Riddles of the Soul
GA 21
Introduction
If ever a difficult book was worth every minute of effort it requires, this is it—all of it, not just the parts already published as The Case For Anthroposophy.
Rudolf Steiner's own words, spoken in Dornach on February 4,1923 shortly after the burning of the first Goetheanum, set the tone:
In the first essay of my book Riddles of the Soul, I reiterate that a person bound to contemporary civilization believes that we confront all kinds of insurmountable limits to our ability to know. Such a person feels relief at this. His relief, however, only indicates a desire not to wake up. He wants to remain asleep. But anyone who in a modem sense wants to enter the spiritual world must begin to grapple with inner soul tasks at precisely the spot where the other person sets limits to knowledge. And as he begins to grapple with the ideas arising at this borderland, there opens up for him gradually, in stages, a view of the spiritual world. One must in fact take what anthroposophy offers in the way it is meant.
Take this first essay of Riddles of the Soul. Its content may be imperfectly expressed, but one can certainly discover in it the intention with which it was written! Its purpose is to awaken the realization: If I stop where modern civilization stops, then the world is actually boarded up for me. From natural science I try to go further. There come the barriers. There the world is boarded up for me.
The content of this first essay of Riddles of the Soul is an effort to knock away those boards with spades. When we feel that we are working with spades to knock away the planks that have boarded up the world for centuries, when we consider the words to be spades, then we arrive at the soul-spiritual realm.
Most people have the unconscious feeling that an essay like the first one in Riddles of the Soul is written with a pen from which ink flows. But it is not written with a pen. It is written with soul spades, which want to rip away the planks that board up the world, i.e., which want to clear away the limitations of natural science, but want to do so with inner work of the soul. The reader must participate in this activation of the soul, however, when reading an essay such as this.
In addendum 6 on page 131 of this book, Rudolf Steiner describes for the first time his thirty-year-long work in relating the three soul forces of thinking, feeling, and willing to the three systems of the body: the nervous, rhythmical, and metabolic. In the same section we are shown why he believed the theoretical division into sensory and motor nerves to be so harmful.
The essay on Max Dessoir challenges us to experience the subtlety and exactitude required of a spiritually striving modem person. As Rudolf Steiner states on page 54, “the thorough permeating of concepts with consciousness is necessary if these concepts are to have a relation to the genuine spiritual world.”
W.L.