Riddles of the Soul
GA 21
Appendix. Dessoir's Response to Steiner's Essay on Him
Those who have worked their way through this essay might be interested in studying an extended passage of Max Dessoir's writing. The first quotation is the opening paragraph of his preface to the first edition of Beyond the Soul (Vom Jenseits der Seele), 1917. It is indicative of the “scientific” and human level of the whole book:
For a long time now, German science has exercised the most extreme restraint with respect to the field that we are to deal with here. And not without good reason. Serious, life-filling research tends to be conservative in its approach, especially when conducted within a working community—as in universities—whereas the amateur science [Liebhaberwissenschaft] of isolated individuals throws itself light-heartedly into the arms of what is new or striking. The scientific sense for cleanliness avoids contact with that murky circle in which charlatans and falsifiers, half-crazy females, and pretentious scatterbrains do their thing. It seems to us beneath our dignity, repugnant, time-consuming, and useless to bother ourselves at all about the mischief of spiritists and faith-healers, the fantasies of the theosophists, and the silly hair-splitting of modern cabalists.
The following quotation is from the preface of the second edition of Max Dessoir's Beyond the Soul, 1920. It is his response to Rudolf Steiner's essay and provides a classic study of the tactics necessary to someone who is careless about the truth:
...In the chapter on anthroposophy, to be sure, I have made no changes, because Herr Dr. Steiner, in his recently published book Riddles of the Soul, zeros in on my word choice; so everything better remain as it was. With the second part of the Steinerian book the fact of the matter is namely: Steiner escapes from any factual discussion by asserting that what I presented has nothing at all to do with his views, that I read his books incompletely and superficially, and that my version of his work was almost entirely a distortion and falsification. In order to show this, for seventy pages he conducts “a little bit of philology.” Oh, if only it were good philology! But it is all pettifoggery, hair-splitting, and much worse, intended to divert attention from the main points. Mr. Steiner says that he regrets being forced to do what he does, and I am happy to believe that he did not feel so well as he was doing it. I am absolutely unable to express how heavily it weighs upon me to enter into this kind of conflict. For, the only real point at issue, little is gained; Steiner's adherents will probably hear little about my refutation, or if they do, will remain true to their master's watchword; what is more, I am at a disadvantage since I do not have seventy pages at my disposal. Nevertheless I would like to respond, in order to spare the friends of my book any doubts they may have.
Let us begin with the first page that is dealt with in more detail, page 254. Here my assailant nails a word that seems suitable to him for proving the low degree of my scientific exactitude. There I call The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity Steiner's “first” work (Erstling). “The truth is that my literary activity begins with my introductions to Goethe's natural-scientific works.” Sure. It is only that, with a really amazing coolness, Steiner is silent on the fact that I communicate this same “truth” on the third and fourth lines of my book, to the effect, namely, that I am speaking of a “first” work relative to theosophy—as the context in which this word appears also shows clearly.
To the factual statements about that book is added then: “Look and see whether there is anything in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that could be synthesized into such monstrously trivial statements.” I looked it up and found the following:
Steiner: “We have, it is true, torn ourselves away from nature; but we must nevertheless have taken something over with us into our own being... We can find nature outside us only when we first know it within us. What is akin to it in our own inner being will be our guide. Thus our course is sketched out for us.” [end of chapter 2.] and further: There is a reason why we can know thinking “more directly and more intimately than any other process of the world. Just because we bring it forth ourselves, we know the characteristics of its course... What is impossible with respect to nature, namely, creating before knowing, we do accomplish with respect to thinking.” [Chapter 3.]
My (Dessoir's) paraphrase: In Steiner's The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity it is stated “that man has taken over into himself something from nature, and therefore, through knowledge of his own being, can solve the riddle of nature; that, in thinking, a creative activity precedes knowing, whereas we are not involved in the coming about of nature and so are dependent on knowing it subsequently.”
Does that suffice? In the last sentence, left out here,1Why?! Please see page 47f. of this book! Ed. of my quote from my footnote on page 254—which, as an almost verbatim paraphrase, Steiner cannot easily deny—Steiner censures the little word “merely,” even though it only means that his teachings on intuition in that first theosophical work have not yet been fully unfolded. Furthermore, with very evil fallout, he turns against my sentence on page 255: “When our soul powers are enhanced ... the ‘I’ in its perception of colors and sounds, can even exclude the mediation of the body from this experience." The basis for this—not the whole basis, to be sure—was a passage in the book Riddles of Philosophy, whose “nonuse” is held up to me by Steiner. There one can read: “And a true knowledge of our ordinary soul life does present itself as one of our first experiences when this new spiritual life has been attained. In reality, even our ordinary soul life is not produced by the body, but rather runs its course outside the body. When I see a color, when I hear a sound, I do not experience the color or sound as resulting from my body; rather, as a self-conscious ‘I,’ I am connected outside of my body with the color or sound. The task of the body is to function as a kind of mirror... The human body is not a producer of perceptions, nor of any soul life; it is an apparatus for reflecting what takes place in a soul-spiritual way outside of the body.”
On that same page 255 I called the cross a symbol for “annihilated lower drives,” whereas Steiner called it a symbol for the “annihilated lower element of our drives.” Steiner takes this deviation—which, please note, does not occur in a direct quotation or anything—as cause for highly excited reproaches and ends with the statement: “Only with respect to these misrepresentations is Dessoir's critique possible.” That is pretty strong medicine, for—I did not mount any critique at all on this point! Bewildered by this, one must ask oneself: Can blindness really go this far?
On page 257 Steiner discovers another example of that superficial and distorted reportage for which he chastises me in front of the "1 through 4,000" readers of his first edition. He, Steiner, is not explaining the objective fact of a limb's so-called “going to sleep” as resulting from the separation of the etheric body. “Only if one takes my formulations the way they are given can one form an opinion as to the significance of my statements...” We had best keep quiet about the significance of the statement, but how do matters stand relative to the formulation? Here it is: “During our life between birth and death a separation of the etheric body occurs only as an exception and only for a short while. For example, if someone puts pressure on a limb, a part of his etheric body can separate from the physical. We say of a limb where this has occurred that it has ‘gone to sleep.’ And the strange sensation that one feels then results from the separation of the etheric body. (Of course, a materialistic way of picturing things can also deny here the invisible element present in the visible, and state that this all results only from the physical disturbance caused by the pressure.) In a case like this, clairvoyant observation can see how the corresponding part of the etheric body extends out from the physical.” (Occult Science, an Outline) I really do not know how it could be an objective blunder, and possibly even a moral failing, for me to have been so bold as to assert that we others “do not wish, with Steiner, to ‘explain’ the ‘going to sleep’ of a leg through the separation of the etheric body from the physical body.”
After all this, I am almost happy to admit that Steiner, in an objection to page 258 of my book, is correct to some extent. I say there that “through” the spiritual beings assumed by Steiner processes of nutrition and excretion supposedly “developed” on Saturn, whereas I should have expressed myself as Steiner demands, more exactly—and also more in detail, to be sure, than is possible in a brief summary—to the effect that through an “interaction” in the etheric body of that entity “an activity arises that now in its turn leads to the nutritional and excretory processes of the primal planetary form.” I emphatically request the reader to extend my sentence accordingly, and furthermore I beg him most urgently to take note of the fact that he does not after all live in the sixth “Post-Atlantean cultural epoch,” but in the fifth. For my part, however, he can believe that I am not particularly upset about my mistaken number, because for me these Post-Atlantean periods and those nutritional processes in the primal planetary form are just humbug.
I now come to page 260. The focal point is the passage “Especially a person who himself teaches wisdom...” Steiner wishes to show what "Dessoir does by retailoring the relevant passage of my book for his readers." The "relevant" German is pitiful and its coarseness certainly obvious (curious, in what tones anthroposophical refinement lets itself be heard). Nevertheless we must linger here for a moment. Before the sentence that I quoted verbatim, there was, among other things, the following: a person who is joined by adherents, “through genuine self-knowledge, can easily become aware that precisely the fact that he has found adherents gives him the feeling that what he has to say does not originate from him.” Several general thoughts follow, among them the ones I cite, and then Steiner continues: “Socrates experienced something like this... Many efforts have been made to explain this ‘daimon’ of Socrates. But one can explain it only if one wishes to give oneself over to the thought that Socrates was able to feel something like what is described in the above discussion.” These presentations are supposedly reinterpreted in a malicious way in my book. Let us listen to Mr. Steiner: “Where I speak of Socrates, he twists the matter to seem that I am speaking about myself by stating, ‘as Mr. Rudolf Steiner confesses’ and even putting my name in italics. What are we dealing with here? With nothing less, in fact, than an objective untruth. I leave it up to any fair thinker to form a judgment about a critic who employs such means.” Easy does it, Herr Dr. Steiner! Is it merely Socrates who is supposed to have experienced “something like” what is described in the “above” discussion, and is the “above” description a “genuine self-knowledge”? Are you perhaps denying that what is expressed here as a general case and later applied to Socrates stems from your own experience? Or do you yourself have no connection with the “spiritual powers from higher worlds”; does everything you recount to your gullible anthroposophists spring from your "ordinary consciousness"? And one more thing, Herr Dr. Steiner: do you really believe that my italicizing of your name is wicked of me? A man like yourself, who has published several thousand pages in your life, must have noticed that in my book, every time a writer's name appears on a page for the first time it is italicized.
Let that be enough. It fills me with burning shame that I could not simply remain silent about accusations that basically touch upon human integrity. As I wrote the pathological history of idealism in the last chapters of my book, I had no inkling that the historian would again be compelled to act as doctor. My personal experiences were more of a sort to make me tired and sad. I had learned to know occult researchers whose weakness in thinking was regarded as a power of inner enlightenment; I had to experience that valuable people are enticed by the empty will-o-the-wisp of spiritism or of faith-healing. Nevertheless, my aim was to take hold of all this with a cautious hand. The most important point, it seemed to me, would be to show that such strange contemporaries are not breathing in the morning air, but rather are surrounded by the thick fumes of the most ancient past. If this effort succeeds, then perhaps the living forces, hidden even here, of the purer forms of idealism could be won, just as from the phenomenological realm something can be rescued for science. Have I been too optimistic? I believe not. For ultimately:
Every flame is upward striving,
Every spirit kindles others,
Through the smoke of words is climbing
Mankind into azure silence.Berlin, January 1918
M.D.