The Younger Generation
GA 217
7 October 1922, Dornach
Lecture V
Yesterday I tried to characterize the spiritual life at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; to describe it as I experienced it, and as it led to the writing of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (The Philosophy of Freedom).
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was to point to moral intuitions as that within man which, in the evolution of the world, should lead to the founding of the moral life of the future. In other words, through my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, I wanted to show that the time has come, if morality is to continue in the evolution of mankind, to make an appeal to what the individual is able to call forth from his inmost nature. I mentioned that the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was published at a time when it was universally said that at last it had been recognized that moral intuitions were an impossibility and that any discussion about moral intuitions must once and for all be silenced. I therefore considered it essential to establish the reality of moral intuition. Thus there was a distinct cleft between what the age, among many of its most eminent minds considered to be truth, and what I was obliged to maintain as truth out of the principles of human evolution.
But on what is this difference really based? Let us look into the depths of man's life of soul, as we see it today in the West. In earlier times people also spoke of moral intuitions, that is to say, it was said that, as an individual entity, man could call forth from within himself independently of external life the impetus to action. But when the new age dawned, in the first third of the fifteenth century and more powerfully in subsequent centuries, what had been said about moral intuitions was no longer quite true. It was said: Morality cannot be established by the observation of external facts; men were no longer aware of a real light when they looked into their inner being. So they declared that moral intuitions were there, but that actually nothing more was known about them. For centuries statements were such that one might say: The thinking, which had been natural before the fifteenth century, moved onwards automatically and facts formerly justified had ceased to be so.
Traditions, of which I have spoken, persisted through the centuries and contributed towards such statements. Before the fifteenth century, men did not speak in indefinite terms as was current later, and this very indefiniteness was untruthful. When speaking of intuitions, of moral intuitions he spoke of that which rose up in his inner being, of which he had a picture as real as the world of Nature when he opened his eyes in the morning. Outside he saw Nature around him, the plants and the clouds; when he looked into his inner being, there arose the Spiritual, the Moral as it was given to him. The further we go back in evolution the more we find that the rising tip of an inner realm into human experience was a matter of course. These facts, as I have explained them to you, are the outcome of Spiritual Science; they may also be studied historically by considering external symptoms. In the days when speech, from being an inner reality was lapsing into untruthfulness, proof for the existence of God came into evidence.
Had anyone during the first centuries of Christianity spoken about proofs for the existence of God, as Anselm of Canterbury, people would not have known what was meant. In earlier times they would have known still less! For in the second or third century before Christ, to speak of proofs for the existence of God would have been as if someone sitting there in the first row were to stand up and I were to say: “Mr. X stands there,” and someone in the room were to assert “No, that must first be proved!” What man experienced as the divine was a Being of full reality standing before his soul. He was endowed with the faculty of perception for what he called divine; this God appears primitive and incomplete in the eyes of modern man. They could not get beyond the point they were then capable of reaching. But the men of that age had no desire to hear about proofs, for that would have seemed absurd. Man began to “prove” the existence of the divine when he had lost it, when it was no longer perceived by inner, spiritual perception. The introduction of proofs for the existence of God shows, if one looks at the facts impartially, that direct perception of the divine had been lost. But the moral impulses of that time were bound up with what was divine. Moral impulses of that time can no longer be regarded as moral impulses for today. When in the first third of the fifteenth century the faculty of perception of the divine-spiritual in the old sense was exhausted, perception of the moral also faded and all that remained was the traditional dogma of morals which men called “conscience.” But the term was always applied in the vaguest manner.
When, therefore, at the end of the nineteenth century it was said that all talk about moral intuitions must be silenced, it was the final consequence of a historical development. Until then human beings had a feeling, however dim, that such intuitions had once existed. But now they began to put themselves to the test. Intelligence had at least brought them to the point of being able to do this; they discovered that with the methods they were accustomed to use to think scientifically, they were unable to approach moral intuitions.
Let us consider the moral intuitions of olden times. History has become very threadbare in this respect. We have a history of outer events and in the nineteenth century a history of culture was established. But this age has been incapable of producing a history which takes man's inner life of soul into account; there is no knowledge of how the life of soul developed from the earliest times until the first third of the fifteenth century. But if we go back in time and consider what was spoken of as moral intuition, we find that it did not arise as a result of inner effort. For this reason the Old Testament, for instance, is right not to feel what figured then as moral intuition as begotten from within, but as divine commandments, coming to the soul from outside. And the further back we go the more the human being felt what he saw when he beheld the moral, to be a gift to his inner nature from some living divine being outside him. Moral intuitions held good as divine commands—not in a figurative or symbolic sense, but in an absolutely real sense.
There is a good deal of truth in contemporary religious philosophies when they allude to a primal revelation preceding the historical age on earth. External science cannot get much beyond, shall I say, a paleontology of the soul. Just as in the earth we find fossils, indicating an earlier form of life, so in fossilized moral ideas we find forms pointing back to the once living, God-given moral ideas. Thus we can get to the concept of primal revelation and say: This primal revelation faded out. Human beings lost the faculty for being conscious of primal revelation. And this loss reached its culminating point in the first third of the fifteenth century. Human beings perceived nothing when they looked within themselves. They preserved only the tradition of what they had once beheld. Religious communities gradually seized upon this tradition and turned its externalized content, this purely traditional content, into dogmas which people were expected merely to believe, whereas formerly they had living experience of their truth, though as coming from outside man.
This was the very significant situation at the end of the nineteenth century: Certain circles realized that the old intuitions, the God-given intuitions, were no longer there; that if a man wants to prove with his head the ideas of the people of old, moral intuitions simply disappear; science has silenced them. Human beings even when receptive are no longer capable of receiving moral intuitions. To be consistent, one would have had to become a kind of Spengler, and to say:—There are no moral intuitions; man in future will have no alternative but gradually to wither up—perhaps asking one's grandfather: “Have you heard that there were once moral intuitions, moral influences?” And the grandfather would answer: “One would have to search the libraries; at second or third-hand one might still glean some knowledge of moral intuitions but no longer from actual experience.” So there is no alternative but to wither up and become senile, not to have youth any more.—That would have been consistent. But people did not dare, for consistency was not an outstanding quality of the dawning age of the intellect.
Indeed, there were many things that one did not dare! If a judgment were pronounced it was only half given, as in the case of du Bois-Reymond [a leading German physiologist at the turn of the nineteenth century] who delivered a speech about the boundaries to the knowledge of Nature. He said that supernaturalism could not be mentioned in connection with natural science, for supernaturalism was faith and not knowledge. Science stops short at the supernatural—and nothing further was said by him on the subject. If mentioned, people got excited and said that this was no longer science; consistency was not a characteristic of the century then ending.
So, on one hand, there was the alternative of withering. The Spiritual passes over gradually into the life of soul, the life of soul into the physical. As a result, after some decades, souls would only have been able to ferret out antiquated moral impulses. After some years, not only the thirty-year-olds but also the twenty-year-olds would have been going about with bald heads, and the fifteen-year-olds with grey hair! This is a figurative way of speaking, but Spenglerism would have become an impulse carried into practice. That was one alternative.
The other alternative was to become fully conscious of the following: With the loss of the old intuitions we are facing Nothingness. What can be done? In this Nothingness to seek the “All”! Out of this very Nothingness try to find something that is not given, but which we ourselves must strenuously work for. This was no longer possible with passive powers of the past, but only with the strongest powers of cognition of this age: with the cognitional powers of pure thinking. For in acts of pure thinking, this thinking goes straight over into the will. You can observe and think, without exerting your will. You can carry out experiments and think: it does not pass right over into the will. You can do this without much effort. Pure thinking, by which I mean the unfolding of primary, original activity, requires energy. There the lightning-flash of will must strike directly into the thinking itself. But the lightning-flash of will must come from each single individual. Courage was needed to call upon this pure thinking which becomes pure will; it arises as a new faculty—the faculty of drawing out of the human individuality moral impulses which have to be worked for and are no longer given in the form of the old impulses. Intuitions must be called up that are strenuously worked for. Today what man works for in his inner being is called “phantasy.” Thus in this present age which has, apart from this, silenced inner work, moral impulses for the future must be produced out of moral phantasy, moral Imagination; the human being had to be shown the way from merely poetical, artistic phantasy, to a creative moral Imagination.
The old intuitions were always given to groups. There is a mysterious connection between primal revelation and human groups. It was always to groups of human beings in association that the old intuitions were given. The new intuitions must be produced in the sphere of each single, individual human soul; in other words, each single human being must be made the source of his own morality. This must be brought forth through the intuitions out of the Nothingness by which man is confronted.
That was the only possibility left, if as an honest man one was not willing to turn to a kind of Spenglerism—and to work in the Spengler way is far from alive. It was a question of finding a living reality out of the Nothingness which confronted men, and it goes without saying that at first one could only make a beginning. For a creative power in the human being had to be called upon, the creation, as it were, of an inner man within the outer man. In earlier times the outer man received moral impulses from outside. Now the human being has to create an inner man and with this inner man there came, or will come, the new moral intuition. So, out of the times themselves there had to be born a kind of Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—something that must inevitably be in sharp opposition to the times.
Let us complete this survey of the condition of the soul of modern man by considering another aspect. You see, as a preparation for intellectualism in western civilization, the consciousness of man's pre-earthly existence had for a long time been wiped out. Western civilization had lost it in very early times. So that in the West there was not this consciousness: “When I issue from the embryonic state of physical development something unites itself with me, something that descends from the heights of spirit and soul and permeates this physical earth-being.”
Now in this connection the following presents itself quite clearly to our vision. I have already given you a picture to elucidate it. I said that when we look at a corpse we know that it cannot have its form through the forces of nature, but must be the remains of a living human being. It would be foolish to speak about the human form as if it were itself something living. We must go back to what was the living human being. In the same way, looked at impartially, man's intellectual thinking presents itself as dead. People naturally will say: “Prove this for us.” It proves itself in the very beholding and the kind of proofs necessary for the side issues are indeed available. But to demonstrate it I would have to go into a good deal of philosophy and this lies outside the scope of our present task. To anyone looking at it without prejudice, intellectual thinking, out of which our whole modern civilization flows, bears the same relation to living thinking as the corpse to the living human being. Just as the corpse is derived from the living man, so the thinking we have today is derived from the living thinking of an earlier time. But upon sound reflection I must say to myself: “This dead thinking must have originated in a living thinking which was there before birth. The physical organism is the tomb of the living thinking, and the receptacle of dead thinking.”
But the strange fact is that during the first two periods of human life, up to the sixth, seventh or eighth years, to the end of the change of teeth, and then further, up to the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth years—that is to say, to the age of puberty—the human being has a thinking not yet entirely dead; but in process of dying. It was only living thinking in pre-earthly existence. During the first two periods of life it comes to the point of dying, and for modern man, since the first third of the fifteenth century, thinking is quite dead by the time of puberty. It is then the corpse of living thinking. It was not always so in the evolution of mankind. If we go back before the fifteenth century, it becomes evident that thinking still was something living. There existed livingly the kind of thinking which human beings today do not like because they feel as if ants were swarming in their brain. They do not like it when something is really alive within them. They want their head to behave in a quiet and comfortable way.
And the thinking in it, too, should take a peaceful course so that all one needs is to help things along with the laws of logic. But pure thinking—that is just as if an ant-heap were let loose in one's head, and that, people say, is not as it should be. At the beginning of the fifteenth century the human being was still able to endure living thinking. I am not saying this in order to criticize; that would be out-of-place, just as out-of-place as to criticize a cow because she is no longer a calf. It would have been the greatest disaster for humanity if this had not happened. There had to be human beings who could not endure having an ant-heap in their head! For what was dead had to be brought to life again in a different way.
And so it came about after the middle of the fifteenth century that human beings inwardly experienced a dead thinking once puberty was passed. They were filled out with the corpse of thinking. Go really deeply and seriously into this idea and you will understand that it is only since that time that an inorganic natural science could arise, because the human being began to grasp purely inorganic laws. Now for the first time man could grasp what is dead in the way striven for since Galileo and Copernicus. The living had first to die inwardly. When man was still inwardly alive in his thinking, he could not grasp the dead in an external way for the living kind of knowledge imparted itself to what was external. Natural science became increasingly pure science and nothing more, and this continued until, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was well-nigh only mathematics. That was the ideal towards which it strove—it strove to be Phoronomy, a kind of system of pure mechanics.
So, in the modern age, man began more and more to make what is dead into the actual object of knowledge. That was the whole aim. This lasted for some centuries; evolution took this direction. Men of genius like de Lamettrie, for example, anticipated the idea that the human being was really a machine. Yes, the human being who only wants to grasp what is dead avails himself of what is merely a machine within him, of what is dead within him. And this makes the development of natural science easy for modern man. For his thinking is dead by the time of puberty, whereas in earlier days he had God-given intuitions; thinking preserved the forces of growth within itself far beyond puberty. In later times, living thinking was lost; human beings in later life learnt nothing more; they simply repeated mechanically what they had assimilated in earlier youth.
You see, this suited the old, who held the control of culture in their hands: to comprehend a dead world with their dead thinking. On this dead thinking, science can be founded, but with it the young can never be taught and educated. And why? Because up to puberty the young preserve the livingness of thinking, in an unconscious way. And so, in spite of all the thought given today to principles of education, if rigidified objective science which comprehends only what is dead becomes the teacher of the living, the youthful feel it like a thorn in the flesh. This thorn enters their heart and they have to tear out from their heart what is living. Many still overlook what has had to come about out of the depths of human evolution: a definite cleavage between young and old. And this cleavage is due to the fact that the young cannot allow the dead thorn to be thrust into their living heart—the thorn which the head produces out of intellectualism. The young demand the livingness that can only come out of the Spirit as the result of strenuous effort by the individual. We are making a beginning in the sphere of moral intuitions.
A beginning has been made in what I have tried to present in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in regard to this purely spiritual matter—for such are moral intuitions, striven for by the human individuality. Because one has dared to open one's mouth while others were saying that nothing should be said—the powers which ordained that one should be stopped from speaking of moral intuitions will themselves be silenced. And so I called upon the living, the purely Spiritual Science is dead. Science cannot make what is living flow from the mouth. And without this one cannot build on it. One must appeal to an inner livingness, and so begin to seek in the right way. The divine lies precisely in the appeal to the original, moral, spiritual intuitions. But if one has once grasped the spiritual then one can unfold the forces which enable one to grasp the Spiritual in wider spheres of cosmic existence. And that is the straight path from moral intuitions to other spiritual contents.
In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have tried to show that knowledge of the super-sensible worlds is built up gradually out of Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive experience. If we look at outer Nature, we reach first Imagination, then Inspiration, and lastly Intuition. In the moral world it is different. If in that world we reach picture-consciousness, Imaginations as such, then with Imaginations of Nature we have at the same time developed the faculty for moral intuitions. Already at the first stage we acquire what, in the other sphere, is not attained until the third stage. In the moral world, intuition follows immediately upon outer perception. In the world of Nature, however, there are two intermediate stages. So that if, in the moral world one speaks of intuitions not in mere phrases but honestly, truthfully, one simply cannot do otherwise than recognize these intuitions as being purely spiritual. But then one must work on to discover other realms of the Spirit. For qualitatively one has grasped in moral Intuition the same as the evolution of the natural world, filled with content by a book such as Occult Science.
But, my dear friends, we must proceed as follows. On the one hand, we must acknowledge that outer science by its very nature can only comprehend what is material; hence perception of the material is not only materialism but also phenomenalism. On the other, we must work to bring back life into what has been made into dead thinking by natural science.
Thus certain Bible words become alive on a higher level. I do not want to intersperse what I say in a sentimental way with words from the Bible but only to elucidate things for our better mutual understanding.
Why is it that today we no longer have any real philosophies? It is because thinking, as I have described it, has died; when based merely upon dead thinking, philosophies are dead from the very outset. They are not alive. And if like Bergson one seeks in philosophy for something living, nothing comes of it because, although spasmodic efforts are made, one cannot lay hold of the living. To grasp the living means first to attain vision. What we need to reach the living is what after our fifteenth year we can add to what has worked within us before our fifteenth year. This is not disturbed by our intellect. What works within us, a spontaneous, living wisdom—we must learn to carry this over into the dead thinking. Dead thinking must be permeated with forces of growth and with reality. For this reason—not out of sentimentality—I want to refer to the words. from the Bible: “Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
For it is always the Kingdom of Heaven that one is seeking. But if one does not become like the child before puberty, one cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Childlikeness, youthfulness, must be brought into dead thinking. Thereby it becomes alive, it comes once more to intuitions; thus we learn to speak out of the primal wisdom of the child. Out of a science of language such as Fritz Mauthner has written, moral intuitions not only become dumb, but actually all talk about the world is silenced. People ought to stop talking about the world because Mauthner proves that all talk about the world consists only of words and words are incapable of expressing reality!
Such thinking has made its appearance only since the first third of the nineteenth century. But supposing our words and concepts not only meant something but had real existence. Then indeed they would not be transparent; then, like clouded lenses before our eyes, they would conceal what is material; because they are realities they would hide the world from us. Something splendid would be made of man had he concepts and words which signify something in themselves! He would have been held fast by them. But concepts and words must be transparent so that we may reach things through them. It is imperative when the desire is almost universal to silence all talk about reality, that we learn to speak a new language.
In this sense we must return to childhood and learn a new language. The language we learn in the first years of childhood gradually becomes dead, because it is permeated by dead intellectual concepts. We must quicken it to new life. We must find something that strikes into what we are thinking, just as when we learnt to speak an impulse arose in us out of the unconscious. We must find a science that is alive. We should consider it a matter of course that the thinking which reached its apex in the last third of the nineteenth century silences our moral intuitions. We must learn to open our mouth by letting our lips be moved by the Spirit. Then we shall become children again, that is to say, we shall carry childhood on into our later years. And that we must do. If a youth movement wants to have truth and not only phraseology, then such a movement is imbued of necessity with the longing for the human mouth to be opened by the Spirit, a longing for the quickening of human speech by the Spirit which wells forth from the individual. As a first step, individual moral intuitions must be brought out of the human individuality; we shall see how as a result, the true Science of the Spirit, which makes all Anthropology into Anthroposophy, is born.
Fünfter Vortrag
[ 1 ] Gestern habe ich versucht, Ihnen die geistige Situation vom Ende des neunzehnten und Anfange des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts zu charakterisieren und ich habe versucht, sie so zu charakterisieren, wie ich sie selbst unmittelbar erlebt habe, so erlebt habe, daß es mich dazu geführt hat, meine «Philosophie der Freiheit» zu schreiben.
[ 2 ] Diese «Philosophie der Freiheit» war auf dem Impulse aufgebaut, im Menschen moralische Intuitionen als dasjenige anzusprechen, was in der Weltentwickelung weiterführen muß zu einer Grundlegung des sittlichen Lebens der Zukunft. Ich wollte durch meine «Philosophie der Freiheit» zeigen, daß in der Menschheitsentwickelung die Zeit gekommen ist, in welcher die Sittlichkeit auf keine andere Weise fortgeführt werden kann, als daß in bezug auf sittliche Impulse an dasjenige appelliert wird, was der Mensch aus dem Innersten seines Wesens, ganz individuell, als moralische Impulse heraufholen kann. Ich habe Sie darauf hingewiesen, daß die Veröffentlichung dieser «Philosophie der Freiheit» in eine Zeit fiel, in welcher in weitesten Kreisen gesagt wurde, daß man endlich erkannt habe, daß moralische Intuitionen eine Unmöglichkeit seien und daß alles Reden darüber mundtot gemacht werden müsse. Ich mußte es also für notwendig halten, eine Begründung der moralischen Intuition zu geben, von der gerade in den Kreisen, die glaubten, mit dem philosophischen Denken auf dem festen Boden neuerer Wissenschaft zu stehen, gesagt wurde, daß sie mundtot gemacht werden müsse. Es war daher eine scharfe Differenz zwischen dem, was die Zeit in vielen ihrer anerkanntesten Geister für das Richtige hielt und dem, was ich aus den Grundlagen der menschheitlichen Entwickelung heraus für das Richtige halten mußte.
[ 3 ] Worauf beruht aber eigentlich diese Differenz? Um dies zu entdecken, wollen wir uns jetzt einmal in die Tiefen des menschlichen Seelenlebens hineinbegeben, wie es sich in unserer Zeit im Abendlande gestaltet hat. Man hat ja auch früher von moralischen Intuitionen gesprochen, indem man gesagt hat, die Menschen können als Wesensindividualität die Antriebe zum Handeln aus den 'Tiefen ihres Wesens heraufholen, unabhängig vom äußeren Leben. Aber schon seit dem ersten Drittel des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts und immer stärker in den folgenden Jahrhunderten wurde alles das, was man in dieser Weise über die moralischen Intuitionen gesagt hatte, vom rein menschlichen Standpunkte aus immer weniger wahr. Denn die Menschen sagten zwar, Sittlichkeit könne nicht begründet werden durch Beobachtung äußerer Tatsachen; aber sie vernahmen nicht mehr etwas wirklich Lichtvolles, wenn sie in ihr eigenes Innere schauten. So behaupteten sie wohl, moralische Intuitionen seien da, aber sie wußten eigentlich nichts mehr davon. Alle solche Behauptungen waren schon seit Jahrhunderten von der Art, daß in ihnen das Denken, das vor dem fünfzehnten Jahrhundert der Menschheit eigen war, automatisch fortrollte und man noch Tatsachen behauptete, die früher ihre Berechtigung gehabt hatten, jetzt aber aufhörten, berechtigt zu sein.
[ 4 ] Die Traditionen, von denen ich Ihnen in den vorangehenden Tagen gesprochen habe, und die durch Jahrhunderte noch fortdauerten, trugen das ihrige dazu bei, daß solche Behauptungen aufgestellt werden konnten. Vor dem fünfzehnten Jahrhundert sprach der Mensch nicht bloß in unbestimmter Weise von diesen Dingen — dieses unbestimmte Sprechen war schon das Unwahrhaftige —, sondern wenn er von Intuitionen, auch von moralischen Intuitionen sprach, so sprach er wie von etwas, das im Innern des Menschen aufstieg und von dem er ebenso eine Vorstellung hatte, als von einem Realen, Wirklichen, wie er eine Vorstellung von einem Wirklichen hatte, wenn er des Morgens nach dem Schlafe die Augen aufmachte und die Natur ansah. Draußen sah er die Natur, sah die Pflanzen, die Wolken. Wenn er in sein Inneres sah, so hatte er aufsteigend das Geistige, welches das Moralische, so wie er es dazumal als ein Gegebenes hatte, umfaßte. Je weiter wir zurückgehen in der Menschheitsentwickelung, desto mehr finden wir, daß das reale Heraufsteigen eines inneren Daseins im menschlichen Erleben etwas Selbstverständliches ist. Wir können diese Tatsachen, die sich so, wie ich sie Ihnen eben erzählt habe, aus der Geisteswissenschaft ergeben, an gewissen äußeren Symptomen auch geschichtlich studieren. So tritt zum Beispiel in der Zeit, in der das Sprechen von einer inneren Realität immer mehr in Unwahrheiten gerät, der Gottesbeweis auf.
[ 5 ] Hätte man in den ersten Jahrhunderten der christlichen Geistesentwickelung von Gottesbeweisen gesprochen, wie Anselm von Canterbury es tat, so hätten die Menschen nicht gewußt, was damit gemeint ist. In noch früheren Zeiten hätten sie es noch weniger gewußt. Im zweiten, dritten Jahrhundert vor Christi Geburt von Gottesbeweisen zu sprechen, wäre so gewesen, wie wenn eine der hier in der ersten Reihe sitzenden Persönlichkeiten aufstünde und ich würde sagen: «Der Herr N.N. steht da!», und irgend jemand hier würde verlangen: «Nein, das muß erst bewiesen werden!» Das, was der Mensch als Göttliches empfand, war für ihn ein unmittelbares, vor seiner Seele stehendes Wesen. Er war behaftet mit der Wahrnehmungsfähigkeit für dasjenige, was er sein Göttliches nannte. Dieses Göttliche war in jenem geschichtlichen Zeitalter mehr oder weniger primitiv, unvollkommen für die Empfindung des heutigen Menschen. Die Menschen sind in diesem primitiven Zeitalter nicht weiter gekommen, als bis zu dem Punkte, den man da kannte. Aber von Beweisen hätten sie nichts hören wollen, denn das wäre ihnen absurd vorgekommen. Das Göttliche zu beweisen fing man erst in der Zeit an, als man es innerlich verloren hatte, als es nicht mehr da war für die innere geistige Anschauung. Das Aufkommen der Gottesbeweise muß, wenn man unbefangen die tatsächliche Welt in Betracht zieht, als einSymptom dafür angesehen werden, daß das unmittelbare Anschauen des Göttlichen verlorengegangen war. Aber mit diesem Göttlichen waren zugleich die damaligen sittlichen Impulse verbunden. Man kann das, was damals sittliche Impulse waren, heute nicht mehr als solche ansehen. Aber für die damaligen Zeiten war es so. Als daher mit dem ersten Drittel des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts die Anschauungsfähigkeit für das Göttlich-Geistige im alten Sinne versiegt war, da versiegte auch die unmittelbare Anschauung für das Sittliche und es blieb nur das traditionell Dogmatische vom Sittlichen übrig, das die Menschen dann so deuteten, daß sie es «Gewissen» nannten. Aber sie meinten damit immer etwas höchst Unbestimmtes.
[ 6 ] Und als es dann am Ende des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts hieß, alles Reden über moralische Intuitionen müsse mundtot gemacht werden, so war das nur die letzte Konsequenz der historischen Entwickelung. Bis dahin hatten dieMenschen noch so eine dunkle Ahnung: es gab einmal solche Intuitionen. Aber jetzt fingen sie an, sich etwas zu prüfen. Schließlich hat ihnen die Intelligenz wenigstens das gebracht, daß sie sich prüfen konnten, und sie fanden nun, daß sie nach der Methode, nach der sie gewohnt waren, naturwissenschaftlich zu denken, gar nicht zu moralischen Intuitionen kamen.
[ 7 ] Nun müssen wir uns einmal die alten moralischen Intuitionen anschauen. In dieser Beziehung ist unsere Geschichte sehr fadenscheinig geworden. Wir haben eine äußere Geschichte. Im neunzehnten Jahrhundert haben wir uns auch bemüht, eine Kulturgeschichte zu begründen. Eine Geschichte jedoch, die auch das Seelenleben der Menschen berücksichtigt, hat die neuere Zeit nicht hervorbringen können, und so weiß man nicht, wie das Seelische sich von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum ersten Drittel des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts entwickelt hat. Geht man aber in der Zeit zurück und schaut sich an, was als moralische Intuition damals angesprochen worden ist, so findet man, das war nicht etwas, das innerlich von der Menschenseele erarbeitet worden war. Deshalb hat zum Beispiel das Alte Testament das, was als moralische Intuition da figuriert, mit vollem Recht nicht als etwas von der menschlichen Seele Erarbeitetes empfunden, sondern als göttliche Gebote, die von außen in sie eingeflossen waren. Und je mehr man zurückgeht, desto mehr findet man, daß der Mensch das, was er beim Anschauen des Sittlichen schaute, als ein inneres Geschenk eines außer ihm lebenden Göttlichen fühlte. Also als göttliches Gebot, und zwar nicht in übertragenem, nicht in symbolischem Sinn, sondern in ganz eigentlichem Sinne wurden damals die moralischen Intuitionen angesehen.
[ 8 ] Es ist daher schon ein großes Stück Wahrheit daran, wenn heute gewisse religiöse Philosophien auf eine Uroffenbarung hinweisen, die den historischen Erdenzeiten vorangegangen ist. Die äußere Wissenschaft kann da nicht viel weiter kommen, als zu einer Art, ich möchte sagen, seelischer Paläontologie. Gerade so, wie man aus dem Erdreiche die petrifizierten Formen findet, die auf das frühere Leben hinweisen, so kann man in den gleichsam petrifizierten Moralideen die Formen finden, welche auf die einstmals lebendigen, gottgegebenen Moralideen zurückweisen. Man kann daher auf den Begriff einer Uroffenbarung kommen und sagen: Diese Uroffenbarung versiegte. Die Menschen verloren die Fähigkeit, sich dieser Uroffenbarung bewußt zu sein. Und der Kulminationspunkt in diesem Verlieren ist im ersten Drittel des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts gelegen. Die Menschen nahmen nichts mehr wahr, wenn sie nach innen schauten. Sie bewahrten nur noch die Tradition dessen, was sie früher geschaut hatten. Dieser Tradition bemächtigten sich allmählich die äußeren Bekenntnisgesellschaften und formten den äußerlich gewordenen, bloß traditionellen Inhalt zu Dogmen, an die man nur glauben sollte, während man sie früher in lebendiger Weise, aber als außermenschlich erlebt hatte.
[ 9 ] Das war die ganz signifikante Situation am Ende des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, daß man in einzelnen Kreisen zum Bewußtsein gekommen war, daß die alten, gottgegebenen Intuitionen nicht mehr da sind, und daß, wenn man mit seinem Kopfe die Gedanken der Alten beweisen will, man nur sagen kann: Es gibt keine moralischen Intuitionen! Die Wissenschaft hat die moralischen Intuitionen mundtot gemacht, und die Menschen, wenn sie sich nur empfangend verhalten, sind nicht mehr fähig, moralische Intuitionen zu empfangen. Wäre man konsequent gewesen, so hätte man schon damals eine Art Spengler werden und sagen müssen: Moralische Intuitionen gibt es nicht, folglich kann die Menschheit eigentlich nichts tun, als in Zukunft langsam vertrocknen. — Man hätte höchstens seinen Großvater fragen können: Habt Ihr gehört, daß es einmal moralische Intuitionen und Einflüsse gegeben hat? — und dieser hätte einem dann geantwortet: Man müßte die Schränke und Bibliotheken durchsuchen, dann könnte man sich aus zweiter und dritter Hand die Kenntnis von moralischen Intuitionen noch erwerben; aber nicht mehr aus dem Erleben heraus. - Dann hätte man sich sagen müssen: Es bleibt also nichts anderes übrig, als in bezug auf moralische Intuitionen zu vertrocknen, greisenhaft zu werden, keine Jugend mehr zu haben. — Da wäre man konsequent gewesen! Das getraute man sich aber nicht, denn Konsequenz war nicht gerade eine hervorragende Eigenschaft des aufgehenden intellektualistischen Zeitalters.
[ 10 ] Man getraute sich überhaupt alles mögliche nicht. Wenn man irgendein Urteil abgab, so gab man es halb ab, etwa wie Du Bois-Reymond in seiner Rede über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, wo er sagt, der Naturwissenschaft könne man nicht mit Supernaturalismus kommen, denn Supernaturalismus sei Glaube und nicht Wissen; beim Supernaturalismus höre die Wissenschaft auf. Weiter wurde auf dieses Gebiet nicht eingegangen. Wenn einer etwas Weitergehendes darüber sagte, fing man an zu schimpfen und behauptete, daß das nicht mehr Wissenschaft sei. Konsequenz war nicht mehr eine Eigenschaft des ausgehenden Jahrhunderts.
[ 11 ] So hatte man auf der einen Seite die Alternative des Austrocknens. Das Geistige geht allmählich ins Seelische, das Seelische ins Physische und nach Jahrzehnten würde die Seele nur noch antiquarische Impulse über Moralität aufstöbern können, was schließlich dazu führen würde, daß nicht erst die Dreißigjährigen, sondern schon die Zwanzigjährigen mit Glatzköpfen und die Fünfzehnjährigen mit grauen Haaren herumlaufen. Das ist ein bißchen bildlich gesprochen; aber das wäre in der Tat der Spenglerismus als ein praktischer Lebensimpuls. Das war die eine Alternative.
[ 12 ] Die andere war die, daß man sich unmittelbar bewußt wurde: Wir stehen mit dem Verluste der alten Intuitionen dem Nichts gegenüber. — Also was tun? In diesem Nichts das All suchen! Aus diesem Nichts heraus etwas suchen, was einem nicht gegeben wird, was man erarbeiten muß. Und erarbeiten konnte man nicht mehr mit den passiven Kräften, die da waren, sondern nur noch mit den stärksten Erkenntniskräften, die in diesem Zeitalter dem Menschen zur Verfügung standen: mit den Erkenntniskräften des reinen Denkens. Denn beim reinen Denken geht das Denken unmittelbar in den Willen über. Beobachten und denken können Sie, ohne Ihren Willen sehr anzustrengen. Experimentieren und Denken geht nicht in den Willen über; aber reines Denken, also elementare, ursprüngliche Aktivität entfalten, dazu gehört Energie. Da muß der Blitz des Willens unmittelbar in das Denken selber einschlagen. Da muß der Blitz des Willens aber auch aus der ganz singulären menschlichen Individualität herauskommen. Und da mußte man schon einmal den Mut haben, an dieses reine Denken zu appellieren, das auch zum reinen Willen wird. Dieser wird aber zu einer neuen Fähigkeit: der Fähigkeit, aus der unmittelbaren menschlichen Individualität heraus moralische Impulse zu gewinnen, die nun erarbeitet werden müssen, die nicht mehr wie die alten gegeben sind. An Intuitionen mußte appelliert werden, die erarbeitet werden! Und das Zeitalter kennt ja dasjenige, was der Mensch im Innern erarbeitet, unter keinem anderen Namen als unter dem der Phantasie. Also mußten in diesem Zeitalter, das ohnedies diese innere Arbeit mundtot gemacht hat, aus der moralischen Phantasie die künftigen moralischen Impulse geboren werden; das heißt, der Mensch mußte verwiesen werden von der bloß poetischen, künstlerischen Phantasie auf eine produktive moralische Phantasie.
[ 13 ] Alle alten Intuitionen waren immer nur Gruppen gegeben. Es besteht ein geheimnisvoller Zusammenhang zwischen der Uroffenbarung und den Menschengruppen. Die alten Intuitionen waren immer Menschengruppen in ihrem Zusammenhange gegeben. Die neuen Intuitionen, die jetzt erarbeitet werden müssen, müssen auf dem Schauplatz jeder einzelnen, individuellen Menschenseele erarbeitet werden; das heißt, jeder einzelne Mensch muß selbst zum Quell des Sittlichen gemacht werden. Das muß aus dem Nichts, dem man sich gegenübergestellt sieht, durch die Intuitionen selber herausgeholt werden.
[ 14 ] Das allein blieb einem übrig, wenn man nicht damals schon als ehrlicher Mensch in eine Art Spenglerismus übergehen wollte, und diese «Spengler»-Arbeiten sind ja nicht gerade lebendige Arbeiten! Es handelte sich aber darum, aus dem Nichts heraus, dem die Menschen gegenübergestellt zu sein schienen, wieder ein lebensvolles Wirkliches zu finden; daher konnte selbstverständlich zunächst nur an einen Anfang appelliert werden. Denn das, woran appelliert werden mußte, ist ein Schaffendes im Menschen, gewissermaßen das Schaffen eines inneren Menschen innerhalb des äußeren Menschen. Der äußere Mensch hat früher die moralischen Impulse von außen bekommen. Jetzt mußte der Mensch selber einen inneren Menschen schaffen. Mit diesem inneren Menschen bekam er zugleich die neue moralische Intuition, oder besser gesagt, er bekommt sie. So mußte aus der Zeit herausgeboren werden, aber als etwas, das sich zugleich der Zeit im strengsten Sinne entgegenstellen mußte, so etwas wie eine «Philosophie der Freiheit».
[ 15 ] Schließen wir daran eine Betrachtung der Seelenlage des modernen Menschen noch von einer anderen Seite. Sehen Sie, wie — ich möchte sagen - zur Vorbereitung des Intellektualismus in der abendländischen Zivilisation hinweggeschafft wurde schon vor längerer Zeit das Bewußtsein des vorirdischen Menschenwesens, des vorirdischen Daseins des Menschen. Das wurde der abendländischen Zivilisation schon in sehr frühen Zeiten genommen, so daß die abendländischen Menschen sich nicht bewußt waren: indem ich mich aus dem embryonalen Zustande der irdischen Entwickelung heraushebe, vereinigt sich mit mir ein anderes, das aus geistig-seelischen Höhen heruntersteigt und dieses physische Erdenwesen durchdringt.
[ 16 ] Nun ist es bei diesem Durchdringen so, daß sich für die Anschauung ganz konkret das Folgende ergibt. Ich habe Sie schon auf ein Bild hingewiesen, damit durch dasselbe verdeutlicht werde, was ich hier zu sagen habe. Wenn wir einen Leichnam ansehen, sagte ich, so wissen wir, daß er seine Form nicht durch die gewöhnlichen Naturkräfte haben kann, sondern er muß Rest sein des lebendigen Menschen. Es wäre eine Torheit, die Form des menschlichen Leibes als etwas an sich Lebendiges aufzufassen. Man muß auf das zurückgehen, was der lebendige Mensch war. So stellt sich aber auch das intellektualistische Denken, unbefangen betrachtet, als etwas’Totes vor uns hin. Natürlich werden die Menschen sagen: Beweise uns das! Es beweist sich eben in der Anschauung, und solche Beweise, die eigentlich nur für die Nebendinge da sind, lassen sich schon auffinden. Aber um das zu zeigen, müßte ich einige Kapitel Philosophie vortragen, was außerhalb der gegenwärtigen Aufgabe liegt. Aber für den, der unbefangen zusieht, stellt sich das intellektualistische Denken, aus dem unsere ganze heutige Zivilisation fließt, im Verhältnis zum lebendigen Denken so dar, wie sich der Leichnam zum lebendigen Menschen verhält. Wie der Leichnam vom lebendigen Menschen stammt, so stammt das, was ich heute an Denken habe, von einem lebendigen Denken, das ich in einer früheren Zeit hatte. Und bei gesundem Denken muß ich mir sagen: Dieses tote Denken muß abstammen von einem lebendigen, das vor der Geburt da war. Der physische Organismus ist das Grab des lebendigen Denkens, der Behälter des toten Denkens.
[ 17 ] Aber das Eigentümliche ist, daß man in den zwei ersten menschlichen Lebensepochen bis zum sechsten, siebenten, achten Jahre, bis zum Ende des Zahnwechsels, und weiter bis zum dreizehnten, vierzehnten, fünfzehnten Jahre, also bis zur Geschlechtsreife, sozusagen ein noch nicht ganz totes Denken hat. Da ist das Denken im Sterben. Gelebt hat es überhaupt nur im vorirdischen Dasein. In den ersten zwei Lebensepochen kommt es zum Sterben. Ganz tot wird es für den Menschen seit dem ersten Drittel des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts eben mit der Geschlechtsreife. Es ist dann der Leichnam dessen, was eigentlich lebendiges Denken ist. Das war nicht immer so in der Menschheitsentwickelung. Wenn man hinter das fünfzehnte Jahrhundert zurückgeht, so zeigt sich, daß das Denken noch etwas Lebendiges gehabt hat, daß da noch jenes Denken vorhanden war, das die heutigen Menschen nicht leiden können, weil sie es so empfinden, wie wenn ihnen ein Ameisenhaufen im Gehirn herumkribbelte. Sie können es nicht leiden, wenn in ihnen etwas lebt. Sie wollen recht still und bequem in der Haltung ihres Kopfes sein können, und auch das Denken darinnen soll ruhig verlaufen, so daß man nur mit logischen Gesetzen etwas nachzuhelfen braucht. Aber reines Denken, das ist so, wie wenn ein Ameisenhaufen im Kopfe wäre, und das, sagen sie, ist nicht gesund. Im Anfange des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts hat man das lebendige Denken noch vertragen. — Ich sage das nicht, um eine Kritik auszuüben. Es wäre auch unangemessen, ebenso unangemessen, wie wenn man an einer Kuh bemängelte, daß sie kein Kalb mehr ist. Es wäre zum größten Unheil für die Menschheit geworden, wenn es nicht so gekommen wäre. Es mußte Menschen geben, die diesen Ameisenhaufen im Kopfe nicht vertragen können. Denn das Tote mußte auf andere Weise wieder zum Leben gebracht werden.
[ 18 ] Die Sache ist nun so, daß seit der Mitte des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts die Menschen nach der Geschlechtsreife ein im wesentlichen totes Denken innerlich erlebten. Sie waren von dem Leichnam des Denkens ausgefüllt. Wenn Sie ganz ernsthaft diesen Gedanken fassen, dann wird es Ihnen begreiflich sein, daß erst seit jener Zeit eine richtige anorganische Naturwissenschaft entstehen konnte, weil da erst der Mensch anfing, rein anorganische Gesetze begreifen zu können. Erst jetzt konnte man das Tote so begreifen, wie es seit Galilei und Kopernikus angestrebt wird. Das Lebendige mußte erst innerlich sterben. Als man noch innerlich lebendig war im Denken, da konnte man das Tote nicht äußerlich begreifen, denn es teilte sich die lebendige Erkenntnisart dem Äußeren mit. Immer reiner wurde die Naturwissenschaft, und das ging so fort, bis sie am Ende des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts fast nur noch Mathematik war. Das war das Ideal, dem sie zustrebte: Phoronomie sollte sie werden, eine Art reiner Mechanik.
[ 19 ] So wurde in neuerer Zeit immer mehr und mehr das Tote zum eigentlichen Erkenntnisobjekt. Das war jetzt das ganze Streben. Das dauerte natürlich einige Jahrhunderte; aber die Entwickelung verläuft in dieser Linie. Geniale Menschen wie de Lamettrie zum Beispiel, sagten schon wie prophetisch, der Mensch sei eigentlich eine Maschine. Der Mensch, der nur das Tote begreifen will, bedient sich allerdings nur des Maschinenmäßigen, des Toten in sich selber. Das macht dem neueren Menschen die naturwissenschaftliche Entwickelung leicht. Das Denken erstirbt mit der Geschlechtsreife. In früherer Zeit hatte man die gottgegebenen Intuitionen, weil das Denken auch noch weit über die Geschlechtsreife hinaus Wachstumskräfte in sich behielt. Nach der Geschlechtsreife verliert der Mensch heute dieses lebendige Denken, und so lernen die Menschen im späteren Alter nichts mehr, sondern sie beten nur nach, was sie in früher Jugend sich schon angeeignet haben.
[ 20 ] Nun war das den Alten, die die Kultur in der Hand hatten, eigentlich ganz angemessen: mit einem toten Denken eine tote Welt zu umfassen.Man kann damit vorzüglich Wissenschaft begründen. Man kann aber damit niemals die Jugend unterrichten und erziehen. Und warum? Weil die Jugend bis zur Geschlechtsreife die Lebendigkeit des Denkens, wenn auch auf unbewußte Art, behält. Und so stellt sich, trotz allen Nachdenkens über die Erziehungsgrundsätze, wie sie in neuerer Zeit gefaßt worden sind, immer mehr heraus, daß wenn die steif gewordene objektive Wissenschaft, die das Tote umfaßt, zur Erzieherin wird und an das Lebendige, Jugendliche herankommt, diese Jugend das wie ein Hereinstoßen eines Pfahles ins Fleisch fühlt. Man stieß ihr einen Pfahl ins Herz, den Tod, und sie soll sich aus dem Herzen das Lebendige herausreißen,. Es mußte aus dem Inneren der menschlichen Entwickelung heraus zu dem kommen, was heute noch sehr vieleLeute übersehen, was aber wirklich in einschneidender Weise vorhanden ist: zu einer Kluft zwischen dem Alter und der Jugend. Und diese Kluft beruht einfach darauf, daß die Jugend sich ins lebendige Herz nicht den toten Pfahl stoßen lassen kann, den der Kopf aus dem bloßen Intellektualismus herausarbeitet. Die Jugend verlangt nach Lebendigkeit, die nur aus dem Geiste heraus von menschlicher Individualität erarbeitet werden kann. Und wir machen den Anfang, diese an moralischen Intuitionen zu erarbeiten.
[ 21 ] Hat man da einmal angefangen, wie ich es versucht habe in meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit» darzustellen bezüglich dieses reinen Geistigen — denn ein rein Geistiges sind diese moralischen Intuitionen, herausgearbeitet aus der menschlichen Individualität — und hat man sich getraut, während die anderen sagten, es sei mundtot gemacht, den Mund aufzumachen: siehe da, die Mächte, welche sagten, man würde mundtot, wenn man von moralischen Intuitionen redet, werden selber mundtot! So appellierte ich an das lebendige rein Geistige. Die Wissenschaft ist tot. Sie kann den Mund nicht lebendig machen. Aber man kann ohnedies nicht auf sie bauen. Man muß an eine innerliche Lebendigkeit appellieren, und so muß man erst richtig anfangen zu suchen. Das Göttliche liegt gerade im Appell an die ursprünglichen moralischen geistigen Intuitionen. Hat man aber das Geistige erfaßt, dann kann man auch die Kräfte entfalten, um von da ausgehend das Geistige in den weiteren Gebieten des Weltendaseins zu erfassen. Und das ist der gerade Weg von den moralischen Intuitionen zu den anderen geistigen Inhalten.
[ 22 ] In meiner Schrift «Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?» habe ich darzustellen versucht, daß sich aufbaut die Erkenntnis der übersinnlichen Welten aus imaginativem, inspiriertem, intuitivem Erleben, allmählich aufbaut. Schaut man auf die äußere Natur, so kommt man zur Imagination, später zur Inspiration und zuletzt zur Intuition. In der moralischen Welt ist es anders. Kommt man da zur Bildlichkeit, zu Imaginationen überhaupt, so hat man an den Imaginationen zugleich die Fähigkeit entwickelt, moralische Intuitionen zu haben. Schon auf der ersten Stufe erringt man sich das, was dort erst auf der dritten Stufe erlangt wird. In der moralischen Welt folgt auf äußere Wahrnehmung gleich die Intuition. Bei der Natur aber folgen dazwischen noch zwei andere Stufen. So daß man also gar nicht anders kann, wenn man nicht phrasenhaft, sondern in ehrlicher Wahrheit auf moralischem Gebiet von Intuitionen gesprochen hat, als sie als etwas rein Geistiges anzuerkennen. Dann aber muß man fortarbeiten, um auch das andere Geistige zu finden. Denn qualitativ hat man in der moralischen Intuition dasselbe ergriffen, was man dann für die natürliche Entwickelung mit einem Inhalt erfüllt, meinetwillen mit der Geheimwissenschaft.
[ 23 ] Aber in einem solchen Gang besteht eben das, was wir nötig haben, meine lieben Freunde. Wir brauchen auf der einen Seite ein volles Eingeständnis dessen, daß die äußere Wissenschaft notwendigerweise nur das Materielle umfassen kann, daher bei der Anschauung des Materiellen nicht nur Materialismus, sondern auch Phänomenalismus bleiben muß. Aber gearbeitet muß daran werden, daß das, was die Naturwissenschaft zum toten Denken macht, wiederum lebendig wird. Und so wird, ich möchte sagen, auf einer etwas höheren Stufe ein Bibelwort lebendig. Ich will nicht in sentimentaler Weise meine Auseinandersetzungen mit Bibelworten durchspicken, sondern ein solches nur gebrauchen, um manche Dinge zu verdeutlichen. Warum haben wir heute keine wirklichen Philosophien mehr? Weil das Denken, wie ich es charakterisiert habe, eigentlich gestorben ist. Daher sind die Philosophien, wenn sie sich bloß auf das gestorbene Denken stützen, von vornherein tot. Sie leben nicht. Und wenn einer wirklich einmal etwas Lebendiges in der Philosophie sucht, wie Bergson, so wird doch nichts daraus, weil er zwar nach dem Lebendigen zappelt, es aber nicht fassen kann. Das Lebendige erfassen heißt: zuerst zum Schauen zu kommen. Was wir notwendig haben, um zu einem Lebendigen zu kommen, ist das, was wir nach unserem fünfzehnten Jahre hinzutragen können zu dem, was in uns gearbeitet hat vor dem fünfzehnten Jahre. Das wird nicht durch unseren Intellekt gestört. Wir müssen das, was da als selbsttätige, lebendige Weisheit in uns wirkt, hineintragen lernen in das abgestorbene Denken. Es muß mit Wachstumskräften und Realität durchdrungen werden. Deshalb möchte ich an dieses Bibelwort - und nicht aus Sentimentalität - anknüpfen: «So ihr nicht werdet wie dieKindlein, könnt ihr nicht in das Reich Gottes kommen.»
[ 24 ] Es ist schließlich doch immer das Reich Gottes, das man sucht. Aber wenn man nicht wird wie das Kind vor der Geschlechtsreife, kann man nicht in das Reich Gottes kommen. Man muß Kindhaftigkeit, Jugendhaftigkeit hineinbringen in sein totes Denken. Dadurch wird es lebendig, dadurch kommt es auch wieder zu Intuitionen. Man möchte sagen, wir lernen aus der Urweisheit des Kindlichen heraus sprechen. Aus einer solchen Sprachwissenschaft, wie sie zum Beispiel Fritz Mauthner geschrieben hat, werden eigentlich nicht nur die moralischen Intuitionen mundtot gemacht, da wird eigentlich schon das ganze Reden über die Welt mundtot gemacht. Man sollte aufhören, über die Welt zu reden, weil Mauthner nachweist, daß alles Reden über die Welt nur aus Worten besteht und Worte keine Wirklichkeit ausdrücken können.
[ 25 ] Ein solches Denken ist erst heraufgekommen seit dem ersten Drittel des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Nur überlegen sich die Leute nicht, was das wäre, wenn unsere Worte und Begriffe nicht bloß etwas bedeuteten, sondern selbst etwas sein würden. Dann wären sie nämlich nicht durchsichtig, dann würden sie wie getrübte Linsen vor unseren Augen das Sinnliche verdecken, sie würden uns alle Aussicht in die Welt zudecken. Da wäre etwas Schönes aus dem Menschen geworden, wenn er Begriffe und Worte hätte, die für sich selber etwas bedeuten! Dann würde er in ihnen steckenbleiben. Begriffe und Worte müssen durchsichtig sein, damit er durch sie zu den Dingen kommt. Notwendig ist eben, wenn man schon will, daß alles Reden über die Realitäten mundtot gemacht sei, daß wir eine neue Sprache lernen.
[ 26 ] In dieser Form müssen wir wiederum in die Kindheit zurückgehen, indem wir eine neue Sprache lernen. Die Sprache, die wir lernen in den ersten Kinderjahren, sie wird allmählich, weil die toten intellektualistischen Begriffe hineindringen, ganz tot. Wir müssen sie wieder beleben. Wir müssen einen Einschlag finden in dasjenige, was wir denken, wie wir einen Einschlag gehabt haben, aus dem Unbewußten heraus, als wir sprechen lernten. Eine lebendige Wissenschaft müssen wir suchen. Wir müssen es natürlich finden, daß das Denken, das den Höhepunkt erreicht hat im letzten Drittel des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, uns mundtot macht für die moralischen Intuitionen. Wir müssen lernen, den Mund aufzumachen, indem wir die Lippen bewegen lassen vom Geiste. Dann werden wir wieder zu Kindern werden, das heißt, wir werden Kindheit hineintragen in das spätere Alter. Und das müssen wir. Wenn irgendeine Jugendbewegung eine Wahrheit haben und nicht nur Phrase sein will, so ist sie notwendigerweise Sehnsucht nach Öffnen des menschlichen Mundes durch den Geist, Sehnsucht nach Belebung der menschlichen Sprache durch den Geist, der aus der menschlichen Individualität entspringt. Man sieht, wie zuerst aus der menschlichen Individualität herausgeholt werden müssen die individuellen moralischen Intuitionen, und man wird sehen, wie als letzte Konsequenz daraus dasjenige hervorgeht, was eine wirkliche Geisteswissenschaft ist, was alle Anthropologie zu einer Anthroposophie macht.
Fifth lecture
[ 1 ] Yesterday, I attempted to characterize the intellectual situation at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, and I tried to characterize it as I experienced it myself, as it led me to write my “Philosophy of Freedom.”
>[ 2 ] This Philosophy of Freedom was based on the impulse to address moral intuitions in human beings as that which must lead to a foundation for the moral life of the future in the development of the world. Through my Philosophy of Freedom, I wanted to show that in human development the time has come when morality can be continued in no other way than by appealing, in relation to moral impulses, to what human beings can bring forth from the innermost depths of their being, entirely individually, as moral impulses. I have pointed out to you that the publication of this Philosophy of Freedom came at a time when it was widely believed that moral intuitions were impossible and that all talk of them must be silenced. I therefore felt it necessary to provide a justification for moral intuition, which was said to be silenced, especially in those circles that believed they stood on the firm ground of modern science with their philosophical thinking. There was therefore a sharp difference between what the most respected minds of the time considered to be right and what I, based on the foundations of human development, had to consider to be right.
>[ 3 ] But what is the basis for this difference? To discover this, let us now delve into the depths of human soul life as it has developed in our time in the West. In the past, people spoke of moral intuitions, saying that human beings, as individual beings, can draw the impulses for action from the depths of their being, independently of external life. But since the first third of the fifteenth century, and increasingly in the centuries that followed, everything that had been said in this way about moral intuitions became less and less true from a purely human point of view. For although people said that morality could not be justified by observation of external facts, they no longer perceived anything truly illuminating when they looked into their own inner selves. Thus, they claimed that moral intuitions existed, but they actually knew nothing more about them. For centuries, all such claims had been of such a nature that the thinking that had been characteristic of humanity before the fifteenth century automatically continued, and people still asserted facts that had previously been justified but had now ceased to be so.
>[ 4 ] The traditions I have spoken to you about in the preceding days, which continued for centuries, contributed to the fact that such assertions could be made. Before the fifteenth century, people did not merely speak of these things in an indefinite way — this vague way of speaking was already untruthful — but when they spoke of intuitions, including moral intuitions, they spoke of something that arose within man and of which they had just as much an idea as they had of something real and actual, just as they had an idea of something real when they opened their eyes in the morning after sleeping and looked at nature. Outside, he saw nature, he saw the plants, the clouds. When he looked within himself, he had the spiritual rising up, which encompassed the moral, just as he had it at that time as something given. The further back we go in human development, the more we find that the real emergence of an inner existence in human experience is something self-evident. We can study these facts, which arise from spiritual science as I have just described them to you, historically in certain external symptoms. For example, at a time when talk of an inner reality increasingly degenerates into untruths, the proof of God's existence appears.
>[ 5 ] If, in the first centuries of Christian spiritual development, people had spoken of proofs of God's existence, as Anselm of Canterbury did, they would not have known what was meant. In even earlier times, they would have known even less. To speak of proofs of God's existence in the second and third centuries before Christ would have been like one of the personalities sitting here in the front row standing up and me saying, “Mr. N.N. is standing there!” and someone here demanding, “No, that must first be proven!” What man perceived as divine was for him an immediate being standing before his soul. He was endowed with the ability to perceive what he called his divine nature. In that historical age, this divine nature was more or less primitive, imperfect for the sensibility of modern man. In this primitive age, people did not progress beyond the point that was known to them. But they would not have wanted to hear about proofs, for that would have seemed absurd to them. People only began to try to prove the divine when they had lost it inwardly, when it was no longer there for their inner spiritual perception. If one considers the actual world impartially, the emergence of proofs of God's existence must be regarded as a symptom of the loss of the direct perception of the divine. But the moral impulses of that time were connected with this divine. What were moral impulses then can no longer be regarded as such today. But for those times it was so. Therefore, when, in the first third of the fifteenth century, the ability to perceive the divine-spiritual in the old sense dried up, the direct perception of the moral also dried up, and all that remained was the traditional dogma of morality, which people then interpreted as “conscience.” But by this they always meant something highly indefinite.
>[ 6 ] And when, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was said that all talk of moral intuitions must be silenced, this was only the final consequence of historical development. Until then, people still had a vague inkling that such intuitions had once existed. But now they began to examine themselves. Finally, intelligence at least enabled them to examine themselves, and they now found that, according to the method they were accustomed to using to think scientifically, they could not arrive at moral intuitions at all.
>[ 7 ] Now we must take a look at the old moral intuitions. In this respect, our history has become very threadbare. We have an external history. In the nineteenth century, we also endeavored to establish a cultural history. However, the modern era has not been able to produce a history that also takes into account the inner life of human beings, and so we do not know how the soul developed from the earliest times to the first third of the fifteenth century. But if we go back in time and look at what was referred to as moral intuition at that time, we find that it was not something that had been developed internally by the human soul. That is why, for example, the Old Testament quite rightly did not regard what appears there as moral intuition as something developed by the human soul, but as divine commandments that had flowed into it from outside. And the further back one goes, the more one finds that human beings felt what they saw when they looked at morality as an inner gift from a divine being living outside themselves. Thus, moral intuitions were regarded at that time as divine commandments, not in a figurative or symbolic sense, but in a very real sense.
>[ 8 ] There is therefore a great deal of truth in the fact that certain religious philosophies today point to a primordial revelation that preceded the historical periods of the earth. External science cannot go much further than a kind of, I would say, spiritual paleontology. Just as one finds petrified forms in the earth that point to former life, so one can find forms in the quasi-petrified moral ideas that point back to the once living, God-given moral ideas. One can therefore arrive at the concept of a primordial revelation and say: this primordial revelation dried up. Human beings lost the ability to be conscious of this primordial revelation. And the culmination point of this loss lies in the first third of the fifteenth century. People no longer perceived anything when they looked inward. They merely preserved the tradition of what they had seen in the past. This tradition was gradually taken over by external confessional societies, which formed the externalized, merely traditional content into dogmas that were to be believed, whereas in the past they had been experienced in a living way, but as something superhuman.
>[ 9 ] This was the very significant situation at the end of the nineteenth century, when people in certain circles had become aware that the old, God-given intuitions were no longer there, and that if one wanted to prove the thoughts of the ancients with one's head, one could only say: There are no moral intuitions! Science has silenced moral intuitions, and people, if they behave only receptively, are no longer capable of receiving moral intuitions. If one had been consistent, one would have had to become a kind of Spengler back then and say: Moral intuitions do not exist, therefore humanity can do nothing but slowly wither away in the future. — At most, one could have asked one's grandfather: Did you hear that there were once moral intuitions and influences? — and he would have replied: One would have to search through the cupboards and libraries, then one could still acquire knowledge of moral intuitions second-hand or third-hand; but no longer from experience. Then one would have had to say to oneself: So there is nothing left to do but wither away in terms of moral intuitions, become senile, and lose one's youth. That would have been consistent! But no one dared to do that, because consistency was not exactly a outstanding characteristic of the dawning intellectual age.
[ 10 ] People didn't dare to do anything at all. If they made any judgment at all, they made it half-heartedly, like Du Bois-Reymond in his speech on the limits of natural knowledge, where he says that one cannot approach natural science with supernaturalism, because supernaturalism is belief and not knowledge; with supernaturalism, science comes to an end. This area was not explored further. If anyone said anything more about it, people began to rant and claim that it was no longer science. Consistency was no longer a characteristic of the outgoing century.
[ 11 ] So, on the one hand, there was the alternative of drying up. The spiritual gradually becomes psychological, the psychological becomes physical, and after decades, the soul would only be able to dig up antiquated impulses about morality, which would ultimately lead to not only thirty-year-olds, but twenty-year-olds with bald heads and fifteen-year-olds with gray hair walking around. That is a bit figurative, but that would indeed be Spenglerism as a practical impulse for life. That was one alternative.
[ 12 ] Seek the whole in this nothingness! Seek something out of this nothingness that is not given to you, that you have to work for. And you could no longer work with the passive forces that were available, but only with the strongest powers of knowledge available to human beings in this age: with the powers of knowledge of pure thinking. For in pure thinking, thinking passes directly into the will. You can observe and think without exerting your will very much. Experimentation and thinking do not merge with the will; but pure thinking, that is, unfolding elementary, original activity, requires energy. Here the flash of the will must strike directly into thinking itself. But the flash of will must also come from the completely unique human individuality. And one had to have the courage to appeal to this pure thinking, which also becomes pure will. But this becomes a new ability: the ability to gain moral impulses from immediate human individuality, which now have to be worked out and are no longer given as they were in the past. It was necessary to appeal to intuitions that had to be worked out! And this age knows what man works out within himself under no other name than that of imagination. So in this age, which has in any case silenced this inner work, the future moral impulses had to be born out of moral imagination; that is, man had to be directed from mere poetic, artistic imagination to a productive moral imagination.
[ 13 ] All old intuitions were always given only to groups. There is a mysterious connection between the original revelation and groups of people. The old intuitions were always given to groups of people in their context. The new intuitions that must now be developed must be developed in the realm of each individual human soul; that is, each individual human being must be made the source of morality. This must be brought out of the nothingness that one finds oneself facing through the intuitions themselves.
>[ 14 ] That was the only option left if one did not want to slip into a kind of Spenglerism as an honest person at that time, and these “Spengler” works are not exactly lively works! But it was a matter of finding a life-filled reality again out of the nothingness with which human beings seemed to be confronted; therefore, of course, one could initially only appeal to a beginning. For what had to be appealed to is something creative in human beings, in a sense the creation of an inner human being within the outer human being. In the past, the outer human being received moral impulses from outside. Now man had to create an inner man himself. With this inner man, he simultaneously gained a new moral intuition, or rather, he is gaining it. Thus, something had to be born out of time, but as something that at the same time had to oppose time in the strictest sense, something like a “philosophy of freedom.”
[ 15 ] Let us follow this with a consideration of the soul state of modern man from another angle. See how — I would say — in preparation for intellectualism in Western civilization, the consciousness of the pre-earthly human being, of the pre-earthly existence of man, was done away with long ago. This was taken away from Western civilization at a very early stage, so that Western people were not aware that when I lift myself out of the embryonic state of earthly development, something else unites with me, something that descends from spiritual-soul heights and permeates this physical earthly being.
>[ 16 ] Now, with this permeation, the following becomes quite concrete for our perception. I have already referred you to an image that illustrates what I am trying to say here. When we look at a corpse, I said, we know that it cannot have its form through the ordinary forces of nature, but must be the remnant of a living human being. It would be foolish to regard the form of the human body as something alive in itself. We must go back to what the living human being was. But then, when viewed impartially, intellectual thinking also appears before us as something dead. Of course, people will say: Prove it to us! It is proven by observation, and such proofs, which are really only necessary for secondary matters, can already be found. But to show that, I would have to lecture on several chapters of philosophy, which is beyond the scope of the present task. But for the impartial observer, intellectualistic thinking, from which our entire modern civilization flows, stands in relation to living thinking as the corpse stands to the living human being. Just as the corpse comes from the living human being, so what I have today in the way of thinking comes from a living thinking that I had in an earlier time. And with healthy thinking, I have to say to myself: This dead thinking must come from a living thinking that was there before birth. The physical organism is the grave of living thinking, the container of dead thinking.
>[ 17 ] But the peculiar thing is that in the first two stages of human life, up to the sixth, seventh, eighth years, until the end of the change of teeth, and further on until the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth years, that is, until sexual maturity, one has, so to speak, a thinking that is not yet completely dead. Thinking is dying. It has only ever lived in pre-earthly existence. In the first two stages of life, it dies. It becomes completely dead for human beings from the first third of the fifteenth century, precisely with the onset of sexual maturity. It is then the corpse of what is actually living thinking. This was not always the case in human evolution. If we go back beyond the fifteenth century, we see that thinking still had something alive in it, that there was still that kind of thinking that people today cannot tolerate because they feel as if there were ants crawling around in their brains. They cannot tolerate anything living within them. They want to be able to keep their heads still and comfortable, and they want their thinking to proceed quietly, so that they only need to help it along with logical laws. But pure thinking is like having an anthill in your head, and they say that is not healthy. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, people could still tolerate living thinking. I am not saying this to criticize. It would be inappropriate, just as it would be inappropriate to criticize a cow for no longer having a calf. It would have been a great misfortune for humanity if this had not happened. There had to be people who could not tolerate this anthill in their heads. For the dead had to be brought back to life in another way.
>[ 18 ] The fact is that since the middle of the fifteenth century, people have experienced an essentially dead thinking within themselves after reaching sexual maturity. They were filled with the corpse of thinking. If you take this thought seriously, you will understand that it was only since that time that a true inorganic natural science could arise, because only then did man begin to be able to comprehend purely inorganic laws. Only now could the dead be understood as it had been sought since Galileo and Copernicus. The living had to die inwardly first. When people were still alive internally in their thinking, they could not understand the dead externally, because the living mode of cognition communicated itself to the external world. Natural science became purer and purer, and this continued until, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was almost entirely mathematics. That was the ideal it was striving for: it was to become phoronomy, a kind of pure mechanics.
>[ 19 ] Thus, in recent times, the dead have increasingly become the actual object of knowledge. That was now the whole pursuit. Of course, this took several centuries, but the development is following this line. Genius people like de Lamettrie, for example, already said prophetically that man is actually a machine. Man, who only wants to understand the dead, makes use only of the mechanical, the dead within himself. This makes scientific development easy for modern man. Thinking dies with sexual maturity. In earlier times, people had God-given intuition because thinking retained its growth forces far beyond sexual maturity. After sexual maturity, people today lose this living thinking, and so they learn nothing more in later life, but merely repeat what they acquired in their early youth.
[ 20 ] Now, this was actually quite appropriate for the elders who held culture in their hands: to embrace a dead world with dead thinking. It is an excellent way to establish science. But it can never be used to teach and educate young people. And why? Because until puberty, young people retain the liveliness of thinking, even if only unconsciously. And so, despite all the reflection on the principles of education as they have been formulated in recent times, it is becoming increasingly clear that when rigid, objective science, which encompasses the dead, becomes the educator and approaches the living, the young, they feel it as if a stake were being driven into their flesh. A stake has been driven into its heart, death, and it is supposed to tear the living out of its heart. From within human development, there had to come what many people still overlook today, but which is really present in a radical way: a gulf between old age and youth. And this gap is simply based on the fact that youth cannot allow the dead stake that the head works out from mere intellectualism to be thrust into its living heart. Youth demands vitality, which can only be developed from the spirit of human individuality. And we are making a start on developing this in moral intuitions.
[ 21 ] Once one has begun, as I have attempted to show in my Philosophy of Freedom with regard to this pure spirit—for these moral intuitions, worked out from human individuality, are a pure spirit—and once one has dared to open one's mouth while others said it was silenced, lo and behold, the powers that said you would be silenced if you spoke of moral intuitions are themselves silenced! Thus I appealed to the living, purely spiritual. Science is dead. It cannot bring the mouth to life. But one cannot rely on it anyway. One must appeal to an inner vitality, and only then can one really begin to search. The divine lies precisely in the appeal to the original moral spiritual intuitions. But once one has grasped the spiritual, one can also unfold the forces to grasp the spiritual in the further realms of world existence. And that is the direct path from moral intuitions to other spiritual contents.
[ 22 ] In my book How to Know Higher Worlds, I have tried to show that knowledge of the supersensible worlds is built up gradually from imaginative, inspired, and intuitive experience. If we look at external nature, we come to imagination, then to inspiration, and finally to intuition. In the moral world, it is different. If one arrives at imagery, at imagination in general, one has at the same time developed the ability to have moral intuitions. Already at the first stage, one achieves what is only attained at the third stage. In the moral world, intuition immediately follows external perception. In nature, however, two other stages follow in between. So that if one has spoken of intuitions in the moral realm not in phrases but in honest truth, one cannot help but recognize them as something purely spiritual. But then one must continue working in order to find the other spiritual element as well. For qualitatively, one has grasped in moral intuition the same thing that one then fills with content for natural development, in my case with the secret science.
>[ 23 ] But this is precisely what we need, my dear friends. On the one hand, we need to fully acknowledge that external science can necessarily only encompass the material, and therefore, when viewing the material, it must remain not only materialistic but also phenomenalistic. But we must work to ensure that what makes natural science dead thinking becomes alive again. And so, I would say, at a somewhat higher level, a biblical saying comes to life. I do not want to pepper my discussion with biblical sayings in a sentimental way, but only use them to clarify certain points. Why do we no longer have any real philosophies today? Because thinking, as I have characterized it, has actually died. Therefore, philosophies that are based solely on dead thinking are dead from the outset. They do not live. And if someone really seeks something alive in philosophy, like Bergson, nothing comes of it because, although he struggles for the living, he cannot grasp it. To grasp what is alive means first to see. What we need in order to arrive at what is alive is what we can add after the age of fifteen to what has been working within us before the age of fifteen. This is not disturbed by our intellect. We must learn to carry what works within us as self-active, living wisdom into dead thinking. It must be permeated with forces of growth and reality. That is why I would like to refer to this Bible verse—and not out of sentimentality: “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.”
>[ 24 ] Ultimately, it is always the kingdom of God that we seek. But if we do not become like children before puberty, we cannot enter the kingdom of God. We must bring childlikeness and youthfulness into our dead thinking. This brings it to life and also brings back intuition. One might say that we learn to speak from the primordial wisdom of childhood. A linguistics such as that written by Fritz Mauthner, for example, not only silences moral intuition, it actually silences all talk about the world. One should stop talking about the world because Mauthner proves that all talk about the world consists only of words, and words cannot express reality. Such thinking has only emerged since the first third of the nineteenth century. But people do not consider what it would be like if our words and concepts did not merely mean something, but were themselves something. Then they would not be transparent; they would obscure the senses like clouded lenses before our eyes, covering our entire view of the world. Something beautiful would have become of human beings if they had concepts and words that meant something in themselves! Then they would get stuck in them. Concepts and words must be transparent so that we can get to the things through them. If we want all talk about realities to be silenced, it is necessary that we learn a new language.
>[ 26 ] In this way, we must return to childhood by learning a new language. The language we learn in our early childhood gradually becomes completely dead because dead intellectual concepts penetrate it. We must revive it. We must find an impact in what we think, just as we had an impact from the unconscious when we learned to speak. We must seek a living science. We must realize that the thinking that reached its peak in the last third of the nineteenth century has silenced us when it comes to moral intuitions. We must learn to open our mouths by letting our lips be moved by the spirit. Then we will become children again, that is, we will carry childhood into later life. And we must do this. If any youth movement wants to have truth and not just be empty words, it must be a longing for the human mouth to be opened by the spirit, a longing for human language to be enlivened by the spirit that springs from human individuality. One sees how individual moral intuitions must first be drawn out of human individuality, and one will see how, as the ultimate consequence of this, what emerges is what is a real spiritual science, what makes all anthropology an anthroposophy.