Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts
GA 26
27. The Apparent Extinction of Spirit-Knowledge in Modern Times
[ 1 ] To gain a true appreciation of Anthroposophy in relation to the development of the Spiritual Soul, we must turn our gaze again and again to the particular mental condition of civilised mankind which began with the blossoming forth of the Natural Sciences and reached its climax in the nineteenth century.
[ 2 ] One should place the character of this age vividly before the soul's eye, comparing it with that of preceding ages. In all ages of the conscious evolution of mankind, Knowledge was regarded as that which brings man to the world of Spirit. To Knowledge, man ascribed whatever relationship to Spirit he possessed. Art and Religion were none other than the living life of Knowledge.
[ 3 ] All this became different when the age of the Spiritual Soul began to dawn. With a very great part of the life of the human soul, Knowledge now concerned itself no more. Henceforth, it sought to investigate that relation to existence which man unfolds when he directs his senses and his intellectual judgement to the world of ‘Nature.’ It no longer wanted to concern itself with that which man unfolds as a relation to the world of Spirit, when he uses—not his outer senses—but his inner power of perception.
[ 4 ] Thus there arose the necessity to connect the spiritual life of man, not with any living present Knowledge, but with Knowledge gained in the past—with Tradition.
[ 5 ] The life of the human soul was rent in twain. On the one hand there stood before man the new science of Nature, striving ever onward and unfolding in the living present. On the other side there was the experience of a relation to the spiritual world, for which the corresponding Knowledge had arisen in the ages past. All understanding of how the Knowledge, corresponding to this side of human experience, had been gained in ages past, was gradually lost. Men possessed the Tradition, but they had lost the way by which the truths of Tradition had been known—discovered. All they could do now was to believe in the Tradition.
[ 6 ] A man who had consciously reflected on the spiritual situation, say about the middle of the nineteenth century, would have been bound to admit: mankind has come to a point where it no longer feels itself capable of evolving any Knowledge, beyond that science which does not concern itself with the Spirit. Whatever can be known about the Spirit, a humanity of earlier ages was able to investigate and discover, but the human soul has lost the faculty for such discovery.
[ 7 ] But men did not place before themselves the full bearing of what was taking place. They were content to say: Knowledge simply does not reach out into the spiritual world. The spiritual world can only be an object of Faith.
[ 8 ] To gain some light upon these facts of modern history, let us look back into the time when the old Grecian wisdom had to retreat before the power of Rome, when Rome had accepted Christianity. When the last Greek Schools of the Philosophers were closed by the Roman Emperor, the last custodians of the ancient Knowledge too departed from the regions in which European spiritual life was henceforth to evolve. They found a haven in the Academy of Gondishapur in Asia, to which they now became attached. This was one of the centres of learning in the East where through the deeds of Alexander the tradition of the ancient Knowledge had been preserved.
[ 9 ] The ancient Knowledge was living on there in the form which Aristotle had been able to give to it. But in the Academy of Gondishapur it was also taken hold of by that Oriental spiritual stream which we may describe as Arabism. Arabism in one aspect of its nature, is a premature unfolding of the Spiritual Soul. Through the soul-life working prematurely in the direction of the Spiritual Soul, the possibility was given in Arabism for a spiritual wave to go forth, extending over Africa to southern and western Europe, and filling certain of the men of Europe with an intellectualism that should not properly have come until a later stage. In the seventh and eighth centuries, southern and western Europe received spiritual impulses which ought to have come only in the age of the Spiritual Soul.
[ 10 ] This spiritual wave was able to awaken the intellectual life in man, but not the deeper founts of experience whereby the soul penetrates into the world of Spirit.
[ 11 ] And now, when in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries man exercised his faculty of Knowledge, he could but reach down to those levels of the soul where he did not yet impinge upon the spiritual world.
[ 12 ] Arabism, entering into the spiritual life of Europe, held back the souls of men, in Knowledge, from the Spirit-world. Prematurely it brought that intellect into activity which was only able to apprehend the outer world of Nature.
[ 13 ] This Arabism proved very powerful indeed. Whosoever was taken hold of by it, was seized by an inward—though for the most part quite unconscious—pride. He felt the power of intellectualism, but not the impotence of intellect by itself to penetrate into Reality. Thus he gave himself up to the externally given Reality of the senses, which places itself before the human being of its own accord. And it did not even occur to him to approach the spiritual Reality.
[ 14 ] The spiritual life of the Middle Ages found itself face to face with this position. It possessed the sublime Traditions about the spiritual world. But the soul-life was intellectually so impregnated by the hidden influence of Arabism, that medieval Knowledge found no access to the sources from which the contents of the great Tradition had after all proceeded.
[ 15 ] Thus from the early Middle Ages onwards, that which men felt instinctively within them as a connection with the Spirit, was battling with Thought in the form that this had assumed under Arabism.
[ 16 ] Man felt the world of Ideas within him; he experienced it as something real. But he could not find the power in his soul to experience, in the Ideas, the Spirit. Thus arose Realism, feeling the reality in the Ideas and yet unable to discover it. In the world of the Ideas, Realism heard the speaking of the Cosmic Word, but it could not understand the speech. [ 17 ] And Nominalism in opposition to it, seeing that the speech could not be understood, denied that there was any speech at all. For Nominalism, the world of Ideas was but a multitude of formulae within the human soul-rooted in no Reality of Spirit.
[ 18 ] What lived and surged in these two currents, worked on into the nineteenth century. Nominalism became the mode of thought of Natural Science, which built up an imposing conceptual system of the outer world of sense, but destroyed the last relics of insight into the nature of the world of Ideas. Realism lived a dead existence. It knew still of the reality of the world of Ideas, but had no living Knowledge with which to reach it.
[ 19 ] But man will reach it when Anthroposophy finds the way from the Ideas to the living experience of Spirit in the Ideas. In Realism truly carried forward, there will arise—side by side with the Nominalism of Natural Science—a path of Knowledge which will prove that the science of the Spiritual, far from being, extinguished in mankind, can enter into human evolution once again, springing forth from newly-opened sources in the soul of man.
(March, 1925)
Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (with regard to the foregoing study: The apparent Extinction of Spirit-Knowledge in Modern Time)
[ 20 ] 177. Looking with the eye of the soul upon the evolution of mankind in the Age of Science, a sorrowful perspective opens up before us to begin with. Splendid grew the knowledge of mankind with respect to all that constitutes the outer world. On the other hand there arose a feeling as though a knowledge of the spiritual world were no longer possible at all.
[ 21 ] 178. It seems as though such knowledge had only been possessed by men of ancient times, and man must now rest content—in all that concerns the spiritual world—simply to receive the old traditions, making these an object of Faith.
[ 22 ] 179. From the resulting uncertainty, arising in the Middle Ages as to man's relation to the spiritual world, Nominalism and Realism proceeded. Nominalism is unbelief in the real Spirit-content of man's Ideas; we have its continuation in the modern scientific view of Nature. Realism is well aware of the reality of the Ideas, yet it can only find its fulfilment in Anthroposophy.
Das scheinbare Erlöschen der Geist-Erkenntnis in der Neuzeit
(Goetheanum, März 1925)
[ 1 ] Wer die Anthroposophie in ihrem Verhältnis zur Entwickelung der Bewußtseinsseele richtig beurteilen will, der muß immer von neuem den Blick auf diejenige Geistesverfassung der Kulturmenschheit lenken, die mit dem Aufblühen der Naturwissenschaften beginnt und die im neunzehnten Jahrhundert ihren Höhepunkt erreicht.
[ 2 ] Man stelle sich doch den Charakter dieses Zeitalters vor das Seelenauge hin und vergleiche ihn mit dem früherer Zeitalter. In aller Zeit der bewußten Menschheitsentwickelung war die Erkenntnis als das angesehen, was den Menschen mit der Geistwelt zusammenbringt. Was man im Verhältnis zum Geiste war, das schrieb man der Erkenntnis zu. In Kunst, in Religion lebte die Erkenntnis.
[ 3 ] Das wurde anders, als die Morgendämmerung des Bewußtseinszeitalters begann. Da fing die Erkenntnis an, sich um einen großen Teil des menschlichen Seelenlebens nicht mehr zu kümmern. Sie wollte erforschen, was der Mensch als Verhältnis zum Dasein entwickelt, wenn er seine Sinne und seinen beurteilenden Verstand nach der «Natur» richtet. Aber sie wollte sich nicht mehr mit dem beschäftigen, was der Mensch als Verhältnis zur Geist-Welt entwickelt, wenn er sein inneres Wahrnehmungsvermögen so gebraucht wie die Sinne.
[ 4 ] So entstand die Notwendigkeit, das geistige Leben des Menschen nicht an das Erkennen der Gegenwart anzuschließen, sondern an Erkenntnisse der Vergangenheit, an Traditionen.
[ 5 ] Entzwei gespalten wurde das menschliche Seelenleben. Vor dem Menschen stand die Natur-Erkenntnis, immer weiter strebend auf der einen Seite, in lebendiger Gegenwart sich entfaltend. Auf der ändern Seite war das Erleben eines Verhältnisses zur geistigen Welt, für das die entsprechende Erkenntnis in älteren Zeiten erflossen war. Für dieses Erleben verlor sich allmählich alles Verständnis, wie die entsprechende Erkenntnis in der Vorzeit zustande gekommen ist. Man hatte die Überlieferung, aber nicht mehr den Weg, auf dem die überlieferten Wahrheiten erkannt worden sind. Man konnte nur an die Überlieferung glauben.
[ 6 ]
Der Mensch, der sich in voller Besonnenheit etwa um die Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts die geistige Situation überlegte, hätte sich sagen müssen: Die Menschheit ist dazu gekommen, sich nur noch für fähig zu halten, eine Erkenntnis zu entfalten, die mit dem Geiste nichts zu tun hat. Was über den Geist gewußt werden kann, hat eine frühere Menschheit erforschen können; die Fähigkeit zu dieser Erforschung ist aber der menschlichen Seele verlorengegangen.[ 7 ] In der ganzen Tragweite stellte man sich nicht vor das Seelenauge, was da eigentlich vorlag. — Man beschränkte sich darauf, zu sagen: Erkenntnis reicht eben nicht bis zur geistigen Welt; diese kann nur Gegenstand des Glaubens sein.
[ 8 ] Man blicke, um etwas Licht für diese Tatsache zu bekommen, in die Zeiten, in denen die griechische Weisheit vor dem christlich gewordenen Römertum zurückweichen mußte. Als die letzten griechischen Philosophenschulen durch den Kaiser Justinian geschlossen wurden, wanderten auch die letzten Bewahrer alten Wissens aus dem Gebiete fort, auf dem nun das europäische Geisteswesen sich entwickelte. Sie fanden Anschluß bei der Akademie von Gondischapur in Asien. Sie war eine der Stätten, wo im Osten durch die Taten Alexanders die Überlieferung von dem alten Wissen sich erhalten hatte. In der Form, die Aristoteles diesem alten Wissen hat geben können, lebte es da.
[ 9 ] Aber es wurde ergriffen von derjenigen orientalischen Strömung, die man als Arabismus bezeichnen kann. Der Arabismus ist nach der einen Seite seines Wesens eine verfrühte Entfaltung der Bewußtseinsseele. Er bot durch das in der Richtung der Bewußtseinsseele zu früh wirkende Seelenleben die Möglichkeit, daß sich in ihm von Asien aus über Afrika, Südeuropa, Westeuropa eine geistige Welle ergoß, die gewisse europäische Menschen mit einem Intellektualismus erfüllte, der erst später kommen durfte; Süd- und Westeuropa bekamen im siebenten, achten Jahrhundert geistige Impulse, die erst im Zeitalter der Bewußtseinsseele hätten kommen dürfen.
[ 10 ] Diese geistige Welle konnte das Intellektuelle im Menschen wecken, nicht aber das tiefere Erleben, durch das die Seele in die Geist-Welt taucht.
[ 11 ] Wenn nun der Mensch im fünfzehnten bis zum neunzehnten Jahrhundert sein Erkenntnisvermögen in Tätigkeit brachte, so konnte er nur bis zu einer Seelentiefe untertauchen, in der er noch nicht auf die geistige Welt stieß.
[ 12 ] Der in das europäische Geistesleben einziehende Arabismus hielt die erkennenden Seelen von der Geist-Welt zurück. Er brachte — verfrüht — den Intellekt zur Wirksamkeit, der nur die äußere Natur fassen konnte.
[ 13 ] Und dieser Arabismus erwies sich als sehr mächtig. Wer von ihm erfaßt wurde, in dem begann ein innerer — zum großen Teile ganz unbewußter — Hochmut die Seele zu ergreifen. Er empfand die Macht des Intellektualismus; aber er empfand nicht das Unvermögen des bloßen Intellektes, in die Wirklichkeit einzudringen. So überließ er sich denn der äußeren sinnenfälligen Wirklichkeit, die sich durch sich selbst vor den Menschen hinstellte; aber er kam gar nicht darauf, an die geistige Wirklichkeit heranzutreten.
[ 14 ] Dieser Lage sah sich das mittelalterliche Geistesleben gegenüber. Es hatte die gewaltigen Überlieferungen von der Geist-Welt; aber sein Seelenleben war durch den — man möchte sagen: im geheimen — wirkenden Arabismus intellektualisch so imprägniert, daß sich der Erkenntnis kein Zugang bot zu den Quellen, aus denen der Inhalt dieser Überlieferung doch zuletzt stammte.
[ 15 ] Es kämpfte nun vom frühen Mittelalter an das, was instinktiv in den Menschen als geistiger Zusammenhang gefühlt wurde, mit der Gestalt, die das Denken durch den Arabismus angenommen hatte.
[ 16 ] Man fühlte die Ideenwelt in sich. Man erlebte sie als etwas Reales. Aber man fand in der Seele nicht die Kraft, in den Ideen den Geist zu erleben. So entstand der Realismus, der die Realität in den Ideen empfand, aber diese Realität nicht finden konnte. Der Realismus hörte in der Ideenwelt das Sprechen des Weltenwortes, er war aber nicht fähig, die Sprache zu verstehen.
[ 17 ] Der Nominalismus, der sich ihm entgegenstellte, leugnete, weil das Sprechen nicht verstanden werden konnte, daß es überhaupt vorhanden sei. Für ihn war die Ideenwelt nur eine Summe von Formeln in der menschlichen Seele ohne eine Wurzelung in einer geistigen Realität.
[ 18 ] Was in diesen Strömungen wogte, es lebte fort bis in das neunzehnte Jahrhundert. Der Nominalismus wurde die Denkungsart der Natur-Erkenntnis. Sie baute ein großartiges System von Anschauungen der sinnenfälligen Welt auf, aber sie vernichtete die Einsicht in das Wesen der Ideenwelt. — Der Realismus lebte ein totes Dasein. Er wußte von der Realität der Ideenwelt; aber er konnte im lebendigen Erkennen nicht zu ihr gelangen.
[ 19 ] Man wird zu ihr gelangen, wenn Anthroposophie den Weg finden wird von den Ideen zu dem Geist-Erleben in den Ideen. In dem wahrhaft fortgebildeten Realismus muß dem naturwissenschaftlichen Nominalismus ein Erkenntnisweg zur Seite treten, der zeigt, daß die Erkenntnis des Geistigen in der Menschheit nicht erloschen ist, sondern in einem neuen Aufstieg aus neu eröffneten menschlichen Seelenquellen in die menschliche Entwickelung wieder eintreten kann.
Goetheanum, März 1925.
Leitsätze Nr. 177 bis 179
(29. März 1925)
(Mit Bezug auf die vorangehende Betrachtung: Das scheinbare Erlöschen der Geist-Erkenntnis in der Neuheit)
[ 20 ] 177. Wer den Seelenblick auf die Entwickelung der Menschheit im naturwissenschaftlichen Zeitalter wirft, dem bietet sich zunächst eine traurige Perspektive. Glänzend wird die Erkenntnis des Menschen in bezug auf alles, was Außenwelt ist. Dagegen tritt eine Art Bewußtsein ein, als ob eine Erkenntnis der Geist-Welt überhaupt nicht mehr möglich sei.
[ 21 ] 178. Es scheint, als ob eine solche Erkenntnis die Menschen nur in alten Zeiten gehabt hätten, und als ob man mit Bezug auf die geistige Welt sich eben damit begnügen müsse, die alten Traditionen aufzunehmen und zu einem Gegenstande des Glaubens zu machen.
[ 22 ] 179. Aus der Unsicherheit, die aus diesem gegenüber dem Verhältnis des Menschen zur geistigen Welt im Mittelalter hervorgeht, entsteht der Unglaube an den Geist-Inhalt der Ideen im Nominalismus, dessen Fortsetzung die moderne Naturanschauung ist, und als Wissen von der Realität der Ideen ein Realismus, der aber erst durch die Anthroposophie seine Erfüllung finden kann.
The apparent extinction of knowledge of the spirit in modern times
(Goetheanum, March 1925)
[ 1 ] Those who wish to judge anthroposophy correctly in its relation to the development of the consciousness soul must always direct their attention anew to that spiritual constitution of cultural humanity which begins with the blossoming of the natural sciences and which reaches its climax in the nineteenth century.
[ 2 ] Put the character of this age before the eye of the soul and compare it with that of earlier ages. In all times of the conscious development of mankind, knowledge was regarded as that which brings man together with the spirit world. What one was in relation to the spirit was ascribed to knowledge. Knowledge lived in art and religion.
[ 3 ] This changed when the dawn of the age of consciousness began. That is when knowledge began to stop caring about a large part of human soul life. It wanted to investigate what man develops as a relationship to existence when he directs his senses and his judgmental intellect towards "nature". But it no longer wanted to concern itself with what man develops as a relationship to the spirit world when he uses his inner perceptive faculty in the same way as the senses.
[ 4 ] So the necessity arose to connect the spiritual life of man not to the knowledge of the present, but to knowledge of the past, to traditions.
[ 5 ] Human spiritual life was split into two. In front of man stood the knowledge of nature, always striving further on the one side, unfolding in the living present. On the other side was the experience of a relationship to the spiritual world, for which the corresponding knowledge had flowed in older times. For this experience, all understanding of how the corresponding knowledge came about in the past was gradually lost. One had the tradition, but no longer the way in which the traditional truths were recognized. One could only believe in the tradition.
[ 6 ] A person who thought about the spiritual situation in full reflection around the middle of the nineteenth century should have said to himself: Humanity has come to consider itself capable only of developing a knowledge that has nothing to do with the spirit. What can be known about the spirit could have been explored by an earlier mankind; but the capacity for this exploration has been lost to the human soul.
[ 7 ] The full extent of what actually existed was not presented to the soul's eye. - One limited oneself to saying: Knowledge does not reach as far as the spiritual world; this can only be the object of faith.
[ 8 ] To shed some light on this fact, look back to the times when Greek wisdom had to retreat before Christianized Romanism. When the last Greek schools of philosophy were closed by the Emperor Justinian, the last keepers of ancient knowledge also migrated away from the area in which the European intellectual system was now developing. They found refuge at the Academy of Gondishapur in Asia. It was one of the places where the tradition of ancient knowledge had been preserved in the East through the deeds of Alexander. It lived there in the form that Aristotle was able to give this ancient knowledge.
[ 9 ] But it was seized by the oriental current that can be described as Arabism. Arabism is, on the one hand, a premature development of the soul of consciousness. Through the soul life working too early in the direction of the consciousness soul, it offered the possibility that a spiritual wave poured out in it from Asia via Africa, Southern Europe and Western Europe, which filled certain European people with an intellectualism that was only allowed to come later; Southern and Western Europe received spiritual impulses in the seventh and eighth centuries that should only have come in the age of the consciousness soul.
[ 10 ] This spiritual wave was able to awaken the intellectual in man, but not the deeper experience through which the soul dives into the spirit world.
[ 11 ] When man in the fifteenth to the nineteenth century brought his cognitive faculty into activity, he could only submerge to a depth of soul in which he had not yet encountered the spiritual world.
[ 12 ] The Arabism that entered European intellectual life kept the cognizing souls back from the spiritual world. It brought - prematurely - the intellect into effect, which could only grasp external nature.
[ 13 ] And this Arabism proved to be very powerful. Whoever was seized by it, an inner - for the most part quite unconscious - arrogance began to take hold of his soul. He felt the power of intellectualism; but he did not feel the inability of the mere intellect to penetrate reality. So he left himself to the external sensuous reality, which presented itself to man through itself; but he did not even think of approaching the spiritual reality.
[ 14 ] This was the situation faced by medieval spiritual life. It had the mighty traditions of the spirit world; but its soul life was so intellectually impregnated by the - one might say: secretly - working Arabism that knowledge had no access to the sources from which the content of this tradition ultimately came.
[ 15 ] From the early Middle Ages onwards, what was instinctively felt in people as a spiritual connection struggled with the form that thought had assumed through Arabism.
[ 16 ] One felt the world of ideas within oneself. One experienced it as something real. But one did not find the strength in the soul to experience the spirit in the ideas. This gave rise to realism, which perceived reality in ideas but was unable to find this reality. Realism heard the speaking of the world word in the world of ideas, but was unable to understand the language.
[ 17 ] The nominalism that opposed it denied that speech existed at all because it could not be understood. For him, the world of ideas was merely a sum of formulas in the human soul without a root in a spiritual reality.
[ 18 ] What surged in these currents lived on into the nineteenth century. Nominalism became the way of thinking about the knowledge of nature. It built up a magnificent system of views of the sensory world, but it destroyed insight into the nature of the world of ideas. - Realism lived a dead existence. It knew of the reality of the world of ideas; but it could not arrive at it in living cognition.
[ 19 ] It will be reached when anthroposophy finds the path from the ideas to the experience of spirit in the ideas. In truly advanced realism, a path of knowledge must stand alongside scientific nominalism that shows that the knowledge of the spiritual in humanity has not been extinguished, but can re-enter human development in a new ascent from newly opened human soul sources.
Goetheanum, March 1925.
Guiding Principles No. 177 to 179
(March 29, 1925)
(With reference to the preceding consideration: The apparent extinction of the knowledge of the spirit in novelty)
[ 20 ] 177 Whoever casts a glance at the development of humanity in the scientific age is initially presented with a sad perspective. Man's knowledge of everything that is external becomes brilliant. On the other hand, a kind of consciousness sets in as if knowledge of the spirit world is no longer possible at all.
[ 21 ] 178. It seems as if people had only had such knowledge in ancient times, and as if, with regard to the spiritual world, one had to be content with taking up the old traditions and making them an object of faith.
[ 22 ] 179. From the uncertainty that arises from this towards the relationship of man to the spiritual world in the Middle Ages, the disbelief in the spiritual content of ideas arises in nominalism, the continuation of which is the modern view of nature, and as knowledge of the reality of ideas a realism, which, however, can only find its fulfillment through anthroposophy.