Anthroposophy has Something to Add to Modern Sciences
GA 73
5 November 1917, Zurich
I. Anthroposophy and Psychology
Anthroposophy and psychology. Spiritual scientific findings concerning the human soul
Reference to ‘anthroposophy’ in this lecture is not to something coming from a sectarian movement or spiritual stream, but to something much more general and human—a spiritual stream that arises with an inner necessity at this time from the scientific approach that has evolved into its present form in recent centuries.
Please do not, however, think of this approach, which we refer to as ‘anthroposophy’, as the kind of logical consequence arising from consistent judgements based on scientific postulates. No, the idea is that this anthroposophy must develop in its own right, as a living structure, living experience, in an age when we have to think scientifically about many issues in life and in the world. It is more like a live offspring—if I may put it like this—of the scientific way of thinking than just a logical conclusion drawn from it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will have to try and make these four lectures on widely different fields in modern science into a whole. This means that individual lectures cannot be complete in themselves, and I would ask you to keep this very much in mind.
Beginning the series of lectures with a look at the relationship between anthroposophy and psychology seems natural and indeed obvious since in aiming to be orientated towards the world of the spirit, and seeking to obtain its findings from that world, we will have to be concerned in anthroposophy with the most inward affairs of the human being, that is, with human psychology. That is one side of it. On the other hand we have to consider that in the course of recent centuries, especially the 19th century, the science called psychology has taken on a very different character from that which it had just a short time before. It is exactly because scientific thinking has been applied in many spheres of life that psychology has become more of an enigma perhaps, has been found to be more full of riddles relating to life than any other field of scientific endeavour in recent times. It was only natural that in the light of the great, tremendous results achieved in scientific research, views and approaches based on scientific methods took hold, as it were, of everything that comes within the horizons of human knowledge. The scientific approach has therefore also extended its power, we might say, to the field of psychology in more recent times.
Let me immediately deal with a prejudice or misunderstanding that arises only too easily when it comes to anthroposophical research. People may say that those who do research with an anthroposophical orientation are not prepared to take account of the scientific advances made in recent times. The opposite is the case. The other lectures I will be giving here will show that modern science is in fact only given its proper due by providing it with the firm foundation which anthroposophy or the science of the spirit is able to provide for it. To some degree this will be evident as soon as we consider the relationship between anthroposophy and human psychology. Modern science is justified in making it an ideal to keep all natural processes that have been studied, the content of natural developments and facts of nature, separate from anything that has soul quality, never allowing anything that comes from subjective, psychological experience and therefore arises as inner experience, to be brought into scientific observations and experiments. That is the only way in which anyone using this modern scientific approach can hope that human beings will not cloud the objective view taken of facts in nature with anything they bring to nature out of inner inclinations or experiences.
It was only natural that such an ideal would give psychology a particular character, for in earlier times the soul did not relate to the outside world in the way it now must do in the scientific study of nature. Anyone who is seeking to get a feel for the scientific thinking and the views of the world held in earlier centuries, will find that in those earlier times people did not neatly keep the facts of nature which they sought to explain and understand apart from the soul’s inner response to these facts and to the symbolic, shall we say, or other ideas developed in relation to them. In a way, the experiences people had in relation to nature were mixed up with the objective facts of nature. However, as science itself was not yet free then from some of the things that came from the soul, people did not find themselves as puzzled as they do today when it comes to psychology. If you found soul qualities revealed in nature herself, and gained soul qualities as well as purely material facts from nature, you were also much more likely than now seems possible—when the aim is to consider nature in such a way that anything ‘subjective’, any soul quality, is ignored—to think that you might learn something about how soul quality was created in the nonphysical world so as to be in harmony with what you would observe in nature and world. If you have a scientific approach where the greatest ideal is thought to be that anything to do with the soul is excluded, so that concepts, ideas and methods must be developed that are based on exclusion of the soul element, how can you use such methods to study and gain any kind of insight in the sphere of the soul? How can anything learnt in modern science, where the soul element is excluded, be applied to a study of the inner life?
Nevertheless, we shall see in the third lecture how physiology and another science which has a great future and is currently in the process of having chairs established at universities—experimental psychology—will gain sound foundations if it proves possible to develop a psychology that is a science of the soul in spite of the modern scientific ideal. The approach which is to be presented here does not in any way go against everything that has come to the inner life out of modern science when this served as an aid. Quite the contrary! The work which has been done in psychology laboratories more recently will truly bear fruit and gain real significance when seen from a particular anthroposophical point of view.1See Steiner R. Von Seelenrätseln, IV. Skizzenhafte Erweiterungen des Inhalts dieser Schrift, 8. Ein oft erhobener Einwand gegen die Anthroposophie. GA 21.
Now we may ask ourselves: What do human beings really want when they approach the natural world using the methods applied, and rightly so, in modern science? What do people want to discover in that world? We could talk about this for hours; let me give a brief idea of how the question might perhaps be answered.
Human beings develop certain needs as their inner life evolves, for the simple reason that they have inner experiences in the psyche, whilst the realities of nature proceed outside them. Modern science is developing out of those needs. People want to be able to cope with the questions that arise inwardly, with the riddles and doubts that may arise in the psyche when they consider the world of nature. And they want to have an image of nature where justice is also done to their inner experiences. It is really the observer who establishes the directives, the trends in modern science. We only have to recall the words if Du Bois- Reymond2Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896). Swiss-born professor of physiology in Berlin. Lecture entitled ‘Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens’ given in Leipzig on 14 August 1872. in his famous talk on the limits of science: ‘Insight is gained into nature when our need for causality is met—something subjective, therefore, something based in human experience.’ The postulate is, however, that such a subjective, personal inner experience, with its doubts and questions, comes up against the outer processes in the world of nature as though against a sphinx. Those natural events do not at first sight match the image we have of them in our souls. We can alter the first image which has arisen at first sight, doing so with the processes that occur in the soul, and exactly in this way arrive at modern science.
Can we do the same with regard to the inner life? This is a question we do not always answer with sufficient clarity and accuracy. We cannot relate to the psyche in the same way as we do to the natural world, posing our questions in our usual state of mind. The life of the psyche happens inside us. We can merely experience it, live through it. We will not gain anything, however, by categorizing whatever we have come to know there the way we do when we categorize the natural world according to laws so as to arrive at a science of nature. This inner life can be known as it occurs in ordinary everyday life; but in thus living in it there is really no reason for us to treat it in the same way as we do the facts of the natural world. These take us into the unknown, as it were, at every step, but when it comes to the inner life we are right inside it. We have to train ourselves to consider specific questions in natural science if with regard to the inner life we want to use a method similar to the one generally used in natural science.
Now we might say that with the natural world, the observer is inevitably someone on the outside, but when it comes to the inner life, there is no outside observer. This makes some people doubt that it will be possible to observe the inner life. They are unable to see how such a split might happen, so that one has the evolution of the inner life and at the same time is also an observer.
But it is exactly this strange paradox which has to come about if we want to develop a psychology that will rank equal with natural science, or, I would say, is in the spirit of the demands made in modern science. The question concerning the observer of the inner life must be taken seriously and considered in its full significance and depth. Nothing that lives in us can directly observe this inner life. Where scientists studying the natural world who want to be true to the ideal of modern science remove everything that has soul quality from their way of thinking, making the psyche stand aside completely, as it were, psychologists must go exactly the opposite way today. They must not take away anything that is inner experience but must bring something into those inner experiences; they must penetrate those inner experiences with something that does not exist in our ordinary conscious minds. Psychologists must go exactly in the opposite direction! Modern science has grown great by going its way, and because of this the psychologist must go the opposite way. The big and significant question is, how can this way be found?
Some of the things I am going to say now will sound strange. But perhaps you need to consider that anything new in the course of cultural development has always seemed strange to begin with. Just think of the great, revolutionary scientific achievements—how people felt about them, and the troubles and strife they caused. Human beings are very much closer to the psyche than they are to the natural world. No wonder then if with regard to psychology, as a more recent science, many things will come up again that have also been known in the evolution of natural scientific research.
With anthroposophically orientated psychology it has to be clear from the beginning that, as I said before, the conscious awareness we have in everyday life and which is also commonly used in ordinary scientific research, will not be enough. Psychology is going to be a challenge to conscious awareness. In a book published a year ago,3Steiner R. The Riddle of Man. Tr. W. Lindemann. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1990. I dealt with the subject of psychology as follows. If the soul is basically unable to know anything about its everyday experiences but is only able to live in them the way one lives in the natural world outside before one has gained an image of it through natural science, this indicates that the soul must change if it is to observe facts relating to itself. This will mean quite a few difficulties with today’s dominant school of thought. The current idea is not to touch the soul, whatever we do, but to leave it as we have received it ‘from the hands of nature herself’, as the saying goes, and to direct scientific study to what lives in the psyche. Psychology will, however, need to draw powers from deeper sources, from spheres that lie hidden from ordinary experience, to gain methods of observation and of forming ideas that differ from those we have in ordinary life.
Let me tell you briefly and simply what has to happen to the human psyche if it is to be a real observer of its own inner experiences or, to put it in a better way, awaken the inner observer who lies hidden in it, so that it may investigate its own inner life. Our thinking, all the ways of forming ideas we develop in the study of the natural world, will not be what we need when it comes to the psyche. You will soon note, especially if you struggle inwardly to gain insight, that all those ideas do not take us beyond the facts that can be observed in natural science; they do not get us anywhere near the realm of the psyche.
The situation changes the moment we reach the points—I call them the frontier posts in our search for knowledge—where the human being is full of doubt to begin with and keeps saying to himself: This is as far as we can go in our search for knowledge with what has been granted to humanity; we cannot go beyond this. Just consider how people whose thinking is wholly based on the modern scientific way and who seek to dig down deeper and deeper into existence in their thoughts then come to such frontier posts. Let me give you some examples to show how someone struggling to gain insight truly comes to quite specific points in his inner life.
The first example I would like to give is one I found with a seeker who may not be appreciated so much as a philosopher but is all the more highly esteemed as a person, and that is the well-known aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer.4Vischer, Friedrich Theodor (1807–1887). Altes und Neues. Stuttgart 1881, Erste Abteilung. In his review of Volkelt’s interesting small book on dream fantasy5Volkelt, Johannes. Die Traum-Phantasie. Stuttgart 1875. he put all his inner energies into raising the question as to what the relationship might be between human soul and human body.
There is a difference between considering the issue from a philosophical perspective, taking a conventional view and applying only the rational mind to it, or letting hard effort in thinking create the inner experience of truly facing something like a sphinx. It was out of such apprehensions—one can see it from the way it all goes—that Friedrich Theodor Vischer, known as ‘V Vischer’, asked himself this question. He wrote: ‘The human soul cannot be in the body; yet it also cannot be anywhere but in the body.’6Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, loc. cit. I, S. 194: ‘The soul, as the highest union of all processes, cannot, however, be located in the body, though it does not exist anywhere but in the body.’ Completely contradictory! The contradiction arises, however, not because it has been dragged in by logic, but out of the fullness of inner thought, a contradiction one is wrestling with, a contradiction that may be the beginning of an inner drama in the struggle to gain insight. And we should not fight shy of such dramas that bring living inner experience if we want to develop a true psychology.
This, then, is one of the highly significant questions at the frontier posts of knowledge. There are many of them. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of seven riddles of the world.7Du Bois-Reymond, as note 2. ‘The seven riddles of the world’ lecture was given at a public meeting at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin to celebrate the Leibniz anniversary on 8 July 1880. Publ. Leipzig 1882. We might refer to hundreds of such questions, both lesser and greater. We may stop at them, saying that this is as far as the human ability to know things goes, but if we admit to this it merely means that we lack courage in the quest for knowledge. What matters here is that we must be able to let such questions live on in us, in the fullness of our inner life, not seeking to consider them rationally, bringing all our inner powers to bear, but to live through them and have the patience to wait and see if something of a revelation will not come from the outside. And this does happen.
If we do not seek to meet such questions with preconceived ideas but enter into the billows, as it were, which such questions raise in the human soul, we come to a completely new living experience which we cannot have in our ordinary state of mind. Let me give you an analogy for this living experience. It is an elementary experience in the psyche and an elementary experience for the genesis of an anthroposophically orientated psychology. We simply must take it in its full reality, not in an abstract, dead sense. Let us think—it does not matter here if the analogy has full justification or not, for it will tell us what it is meant to tell us—let us think of an animal that is very low down in the evolutionary scale, a creature that does not yet have a differentiated sense of touch relating to the outside world. It is more or less just rummaging around inside as it experiences life and bumps into physical objects that exist around it. Now imagine such a life form gaining perfection in terms of the theory of evolution. What can evolve in this case? Where a lower animal merely bumps into objects outside and experiences those bumps inwardly in a completely undifferentiated way, differentiation in the course of evolution causes this to develop into a sense of touch. In the scientific theory of evolution, the differentiation of life in the senses is, I would say, generally presented as bumping into things and differentiation developing from this. The process which here happens externally, physiologically, or physically if you like—with a differentiated sense of touch developing merely from bumping into things—repeats itself purely at the level of the soul, if we take things in a truly living way, as we arrive at those frontier posts of knowledge with the psyche fully involved in the process. First you will feel as if you were in the dark in the world of mind and spirit, bumping into things everywhere. The fact that questions like those asked by Vischer have arisen proves that we live in darkness of soul, in an existence that is grounded in the world of the spirit and touches on that world. But the element which thus comes up against the world of the spirit now needs to be differentiated.
If we truly live with such frontier issues, something enters into the soul, is brought to it by revelation, which previously existed as little for the soul as sensory perception based on a differentiated sense of touch existed for a creature that had not yet developed such a differentiated sense of touch but merely bumped into things. We have to live with and through those frontier issues, the countless, tormenting, sphinx-like questions, so that we may know that the methods we can gain through working with nature, the methods which truly meet the ideal of the modern scientific approach, only take us to the point, where soul and spirit are concerned, where we bump into those boundaries. From there, life itself must forward.
And it can move forward. This can only be empirical fact. I am talking about something which every thinker who bases himself on modern science has perceived only too clearly, too significantly. The time when the soul truly expands its sphere of life into these boundary areas of knowledge can only come slowly as we patiently feel our way. I have given examples of such boundary issues in a brief chapter I have just written in the book which is due to appear shortly.8See Von Seelenrätseln (note 1), Kap. IV, 6, S. 150 ff.
Let me refer to another such fundamental boundary issue which we find in the work of Friedrich Theodor Vischer. It is an example of how someone who is beginning to live with the drama of insight and knowledge in himself in a very real way comes to the matter I have just been characterizing, inwardly feeling his way and not yet outwardly differentiated in feeling one’s way in mind and spirit. When Friedrich Theodor Vischer was struggling with these issues, the time had not yet come for the soul to break through the boundaries it had met. Vischer wrote:
No mind without a nerve centre, nor a brain, say our opponents. We say: no nerve centre and no brain unless there has been preparation in countless stages, starting from below; it is easy to be derisory about the spirit bumbling about in granite and limestone—no harder than it would be for us to ask derisively how the protein in the brain manages to get to something as sublime as ideas. Human powers of insight lack the ability to establish levels or degrees. It will remain a secret how it comes about that nature, and the spirit must surely slumber beneath her, is there as such a perfect counter thrust of the spirit that we—please note his choice of term here—
get bumps and bruises from it; it is a forcible separation that seems so absolute that Hegel’s concepts of being other and being outside oneself, however brilliantly formulated, really say practically nothing, simply covering up the abruptness of the apparent dividing wall. Fichte gives proper recognition to the fine edge and impact in this counter thrust, but no explanation.9As note 4, S. 229 f.
There can be no more accurate description of this inner life. First it feels itself bumping into the world of the spirit when such boundary issues come up, and it longs to let this process of coming up against the world of the spirit become differentiated and be a real way of feeling one’s way in that world, with, to use Goethe’s words, a mental organ developing.10‘We learn to see with eyes of the spirit. Without them we stumble about blindly as in anything else and thus also in the study of nature.’ Goethe, Erster Entwurf einer allgemeinen Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie, ausgehend von der Osteologie VII, B (1795), in Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften herausgegeben und kommentiert von Rudolf Steiner in Kuerschners Deutsche National-Litteratur (1883-97), 5 Bände, Nachdruck Dornach 1975, GA Bibl.-Nr. la-e, Bd. 1, GA Bibl.-Nr. la, S. 262. With ref. to ‘ears of the spirit’, see also Goethe’s Faust 2, Act 1, Pleasing landscape, ‘Hark, the Hours, with furious winging, Bear to spirit-ears the ringing Rumours of the new day-springing.’ Tr. P. Wayne. Penguin Books 1959. Where Goethe spoke of eyes and ears of the mind, we might say that organs of touch11Spiritual organs of touch - see questions and answers following the lecture. arise in the mind at a most elementary level as we live in these things. It is truly a vital process, a growth process; it is not a matter of simply applying what one has previously learnt in the sciences; it is something as real as the way a child grows, but it takes the soul into regions it has not known before.
People are often mistaken about this. Thus the philosopher Bergson,12Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), French philosopher. who has grown famous, makes one of the absolutely basic errors in this field. Henri Bergson says we cannot comprehend the world with the analytical mind, and especially cannot comprehend the inner life in this way, for in the psyche, and in the whole of existence, everything is evolving, flowing, vital. What is he thinking? That what we need does already exist and we can look for it with powers we already possess. In this, however, he is greatly mistaken. It does not lead to anything that can truly explain the psyche, for the soul must go beyond itself; it must develop something it does not yet have. The soul does not think that the life which it is to explore does already exist, but that it must first be gained.
Many people are really scared—if I may use the term—of entering deeply into the inner drama of gaining insight and knowledge. They believe it will take them into the abyss of subjectivity, the abyss of individual nature. If they were really to enter into this abyss in the way which has just been described, they would find that in doing so they would find something inside themselves that is as objective as are the things we find when we consider the natural world. It is merely an illusion to think that in living through the drama of insight one person would find one thing, and another something else. In a certain respect individual experiences have to differ because they are different aspects, different views of the same thing seen from different sides. Yet if we take photographs of something from different angles and those photographs look different, this does not mean to say that the thing itself does not present something objective in those aspects. We should not be dogmatic about anything someone has gathered from the psyche in this way, making his particular formulation into dogma and believing in it as one believes in any dogma or law of nature. No, we have to be clear in our minds that however subjective something perceived with the mind’s organs of touch may be, seeing that it represents a particular angle—if the methods I have presented only in principle are developed further, organs will truly develop in soul and spirit that may be compared to eyes and ears of the mind—if the world of the spirit is characterized on the basis of a mind that has vision of the kind I referred to in my book,13Steiner R. The Riddle of Man (note 3). then something described by an observer may be a subjective aspect; but if we accept it we approach the world of the spirit in the same way as we have a true image of a tree even if it is only from one angle. This is something that needs to be understood, especially in this particular field.
When human beings go beyond themselves in their inner life, something arises which I have described in my book How to Know Higher Worlds. There you find a detailed description of what the soul has to do so that it may go beyond itself in this way. Today I have, of course, only been able to give the principles. If you take what it says in the book to a certain level you will discover why I called the experiences, which are of a completely new kind compared to our ordinary conscious awareness, ‘imaginations’, seeing in images, and referred to the level of awareness which develops as ‘imaginative awareness’.
This imaginative awareness has nothing to do with fantasy. Its content is new compared to what one has known before. ‘Imaginative awareness’ is a term like many others. What matters is that the imaginations or inner images we gain, enriching our inner life, clearly show that they are, well, let us say reflections of a non-physical reality, just as our usual ideas of things are reflections of outer physical reality.
I have now described the process in which the soul rises above itself at the first level to gain imaginative insight. With this imaginative insight one is in fact living in a state for which we have to use a paradoxical term, and this can of course be the subject of derision in view of general thinking habits today. It is that in uniting the soul with the living inner experiences thus gained we are living out of the body. This is the crux of the matter. And above all we learn to distinguish experiences which we have gained in this way, without making use of the body, from those gained in the outside world which we have perceived through the senses; above all, however, also distinguish them from anything by way of visions, hallucinations or illusions.14See also public lectures Errors in Spiritual Investigation given in Berlin on 6 March 1913; tr. WW. Ringwald, A. Wulsin. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1983 (from GA 62), and ‘Die Wege der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis’, Berlin, 21 Nov, 1912, in Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung, GA 62. Lectures to members in Dornach on 1 and 2 July 1921 in Steiner R. Therapeutic Insights (from GA 205), tr. M. Laird-Brown, A. Wulsin, G. Kamow. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1984.
For this is something we must always remember. The way which is shown here goes in the opposite direction to the one which we may call pathological, the way that leads to illusory and visionary life. Those who find their way to a life in images know that anything we perceive with the senses, perceive with normal senses in the world of nature, is of a higher quality than anything that may present itself in visions or hallucinations. If we give ourselves up to visions we enter more deeply into our living physical body, becoming more closely bound up with it; we bring soul quality into the living body but we do not come free of it.
In the third lecture we will consider the human being as part of the natural world, and we will then realize why the contents of visions can be confused with perceptions made in the spirit. Today we are talking about the inner life, the psyche, and it is important to make the distinction quite clear—a visionary goes down into the life of the body, whilst someone seeking imaginative insight enters into a life that is wholly in the soul sphere, and this leads to experience lived independently of the body.
As I said, this is highly unusual in present-day thinking. Someone wanting to reach the world of the spirit on an amateurish basis, with amateurish ideas, would greatly like to think of this world by taking external sensory perceptions for a model; he would greatly like—we can see this in spiritualism, which is so disastrous—to have factual things in the spirit, just as one sees factual natural effects if one performs a physical experiment in a laboratory. He wants a tangible spirit. Yet the things we find in imaginative perception do not compare with anything tangible. In my book15See Von Seelenrätseln ( as note 1). I compared this—one can only offer an analogy, for it is not the same—with the memories of past events which we think we call up from the depths of our inner life. The tenuous nature of such memories, which are entirely nonphysical, having soul quality, is the only thing in which it is possible to experience the spirit in which the psyche has its roots. It is just that the images seen independently of the body do not relate to anything one has known in the physical world. They have their own content which tells us that we have entered into a new, non-physical world, a world we did not know before. One gradually has to familiarize oneself with a very different way of inner experience, for the I will not have the support of the physical organs through which we gain our sensory perceptions. It takes some time to get used to this kind of life.
Above all it is this: I may have compared the images gained in the new way with memories of past events, but everything that arises by way of such images, and which therefore is a reflection of a spiritual reality, has one peculiarity which it is hard to get used to, and that is the peculiarity that the more perfect such a non-physical perception is, the less are we able to recall it afterwards. We are used to remembering things that have gone through our minds. Those non-physical experiences do not generate an immediate power to remember. The process is very different. I described it in the above book. It goes like this: If you want to have a specific non-physical image you have to prepare for this, exercising the soul so that it will develop the inner powers by which the image may be revealed. We can remember the things the soul does, what it undertook to gain that image vision. It is then possible to call the image up again. So once you have had a spiritual experience in imaginative insight you will not easily remember it; you have to go through all the inner preparation again; this you can remember. You can say to yourself: you did this, and you did that; do it again and you’ll have the experience again. Only if we succeed in bringing copies of it, as it were, back to our ordinary conscious mind, to our ordinary thinking, as ideas will we be able to recall those copies. But the actual nonphysical image has to be new every time, otherwise it is not the real thing.
Another peculiarity is this. Ideas we gain in our life in the outside world are produced all the more easily the more often we produce them. We get a degree of practice in this, and these things become habit. This is not the case when we have living experience of non-physical images, genuine spiritual realities. It is rather the opposite. The more often we seek to have a non-physical image under the same conditions, the more vague does it grow. Hence you have the strange situation, really quite paradoxical, that students in the life of the spirit who make efforts to gain certain non-physical images will have them and then be surprised that they cannot have them again. The ability to produce something again is often lost very quickly, the second or third time, and we then have to make new efforts, over and over again, to call up something which is escaping us, as it were, having come to us just once from the world of the spirit.
You will find all the individual exercises that will help to overcome the problem in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, though even there it is just a brief outline of things I have said on the subject since.
Another peculiarity is that you will only manage to cope with such imaginative ideas if you have gone through inner training to develop a life of thinking, forming ideas, inner responses and of will that provide reference points, so that one may bring ideas into the non-physical images. If you do not pay careful attention to this, you may fall into inner confusion and darkness, though this would not be pathological. Again and again you come to say to yourself: Here you learn something out of the spirit which you cannot yet understand, for you have not developed concepts that go sufficiently deep for this. At that point you have to stop, you have to find another way, trying to take your ability to form ideas in the world of the senses further, so that you may on a later occasion understand what you have not been able to understand before.
In short, I could mention many more such characteristics. You come across lots of things that take you aback and are paradoxical compared to the inner experiences we have in our ordinary state of mind. Yet it is only when we have torn the soul element away, as it were, from the living body that we are in the world of the spirit. No one can deny this experience, which is spiritual.
With the development which I have been describing so far, you are able to gain certain insights. You come to see that apart from the physical body, which is part of us and which is the object of anatomy, physiology and of modern science altogether, something else is also truly our own. In my more recent books I have called it the ‘body of creative powers’, so that there may be no misunderstanding; previously I called it the ‘ether body’.16Also called ‘formative forces body’ by some translators. [Tr.] For basic details see Steiner R. Theosophy (various translations) I, 4; Steiner R. Occult Science (GA 13; various translations), chapter on essential nature of humanity, and subsection on human ether body. It is really a second element in us, and can never be perceived by ordinary sensory perception, ordinary inner experience. It can only be perceived if this inner experience progresses to become the capacity for vision in images. For this body of creative powers does not exist in space; it is something which lives only in time, but lives in time in such a way that everything which is active in our physical body from birth or conception to death, let us say, wells forth from this body of creative powers. We have a second body in us, a body of creative powers. It becomes a reality for us when we gain the power of awareness in images.
This awareness will not, however, take us beyond the principle which is with us from birth to death as our body of creative powers. This may sound odd, but that does not matter. We are able to go beyond it if we find additional ways of inwardly strengthening the soul, which has now become free of the body. Exercises have to be done again and again, with patience, to develop a completely new relationship to the principle we call the life of ideas or concepts.
In ordinary life we bring objects around us to mind by forming ideas of them. When we have an idea of something we think we possess whatever we are inwardly able to have of such an external object. This is a notion we must abandon when we come to gain experience in the spiritual realm. We need to be able, as it were, to put ourselves in a position where we let our ideas of things be like forces and powers that fight one another in the inward drama of gaining insight and knowledge. We have to develop the ability to let one idea enter into conflict with another. We must long to characterize anything we have characterized from one point of view also from another. At this level terms like materialism, idealism, spirituality, sensuality, and so on, all become empty phrases, for all of them, woven from the webs of concepts we have, prove to be like photographs taken from different angles.
We come to realize that in the realm of the spirit we have to deal with our concepts the way we work with our sense organs in the sphere of the senses. We walk around objects. We do not consider concepts as snapshots but merely as something which characterizes objects for us from one perspective or another, giving a one-sided view.
The spiritual scientist will therefore develop an inner tendency to characterize things from one angle, and then to characterize them also from the opposite angle. He will above all feel a longing to develop certain ideas and then refute them again, thus truly going through this inner combat. I am just giving some important inner aspects which one has to make progressively come true when a certain point has been reached at the frontier post of knowledge and insight.
The soul then continues to develop. It manages to develop the faculty I have called ‘inspired insight’ in my books. Please leave aside all superstition or prejudiced ideas with regard to this. The soul then separates from the body to a higher degree. Having gained this level of insight and knowledge one is not merely able to perceive the body of creative powers which is with us in time, from birth to death, but also spiritual realities that are outside our bodies, just as we see physical realities with our physical eyes. In my next lecture I will be speaking of the spiritual reality outside the human being. Now I am first of all going to talk about what the human being sees with this inspired insight, a spiritual reality that lies within him.
Something arises in inspired insight which does not live in our existence between birth and death; it lived before us, before we entered into the earthly body at birth, or, let us say, conception. It will live with us when we enter into the world of the spirit at our death. It has united with the physical genetic material we have from our parents and ancestors; it has penetrated this physical material. Inspired insight will truly allow us to perceive what preceded our physical existence at the soul level, what happens after our physical death, for we learn to see, in the spirit, the part of us which is wholly independent of the physical body. The body of creative powers is still bound to our physical existence; it will disperse when it is cut off from this physical existence. The principle which inspired insight is able to perceive does not disperse; it remains by itself; it is the part of us which goes through births and deaths. In the field of inspired insight the human being is able to investigate properly what connects him with worlds that are wholly of the spirit, what works most powerfully so that he becomes this particular human being when physical genetic material connects with his spiritual part.
The third ability we acquire is called intuition. This is not the kind of vague idea generally called an ‘intuition’ but something else. I’ll just refer to it briefly. At the third level of spiritual insight you can become fully aware—this will happen at a particular point of time in our inner development—that you are someone else, that through the efforts you made as you progressed through vision in images and inspiration you have truly found an inner observer in you.
Something significant then occurs in the drama of insight and knowledge, as I have called it. At this point we may say: You can see that it is not only this physical body of ours which the spirit has helped to create; you come to see that our soul itself, with its feelings, tendencies, ambitions, affects and will qualities, has come to be what it is through spiritual processes. The drama thus becomes an inner stroke of destiny.
You may have destiny experiences in life that make you shout for joy or feel very low, you may know the worst and also great happiness—the things you experience when you perceive the development not only of the physical aspect but of also of the soul principle, are a stroke of destiny, an inner stroke of destiny that means more to someone who experiences it to the full in the drama of knowledge and insight than the highs and lows, pleasures and pain of destiny experiences in everyday life.
If this is possible, if there truly is this inner power to bring about change, so that the inner eye perceives not only the physical and bodily aspect out of the spirit but the soul principle itself within the process of spiritual evolution, then intuitive perception arises. A sphere is entered which encompasses repeated earth lives, the ability to look back on earlier lives on earth, and the certainty that this life on earth will be followed by others. Knowledge is gained that the whole of human life consists of successive lives on earth, with lives in the world of the spirit in between them that extend from death to rebirth.
With all this, the inner eye needs to be directed to something for which a relationship with the natural world outside has not really trained it. With reference to the natural world we always ask about the origin and cause of facts. When it comes to things of the spirit, questions as to origin and causes will not serve. When the realm of the spirit opens up to someone in the way I have mentioned, he finds that everything that has to do with growth, thriving, progression and development has retrogressive development mixed in with it, with existence progressively crumbling away and destruction in progress all the time. This is what made individuals who were able to see this—perhaps not in this modern way, but in the ways in which such things were known in the past—say that insight into the spirit takes us to the gates of death.17In his Phaedo (67 d-e), Plato had Socrates say: "... people really do not seem to have an idea that men who are faithful followers of philosophy are in life, in their whole lives, concerned over nothing but their dying and their death. And if that is true, it would be entirely wrong to think of death all one's life and then in the hour of death turn against one’s own wish and goal." Sec also Rudolf Steiner on Arnold Fortlage in the lecture of 7 November 1917 in this volume. You come to realize that conscious awareness, life in mind and spirit, and living in the spirit in full conscious awareness can only arise if a principle that makes existence crumble away enters into all our growth, healthy development and progression. You come to see that death is but a single major event which we can think of as divided up, broken up into its atoms, as it were, and happening in us all the time when we gain conscious awareness in physical life. In this world, to know is to enter a little bit into something that will come all at once when we go through the gates of death.
You get to know the relationship between the conscious mind and the process of dying. In doing so, you also get to know how this conscious awareness goes through the gates of death, and that death actually awakens us to a different conscious awareness. We enter into this when we lay aside our physical body. We lay this aside, as it were, merely in order to gain such insight in images, inspiration and intuition.
If you want to get a real idea of gaining insight in the spirit, you have to get used to seeing your relationship to the world in a very different way from the one you have been used to. Above all it is necessary to give up the idea that you can somehow find the spirit by interpreting the material world, looking at it critically in some way, and by finding laws based on the material world. The laws we discover in relation to the material world only apply in that world. You will not find the spirit by interpreting the world you perceive through the senses; when you are in the physical body you find the spirit in connection with the world of the senses; but you find it through independent life in the realm of the spirit.
Let me clarify this by using an analogy. When we read sequences of words, which are letters put in a row, we do not say: There’s a vertical line, there’s a horizontal line; we do not identify the letters but consider the row of letters or words as a whole, and an inner content then arises. This content has nothing to do with identification of the letters. You must have learned to read. And something quite different from the identity of individual letters arises in the reader’s mind. You cannot find the spirit which you discover from the letters by looking in the printers’ letter case. Nor can you find the life of the spirit by spelling out nature. You will only find it if you let the soul rise beyond itself and thus find the element which extends from the spirit itself into this physical life, in so far as the soul finds itself living in the physical world between birth and death.
You see, this leads to a psychology that can well hold its own side by side with the natural sciences. It does not transfer the methods developed in the study of nature to the psyche, nor does it stop at the inner life as we know it in everyday life. Instead it brings an objective principle into the inner life, and out of this the psyche experiences itself. The living body has also been born out of this principle, as we shall see in the third lecture.
These are first, elementary indications; you will have to refer to my books for the rest. They show how human beings can find the immortal element that lies in them, and how a psychology with this anthroposophical orientation truly guides us in this direction. Then such things as happened to Franz Brentano,18Brentano, Franz (1838–1917), German psychologist and philosopher. Rudolf Steiner had written about Franz Brentano in an essay on the future of psychology in 1893 (in Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie, GA 30), referring to his views on extending the natural scientific approach to certain areas, for instance in psychology. The essay concludes: ‘General acceptance of Brentano’s statement would for me mean the general decline and decay of philosophy.’ Rudolf Steiner also wrote extensively in appreciation of Brentano, e.g. in Von Seelenrätseln (note 1), and spoke about him in a lecture he gave in Berlin on 12 December 1911 (in A psychology of Body, Soul and Spirit, GA 115, tr. M. Spock; Hudson: Anthroposophie Press 1999). the great psychologist who died in Zurich in March this year, need no longer happen. Brentano was a significant figure, but also a tragic one in the way he bore with his thinking. He came to the study of psychology at a time when the modern scientific way of thinking was developing. He wanted to apply this approach to the inner life. One can get no further with this approach, however, than to compare ideas as to how feelings want to rise in the soul, what attention is and so on in outer physical life. In his work on psychology from the empirical standpoint—in the first volume he wrote, which has remained the only one—Franz Brentano regretted the things psychology could not achieve, saying: What help is it to us, even if we are thoroughly scientific in our approach, to compare ideas, make associations of ideas, the way inclinations and disinclinations arise, and so on, if the great hopes held by Plato and Aristotle cannot be fulfilled. They hoped that with psychology we would gain insight into how the better part of our nature lives on when we have gone through the gates of death.19The actual words are: ‘For the hopes Plato and Aristotle had of gaining certainty concerning the continued existence of the better part of us once the body has dissolved, the laws of association of ideas, the development of convictions and opinions and the budding and growth of pleasure and love would be anything but genuine compensation ... And if the difference between the two views did truly mean accepting or rejecting the question of immortality, it would have to be considered highly significant for psychology, and we would inevitably have to enter into a metaphysical investigation of substance as the vehicle for states and conditions.’ Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, Leipzig 1874, S. 20.
Franz Brentano regretted the fact that he did not have the means of tackling these problems. It is remarkable to see how he struggled with them to the end of his life. The straight, honest nature of his struggles is evident especially from the tragic circumstance I referred to in an obituary for Franz Brentano which appears in the third chapter of my above-mentioned book. He was always saying he would continue his book on psychology, the first volume of which had been published. The work was intended to be in four or five volumes. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874. He promised the second for the autumn of that year, to be followed by the rest. He did not publish any of those, however. He wanted to master the inner life with the modern scientific method; he wanted to set about this in a straight and honest way. If he had been able to do so, if the modern scientific method had not been like a dead weight on his powers of investigation because he misunderstood it, he would have been able to enter through the gates into a life in the spirit that gathers something from the depths of the soul that cannot be there if one has only the methods of modern science.
We can see from the tragedy of Franz Brentano’s life as a scientist—and of the lives of many others, but especially in his case, because he was such a significant figure who at the same time was absolutely honest—that there is a need for a psychology that can only be found through inner experiences gained out of the living body. Then the great problems can be considered again, issues that must be foremost in the minds of those who consider their own inner life—the problem of immortal life, if we find the truly immortal part by the methods I have described, and also the problem of free will, which we are going to consider later on in these lectures. These are the two most important and compelling problems. But look at the works on psychology published in recent years. These problems are completely left aside in them; indeed, they have disappeared from psychological studies, simply for the reasons we have been considering today.
There is more to it, however, than being able to work with those great questions. The insights psychologists are seeking with methods they have developed by going more deeply into the modern scientific approach can only be fully clear if one can consider them from the point of view which I have indicated. That is the way it is. Modern science will prove valid on the one hand, the science of the spirit and spiritual investigation on the other. But it is just the way it is when one is digging a tunnel from two sides and must have worked things out carefully in advance so that one may meet in the middle. Spiritual science and natural science must come together if the knowledge and insight sought by humanity is to be a whole.
Let me give you just one example of how ordinary psychology, too, can be conquered if we enter the higher regions which I have briefly outlined today. Among the questions considered by people who do research in psychology are those concerning memory or recall. It is enough to drive you to despair to see how the memory problem is dealt with in the ordinary approaches to psychology. There you can really see the frontier posts in the process of gaining insight. Someone has an idea which he develops from something he has perceived through the senses; this idea then ‘goes down’ into the soul sphere; it ‘vanishes’, as they say, and later the person is able to recall it. Where has it been?
I won’t go into everything that has been said on the matter for centuries. On the one hand people say that such ideas vanish into the unconscious and then come up again across the threshold to conscious awareness. I’d like to know someone who is able to find any real meaning in such words as he says them. All meaning is immediately lost when you talk of ideas ‘going down’ and ‘coming up’. You can say anything; but you cannot envisage it; for it does not relate to any kind of reality. Psychologists more inclined towards physiology will talk about ‘traces engraved’ in the nervous system or brain; these traces then ‘call’ the ideas ‘up again’. People try painfully to explain how the idea which has gone down is dug out from those traces. As I said, it can drive you to despair when you consider the different approaches to psychology. Just think of how much serious, noble, genuine research effort goes into working on these problems. We certainly would not deny that such honest and genuine work is being done.
In truth, however, this simple fact relating to the inner life can only be seen in the right light if we consider it with the power in our souls that has the spiritual organs to observe the ordinary inner life, too, from the point of view taken in the world of the spirit. You then find that there is no question of an idea which I have ‘going down’ to anywhere or ‘coming up’ again somewhere. People altogether have the wrong idea of memory. An idea I form on the basis of something perceived in the world around me does not live in me as something real at all, but as a mirror image which the soul creates by means of the body’s mirroring. We will go into this in the third lecture. And this idea lives only now! It is no longer there once I have lost it from the inner life. There is no such thing as ideas going down and coming up again, thus creating memories. The commonly held idea of memory is wrong.
What matters is this. Having sharpened the soul’s power to see things in the spirit, you see—you can observe this in the spirit just as you observe things in the world outside—that something else is going on at the same time as we form an idea based on something we have perceived. It is not the process of forming the idea but this other, unconscious process running parallel to it which produces something that does not come directly to conscious awareness but lives on in me. So if I have an idea, a subconscious process develops that is wholly bound up with the physical body. When occasion arises to call this process up again, the idea forms again because the soul now looks to this process, which is a purely bodily one. A remembered idea is a new idea created from the depths of the living body. It is like the earlier idea because it has been called up in the unconscious process that had been produced in the living body. The soul reads the engram engraved in the body, as it were, when it recalls an idea.
This, then, does correct the ideas ordinarily held by psychologists. You now have the right idea instead of something perceived in entirely the wrong way in ordinary experience. I could go through the whole of psychology with you and show you many points where genuine insight shows that the inner experiences which people think they have prove to be illusory. People have quite wrong ideas about the inner life, and these need to be corrected by the soul coming free of the body and then observing its life from a truly spiritual point of view.
It is exactly with ideas like these, which on the one hand really make the spirit accessible to scientific study, that on the other hand the fruits of faithful hard work with the modern scientific method in experimental psychology and physiological psychology as well as other fields find their right place. Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science is neither hostile nor unsympathetic towards such work. Knowing that the ordinary methods developed in the study of the physical world cannot solve but only raise questions, real questions, work done in spiritual science can make the results of natural scientific investigation truly fruitful by casting a new light on those questions.
The work done in anthroposophically orientated spiritual science is truly moving towards natural science, like digging a tunnel from opposite directions. Another example will show this. Scientists with a Darwinian orientation have recently made some very interesting findings, which I am going to tell you about in a minute. But first let me say that the unconscious activity which underlies memory recall is something different from the powers of heredity or of growth, but, having developed parallel to the forming of ideas, it is also related to those powers. Powers that take effect at an unconscious level when we form an idea on the basis of sensory perceptions are related to the powers that grow in us. They create dispositions in the living body that can later be read, leading to memory recall. Genuine observation in the soul gives us a clear idea of how the powers of memory relate to those of heredity and growth. A bridge is built—we will be saying more about such bridges in the next few days—between soul and spirit on the one hand and the living body on the other.
Consider how Darwinian Richard Semon starts with heredity in his very interesting book, with the emergence of characteristics, and then brings these hereditary powers together with the powers of memory.20Semon, Richard (1859–1919). Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens. Dritte Auflage, Leipzig 1911. Semon explored changes in organic matter (plant, animal, human) due to external stimuli. He called them engrams and the ‘sum of engrams an organism possesses’ its ‘engram resource’, distinction having to be made between an ‘inherited and an individually acquired engram resource’. ‘The name I give to the phenomena in an organism resulting from the presence of a particular engram or sum of engrams, is “mnemic phenomena”. The quintessence of an organism’s mnemic faculties I call “Mneme”.’ S. (page) 15. Semon deliberately avoided the terms ‘memory’ and ‘recall’, using instead a terminology that ‘permitted’ him ‘to abstract from this completely whether or not the material processes concerned manifest through higher conscious sentience in the given case or not.’ S. (page) 390. The scientist thus sees a relationship between hereditary and memory powers. The psychologist has come to connect the unconscious powers that lie behind heredity with those of memory recall.
These things happen quite independently of one another. What Richard Semon called ‘mneme’ in his most interesting book agrees with the views held in anthroposophically orientated psychology, where consideration extends to regions in the human being that are also studied by modern scientific methods. We will speak of this in the third lecture.
What I have been saying today at an elementary level about the results of genuine spiritual experience in the soul that provide the basis for a more up-to-date psychology, must inevitably sound strange in many ways to people used to thinking in the way that is usual today. This is perfectly understood by someone who is in the midst of these things, yet perhaps one may also say that it needs more than just hearing an interesting lecture. You need to enter deeply into the serious process of spiritual scientific investigation. You will find that one’s powers are used differently from the way they are in natural science, but that the route followed in anthroposophical research is no less serious, no less demanding than the route taken in natural scientific research. The fact is, however, that the fruits, the results of natural science only provide the starting point for spiritual research. We come to concepts, ideas and natural laws when we want to investigate the natural world. We make it our premise that the work done in natural science takes us to the frontier posts from which we set out to make investigations in the science of the spirit and in anthroposophical psychology.
I would say, therefore, that psychology based on anthroposophy should not be said to go against the justifiable demands of today’s natural scientific way of thinking. Quite the contrary. It does not reject anything resulting from justifiable investigations in natural science. Nowhere does it oppose such justifiable science. However, it cannot stop at merely drawing logical conclusions from things that are already given in natural science. Spiritual science is not a philosophy where one merely wants to draw conclusions based on natural science. No! In anthroposophically orientated spiritual science we have to adopt a different device, the device that this spiritual investigation must follow from natural science not as an abstract logical conclusion, but as a live offspring.
The spiritual investigator holds the belief, which is stronger than the belief of many a natural scientist who rejects spiritual investigation, that natural science is sufficiently robust not only to lead to its logical consequences but to bring forth, from itself, as it were, something that is very much alive. This has its own vital energies and must thrive by having its own independent life. This is what the science of the spirit should be, a science which natural science itself demands.
Questions and Answers
Several questions related to repeated lives on earth.
Ladies and gentlemen, the nature of the questions which have been asked is such that a brief answer cannot be satisfactory. One would indeed have to speak volumes to answer them in full. First of all we have the question:
What purpose does reincarnation serve?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, essentially the question as to purpose—I have to answer in a scientific way, otherwise it is just empty words—and the question as to reason—I am afraid I cannot go into the question as to whether teleology is justifiable or not—is a question arising in the physical world and therefore has validity in the physical world. Reincarnation—if we want to use this term for repeated lives on earth—I like to avoid jargon, which is why I spoke of ‘repeated lives on earth’—is governed by laws that belong to the world of the spirit and have significance in that world. This is something people find most difficult to get used to—that in moving from the physical world to the world of the spirit one must also change, or metamorphose, one’s concepts, and that concepts which apply in the physical world lose in significance, in importance, when we enter into the world of the spirit. Once you have started to know the nature of the spiritual world you do not really ask about the ‘purpose of the human being’ the way one would ask about the purpose of a machine, and certainly not about the ‘purpose of reincarnation’.
I said in my lecture that the way of thinking developed in the natural sciences is essentially the way of thinking developed in relation to the physical world around us. It will at best lead to the right questions being asked. One must then, however, seek to obtain the answers from the world of the spirit.
Someone asking: ‘What purpose does reincarnation serve?’ will of course have a reason for asking. There is a need to know, despite the fact that the question as to the purpose is not really applicable in the sphere one is dealing with. I would, however, ask you to consider the following. I would like to say that I have to bring together the building blocks needed to answer these questions. The science of the spirit is not like something you can quickly make your own by using a small handbook. It is in fact a very comprehensive field.
When we ask questions in life, one way is to continue with further questions until we come to an end. But this may not apply in every case. You see I am asked a question like this one hundreds of times. On many occasions I have said the following on the subject: People wanting to go from Zurich to Rome may want to know the route. And indeed, if no one in Zurich is able to give them the exact route, in every detail, they may decide that they don’t want to go to Rome after all. On the other hand there may be people who’ll be happy to know the route from Zurich to Lugano, and once in Lugano will be satisfied to learn how they should go on from there, and later on again how to go further. This is an analogy. It is meant to say that when we are in one life on earth, this has relevance for subsequent lives on earth. We have a progression. We are going to gain things in other lives on earth that we are not going to gain in this one. We go through experiences that present different trials and learning experiences. If we were able to answer all questions in this life on earth, then this life would not generate future lives on earth.
For the science of the spirit, it is therefore a matter of presenting the fact of reincarnation, if I am to use that term. Just as an individual gives purpose to a particular life on earth out of a free impulse, so he will give successive purposes, with one arising from the other, to repeated lives on earth. And he will not imagine that he can define the whole compass of human existence—which involves a number of lives one earth—in one of those lives. You altogether get out of the habit of producing definitions meant to be comprehensive when you enter into the true inner life in the spirit. Definitions are quite useful in ordinary physical life; in the life of the spirit, where it is all about perspectives, we are reminded, when someone just asks for definitions, of the example of a definition given in Greek literature. Asked how to define a human being, it was said—for definitions must always refer to individual characteristics—that a human being was a creature with two legs and no feathers.21Diogenes Laertius (2nd century AD), Greek writer. Peri bion doniaton kai apophthegmaton ton en philosophia endokimesanton (lives of the Greek philosophers). Book 6, ch. 2, 40: ‘When Plato made the definition that man is a two-legged featherless creature, and people applauded this, he [Diogenes of Sinope] plucked a cockerel and brought him to the school, saying: This is Plato’s man.’ The next time someone brought along a cockerel which he had plucked—a ‘human being’!
Well, I do of course know the requirements for a proper logical definition. However, from the spiritual point of view, definitions show definite bias. So do all statements of purpose, of causality, and so on. Reality is something into which you find your way, in which you are alive and active, but you do not define it using biased terms. You will find the purposes in successive lives on earth. But when someone asks about the ‘purpose of reincarnation’, this lacks substance.
Question. Is reincarnation a product of ideas developed in the spiritual realm?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, one might say so. One will, however, have to take into account what I said in my book. The kind of ideas we have in our ordinary way of thinking are not really true ideas from the spiritual point of view. They have been deprived of life and are like corpses of ideas. This is the strange thing. Much more lives in the soul than does normally come to conscious awareness. Much of it is partly deprived of life because we would be unable to bear it in our ordinary way of thinking. It is then like the corpse of an idea. Hence the abstract notions we have. They are really only a reflection, something that arises and passes away again. We do not remember it at all, as I have shown in the lecture. Behind it, however, is the living, spiritual reality which enters into vision in images, which goes through death and does live in the powers of reincarnation. Perhaps this would answer the question.
Question. Does reincarnation follow absolute established laws rather than being the outcome of creative etheric powers?
Only life between birth and death, or rather conception and death, is the outcome of creative etheric powers. The principle we are calling ‘reincarnation’ is subject to much higher spiritual laws. It is difficult to say if it is ‘established law’; it is simply a fact. Repeated lives on earth are a fact. ‘Outcome of creative etheric powers?’ Human beings only acquire an ether body as they are moving towards conception; they lay it aside again after death; the body of creative powers is not eternal, as I said in my lecture. But the powers to be considered when we speak of the laws of reincarnation do not enter into the human I’s awareness nor do they enter into the sphere of the ordinary physical world.
You see, the way would open up for many people even in this realm if we were only to look for it in the right way. The point is—and I have spoken of this with reference to individual instances—that experiences gained in the world of the spirit seem paradoxical compared to those we have in everyday life. In many respects the things you find in the other world are completely different from those we know in the physical world. We have to say that with their capacity for forming ideas based on experiences gained in natural life, through natural events, human beings are hardly able to go beyond ideas relating to space. Honest and more accurate self knowledge shows how little we are able to go beyond concepts of space. Just consider, how do we gain ideas of time? Really from ideas of space. Changes in space, the sun’s and moon’s changes in position, and indeed the hands of a clock in our case—that is how we gain our ideas of time. In reality they are ideas of space. The spiritual principle, on the other hand, lives in time even in its lowest form, which is the body of creative powers. Here we need a real idea of time!
Very few people are able to get a real idea of time today. And one is even less able to get a real idea of the different velocities—not times, therefore, but velocities—that apply in the realm of soul and spirit. Our inner life depends on the fact that our thinking, the forming of ideas, for instance, goes at quite a different speed from our feeling, and this again goes at a different speed from our doing. These things—that different velocities are layered one inside the other in the inner life—actually cause conscious awareness to arise in us. Conscious awareness only arises where something meets with interference. This is actually why it is also related to death—for death interferes with life. But it is altogether the situation that interference occurs. This is why Bergson’s view is so wrong, for instance, that one should always look to life and movement;22Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner. His views on our inability to grasp life, or anything that moves, in our thoughts are above all presented in La pensée et le mouvant. Essais et conférences, 3rd edn, Paris 1934, especially in the lecture given in Bologna on 10 April 1911, entitled ‘L’intuition philosophique’. instead we come to the nature of movement by impeding it, and to the nature of life by seeing how death takes hold of life. To enter into the essential nature of life is something different from having a view of life.
All this makes us realize that the nature of law itself changes when you enter into the life of the spirit, and many people find this highly inconvenient. They therefore do not even take courage and enter into that life with their concepts and ideas, for those concepts and ideas would have to change. In genuine spiritual investigation you essentially get to know this very, very well. I do not like to bring in anything personal, for personal elements have not much to do with being objective. But many years ago an important question arose for me which has proved fruitful in a particular field. Herbart23Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1776–1841), German philosopher and educationist. See his Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegruendet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik, Koenigsberg 1824. and other psychologists applied arithmetic or mathematics to research in their field; they tried to calculate facts relating to the psyche. Eduard von Hartmann24Hartmann, Eduard von (1842–1906), German philosopher. even tried to calculate facts that must be taken in a moral sense when he undertook to establish the basis of pessimism mathematically. He put all pleasures on the debit side of life and all negative experiences on the credit side, and then said: the negative experiences show a surplus; therefore life is bad.
I have shown the whole of this to be nonsense. You will find the proof I gave in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity25See Steiner, Rudolf The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (GA 4), Tr. R. Stebbing rev. Bristol: Rudolf Steiner Press 1963. ch. 13. A number of other translations have been published, the most recent being Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. A Philosophy of Freedom. Tr. M. Lipson. Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1995. written in 1894. If you want to speak of calculations, you have to make quite a different start, not establishing the balance by subtraction but writing a division, a fraction, making all pleasure, delight, experiences that prove elevating in life the enumerator and all pain and suffering the denominator. Let us look at this division. When would life seem to be no longer worth living? If the denominator were zero, if there were no pain at all, the figure would be infinitely great. But the denominator would have to be infinitely great if the fraction were to equal zero. This means that life would no longer seem worth living only if the pain was infinitely great. This cannot be decided by any kind of abstract reckoning but only by life itself. Life does its reckoning in this way.
When it comes to the psyche, we cannot do calculations about inner events the way Herbart or Hartmann wanted to do it. Life gives the result, and when you get up into the worlds of the spirit the result divides up—a sum into summands, a fraction into enumerator and denominator. You get exactly the opposite. Here in physical life, you have the individual summands and enumerators and denominators and then get your result. There it is the other way round. You have the result, it is inner experience, and the individual elements that lead to the result go into the world of the spirit. So you see, many of our ideas have to be completely rethought if we want to cross the threshold from the physical world to the world of the spirit.
Perhaps the things I have said in connection with this question will give you the idea that this science of the spirit really is not something straight off the bat, nor is it the offspring of fantasy. It is something which, as I said in the lecture, needs no less effort to gain than any other kind of scientific work. Only the powers needed for this belong to another sphere. We therefore have to say that there is a law to the progression of repeated lives on earth. But the nature of this law is something we must first of all get hold of. This is why I said it is not a matter of interpreting natural phenomena but of truly rising above them so that we may live freely in the spirit inwardly. This, then, answers the question.
Now a strange question—strange after this lecture: Question: Which are the spiritual organs of touch?
Well, we should not think of this as something physical. I made it quite clear that it is something that exists in the realm of soul and spirit and can only be compared with something that arises from memory. If you want the kind of answer where you have the specific ‘spiritual organs of touch’ and are then looking for a generic term, you’ll not achieve anything. Instead, we have to find our way through, as I have shown. The soul reaches limits, differentiates and develops ‘spiritual organs of touch’ which in the realm of soul and spirit can be compared to the organs of touch we have in the physical realm, just as we may compare ‘eyes of the spirit’ and ‘ears of the spirit’ with physical eyes and physical ears.
Question. Are there clear definitions of what we understand by 'belief’?
I would really need to give you the history and origins of the word ‘belief’ to make the answer complete, and then show how the different kinds of belief evolved from this. Let me say the following, however. In more recent times the meaning of the word ‘belief’ has been limited to ‘taking something to be true’ on a subjective basis—insight, therefore, that is not real insight but a subjective surrogate of insight. The word did not always have such a limited meaning. To understand the background to the idea of belief we have to consider the following.
In today’s lecture I mentioned just briefly that the soul related to reality in a different way in earlier times. It has only come to stand apart from the reality of the natural world in more recent times. In those earlier times, when the soul was still more closely connected with the spiritual reality and had developed an inner awareness of soul content that was other than it has to be now in modern anthroposophy, people knew that if they took something to be true, this was not just a theoretical attitude, for their believing something to be true also had the power of living reality in it. If I have an ideal and believe in my ideal, this is not just a matter of letting the idea of the ideal be present in the mind; a power of soul connects with the ideal. And this is part of the human being’s reality. Human beings are involved in creating reality. Here ‘belief’ means a positive way of generating inner power.
The concept ‘belief’ is presented in a similar way in Ricarda Huch’s interesting book on Luther’s faith.26Huch, Ricarda (1864–1947), German novelist and historian. Luthers Glaube, Briefe an einen Freund (Luther’s faith, letters to a friend), Leipzig 1916. See also Rudolf Steiner's lecture on Luther given in Berlin on 11 September 1917, in Karma of Materialism (GA 176) tr. R. Stebbing; New York & London: Anthroposophic Press & Rudolf Steiner Press 1985. There, too, the concept of belief is found to be not just believing something to be true but connecting oneself with the reality as it evolves. I would like to say that when one is in the power of belief, one has something in oneself like the seed which a plant holds in itself; it is not yet a real plant but has the power to grow into a real plant.
Belief thus should not be the image or reflection of an insight but an element in the realm of ideas that connects with a genuine power, so that we are wholly within reality with our belief. And if someone were to insist that belief gives him no insight, he would nevertheless have to admit that if he uses the concept ‘belief’ in this way, the reality in it places him in the real world.
These are just hints, brief comments.
Geisteswissenschaftliche Ergebnisse über die Menschlichen Seelenfragen
Was in diesem Vortrage hier mit Anthroposophie gemeint sein wird, soll nicht irgend etwas sein, das sich aus einer sektiererischen Bewegung oder Geistesströmung oder dergleichen heraus ergibt, sondern etwas viel AllgemeinerMenschliches: eine Geistesströmung, welche sich mit innerer Notwendigkeit in unserer Zeitepoche ergibt aus dem Heraufkommen der naturwissenschaftlichen Weltanschauung im Laufe der letzten Jahrhunderte in der Gestalt, welche diese naturwissenschaftliche Weltanschauung insbesondere in unserer Zeit angenommen hat.
Dabei ist aber nicht zu denken, daß dieses als Anthroposophie Gemeinte wie eine logische Folge, wie irgendeine Urteilskonsequenz sich ergeben soll aus naturwissenschaftlichen Voraussetzungen; sondern gedacht ist vielmehr, daß diese Anthroposophie sich als lebendiges Gebilde, als Erlebnis, selbst entwickeln muß in einem Zeitalter, das für viele Fragen des Lebens, der Welt, naturwissenschaftlich denken muß. Mehr wie ein lebendiges Kind — wenn ich so sagen darf — der naturwissenschaftlichen Vorstellungsart, denn als eine bloß logische Konsequenz, ist diese Anthroposophie gedacht.
Nun muß ich mich allerdings bemühen, sehr verehrte Anwesende, diese vier Vorträge, die über die verschiedensten Gebiete der gegenwärtigen Wissenschaften sich erstrekken sollen, zu einem Ganzen zu gestalten. Daher wird der einzelne Vortrag als solcher kein abgeschlossenes Ganzes sein können, und ich werde sehr bitten müssen, dieses zu berücksichtigen.
Wenn ich die Vortragsserie eröffne mit einer Besprechung der Beziehungen von Anthroposophie und Seelenwissenschaft, so scheint dies insofern natürlich, ja selbstverständlich zu sein, als Anthroposophie, die orientiert sein will nach der geistigen Welt, die ihre Forschungsergebnisse aus der geistigen Welt heraus suchen soll, zunächst ganz besonders sich wird zu schaffen machen müssen mit den inneren Angelegenheiten des Menschen selbst, mit dem seelischen Leben des Menschen. Dies auf der einen Seite. Auf der anderen Seite aber kommt in Betracht, daß im Laufe der letzten Jahrhunderte, insbesondere im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts, dasjenige, was man Seelenwissenschaft, Psychologie nennt, im Grunde ein ganz anderes Gepräge erhalten hat, als es noch vor kurzer Zeit hatte. Seelenwissenschaft ist gerade durch die Ausdehnung des naturwissenschaftlichen Denkens über viele Gebiete des Lebens vielleicht rätselvoller geworden, mehr erfüllt worden von allen möglichen Lebensrätseln als irgendeine andere wissenschaftliche Betätigung der neueren Zeit. Es war ja nur natürlich bei den großen, gewaltigen Ergebnissen des naturwissenschaftlichen Forschens, daß naturwissenschaftlich-methodisches Denken, naturwissenschaftliche Anschauungsweise gewissermaßen Besitz ergriff von alldem, was im Bereiche der menschlichen Erkenntnis liegt. So ist es denn auch gekommen, daß diese naturwissenschaftliche Anschauungsweise, man könnte sagen, ihre Macht ausgedehnt hat in der neueren Zeit über das Gebiet des Seelenlebens.
Nun möchte ich von vornherein das Vorurteil, das Mißverständnis, das sich so leicht gerade gegenüber anthroposophischer Forschung erheben will, berichtigen, das darinnen bestehen könnte, daß anthroposophisch orientierte Geisteswissenschaft nicht rechnen wolle mit dem, was naturwissenschaftliche Vorstellungsart der neueren Zeit der Menschheit zu bieten hat. Im Gegenteil, die weiteren Vorträge, die ich hier werde zu halten haben, werden gerade zeigen, wie Naturwissenschaft erst dann zu ihrem vollen Rechte kommt, wenn sie diejenige starke Begründung erfährt, die sie durch Anthroposophie oder Geisteswissenschaft erfahren kann. Und in gewisser Beziehung wird sich das schon bei der Betrachtung des Verhältnisses der Anthroposophie zur menschlichen Seelenwissenschaft zeigen. Es ist ein berechtigtes Ideal der modernen Naturwissenschaft, dasjenige, was sie betrachtet als natürliches Geschehen, als Inhalt der Naturprozesse und Naturtatsachen, abzulösen von jeglichem Seelischen, nirgends in die wissenschaftliche Beobachtung, in das wissenschaftliche Experiment hineinzumischen irgend etwas, was aus dem Subjektiven — wie man es nennt —, was aus dem seelischen Erleben kommt. Dadurch allein kann diese naturwissenschaftliche Denkweise hoffen, daß der Mensch nicht das objektive Bild der Naturtatsachen durch dasjenige trübt, was er durch seine seelischen Tendenzen, durch seine seelischen Erlebnisse in die Natur hineinträgt.
Es ist nur natürlich, daß unter einem solchen Ideal ganz besonders die Seelenwissenschaft eine bestimmte Ausprägung erfahren mußte. Denn so wie sich die Seele zur Außenwelt stellen muß in der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis der Natur, so hat sich diese Seele in früheren Zeitläuften zur Außenwelt nicht gestellt. Wer wirklich einen Sinn dafür hat, sich in wissenschaftliches Denken, in Weltauffassungen verflossener Jahrhunderte hineinzufinden, der kann bemerken, daß in diesen früheren Zeitläuften die Menschen überall, wenn sie versuchten, die Naturtatsachen zu erklären und zu begreifen, diese Naturtatsachen nicht rein sonderten von dem, was die Seele empfand an diesen Naturtatsachen, was die Seele sich als, sagen wir, symbolische oder andere Vorstellungen an diesen Naturtatsachen machen wollte. Es war gewissermaßen dasjenige, was der Mensch an der Natur erlebte, vermischt mit dem, was objektive Naturtatsache selbst war. Dadurch aber, daß die Naturwissenschaft selbst nicht frei von manchem war, was die Seele hergab, dadurch kam man in bezug auf die Seelenwissenschaft in keine so rätselvolle Lage hinein wie in der Gegenwart. Wer schon Seelisches in der Natur geoffenbart kriegte und mit den rein materiellen Tatsachen das Seelische mit herausnahm aus der Natur, der konnte auch viel eher glauben, in bezug auf das Gebautsein des Seelischen im Wesen der geistigen Welt im Einklange mit der Natur- und Weltbetrachtung irgend etwas zu erfahren — viel eher, als dies jetzt möglich zu sein scheint, wo man die Natur so betrachten will, daß gerade alles «Subjektive», alles Seelische bei dieser Betrachtung wegbleibt. Wie soll man denn mit einer naturwissenschaftlichen Anschauungsart, die gerade ihr vollkommenstes Ideal darinnen sieht, das Seelische auszuschließen, die also Begriffe, Ideen, Methoden ausbilden muß, welche auf dem Ausschluß des Seelischen beruhen, wie soll man denn mit diesen Methoden nun herübergehen können in das Seelische und von diesem Seelischen irgend etwas erkennen können? Wie soll man denn anwenden können, was man an der Naturwissenschaft, die das Seelische ausschließt, gelernt hat, auf die Betrachtung des seelischen Lebens?
Dennoch, wir werden im dritten Vortrage sehen, wie gerade Physiologie, und wie auch eine sehr zukunftsreiche Wissenschaft, die gegenwärtig erst anfängt, sich die Universitätslehrstühle zu erobern: die experimentelle Psychologie, ihre guten Grundlagen finden werden, wenn man wiederum die Möglichkeit findet, trotz dem Ideal naturwissenschaftlicher Betrachtungsweise zu einer Seelenwissenschaft zu kommen. Denn, was hier vertreten werden soll, das steht in keiner Beziehung demjenigen ablehnend gegenüber, was von seiten der Naturwissenschaft als Hilfswissenschaft dem seelischen Leben zugeflossen ist. Im Gegenteil! Gerade was psychologische Laboratorien der neueren Zeit anstreben, wird von einem gewissen anthroposophischen Gesichtspunkte aus erst seine rechte Fruchtbarkeit, seine rechte Bedeutung gewinnen.
Man kann sich nun fragen: Was will eigentlich der Mensch, wenn er sich wissenschaftlich der Natur gegenüberstellt in der Form, wie das heute die Naturwissenschaft mit Recht tut? Was will eigentlich der Mensch an der Natur erkennen? Man könnte über diese Frage stundenlang reden; allein ich will nur kurz andeuten, wie sie etwa beantwortet werden kann.
Der Mensch entwickelt in dem, was sich abspielt im Laufe des seelischen Lebens, gewisse Bedürfnisse, die sich einfach dadurch ergeben, daß er in sich seelisch erlebt und außer sich den Ablauf der Naturtatsachen hat. Aus diesen Bedürfnissen heraus entwickelt sich dasjenige, was Naturwissenschaft ist. Man will in der Seele selbst zurechtkommen mit dem, was die Seele fragen kann, mit dem, was die Seele als Rätsel, als Zweifel sich aufwerfen kann bei der Anschauung der Natur. Und man will die Natur in einem solchen Bilde sehen, daß dasjenige, was als innerer Ablauf der seelischen Erlebnisse in uns erfahren wird, dabei zu seinem Rechte kommt. Der Beobachter ist es eigentlich, der die Direktiven, der die Tendenzen der Naturwissenschaft gibt. Man braucht sich nur etwa an einen solchen Ausspruch wie den von Da» Bois-Reymond zu erinnern, den er gelegentlich seiner berühmten Rede «Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens» tat: Eine Naturerkenntnis ist dann vorhanden, wenn unser Kausalitätsbedürfnis — also ein Subjektives, etwas, das im menschlichen Erleben begründet ist —, wenn das befriedigt ist. Das aber setzt voraus, daß dieses subjektive, persönliche seelische Erleben mit seinen Fragen, mit seinen Zweifeln wie einer Sphinxnatur gegenübersteht dem äußeren Ablauf der Naturerscheinungen, daß diese nicht in ihrem ersten Anblicke ergeben, was das Seelenleben als ein Bild von ihnen formt. Wir können das erste Bild, das sich dem vorläufigen Anschauen ergibt, durch das, was in unserer Seele abläuft, verändern und bekommen dadurch gerade die Naturwissenschaft.
Können wir dies mit dem seelischen Leben ebenso machen? Diese Frage beantwortet man sich nur nicht immer deutlich und exakt genug. Zum Seelischen können wir uns nicht in derselben Art fragend mit dem gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein stellen, wie zur Natur. Dieses Seelische läuft in uns ab. Wir können es bloß erfahren, bloß erleben. Aber wir werden nichts gewinnen, wenn wir das, was uns schon bekannt ist, dann so gliedern, wie wir gesetzmäßig die Natur gliedern, um zu einer Naturwissenschaft zu kommen. Dieses seelische Erleben, wie es im gewöhnlichen Alltagsdasein auftritt, kann man erleben; aber es ist eigentlich, indem man es so erlebt, kein Anlaß da, es in derselben Weise zu behandeln wie die Naturtatsachen. Diese führen auf Schritt und Tritt sozusagen ins Unbekannte, während wir im seelischen Erleben unmittelbar drinnenstehen. Man muß sich schon an der Naturwissenschaft selbst gewisse Fragestellungen anerziehen, wenn man dem seelischen Erleben gegenüber eine ähnliche Methode anwenden will, wie sie in der Naturwissenschaft üblich ist.
Man könnte nun sagen: Der Natur gegenüber ist der Beobachter als selbstverständliche Außenpersönlichkeit gegeben; dem seelischen Erleben steht kein Beobachter gegenüber. Daher verzweifelten manche Leute überhaupt an einer Möglichkeit, das seelische Leben zu beobachten, weil sie sich gar nicht vorstellen konnten, wie die Spaltung sich vollziehen könnte: daß man zu gleicher Zeit den Ablauf des Seelenlebens hat und dennoch Beobachter ist.
Das ist es aber gerade, dieses sonderbare Paradoxon, was eintreten muß, um eine Seelenwissenschaft, die sich der Naturwissenschaft zur Seite stellen kann, ich möchte sagen, im Geiste der Forderungen der Naturwissenschaft wieder erstehen zu lassen. Die Frage nach dem Beobachter des seelischen Lebens muß ernst, muß in ihrer vollen Bedeutung und Tiefe genommen werden. Dasjenige, was in uns lebt, kann dieses Seelische nicht unmittelbar beobachten. Wenn der Naturforscher, der das Ideal naturwissenschaftlicher Anschauung in der Gegenwart erfüllen will, in seiner Vorstellungsweise alles absondert, was Seele ist, wenn er gewissermaßen das Seelische ganz zurücktreten läßt, so muß der Seelenforscher heute den gerade entgegengesetzten Weg gehen: Er muß nun nichts absondern von den seelischen Erlebnissen, sondern er muß etwas hereinholen in diese seelischen Erlebnisse; er muß diese seelischen Erlebnisse mit etwas durchdringen, was im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein nicht da ist. Gerade den entgegengesetzten Weg muß der Seelenforscher gehen! Weil Naturwissenschaft groß geworden ist auf ihrem Wege, muß der Seelenforscher diesen entgegengesetzten Weg gehen. Die große, bedeutungsvolle Frage entsteht: Wie kann dieser Weg gefunden werden?
Da werde ich nun manches Paradoxe zu sagen haben. Aber ich bitte, darauf Rücksicht zu nehmen, daß dasjenige, was im Laufe der menschlichen Geistesentwickelung auftrat, in den ersten Zeiten seines Auftretens immer einen paradoxen Charakter hatte. Man denke nur an die großen, umwälzenden naturwissenschaftlichen Errungenschaften selbst, wie sie auf den Menschen gewirkt haben, welche Zweifel, welche Anfechtungen, welche Kämpfe sie hervorgerufen haben! Dem Seelischen steht der Mensch noch viel näher als der Natur. Kein Wunder, wenn sich auch bezüglich der neueren Seelenwissenschaft so manches von dem wieder ergeben kann, was sich bei dem Fortschritte des naturwissenschaftlichen Forschens ergeben hat.
Klar muß man sich von vornherein bei der anthroposophisch orientierten Seelenwissenschaft sein, daß man mit dem Bewußtsein, das unseren Alltag erfüllt, das auch in der gewöhnlichen naturwissenschaftlichen Forschung üblich ist, wie ich schon angeführt habe, nicht auskommt. Seelenwissenschaft wird eine Bewußtseinsfrage werden. Und als solche Bewußtseinsfrage habe ich diese Seelenwissenschaft in meinem vor einem Jahre erschienenen Buche «Vom Menschenrätsel» behandelt: Wenn die Seele so, wie sie im gewöhnlichen Erleben ihren eigenen Erfahrungen gegenübersteht, von diesen Erfahrungen im Grunde nichts wissen kann - wenn sie sie nur erleben kann, wie man die äußere Natur, bevor man ein naturwissenschaftliches Bild von ihr hat, erlebt —, so deutet das schon darauf hin, daß diese Seele mit sich Veränderungen vornehmen muß, wenn sie ihre eigenen Tatsachen beobachten will. Das wird manche Schwierigkeiten geben gegenüber der herrschenden Denkweise der Gegenwart. Diese geht dahin, an die Seele ja nicht zu rühren, sie so zu lassen, wie man sie gewissermaßen, wie man etwa sagt, «aus den Händen der Natur selbst» erhalten hat, und in der Wissenschaft an dasjenige, was da in ihr lebt, anzuknüpfen. Seelenwissenschaft wird aber aus den tieferen Quellen, die für das gewöhnliche Erleben verborgen sind, Kräfte heraufholen müssen, durch die andere Beobachtungsmethoden, andere Vorstellungsarten entstehen, als sie im gewöhnlichen Leben da sind.
Nun will ich in Kürze schlicht schildern, was mit der menschlichen Seele vorgehen muß, wenn sie ein wirklicher Beobachter der eigenen seelischen Erlebnisse werden will, besser gesagt, wenn sie den inneren Beobachter, der in ihr verborgen ist, erwecken will, damit sie ihr eigenes Erleben erforschen kann. Mit dem Denken, mit all den Vorstellungsformen, die man sich bei der Betrachtung der äußeren Natur aneignet, kommt man dem Seelischen gegenüber nicht zurecht. Man kommt mit all diesen Vorstellungen — wie man, gerade wenn man innerlich ringt mit der Erkenntnis, bald bemerken kann — überhaupt nicht hinaus über den Tatsachenkreis, der sich naturwissenschaftlich überschauen läßt; man kommt damit gar nicht heran an das Seelische.
Die Sache wird in dem Augenblicke anders, da man an die Punkte — ich nenne sie Grenzorte des Erkennens — kommt, an denen der Mensch zunächst zweifelnd steht und oftmals sich sagt: Bis hierher kommen wir mit dem, was uns als Menschen einmal beschieden ist in bezug auf unseren Erkenntnistrieb; aber hier liegen unübersteigliche Grenzen; über die kommt man nicht hinaus. - Man braucht nur zu sehen, wie Menschen, die, gerade erfüllt von der naturwissenschaftlichen Anschauungsweise der letzten Zeiten, mit ihren Gedanken versuchen, immer tiefer und tiefer in das Dasein hineinzuschürfen, an solche Grenzorte des Erkennens herangelangen. Ich will ein paar Beispiele anführen, die uns zeigen werden, wie der nach Erkenntnis Ringende da wirklich an ganz besondere Stellen des Seelenerlebens kommt.
Als erstes Beispiel möchte ich eines anführen, das ich gefunden habe bei einem vielleicht als Philosoph weniger geschätzten, aber als Persönlichkeit um so höher zu schätzenden Erkenntnissucher: bei dem berühmten Ästhetiker Friedrich Theodor Vischer. Als Vischer das interessante Büchelchen Volkelts über «Die Traum-Phantasie» besprach, da warf er sich mit aller inneren Erkenntnisenergie die Frage auf: Welches kann die Beziehung sein der menschlichen Seele und des menschlichen Leibes?
Es ist ein anderes, ob man sich aus philosophischen Voraussetzungen, aus Schulbegriffen heraus dieses Problem vorlegt, ob man sich nur verstandesmäßig damit beschäftigt, oder ob es aus einem harten Denk-Erleben heraus vor die Seele tritt, so daß es wirklich wie sphinzartig sich vor diese Seele hinstellt. Aus solchem bangem Erleben heraus stellte sich — das sieht man dem ganzen Zusammenhang an der sogenannte V-Vischer, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, die Frage. Er sagt: Die Seele des Menschen, sie kann nicht im Leibe sein; aber sie kann auch nicht anderswo als im Leibe sein. — Ein vollständiger Widerspruch! Aber ein Widerspruch, der sich nicht logisch herbeigezerrt ergibt, sondern der sich aus dem vollen inneren Denken heraus ergibt, ein Widerspruch, in dem man ringt, ein Widerspruch, der der Beginn sein kann eines inneren Erkenntnisdramas. Und vor solchen inneren Erkenntnisdramen, weil sie zum Erleben führen, darf man nicht zurückschrecken, wenn wirkliche Seelenwissenschaft entstehen soll.
Ich habe damit eine der sehr bedeutungsvollen Fragen, die an den Grenzorten des Erkennens entstehen, angedeutet. Es gibt viele. Du Bois-Reymond hat von sieben Welträtseln gesprochen. Man könnte Hunderte und Hunderte kleinerer und größerer solcher Fragen anführen. Bei diesen Fragen kann man so stehenbleiben, daß man sagt: Bis hierher reicht das menschliche Erkennen, weiter kann man nicht gehen! — Aber wenn man sich dieses Geständnis macht, dann fehlt es nur an Erkenntnismut. Das, um was es sich handelt, ist: bei solchen Fragen mit dem vollen inneren Seelenleben stehenbleiben zu können, diese Fragen mit allen gesamten Kräften der Seele nicht verstandesmäßig zu betrachten, sondern sie zu durchleben und Geduld zu haben, zu warten; ob sich da etwas wie eine Offenbarung von außen ergibt. Und das geschieht.
Wer sich solche Fragen nicht mit den vorgefaßten Begriffen, die er schon hat, beantworten will, sondern gewissermaßen untertaucht in das Wogen, das solche Fragen über die menschliche Seele bringen, der kommt zu einem völlig neuen Erleben, das er nicht im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein haben kann. Ich kann mich durch einen Vergleich ausdrücken über dieses Erleben. Es ist ein elementares Erleben des Seelendaseins und ein elementares Erleben für die Entstehung einer anthroposophisch orientierten Seelenwissenschaft oder Psychologie. Man muß es nur in seiner vollen Realität nehmen, nicht in seiner abstrakten Torheit. Wir denken - ob der Vergleich nun mehr oder weniger berechtigt ist oder nicht, darauf kommt es jetzt nicht an, was er uns sagen soll, wird er uns sagen —, wir denken an ein ganz niedriges Tier, das noch nicht einen nach außen hin differenzierten Tastsinn sich ausgebildet hat, das gewissermaßen mit seinem Erleben nur innerlich in sich selber wühlt und an die physischen Gegenstände um sich herum anstößt. Wir denken uns im Sinne der Evolutionstheorie, solch ein Leben sich vervollkommnend. Was kann da entstehen? Dasjenige, was beim niedrigen Wesen nur ein Stoßen an die äußeren Dinge ist und ein innerlich undifferenziertes Erleben dieser Stöße, das differenziert sich im Laufe der Entwickelung so, daß der’Iastsinn entsteht. Die naturwissenschaftliche Evolutionslehre stellt die Differenzierung des Sinnenlebens überhaupt so, ich möchte sagen, aus dem Gestoßenwerden von den Dingen, aus dem Differenziertwerden durch dieses Gestoßenwerden dar. Was da äußerlich, physiologisch, physisch meinetwillen geschieht: die Entwickelung eines differenzierten Tastsinnes aus dem bloßen Anstoßen an die äußeren Gegenstände, das wiederholt sich auf rein seelischem Gebiete, wenn man die Dinge lebensvoll nimmt, wenn man an solche Grenzorte des Erkennens mit vollem, innerem Seelenanteil kommt. Da fühlt man sich an diesen Grenzorten zunächst wie in der Dunkelheit der geistigen Welt drinnen, anstoßend überall. Daß solche Fragen wie bei Vischer entstehen, ist einem ein Beweis: Man lebt in einem dunklen seelischen Dasein, gegründet in der geistigen Welt, stoßend an die geistige Welt. Aber differenzieren muß sich nun dasjenige, was so stößt an die geistige Welt!
Im wirklichen Erleben solcher Grenzfragen fügt sich, offenbart sich in die Seele etwas hinein, was sonst nicht da ist, was ebensowenig vorher in der Seele da ist, wie die Wahrnehmung der äußeren Gegenstände durch einen differenzierten Tastsinn da ist für das Wesen, das diesen differenzierten Tastsinn noch nicht entwickelt hat, sondern nur an die Dinge stößt. Man muß dazu kommen, die Grenzfragen, diese zahllosen, quälenden, sphinxartigen Grenzfragen zu erleben, um zu wissen: die Methoden, die wir an der Natur gewinnen können, die Methoden, die gerade das Ideal naturwissenschaftlicher Anschauungsweise erfüllen, sie führen, wenn es sich um das Seelisch-Geistige handelt, nur bis zu einem Stoßen an den Grenzen; da muß das Leben weiterrücken!
Und es kann weiterrücken. Das kann nur eine Erfahrungstatsache sein. Was ich hier meine, das tritt dem in der Naturwissenschaft wurzelnden Denker der letzten Jahrzehnte nur allzu klar, nur allzu bedeutsam vor die Seele. Denn erst allmählich kann die Zeit heraufkommen, wo durch geduldiges Sich-Hineinfinden in diese Grenzfragen des Erkennens die Seele wirklich ihr Lebensgebiet ausdehnt. Ich habe Beispiele solcher Grenzfragen angeführt in dem kleinen Kapitel, das ich gerade über diese Fragen in meinem Buche, das in den nächsten Tagen erscheinen wird, «Von Seelenrätseln», geschrieben habe.
Ich möchte noch eine andere solche Grundgrenzfrage, wie sie auftritt bei Friedrich Theodor Vischer, anführen, als Beispiel, wie jemand, der wirklich beginnt, das Erkenntnisdrama in sich zu erleben, herankommt an das, was ich eben jetzt charakterisiert habe — wenn auch, als Friedrich Theodor Vischer strebte, noch nicht die Zeit da war, in der die Seele durchbrechen konnte durch die Grenzen, an denen sie steht —, innerlich tastend, noch nicht äußerlich differenziert im geistigen Tasten. Vischer sagt da: «Kein Geist, wo kein Nerven-Zentrum, wo kein Gehirn, sagen die Gegner. Kein Nerven-Zentrum, kein Gehirn, sagen wir, wenn es nicht von unten auf unzähligen Stufen vorbereitet wäre; es ist leicht, spöttlich von einem Umrumoren des Geistes in Granit und Kalk zu reden, — nicht schwerer, als es uns wäre, spottweise zu fragen, wie sich das Eiweiß im Gehirn zu Ideen aufschwinge. Der menschlichen Erkenntnis schwindet die Messung der Stufenunterschiede. Es wird Geheimnis bleiben, wie es kommt und zugeht, daß die Natur, unter welcher doch der Geist schlummern muß, als so vollkommener Gegenschlag des Geistes dasteht, daß wir uns» — ich bitte, die Redeweise ins Auge zu fassen! — «Beulen daran stoßen; es ist eine Diremtion von solchem Schein der Absolutheit, daß mit Hegels Anderssein und Außersichsein, so geistreich die Formel, doch so gut wie nichts gesagt, die Schroffheit der scheinbaren Scheidewand einfach verdeckt wird. Die richtige Anerkennung der Schneide und des Stoßes in diesem Gegenschlag findet man bei Fichte, aber keine Erklärung dafür.»
Man kann nicht genauer die Schilderung dieses inneren Seelenlebens haben: wie es sich fühlt zunächst anschlagend an die geistige Welt da, wo es diese Grenzfragen erlebt, wie es sich sehnt, sich aus diesem Heranschlagen an die geistige Welt zu differenzieren zu einem wirklichen Tasten der geistigen Welt, zu einem Aufgehen eines - um den Goetheschen Ausdruck zu gebrauchen - geistigen Organes. Wie Goethe von Geistesaugen und Geistesohren spricht, so könnte man sagen, gehen auf der elementarsten Stufe geistige Tastorgane auf, dadurch, daß man sich in diese Dinge hineinlebt. Das ist ein wirklicher Lebensprozeß, ein wirklicher Wachstumsprozeß; das ist nicht eine bloße Anwendung desjenigen, was man schon gelernt hat an den anderen Wissenschaften; sondern das ist etwas, was so real ist wie das Heranwachsen des Kindes, was aber die Seele in Regionen hineinbringt, die sie vorher nicht erlebt hat.
Über diese Dinge täuschen sich heute viele. Einer ganz prinzipiellen Täuschung auf diesem Gebiete gibt sich der berühmt gewordene Philosoph Bergson zum Beispiel hin. Bergson spricht davon, daß man nicht die Welt umfassen könne mit dem zergliedernden Verstande, daß man insbesondere das Seelenleben nicht erfassen könne mit dem zergliedernden Verstande, weil im Seelischen, weil überhaupt im Dasein überall «Werden» ist, überall «Fließen», überall «Leben». Was glaubt Bergson? Daß dasjenige, worauf es ankommt, schon da ist, daß man es suchen kann mit den Kräften, die man schon hat. Das ist aber der große Irrtum. Da finder man nicht dasjenige, was das Seelische wirklich erklären kann, sondern die Seele muß über sich selber hinausgehen; die Seele muß etwas entwickeln, was sie nicht hat. Sie muß nicht glauben, daß das Leben, das sie erforschen soll, schon da ist, sondern daß dieses Leben erst errungen werden muß.
Vor diesem Sich-Vertiefen in das Erkenntnisdrama des Inneren haben viele — ich darf den Ausdruck wohl gebrauchen — eigentlich eine große Angst. Sie glauben, in den Abgrund der Subjektivität, in den Abgrund der Individualität hineinzukommen. Wenn sie sich wirklich in solcher Art in diesen Abgrund hineinbegeben würden, wie es jetzt geschildert worden ist, dann würden sie finden, daß, indem sie das tun, sie innerlich ein so Objektives finden, wie man äußerlich das Objektive findet, wenn man der Natur gegenübersteht. Es ist nur eine Illusion, wenn man glaubt, daß der eine Mensch dieses, der andere jenes beim Durchleben des Erkenntnisdramas findet. In gewisser Beziehung müssen die individuellen Erlebnisse verschieden sein, weil sie verschiedene Aspekte, verschiedene Ansichten desselben Dinges von verschiedenen Seiten sind. Aber damit, daß man Photographien von verschiedenen Seiten von irgendeinem Ding aufnimmt und diese Photographien verschieden sind, damit ist nicht gesagt, daß das Ding selbst nicht sein Objektives diesen Aspekten darbietet. Man muß das, was der Erkenner auf diese Weise heraufholt aus seiner Seele, nicht so nehmen, daß man es rein dogmatisch hinnimmt, daß man nun an die besondere Formulierung, die er gibt, wie an ein Dogma oder ein Naturgesetz glaubt. Sondern man muß sich klar sein: Es mag noch so subjektiv durch den besonderen Aspekt das sein, was durch die geistigen Tastorgane erscheint — und wenn die Methoden, die ich jetzt nur prinzipiell angegeben habe, weiter ausgebildet sind, so entstehen wirklich geistig-seelische Organe, die man mit Geistesaugen und Geistesohren vergleichen kann -, wenn auf Grundlage des schauenden Bewußtseins, so nenne ich es in meinem Buche «Vom Menschenrätsel», die geistige Welt charakterisiert wird, dann mag das, was der Beobachter schildert, ein subjektiver Aspekt sein; aber indem man es hinnimmt, steht man der geistigen Wirklichkeit gegenüber, wie man ein wirkliches Abbild eines Baumes hat, wenn man es auch nur von einer Seite hat. Das ist das, was gerade auf diesem Gebiete verstanden werden muß.
Wenn der Mensch in diesem seinem seelisch-geistigen Leben über sich selbst hinausgeht, ergibt sich das, was ich in meiner Schrift «Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?» schildere, in der Sie eine ausführliche Darstellung finden können, was die Seele mit sich zu machen hat, um so über sich hinauszugehen. Ich konnte heute selbstverständlich nur das Prinzipielle angeben. Wenn Sie das, was da in diesem Buche dargestellt ist, bis zu einem gewissen Grade verfolgen, werden Sie finden, warum ich die Erlebnisse, die völlig neue Erlebnisse sind gegenüber dem gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein, zunächst Imaginationen genannt habe, und die Bewußtseinsstufe, die sich da entwickelt, das imaginative Bewußtsein.
Dieses imaginative Bewußtsein ist nichts Phantastisches. Es hat einen Inhalt, der neu ist gegenüber dem, was man vorher erfahren hat. «Imaginatives Bewußtsein» ist ein Wort wie so viele. Worauf es ankommt, ist, daß in den Imaginationen, die man sich als Bereicherung des Seelenlebens erwirbt, klar ausgedrückt ist, daß sie, nun, sagen wir, Abbilder sind einer geistigen Wirklichkeit, wie unsere gewöhnlichen Vorstellungen Abbilder sind der äußeren physischen Wirklichkeit.
Ich habe Ihnen den Prozeß geschildert, durch den die Seele auf der ersten Stufe sich über sich selbst hinaushebt zu dem, was man imaginatives Erkennen nennt. Mit diesem imaginativen Erkennen lebt man tatsächlich in einem Zustande, den man mit einem paradoxen Wort bezeichnen muß — das selbstverständlich unter den Denkgewohnbheiten der Gegenwart nur spöttisch behandelt werden kann: Man lebt, indem man seine Seele vereinigt mit dem, was man so erlebt, man lebt außerhalb des Leibes. Darauf kommt es an! Und man lernt vor allen Dingen dasjenige, was man so erlebt ohne die Zuhilfenahme des Leibes, zu unterscheiden: erstens von den gewöhnlichen sinnlichen Wahrnehmungen, die an der sinnlichen Außenwelt gewonnen sind; aber auch von alledem, was Visionen, Halluzinationen, Illusionen sind.
Denn das muß immer festgehalten werden: Der Weg, der hier angedeutet worden ist, führt nach der gerade entgegengesetzten Linie hin als der Weg, der als ein krankhafter bezeichnet werden kann, der nach dem illusionären, nach dem visionären Leben führt. Gerade wer sich in das imaginative Leben hineinfindet, der weiß, daß das, was wir sinnlich wahrnehmen, mit unseren gesunden Sinnen an der Natur wahrnehmen, daß das geistig höher steht als alles, was durch Visionen, Halluzinationen vor unsere Seele treten kann. Indem wir uns Visionen hingeben, tauchen wir tiefer in unsere bloße Leiblichkeit hinab, verbinden wir uns inniger mit der Leiblichkeit, durchziehen wir die Leiblichkeit mit unserem Seelischen, machen uns nicht von ihr frei.
Wenn wir im dritten Vortrage über den Menschen als Naturwesen sprechen werden, wird uns klarwerden, warum die Inhalte der Visionen mit Geistwahrnehmungen verwechselt werden können. Heute, wo wir von dem seelischen Erleben sprechen, handelt es sich darum, den Unterschied scharf hervorzuheben: daß der Visionär hinuntersteigt in sein Leibesleben, derjenige aber, der nach der imaginativen Erkenntnis strebt, in ein rein Seelisches sich hineinlebt, durch das er zu einem vom Leibe unabhängigen Erleben kommt.
Das ist, wie gesagt, eine paradoxe Vorstellung für die Denkgewohnheiten der Gegenwart. Derjenige, der heute aus laienhaften Untergründen, aus dilettantischen Vorstellungen heraus an die geistige Welt kommen möchte, der möchte sich diese geistige Welt so gern nach dem Musterbilde der äußeren Wahrnehmungen vorstellen, der möchte so gern — man sieht das an dem verhängnisvollen Spiritismus —, daß ihm, wie durch ein physisches Experiment im Laboratorium eine Naturtatsache, so geistige Tatsachen entgegentreten. Er möchte den Geist greifen. Was uns aber entgegentritt in der imaginativen Wahrnehmung, das läßt sich nicht mit etwas Greifbarem vergleichen. Ich habe es in dem Buch «Von Seelenrätseln» verglichen — aber es ist nicht dasselbe, es läßt sich nur vergleichen — mit den Erinnerungsvorstellungen, die wir aus dem Untergrunde unseres seelischen Lebens glauben heraufzuholen über vergangene Erlebnisse. Die Dünnheit, bloß seelisch-geistig, die solche Erinnerungserlebnisse haben, das ist das einzige, worin der Geist, in dem die Seele wurzelt, überhaupt erlebt werden kann. Nur daß die Imaginationen, die so wie Erinnerungsvorstellungen in der Seele aufgehen, nicht anknüpfen an in der physischen Welt Erlebtes, sondern daß sie durch ihren eigenen Inhalt ankündigen: man ist eingetreten in eine neue, geistige Welt, in eine Welt, die man vorher nicht gekannt hat. Man muß sich erst nach und nach bekanntmachen mit der ganz anderen Art des seelischen Erlebens, wenn man so mit seinem Ich nun nicht die Stütze hat der leiblichen Organe, durch die man die äußeren Wahrnehmungen sich verschafft; man muß sich nach und nach erst gewöhnen in dieses Leben hinein.
Vor allen Dingen: trotzdem ich diese Vorstellungen der imaginativen Erkenntnis mit Erinnerungsvorstellungen verglichen habe, trotzdem hat alles, was als Imagination auftritt, was also die Wiedergabe einer geistigen Wirklichkeit ist, eine Eigentümlichkeit, an die wir uns sehr schwer gewöhnen, nämlich die Eigentümlichkeit, daß je vollkommener eine solche geistige Wahrnehmung in der Imagination ist, desto weniger können wir uns, nachdem wir sie gehabt haben, an sie erinnern. Wir sind gewöhnt, an dasjenige uns zu erinnern, was durch unsere Seele gezogen ist. So, wie wir das geistige Erlebnis haben, so erzeugt es uns nicht Erinnerungskraft unmittelbar; sondern der Vorgang ist ein ganz anderer. Ich habe ihn in meinem Buch «Von Seelenrätseln» geschildert. Der Vorgang ist der folgende: Wenn man eine bestimmte Imagination haben will, so muß man sich dazu vorbereiten, man muß die Seele üben, daß sie innerlich die Kräfte entwickelt, durch die die Imagination sich ihr offenbaren kann. An das, was die Seele tut, an das, was die Seele vornimmt, um zu der Imagination zu kommen, an das kann man sich erinnern. Dadurch kann man die Imagination von neuem hervorrufen. Man kann also, wenn man einmal ein geistiges Erlebnis in imaginativer Erkenntnis gehabt hat, sich nicht ohne weiteres an dasselbe erinnern, sondern man muß wiederum alle die inneren Seelenvorbereitungen machen; an die kann man sich erinnern. Man kann sich sagen: Das hast du getan, jenes hast du getan; tu’ es wieder, dann bekommst du das Erlebnis wieder. -— Und nur dann, wenn es uns gelingt, gewissermaßen in das gewöhnliche Bewußtsein, in das gewöhnliche Denken, vorstellungsmäßig, Abbilder der Imaginationen hereinzubringen, dann können wir uns an diese Abbilder erinnern. Aber das, was wirklich Imagination ist, das muß immer von neuem auftreten, sonst ist es keine wirkliche Imagination.
Eine andere Eigentümlichkeit ist diese: Vorstellungen, die wir im äußeren Leben gewinnen, werden von uns um so leichter gebildet, je öfter wir sie bilden. Während wir da eine gewisse Übung bekommen und die Dinge in unsere Gewohnheit übergehen, ist das bei dem Erleben der Imagination, bei dem Erleben wirklicher geistiger Tatsachen nicht der Fall. Das Gegenteil ist der Fall: Je öfter wir unter denselben Bedingungen eine Imagination haben wollen, desto undeutlicher wird sie. Daher rührt der sonderbare Umstand, der recht paradoxe Umstand, daß Schüler des geistigen Lebens, die sich Mühe geben, zu gewissen Imaginationen zu kommen, solche Imaginationen haben und dann verwundert sind, warum sie sich nicht wiederholen. Da verliert sich sogar die Gabe, die Sache wieder hervorzurufen, oftmals schon das zweite, dritte Mal, und es ist dann notwendig, daß neue und immer erneuerte Veranstaltungen gemacht werden, um das, was uns gewissermaßen flieht, indem es einmal aus der geistigen Welt an uns herangetreten ist, wieder heraufzurufen.
Solche inneren seelischen Übungen, welche diese Schwierigkeiten überbrücken, finden Sie alle im einzelnen geschildert in meinem Buche: «Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?», wenn auch das selbst nur ein kurzer Abriß desjenigen ist, was später über diese Dinge von mir gesagt worden ist.
Eine weitere Eigentümlichkeit ist diese, daß man mit solchen imaginativen Vorstellungen nur zurechtkommit, wenn man in dem Denk-, wie in dem Vorstellungs-, Empfindungs- und Willensleben, das man sich als Mensch bis zu dieser geistigen Schulung angeeignet hat, Anhaltspunkte findet, um die Imaginationen mit Vorstellungen zu durchdringen. Wenn man nicht sorgfältig hierauf achtgibt, kann man zwar nicht krankhaft, aber seelisch verworren und verdunkelt werden. Man kommt immer wiederum dazu, sich zu sagen: Jetzt erfährst du etwas Geistiges, das kannst du noch nicht verstehen, du hast nicht tief genug Begriffe dafür ausgebildet. - Dann muß man aufhören, dann muß man den Weg so ändern, daß man versucht, sein gewöhnliches, in der Sinnenwelt auszubildendes Vorstellen weiterzuführen, um bei einer späteren Gelegenheit das zu verstehen, was man vorher nicht verstanden hat.
Kurz, ich könnte noch viele solche Eigenschaften anführen, man macht Bekanntschaft mit lauter Dingen, welche frappierend, paradox sind gegenüber dem seelischen Erleben, das dem gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein angehört. Dann aber erst, wenn man in dieser Weise gewissermaßen das Seelische losgerissen hat von dem Leiblichen, dann erst steht man im Geistigen, in der geistigen Welt drinnen, Die Erfahrung, die geistige, kann keiner bestreiten.
Mit dem, was ich Ihnen bisher geschildert habe, kommt man bis zu gewissen Einsichten. Man kommt zu der Einsicht, daß außer dem physischen Leib, den man an sich trägt und der das Objekt der Anatomie, der Physiologie, überhaupt der äußeren Naturwissenschaft ist, uns wirklich das eigen ist, was ich in meinen neueren Büchern, damit kein Mißverständnis entsteht, «Bildekräfteleib» nenne, während ich es früher «Atherleib» genannt habe. Es ist wirklich ein zweites Element, das in uns ist und das sich niemals der gewöhnlichen Wahrnehmung, dem gewöhnlichen seelischen Erleben ergeben kann, sondern das sich nur ergeben kann, wenn dieses seelische Erleben bis zur Imagination fortschreitet. Denn dieser Bildekräfteleib ist nichts Räumliches; dieser Bildekräfteleib ist etwas, das nur in der Zeit lebt, das aber in der Zeit so lebt, daß alles, was in unserem physischen Leib, sagen wir, von unserer Geburt oder Empfängnis bis zu unserem Tode wirkt, herausquillt aus diesem Bildekräfteleib. Einen zweiten Leib, einen Bildekräfteleib tragen wir in uns. Er wird eine Realität, eine Wirklichkeit für das imaginative Bewußtsein.
Aber weiter kommen wir mit diesem imaginativen Bewußtsein nicht, als zu dem, was uns als Bildekräfteleib — der Ausdruck ist paradox, das macht aber nichts — von der Geburt bis zum Tode begleitet. Weiter kommt man, wenn man nun zu dem, was eben angedeutet worden ist, fortschreitend noch in anderer Weise die nun frei gewordene Seele innerlich erkraftet, innerlich erstarkt, wenn man nun in immer erneuter und erneuter geduldiger Übung zu dem, was man Vorstellungsleben, was man Begriffsleben nennt, ein ganz neues Verhältnis bekommt.
Vorstellen ist für uns im gewöhnlichen Leben ja etwas, wodurch wir uns die äußeren Gegenstände vergegenwärtigen. Wenn wir eine Vorstellung haben, glauben wir: das, was wir innerlich von einem äußeren Gegenstand besitzen können, besitzen wir eben! Davon müssen wir für das Gebiet des geistigen Erlebens loskommen. Wir müssen uns gewissermaßen in die Lage versetzen können, unsere Vorstellungen wie innerlich gegeneinander kämpfende Kräfte und Mächte in uns im innerlichen Erkenntnisdrama ablaufen zu lassen. Wir müssen die Fähigkeit gewinnen, eine Vorstellung in den Kampf mit der anderen treten zu lassen. Wir müssen uns die Sehnsucht erwerben, wenn wir eine Sache von einer Seite charakterisiert haben, sie auch von der entgegengesetzten Seite zu charakterisieren. Auf dieser Stufe werden die Ausdrücke: Materialismus, Idealismus, Spiritualismus, Sensualismus und so weiter, sie werden alle Redensarten, weil alle diese Begriffe, die bloß aus den Begriffsnetzen herausgesponnen sind, sich eben wie photographische Aufnahmen von verschiedenen Seiten erweisen.
Wir lernen erkennen, daß wir mit unseren Begriffen auf geistigem Gebiete uns so verhalten müssen, wie wir uns auf sinnlichem Gebiete in unseren Sinnesorganen verhalten. Wir gehen um die Gegenstände herum. Wir betrachten die Begriffe nicht als Abbilder, sondern nur als dasjenige, was einseitig von diesem oder jenem Aspekte aus die Dinge charakterisiert.
Der Geistesforscher wird daher gerade den Trieb in sich ausbilden, die Dinge von der einen Seite zu charakterisieren, und sie auch von der anderen Seite, von der entgegengesetzten Seite zu charakterisieren. Er wird namentlich eine Sehnsucht empfinden, gewisse Vorstellungen sich zu bilden und dann sich selbst zu widerlegen, diesen innerlichen Kampf wirklich durchzumachen. Ich gebe da nur einige prinzipielle innerliche Gesichtspunkte an, die man aufsteigend wahrmachen muß, wenn man an dem Grenzort der Erkenntnis bis zu einem gewissen Punkt gekommen ist.
Dann entwickelt sich die Seele weiter. Sie gelangt dazu, das in sich zu entwickeln — und ich bitte, da von allem Aberglauben oder vorurteilsvoller Vorstellung abzusehen -, was ich in meinen Büchern genannt habe die inspirierte Erkenntnis. In einem höheren Grade löst sich dadurch die Seele vom Leibe los, und nach dem Erringen dieser Erkenntnisstufe ist man nun nicht bloß imstande, zu überschauen, was als ein Bildekräfteleib in der Zeitenfolge unser Dasein von der Geburt bis zum Tode begleitet, sondern jetzt ist man imstande, auch Geistiges zu schauen, das außer unserem Leibe ist, geistige Wirklichkeit, wie die physischen Augen physische Wirklichkeit schauen. Ich werde im nächsten Vortrage von der äußeren geistigen Wirklichkeit zu sprechen haben und will hinweisen zunächst auf das, was der Mensch als in ihm selbst beschlossene geistige Wirklichkeit mit dieser inspirierten Erkenntnis nunmehr schaut.
Was da auftaucht vor der inspirierten Erkenntnis, das lebt nicht in unserem Dasein von der Geburt bis zum Tode, das hat vor uns gelebt, bevor wir durch die Geburt, oder sagen wir Empfängnis, in den irdischen Leib eingetreten sind; und nachdem wir durch den Tod in die geistige Welt eintreten werden, wird es mit uns leben. Das hat sich verbunden mit den Erbmassen, die uns von Eltern und Voreltern physisch überkommen; das durchdrang dieses Physische. Zur Anschauung desjenigen, was von uns unserem physischen Dasein seelisch vorangegangen ist, was unserem physischen Tode folgt, gelangt man wirklich durch die inspirierte Erkenntnis, weil man zu einem geistigen Anschauen des von diesem physischen Leib völlig Unabhängigen gelangt. Der Bildekräfteleib ist noch an dieses physische Dasein gebunden; er zerstäubt, wenn er von diesem physischen Dasein getrennt wird. Was die inspirierte Erkenntnis wahrnehmen kann, das zerstäubt nicht, das bleibt in sich, das ist dasjenige, das durch Geburten und Tode geht. Auf dem Gebiete der inspirierten Erkenntnis kann nun der Mensch wirklich sachgemäß untersuchen, was ihn verbindet mit rein geistigen Welten, was kraftvoll arbeitet, so daß er dieser Mensch wird, wenn sich mit seinem geistigen Teil verbindet die physische Erbmasse. _
Und das dritte, wozu man gelangt, ist die Intuition. Damit ist nicht das Unklare gemeint, das gewöhnlich mit «Intuition» bezeichnet wird, sondern dasjenige, was ich nun andeuten will. Was man als dritte Stufe der geistigen Erkenntnis erringen kann, das erlangt man dann, wenn man vollständig gewahr wird — es wird das in einem bestimmten Zeitpunkte der seelischen Entwickelung auftreten —, daß man ein anderer ist, daß man wirklich einen inneren Beobachter in sich gefunden hat durch die Anstrengungen, die man gemacht hat durch Imagination und Inspiration hindurch.
Da tritt ein Bedeutsames ein innerhalb desjenigen, was ich das Erkenntnisdrama genannt habe. Da tritt etwas ein, wo man sagen kann: Man sieht, daß aus dem Geistigen heraus nicht nur dieser unser physischer Leib mitgestaltet ist, man lernt sehen, daß unsere Seele selber, so wie sie mit ihren Gefühlen, mit ihren Tendenzen, mit ihren Ambitionen, mit ihren Affekten, mit ihrem Willenscharakter in uns lebt, daß sie so selber durch geistige Vorgänge geworden ist. Ein innerlicher Schicksalsschlag wird das Erkenntnisdrama.
Man mag Schicksalserlebnisse haben im Leben, die einen himmelhoch jauchzend, zu Tode betrübt sein lassen, man mag das Schlimmste und das Freudigste erleben: was man erlebt, wenn man das Werden nicht nur des Leiblichen, sondern das Werden des Seelischen erlebt, das ist ein Schicksalsschlag, ein innerlicher Schicksalsschlag, der für den, der ihn voll erlebt im Erkenntnisdrama, mehr bedeutet als die höchsten und tiefsten, freudvollsten und leidvollsten Schicksalserlebnisse des äußeren Daseins.
Wenn das so sein kann, wenn in der Seele wirklich diese innere Kraft den Umschwung bewirken kann, daß ihr nicht nur das Leibliche aus dem Geistigen heraus erscheint, sondern das Seelische selbst innerhalb des geistigen Werdens, dann tritt die intuitive Erkenntnis ein. Und dann ist das Gebiet beschritten, welches die wiederholten Erdenleben, das Zurückschauen zu früheren Erdenleben und das Gewißsein, daß dieses Erdenleben sich wiederholen wird, umfaßt. Die Erkenntnis tritt ein, daß das gesamte Leben des Menschen besteht aus aufeinanderfolgenden Erdenleben mit dazwischenliegenden Leben in der geistigen Welt vom Tod zu einer neuen Geburt.
Mit alldem muß verbunden sein, daß unser innerer seelischer Blick auf etwas gerichtet wird, für das er eigentlich nicht eingeschult ist durch den Bezug auf die äußere Natur.
Mit Bezug auf die äußere Natur fragen wir stets nach der Herkunft, nach den Ursachen. Mit den Fragen nach der Herkunft, nach den Ursachen, kommen wir aber nicht dem Geiste gegenüber zurecht. Derjenige, der sich das geistige Gebiet so erschließt, wie ich es erwähnt habe, dem offenbart sich, daß sich in alles Wachsende, Gedeihende, in alles Fortschreitende, sich Entwickelnde hineinstellt eine rückschreitende Entwickelung, ein fortdauerndes Abbröckeln des Daseins, ein fortdauerndes Zerstörerisches. Deshalb haben diejenigen, die vielleicht nicht in dieser modernen Form dies durchschauten, aber in den Formen, in denen man früher solche Sachen gewußt hat, gesagt: Geistige Erkenntnis führt an die Pforte des Todes. - Man lernt erkennen, daß Bewußtsein, geistiges Erleben, bewußtes Geist-Erleben nur auftreten kann dadurch, daß sich in das Wachsende, Gedeihende, in das Fortschreitende der Entwickelung hineinstellt dasjenige, was dieses Dasein abbröckelt; und man lernt erkennen, daß der Tod nur das einmalige große Ereignis ist, das man sich aufgeteilt, gewissermaßen in seine Atome zerteilt denken kann als dasjenige, was in uns fortwährend geschieht, während wir im leiblichen Leben bewußt werden. Das Wissen in dieser Welt ist ein Hereintreten im kleinen desjenigen, was uns mit einem Schlag überfällt, wenn wir durch die Pforte des Todes gehen.
Man lernt die Verwandtschaft des Bewußtseins mit dem Sterben erkennen. Und eben dadurch, daß man die Verwandtschaft des Bewußtseins mit dem Sterben erkennen lernt, dadurch lernt man auch erkennen, wie dieses Bewußtsein hindurchschreitet durch die Pforte des Todes, wie der Tod gerade ein Erwecker ist eines anderen Bewußtseins, in das wir eintreten, wenn wir den physischen Leib ablegen, den wir ja gewissermaßen nur behufs der Erkenntnis ablegen, wenn wir solche imaginative, inspirierte, intuitive Erkenntnis erwerben.
Man muß sich hineinfinden, über seine Beziehung zur Welt in ganz anderer Art zu denken, als man es vorher gewohnt war, wenn man sich einen wirklichen Begriff machen will von geistigem Erkennen. Vor allen Dingen muß man den Glauben ganz verlieren, daß man den Geist irgendwie finden kann, wenn man die materielle Welt deutet, wenn man die materielle Welt irgendwie kritisiert, wenn man an der materiellen Welt Gesetze findet. Die Gesetze, die man an der materiellen Welt findet, die gelten auch nur für die materielle Welt. Den Geist findet man nicht durch Deutung der Sinneswelt; den Geist findet man im physischen Leib an der Sinneswelt; aber man findet ihn im freien Erleben des geistigen Gebietes.
Ich kann mich durch einen Vergleich klarmachen: Wenn wir die Wortreihen, die Buchstabenreihen lesen, so nehmen wir sie nicht so auf, daß wir sagen: da ist ein senkrechter Strich, da ist ein horizontaler Strich; wir deuten nicht die Buchstaben, wir sehen über die Buchstabenreihe und Wortreihe hin, und da entwickelt sich ein innerlicher Inhalt. Dieser Inhalt hat mit einer Deutung der Buchstaben nichts zu tun. Man muß lesen gelernt haben. Was sich beim Leser entwickelt, ist etwas ganz anderes, als was in den Buchstaben liegt. Man kann nicht den Geist, den man beim Lesen aus den Buchstaben heraus findet, aus dem Setzerkasten holen. Ebensowenig kann man aus der Natur durch Deutung der Natur das geistige Leben finden. Das geistige Leben kann man nur finden, wenn man die Seele über sich selbst hinaufhebt und dadurch dasjenige findet, was nun aus dem Geiste selbst hereinragt in dieses physische Leben, insofern im Physischen die Seele sich erlebt zwischen Geburt und Tod.
Sie sehen, da kommt eine Seelenwissenschaft zustande, welche gut neben der Naturwissenschaft stehen kann, weil sie gar nicht die Methoden auf das Seelische überträgt, welche an der Natur herangebildet sind, weil sie aber auch nicht bei diesem Seelischen, wie es im gewöhnlichen Dasein erlebt wird, stehenbleibt, sondern in dieses Seelische hineinträgt ein Objektives, aus dem heraus dieses Seelische sich erlebt, und aus dem auch das Leibliche geboren ist, wie wir im dritten dieser Vorträge sehen werden.
Das sind einige Andeutungen, nur die allerersten, elementaren Andeutungen — bezüglich alles übrigen muß ich auf meine Bücher verweisen —, Andeutungen, wie der Mensch das finden kann, das in ihm liegt und das sein Ewiges ist, wie diese Seelenlehre, die anthroposophisch orientiert ist, den Menschen wiederum wirklich dazu führt, daß nun nicht mehr einzutreten braucht, was bei einem sehr bedeutenden, aber tragisch sein Denken ertragenden Forscher der Gegenwart eingetreten ist, bei dem im März dieses Jahres hier in Zürich verstorbenen großen Psychologen Franz Brentano. Franz Brentano lebte sich hinein in die psychologische Forschung in dem Zeitalter, als die äußere naturwissenschaftliche Denkweise heraufkam. Er wollte die naturwissenschaftliche Methode, so wie sie ist, anwenden auf das Seelenleben. Man kommt mit dieser naturwissenschaftlichen Methode aber nicht weiter, als Vorstellungen zu vergleichen: wie Gefühle aus der Seele herauf wollen, wie Aufmerksamkeit ist und so weiter im äußeren physischen Leben. Aber Franz Brentano beklagt es in seinem Buch «Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte», im ersten Band, den er geschrieben hat, und der der einzige geblieben ist, er beklagt, was die Seelenwissenschaft da nicht erreichen kann, indem er sagt: Was kann uns helfen, wenn wir auch recht naturwissenschaftlich zu Werke gehen, die Vergleichung von Vorstellungen, die Assoziation von Vorstellungen, das Entstehen von Lust und Unlust und so weiter, wenn sich die großen Hoffnungen eines Platon und Aristoteles nicht erfüllen können: daß wir Einsicht gewinnen können durch die Seelenwissenschaft in das Fortleben des besseren Teiles unseres Wesens nach dem Durchgehen durch die Pforte des Todes. — Franz Brentano beklagt, daß er mit seinen Mitteln sich an diese Probleme nicht heranmachen kann. Das ist merkwürdig, wie er bis zu seinem Lebensende gerungen hat mit diesen Problemen. Die Aufrichtigkeit, die Ehr;'chkeit seines Ringens geht gerade aus dem tragischen Umstande hervor, den ich im dritten Kapitel meines Buches «Von Seelenrätseln» in einem Nachruf an Franz Brentano ausgeführt habe. Immer wieder und wiederum versprach er die Fortsetzung seiner «Psychologie», nachdem der erste Band erschienen war. Sie war auf vier oder fünf Bände berechnet, im Frühling 1874 erschien der erste Band, für den Herbst versprach er den zweiten, dann in kurzen Zeiträumen die folgenden: Nichts ist wieder erschienen! Er wollte mit naturwissenschaftlicher Methode das Seelenleben meistern, er wollte ehrlich und aufrichtig zu Werke gehen. Hätte er es vermocht, hätte nicht die naturwissenschaftliche Methode wie ein Bleigewicht an seinen Forscherkräften gehangen, weil er sie eben mißverstand, er wäre fähig gewesen, einzutreten durch das Tor in das geistige Erleben, das aus der Seele etwas heraufholt, was nicht da sein kann, wenn man bloß naturwissenschaftliche Methoden hat. An dem tragischen Forscherleben Franz Brentanos zeigt sich wie an vielen anderen Persönlichkeiten der Gegenwart — aber bei ihm, weil er eine so bedeutende und zu gleicher Zeit innerlich so grundehrliche Natur war, besonders eindringlich —, wie gerade durch die naturwissenschaftlichen Errungenschaften eine solche Seelenwissenschaft mit Notwendigkeit gefordert wird, die nur in vom Leiblichen befreiten seelischen Erfahrungen erlangt werden kann. Da werden wiederum die großen Probleme vor die Seele hintreten können, die vor allen Dingen den Menschen beschäftigen müssen, indem er den Blick auf sein eigenes Seelenleben richtet: das große Problem des unsterblichen Lebens — indem wir den wirklich unsterblichen Teil erfassen durch solche Methoden, wie wir es geschildert haben — und auch das Problem der Willensfreiheit, von dem wir in diesen Vorträgen noch sprechen werden, beides Probleme, die gerade die wichtigsten, die zwingendsten sind. Man lese aber nach die Psychologien der letzten Jahrzehnte, Diese Probleme sind vollständig verbannt, ja verschwunden aus der psychologischen Forschung, einfach aus den Gründen, die in der heutigen Betrachtung angegeben worden sind.
Aber nicht nur, daß man an diese großen Seelenfragen herankommt! Sondern auch dasjenige, was der Psychologe sucht, was er gerade mit seinen durch Vertiefung in die naturwissenschaftliche Denkweise entstandenen Methoden erforschen will, auch das wird erst völlig klar, wenn man es verfolgen kann von dem Gesichtspunkte aus, der hier angedeutet worden ist. Die Sache liegt schon so: Naturwissenschaft wird auf der einen Seite gelten, Geisteswissenschaft, Geistesforschung auf der anderen Seite. Aber wie man beim Tunnelgraben, wenn man richtig alles erwogen hat, von zwei Seiten grabend, in der Mitte sich zusammenfindet, so finden sich Geistesforschung und Naturforschung zusammen und geben erst ein Ganzes der vom Menschen erstrebten Erkenntnis.
Ich will nur ein Beispiel anführen, wie auch die gewöhnliche Psychologie dadurch erobert werden kann, daß man sich in diese hohen Gebiete begibt, auf welche heute nur elementar hingedeutet worden ist. Es liegen vor dem Menschen, wenn er psychologisch forscht, solche Fragen wie die nach dem Gedächtnis, nach der Erinnerung. Man könnte verzweifeln, wenn man sich in den gewöhnlichen Psychologien mit dem Erinnerungsproblem befaßt. Da wird einem so ganz klar, wie da die Grenzorte des Erkennens sind: Der Mensch stellt sich etwas vor, gewinnt eine Vorstellung an einer äußeren Wahrnehmung; nun ja, diese Vorstellung «geht hinunter» ins seelische Element, «verschwindet», so sagt man, aber der Mensch kann sich später an die Vorstellung erinnern. Wo war sie?
Ich will mich jetzt nicht verbreiten über all das, was seit Jahrhunderten gesagt wird über diese Fragen. Nach der einen Seite sagt man: Solche Vorstellungen verschwinden hinunter ins Unbewußte, treten dann wiederum hinauf über die Schwelle des Bewußtseins. — Ich möchte jemanden kennen, der imstande ist, wenn er diese Worte prägt, mit ihnen einen inhaltlichen Sinn zu verbinden! Man verliert sofort einen Sinn, wenn man von diesem «Hinuntersteigen» und «Hinaufsteigen» der Vorstellungen spricht. Sprechen kann man von allem; aber vorstellen kann man es sich nicht; denn es entspricht keiner irgendwie gearteten Wirklichkeit. Die mehr physiologisch orientierten Psychologen sprechen davon, daß «Spuren» sich «eingraben» in das Nervensystem, in das Gehirn; diese Spuren «rufen» dann diese Vorstellungen «erneut hervor». Man krankt dann daran, zu erklären, wie aus diesen Spuren hervorgegraben wird die Vorstellung, die hinuntergezogen ist. Wie gesagt, man kann verzweifeln an dem, was da Inhalt der gewöhnlichen Psychologien ist. Wieviel ernste, edle, echte Forscherarbeit wird doch auf diese Probleme gewendet! Durchaus nicht verkannt werden soll diese ehrliche, echte Forschungsarbeit.
Die Wahrheit ist aber, daß auch diese einfache Tatsache des Seelenlebens sich erst im rechten Lichte zeigt, wenn man sie mit derjenigen Kraft der Seele betrachtet, die nun die Geistorgane hat, die nun wirklich vom Gesichtspunkte, der in der geistigen Welt eingenommen wird, auch das gewöhnliche Seelenleben beobachtet. Da merkt man: Es ist gar keine Rede davon, daß eine Vorstellung, die ich jetzt habe, irgendwo «hinunterzieht» und irgendwo wieder «heraufkommt». Das Erinnern wird überhaupt ganz falsch vorgestellt. Eine Vorstellung, die ich durch eine äußere Wahrnehmung jetzt gewinne und jetzt habe, die lebt in mir überhaupt nicht als etwas Reales, sondern als Spiegelbild, das sich die Seele bildet durch die Spiegelung des Leibes. Wir werden davon näher im dritten Vortrage sprechen. Und es lebt diese Vorstellung nur jetzt! Wenn ich sie aus dem Seelenleben verloren habe, dann ist sie nicht mehr da. Es gibt das gar nicht: Hinuntertauchen von Vorstellungen und Wiederherauftauchen — und so Erinnerungen bilden. Die triviale Vorstellung der Erinnerung ist schon falsch.
Worauf es ankommt, ist: wenn man die Kraft der Seele für das geistige Schauen geschärft hat, so sieht man — wie man in der Außenwelt beobachtet, so kann man im Geiste das beobachten —, daß, während wir eine Vorstellung gewinnen durch eine Wahrnehmung, noch ein anderer Vorgang vor sich geht. Und nicht der Vorstellungsvorgang, sondern dieser andere, unterbewußte Vorgang, der sich parallel dem Vorstellen abspielt, erzeugt in uns etwas, das, indem ich die Vorstellung habe, gar nicht unmittelbar ins Bewußtsein kommt, das aber fortlebt. Habe ich jetzt eine Vorstellung, so entsteht ein unterbewußter und jetzt rein an das Körperliche gebundener Prozeß. Wenn später durch irgendeine Veranlassung dieser Prozeß wieder aufgerufen wird, dann bildet sich, indem die Seele jetzt hinblickt auf diesen Prozeß, der ein rein leiblicher ist, aufs neue die Vorstellung. Eine erinnerte Vorstellung ist eine aus den Tiefen des Leibeslebens herauf gebildete neue Vorstellung, die der alten gleicht, weil sie durch den unterbewußten Prozeß, der sich gebildet hat im leiblichen Leben, heraufgerufen wird. Die Seele liest gewissermaßen das Engramm, das in dem Leibe eingegraben ist, wenn sie sich an eine Vorstellung erinnert.
So werden schon die gewöhnlichen Vorstellungen der Psychologen korrigiert. Man gewinnt das Richtige anstelle desjenigen, was im gewöhnlichen Erleben ganz falsch vorgestellt wird. Und so könnte ich, die ganze Psychologie durchgehend, Ihnen an vielen Punkten zeigen, wie sich vor der wirklichen Erkenntnis das, was die Seele eigentlich glaubt als ihr Erlebnis zu haben, als eine Illusion erweist, wie man ganz falsche Vorstellungen über dieses Seelenleben hat, wie diese sich erst korrigieren lassen müssen dadurch, daß die Seele sich befreit vom Leibe und nun wirklich vom geistigen Gesichtspunkte aus ihr Erleben beobachten kann.
Gerade durch solche Vorstellungen, die auf der einen Seite wirklich der Wissenschaft den Geist erschließen und die geistige Welt eröffnen, wird auf der anderen Seite erst dasjenige, was in treuer und fleißiger Forschung nach naturwissenschaftlicher Methode auch in der Experimentalpsychologie, in der physiologischen Psychologie gewonnen wird, an die rechte Stelle gerückt. Und diesen Gebieten steht wahrhaftig die anthroposophisch orientierte Geisteswissenschaft nicht feindlich, nicht unsympathisch gegenüber. Sondern sie, die weiß, daß die gewöhnlichen Methoden, die an der äußeren Natur gewonnen werden, im seelischen Erleben nicht zu Lösungen, sondern nur zu Fragen führen können, zu richtigen Fragestellungen, sie wird gerade durch ihr Licht erst dasjenige recht fruchtbar machen können, was auf dem äußeren naturwissenschaftlichen Wege gewonnen werden kann.
Wie das Arbeiten der anthroposophisch orientierten Geisteswissenschaft wirklich von der anderen Seite des Berges her, wie man einen Tunnel von zwei Seiten gräbt, der Naturwissenschaft sich entgegen arbeitet, kann sich auch an einem weiteren Beispiel zeigen. In der letzten Zeit sind darwinistisch orientierte Naturforscher zu etwas sehr Interessantem gekommen, das ich gleich anführen werde. Vorher will ich noch erwähnen, daß die unterbewußte Tätigkeit, welche der Erinnerung zugrunde liegt, indem sie sich parallel dem Vorstellen unterbewußt entwickelt, zwar etwas anderes, aber verwandt ist mit dem, was in den Vererbungskräften, in den Wachstumskräften liegt. Den Kräften, die in uns wachsen, sind diejenigen Kräfte verwandt, die wirksam sind im Unterbewußten, wenn wir an einer sinnlichen Wahrnehmung eine Vorstellung bilden und die Dispositionen hervorrufen im Leiblichen, die später gelesen werden, die zur Erinnerung führen. Durch wirkliche seelische Beobachtung kommt man zu einer klaren Anschauung über die Verwandtschaft der Gedächtniskräfte mit den Vererbungs- und Wachstumskräften. Es wird eine Brücke geschaffen — und wir werden von solchen Brücken in den nächsten Tagen noch deutlicher sprechen — zwischen Seelisch-Geistigem und Leiblichem.
Und nun sehe man, wie Richard Semon, der darwinistisch orientierte Naturforscher, in einem sehr interessanten Buche ausgeht von den Vererbungsverhältnissen, von dem Auftreten von Vererbungsmerkmalen, und dazu kommt, diese Vererbungskräfte zusammenzubringen mit den Gedächtniskräften! Der Naturforscher kommt also dazu, die Vererbungskräfte verwandt mit den Gedächtniskräften zu finden. Der Seelenforscher kommt dazu, die unterbewußten, der Erinnerung zugrundeliegenden Kräfte mit denen der Vererbung verwandt zu finden!
Diese Dinge geschehen ganz unabhängig voneinander. Was Richard Semon als Mneme beschrieben hat in seinem sehr interessanten Buch, das begegnet sich mit der Seelenforschung, die anthroposophisch orientiert ist, und die sich auf die Betrachtung derjenigen Gebiete ausdehnt, die nach naturwissenschaftlichen Methoden auch am Menschen erforscht werden. Doch davon dann im dritten Vortrage.
Gewiß, schon das Elementare, das ich mir erlaubte heute vorzubringen über die Erfolge eines wirklichen GeistErlebens der Seele und dadurch über die Begründung einer neueren Seelenwissenschaft, es muß den Denkgewohnheiten der Gegenwart gegenüber vielfach paradox erscheinen. Aber wenn das auch durchaus gerade dem am begreiflichsten ist, der in diesen Dingen drinnensteht, so darf wohl auch gesagt werden, man möge sich nur wirklich nicht bloß in einem Vortrage anregen lassen, sondern sich vertiefen in den ernsten Gang geisteswissenschaftlicher Forschung. Man wird sehen, daß die Kräfte zwar auf andere Weise verwendet werden als auf dem Gebiet der Naturwissenschaft, daß aber der Forscherweg der Anthroposophie nicht minder ernst, nicht minder mühevoll ist als derjenige, der auf seiten der naturwissenschaftlichen Forschung entwickelt wird, wenn auch gerade dasjenige, was bei der Naturwissenschaft Resultat, Ergebnis ist, bei der Geistesforschung Ausgangspunkt sein muß: Wir langen bei den Begriffen, Vorstellungen, Naturgesetzen an, wenn wir Natur erforschen wollen. Wir gehen davon aus, daß uns das, was Naturforscher erleben, bis an die Grenzorte bringt, wenn wir in die Geistesforschung und in die anthroposophische Seelenforschung eintreten wollen.
So meine ich, daß die Psychologie, die Seelenforschung, die auf Anthroposophie fußt, nicht als gegnerisch gegenüber den berechtigten Forderungen der heutigen naturwissenschaftlichen Denkweise bezeichnet werden darf. Im Gegenteil: sie lehnt nichts ab, was aus den berechtigten Forschungen der Naturwissenschaft hervorgeht; sie ist nirgends gegnerisch zu dieser berechtigten Naturwissenschaft! Aber sie kann nicht stehenbleiben etwa dabei, bloße logische Folgerungen zu ziehen aus dem, was die Naturwissenschaft schon selbst gibt. Eine solche Philosophie bedeutet Geisteswissenschaft nicht, die nur weiter logische Folgerungen ziehen will aus der Naturwissenschaft. Nein! Ein höheres Bekenntnis muß die anthroposophisch orientierte Geisteswissenschaft ablegen, das Bekenntnis, daß hervorgehen muß diese Geistesforschung aus der Naturwissenschaft nicht als eine abstrakte logische Folge, sondern als ein lebendiges Kind.
Und den Glauben, den stärkeren Glauben als mancher Naturforscher, der die Geistesforschung ablehnt, den stärkeren Glauben an die Naturforschung hat der Geistesforscher, daß diese Naturforschung stark genug ist, nicht nur zu ihren logischen Konsequenzen zu führen, sondern stark genug, ein ganz Lebendiges gleichsam aus sich heraus zu gebären, das entsteht mit eigener Lebenskraft, durch eigenes freies Leben gedeihen muß, und das sein muß: die von der Naturwissenschaft selber geforderte Geisteswissenschaft.
Fragenbeantwortung
Zum Thema der wiederholten Erdenleben wurden mehrere Fragen gestellt.
Sehr verehrte Anwesende! Die Fragen, die hier aufgeworfen worden sind, sie sind solche, daß vieles Unbefriedigende an der Antwort bleibt, wenn man sie kurz beantwortet, oder aber, daß man, wenn man sie richtig befriedigend beantworten wollte, ganze Bücher sprechen müßte. Zunächst liegt die Frage vor:
Was für einen Zweck hat die Reinkarnation?
Ja, sehr verehrte Anwesende, im Grunde genommen ist die Frage nach dem Zweck — ich muß schon der Antwort den wissenschaftlichen Charakter geben, sonst ist es ja nur ein Herumreden — geradeso wie die Frage nach dem Grunde— ob nun die Teleologie berechtigt ist oder nicht, darauf kann ich mich nicht einlassen -, eine Frage, die in der physischen Welt entspringt, innerhalb der physischen Welt ihre Bedeutung hat. Die Reinkarnation — wenn man so die wiederholten Erdenleben nennen will, ich vermeide gern Schlagworte, deshalb sprach ich auch heute von wiederholten Erdenleben -, die Reinkarnation aber ist von Gesetzen getragen, welche der geistigen Welt angehören, welche in der geistigen Welt ihre Bedeutung haben. Und daran gewöhnt man sich am allerschwersten: daß man beim Übergang von der physischen Welt in die geistige Welt auch seine Begriffe wandeln, metamorphosieren muß, daß die Begriffe, welche für die physische Welt gelten, ihre Bedeutung, ihre Tragweite verlieren, wenn man in die geistige Welt eintritt. Wer begonnen hat, den eigentlichen Charakter der geistigen Welt zu kennen, der frägt nicht eigentlich, wie man nach dem Zwecke einer Maschine frägt, nach dem «Zweck des Menschen», viel weniger nach dem «Zweck der Reinkarnation».
Ich habe im Laufe des Vortrags gesagt: die Denkungsweise, die an Hand der Naturwissenschaft gewonnen wird — das ist ja im wesentlichen auch die Denkweise, die an der physischen Außenwelt gewonnen wird -, sie führt höchstens zu den richtigen Frage-Stellungen; aber die Antworten muß man dann versuchen, aus der geistigen Welt hereinzuholen.
Nun, natürlich, wer so etwas frägt: «Welchen Zweck hat die Reinkarnation?» -, der denkt sich etwas dabei. Es entspricht das einem gewissen Bedürfnis, etwas zu wissen, obwohl die Frage nach dem Zweck ja eigentlich in dieser Sphäre nicht anwendbar ist, um die es sich da handelt. Nun aber bitte ich Sie, folgendes zu bedenken. Ich möchte sagen, ich muß die Bausteine zur Fragenbeantwortung zusammentragen. Geisteswissenschaft ist eben etwas, was man nicht wie ein kleines Handbuch so schnell sich aneignen kann, sondern es ist etwas, was wirklich ein sehr umfassendes Gebiet ist.
Wenn wir im Leben Fragen stellen, so können wir so verfahren, daß wir gewissermaßen mit den Fragen immer bis ans Ende gehen. Aber vielleicht wird das nicht in allen Fällen anwendbar sein. Sehen Sie, solch eine Frage wie diese, die wird einem hundert und hundertmal gestellt. Ich habe oftmals das Folgende dazu gesagt: Es kann Menschen geben, die wollen von Zürich nach Rom fahren, und sie wollen den Weg wissen. Ja, wenn ihnen jemand den genauen Weg mit allen Details nicht angeben kann in Zürich hier, so wollen sie überhaupt nicht nach Rom fahren. Es kann aber auch solche Menschen geben, welche befriedigt sind, den Weg von Zürich nach Lugano zu wissen, und die dann befriedigt sind, wenn sie in Lugano erfahren, wie sie weiterkommen, und dann, wie sie wieder weiterkommen. Das ist ein Vergleich. Er will das Folgende besagen: Wenn wir in einem Erdenleben stehen, so ist dieses hinblickend auf folgende Erdenleben. Darinnen drückt sich eine Entwickelung aus. Wir werden in anderen Erdenleben Dinge gewinnen, die wir in diesem Erdenleben nicht gewinnen. Wir gehen durch Erlebnisse, die uns andere Prüfungen, andere Erfahrungen bringen. Würden wir in diesem Erdenleben alle Fragen beantworten können, so würde dieses Erdenleben nicht folgende Erdenleben erzeugen!
So handelt es sich für Geisteswissenschaft darum, die Tatsache der Reinkarnation, wenn ich den Ausdruck schon gebrauchen soll, hinzustellen. So wie der Mensch dem einzelnen Erdenleben aus seinen freien Impulsen heraus den Zweck gibt, so gibt er aufeinanderfolgende Zwecke, von denen einer aus dem anderen hervorgeht, den wiederholten Erdenleben. Und er wird sich nicht einbilden, in einem Erdenleben den ganzen Umfang des menschlichen Daseins, das durch die wiederholten Erdenleben geht, zu definieren. Definitionen, die etwas umfassen wollen, gewöhnt man sich überhaupt ab, wenn man in das wirklich geistige Seelenerleben hineinkommt. Definitionen sind im gewöhnlichen physischen Leben ganz gut; im geistigen Leben, wo alles auf Aspekte hinausläuft, da wird man wirklich, wenn jemand just Definitionen verlangt, erinnert an das Beispiel, das in der griechischen Literatur gegeben ist, wo ausgeführt wird, was eine Definition ist. Auf die Frage, wie man einen Menschen definieren solle, wird gesagt - man kann ja immer nur aus einzelnen Merkmalen heraus definieren -: Ein Mensch ist eine Wesenheit, die zwei Beine und keine Federn hat. —- Da brachte das nächste Mal einer einen Hahn mit, den er gerupft hatte - als «Menschen».
Nun, ich weiß selbstverständlich, was die Logik alles fordert von einer richtigen Definition. Dennoch, vor dem geistigen Auge nehmen sich Definitionen doch als Einseitigkeiten aus. Ebenso alle Zwecksetzungen, Kausalsetzungen und so weiter. Die Wirklichkeit ist etwas, in das man sich hineinfindet, in dem man lebt und webt, das man aber nicht mit einseitigen Begriffen umspannen wird. Man wird in den aufeinanderfolgenden Erdenleben die Zwecke finden. So daß also ein rechter Inhalt nicht da ist bei der Frage nach dem «Zweck der Reinkarnation».
Frage: Ist Reinkarnation ein Produkt der Vorstellung im Geistigen?
Ja, sehr verehrte Anwesende, das kann man schon sagen, aber man muß dazunehmen, was ich in meinem Buch «Von Seelenrätseln» gezeigt habe: Vorstellungen, so wie man sie im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein hat, sind eigentlich vor dem geistigen Schauen keine wirklichen Vorstellungen, sondern sie sind abgelähmte Vorstellungen, sie sind wie die Leichen der Vorstellungen. Das ist das Merkwürdige. Was in der Seele lebt, ist weit mehr als das, was im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein zum Bewußtsein kommt. Was in der Seele lebt, wird herabgelähmt, weil es nicht ertragen würde vom gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein, und lebt dann wie ein Vorstellungsleichnam. Daher die abstrakten Begriffe in der Seele. Was man da hat, das ist eigentlich nur ein Spiegelbild, das ist etwas, was auftritt und vergeht, was gar nicht erinnert wird, wie ich im Vortrag ausgeführt habe. Was aber dahintersteht, was in die Imagination hereinkommt, diese lebendige geistige Realität, das ist dasjenige, was durch den Tod hindurchgeht und was in den Kräften der Reinkarnation allerdings lebt. Vielleicht wird das die Antwort der Frage sein.
Frage: Ist Reinkarnation absolute gesetzmäßige Einrichtung, nicht ein Ergebnis der Bildekräfte?
Ein Ergebnis der Bildekräfte ist nur das Leben zwischen Geburt und Tod beziehungsweise Empfängnis und Tod. Aber das, was hier Reinkarnation genannt wird, steht unter weit höheren geistigen Gesetzen. Ob sie eine «gesetzmäßige Einrichtung» ist, das ist schwer zu beantworten; sie ist eben eine Tatsache. Die wiederholten Erdenleben sind eine Tatsache, «Ein Ergebnis der Bildekräfte?» Den Bildekräfteleib eignet sich der Mensch erst an, wenn er als Seele gegen die Empfängnis zugeht; den legt er auch nach dem Tode wieder ab; der Bildekräfteleib ist — wie ich im Vortrag ausgeführt habe — nichts Ewiges. Die Kräfte aber, die in Betracht kommen, wenn von den Gesetzen der Reinkarnation gesprochen wird, sind solche, die gar nicht hereintreten, nicht nur nicht ins Ich-Bewußtsein, sondern gar nicht in den Bereich der gewöhnlichen physischen Welt.
Sehen Sie, da könnte sich schon auf diesem Gebiete der Weg für viele Menschen eröffnen, wenn man nur suchen würde in der richtigen Weise. Es handelt sich darum — wie ich schon für einzelne Dinge angegeben habe -, daß die Erlebnisse in der geistigen Welt paradox wirken gegenüber den Erlebnissen des gewöhnlichen Daseins, daß in vieler Beziehung die Dinge ganz anders wirken, die man erlebt, wenn man in die geistige Welt eintritt, gegenüber den Dingen der physischen Welt. Und da muß man sagen: der Mensch kommt, weil er sein Vorstellungsvermögen nach den Erfahrungen des natürlichen Lebens, des natürlichen Geschehens einrichtet, mit seinen Begriffen kaum über Raumesvorstellungen hinaus. Eine genauere, eine wirklich ehrliche Selbsterkenntnis zeigt, wie wenig der Mensch über Raumesvorstellungen hinauskommt. Denn sehen Sie: die Zeitvorstellungen, woran gewinnt man sie? Eigentlich aus Raumvorstellungen! Die Raumänderungen, die Ortsänderungen der Sonne, des Mondes, der Zeiger der Uhr sogar bei uns, aus denen gewinnen wir Zeitvorstellungen. Aber es sind eigentlich Raumvorstellungen, die wir da haben. Das Geistige aber in seiner niedersten Form als Bildekräfteleib lebt schon in der Zeit. Da muß man schon eine wirkliche Vorstellung von der Zeit haben!
Aber eine wirkliche Vorstellung von der Zeit verschaffen sich heute die wenigsten Menschen. Und noch weniger verschafft man sich eine wirkliche Vorstellung von den verschiedenen Geschwindigkeiten — also jetzt nicht Zeiten, sondern Geschwindigkeiten —, die im Seelisch-Geistigen herrschen. Unser seelisches Leben beruht darauf, daß zum Beispiel das Denken, das Vorstellen, mit einer ganz anderen Geschwindigkeit abläuft als das Fühlen, und dieses wiederum mit einer ganz anderen Geschwindigkeit als das Wollen. Diese Dinge — daß innerlich im Seelenleben verschiedene ineinandergeschichtete Geschwindigkeiten sind bewirken gerade das innere Entstehen des Bewußtseins. Bewußtsein entsteht nur da, wo irgend etwas sich stört. Daher ist Bewußtsein sogar verwandt mit dem Tode: weil der Tod das Leben stört. Aber überhaupt: es stört sich etwas! Daher ist zum Beispiel die Bergsonsche Vorstellung so falsch, daß man überall aufs Leben sehen muß und auf die Bewegung; während man geradezu zum Wesen der Bewegung kommt, wenn man die Bewegung hindert, zum Wesen des Lebens kommt dadurch, daß man sieht, wie das Leben vom Tode erfaßt wird. Etwas anderes, als das Leben auffassen, ist es, in das Wesen des Lebens eindringen.
Diese Dinge führen dazu, einzusehen, daß Gesetzmäßigkeit selbst etwas anderes wird, wenn man in das geistige Leben eintritt, was vielen Menschen höchst unbequem ist. Sie fassen daher gar nicht den Mut, in die geistige Welt einzudringen mit ihren Begriffen und Ideen: weil diese Begriffe und Ideen sich verändern müßten! Wenn man wirklich geistig forscht, lernt man das im Grunde genommen sehr, sehr gründlich kennen. Ich rede sehr ungern von Persönlichem, weil das Persönliche mit dem Objektiven nicht viel zu tun hat. Aber vor vielen Jahren schon trat mir eine wichtige Frage entgegen, die auf einem gewissen Spezialgebiet für mich fruchtbar geworden ist: Herbart und andere Psychologen haben das Rechnen, die Mathematik angewendet auf die Seelenforschung; sie versuchten, seelische Tatsachen zu berechnen. Eduard von Hartmann hat dann sogar moralisch zu nehmende Tatsachen zu berechnen versucht, indem er den Pessimismus mathematisch zu begründen unternahm; auf die eine Seite, die Soll-Seite des Lebens buchte er alle Lusterlebnisse, auf die HabenSeite alle Unlusterlebnisse und sagte dann: die Bilanz ergibt einen Überschuß an Unlust — also ist das Leben schlecht.
Ich habe gezeigt, daß die ganze Rechnung unsinnig ist. Sie können diesen Beweis finden in dem entsprechenden Kapitel meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit», die 1894 geschrieben ist. Wenn man hier von Rechnung sprechen will, so ist der Rechnungsanfang ganz anders zu machen. Er ist so zu machen, daß man nicht eine Subtraktion macht, eine zur Bilanz führende Subtraktion, sondern daß man eine Division aufschreibt, einen Bruch, daß man als Zähler aufschreibt alles, was man an Lust, an Freude, an Erhebung erlebt in seinem Lebenslauf, und als Nenner allen Schmerz, alles Leid. Betrachten wir diesen Bruch. Wann würde das Leben nicht mehr lebenswert erscheinen? Wenn der Nenner Null wäre, gar kein Schmerz da wäre, so wäre der Wert unendlich groß. Aber der Nenner muß unendlich groß werden, wenn der Bruch den Wert Null haben sollte, Das heißt: erst dann würde das Leben nicht mehr lebenswert erscheinen, wenn die Schmerzen unendlich groß wären. Die Entscheidung darüber gibt uns keine abstrakte Rechnung, sondern die Entscheidung gibt uns das Leben selber. Das Leben rechnet so!
Wenn man auf seelische Ereignisse sieht, so kann man das Verhältnis der Rechnung zum seelischen Ereignis nicht so machen, wie Herbart oder wie Hartmann in diesem Falle. Sondern das Leben gibt das Resultat, und wenn man dann hinaufkommt in die geistigen Welten, so zerteilt sich das Resultat auseinander — eine Summe in Summanden, ein Bruch in Zähler und Nenner. Gerade ins Umgekehrte kommt man hinein. Während man hier im physischen Leben die einzelnen Summanden und Zähler und Nenner hat und dann das Resultat bekommt, ist es umgekehrt: im geistigen Erleben ist das Resultat da; es wird erlebt, und in die geistige Welt hinein gehen die einzelnen Elemente, die zum Resultat führen. Sie sehen also: man muß viele Vorstellungen gründlich umdenken, wenn man die Schwelle überschreiten will zwischen der physischen und der geistigen Welt.
Vielleicht können solche Ausführungen, die ich an diese Frage angeknüpft habe, doch bei Ihnen die Vorstellung hervorrufen, daß wirklich diese Geisteswissenschaft nicht etwas ist, das so aus dem Ärmel herausgeschüttelt oder aus der Phantasie herausgeboren ist, sondern daß sie etwas ist, was schon wirklich — wie ich im Vortrag gesagt habe — mit nicht geringeren Kräften erarbeitet wird, als in irgendeiner anderen wissenschaftlichen Arbeit Kräfte angewendet werden. Nur stehen sie auf einem anderen Gebiete. So daß man sagen muß: es ist Gesetzmäßiges in jenem Verlaufe, der durch die wiederholten Erdenleben ausgedrückt wird. Aber die Natur dieses Gesetzmäßigen muß man sich eigentlich erst verschaffen. Daher sagte ich, es handelt sich nicht darum, daß man deutet die Naturerscheinungen, sondern daß man sich wirklich erhebt über die Naturerscheinungen und das Geistige frei in sich erlebt. Damit habe ich die Frage beantwortet.
Nun eine merkwürdige Frage — merkwürdig nach diesem Vortrage: Welches sind die geistigen Tastorgane?
Ja, etwas Sinnliches darf man sich nicht vorstellen darunter. Ich habe scharf hervorgehoben, daß es sich um etwas Seelisch-Geistiges handelt, das man nur mit dem vergleichen kann, was in der Erinnerung auflebt. Also wenn man das so beantwortet haben will, daß man zum Unterbegriff «geistige Tastorgane» einen Oberbegriff sucht, den man schon kennt, dann wird man mit dieser Sache nicht zurechtkommen. Sondern man muß sich eben hindurchwinden durch das, was gezeigt worden ist: Die Seele gerät an Grenzen, differenziert sich und entwickelt «geistige Tastorgane», die, auf seelisch-geistigem Gebiet, verglichen werden können mit den Tastorganen auf physischem Gebiet, so wie «Geistesaugen» und «Geistesohren» mit physischen Augen und physischen Ohren.
Frage: Gibt es klare Definitionen davon, was man unter «Glaube» versteht?
Nun müßte ich Ihnen natürlich eine Sprachgeschichte des Wortes «Glaube» geben, wenn ich vollständig sein wollte, und von da ausgehend dann die verschiedenen Formen des Glaubens entwickeln. Ich möchte aber das Folgende sagen: Das Wort «Glaube» hat in unserer neueren Zeit die eingeschränkte Bedeutung erhalten des Fürwahrhaltens aus subjektiven Gründen heraus, also eine Erkenntnis, die eigentlich keine Erkenntnis ist, sondern nur ein subjektives Surrogat für eine Erkenntnis. Das hat man nicht zu allen Zeiten unter «Glaube» verstanden. Will man verstehen, woraus die Glaubensvorstellung eigentlich entstanden ist, so muß man sich folgendes vorhalten.
Wie ich nur angedeutet habe im heutigen Vortrage, war früher die Seele in einer anderen Weise mit der Wirklichkeit verknüpft. So abgesondert hat die Seele eine Naturwirklichkeit von sich selber erst in neueren Zeitläuften. In jenen älteren Zeiten, in denen die Seele noch mehr mit der geistigen Wirklichkeit verknüpft war und ein inneres Bewußtsein von seelischem Gehalt in einer anderen Art entwickelt hat, als das jetzige moderne Anthroposophische sein muß, da wußte man: wenn man etwas für wahr hält, so ist das nicht bloß ein theoretisches Verhalten, sondern es ist in diesem Fürwahrhalten zugleich eine Kraft des Seins drin. Wenn ich ein Ideal habe und glaube an mein Ideal, so ist dieses glauben an das Ideal nicht bloß das Präsentmachen der Idee des Ideals im Bewußtsein, sondern es verbindet sich eine seelische Kraft mit dem Ideal. Und diese Verbindung einer seelischen Kraft mit dem Ideal gehört von seiten des Menschen der Wirklichkeit an. Man arbeitet an der Wirklichkeit mit. Es ist also eine positive Kraftentfaltung, die im «Glauben» liegt.
In einer entsprechenden Weise kommt in dem interessanten Buch von Ricarda Huch: «Luthers Glaube», der Glaubebegriff zum Vorschein. Da ist wiederum gefunden der Glaubebegriff nicht bloß als ein Fürwahrhalten, sondern als ein Mit-dem-Realwerden-sich-Verbinden; so daß man, ich möchte sagen, indem man in der Glaubenskraft drinnensteht, etwas in sich hat wie den Keim, den die Pflanze in sich hat, der auch noch keine wirkliche Pflanze ist, aber die Kraft hat, eine wirkliche Pflanze zu werden.
Es ist nicht ein Erkenntnisabbild, was man also im Glauben haben wollte, aber es ist ein Vorstellungselement, das sich mit einer wirklichen Kraft verbindet, so daß man mit dem Glauben in der Realität steht. Und würde jemand selbst behaupten wollen, daß der Glaube ihm keine Erkenntnis bringt, so würde er trotzdem noch zugeben müssen, wenn er den Glaubebegriff in dieser Weise anwendet, daß ihn das, was dieser Glaubebegriff als Realität enthält, in die Wirklichkeit hineinstellt. — Das sind so kleine Andeutungen, Skizzen.
Spiritual scientific findings on questions concerning the human soul
What is meant by anthroposophy in this lecture is not something that arises from a sectarian movement or spiritual current or the like, but something much more universal and human: a spiritual current that arises with inner necessity in our era from the emergence of the scientific worldview over the last few centuries in the form that this scientific worldview has taken on, especially in our time.
However, this should not be thought of as if anthroposophy were a logical consequence, a kind of judgmental conclusion arising from scientific premises; rather, it is thought that anthroposophy must develop as a living entity, as an experience, in an age that must think scientifically about many questions of life and the world. This anthroposophy is conceived more as a living child — if I may say so — of the scientific way of thinking than as a mere logical consequence.
Now, dear audience, I must endeavor to shape these four lectures, which will cover a wide range of current scientific fields, into a coherent whole. Therefore, the individual lectures will not be complete in themselves, and I must ask you to take this into account.
If I open the series of lectures with a discussion of the relationship between anthroposophy and the science of the soul, this seems natural, since anthroposophy, which seeks to orient itself toward the spiritual world and to seek its research results from the spiritual world, must first and foremost concern itself with the inner affairs of the human being, with the soul life of the human being. That is one side of the coin. On the other hand, however, it must be considered that in the course of the last few centuries, especially in the course of the 19th century, what is called soul science, psychology, has basically taken on a completely different character than it had only a short time ago. Precisely because of the expansion of scientific thinking into many areas of life, the science of the soul has perhaps become more mysterious, more filled with all kinds of life's mysteries than any other scientific activity of modern times. Given the great and powerful results of scientific research, it was only natural that scientific-methodical thinking and the scientific way of looking at things should, in a sense, take possession of everything that lies within the realm of human knowledge. And so it has come to pass that this scientific way of looking at things has, one might say, extended its power in modern times to the realm of the soul life.
Now I would like to correct from the outset the prejudice, the misunderstanding, that so easily arises in relation to anthroposophical research, which could consist in the idea that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not want to take into account what the scientific way of thinking of modern times has to offer humanity. On the contrary, the further lectures I will be giving here will show precisely how natural science only comes into its own when it receives the strong foundation that it can experience through anthroposophy or spiritual science. And in a certain respect, this will already become apparent when considering the relationship between anthroposophy and human soul science. It is a legitimate ideal of modern natural science to separate what it considers to be natural events, the content of natural processes and natural facts, from anything spiritual, and not to allow anything that comes from the subjective — as it is called — from spiritual experience, to interfere with scientific observation or scientific experimentation. Only in this way can this scientific way of thinking hope that human beings will not cloud the objective picture of natural facts with what they bring into nature through their soul tendencies and soul experiences.
It is only natural that, under such an ideal, the science of the soul in particular had to undergo a certain transformation. For just as the soul must relate to the outside world in the scientific knowledge of nature, so in earlier times this soul did not relate to the outside world. Anyone who really has a sense of scientific thinking, of the worldviews of past centuries, can see that in these earlier times, when people everywhere tried to to explain and understand the facts of nature, they did not separate these facts of nature purely from what the soul felt about these facts of nature, what the soul wanted to make of these facts of nature as, let us say, symbolic or other ideas. In a sense, what people experienced in nature was mixed with what was objectively a natural fact. However, because natural science itself was not free from many things that the soul yielded, people did not find themselves in such a puzzling situation with regard to the science of the soul as they do today. Those who already perceived the soul in nature and, along with the purely material facts, took the soul out of nature, were also much more likely to believe that they could learn something about the structure of the soul in the spiritual world in harmony with the observation of nature and the world — much more readily than seems possible now, when people want to view nature in such a way that everything “subjective,” everything spiritual, is left out of this view. How, then, with a scientific view of the world that sees its most perfect ideal in the exclusion of the soul, and which must therefore develop concepts, ideas, and methods based on the exclusion of the soul, how, then, can one use these methods to cross over into the soul and recognize anything of this soul? How can we apply what we have learned from natural science, which excludes the spiritual, to the consideration of spiritual life?
Nevertheless, in the third lecture we will see how physiology in particular, and also a very promising science that is only just beginning to conquer university chairs: experimental psychology, will find their sound foundations if we find a way to arrive at a science of the soul despite the ideal of the natural scientific approach. For what is to be advocated here is in no way opposed to what has flowed into the life of the soul from the natural sciences as an auxiliary science. On the contrary! It is precisely what modern psychological laboratories are striving for that will, from a certain anthroposophical point of view, gain its true fruitfulness, its true significance.
One may now ask: What does man actually want when he confronts nature scientifically in the way that natural science rightly does today? What does man actually want to know about nature? One could talk about this question for hours; but I will only briefly indicate how it might be answered.
In the course of their spiritual life, human beings develop certain needs that arise simply from the fact that they experience things spiritually within themselves and observe the course of natural events outside themselves. These needs give rise to what we call natural science. We want to come to terms in our souls with what the soul can ask, with what the soul can raise as mysteries and doubts when contemplating nature. And we want to see nature in such a way that what we experience as the inner course of soul experiences within us is given its rightful place. It is actually the observer who gives the directives, who sets the trends in natural science. One need only recall a statement such as that made by Da Bois-Reymond in his famous speech “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge”: Knowledge of nature is present when our need for causality — that is, something subjective, something based on human experience — is satisfied. But this presupposes that this subjective, personal spiritual experience, with its questions and doubts, faces the external course of natural phenomena like a sphinx, and that these phenomena do not reveal at first glance what the soul forms as an image of them. We can change the first image that arises from our initial observation through what takes place in our soul, and in this way we obtain natural science.
Can we do the same with the life of the soul? This question is not always answered clearly and precisely enough. We cannot approach the soul in the same questioning way with ordinary consciousness as we do nature. This soul life takes place within us. We can only experience it, only live it. But we will gain nothing if we then structure what we already know in the same way that we structure nature according to laws in order to arrive at a natural science. This soul experience, as it occurs in ordinary everyday life, can be experienced; but actually, when experienced in this way, there is no reason to treat it in the same way as natural facts. These lead us into the unknown at every turn, so to speak, while we are directly involved in spiritual experience. One must first learn certain questions from natural science itself if one wants to apply a similar method to spiritual experience as is customary in natural science.
One could now say: in relation to nature, the observer is given as a self-evident external personality; there is no observer in relation to spiritual experience. Therefore, some people despaired of the possibility of observing spiritual life at all, because they could not imagine how the division could take place: that one could have the course of spiritual life and still be an observer at the same time.
But it is precisely this strange paradox that must occur in order to revive a science of the soul that can stand alongside natural science, I would say, in the spirit of the demands of natural science. The question of the observer of spiritual life must be taken seriously, in all its meaning and depth. That which lives within us cannot directly observe this soul life. If the natural scientist who wants to fulfill the ideal of scientific observation in the present separates everything that is soul from his way of thinking, if he, so to speak, lets the soul life recede completely, then the soul researcher today must take the opposite path: He must not separate anything from the soul experiences, but must bring something into these soul experiences; he must permeate these soul experiences with something that is not present in ordinary consciousness. The researcher of the soul must take precisely the opposite path! Because natural science has become great in its own way, the researcher of the soul must take this opposite path. The great, significant question arises: How can this path be found?
I will now have to say some paradoxical things. But I ask you to bear in mind that whatever has arisen in the course of human spiritual development has always had a paradoxical character in the early stages of its emergence. Just think of the great, revolutionary scientific achievements themselves, how they have affected people, what doubts, what challenges, what struggles they have caused! Human beings are much closer to the soul than to nature. It is no wonder that, with regard to the newer science of the soul, many of the same things may arise that have arisen in the progress of scientific research.
It must be clear from the outset in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that the consciousness that fills our everyday lives, which is also common in ordinary scientific research, as I have already mentioned, is not sufficient. Psychology will become a question of consciousness. And as such a question of consciousness, I have dealt with this psychology in my book “The Riddle of Man,” published a year ago: If the soul, as it confronts its own experiences in ordinary life, cannot really know anything about these experiences — if it can only experience them in the same way that one experiences external nature before one has a scientific picture of it — then this already indicates that this soul must undergo changes if it wants to observe its own facts. This will cause some difficulties in relation to the prevailing way of thinking today. This way of thinking tends not to touch the soul, to leave it as it is, as it were, as one might say, “in the hands of nature itself,” and to connect with what lives within it in science. But soul science will have to draw on forces from deeper sources that are hidden from ordinary experience, through which other methods of observation and other ways of thinking arise than those that exist in ordinary life.
Now I will briefly describe what must happen to the human soul if it wants to become a true observer of its own soul experiences, or rather, if it wants to awaken the inner observer hidden within it so that it can explore its own experiences. With thinking, with all the forms of imagination that one acquires when observing external nature, one cannot cope with the soul. With all these ideas — as one soon realizes, especially when one is struggling inwardly with knowledge — one cannot go beyond the circle of facts that can be surveyed scientifically; one cannot approach the soul at all.
The situation changes at the moment when one reaches the points — I call them the limits of knowledge — where human beings initially stand in doubt and often say to themselves: This is as far as we can go with what we as human beings are capable of in terms of our drive for knowledge; but here lie insurmountable limits; we cannot go beyond them. One need only see how people who, filled with the scientific worldview of recent times, try with their thoughts to delve deeper and deeper into existence, arrive at such borderlands of knowledge. I would like to give a few examples that will show us how those who strive for knowledge really arrive at very special places of soul experience.
As a first example, I would like to cite one that I found in a seeker of knowledge who is perhaps less appreciated as a philosopher but all the more appreciated as a personality: the famous aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer. When Vischer discussed Volkelts' interesting little book on “Die Traum-Phantasie” (The Dream Fantasy), he asked himself with all his inner energy of insight: What can be the relationship between the human soul and the human body?
It is one thing to approach this problem from philosophical premises, from academic concepts, to deal with it only intellectually, and quite another when it arises from a harsh experience of thought, so that it really stands before the soul like a sphinx. Out of such an anxious experience, the question arose — as can be seen from the whole context — for the so-called V-Vischer, Friedrich Theodor Vischer. He says: The soul of man cannot be in the body; but it cannot be anywhere else but in the body. — A complete contradiction! But a contradiction that does not arise from logical reasoning, but from full inner thinking, a contradiction in which one struggles, a contradiction that can be the beginning of an inner drama of insight. And one must not shy away from such inner dramas of insight, because they lead to experience, if real soul science is to arise.
I have thus hinted at one of the very significant questions that arise at the frontiers of knowledge. There are many. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of seven world riddles. One could cite hundreds and hundreds of smaller and larger questions of this kind. With these questions, one can pause and say: This is as far as human knowledge can go, one cannot go any further! — But if one makes this admission, then all that is lacking is the courage to seek knowledge. What is at stake is being able to pause with one's full inner soul when faced with such questions, not to consider them intellectually with all one's soul, but to live through them and have the patience to wait and see if something like a revelation from outside will arise. And that is what happens.
Those who do not want to answer such questions with the preconceived notions they already have, but instead immerse themselves, as it were, in the waves that such questions bring to the human soul, will come to a completely new experience that they cannot have in ordinary consciousness. I can express this experience through a comparison. It is an elementary experience of the soul's existence and an elementary experience for the development of an anthroposophically oriented science of the soul or psychology. One must only take it in its full reality, not in its abstract folly. We think—whether the comparison is more or less justified or not, that is not important now, what it is supposed to tell us, it will tell us—we think of a very low animal that has not yet developed an outwardly differentiated sense of touch, that, in a sense, only digs inwardly within itself with its experience and bumps into the physical objects around it. We imagine, in the sense of evolutionary theory, such a life perfecting itself. What can arise from this? That which in the lowly creature is only a bumping into external things and an internally undifferentiated experience of these bumps, differentiates itself in the course of development in such a way that the sense of touch arises. The scientific theory of evolution presents the differentiation of sensory life in general, I would say, as arising from being bumped by things, from becoming differentiated through this bumping. What happens externally, physiologically, physically for my sake: the development of a differentiated sense of touch from the mere bumping into external objects, this is repeated in the purely spiritual realm when one takes things to heart, when one comes to such borderline places of cognition with full, inner soul participation. At these borderline points, one initially feels as if one were in the darkness of the spiritual world, bumping into things everywhere. The fact that questions such as those raised by Vischer arise is proof of this: one lives in a dark spiritual existence, founded in the spiritual world, bumping into the spiritual world. But what bumps into the spiritual world must now differentiate itself!
In the real experience of such borderline questions, something that is not otherwise there, that is just as little there in the soul as the perception of external objects through a differentiated sense of touch is there for the being that has not yet developed this differentiated sense of touch, but only bumps into things, fits into and reveals itself in the soul. One must come to experience the borderline questions, these countless, tormenting, sphinx-like borderline questions, in order to know: the methods we can gain from nature, the methods that fulfill the ideal of the scientific view, lead, when it comes to the soul and spirit, only to a collision with the boundaries; there, life must move on!
And it can move forward. That can only be a fact of experience. What I mean here is all too clear, all too significant to the soul of the thinker of recent decades who is rooted in natural science. For only gradually can the time come when, through patient immersion in these borderline questions of knowledge, the soul truly expands its sphere of life. I have cited examples of such borderline questions in the short chapter I have just written on these questions in my book, Von Seelenrätseln (Mysteries of the Soul), which will be published in the next few days.
I would like to cite another such fundamental borderline question, as it arises in Friedrich Theodor Vischer, as an example of how someone who really begins to experience the drama of knowledge within themselves approaches what I have just characterized — even though, when Friedrich Theodor Vischer strove, the time had not yet come when the soul could break through the boundaries at which it stands —, groping inwardly, not yet differentiated outwardly in spiritual groping. Vischer says: "No spirit where there is no nerve center, where there is no brain, say the opponents. No nerve center, no brain, we say, if it were not prepared from below on countless levels; it is easy to speak mockingly of a stirring of the spirit in granite and limestone — no more difficult than it would be for us to ask mockingly how the protein in the brain swings into ideas. Human knowledge is losing the ability to measure the differences between levels. It will remain a mystery how it comes about that nature, under which the spirit must slumber, stands as such a perfect counterstroke to the spirit that we — I beg you to consider the wording! — bump our heads on it; it is a diremtion of such an appearance of absoluteness that Hegel's otherness and otherness, as witty as the formula may be, says as good as nothing, simply concealing the harshness of the apparent dividing wall. The correct recognition of the edge and the blow in this counterattack can be found in Fichte, but no explanation for it."
One cannot have a more precise description of this inner spiritual life: how it feels at first when it strikes the spiritual world, where it experiences these borderline questions, how it longs to differentiate itself from this striking of the spiritual world to a real groping of the spiritual world, to the opening up of a spiritual organ, to use Goethe's expression. Just as Goethe speaks of spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, one could say that, at the most elementary level, spiritual organs of touch open up as a result of living into these things. This is a real life process, a real growth process; it is not merely an application of what one has already learned in other sciences; rather, it is something as real as the growth of a child, but which brings the soul into regions it has not experienced before.
Many people today are mistaken about these things. The famous philosopher Bergson, for example, succumbs to a very fundamental misconception in this area. Bergson says that one cannot comprehend the world with the dissecting intellect, that one cannot comprehend the life of the soul in particular with the dissecting intellect, because in the soul, because in existence in general, there is “becoming” everywhere, ‘flowing’ everywhere, “life” everywhere. What does Bergson believe? That what matters is already there, that one can seek it with the powers one already has. But that is the great error. One does not find there what can truly explain the soul; rather, the soul must go beyond itself; the soul must develop something it does not have. It must not believe that the life it is to explore is already there, but that this life must first be attained.
Many people are actually very afraid—if I may use the expression—of delving into the drama of inner knowledge. They believe they are entering the abyss of subjectivity, the abyss of individuality. If they really were to enter this abyss in the way I have just described, they would find that in doing so they would discover something as objective within themselves as one finds objectivity outside oneself when facing nature. It is only an illusion to believe that one person finds this and another finds that when living through the drama of knowledge. In a certain sense, individual experiences must be different because they are different aspects, different views of the same thing from different sides. But the fact that one takes photographs of different sides of any thing and that these photographs are different does not mean that the thing itself does not present its objective nature to these aspects. One must not take what the knower brings up from his soul in this way and accept it purely dogmatically, believing in the particular formulation he gives as if it were a dogma or a law of nature. Instead, one must be clear that However subjective it may be through the particular aspect that appears through the spiritual organs of perception — and when the methods I have now only indicated in principle are further developed, then truly spiritual-soul organs arise that can be compared to spiritual eyes and spiritual ears — when, on the basis of contemplative consciousness, as I call it in my book “The Riddle of Man,” then what the observer describes may be a subjective aspect; but by accepting it, one is confronted with spiritual reality, just as one has a true image of a tree, even if one only has it from one side. This is what must be understood in this particular field.
When human beings transcend themselves in their soul-spiritual life, the result is what I describe in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” in which you will find a detailed description of what the soul must do to transcend itself. Of course, I could only give the basic principles today. If you follow what is described in this book to a certain extent, you will find why I have called these experiences, which are completely new experiences compared to ordinary consciousness, imaginations, and the level of consciousness that develops there, imaginative consciousness.
This imaginative consciousness is nothing fantastical. It has a content that is new compared to what one has experienced before. “Imaginative consciousness” is a word like so many others. What matters is that the imaginations one acquires as an enrichment of one's soul life clearly express that they are, let us say, images of a spiritual reality, just as our ordinary ideas are images of external physical reality.
I have described to you the process by which the soul, in the first stage, rises above itself to what is called imaginative cognition. With this imaginative cognition, one actually lives in a state that must be described with a paradoxical word — which, of course, can only be treated with derision under the thinking habits of the present: One lives by uniting one's soul with what one experiences in this way; one lives outside the body. That is what matters! And above all, one learns to distinguish what one experiences in this way without the aid of the body: first, from the ordinary sensory perceptions gained from the sensory world outside; but also from everything that is visions, hallucinations, and illusions.
For it must always be remembered that the path indicated here leads in the opposite direction to the path that can be described as pathological, which leads to an illusory, visionary life. It is precisely those who find their way into the imaginative life who know that what we perceive with our healthy senses in nature is spiritually higher than anything that can come before our soul through visions and hallucinations. By indulging in visions, we sink deeper into our mere physicality, connect more intimately with physicality, permeate physicality with our soul, and do not free ourselves from it.
When we talk about human beings as natural beings in the third lecture, it will become clear to us why the contents of visions can be confused with spiritual perceptions. Today, when we talk about soul experience, it is important to emphasize the difference: the visionary descends into his bodily life, but the one who strives for imaginative knowledge lives into a purely soul life, through which he comes to an experience independent of the body.
As I said, this is a paradoxical idea for the thinking habits of the present day. Those who today, from amateurish backgrounds and with dilettantish ideas, want to approach the spiritual world, would like to imagine this spiritual world according to the model of external perceptions; they would like so much — as can be seen in the disastrous practice of spiritualism — to encounter spiritual facts as if they were natural facts, as in a physical experiment in a laboratory. They want to grasp the spirit. But what we encounter in imaginative perception cannot be compared with anything tangible. In the book “Von Seelenrätseln” (On Soul Riddles), I compared it — but it is not the same, it can only be compared — with the memory images that we believe we can bring up from the depths of our soul life about past experiences. The thinness, merely soul-spiritual, of such memory experiences is the only thing in which the spirit, in which the soul is rooted, can be experienced at all. Only that the imaginations that arise in the soul like memories do not connect with experiences in the physical world, but announce through their own content that one has entered a new, spiritual world, a world that one did not know before. One must first gradually familiarize oneself with this completely different kind of soul experience, when one no longer has the support of the physical organs through which one obtains external perceptions; one must gradually accustom oneself to this life.
Above all: even though I have compared these images of imaginative knowledge with images of memory, everything that appears as imagination, that is, the reproduction of a spiritual reality, has a peculiarity that is very difficult for us to get used to, namely the peculiarity that the more perfect such a spiritual perception is in the imagination, the less we can remember it after we have had it. We are accustomed to remembering what has passed through our soul. The way we have the spiritual experience does not immediately generate the power of memory; rather, the process is quite different. I have described it in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (On the Mysteries of the Soul). The process is as follows: if one wants to have a certain imagination, one must prepare oneself for it; one must train the soul to develop the inner powers through which the imagination can reveal itself. One can remember what the soul does, what the soul undertakes in order to arrive at the imagination. In this way, one can evoke the imagination anew. So once you have had a spiritual experience in imaginative knowledge, you cannot simply remember it, but you must again make all the inner soul preparations; you can remember those. You can say to yourself: You did this, you did that; do it again, and you will have the experience again. — And only when we succeed in bringing images of the imagination into our ordinary consciousness, into our ordinary thinking, in a sense, can we remember these images. But what is really imagination must always arise anew, otherwise it is not real imagination.
Another peculiarity is this: the more often we form ideas that we gain in our outer life, the easier it is for us to form them. While we gain a certain amount of practice and things become habitual, this is not the case with the experience of imagination, with the experience of real spiritual facts. The opposite is true: the more often we want to have an imagination under the same conditions, the less distinct it becomes. This gives rise to the strange and quite paradoxical circumstance that students of spiritual life who make an effort to arrive at certain imaginations have such imaginations and are then surprised when they do not repeat themselves. Even the gift of recalling the experience is often lost after the second or third time, and it then becomes necessary to make new and ever-renewed efforts to recall what, in a sense, eludes us once it has approached us from the spiritual world.
Such inner spiritual exercises, which bridge these difficulties, are described in detail in my book: “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” even if that is only a brief outline of what I later said about these things.
Another peculiarity is that one can only cope with such imaginative ideas if one finds points of reference in the life of thought, imagination, feeling, and will that one has acquired as a human being up to this spiritual training, in order to permeate the imaginations with ideas. If one does not pay careful attention to this, one may not become ill, but one may become mentally confused and clouded. One always comes back to saying to oneself: Now you are experiencing something spiritual that you cannot yet understand; you have not developed concepts deep enough for it. Then one must stop, then one must change course in such a way that one tries to continue one's ordinary imagination, which is to be developed in the sensory world, in order to understand at a later opportunity what one did not understand before.
In short, I could cite many more such characteristics; one becomes acquainted with all kinds of things that are striking and paradoxical in relation to the soul experience that belongs to ordinary consciousness. But only when you have, in a sense, detached the soul from the body in this way, only then do you stand in the spiritual, in the spiritual world. No one can deny the spiritual experience.
What I have described to you so far leads to certain insights. One comes to the insight that, apart from the physical body that we carry within ourselves and that is the object of anatomy, physiology, and external natural science in general, what is truly our own is what I call, in my more recent books, to avoid any misunderstanding, the “image-force body,” whereas I used to call it the “etheric body.” It is truly a second element that is within us and that can never be revealed to ordinary perception, to ordinary soul experience, but can only be revealed when this soul experience progresses to the point of imagination. For this image-force body is not something spatial; this image-force body is something that lives only in time, but lives in time in such a way that everything that works in our physical body, let us say, from our birth or conception to our death, springs forth from this image-force body. We carry a second body, an image-forming body, within us. It becomes a reality, a reality for the imaginative consciousness.
But with this imaginative consciousness we cannot go further than what accompanies us from birth to death as the image-forming body — the expression is paradoxical, but that does not matter. We can go further if we now, in addition to what has just been indicated, progressively strengthen the soul that has now been freed in another way, if we now, through ever-renewed and renewed patient practice, develop a completely new relationship to what we call the life of imagination, the life of concepts.
In ordinary life, imagination is something through which we visualize external objects. When we have an idea, we believe that what we can possess internally of an external object, we actually possess! We must break away from this in the realm of spiritual experience. We must, so to speak, be able to put ourselves in a position to let our ideas play out in an inner drama of cognition, like forces and powers fighting each other within us. We must acquire the ability to let one idea enter into battle with another. We must acquire the desire, once we have characterized something from one side, to also characterize it from the opposite side. At this stage, the terms materialism, idealism, spiritualism, sensualism, and so on, all become figures of speech, because all these concepts, which are merely spun out of conceptual networks, turn out to be like photographic images from different sides.
We learn to recognize that we must behave with our concepts in the spiritual realm as we behave in the sensory realm with our sensory organs. We walk around objects. We do not regard concepts as images, but only as what characterizes things one-sidedly from this or that aspect.The spiritual researcher will therefore develop within himself the urge to characterize things from one side and also to characterize them from the other side, from the opposite side. He will feel a longing to form certain ideas and then to refute them himself, to really go through this inner struggle. I am only giving a few basic inner points of view that must be realized in ascending order when one has reached a certain point at the boundary of knowledge.
Then the soul develops further. It manages to develop within itself — and I ask you to refrain from all superstition or prejudiced ideas — what I have called in my books inspired knowledge. To a higher degree, the soul detaches itself from the body, and after reaching this level of knowledge, one is now not only able to see what accompanies our existence from birth to death as an image-forming body in the sequence of time, but one is now also able to see the spiritual that is outside our body, spiritual reality, just as the physical eyes see physical reality. In the next lecture, I will speak about external spiritual reality and will first point out what human beings now see as spiritual reality within themselves through this inspired knowledge.
What appears before inspired knowledge does not live in our existence from birth to death; it lived before us, before we entered the earthly body through birth, or let us say conception; and after we enter the spiritual world through death, it will live with us. It has connected itself with the hereditary mass that we have physically inherited from our parents and ancestors; it permeated this physical body. Inspired knowledge truly enables us to perceive what preceded our physical existence in our soul and what follows our physical death, because it enables us to perceive spiritually what is completely independent of this physical body. The image-forming body is still bound to this physical existence; it dissipates when it is separated from this physical existence. What inspired knowledge can perceive does not dissipate, it remains within itself, it is that which passes through births and deaths. In the realm of inspired knowledge, human beings can now truly investigate what connects them to purely spiritual worlds, what works powerfully so that they become human beings when their spiritual part connects with their physical hereditary mass.
And the third thing one arrives at is intuition. This does not mean the unclear thing that is usually referred to as “intuition,” but rather what I am now about to indicate. What can be achieved as the third stage of spiritual knowledge is attained when one becomes fully aware — this will occur at a certain point in one's soul development — that one is different, that one has truly found an inner observer within oneself through the efforts one has made through imagination and inspiration.
Something significant occurs within what I have called the drama of knowledge. Something occurs where one can say: one sees that not only is our physical body co-created from the spiritual, one learns to see that our soul itself, as it lives within us with its feelings, its tendencies, its ambitions, its emotions, its will character, has itself become so through spiritual processes. The drama of knowledge becomes an inner stroke of fate.
One may have experiences of fate in life that make one exultant or deeply saddened, one may experience the worst and the happiest: what one experiences when one experiences not only the becoming of the physical, but also the becoming of the soul, is a stroke of fate, an inner stroke of fate, which for those who experience it fully in the drama of knowledge means more than the highest and deepest, most joyful and most painful experiences of fate in external existence.
If this can be so, if this inner power can really bring about a change in the soul, so that not only the physical appears out of the spiritual, but the soul itself within spiritual becoming, then intuitive knowledge enters. And then the realm is entered which encompasses repeated earth lives, looking back on previous earth lives, and the certainty that this earth life will be repeated. The realization dawns that the entire life of the human being consists of successive earth lives with intervening lives in the spiritual world from death to a new birth.
All this must be connected with the fact that our inner spiritual gaze is directed toward something for which it is not actually trained through its relationship to external nature.
With regard to external nature, we always ask about origins, about causes. But with questions about origins and causes, we cannot cope with the spirit. Those who open themselves to the spiritual realm in the way I have mentioned will discover that everything that grows, flourishes, progresses, and develops is accompanied by a regressive development, a continuous crumbling of existence, a continuous destructive force. That is why those who may not have understood this in its modern form, but in the forms in which such things were known in the past, said: Spiritual knowledge leads to the gates of death. One learns to recognize that consciousness, spiritual experience, conscious spiritual experience can only occur when that which crumbles this existence intervenes in the growing, flourishing, progressing development; and one learns to recognize that death is only the one great event that can be divided, so to speak, into its atoms, as that which is constantly happening within us while we become conscious in physical life. Knowledge in this world is a small entry into that which overwhelms us in one fell swoop when we pass through the gate of death.
One learns to recognize the relationship between consciousness and dying. And precisely by learning to recognize the relationship between consciousness and dying, one also learns to recognize how this consciousness passes through the gate of death, how death is precisely an awakener of another consciousness into which we enter when we lay down the physical body, which we lay down, so to speak, only for the sake of knowledge, when we acquire such imaginative, inspired, intuitive knowledge.
One must learn to think about one's relationship to the world in a completely different way than one was accustomed to before, if one wants to gain a real understanding of spiritual knowledge. Above all, one must completely abandon the belief that one can somehow find the spirit by interpreting the material world, by criticizing the material world in some way, by finding laws in the material world. The laws that are found in the material world apply only to the material world. The spirit is not found by interpreting the sensory world; the spirit is found in the physical body in the sensory world; but it is found in the free experience of the spiritual realm.
I can make this clear by means of a comparison: when we read rows of words, rows of letters, we do not perceive them in such a way that we say: there is a vertical line, there is a horizontal line; we do not interpret the letters, we look beyond the rows of letters and words, and an inner content develops. This content has nothing to do with an interpretation of the letters. One must have learned to read. What develops in the reader is something quite different from what lies in the letters. One cannot take the spirit that one finds in the letters when reading out of the typesetter's box. Nor can one find spiritual life in nature by interpreting nature. Spiritual life can only be found by lifting the soul above oneself and thereby finding that which now protrudes from the spirit itself into this physical life, insofar as the soul experiences itself in the physical between birth and death.
You see, a science of the soul is emerging that can stand alongside the natural sciences because it does not transfer the methods developed for nature to the soul, but also because it does not stop at the soul as it is experienced in ordinary existence, but carries into this soul something objective from which the soul experiences itself and from which the physical is also born, as we shall see in the third of these lectures.
These are just a few hints, only the very first, elementary hints — for everything else I must refer you to my books — hints as to how human beings can find what lies within them and is their eternal essence, how this anthroposophically oriented doctrine of the soul can truly lead human beings to avoid what happened to a very significant but tragically thinking researcher of the present day, the great psychologist Franz Brentano, who died here in Zurich in March of this year. Franz Brentano immersed himself in psychological research at a time when the external scientific way of thinking was emerging. He wanted to apply the scientific method, as it is, to the life of the soul. However, this scientific method does not allow us to go beyond comparing ideas: how feelings arise from the soul, what attention is, and so on in external physical life. But Franz Brentano laments this in his book “Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,” in the first volume he wrote, which remained the only one, he laments what the science of the soul cannot achieve by saying: What can help us, even if we proceed in a scientific manner, comparing ideas, associating ideas, the emergence of pleasure and displeasure, and so on, if the great hopes of Plato and Aristotle cannot be fulfilled: that we can gain insight through the science of the soul into the survival of the better part of our being after passing through the gate of death. — Franz Brentano laments that he cannot tackle these problems with the means at his disposal. It is remarkable how he struggled with these problems until the end of his life. The sincerity and honesty of his struggle emerge precisely from the tragic circumstances that I described in the third chapter of my book Von Seelenrätseln (On the Mysteries of the Soul) in an obituary for Franz Brentano. Again and again, he promised to continue his “Psychology” after the first volume was published. It was planned to be four or five volumes; the first volume appeared in the spring of 1874, and he promised the second for the fall, then the following ones in quick succession. Nothing else ever appeared! He wanted to master the life of the soul using scientific methods; he wanted to work honestly and sincerely. Had he been able to do so, had the scientific method not weighed down his research efforts like a lead weight because he misunderstood it, he would have been able to enter through the gate into the spiritual experience that brings forth something from the soul that cannot be there if one has only scientific methods. The tragic life of Franz Brentano as a researcher shows, as with many other personalities of the present day — but in his case, because he was such an important and at the same time inwardly so fundamentally honest nature, particularly strikingly — how scientific achievements necessitate a science of the soul that can only be attained through spiritual experiences freed from the physical. Then the great problems that must occupy human beings above all else when they turn their gaze to their own spiritual life will once again come to the fore: the great problem of immortal life — by grasping the truly immortal part through methods such as those we have described — and also the problem of free will, which we will discuss in these lectures, both of which are the most important and compelling problems. But if you read the psychology literature of the last few decades, you will see that these problems have been completely banished, indeed have disappeared from psychological research, simply for the reasons that have been stated in today's discussion.
But it is not only a matter of approaching these great questions of the soul! What the psychologist seeks, what he wants to investigate with his methods developed through immersion in the scientific way of thinking, also becomes completely clear only when it can be pursued from the point of view indicated here. The situation is already as follows: natural science will apply on the one hand, and spiritual science and spiritual research on the other. But just as when digging a tunnel, if everything has been properly considered, digging from two sides, one meets in the middle, so spiritual research and natural research come together and only then form a whole of the knowledge sought by human beings.
I would like to give just one example of how even ordinary psychology can be conquered by venturing into these lofty realms, which have only been touched upon today. When conducting psychological research, humans are confronted with questions such as those concerning memory and recollection. One could despair when dealing with the problem of memory in ordinary psychology. There it becomes very clear where the limits of knowledge lie: human beings imagine something, gain an idea from an external perception; well, this idea “goes down” into the soul element, “disappears,” as they say, but later on, people can remember the idea. Where was it?
I don't want to go into all that has been said about these questions for centuries. On the one hand, it is said that such ideas disappear down into the unconscious, then rise again above the threshold of consciousness. — I would like to meet someone who, when he coins these words, is able to connect them with a meaningful content! One immediately loses meaning when one speaks of this “descending” and “ascending” of ideas. One can talk about anything, but one cannot imagine it, because it does not correspond to any kind of reality. Psychologists with a more physiological orientation speak of “traces” that “dig themselves” into the nervous system, into the brain; these traces then “re-evoke” these ideas. One then suffers from having to explain how the idea that has been pulled down is dug up from these traces. As I said, one can despair of what is the content of ordinary psychology. How much serious, noble, genuine research work is devoted to these problems! This honest, genuine research work should not be underestimated.
The truth is, however, that even this simple fact of soul life only reveals itself in the right light when it is viewed with the power of the soul that now has the spiritual organs, which now truly observes ordinary soul life from the point of view taken in the spiritual world. Then one realizes that there is no question of an idea that I now have “descending” somewhere and “ascending” again somewhere else. Memory is completely misunderstood. An idea that I now gain through an external perception and now have does not live in me as something real at all, but as a reflection that the soul forms through the reflection of the body. We will talk about this in more detail in the third lecture. And this idea only lives now! Once I have lost it from my soul life, it is no longer there. There is no such thing as ideas sinking down and resurfacing — and thus forming memories. The trivial idea of memory is already wrong.
What matters is this: once you have sharpened the soul's power of spiritual vision, you see — just as you observe in the outside world, so you can observe in the spirit — that while we gain an idea through perception, another process is also taking place. And it is not the process of imagination, but this other, subconscious process, which takes place parallel to imagination, that creates something in us which, when I have the idea, does not immediately come into consciousness, but which lives on. When I have an idea, a subconscious process arises that is now purely bound to the physical. When this process is later recalled for some reason, the idea is formed anew as the soul now looks at this process, which is a purely physical one. A remembered idea is a new idea formed from the depths of physical life, which resembles the old one because it is evoked by the subconscious process that has formed in physical life. In a sense, the soul reads the engram engraved in the body when it remembers an idea.
In this way, even the ordinary ideas of psychologists are corrected. One gains the correct view instead of what is presented quite wrongly in ordinary experience. And so I could show you, throughout the whole of psychology, how what the soul actually believes to be its experience proves to be an illusion in the light of true knowledge, how we have completely false ideas about this soul life, and how these must first be corrected by the soul freeing itself from the body and now truly observing its experience from a spiritual point of view.
It is precisely through such ideas, which on the one hand truly open up the spirit to science and reveal the spiritual world, that on the other hand, what is gained through faithful and diligent research using scientific methods, including in experimental psychology and physiological psychology, is put in its rightful place. And anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is truly not hostile or unsympathetic to these fields. Rather, knowing that the ordinary methods used to gain knowledge of the external natural world cannot lead to solutions in the soul's experience, but only to questions, to the right questions, it is precisely through its light that it will be able to make truly fruitful what can be gained by the external scientific path.
How the work of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science really works from the other side of the mountain, just as a tunnel is dug from two sides, working towards natural science, can also be shown by another example. Recently, Darwinist-oriented natural scientists have come up with something very interesting, which I will mention in a moment. Before that, I would like to mention that the subconscious activity that underlies memory, developing subconsciously in parallel with imagination, is something different but related to what lies in the forces of heredity and growth. The forces that grow within us are related to those forces that are active in the subconscious when we form an idea from a sensory perception and evoke dispositions in the physical body that are later read and lead to memory. Through genuine soul observation, one arrives at a clear understanding of the relationship between the powers of memory and the powers of heredity and growth. A bridge is created — and we will speak more clearly about such bridges in the coming days — between the soul-spiritual and the physical.
And now let us see how Richard Semon, the Darwinian-oriented natural scientist, in a very interesting book, starts from the conditions of heredity, from the occurrence of hereditary characteristics, and comes to bring these hereditary forces together with the powers of memory! The natural scientist thus comes to find the forces of heredity related to the forces of memory. The soul researcher comes to find the subconscious forces underlying memory related to those of heredity!
These things happen quite independently of one another. What Richard Semon described as Mneme in his very interesting book coincides with soul research, which is anthroposophically oriented and extends to the consideration of those areas that are also researched in humans using scientific methods. But more on that in the third lecture.
Certainly, even the elementary points I have taken the liberty of presenting today about the successes of a real spiritual experience of the soul and, through this, about the foundation of a newer science of the soul, must appear paradoxical in many ways to the thinking habits of the present. But even if this is most comprehensible to those who are already familiar with these matters, it may also be said that one should not merely be inspired by a lecture, but should delve deeper into the serious course of spiritual scientific research. One will see that the forces are used in a different way than in the field of natural science, but that the path of research in anthroposophy is no less serious, no less laborious than that developed in natural scientific research, even if what is the result in natural science must be the starting point in spiritual research: We start with concepts, ideas, and natural laws when we want to investigate nature. We assume that what natural scientists experience brings us to the limits of what is possible when we want to enter into spiritual research and anthroposophical soul research.
I therefore believe that psychology and soul research based on anthroposophy should not be regarded as opposed to the legitimate demands of today's scientific way of thinking. On the contrary, it rejects nothing that emerges from legitimate scientific research; it is in no way opposed to legitimate science! But it cannot stop at merely drawing logical conclusions from what natural science itself already provides. Such a philosophy does not mean spiritual science, which only wants to draw further logical conclusions from natural science. No! Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must make a higher commitment, the commitment that this spiritual research must emerge from natural science not as an abstract logical consequence, but as a living child.
And the spiritual researcher has a stronger belief than many natural scientists who reject spiritual research, a stronger belief in natural science, that this natural science is strong enough not only to lead to its logical consequences, but strong enough to give birth to something completely alive, as it were, something that arises with its own life force, that must flourish through its own free life, and that must be: the spiritual science demanded by natural science itself.
Question and Answers
Several questions were asked on the subject of repeated earthly lives.
Dear attendees! The questions that have been raised here are such that many aspects of the answer remain unsatisfactory if one answers them briefly, or that, if one wanted to answer them satisfactorily, one would have to write entire books. First of all, there is the question:
What is the purpose of reincarnation?
Yes, dear attendees, basically the question of purpose — I must give the answer a scientific character, otherwise it is just beating around the bush — is just like the question of reason — whether teleology is justified or not, I cannot get involved in that — a question that arises in the physical world and has its meaning within the physical world. Reincarnation — if one wants to call repeated earthly lives that, I like to avoid buzzwords, which is why I spoke today of repeated earthly lives — reincarnation, however, is governed by laws that belong to the spiritual world, that have their meaning in the spiritual world. And this is the most difficult thing to get used to: that when one passes from the physical world into the spiritual world, one must also change, metamorphose one's concepts, that the concepts that apply to the physical world lose their meaning, their significance, when one enters the spiritual world. Those who have begun to know the true character of the spiritual world do not actually ask, as one might ask about the purpose of a machine, about the “purpose of human beings,” much less about the “purpose of reincarnation.”
I said in the course of the lecture: the way of thinking that is gained from natural science — which is essentially also the way of thinking that is gained from the physical outside world — leads at most to the right questions; but one must then try to obtain the answers from the spiritual world.
Now, of course, anyone who asks a question like, “What is the purpose of reincarnation?” has something in mind. It corresponds to a certain need to know something, even though the question of purpose is not actually applicable in this sphere. But now I ask you to consider the following. I would like to say that I have to gather the building blocks for answering questions. Spiritual science is not something that can be acquired quickly like a small handbook, but rather something that is truly a very comprehensive field.
When we ask questions in life, we can proceed in such a way that we always go to the end with the questions, so to speak. But perhaps that will not be applicable in all cases. You see, a question like this one is asked a hundred and a hundred times. I have often said the following about this: There may be people who want to travel from Zurich to Rome, and they want to know the way. Yes, if someone here in Zurich cannot give them the exact route with all the details, they do not want to travel to Rome at all. But there may also be people who are satisfied with knowing the route from Zurich to Lugano, and who are then satisfied when they find out in Lugano how to continue their journey, and then how to continue further. This is a comparison. It means the following: when we are in one earthly life, it is with a view to subsequent earthly lives. This expresses a process of development. In other earthly lives we will gain things that we do not gain in this earthly life. We go through experiences that bring us other trials, other experiences. If we could answer all questions in this earthly life, this earthly life would not produce subsequent earthly lives!
So for spiritual science, it is a matter of establishing the fact of reincarnation, if I may use the term. Just as human beings give purpose to their individual earthly lives out of their free impulses, so they give successive purposes, each arising from the other, to their repeated earthly lives. And they will not imagine that they can define in one earthly life the whole scope of human existence, which passes through repeated earthly lives. One becomes unaccustomed to definitions that seek to encompass something when one enters into the truly spiritual experience of the soul. Definitions are quite good in ordinary physical life; in spiritual life, where everything boils down to aspects, one is really reminded, when someone demands definitions, of the example given in Greek literature, where it is explained what a definition is. When asked how one should define a human being, it is said—since one can only ever define on the basis of individual characteristics—that a human being is a creature that has two legs and no feathers. The next time, someone brought a rooster that he had plucked—as a “human being.”
Now, I know, of course, what logic demands of a correct definition. Nevertheless, in the mind's eye, definitions appear to be one-sided. The same applies to all purposes, causal assumptions, and so on. Reality is something you find yourself in, something you live and weave in, but which cannot be encompassed by one-sided concepts. One will find the purposes in successive earthly lives. So there is no real answer to the question of the “purpose of reincarnation.”
Question: Is reincarnation a product of the imagination in the spiritual realm?
Yes, dear attendees, one can say that, but one must add what I have shown in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Mysteries of the Soul): ideas as we have them in ordinary consciousness are not really ideas in the spiritual sense, but rather paralyzed ideas, like the corpses of ideas. That is the strange thing. What lives in the soul is far more than what comes to consciousness in ordinary consciousness. What lives in the soul is paralyzed because it would not be tolerated by ordinary consciousness, and then lives like a corpse of imagination. Hence the abstract concepts in the soul. What we have there is actually only a reflection, something that appears and disappears, something that is not remembered at all, as I explained in my lecture. But what lies behind it, what enters the imagination, this living spiritual reality, is what passes through death and lives on in the forces of reincarnation. Perhaps that will be the answer to the question.
Question: Is reincarnation an absolute lawful institution, not a result of the formative forces?
Only life between birth and death, or conception and death, is a result of the formative forces. But what is called reincarnation here is subject to far higher spiritual laws. Whether it is a “lawful institution” is difficult to answer; it is simply a fact. Repeated earthly lives are a fact. “A result of the formative forces?” Human beings only acquire the formative force body when they approach conception as souls; they also shed it again after death; the formative force body is — as I explained in the lecture — not eternal. However, the forces that come into play when we speak of the laws of reincarnation are those that do not enter at all, not only into the consciousness of the self, but into the realm of the ordinary physical world.
You see, the way could already open up for many people in this area, if only they would search in the right way. The point is — as I have already indicated for individual things — that experiences in the spiritual world seem paradoxical compared to experiences in ordinary existence, that in many respects the things one experiences when entering the spiritual world seem quite different from the things of the physical world. And here we must say that because human beings base their imagination on the experiences of natural life and natural events, their concepts hardly go beyond ideas of space. A more accurate, truly honest self-knowledge shows how little human beings go beyond ideas of space. For you see, where do we get our ideas of time? Actually, from ideas of space! The changes in space, the changes in location of the sun, the moon, even the hands of the clock, from which we gain our concepts of time. But these are actually concepts of space that we have. The spiritual, however, in its lowest form as the image-forming body, already lives in time. There one must already have a real concept of time!
But very few people today have a real concept of time. And even fewer have a real concept of the different speeds — not times, but speeds — that prevail in the soul and spirit. Our soul life is based on the fact that, for example, thinking and imagining take place at a completely different speed than feeling, and feeling in turn at a completely different speed than willing. These things — that there are different speeds interwoven within the soul life — are precisely what cause the inner emergence of consciousness. Consciousness arises only where something disturbs itself. Therefore, consciousness is even related to death: because death disturbs life. But in general: something is disturbed! That is why, for example, Bergson's idea is so wrong that one must look everywhere at life and at movement; whereas one comes to the very essence of movement when one hinders movement, and to the essence of life when one sees how life is grasped by death. To grasp something other than life is to penetrate into the essence of life.
These things lead us to realize that lawfulness itself becomes something else when we enter into spiritual life, which is highly uncomfortable for many people. They therefore do not have the courage to penetrate the spiritual world with their concepts and ideas: because these concepts and ideas would have to change! When one truly engages in spiritual research, one learns this very, very thoroughly. I am very reluctant to talk about personal matters, because the personal has little to do with the objective. But many years ago, I was confronted with an important question that has become fruitful for me in a certain specialized field: Herbart and other psychologists applied arithmetic and mathematics to the study of the soul; they attempted to calculate psychological facts. Eduard von Hartmann even attempted to calculate morally relevant facts by attempting to justify pessimism mathematically; on the debit side of life, he recorded all pleasurable experiences, and on the credit side, all unpleasant experiences, and then said: the balance shows a surplus of unpleasantness — therefore, life is bad.I have shown that the whole calculation is nonsensical. You can find this proof in the corresponding chapter of my “Philosophy of Freedom,” written in 1894. If one wants to speak of calculation here, the beginning of the calculation must be done quite differently. It must be done in such a way that one does not perform a subtraction, a subtraction leading to a balance, but rather that one writes down a division, a fraction, writing down as the numerator everything one experiences in one's life in terms of pleasure, joy, and elation, and as the denominator all pain and suffering. Let us consider this fraction. When would life no longer seem worth living? If the denominator were zero, if there were no pain at all, the value would be infinitely large. But the denominator must become infinitely large if the fraction is to have the value zero. That means: only then would life no longer seem worth living, if the pain were infinitely great. The decision about this is not given to us by an abstract calculation, but by life itself. That is how life calculates!
When we look at spiritual events, we cannot calculate the relationship between the calculation and the spiritual event in the same way as Herbart or Hartmann did in this case. Instead, life gives us the result, and when we ascend into the spiritual worlds, the result splits apart — a sum into addends, a fraction into numerator and denominator. One enters into precisely the opposite. While here in physical life one has the individual addends and numerators and denominators and then obtains the result, it is the other way around: in spiritual experience, the result is there; it is experienced, and the individual elements that lead to the result enter into the spiritual world. So you see: one must thoroughly rethink many ideas if one wants to cross the threshold between the physical and the spiritual world.
Perhaps such explanations, which I have linked to this question, can perhaps give you the idea that this spiritual science is not something that is just pulled out of thin air or born of imagination, but that it is something that is really — as I said in the lecture — worked out with no less effort than is applied in any other scientific work. Only they are in a different field. So one must say: there is a lawfulness in that process which is expressed through repeated earthly lives. But one must first acquire an understanding of the nature of this lawfulness. That is why I said that it is not a matter of interpreting natural phenomena, but of truly rising above natural phenomena and freely experiencing the spiritual within oneself. With that, I have answered the question.
Now a strange question — strange after this lecture: What are the spiritual organs of touch?
Yes, one must not imagine anything sensual by this. I have emphasized sharply that it is something soul-spiritual that can only be compared to what comes alive in memory. So if one wants to answer this by looking for a generic term for the sub-term “spiritual organs of touch” that one already knows, then one will not be able to cope with this matter. Instead, you have to work your way through what has been shown: the soul reaches its limits, differentiates itself, and develops “spiritual sense organs” which, in the spiritual realm, can be compared to the sense organs in the physical realm, just as “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” can be compared to physical eyes and physical ears.
Question: Are there clear definitions of what is meant by “faith”?
Now, of course, if I wanted to be complete, I would have to give you a linguistic history of the word “faith” and then, starting from there, develop the various forms of faith. However, I would like to say the following: in our modern times, the word “faith” has taken on the limited meaning of believing something to be true for subjective reasons, i.e., a belief that is not actually a belief, but only a subjective substitute for a belief. This has not always been understood as “faith.” If one wants to understand where the concept of faith actually originated, one must bear the following in mind.
As I have only hinted at in today's lecture, the soul used to be connected to reality in a different way. It is only in more recent times that the soul has become separated from natural reality. In those older times, when the soul was still more connected with spiritual reality and developed an inner consciousness of soul content in a different way than the current modern anthroposophical approach must be, it was known that when one believed something to be true, it was not merely a theoretical attitude, but that this belief also contained a force of being. When I have an ideal and believe in my ideal, this belief in the ideal is not merely the presence of the idea of the ideal in consciousness, but a spiritual force is connected with the ideal. And this connection of a spiritual force with the ideal belongs to reality on the part of the human being. One works together with reality. So it is a positive unfolding of power that lies in “belief.”
In a similar way, the concept of belief comes to the fore in Ricarda Huch's interesting book, Luther's Faith. Here, too, the concept of faith is found not merely as a belief, but as a connection with what is becoming real; so that, I would say, by standing within the power of faith, one has something within oneself like the seed that the plant has within itself, which is not yet a real plant, but has the power to become a real plant.
What one wants to have in faith is not an image of knowledge, but an element of imagination that connects with a real power, so that one stands in reality with faith. And if someone wanted to claim that faith does not bring them knowledge, they would still have to admit, if they apply the concept of faith in this way, that what this concept of faith contains as reality places them in reality. — These are just small hints, sketches.