has actually undergone a change. He senses a discrepancy between his thinking, the effects of which he brings from his previous life, and the things as they have developed in the period during which he was absent from the earth. His thinking does not harmonize with them. And now gradually he adjusts himself to his new life, but he does by no means completely take up into this consciousness what he may learn from his surroundings. He only takes it up as though through a veil. He elaborates it only after death, and then, again, carries it into his next life. Man will constantly live in this duality of his soul life. He will always become aware of the following: You are bringing with you something in regard to which the world into which you have grown through birth is new. But through your physical being you now receive something from this world which does not completely penetrate your soul, which you will have to work over, however, after death. The human being of the present day ought to become thoroughly acquainted with the way of experiencing life. For only by familiarizing himself with such a thing does he become aware of the forces which pulse through our existence and which otherwise remain entirely unnoticed. We are drawn into the web of these forces. But if we do not try to penetrate them with our consciousness, they make us to a certain degree sick in our soul. This falling apart the human being will perceive more and more: the falling apart of that which has stayed with him from the previous life and that which is prepared in the present life for the next one. And since man will sense this duality more and more, he will be in need of an inner mediation, a real inner mediation. And the great question will become ever more burning: Where must we look for this inner mediation? We can only find an answer to this question if we consider the following: I have often told you that we human beings are completely awake only in our thinking in the period between awaking and falling asleep of ordinary life. The life of thought means complete wakefulness. We are not completely awake, even in waking life, in regard to our feelings. Our feelings are at the stage of dream consciousness, even though we are fully awake in our conceptions and thoughts. He who is able to make research in this field knows through direct perception that feelings have no greater vitality than have dreams; only, the conception through which feelings are represented makes it appear differently. But the life of feelings as such arises out of the depths of consciousness like the surging up of dreams. And the actual life of will is asleep in us, even in our waking life; in regard to the will we are asleep. Thus, also in waking life, we carry these three states of consciousness within us. During the day, we walk around with a waking life of thoughts; we deceive ourselves in believing that we are awake also in our will because we have thoughts about that which the will performs. Not the experience of the will itself, but only its mental image is what enters our consciousness. We dream our feelings, we sleep our willing. But if imaginative knowledge raises up what otherwise dreams in the feelings and makes it a matter of complete, clear world cognition, then we become aware of the fact that wisdom is contained not only in our thoughts—let us call it “wisdom” although with many human beings it is “un-wisdom”—but that wisdom is also contained in our feelings, and that it is also contained in our willing. In regard to present-day human existence we can only speak clearly about that which is contained in our thought life. In regard to the world of feelings mankind today entertains thoughts which hardly differ from those it entertains in regard to dream life; and yet, wisdom is also contained in the life of feeling. My dear friends, the person who earnestly applies to his own soul the exercises which are described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (Anthroposophic Press, New York) will come closest to experiencing a certain inner soul-surging which takes its course in a dreamlike manner, as it were. For most human beings it will not contain more regularity than ordinary dreaming; but it is possible, at a comparatively early moment, to bring so much order into this inner experiencing that one becomes aware of the fact that, although this inner experience is not governed by ordinary logic—indeed, it is sometimes governed by a very grotesque logic, and the most varied fragments of thought arrange themselves and occur in a dreamlike fashion—one becomes aware of the fact that something real takes place there. This first inner experience, which is still very primitive, may be recognized by the one who applies, even to some degree, to his own soul life what has been described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. When the human being dives down into this surging of waking dreams, a new reality emerges in contrast to the ordinary reality of external life. Comparatively soon the human being may become aware of this arising of a new reality. And also comparatively soon may he become aware that wisdom is contained in all this, but a wisdom he cannot take hold of, for which he does not feel himself mature enough to become fully conscious of it. It escapes him time and again, and he does not understand it. But he becomes aware, or at least, may become aware of the fact that wisdom does not only flow through the upper stratum of his consciousness which permeates him in ordinary waking day-life, but that below this there lies another stratum of his consciousness which appear illogical to him for the simple reason that he himself calls it that since he cannot yet take hold of its wisdom. We may say: the moment we have completely acquired imaginative cognition, these waking dreams cease to be as grotesque as they appear to ordinary life; they then permeate themselves with a wisdom that points to another content of reality, to a world different from the sense world which we fathom with ordinary wisdom. You see, my dear friends, in ordinary life only the world of feeling surges up into our every-day consciousness out of this substratum of our consciousness. And out of a still deeper stratum, which lies below the one just mentioned, there surges up the world of will which is also permeated by wisdom. We are connected with this wisdom, but we are not at all aware of it in ordinary consciousness. Thus we may say: We human beings are governed by three strata of consciousness. The first is our conceptual consciousness in which we live every day. The second is an imaginative consciousness. And the third is an inspired consciousness which remains very deeply hidden, which works in us, to be sure, but whose nature we do not recognize in ordinary life. If only modern philosophy were less perplexed in its concepts—I am not referring here to people who have nothing to do with philosophy, but philosophers should grasp such matters, yet they refuse to do so—if only modern philosophy were less confused it would have to notice the great difference that exists between truths that are arrived at purely upon the basis of external observation of nature and the truths that are found in the sciences, such as mathematics and geometry, which are employed in the endeavor to understand external nature. We are in a sense justified in saying that in regard to the truths which man acquires through external observation—this has so often been stressed in the history of philosophy that a special reference to it ought to be superfluous for the philosopher—in regard to the truths of external observation we can never speak of actual certainty. Kant and Hume have elaborated this especially clearly by their grotesque assertion that, although it is true that we observe that the sun rises, we cannot, however, assert from this observation that the sun will rise again tomorrow; we only can conclude from the fact that the sun has risen up to now every day that is will also rise tomorrow. This is the way with all truths which we derive from external observation. But it is not so in the case of mathematical truths. If we have once grasped them we know they are valid for all future times. Whoever knows and is able to prove, out of inner reasons, that the square above the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the two other sides of the right-angled triangle knows that it would be impossible to draw a rectangular triangle for which this law does not hold good. These mathematical truths are different from the truths we arrive at through external observations; we know the facts, but with the means of present-day research we are unable to grasp the underlying reason. The reason is to be found in the fact that mathematical truths originate deep down in the inner being of man, that they arise on the third level of consciousness, in the lowest stratum and, without his being aware of it, shoot up into man's upper consciousness, where he then perceives them inwardly. We possess mathematical truths through the fact that we ourselves behave mathematically in the world. We walk, we stand, and so forth; we describe certain lines on the earth. Through this will relationship to the external world we actually receive the inner perception of mathematics. Mathematics arises below in the third consciousness and shoots up from there.
Thus, although we are not conscious of its origin, we have very clear concepts of at least one part of this lowest stratum of consciousness: we are aware of the mathematical and geometrical concepts. The middle stratum is of a dreamlike and confused character. And here, “in the upper story,” where the day-waking conceptual life takes place, we are clear again. What plays up from the third stratum of consciousness is also clear in us. What lies between the two reaches most human beings like a confused waking dreaming. It is very significant that we should make this fact clear to ourselves. For, you see, the Greeks, during the four and one half centuries (number one), which they had retained as the remainder of the Mystery culture. And this is a purely Luciferic element. I have described it to you recently: it is the intellectualistic culture. Clarity rules in our head. It is permeated by wisdom, generally valid wisdom. But this is the Luciferic element in us. And, again, that which exists here below and which is so much beloved by modern scientists and was so much beloved by Kant that he said: in regard to nature, science exists only in as far as it contains mathematics—this is the purely Ahrimanic element, which arises from below through our human nature. It is the Ahrimanic element. It does not suffice, my dear friends, to know of something that it is correct. We know that the things we comprehend intellectually through our head are correct; but this is a gift of the Luciferic element. And we know that mathematics is correct; but this sovereign correctness of mathematics we owe to Ahriman who sits in us. The most uncertain element is in the middle. It consists of seemingly illogical, billowing dreams. I will describe to you another symptom so that you may grasp the full significance of this matter. In reality, the whole mathematical conception of the world as it arose with Galileo and Giordano Bruno stems from this deepest stratum of consciousness. Four and one half centuries have elapsed since we have begun to acquire this world conception, since we have begun to introduce this Ahrimanic element into our human thinking and sensing. Whereas in Greek thinking the last echo of the Mystery culture shone into the clearest brightness of consciousness, there arises in our deepest, darkest strata of consciousness that which only in the future will reach its climax. This is beginning to arise down there.
Our soul life is like a scale beam which has to try to establish equilibrium, on one hand the Luciferic, on the other the Ahrimanic element. The Luciferic element lies in our clear head, the Ahrimanic element below in the wisdom which permeates our will. Between the two, we have to try to establish a state of balance in an element which at first does not seem to be permeated by anything. How does wisdom enter this middle part of man? Man is placed in the world at present in such a way that his head is supported by Lucifer, his metabolic wisdom, his limb-wisdom by Ahriman. That which we have described as the middle state of consciousness is dependent upon our heart organization and the human rhythmical system (read what I saw concerning this fact in my book, Von Seelenraetseln). This sphere of our existence must gradually become just as ordered as the head wisdom became ordered through logic and the Ahrimanic wisdom through mathematics, geometry, through external rational nature observation. What will bring inner logic, inner wisdom, inner power of orientation into this middle part of our human nature? The Christ impulse, that which passed over into the earth culture through the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus you see, we have a spiritual-scientific anatomy which shows us what is culture of the head, what is culture of metabolism, which also shows us the nature and needs of that sphere of our organism which lies between the two. That man permeates himself with the Christ impulse is a requisite part of his nature. Let us for a moment hypothetically assume that the Mystery of Golgotha had not entered Earth evolution: the human being would have his head wisdom. He also would have what has arisen since the fifteenth century A.D. But in regard to his central being he would be desolate and void. He would feel more and more the disagreement between the two inner spheres mentioned above. He would be unable to bring about the state of equilibrium. We can only bring about this state of equilibrium by permeating ourselves more and more with the Christ impulse which calls forth the state of balance between the Luciferic and Ahrimanic element. From this you will see that we may say: In the pre-Christian four and one half centuries there was bestowed upon the human being, like a preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha, the last ramification of the ancient Mystery culture, which has settled like a head-memory of this ancient culture. And in our modern age, the human being passed through four and one half centuries of preparation for a new spirit direction, for a new kind of Mystery culture. But in order that these two might be connected in the historical evolution of mankind, the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place as an objective fact in mankind's evolution. Internally, however, this evolution takes its course in such a way that human beings grow and develop until, beginning with the fifteenth century A.D. they receive the new impulse which I have characterized as an Ahrimanic impulse, and through which they will feel more and more: we need the possibility of building a bridge between the two periods. In this way we may inwardly comprehend the threefold human being. And we shall comprehend him still more accurately if we join to what I have said today something which I have repeatedly mentioned. It was impossible for the ancient Greeks who retained the remnants of ancient Mystery culture to be an atheist—although it happened in a few abnormal cases, but not to the degree it occurs today. Atheism has only arisen in more recent times, at least in its radical form. For the Greek who was really imbued with dialectics felt the Divine holding sway in thinking, even in thinking void of content. If we know this and then look upon the appearance of atheism, upon the complete denial of the Divine, we shall find the reason for this atheism. Only those human beings, my dear friends—naturally, we need the methods of spiritual science in order to recognize this—only those human beings are atheists in whose organism something is organically disturbed. To be sure, this may lie in very delicate structural conditions, but it is a fact that atheism is in reality a disease. This is the first thing we have to hold fast: atheism is a disease. For, if our organism is completely healthy, the harmonious functioning of its various members will bring it about that we ourselves sense our origin from the Divine—ex deo nascimur. The second point, to be sure, is something different. Man may sense the Divine but may have no possibility to sense the Christ. In this respect we do not differentiate carefully enough today. We are satisfied with words, also in other spheres. For, if we test today the actual spiritual content of the view of many human beings of the occident and are not influenced by their words—they say they agree with Christian precepts, they believe in the freedom of the will, and so forth—we shall find that the whole configuration of their thinking contradicts what they thus express. Only through their participation in cultural life have they become accustomed to speak of Christ, of freedom, and so forth. In reality, my dear friends, a great number of human beings living among us are nothing but Turks; for the content of their faith is the same as the fatalistic content of faith of the Mohammedans—although this fatalism is often described as a necessity of nature. Mohammedanism is much more prevalent than we think. If we do not focus our attention upon the words but upon the spirit-soul content, we shall find that many Christians are Turks. They call themselves “Christians” even though they cannot find the transition from the God they sense to the Christ. I only need to draw your attention to the classical example of a modern theologian, Adolf Harnack, who wrote the book, Wesen des Christentums. (Essence of Christianity.) Please, make the following test: scratch out in this book the name of Christ wherever it occurs and replace it by the name of God, this will change nothing in the content of this book. There is no necessity that what this man states should refer to the Christ. What he states refers to the general Father god who lies at the foundation of the world. There is no need at all that he should refer to the Christ with what he states. Wherever he proves something it is externally and internally untrue as he borrows the various communications from the Gospels. In the way he elaborates these communications there can be seen no reason whatsoever for connecting them with the Christ. We must acquire the possibility of conceiving of the Christ in such a way that we do not identify Him with the Father god. Many of the modern evangelical theologians are no longer able to differentiate between the general concept of God and the concept of the Christ. To be unable to find the Christ in life is a different matter from being unable to find the Father God—You know that it is not here a matter of doubting the Divinity of the Christ. It is a matter of clear differentiation, in the sphere of the Divine, between the Father God and the Christ God. This comes to expression in the soul of man. Not to find God the Father is a disease; not to find the Christ is a misfortune. For the human being is so connected with the Christ as to be inwardly dependent upon this connection. He is, however, also dependent upon that which has taken place as a historical event. He must find a connection with the Christ here upon earth, in external life. If he does not find it is a misfortune. Not to find the Father god, to be an atheist, is an illness. Not to find the Son God, the Christ, is a misfortune. And what does it mean if we do not find the Spirit? To be unable to take hold of one's own spirituality in order to find the connection of one's own spirituality with the spirituality of the world signifies mental debility; not to acknowledge the Spirit is a deficiency of mind, a psychic imbecility. Please remember these three deficiencies of the human soul constitution. Then we shall be able to continue tomorrow in the right way. Remember what I have told you today about the three kinds of consciousness; remember that it is a disease if we are an atheist, if we do not find the God out of whom we are born and whom we must find if we possess a completely sound organism; that it is a misfortune if we do not find the Christ; that it is a psychic deficiency if we do not find the Spirit. This is also the way in which the paths that lead man to the Trinity differ from one another. It will become more and more necessary for mankind to enter into these concrete facts of soul life and not to remain stuck in general, nebulous notions. People are specially inclined today toward these nebulous notions. To replace this inclination by the inclination to enter into concrete facts of soul life is an essential task of our age. |