Anthroposophy has Something to Add to Modern Sciences
GA 73
14 November 1917, Zurich
IV. Anthroposophy and Sociology
Spiritual scientific findings concerning rights and moral and social forms of life
You will have seen from the three lectures I have given here to characterize the way anthroposophically orientated spiritual science relates to three different fields of human endeavour in the sciences, that with this spiritual science it is above all important to develop ideas that relate to the reality of things and make it possible to enter into the fullness of real life in order to gain knowledge of that real world. We may say—and this will have been evident from the whole tenor of my lectures—that for a relatively long period in the evolution of human science, concepts in accord with reality have only been gained in the field of natural science that is based on the evidence of the senses. In some respects these concepts are exemplary scientific achievements. However, with regard to reality they only go as far as lifeless nature—I think it is reasonable to say this. Lifeless nature exists not only where it is immediately apparent to the senses but also as a mineral element in the life forms and mind-endowed entities that live in the physical world. In modern science, people have a grasp of things that is exemplary. I think we have very clear evidence of this in the applications of natural science in human life, applications that have been perfected and are tremendously successful. When concepts are applied to human life we can, under certain conditions, see how far they are in accord with reality. A watch cannot be constructed if one has the wrong concepts of mechanics and physics; it would soon tell us that the wrong concepts have been used.
This is not the case with all areas of life, and especially in the areas we are going to consider today, reality does not always immediately make it clear if we are dealing with concepts that are in accord with it, if they have been gained on the basis of reality or not.
In the field of natural science it is relatively safe to use concepts that are not in accord with the truth, for they will show themselves to be erroneous or inadequate for as long as one stays within the field of natural science, that is, theoretical discussion which may then also be put into practice. However, when it comes to social life, the life of human communities in any form, we have to consider not only how to gain concepts but also how to bring these to realization. Under present-day conditions there are spheres of life where inadequate concepts can indeed be introduced. The inadequacies of the ideas, notions, reactions and so on will then show themselves; but in some respect people living entirely with a natural scientific bias will be helpless in face of the consequences of such concepts. In a sense it would be reasonable to say that the tragic events which have now come upon the human race are essentially connected—more than one would think, and more so than can be even hinted at in one brief lecture—with the fact that for long periods of time people did not know how to develop concepts that were in accord with reality, concepts that could be used to encompass the facts of real life. These facts of real life have become too much to handle for humanity today. In many ways the inadequate ideas humanity developed in the course of centuries are being reduced to absurdity in a most terrible way in these tragic events.
We discover what really lies behind this if—let us now take a view that is different from those taken in the previous lectures—we first of all look at the way attempts have been made again and again in recent times to establish a general human philosophy on the basis of natural science, the way people have tried to introduce natural scientific thinking, so exemplary in its own sphere—let me repeat this over and over again—to all spheres of human life—psychology, education, politics, social studies, history, and so on.
Anyone who knows about developments in this direction will know the efforts people who think in the natural scientific way have made to apply the ideas and concepts they have evolved in natural science to all the above spheres of life. Proof of this is available in hundreds of ways, but let me just give some characteristic details. They may go some way back, but 1 think we can say that the trend they reflect has continued to this day and has indeed been growing.
Someone who in my view is an outstanding scientist spoke at two scientific gatherings in 1874 and 1875 on the sphere of rights, issues concerning morality and law, and human social relationships. In the course of those lectures he said some highly characteristic things. He actually claimed that anyone who in terms of modern scientific education has the necessary maturity ought to demand that the natural scientific way of thinking should be made part of people’s general awareness, like a kind of catechism. The inner responses, needs and will impulses arising in human beings as the basis of their social aspirations would thus have to be closely connected as time goes on with a purely natural-scientific view of the world that would be spreading more and more. This is what Professor Benedikt said at the 48th science congress.80Moriz Benedikt (1835–1920). Zur Psychophysik der Moral mid des Rechts. Zwei Vortraege gehalten in der 47. und 48. Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher. Wien 1875. He said the scientific view of the world needed to gain the breadth, depth and clarity to create a catechism that would govern the cultural and ethical life of the nation. It is his ideal, therefore, that everything in social life that speaks out of the cultural, heart-felt and will-related needs of people should be a reflection of natural-scientific ideas!
With regard to psychology, the same scientist said that it, too, had become a natural science since it followed physics and chemistry in casting off the ballast of metaphysics and no longer took hypotheses for its premises that were unfathomable for our present-day organization.
Many scientists—including Oscar Hertwig, whom I mentioned the day before yesterday, Naegeli and many others—emphasize again and again that natural science can only work effectively in its own field. The scientific ideas that are developed are such, however, that the way in which they are developed, as it were, prevents humanity from searching and striving for other spheres of reality than those that can at best be reached with natural science. I have quoted things people said some time ago, but if we were to quote today’s speakers we would find that they are entirely in the same spirit.
It is reasonable to quote Benedikt, who is a criminal anthropologist, for although he wants to take the purely scientific point of view also in looking at social life, he still has so much purely naive conceptual material in him which is in accord with reality that much of what he says—really going against his own theoretical theses—does truly extend into the reality of the world. On the whole, however, one may say that this tendency or inclination to develop a whole philosophy based on natural-scientific concepts, which are excellent in their own field, has gradually produced a quite specific philosophy, and one might almost get oneself a bad name by actually putting the philosophy that has developed out of this tendency into words. Today someone may do excellent work in his field, and if he then establishes a philosophy he extends knowledge which in its own field is indeed excellent to the whole world, and above all also to areas of which he in fact knows nothing. We can certainly say therefore that we have an excellent science today and its contents relate to things which people understand thoroughly. But then there are also philosophies which generally speaking are about things people do not understand at all!
This is certainly not without significance when it comes to the sphere of social life. Here man himself is the reality factor. Human beings are in these social spheres and anything they do is indeed such that anything that lives in their philosophy of life does enter into their impulses and into the social structures and the way in which people live together. This is why the kind of things were created which I referred to briefly at the beginning today.
In what I am saying today, I want again, as in the first three talks, base myself more on individual aspects of real life, on findings made in what I call spiritual investigation. I hope that with the aid of these I will be able to show how we should approach the fields of social studies in spiritual research.
A particular problem arises for modern people who have scientific knowledge, and whose life of ideas is based entirely on scientific training, when they approach the sphere of social life and immediately have to consider a fundamental concept, which is the concept of human freedom. This concept, which doubtless has many nuances, has in some respect become a cross that has to be borne in modern thinking about the world. For on the one hand it is extraordinarily difficult to understand the social structure of today without having clarity with regard to the concept of freedom. On the other hand, however, someone who is thinking in the natural scientific way, in the thinking habits of our time, will hardly know what to do with the concept of freedom. We know that disputes concerning this concept go back a long way and that there have always been two factions, though the nuance has varied—the ‘determinists’ who assumed that all human actions are in a way predetermined, in a more naturalistic or some other way, so that a person only does things under an unknown yet existing compulsion or causality; then there were the ‘indeterminists’ who denied this and concentrated more on subjective reality, that is, on what human beings experience inwardly as they develop their conscious awareness, and who maintained that genuinely free human actions were independent of such fixed predetermination which would exclude the concept of freedom.
Considering the way in which natural science has developed so far it is truly impossible to make something of the concept of freedom in that science. Anyone who makes a training in natural science the basis for establishing a sociology will be forced, in many respects, to take the wrong view of that concept of freedom and produce a structure for life that takes no account of the concept of freedom, ascribing everything to particular causes that lie either outside or inside the human being. In some respects such an approach is easy, for it allows one in a way to determine the social structure from the beginning. It is easier to reckon with human actions if they are predetermined than if one must expect a spirit of freedom in the human being to play a role.
It would be wrong to present as a concept of freedom some kind of visionary concepts, vague mystical ideas that would tend to be more or less the opposite of what modern natural science has to offer. We have to realize that a science of the spirit is only justifiable if it does not go against the true meaning of progress in natural science. Because of this, I must again start today by relating the fundamental concept in developing social life, which is the concept of freedom, to such natural scientific ideas as can be gained with the help of the science of the spirit.
According to the customary natural scientific concepts, human beings depend for their actions on the peculiarities of their organization. These are themselves investigated, as I have shown the last time, by applying the law of conservation of energy like a formula to the inner life, and this leads to the concept of freedom being excluded. If it is true that human beings are only able to develop energies and powers by transforming things they have taken in, then it will, of course, be impossible for the soul to develop any energies and powers of its own—which would be the requirement if freedom were to become a reality.
In the science of the spirit it is, however, evident that it is absolutely necessary to put the whole of the knowledge gained in the natural sciences on a new basis in this particular area. Admirable factual discoveries have been made in the natural sciences, as I have also said in the preceding lectures. But concepts and ideas about nature are so narrowly defined that it is not possible to have a comprehensive view of those discoveries. In the last lecture I referred to the way in which the science of the spirit makes it possible to relate the whole sphere of the human soul and spirit to the whole sphere of the living body, and that it then emerges that we need to relate the actual life of ideas to the life of the nerves, the life of feeling to the ramifications and to anything depending on the breathing rhythm, and the life of the will to metabolism.
If, for a starting point, we take the natural scientific view of the relationship between the life of ideas in the human soul and the life of the nerves, someone familiar with modern scientific ideas will have to say: ‘Processes occur in the life of the nerves; they are the causes of parallel processes in the life of ideas.’ Since there has to be a process in the nerves—and by definition this has its causal origin in the whole organism—for every idea-forming process in the soul, the corresponding process in the mind cannot be free, seeing that the process in the nerves is apparently the result of causal conditions existing in the organism. It thus has to be subject to the same necessity as the corresponding process in the nerves.
That is still the view taken today. It will not be like this in future, seen from the natural scientific point of view! People will then look with very different eyes at certain new approaches that have already been developed in natural scientific research. It will however mean that the directions to be taken in research are indicated out of the science of the spirit, for this alone can make it possible to throw a truly comprehensive light on the findings made in natural science.
The strange thing the spiritual investigator finds is that the life of our nerves relates in a quite specific way to the corresponding rest of the organism. We have to say it is like this: In the life of the nerves the organism destroys itself in a specific way, it is not built up in it. And in the life of the nerves—if we take it as pure life in the nerves, not nutritional life in the nervous system—the first processes to be considered are not growth or development processes, but processes of involution, of destruction.
One is easily misunderstood in this area, for it is still completely new today. And in one short lecture it is difficult to bring in all the concepts that will prevent such misunderstanding. So I simply have to accept the danger of being misunderstood. What I can say is that the life of the nerves as such proceeds in a way that is completely different from all the other organic processes that serve growth, reproduction and the like. The latter mean development in the ascent. This includes the development of cells, the cell division processes we can observe in reproduction and growth processes, as something side by side with cells that are still in the life of reproduction, or at least a degree of partial reproduction. When the human organisation—it is similar for the animal organization, but this is only of minor interest to us today—extends into the life of the nerves, it partly dies off in that life of the nerves. Going into the life of the nerves, developing processes are broken down. We may thus say that even from a purely natural scientific point of view it is evident—and the life of the red blood cells runs to some degree parallel to the life of the nerves—that division processes come to a stop as they enter into nerve cells and red blood cells. This is wholly factual evidence of something which a conscious mind with vision is able to perceive: that the nerve cannot have part in anything that is in any way productive, but that the nerve inwardly brings life to a halt, so that life comes to an end where the nerve branches.
By having a nervous system, we are, as it were, bearing death in us at the organic level. To compare what is really going on in the life of the nerves with something else in the organism, I’d have to say, strange though it may sound: ‘The unconscious processes in the life of the nerves cannot be compared with the process, for example, which happens when someone has taken in food and this food is processed in the organism for constructive development. No, the actual process in the nerves—as a process in the nerves, and not a nerve nutrition process—can be compared to what happens in the organism when it breaks down its tissues because of hunger.’ It is thus a destructive and not a constructive process which extends into the nervous system.
Nothing of any kind can emerge or result directly from this nervous system. This nervous system represents a process that has been stopped, a process that shows itself in progress in the cell life of reproductive cells and growth cells. There it is progressive; in the neural organs it is stopped. In reality, therefore, the life of the nerves merely provides the basis, the soil, on which something else may spread.
The principle which spreads on top of this life of the nerves, extending over this life of the nerves, is the life of ideas—initially stimulated by the outer senses—entering into the life of the nerves. It is only if we understand that the nerves are not the reason for forming ideas but merely provide a basis by having destroyed organic life, that we understand that the principle which develops on the basis of this life of nerves is something foreign to the life of nerves itself.
The mind and soul principle developing on the basis of a life in the nerves which is destroying itself is so foreign to it that we may say: It really is just as when I walk along a road and leave my footprints behind me. Someone following those footprints should not derive the shapes he sees in my footprints from any kind of forces in the soil itself, coming, as it were, from inside the soil to produce my footprints. Every expression of inner life may be seen in the nervous system, like my footprints in the soil, yet it would be wrong to explain the life of mind and soul as something inwardly ‘arising from the nervous system’. The life in mind and soul leaves tracks in the prepared soil, a soil that has been prepared by ‘forgoing’ the possibility of the nerve continuing its own productivity, if I may put it like this in symbolic terms.
Perceptive vision also shows the life in mind and spirit which thus develops on a basis of destruction, of a dying process in the human being, to be connected with organic life, initially the life of nerves; but in such a way that this life of nerves provides only the conditions, the soil, something which has to be there to provide the basis on which it can be active in this place. Seen from the outside, the principle which is active here may seem to arise from the nervous system, to be bound to the nervous system, but this life in soul and spirit is as independent of the nervous system as a child is of his parents when he develops independent inner activity, though the parents are, of course, the soil or basis on which the child must develop. Just as we may see the parents as the cause of the child if we look at this from outside, and just as the child is wholly free in developing his individual spirit and we cannot say that when the child develops independence there is not an activity in him which is in no way connected with his parents, we have to say in exactly the same way that the principle which is coming alive and developing in terms of mind and spirit becomes independent of the soil which it needs to thrive.
I am just referring briefly here to a system of ideas that will develop further in the course of time—the science of the spirit is only in its beginnings now—by taking certain ideas from natural science to their highest extreme. Those very ideas from natural science will not lead to the exclusion of human freedom but to a way of explaining and understanding freedom actually in natural scientific terms, for they will make people observe not only constructive and progressive processes in the organism but also those that are destructive, paralysing themselves in themselves. They will show that if the element of soul and spirit is to arise, the organic principle cannot continue in a straight line of development and so produce something non-physical. No, as the non-physical, spiritual principle begins to come into existence, this organic principle must first prepare the soil by destroying itself, breaking itself down, within itself.
When the ideas of constructive development, which are the only ones to be considered nowadays, have ideas about destructive development added to them, this will bring tremendous advances in the natural scientific approach. A bridge will be built that needs to be built because natural science must not be shut out today—a bridge from nature as it is understood to the sphere of social life which still needs to be understood.
A natural science that is incomplete prevents us from developing the concepts needed for the sphere of social life; once it is completed, its inner sterling character, inner greatness, will help us to establish the right kind of sociology.
I have thus presented, albeit briefly, the fundamental concept of social life, the concept of freedom. This has been set out fully in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, published in 1894, and the inner reasons given there accord fully with what I have now shown in a more natural scientific way. This is also evident from what I have written in my book The Riddle of Man81See note 3. which appeared almost two years ago. Let us now continue our consideration of the connection between man’s life in spirit and soul and other spheres of existence.
The last time and today I referred briefly to the way in which this element of mind, spirit and soul is connected—as life of ideas with the life of the nerves, as life of feeling with life in the breathing rhythm, and as life of will with metabolic life. This only shows the connection in one aspect, however. Just as natural science will one day, when it has perfected itself in this direction, relate the threefold soul as a whole—as I have shown—to the whole bodily human organism, so will spiritual science be able to look for the connections of the human mind and soul with this spiritual principle, that is, in the other direction.
On the one hand, the life of ideas has its bodily foundation in the life of the nerves, on the other it is connected with the world of the spirit, a world to which it belongs. This world, with which the life of ideas is also connected, can only be discerned through perceptive vision. It is perceived by a mind that has reached the first level of this vision, which I have called imaginative perception, or perception in images. This is gained out of the soul itself, like the opening of an inner eye. I characterized this in my first lecture.
As the life of ideas relates to the life of nerves in the body, which is its physical foundation, so it also arises from the realm of the spirit, a purely non-physical world that is seen to be a real world when we come to observe this reality with that vision in images. This real world is not contained within the sense-perceptible world. It is, as it were, the first world that goes beyond the senses, bordering directly on our own.
Here one finds that the relationship which the human being has to the world around him, as he is aware of it in his mind, is only part of his total relationship to the world; anything we have in our conscious awareness is a segment of the reality in which we are. Below this level of awareness lies another relationship to the surrounding world, to the natural world and the world of the spirit. Even the connection between our life of ideas and the life of the nerves in the body has been pushed below the threshold of conscious awareness and can only be brought up from there with an effort if one wishes to characterize it the way I have done today. On the other hand the relationship of our life of ideas to the spiritual world which we can only perceive in images is also such that it does not enter into our ordinary conscious awareness, though it does enter into human reality.
In the human mind we have first of all everything that has been stimulated by the senses and by the rational mind which is bound to the senses; this is the usual content of the conscious mind. Below this, however, lies a sum total of processes that initially do not come to ordinary awareness, but arise as a spiritual principle, which can only be perceived in images; this plays into our soul nature just as sounds, colours, smells and so on play into the everyday life of our souls. Ordinary conscious awareness thus rises, as it were, from another sphere which itself can only be brought to conscious awareness if we are able to perceive in images. The fact that people do not know of these things does not mean that they do not exist in reality. Moving through the world we bear the content of our ordinary conscious awareness with us; we also bear with us everything that comes from the ‘imaginative’ spiritual world, as I’ll call it for the moment.
It is of tremendous importance, especially at the present time, to understand that the human being relates to the world around him in this way. A field for research—I am far from underestimating this field, I appreciate its significance—and there was every reason for it to come up at the present time, has indeed come up at the present time. It is like a powerful pointer to man’s relationship to the world around him which I have just characterized as the spiritual world of images, a relationship that is only little known so far. It is a feature of our present time that much comes to human awareness that can really only be encompassed with the means of insight given through the science of the spirit. Humanity is called upon to perceive these things today in that one’s nose is rubbed in them, to put it plainly, with life taking a course where people cannot avoid seeing them. Yet modern people still cannot overcome their reluctance to tackle this with the means for insight provided by the science of the spirit. They therefore try to use the means of ordinary natural science or concepts developed in relation to other things to approach areas which today literally cry out for investigation.
The field I am referring to is that of analytical psychology, also called psychoanalysis, which is, of course, particularly well known in this city.82See note 79. What makes it remarkable is that a field opens up to challenge the investigator that lies outside our ordinary conscious awareness; it must refer to something that lies below the threshold of that awareness. People are, however, trying to work with what I may call inadequate tools in this field. As they endeavour to apply these inadequate tools also in practice—only therapeutically and educationally, to begin with, perhaps, but perhaps also pastorally—we have to say that the matter has more than theoretical significance. I am, of course, not in a position to discuss the whole field of psychoanalysis. That would need many lectures.83 Rudolf Steiner had given two lectures on anthroposophy and psychoanalysis in Dornach on 10 and 11 November 1917: Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology’ (from GA 178), tr. M. Laird-Brown; Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1990. Let me, however, refer to some of the principles, some of the real aspects in this context. Psychoanalysis is a field where investigation and social life meet in a point, as happens also in other fields of this kind which we’ll be considering today.
Above all, and as you are no doubt aware, analytical psychology essentially has to do with bringing ‘lost’ memories back to mind for therapeutic purposes. The thesis is that the psyche contains certain elements that do not come to conscious awareness. It is then widely assumed that these memories have gone down into the unconscious or the like, and efforts are made to go and cast light below the threshold of consciousness by using the ordinary memory concept and enter into regions not illuminated by our ordinary consciousness.
Now I did already mention in these lectures that the science of the spirit has the task of illuminating the human memory process in a very major way. Again it will not be possible, of course, to avoid all the misunderstandings that can arise with such a brief review of the subject. I have heard it said, for example—several times, not just once—that psychoanalysis was really on the same road as the science of the spirit which I represent; it was only that psychoanalysts took some things in a symbolic way, whilst I took things which those enlightened psychoanalysts considered to be symbolic to be realities. That is a grotesque misapprehension, and you cannot characterize the relationship of psychoanalysis to the science of the spirit in a worse way than by saying that.
To understand this we need to take another look at the nature of the memory process. Let me emphasize once again that the process of forming ideas, the activity of doing so, is something which in the inner life of man essentially relates only to the present. An idea as such never goes down to some unconscious level of the mind, just as a mirror image seen when passing a mirror will not settle down somewhere so that it may come up again the next time you pass the mirror. The coming up of an idea is a phenomenon that begins and ends in the present moment. And anyone thinking that memory consists in there ‘having been’ an idea which ‘comes up’ again, may well be an excellent Herbartian psychologist, or a psychologist in some other direction, but is not basing himself on a genuinely observed fact.
What we have here is something entirely different. The world in which we live is filled not only with the sensory perceptions that enter into our present life of ideas through eye or ear. This whole world—and that of course also means the natural world—is based on a world that has to be perceived in images, a world which initially does not come to conscious awareness. The contents of this world of images act parallel to my momentary life of ideas: as I form an idea, letting these momentary processes take their course in me, another process runs parallel to them, with a current of unconscious life moving through my soul. This parallel process causes inner tracks to be left—I could characterize these in all detail, but have to limit myself to brief indications here—and these are observed when memory arises later.
When memory arises, therefore, it is not a matter of an old idea, which might have been stored somewhere, being brought back again. Instead we look inwards at tracks left in a parallel process. Memory is a process of perception directed inwards.
The human soul is capable of many things at an unconscious level which it is not able to do consciously in ordinary life. To compare the process that occurs when a ‘forgotten’ event ‘comes back to mind’, doing so in very general terms—let me emphasize this: in very general terms—with something else, I would say that it is quite similar to sensory perception using the outer senses. The difference is that with the latter I recreate my perceptions in temporary images that only exist for the moment. Anything I recreate from memory is a specific form of inner perception. Within myself, I perceive the residue of the parallel process; this has remained stationary. As a crude analogy, recall is a process in which the soul reads at a later time something that had gone parallel to the forming of an idea. The soul has this ability, at an unconscious level, to read in itself what had been developing when I formed an idea. I did not know this at the time, for the idea blocked it out. Now it is recalled. Instead of having a sensory perception of something on the outside, I perceive my own inner process. That is the real situation.
I am fully aware that a fanatical psychoanalyst—none of them see themselves as fanatical, of course, and I know this, too—will say that he has no problem in agreeing to this explanation of memory. But in fact he’ll never do so when considering these things in practice. Anyone who knows the literature will know that it is never done and that this is in fact the source of countless errors. For people do not know that it is not a matter of past ideas that linger somewhere in the unconscious, but concerns a process that can only be understood if we understand the way in which an imaginative world plays into our world in a process that runs parallel to the life of forming ideas.
The first significant errors arise because a wrongly understood memory process forms the theoretical basis and is applied in practice in analytical psychology. When we penetrate to the real process of remembering, there can be no question of looking for elements in the soul which psychoanalysts consider to be pathological in memories that linger somewhere. It is a matter of perceiving how the patient relates to a real, objective world of non-physical processes, which he is, however, adopting in an abnormal way. This makes a huge difference, something which we must of course think through in every possible aspect.
Psychoanalysts who apply their natural scientific training one-sidedly in an important sphere of real life also fall into another kind of error. They use dream images for psychological diagnosis in a way that cannot be justified in the face of genuine observation. We need genuine observation and concepts that relate to reality so that we may enter into this strange, mysterious world of dreams in the right way. This is only done if we know that human beings have their roots not only in the environment in which they live with their ordinary conscious minds but—even in the life of ideas, as we have seen, and later we’ll also see some other things—in a world of spirit. Our ordinary conscious awareness comes to an end when we sleep, but that connection with the world that remains at a subconscious level does not come to an end.
There is a process—I cannot characterize it in detail, time being short—in which the special conditions pertaining in sleep cause the things we live through in connection with our spiritual environment to be clothed in symbolic dream images. The content of those dream images is quite immaterial. The same process—the relationship of the human being to his spiritual surroundings—may appear as a particular sequence of symbolic images for one individual and as a different one for another. Anyone with the necessary knowledge in this field knows that typical unconscious processes in the psyche assume the garb of widely differing reminiscences of life in all kinds of different people, and that the content of the dream does not matter. You only come to realize what lies behind this if you train yourself to ignore the content of the dream completely and consider instead what I’d call the inner dynamic of the dream. It is a question of whether a foundation is first laid with a particular dream image, then tension is created and then an evolution, or whether the sequence is different, starting with tension which is then followed by resolution.
It needs a great deal of preparation before one can consider the evolution of a dream, the whole drama of it, wholly leaving aside the content of the images. To understand dreams one must be able to do something that would be like seeing a play and taking an interest in the scenes only in so far as one perceives the writer behind it and the ups and downs of his inner experience. We must stop wanting to grasp dreams by abstract interpretation of their symbolism. We need to be able to enter into the inner drama of the dream, the inner context, quite apart from the symbolism, the content of the images. Only then will we realize how the soul relates to its spiritual surroundings. These cannot be seen in the dream images which someone who does not have vision in images uses for reality under the abnormal conditions of sleep, but only through awareness in images. The drama that lies beyond the dream images can only be understood if we have imaginative awareness.
As you are probably aware, research in analytical psychology also extends—and in a way this is most praiseworthy—to mythology. Many interesting things have been discovered, and other things that are enough to make your hair stand on end. I won’t go into detail, but it is important to see that individual scientists still work in such a way today that they one-sidedly develop a limited area, taking no account of scientific discoveries that have already been made, though these can often throw much more light on the matter than one is able to do oneself.
An old friend of mine who died quite some time ago wrote a very good book on mythology. He was Ludwig Laistner.84 Laistner, Ludwig (1845–1896). Das Raetsel der Sphinx, Grundzüge einer Mythengeschichte, Berlin 1889. See the Rudolf Steiner’s story of his life (GA 28, various translations), chapter 15. After going right round the world, as it were, with regard to the origin of myths, he showed in a very interesting way that if you want to understand myths it is not at all important to consider the content, that is, what they tell—doing so in one way in one place and in a different way in another—or the actual images of those myths; no, in that case, too, it is important to let the dramatic events come to light that come to expression in the different mythological images. Laistner also considered the connection between mythological images and the dream world, doing so in a way that was still elementary but nevertheless correct. His studies therefore provided an excellent basis for connecting research into dreams with the investigation of myths. If in mythology, too, people were aware that it is merely images that come across into dream consciousness from the creative sphere of myths, images which arbitrarily, I would say, represent the actual process, that would be a much more intelligent way of working. As it is, people working in analytical psychology—and I do fully recognize their importance and that they work with the best and truly honest good will—attempt things that must be askew and one-sided because their means are inadequate.
There is very little inclination to go really deeply into things, and to get help from spiritual life to understand reality in terms that relate to reality. More recent research in psychoanalysis did, apart from the ordinary concept of memory and the kind of dreams that have their origin in individual life, also involve taking account of a ‘super-individual unconscious’,85 See Jung, C. G., Psychology of the Unconscious Chapter 5. as it is called. At this point, however, a research method pursued with such inadequate means has led to a most peculiar result. There is a feeling—and we have to be thankful that such a feeling at least exists—that this inner life of the human psyche is connected with a life of the spirit that lies outside it; however, there is nothing one can do to perceive this connection in real terms. I honestly don’t want to find fault with these scientists, and I greatly respect their courage, for in a present world which is so full of prejudice it needs real courage to speak of such things; but it has to be pointed out—especially because these things also enter into practical considerations—that there is a way of overcoming such one-sidedness.
Jung, a scientist of great merit who lives here in Zurich, has taken refuge, as it were, in trans-individual, super-individual unconscious spirit and soul contents. According to him the human soul relates not only to memories which the individual has somehow stored or the like, but also to things that lie outside its individual nature. An excellent, bold idea—to relate this life in the human psyche not only by the means of the body but also in itself to soul qualities in the outside world; it certainly merit's recognition. The same man does, however, ascribe what happens in the soul in this way to a kind of memory again, even if it is super-individual. You cannot get away from the concept of mneme, or memory, though we can’t really speak of memory any longer when we go beyond the individual element. Jung puts it like this: you come to see that ‘archetypal images' live in the soul, images of the myths evolved among the ancient Greeks—archetypes, to use Jacob Burckhardt’s term. Jung says, significantly, that everything humanity and not only the individual person has gone through may be active in the soul; and as we do not know of this in ordinary conscious awareness, this rages and rises up unconsciously against the conscious mind, and you get the strange phenomena that show themselves today as hysterical and other conditions. Everything humanity has ever known of the divine and also of devilish things rises up again, Jung says in his latest book; people know nothing about it, but it is active in them.
Now it is highly interesting to look at an investigation done with inadequate means, taking a characteristic instance. This scientist has come to say, in an extraordinarily significant way that when people do not consciously establish a connection with a divine world in their souls, this connection is created in their subconscious, even though they know nothing about it. The gods live in the subconscious, below the threshold of conscious awareness. And a content of which they know nothing in their conscious minds may come to expression in that they ‘project’ it, as the term goes, on to their physician or another person. Thus a memory of some devilry may be active in the subconscious but not come to conscious awareness; it rages inside, however; the individual must rid himself of it; he transfers it to some other person. The other person is made into a devil; this may be the physician, or, if he does not manage to do this, the individual does it to himself.
From this point of view it is most interesting to see how a scientist comes to his conclusions about these things. Let us look at one of the latest books on psychoanalysis, The Psychology of the Unconscious by Carl Gustav Jung.86Ibid. He writes that the idea of God is simply a necessary psychological function of an irrational kind. Jung deserves great merit for acknowledging this, for it means that for once recognition is given to the nature of the human subconscious as being such that people establish connections with a divine world in their subconscious. The author then goes on to say that this idea of God has absolutely nothing to do with the question as to the existence of God. This last question, he says, is one of the most stupid questions anyone may ask.
We are not concerned with the scientist’s own view of the idea of God. He may be a very devout person. What concerns us here is what lives in the scientist’s own subconscious life of ideas, if I may use that term. Inadequate means of research mean no less than that one says to oneself: The human soul has to establish relationships to the gods below the threshold of consciousness; but it has to make these relationships such that they have nothing to do with the existence of God. It means that the soul must of necessity content itself with a purely illusory relationship; yet this is eminently essential to it, for without this it will be sick. This is of tremendous import, something we should not underestimate! I have merely indicated how inadequate the means are with which people are working in a quite extensive field.
I’ll now continue my description of the human being and the way he needs to relate to his social environment. The life of feelings—not now the life of ideas, but the life of feelings—has its physical counterpart in the breathing rhythm, as I said, and on the other hand also relates to spiritual contents. The element in the spirit which corresponds to the life of feelings the way the life of the breathing rhythm does at the physical level, can only be penetrated, being a spiritual content, a content of spiritual entities, spiritual powers, with an ‘inspired’ mind, as I have called it in these lectures.
This inspired mind opens up not only the spiritual content that fills our existence from birth, or let us say conception, until death, one also comes to see things that go across birth and death and have to do with our life between death and rebirth, that is, of a spirit that is alive even when the human being no longer has this physical body.
Whereas the human being gains a basis for this physical body through physical heredity, the principle which is born out of the inspired world, creates its physical expression in the breathing rhythm. But into this life of feeling—whereas initially only elements coming between birth and death play into the life of ideas which the human being knows in his ordinary conscious awareness—enters everything by way of powers and impulses that has been active during the time from the last death to the present birth. This will be active again between this death and a new birth. The core of the human being’s eternal reality plays into this life of feeling.
The third thing to be noted is that the human being’s life of will relates on the one hand really to the lowest functions in the human organism, to metabolism, something which in the widest sense comes to expression in hunger and thirst. On the other hand it relates in the spirit to the highest spiritual world, the intuitive world, which I have mentioned on several occasions in these lectures. We thus do indeed have a complete reversal of the situation.
Initially the life of ideas is subconsciously in touch with the world of images, and with the life of nerves in its other aspect. In a world that projects beyond our personal life in a body as the core of our reality, the life of feeling goes towards the spiritual side. And the life of will, which comes to physical expression whenever there is a will impulse in some metabolic process, and therefore in the lowest processes in the organism, is on the spiritual side connected with the highest spiritual world, the intuitive world.
We have to enter into this region if we want to investigate ‘repeated lives on earth’, as they are called. Impulses that go from one life on earth to another cannot be grasped in images, let alone in our ordinary conscious awareness, and not even with inspired consciousness. This needs intuitive awareness. Impulses from earlier lives on earth enter into our life. Impulses from this life will enter into later lives on earth. The only possible character our investigations can have at this point is one of having developed a sense for real intuitions, not the wishy-washy kind of which we speak in ordinary life.
The complete conscious mind thus perceives the complete human being as he lives in soul and spirit in three ways—in ideas, feelings and will impulses, all of which rise up and go down again. For he has his basis in three ways in a living physical body and takes his origin in the world of the spirit. The science of the spirit takes us to the eternal in man not in any speculative or hypothetical way, but by showing how the conscious mind must develop if it is to behold the eternal core of the human being who develops in successive lives on earth.
This complete human being—not an abstract human being presented in natural science or by naturalists in an empty, abstract set of ideas that do not hold the whole of reality—this complete human being is part of a social life. Our ordinary conscious mind is able to understand the natural world outside in so far as it is not organic but something in the lifeless, mechanical sphere—in modern science this is often the only thing considered to have validity and be worth considering. This level of the mind is not able, however, to find concepts that are wholly viable when it comes to social life if they have evolved in the pattern used in everyday thinking. The secret of social life is that it does not develop according to the concepts we have in our ordinary thinking but does so outside the sphere of the conscious mind, in impulses that can only be grasped with the higher levels of conscious awareness of which I have spoken.
This insight can throw light on many things which in our present social life must inevitably end in absurdity because the concepts people want to apply to it do not relate to reality. So there we are today, with concepts gained from an education based on natural scientific ideas, and we want to be creative in social life. But this social life needs additional concepts that differ from those we have in our ordinary thinking—just as the subconscious life of the psyche presenting in psychoanalysis also calls for additional concepts.
In the first place three areas in social communities need to have light thrown on them through anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. I’ll only be able to give a rough outline, for the science of the spirit is still in its beginnings and many things still need to be investigated. I will thus merely characterize the general nature of the strands we have to see running from spiritual scientific insights to insight into social life.
Three spheres of social life may be seen. The first sphere where what I have been characterizing just now applies, is the sphere of economics. We know that economic laws live in our social structure, and that we need to know these laws. Anyone involved in legislation or government and anyone who runs any kind of firm which is after all part of the social structure in life as a whole must work with the laws of economics.
The economic structure, as it exists in real terms, cannot be grasped if we apply only the concepts gained in the natural scientific way of thinking, concepts that govern practically the whole of people’s thinking today. The impulses that are active in economic life are entirely different from those in the natural world, and that includes human nature. In basic human nature, our view rests on questions of need, for example. Issues concerning the meeting of needs are the basis of our external economic order. To gain genuine insight into a social community with its economic structure I need to perceive how depending on the geographical and other conditions the means are available to meet human needs. For the individual we start from the question of needs, but to consider the economy we must start from the opposite side. Then we do not consider what people need but what is available to people in a given area as community life develops. This is just a brief indication. Many things would need to be said if we wanted to consider the economic structure in its entirety. Yet the economic structure of a country or community, which is really an organism, cannot be dealt with by using concepts taken from ordinary natural science.
That may lead to some very strange things! Here it is reasonable to say something in particular because I am truly not just referring to it in the light of current events. People might object that I have been influenced by these current events, but that is not the case. What I am going to say now is something I spoke of in a course of lectures I gave in Helsingfors before the present war started.87 The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita (GA 146). about Wilson in the 5th lecture, on 1 June 1913. My reasons for referring to it now have therefore nothing at all to do with the war. I need to say this in advance, so that there shall be no misunderstanding.
At that time in Helsingfors—that is, before the war—I showed how we can go astray if we want to grasp the social structure of human communities wholly with natural scientific ideas. For my example I chose someone who falls into this error to the greatest degree—Woodrow Wilson.88Wilson, (Thomas) Woodrow (1856–1924), 28th President of the USA 1913-1921. In The New Freedom, in a chapter on the meaning of progress, he wrote that a government was not a machine but a living entity. It was subject not to the theory of the universe but to that of organic life. It was elucidated by Darwin and not Newton. He went on to say that live political constitutions had to be Darwinian in structure and in the way they were used. I referred to the strange way in which Woodrow Wilson—academic thinking had in this case advanced to statesmanship—said that if one considers the days of Newtonism, when a more mechanical view was taken of the whole world, one can see that the mechanical ideas which Newton and others had made current had also entered into people’s ideas of the state, their ideas of social life. It is wrong, however, to consider social life in such a narrow way, said Woodrow Wilson; we have to do it differently today and apply Darwinian ideas to social life. He was thus doing the same thing, only with the ideas that are now current in natural science.
Yet Darwinian ideas are of as little use in understanding social structures as were Newtonian ones. As we have heard, not all Darwinian ideas are actually applicable in organic life. This remained at a subconscious level for Wilson, however, and he did not realize that he was making the very mistake which he had identified and censured just before.
Here we have an outstanding example of people unable to realize that they are working with inadequate tools that will not cope with reality when they try to master and understand social life today. Such a situation, where the tools are inadequate even as people make world history, is something we come across wherever we go. And if people were able to see through what is happening here, they would be able to see deeply into the deeper causes of the phrase mongering that goes on at present, reasons that are generally not apparent to the world today.
Economic structures cannot be understood if we use natural scientific concepts—whether gained from Darwinism or Newtonism—for these only apply to the facts of nature. Instead, we must move on to other concepts.
I can only characterize these other concepts by saying that they must rest on if not perhaps a clear idea, then at least a feeling of entering wholly into the social structure, so that ideas come up that belong to life in images. It needs the help of image-based ideas to get a picture of a real social structure that exists in one place or another. Otherwise we only get abstractions of no value that have no substance to them.
We no longer create myths today. But the power to create myths was an impulse in the human soul that went beyond everyday reality. Today, people must take the same inner impulse which our forebears used to create myths; they created, if I may put it like this, images of a spiritual reality out of powers of imagination that related to that reality; we must have ideas in images of economic systems. We cannot create myths, but need to be able to see the geographical and other situations of the terrain together with the given character of people, the needs of people, in such a way that they are seen together with the same power that was formerly used to create myths, a power that is alive and active in the spiritual sphere as the power to form images and which is also reflected in the economic structure.
A second sphere in social life is the moral structure and the moral impulse that lives in a totality. Again we go down into all kinds of unconscious spheres to investigate the impulses revealed in human moral aspirations—moral in the widest possible sense. Anyone wishing to intervene in this, be it as a statesman, be it as a parliamentarian, or also as the head of some firm who wants to take a leading role, will only understand the structure if he is able to master it with concepts that have at least a basis in insights gained through inspiration.
This is even more necessary today than people tend to think; intervening in this social aspect in so far as moral impulses are involved. These moral impulses need to be studied truthfully and in real terms, just as the impulses of organic life cannot be invented but have to be studied by considering the organism itself. If people were to think up concepts about lion nature, cat nature, or hedgehog nature, if you will, the way they think up concepts in thinking up Marxism today, or other socialist theories, and failed to study nature in reality, and if they were to construct purely a-priori concepts of animal nature, they would arrive at strange theories about the animal organization.
The important point is that the social organism also has to be studied in absolutely real terms where moral principles in the widest sense are involved. The forces of need that human beings bring into play—they, too, are moral powers in the wider sense—can only be mastered if we investigate the real social organism on the basis of ideas that have their roots in the inspired world, even if these ideas are only dimly apparent. Today we are still a long way away from such a way of thinking!
In the science of the spirit one comes to study the nature of the impulses that live among the people in Central Europe, Western Europe or Eastern Europe in real terms and in detail. One comes to see in very real terms how the different inner impulses arising from the social organism are just as real and well-founded as the impulses that arise from the physical organism. One comes to see that the way nations live together is also connected with these impulses that can be studied from deep down. In the science of the spirit one finds that the structure of the soul differs greatly between the West and the East of Europe, and one comes to know that such a structure must become part of the whole of European life. Let me remind you that I have been talking about the different soul structures that underlie European social life for decades, speaking out of purely spiritual scientific ideas.89See e.g. Steiner R. The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls (GA 121); tr. A. H. Parker; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1970. The discoveries made in the science of the spirit are confirmed by people with empirical knowledge who know the reality of life. Look in yesterday’s and today’s issues of the Nene Zürcher Zeitung [major Swiss paper] for what is said there about the soul of the Russian people and Russian ideals, taking a Dostoevskyan view.90 This was a review of a volume of Dostoevsky’s political writings which had been published by Piper & Co. in Munich in 1917. It appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 13 November (No. 2134) and 14 November 1917 (No. 2141). The review presents Dostoevsky as someone who took the Slavophile movement to its perfection in Russia, decisively demanding that people ‘turn away from St Petersburg’ and that Russian culture should again have its focus in ‘Moscow’—turning away from Western decadent intellectual thinking and concentrating once more on the thinking of the Russian ‘people’ ... There you have complete proof—I can only refer you to this, time being too short for a detailed description—in observations made in an outer way of a result arising very evidently from something that has been put forward for years in the science of the spirit.
You then come to study social impulses and energies in real life. As it is impossible to master life with concepts far removed from reality, this life gets on top of people. They no longer know how to encompass life with concepts as abstract as those used in the sphere of natural science. These prove inadequate in the social sphere. This life, which is surging and billowing deeper down and has not been grasped in conscious awareness, has therefore brought about the catastrophic events we are now going through in such a terrible way.
A third sphere we meet in social life is the one we call the life of rights. Essentially the social structure of any body is made up of economic life, moral life and the life of rights. All these terms must be taken in the spiritual sense, however. Economic life can only be studied in a real sense if we think in images; moral life and its true content can only be studied with the help of inspired ideas; the life of rights can only be understood with the help of intuitive ideas, and these, too, must be gained from full and absolute reality.
We can thus see how the insights sought into nonphysical aspects with the science of the spirit apply to different spheres of social life. In the field of education, too, which essentially is part of the social sphere, fruitful concepts will only arise if we are able to develop image-based concepts so that we may see life which is as yet unformed in images that arise in us—not in the abstract terms that are so common in education today but on the basis of genuine vision in images—and also guide it on that basis.
The life of rights, concepts in the sphere of rights—just think how much has been written and said about this in recent times. Basically, however, people have no really clear idea of even the simplest concepts in the sphere of rights. Here, too, we merely need to consider the efforts of people who want to work entirely out of a training in the natural sciences, Fritz Mauthner, for instance, author of the highly interesting dictionary of philosophy.91 Wörterbuch der Philosophy, 1. Bd., München & Leipzig 1910. Read the entry on law, penal law or, in short, everything connected with this, and you’ll see that he dissolves all known ideas and concepts, and also existing institutions, showing that there is no possibility whatsoever, nor ability, to put anything in their place. It will only be possible to put something in their place if people look for what they are seeking in the structure of rights in the world that is the very foundation of social structures, a world open only to intuitive perception.
Here in Zurich I am able to refer to a work in which the author, Dr Roman Boos, has made a start with looking at the sphere of rights in this way.92 Boos, Roman (1889–1952), social scientist. Active representative of anthroposophy and the threefold commonwealth impulse. His treatise on a labour contract was published by Duncker und Humblot in Munich and Leipzig in 1910. An excellent beginning has been made in basing real issues in the sphere of rights on the situations pertaining to the structure of rights and the social structure and arriving at realistic ideas concerning individual details in the sphere of rights. Study such a work and you will see what is meant when we demand that social life as a life of rights should be studied in a realistic and not an abstract way, developing our ideas about it in real terms, encompassing it with concepts that relate to reality. It is of course harder to do than if we construct utopian programmes and utopian government structures. For it means that the whole human being has to be considered and one must truly have a sense of what is real.
I have made the concept of freedom the fundamental one in order to show that although we are looking for laws pertaining to the world of the spirit, the concept of freedom is wholly valid in the science of the spirit. It will not be easy, however, to study these things in real terms. For we then come above all to realize the complexity of reality, which cannot be encompassed in one-sided concepts that are like stakes put in the ground here or there. One realizes that as soon as we go beyond the individual person we must encompass this reality in concepts that are like the concepts used in the science of the spirit which I have described in these lectures.
Let me give you a powerful example. People like to live with biased ideas, concepts gained in their habitual way of thinking. When the first railway was built in Central Europe, a body of medical men—learned people, therefore—was also consulted. This has been documented, though it may sound like a children’s tale. The doctors found that no railway should be built, since it would cause damage to people’s nervous systems. And if people insisted after all on having railways, one should at least put high board fences on either side of the railway lines so that people would not get concussion when a train went past.93 The expert opinion of the Royal Bavarian College of Medicine has not survived; its original existence is therefore disputed by some. Reference to it is however made in Hagen, Rudolf, Die erste deutsche Eisenbahn, 1885, p. 45, and in Kemmerich, Max, Kultur- Kuriosa, Munich 1909, p. 282 & 295. Kemmerich was unable to give an ‘authentic source’, but spoke of a ‘sufficiently well-known fact’. This expert opinion from the first half of the 19th century was based on the habitual way of thinking at that time. Today we may find it easy to laugh about such a biased opinion; for those learned gentlemen were, of course, wrong. Developments have overtaken them. Progress will overtake many things which ‘esteemed gentlemen’ consider to be right.
There is, however, another question, strange though it may seem. Were those learned gentlemen simply wrong? It only seems so. They were certainly wrong in one respect, but they were not simply wrong. Anyone who has a feeling for the more subtle things in the development of human nature will know that the development of railways does in a strange way relate to the development of some phenomena of nervousness which people suffer at present. Such a person will know that whilst it may not be as radical as those learned gentlemen put it, the trend of their opinion was partly right. Anyone who truly has a feeling for the differentiated nature of life, for the difference between our life today and life at the turn of the 18th to 19th century will know that railways did cause nervousness, so that the learned doctors were right in some respect.
The idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, which is still applicable to some natural event or some natural human phenomenon, does not apply when it comes to the social structure. Here it is necessary for a person to develop a faculty for more comprehensive ideas by training his inner abilities in a wholly different way. Those ideas need to encompass a social life that goes far beyond anything which one-sidedly abstract ideas taken from natural science—and they have to be abstract—are able to encompass.
Time being short, I have of course only been able to give brief indications that the sphere of social science, of economics, of social morality in the widest sense, law and everything connected with it, will only be mastered when people overcome the laziness which is such an obstacle today. For essentially it is laziness and a fear of genuine ways that lead to insight which prevent people from looking at the world in the light of spiritual science.
In spite of being permitted to give a course of four lectures, I have of course only been able to refer briefly to some things. I am fully aware that I could only give some initial ideas. It also was merely my intention to make the connection to the individual sciences known today in form of initial ideas. I know that many objections can be raised, and am thoroughly familiar with the objections that may be raised. Anyone who bases himself on the science of the spirit must always raise all possible objections for himself at every step, for it is only by measuring his insights against the objections that one truly develops from the depths of the soul the potential vision in the spirit that can cope with reality.
Yet though I am aware how imperfect the ideas I have presented have been—it would need many weeks to give all the details which I was able merely to refer to briefly as results—perhaps I may think after all that I have given some idea in at least one direction, and that is that spiritual science has nothing to do with stirring things up because one has some abstract ideal or other. It is a field of research which the progress of human evolution actually demands at this time. Someone who is working in this field of investigation and truly understands its impulses will know that it is exactly the areas that are demanded in the present time—like the field of psychoanalysis of which I spoke—which show, if truly penetrated, that they can in fact only come fully into their own if illuminated by what we are here calling spiritual science with an anthroposophical orientation. I wanted to show that this is not something dependent on sudden whims or vague mysticism but is pursued in all seriousness by people who are serious investigators, at least in their intentions. I therefore presented a number instances to show that current scientific thinking can gain a great deal from the science of the spirit which we have today.
I do not believe this science of the spirit to be something completely new. We need go back no further than Goethe to find the elementary beginnings in his theory of metamorphosis. These merely need to be developed further in the science of the spirit—though not with abstract, logical scientific hypotheses. They need to be developed in a way that is full of life.
As I myself have been working with the further development of the Goethean approach for more than 30 years, I privately like to refer to the approach called spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation as Goethe’s approach taken further. If it were entirely my own choice, I’d like to call the building in Dornach which is dedicated to this approach a Goetheanum,94 In a public lecture which Rudolf Steiner gave in Basle on 18 October 1917, he said for the first time that he would like to call the ‘St John’s Building’ in Dornach the ‘Goetheanum’. ‘... Most of all—providing it is not misunderstood—I would like to call the world view which thus arises in a scientific way after the sources from which it has arisen for myself, calling it Goetheanism. In the same way I would greatly prefer to call the building out there in Domach, which is dedicated to this world view, the ‘Goetheanum’, providing this does not lead to misunderstanding upon misunderstanding.’ Published in German in Freiheit—Unsterblichkeit—Soziales Leben (GA 72). to indicate that this spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation is not something new suddenly emerging into the light of day as something arbitrarily developed from a single case but something which the spirit of our age is calling for and also the spirit of human evolution as a whole.
It is my belief that people who have gone along with the spirit in human evolution have in their best endeavours at all times pointed to the principle which must today show itself as the fruits and flowers of scientific endeavour so that genuine, serious insight into the life of the spirit may be established. This must be done with the same seriousness and integrity which has also be brought to the development of natural science in recent centuries and especially in more recent times, a science which those working in the science of the spirit do not reject or denigrate.
My aim in giving these lectures has not been to fight other sciences or go against them in any way, but to show—as I said in my introduction—that I appreciate them. I believe they are great not only in what they are today but also in what may still develop. In my view it shows greater appreciation of natural scientific and other modern ways of thinking if one does not merely stay at the point where one is, but believes that if we enter wholly into everything that is good in the different fields of science, this will not only permit the logical development of some philosophy or other which then does not take us further than what already exists in its basic premises, but will be able to bring forth something that is alive. Spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation wants to be something which thus has life and is not merely based on logical conclusions.
Questions and answers
From the question and answer session95Some of the questions did not relate directly to the subject and have therefore been omitted. which followed the lecture given in Zurich on 14 November 1917
Question. How does the lecturer explain the process of forgetting?
Well, this is something that can be dealt with briefly. The process of forgetting essentially is due to the fact that the process I referred to as running parallel to the forming of ideas and on which memory depends has a phase of ascent and one of descent. To be more easily understood I might mention that a process which is not the same, but exemplifies the process we are considering, was something Goethe called the ‘fading away of sensory perceptions’. This fading away of sensory perceptions—when a sensory perception has come to an end, the effect of it is still there but fading—is not the process on which forgetting is based, but it helps to clarify the situation. It is exemplary, as it were, of the whole process which occurs there. Let me emphasize that I see this as a process which is mental and physical and not physiological, though it does extend into the physiological aspect. You will find more details about this in my books. But this process, too, has a phase when the effect dies down, and that is the basis of forgetting. The ascending phase is the basis of remembering, and the descending phase of forgetting. The process of forgetting is not all that surprising, I would say, if one takes the view of remembering which I have been presenting.
Question. What does it mean if someone never dreams, or is never aware of his dreams? How should we consider this phenomenon in psychological and anthroposophical terms respectively, that is, how does such a person differ from others in mind and spirit?
This is quite a problematical issue. It is easy for people to say that they never dream, but it is not really the case. What we have here is a certain weakness relating to the subconscious processes that give rise to dreaming. This weakness means a person is unable to bring up from the subconscious what is meant to be read from this subconscious, as I put it metaphorically. Everyone dreams. But just as there are other weaknesses, so some people are in a condition where it is impossible to bring their dreams up to conscious awareness. This weakness should not, however, be regarded the way we may regard an organic weakness, say. It can easily arise if the mind is outstanding in some other area. Thus we are told that Lessing never dreamt. In his case this would have been due to the fact that his was an eminently critical mind. By concentrating his powers as strongly as we know him to have done, thus using them in one aspect of his inner nature, Lessing weakened them in another area. We therefore should not see this weakness as something really bad; it may have to do with strengths in other areas.
To interpret such a thing ‘psychologically’ and ‘anthroposophically’ is, of course, one and the same thing for a spiritual scientist. It cannot even be said that someone with a certain weakness in bringing dreams to mind would also have a weakness, for example, relating to processes that are part of imaginative perception. This need not be the case at all. Someone may not have much of a gift for what is ordinarily called dreaming, and yet develop powers of imaginative perception and so on by using the methods I have given in my books, especially in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. It may be the case that when he now uses his powers specifically for imaginative perception of the world, in full conscious awareness, to look into the world of the spirit—we might say clairvoyant insight if the term can be used without prejudice—this may actually suppress ordinary dreaming, though the reverse may also be the case.
I know a great number of people who use the exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds in their souls and experience a transformation in the life of dreams, which is also described in the book. Ordinary dream life is vague in its contents. It changes strangely under the influence of awakening imaginative perception.
The inability to bring dreams to mind thus points to nothing more than a partial weakness in someone’s nature, and this should be regarded in the same way as when someone has strong muscles in another sphere, and someone else’s muscles are weaker. It is something that lies entirely in the nuances of the way in which people are constituted.
Geisteswissenschaftliche Ergebnisse über Recht, Moral und Soziale Lebensformen
Aus den drei Vorträgen, die ich hier gehalten habe, um das Verhältnis der anthroposophisch orientierten Geisteswissenschaft zu drei verschiedenen Gebieten des menschlichen Wissenschaftsstrebens zu charakterisieren, wird ersichtlich gewesen sein, daß es dieser Art von Geisteswissenschaft vor allen Dingen darauf ankommt, wirklichkeitsgemäße Begriffe und Vorstellungen zu entwickeln, welche geeignet sind, in das volle, wirkliche Leben unterzutauchen, um durch solches Untertauchen ein Wissen von der Wirklichkeit zu erreichen. Man kann sagen — und aus dem ganzen Sinne meiner Vorträge wird das hervorgegangen sein -, daß seit einer verhältnismäßig langen Zeit menschlicher Wissenschaftsentwickelung wirklichkeitsgemäße Begriffe nur gewonnen worden sind auf dem Gebiete der äußeren sinnenfälligen Naturwissenschaft. Und in einer gewissen Beziehung sind diese für das äußere Sinnesdasein gewonnenen Begriffe wissenschaftlich mustergültig. Allein sie erstrecken sich in bezug auf das Wirkliche nur so weit, als — man kann schon sagen — die leblose Natur in Betracht kommt, die ja nicht bloß da vorhanden ist, wo sie unmittelbar als solche auftritt, sondern als mineralischer Einschlag auch in den Lebewesen und in den Geistwesen, die auf der sinnlichen Erde leben. Man begreift heute naturwissenschaftlich musterhaft. Aber man begreift nur, was sich innerhalb der mechanischen leblosen Gesetze feststellen läßt. Daß man dieses musterhaft begreift, dafür gibt es ja, ich möchte sagen, einen recht anschaulichen Beweis: die vervollkommneten, so gewaltig erfolgreichen Anwendungen der Naturwissenschaft auf das menschliche Leben. Denn wendet man Begriffe auf das menschliche Leben an, so erweist sich unter gewissen Voraussetzungen durch die An‘wendungsmöglichkeit der wirklichkeitsgemäße Charakter dieser Begriffe. Eine Uhr kann man nicht mit falschen mechanischen und physikalischen Begriffen konstruieren; sie würde alsbald verraten, daß man falsche Begriffe angewendet hat.
Das ist nicht so bei allen Gebieten des Lebens, sondern gerade bei den Lebensgebieten, die uns heute beschäftigen sollen, zeigt die Wirklichkeit in ihrem Verlaufe nicht ohne weiteres sogleich, ob man es mit wirklichkeitsgemäßen, aus der Wirklichkeit herausgeholten Begriffen zu tun hat oder nicht.
Innerhalb des naturwissenschaftlichen Gebietes selbst ist die Anwendung nichtwirklichkeitsgemäßer Begriffe verhältnismäßig gefahrlos; denn diese Begriffe erweisen ihre Irrtümlichkeit oder ihre Unzulänglichkeit, solange man innerhalb des naturwissenschaftlichen Gebietes selbst bleibt, eben innerhalb der theoretischen Diskussion, die ja dann auch der Praxis des Lebens zugrunde liegen kann. Kommt aber das soziale Leben, das menschliche Gemeinschaftsleben überhaupt in Betracht, dann steht man nicht bloß der Gewinnung irgendwelcher Begriffe, sondern dann steht man der Realisierung der Begriffe im Leben gegenüber. Und man hat es nach den heutigen Verhältnissen mit Lebensgebieten zu tun, in die man sehr wohl unzulängliche Begriffe einführen kann. Es zeigt sich zwar dann das Unzulängliche der Vorstellungen, der Ideen, der Empfindungen und so weiter; aber dennoch kann der Mensch in einer gewissen Beziehung, wenn er unter bloß naturwissenschaftlichen Vorurteilen lebt, hilflos dem gegenüberstehen, was als die Folge, als die Konsequenz solcher Begriffe eintritt. Man kann in einer gewissen Beziehung sagen, daß die tragischen Ereignisse, die jetzt über das Menschengeschlecht hereingezogen sind, im Grunde genommen damit zusammenhängen — mehr als man denkt, und mehr als man in so kurzen Ausführungen, wie die heutigen sind, auch nur andeuten kann -, daß durch lange Zeiten die Menschen nicht verstanden haben, wirklichkeitsgemäße Begriffe zu entwickeln, welche geeignet gewesen wären, Tatsachen des wirklichen Lebens zu umfassen. Diese Tatsachen des wirklichen Lebens sind heute der Menschheit über den Kopf gewachsen. Und diese tragischen Ereignisse sind vielfach ein Ad-absurdum-Führen auf die schrecklichste Art desjenigen, was an unzulänglichen Vorstellungen im Laufe von Jahrhunderten sich in der Menschheit entwickelte.
Man kommt auf das, was da eigentlich zugrunde liegt, nur, wenn man — jetzt noch einmal wollen wir von einem anderen Gesichtspunkte aus als in den gehaltenen Vorträgen das machen — zunächst einmal den Blick darauf hinrichtet, wie immer wieder und wiederum in der neueren Zeit der Versuch aufgetreten ist, aus der Naturwissenschaft heraus eine Gesamtweltanschauung des Menschen zu bebegründen, wie der Versuch gemacht worden ist, naturwissenschaftliches Denken, das auf seinem Gebiete — ich wiederhole es immer wiederum — so mustergültig ist, in alle Gebiete des menschlichen Lebens einzuführen: in die Gebiete des Seelenwesens, der Pädagogik, der Politik, der Sozialistik, der Geschichte und so weiter.
Wer die Entwickelung nach dieser Richtung kennt, der weiß, wie sich naturwissenschaftliche Denker angestrengt haben, das, was sie an Vorstellungen und Begriffen in ihrer Naturwissenschaft herangeschult haben, anzuwenden auf alle die angedeuteten Gebiete des menschlichen Lebens. Ich möchte, obwohl das, was ich eben gesagt habe, durch Hunderte von Belegen gestützt werden kann, nur einiges Charakteristische anführen. Wenn es auch älteren Datums ist, so kann man doch sagen, daß sich die Tendenz, die sich darinnen ausspricht, bis zum heutigen Tage erhalten, ja sich noch erweitert hat.
Ein ausgezeichneter Naturforscher, nach meiner Ansicht, hat bei zwei Naturforscherversammlungen in den siebziger Jahren des abgelaufenen Jahrhunderts, 1874 und 1875, Vorträge gehalten über das Rechtsgebiet, über Fragen der Moral und des Rechtes, des sozialen Zusammenhanges der Menschen, und er hat im Verlaufe dieser Vorträge recht charakteristische Sätze gesprochen. Er hat geradezu die Forderung aufgestellt, daß, wer im Sinne der naturwissenschaftlichen Bildung der neueren Zeit reif ist, verlangen müsse, daß die naturwissenschaftliche Denkweise übergehen müsse in das allgemeine Menschheitsbewußtsein wie eine Art Katechismus; so daß dasjenige, was als Empfindungen, als Bedürfnisse, als Willensimpulse in den Menschen auftritt und damit die Grundlage bildet für die sozialen Aspirationen, allmählich in innigen Zusammenhang gebracht werden müßte mit einer sich immer weiter und weiter ausbreitenden rein naturwissenschaftlichen Anschauung der Welt. So hat Professor Benedikt auf der achtundvierzigsten Naturforscherversammlung gesagt. Die naturwissenschaftliche Weltanschauung müsse die Breite und Tiefe und Klarheit erreichen, um einen Katechismus zu schaffen, der das geistige und ethische Leben des Volkes beherrsche. Sein Ideal ist also, daß alles, was aus den Geistes-, Herzens- und Willensbedürfnissen der Menschen heraus spricht im sozialen Leben, ein Abdruck sei naturwissenschaftlicher Vorstellungen!
Und mit Bezug auf die Seelenwissenschaft sagt derselbe Forscher: Auch die Psychologie sei eine Naturwissenschaft geworden, seit sie, wie die Physik und Chemie, den Ballast der Metaphysik abgeworfen habe und nicht mehr Hypothesen, die für unsere heutige Organisation unergründlich seien, als Prämissen wähle.
Obzwar von vielen Naturforschern — auch von dem vorgestern erwähnten Oscar Hertwig, von Nägeli, von vielen, vielen anderen - immer wieder und wiederum betont wird, daß Naturwissenschaft eben nur auf ihrem Gebiete Rechtes leisten kann, so werden doch die naturwissenschaftlichen Vorstellungen so gebildet, daß gewissermaßen durch die Art, wie sie gebildet werden, abgewiesen wird ein Forschen, ein Streben der Menschheit nach anderen Wirklichkeitsgebieten, als sie der Naturwissenschaft gerade erreichbar sind. Und man könnte, wie ich ältere Aussprüche angeführt habe, Aussprüche heutigen Tages anführen: man würde sie durchaus in demselben Geiste gehalten finden.
Benedikt, den Kriminalanthropologen, darf ich aus dem Grund besonders anführen, weil er, trotzdem er auf rein naturwissenschaftlichem Standpunkte auch in der sozialen Lebensbetrachtung stehen will, noch so viel rein naiven, wirklichkeitsgemäßen Begriffsmaterials in sich hat, daß vieles von dem, was er vorbringt - eigentlich gegen seine theoretischen Aufstellungen —, wahrhaftig eingreift in die Wirklichkeit der Welt. Aber im ganzen kann man sagen, durch diese Neigung, durch diese Tendenz, mit naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffen, die auf ihrem Gebiete ausgezeichnet sind, eine ganze Weltanschauung aufzubauen, ist allmählich überhaupt als Weltanschauung etwas ganz Besonderes entstanden, so daß man fast in den Ruf kommen könnte, ein böser Mensch zu sein, wenn man ausspricht, was unter dieser Tendenz Weltanschauung geworden ist: Heute bewirkt irgendein Mensch Ausgezeichnetes auf seinem Gebiete, und wenn er dann eine Weltanschauung begründet, so dehnt er dieses ausgezeichnete Wissen auf einem bestimmten Gebiet aus über das gesamte Weltgebiet, über diejenigen Gebiete vor allen Dingen, von denen er — nichts versteht. So daß man schon sagen kann: Heute ist allmählich eine ausgezeichnete Wissenschaft da, welche den Inhalt desjenigen enthält, was die Leute gut verstehen; und es sind Weltanschauungen da, die im allgemeinen enthalten, wovon die Leute nichts verstehen!
Dies ist, wenn das soziale Lebensgebiet in Betracht kommt, wahrhaftig nicht ohne Bedeutung. Denn das soziale Lebensgebiet hat zu seinem Wirklichkeitsfaktor den Menschen selber. Der Mensch steht drinnen in diesen sozialen Lebensgebieten, und das, was er tut, das ist schon so, daß in seine Impulse, in das, was sich als Gestaltung im menschlichen Zusammenleben, als soziale Struktur bildet, hineinfließt, was in der Weltanschauung lebt. Und dadurch sind solche Dinge geschaffen worden, wie ich sie im Beginne meiner heutigen Auseinandersetzungen angedeutet habe.
Ich will nun auch bei diesen Betrachtungen heute, wie bei den drei ersten, mehr ausgehen von konkreten Einzelheiten, von Ergebnissen desjenigen, was ich die Geistesforschung nenne, um zu versuchen, mit Hilfe solcher Ergebnisse zu zeigen, in welches Verhältnis sich diese Geistesforschung auch zu den sozialen Erkenntnisgebieten stellen muß.
Eine besondere Schwierigkeit tritt auf für den modernen Menschen, der naturwissenschaftlich bewandert ist, dessen Vorstellungsleben naturwissenschaftlich erzogen worden ist, wenn er nun an das soziale Lebensgebiet herantritt und gleich einen fundamentalen Begriff ins Auge zu fassen hat: den Begriff der menschlichen Freiheit. Dieser Begriff der menschlichen Freiheit, der ja gewiß in den verschiedensten Nuancen auftritt, ist in einer gewissen Beziehung geradezu zum Kreuz der modernen Weltanschauungsbetrachtungen geworden. Denn auf der einen Seite ist es außerordentlich schwierig, die soziale Struktur der Menschheit zu begreifen, ohne über den Freiheitsbegriff ins klare zu kommen; auf der anderen Seite aber wieder ist der naturwissenschaftlich Denkende nach den Denkgewohnheiten der heutigen Zeit kaum imstande, irgend etwas mit dem Freiheitsbegriff anzufangen. Man weiß ja, daß in bezug auf den Freiheitsbegriff alte Streitigkeiten stattgefunden haben, daß es immerzu mit verschiedenen Nuancen zwei Parteien gegeben hat: die sogenannten Deterministen, welche annahmen, daß alle menschlichen Handlungen in einer gewissen Weise vorbestimmt sind — in mehr naturalistischer oder in anderer Weise —, so daß der Mensch nur ausführt, wozu ein zwar unbekannter, aber doch vorhandener Zwang, eine Kausalität, vorliegt; und die Indeterministen, die dieses leugneten und sich mehr an den subjektiven Tatbestand hielten, an das, was der Mensch in sich erlebt, indem er sein Bewußtsein entwickelt, und die Unabhängigkeit der wirklich freien Handlungen des Menschen von solchen festen Bestimmungen, welche den Freiheitsbegriff ausschließen können, behaupteten.
So wie sich die Naturwissenschaft bis heute entwickelt hat, ist es aber auch eigentlich unmöglich, naturwissenschaftlich etwas mit dem Freiheitsbegriff zu machen; so daß man, wenn man mit naturwissenschaftlicher Erziehung soziologische Wissenschaft begründet, in vieler Beziehung genötigt ist, den Freiheitsbegriff falsch zu fassen und eine Lebensstruktur zu konstruieren, welche auf den Freiheitsbegriff keine Rücksicht nimmt, welche alles zurückführt auf gewisse Verursachungen, die außerhalb oder innerhalb des Menschen liegen. Solch eine Betrachtungsart ist in gewisser Beziehung bequem, denn sie gestattet einem, die soziale Struktur von vornherein in einer gewissen Weise zu bestimmen: weil es leichter ist, das menschliche Handeln abzuschätzen, wenn es bestimmt ist, als wenn man damit zu rechnen hat, daß freies Wesen im Menschen eine Rolle spielt.
Nun kann man nicht als Freiheitsbegriff irgendwelche schwärmerischen Begriffe aufstellen, irgendwelche mystischen Verschwommenheiten darlegen, die etwa im Gegensatz stehen dürften zu dem, was die heutige Naturwissenschaft bietet! Das muß schon festgehalten werden, daß, wenn Geisteswissenschaft eine Berechtigung haben soll, sie nicht mit dem, was der wahre Sinn naturwissenschaftlichen Fortschrittes ist, in irgendwelchen Zwiespalt kommen darf. Daher muß ich auch heute davon ausgehen, den Fundamentalbegriff sozialer Lebensgestaltung, den Freiheitsbegriff, in eine Beziehung zu setzen zu denjenigen naturwissenschaftlichen Vorstellungen, die mit Hilfe der Geisteswissenschaft gewonnen werden können.
Nach den gewohnten naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffen ist der Mensch in seinen Handlungen abhängig von den Eigentümlichkeiten seiner Organisation. Und da diese Eigentümlichkeiten seiner Organisation selbst in einem solchen Grade erforscht werden, daß man, wie ich das letzte Mal darlegte, das Gesetz von der Erhaltung der Kraft auf das Seelenleben rechnend anwendet, so kommt man zu einer Ausschliefßung des Freiheitsbegriffes. Kann der Mensch nur dasjenige aus sich heraus an Kräften entwickeln, was Umsatz ist des Aufgenommenen, wie ich im letzten Vortrag angedeutet habe, so kann selbstverständlich die Seele aus sich heraus nicht irgendwelche Kraftentfaltung entwickeln — was Anforderung wäre für eine Verwirklichung der Freiheit.
Geisteswissenschaft zeigt aber, daß Naturwissenschaft sehr, sehr nötig hat, auf dem Gebiete, das da in Frage kommt, den ganzen Umfang ihrer Erkenntnisse wirklich noch auf eine andere Basis zu stellen, als sie heute stehen. Naturwissenschaft — ich habe es schon angedeutet in den vorigen Vorträgen — hat bewunderungswürdige Tatsachengebiete erschlossen. Aber durch die eng umgrenzten Begriffe und Vorstellungen, die man heute von der Natur hat, können diese keineswegs umfaßt werden. Im Verlaufe des vorigen Vortrags gestattete ich mir, darauf hinzuweisen: wie Geisteswissenschaft dazu führt, das ganze Geistig-Seelische des Menschen zu dem ganzen Physisch-Leiblichen in Beziehung zu setzen, und darauf, wie sich da herausstellt, daß man das eigentliche Vorstellungsleben in Beziehung zu setzen hat zu dem Nervenleben, das Gefühlsleben zu den Verästelungen und Dependenzen des Atmungsrhythmus und das Willensleben zu dem Stoffwechsel.
Gehen wir, einleitungsweise, auf eine Fortsetzung naturwissenschaftlicher Anschauung über die Beziehung, die das menschliche seelische Vorstellungsleben zum Nervenleben hat, aus, so wird selbstverständlich der an die heutigen naturwissenschaftlichen Vorstellungen Gewöhnte sagen müssen: Es gehen gewisse Vorgänge im Nervenleben vor sich; diese sind Ursachen oder Parallelvorgänge des Vorstellungslebens. — Und da einem jeden seelischen Vorstellungsvorgang nach diesen naturwissenschaftlichen Annahmen ein Nervenvorgang entsprechen muß - der aber als solcher im ganzen Organismus kausal, ursächlich begründet ist —, so kann, da der Nervenvorgang scheinbar mit einer Ursachennotwendigkeit aus den Bedingungen des Organismus heraus folgt, der ihm entsprechende Geistesvorgang kein freier sein, sondern er muß unter derselben Notwendigkeit stehen, wie der ihm entsprechende Nervenvorgang.
So sieht es heute noch aus. So wird es, vom naturwissenschaftlichen Gesichtspunkte aus gesehen, nicht in der Zukunft aussehen! Da wird man gewisse Ansätze, die heute schon im naturwissenschaftlichen Forschungsgebiete da sind, in ganz anderer Weise ansehen. Allerdings wird dazu notwendig sein, daß die Richtungslinien der Forschung von der Geisteswissenschaft vorgezeichnet werden, weil nur dadurch eine wirklich unbefangene Beleuchtung der naturwissenschaftlichen Ergebnisse zustande kommen kann.
Das Merkwürdige nämlich, das sich dem Geistesforscher ergibt, ist: daß unser Nervenleben in einer ganz besonderen Beziehung zum entsprechenden übrigen Organismus steht, die man bezeichnen muß dadurch, daß man sagt: im Nervenleben baut sich der Organismus in einer bestimmten Weise ab, nicht auf; und im Nervenleben kommen zunächst — wenn wir es als reines Nervenleben, nicht als Ernährungsleben im Nervensystem auffassen — diejenigen Vorgänge in Betracht, die nicht Wachstumsvorgänge, nicht aufsteigende Entwickelungsvorgänge sind, sondern rückbildende Vorgänge, Abbauvorgänge, rückläufige Entwickelungsvorgänge.
Es ist sehr leicht, auf diesem Gebiete, da es heute noch vollständig neu ist, mißverstanden zu werden. Und in einem so kurzen Vortrage ist es schwer, alle Begriffe heranzutragen, die solches Mißverstehen ausschließen. Man muß sich dieser Gefahr, mißverstanden zu werden, schon aussetzen. Gesagt werden kann: das Nervenleben als Nervenleben verläuft ganz anders als andere organische Vorgänge, die dem Wachstum, der Fortpflanzung oder ähnlichem dienen. Diese letzteren organischen Vorgänge sind solche aufsteigender Entwickelung. So die Zellenentwickelung, die Vorgänge, welche im Fortpflanzungsvorgang, im Wachstumsvorgang als Zellteilung zu beobachten sind, als Nebeneinanderlagerung der noch im Leben der Fortpflanzung, wenigstens einer gewissen partiellen Fortpflanzung befindlichen Zellen. Indem sich aber die menschliche Organisation — bei der tierischen ist es ähnlich, sie interessiert uns heute weniger - in das Nervenleben hineinerstreckt, erstirbt sie partiell im Nervenleben. In das Nervenleben hinein findet ein Abbau der aufsteigenden Prozesse statt. So daß man sagen kann, schon rein naturwissenschaftlich zeigt sich — und mit dem Nervenleben parallel geht in einer gewissen Weise das Leben der roten Blutkörperchen -, daß die Teilungsvorgänge in die Nervenzellen und in die roten Blutkörperchen hinein aufhören. Und das ist schon eine rein tatsächliche Andeutung desjenigen, was das schauende Bewußtsein erkennt: daß der Nerv nicht beteiligt sein kann an irgend etwas Hervorbringendem, sondern daß der Nerv das Leben innerlich aufhält, daß also da, wo der Nerv sich verästelt, das Leben erstirbt.
Wir tragen, indem wir das Nervensystem in uns tragen, den Tod gewissermaßen schon organisch in uns. Sollte ich mit etwas anderem im Organismus — so sonderbar das klingt — vergleichen, was da eigentlich im Nervenleben stattfindet, so müßte ich sagen: Was unterbewußt im Nervenleben vor sich geht, das läßt sich nicht etwa vergleichen mit dem Prozesse, der sich abspielt, wenn der Mensch Nahrung aufgenommen hat, und diese Nahrung nun verarbeitet wird im Organismus zum weiteren Aufbau; nein, der eigentliche Nervenprozeß — als Nervenprozeß, nicht als Nervenernährungsprozeß — läßt sich mit dem vergleichen, was im Organismus entsteht, wenn der Organismus sein Gewebe abbaut im Hunger. So daß sich nicht ein Aufbauendes, sondern ein Abbauendes in das Nervensystem hinein erstreckt.
Aus diesem Nervensystem kann nicht irgend etwas sich entwickeln, nicht irgend etwas sich ergeben, unmittelbar aus ihm heraus; sondern dieses Nervensystem stellt einen aufgehaltenen Prozeß dar, der in seinem fortlaufenden Verlauf im Zellenleben bei den Fortpflanzungszellen, bei den Wachstumszellen erscheint: da ist er fortlaufend; er wird aufgehalten in den Nervenorganen. So daß das Nervenleben in Wahrheit nur den Grund und Boden liefert, daß sich auf ihm etwas anderes ausbreiten kann.
Dasjenige, was sich auf diesem Nervenleben ausbreitet, was sich aber dieses Nervenleben gleichsam hinzieht, das ist dasjenige, was in dieses Nervenleben nun als das -- zunächst durch die äußeren Sinne angeregte — Vorstellungsleben einzieht. Und nur dann, wenn man versteht, daß die Nerven nicht Veranlassung des Vorstellens sind, sondern nur den Boden abgeben dadurch, daß sie das organische Leben abgebaut haben, nur wenn man dies versteht, versteht man, daß ein dem Nervenleben selbst Fremdes auf dem Grunde dieses Nervenlebens sich entwickelt.
So fremd ist das, was sich als Geistig-Seelisches auf dem Grunde dieses sich selbst abbauenden Nervenlebens entwickelt, daß man sagen kann: Es ist wirklich so, wie wenn ich über eine Straße gehe und meine Fußtritte als Spuren eingrabe. Geht dann jemand nach, so darf er nun nicht das, was da als Formen meiner Fußtritte sichtbar ist, aus irgendwelchen Kräften ableiten, die im Erdreich selber sind, die gleichsam aus dem Inneren des Erdreichs herauf diese Fußspuren markieren würden. Obwohl man, wie meine Fußtritte im Boden, jede Äußerung seelischen Lebens im Nervensystem sieht, so darf doch nicht aus einem inneren «Heraufsteigen aus dem Nervensystem» erklärt werden, was geistig-seelisches Leben ist. Sondern in den zubereiteten Boden werden durch das geistig-seelische Leben Spuren eingegraben, in den Boden, der dadurch vorbereitet ist, daß eben innerhalb des Nervs darauf «verzichtet» wird — wenn ich es symbolisch so ausdrücken darf -, die eigene organische Produktivität fortzusetzen.
Was sich so aus dem Boden des Abbaues, des Ersterbens im Menschen als geistig-seelisches Leben, zunächst als Vorstellungsleben entwickelt, das stellt sich durchaus auch dem schauenden Bewußtsein im Zusammenhange mit dem organischen Leben, zunächst dem Nervenleben, dar; aber so, daß es in diesem Nervenleben nur seine Voraussetzung, seinen Boden hat, dasjenige, was da sein muß, unter dessen Voraussetzung es an diesem Orte sich betätigen kann. Dagegen ist dasjenige, was sich betätigt — obwohl es für die äußere Beobachtung hervorzugehen scheint aus dem Nervensystem, gebunden zu sein scheint an das Nervensystem -, es ist dieses geistig-seelische Leben gegenüber dem Nervensystem so unabhängig wie das Kind gegenüber den Eltern, das selbständige innere Regsamkeit entfaltet, trotzdem die Eltern der Mutterboden für dasjenige sind, auf Grund dessen sich das Kind entwickeln muß. Wie man dem äußeren Anschauen nach die Ursache für das Kind in dem Elternpaar sehen kann, wie aber das Kind in vollständig freier Entfaltung seiner Individualität dasteht und man nicht sagen kann: wenn das Kind zur Selbständigkeit heranwächst, so sei in ihm nicht eine von den Eltern losgelöste Regsamkeit —, genau in demselben Sinne muß man sagen: Was sich im geistig-seelischen Sinne regt und sich entwickelt, das macht sich unabhängig von dem Mutterboden, auf dem es gedeihen muß.
Ich deute hier ein Vorstellungssystem nur an, das im Laufe der Zeit - Geisteswissenschaft ist ja im Anfange ihrer Entwickelung — einen Ausbau gerade dadurch erfahren wird, daß gewisse naturwissenschaftliche Vorstellungen zu ihrer Höhe getrieben werden. Und gerade diese naturwissenschaftlichen Vorstellungen werden nicht dazu führen, die menschliche Freiheit auszuschließen, sondern dazu, auch naturwissenschaftlich die Freiheit zu erklären, die Freiheit zu verstehen — weil sie dazu führen werden, nicht nur, wie man es jetzt tut, aufbauende, fortschreitende Vorgänge zu beobachten im Organismus, sondern abbauende und in sich selber sich lähmende Vorgänge -, weil sie zeigen werden, daß, damit das Geistig-Seelische entsteht, nicht das Organische in gerader Linie der Entwickelung fortschreiten und das Geistige aus sich hervorbringen kann, sondern daß dieses Organische, indem das Geistige heraufzieht in das Organische, zuerst den Boden dadurch bereiten muß, daß es sich selbst in sich vernichtet, in sich abbaut.
Daß man zu den heute einzig und allein berücksichtigten Aufbauvorstellungen die Vorstellungen über abbauendes Leben hinzufügen wird, das wird mit großen Fortschritten naturwissenschaftlicher Anschauungsweise in der Zukunft verbunden sein. Und das wird eine Brücke schlagen, die geschlagen werden muß, weil Naturwissenschaft heute nicht übergangen werden darf, eine Brücke von der begriffenen Natur zu dem zu begreifenden sozialen Lebensgebiet.
Nur unvollendete Naturwissenschaft ist ein Hindernis, die für das soziale Lebensgebiet notwendigen Begriffe zu gewinnen; vollendete Naturwissenschaft wird gerade durch ihre innere Gediegenheit, durch ihre innere Größe, eine richtige Sozialwissenschaft begründen helfen.
Nachdem ich auf diese Weise wenigstens andeutungsweise den Fundamentalbegriff des sozialen Lebens, den Freiheitsbegriff, entwickelt habe — wie er mehr innerlich gesehen werden muß, das habe ich schon 1894 ausführlich ausgeführt in meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit», und diese innerliche Begründung stimmt vollständig mit dem überein, was ich nunmehr auf mehr naturwissenschaftliche Art gezeigt habe, wie ja hervorgeht aus den Darlegungen über diese Verhältnisse, die ich in meinem vor nahezu zwei Jahren erschienenen Buche «Vom Menschenrätsel» gegeben habe -, möchte ich fortfahren in der Auseinandersetzung über den Zusammenhang des menschlichen geistig-seelischen Lebens mit anderen Gebieten des Daseins.
Ich habe das letzte Mal und heute andeutungsweise darauf hingewiesen, wie dieses Geistig-Seelische zusammenhängt: als Vorstellungsleben mit dem Nervenleben, als Gefühlsleben mit dem Atmungsrhythmusleben, als Willensleben mit dem Stoffwechselleben. Das aber ist nur der Zusammenhang nach der einen Seite hin. Genau ebenso wie Naturwissenschaft, wenn sie sich in sich selbst nach dieser Richtung hin vollenden wird, die dreifach gegliederte Seele als Ganze in Zusammenhang bringen wird — wie ich das dargelegt habe mit dem ganzen menschlichen Leibesorganismus, so wird Geisteswissenschaft nach der anderen Seite, nach der Seite des Geistes, die Beziehungen des menschlich Geistig-Seelischen zu diesem Geistigen aufsuchen können.
So wie das Vorstellungsleben auf der einen Seite seinen leiblichen Grund und Boden in dem Nervenleben hat, so hängt das Vorstellungsleben nach der anderen, nach der geistigen Seite, mit einer Welt zusammen, zu der es gehört. Aber diese Welt, mit welcher das Vorstellungsleben nach der geistigen Seite zusammenhängt, kann man nur erkennen durch das schauende Bewußtsein, und zwar durch die erste Stufe dieses schauenden Bewußtseins, durch dasjenige, was ich das imaginative Erkennen, das imaginative Schauen genannt habe, das aus der Seele selbst herausgeholt wird, wie ein geistiges Auge aufgeht. Ich habe das im ersten Vortrag charakterisiert.
So wie das Vorstellungsleben in Beziehung steht zu dem Leibes-Nervenleben, in ihm seinen Grund und Boden hat, so geht es hervor aus dem Geistigen, aus einer rein geistigen Welt, die erkannt wird als eine wirkliche Welt, wenn man mit dem imaginativen Bewußtsein diese Wirklichkeit beobachtet. Diese wirkliche Welt ist nicht innerhalb der Sinneswelt beschlossen. Sie ist gewissermaßen die erste uns zunächstliegende übersinnliche Welt.
Und hier kommt man darauf, daß das Verhältnis des Menschen zu seiner Umwelt, wie es ihm bewußt wird durch sein gewöhnliches Bewußtsein, nur ein Teil seiner Gesamtbeziehung zur Welt ist; denn, was wir im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein in uns tragen, das ist ein Ausschnitt aus der Wirklichkeit, in der wir drinnenstehen. Unter diesem Bewußtsein liegt ein anderes Verhältnis des Menschen zur Umwelt, zur Naturwelt und zur Geisteswelt. Schon das Verhältnis des Vorstellungslebens zum leiblichen Nervenleben ist ja unter die Schwelle des Bewußtseins gedrängt und kann nur mit Mühe heraufgeholt werden, wenn man es so charakterisieren will, wie ich es heute getan habe. Aber auf der anderen Seite ist auch das Verhältnis des menschlichen Vorstellungslebens zur imaginativ zu erfassenden geistigen Welt ein solches, das nicht in das gewöhnliche Bewußtsein, wohl aber in die menschliche Wirklichkeit eintritt.
Im menschlichen Bewußtsein haben wir zunächst alles, was angeregt wird durch unsere Sinne und durch den an die Sinne gebundenen Verstand; das umfaßt unser gewöhnliches Bewußtsein. Aber darunter spielt sich eine Summe von Vorgängen ab, die zunächst nicht in dieses gewöhnliche Bewußtsein eintreten, sondern die ein Hereinspielen eines nur imaginativ zu erfassenden Geistigen in unser seelisches Wesen sind, so wie das Hereinspielen der Töne, Farben, Gerüche und so weiter in unser gewöhnliches Bewußtsein im Seelenleben geschieht. So hebt sich gewissermaßen das gewöhnliche Bewußtsein aus einem anderen Gebiete heraus, das erst durch das imaginative Vorstellen in dieses Bewußtsein heraufgetragen werden kann. Daß der Mensch nichts weiß von diesen Dingen, bedeutet nicht, daß sie in seiner Wesenheit nicht wirklich seien. Indem wir durch die Welt schreiten, tragen wir den Inhalt unseres gewöhnlichen Bewußtseins mit uns; aber wir tragen auch alles dasjenige mit uns, was außerdem hereinkommt aus der imaginativen, so will ich sie nennen, geistigen Welt zunächst.
Es ist insbesondere in der Gegenwart von einer ganz großen Bedeutung, sich klarzumachen, daß das Verhältnis des Menschen zu seiner Umwelt so ist. Denn ein Forschungsgebiet — ich bin weit entfernt davon, dieses Forschungsgebiet zu unterschätzen, ich schätze es in seiner Bedeutung —, ein Forschungsgebiet, zu dem gerade die Veranlassung ist, daß es in der Gegenwart auftritt, tritt wirklich in der Gegenwart auf: wie ein mächtiger Hinweis auf das allerdings der Gegenwart noch recht unbekannte Verhältnis des Menschen zu der Umwelt, die ich eben als die imaginative Geisteswelt charakterisiert habe. Aber das ist eben eine Eigentümlichkeit der Gegenwart, daß vieles in das Bewußtsein der Menschen hereintritt, das eigentlich nur umspannt und umfaßt werden kann mit den Erkenntnismitteln der Geisteswissenschaft. Der Mensch ist gegenwärtig aufgefordert, diese Dinge zu erkennen, weil er, wenn ich den trivialen Ausdruck gebrauchen darf, mit der Nase darauf gestoßen wird, weil das Leben sich so entwickelt, daß der Mensch darauf gestoßen wird. Aber es herrscht innerhalb unserer Zeitgenossenschaft noch eine für viele unüberwindliche Abneigung, mit den Erkenntnismitteln der Geisteswissenschaft daran heranzugehen. Und so wollen sie mit den an der gewöhnlichen Naturwissenschaft oder an anderem geschulten Begriffen an Gebiete herantreten, die mit aller Energie von den Menschen heute gewissermaßen fordern, daß sie erforscht werden.
Das Gebiet, das ich hier meine, ist das gerade in dieser Stadt so sehr bekannte Gebiet der analytischen Psychologie, auch Psychoanalyse genannt. Diese Psychoanalyse ist dadurch bemerkenswert, daß vor dem psychoanalytischen Forscher fordernd ein Gebiet auftritt, das nicht von dem gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein umfaßt wird, das hinweisen muß auf etwas, was unter der Schwelle dieses gewöhnlichen Bewußtseins liegt. Aber nun versucht man, dieses Gebiet zu ergreifen mit dem, was ich nennen möchte unzulängliche Erkenntnismittel. Und da man mit diesen unzulänglichen Erkenntnismitteln versucht, auch praktisch tätig zu sein, auch in die soziale Lebensstruktur einzugreifen — wenn auch zunächst nur therapeutisch und pädagogisch, vielleicht auch schon seelsorgerisch —, so muß man sagen, die Sache hat nicht nur eine theoretische Bedeutung, die Sache hat eine wichtige praktische Bedeutung. Nun kann ich selbstverständlich nicht das ganze Gebiet der Psychoanalyse auseinandersetzen. Dazu brauchte es viele Vorträge. Aber auf einiges Konkrete, Prinzipielle will ich gerade in diesem Zusammenhang hinweisen. Denn diese Psychoanalyse ist ein Gebiet, wo sich gewissermaßen Forschung und soziales Leben auf einem Punkte begegnen, wie wir andere Gebiete von dieser Art heute noch zu besprechen haben.
Vor allen Dingen wissen Sie ja vielleicht, daß die analytische Psychologie im wesentlichen damit arbeitet, gewisse, ich möchte sagen verlorene, Erinnerungsvorstellungen in das gewöhnliche Bewußtsein zu therapeutischen Zwecken heraufzuholen. Sie setzt also voraus, daß im Seelenleben gewisse Elemente vorhanden sind, die im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein nicht vorliegen. Sie kommt dann in weitem Umfang zu der Annahme, daß dieses in das Unterbewußtsein Hinuntergetauchte Erinnerungsvorstellungen sind oder Ähnliches, und sucht dann mit Hilfe des gewöhnlichen Erinnerungsbegriffes unter die Schwelle des Bewußtseins zu kommen, hinabzuleuchten unter die Schwelle des Bewußtseins in Gebiete, wohin das gewöhnliche Bewußtsein nicht leuchtet.
Nun habe ich ja schon in diesen Vorträgen angedeutet, daß Geisteswissenschaft ganz wesentlich den Erinnerungsvorgang des Menschen zu beleuchten hat. Auch auf diesem Gebiete wird es ja selbstverständlich nicht möglich sein, alle Mißverständnisse, die sich gegenüber einer kurzen Darstellung erheben können, auszuschließen. Ich habe zum Beispiel gehört — öfter, nicht einmal -, daß Psychoanalyse eigentlich auf demselben Wege wäre wie die von mir vertretene Geisteswissenschaft; nur nähmen die Psychoanalytiker gewisse Dinge symbolisch, während ich diese Dinge, die der Psychoanalytiker in seiner Aufgeklärtheit symbolisch nimmt, für Wirklichkeiten nähme. Das ist ein groteskes Mißverständnis, denn durch nichts kann man schlechter das Verhältnis der Psychoanalyse zu der von mir gemeinten Geisteswissenschaft charakterisieren, als wenn man dieses sagt.
Dazu aber, um das einzusehen, ist nötig, daß noch einmal eingegangen wird auf das Wesen des Erinnerungsvorganges. Ich muß noch einmal betonen: der Vorstellungsvorgang, die Tätigkeit des Vorstellens, ist etwas, was im Grunde genommen innerhalb des menschlichen Seelenlebens nur der Gegenwart angehört. Eine Vorstellung taucht niemals als solche in irgendein Unterbewußtsein hinunter, geradesowenig wie ein Spiegelbild, wenn man an dem Spiegel vorbeigegangen ist und das Spiegelbild nicht mehr erscheint, irgendwo sich niederlegt, damit es wieder auftauchen kann, wenn man ein zweites Mal vor dem Spiegel vorbeigeht. Das Auftauchen der Vorstellung ist eine Erscheinung, die beginnt und schließt, indem sie sich gegenwärtig abspielt. Und wenn man den Glauben hegt, daß Erinnerung darin bestehe, daß die Vorstellung irgendwo «war» und wiederum «herauftritt», so kann man zwar ein sehr guter Herbartscher Psychologe sein, auch ein Psychologe in mancherlei anderer Richtung, aber man steht nicht auf dem Boden einer wirklich beobachteten Tatsache.
Dasjenige, um was es sich handelt, ist etwas ganz anderes. Die Welt, in der wir leben, ist nicht nur von dem durchsetzt, was in das augenblickliche Vorstellungsleben durch unser Auge, Ohr, an Sinnesinhalt eindringt, was nur ein gegenwärtiges Leben gewinnt; sondern dieser ganzen Welt liegt zugrunde — auch der äußeren Naturwelt selbstverständlich - eine imaginativ zu erfassende Welt, die zunächst nicht zum Bewußtsein kommt. Dasjenige, was in dieser imaginativen Welt ist, das wirkt dem augenblicklichen Vorstellungsleben parallel: während ich vorstelle, also diese augenblicklichen gegenwärtigen Vorgänge in mir sich abspielen lasse, wirkt ihnen — indem ein Strom unterbewußten Lebens durch meine Seele durchzieht — parallel ein anderer Vorgang. Und dieser andere Vorgang, der führt zu den inneren Spurenbildungen - ich könnte sie sehr ausführlich charakterisieren, aber ich muß mich hier auf Andeutungen beschränken -, die später beobachtet werden, wenn Erinnerung auftritt.
Tritt also Erinnerung auf, so wird nicht die alte Vorstellung, wie sie irgendwo aufgehoben gewesen wäre, wieder vergegenwärtigt, sondern es wird nach innen angeschaut, was durch einen Parallelvorgang geblieben ist. Erinnerung besteht in einer inneren Wahrnehmung.
Im Unterbewußten ist die menschliche Seele zu mancherlei fähig, zu dem sie nicht im Bewußten fähig ist im gewöhnlichen Leben. Und wenn ich den Vorgang, der eintritt, wenn ein sogenanntes vergessenes Ereignis wiederum «in die Erinnerung herauftritt», im groben Sinne — ich betone ausdrücklich: im groben Sinne! — mit etwas vergleichen will, so möchte ich sagen, dieser Vorgang ist ganz ähnlich dem Vorgang der äußeren Wahrnehmung; nur daß ich, wenn ich eine äußere Wahrnehmung habe, das Wahrgenommene in der vorübergehenden, nur gegenwärtigen Vorstellung nachbilde; was ich aber in derErinnerung nachbilde, ist eine Ausprägung innerer Wahrnehmung: ich nehme den stehengebliebenen Rest des Parallelvorganges innerlich wahr. Erinnerung ist, grob verglichen, ein Lesen der Seele in einer späteren Zeit dessen, was mit der Vorstellungsbildung parallel gegangen ist. Die Seele hat unterbewußt dieses Vermögen, in sich zu lesen, was sich gebildet hat, während ich vorgestellt habe. Damals habe ich es nicht gewußt; denn da war es von der Vorstellung zugedeckt. Jetzt wird es erinnert. Statt daß ich von außen die Sache wahrnehme, nehme ich den eigenen inneren Vorgang wahr. So ist die Wirklichkeit.
Ich weiß sehr wohl, daß ein fanatischer Psychoanalytiker — aber keiner ist nach seiner Meinung fanatisch, das weiß ich auch, selbstverständlich — sagen wird, er könne sich mit einer solchen Auslegung der Erinnerung sehr gut einverstanden erklären. Aber in der Praxis seiner Auseinandersetzungen tut er es eben nie. Wer die Literatur kennt, der weiß, daß es nie geschieht, und daß gerade hier die Quelle von unzähligen Fehlern ist: weil man gar nicht weiß, daß es sich nicht um vergangene Vorstellungen handelt, die irgendwo herumbummeln im Unterbewußten, sondern um einen Vorgang, der nur begriffen werden kann, wenn man den dem Vorstellungsleben parallelgehenden Vorgang des Hereinspielens einer imaginativen Welt in unsere Welt wirklich begreift.
Hier entstehen die ersten bedeutungsvollen Irrtümer dadurch, daß von dem, was man analytische Psychologie nennt, ein falsch ausgelegter Erinnerungsvorgang theoretisch zugrunde gelegt und praktisch verwertet wird. Wenn man in den wirklichen Erinnerungsvorgang eindringt, handelt es sich durchaus nicht darum, daß man dasjenige, was in der Seele des vom Psychoanalytiker als krank angesehenen Individuums auftritt, in verbummelten Erinnerungen sucht, sondern darum, daß man darauf kommt, wie der Patient im Zusammenhange steht mit einer wirklichen objektiven Welt von geistigen Vorgängen, die er nur abnorm aufnimmt. Das macht einen großen Unterschied, den man sich allerdings nach allen Seiten durchdenken muß.
Allein der Psychoanalytiker, der eben in einseitiger Weise seine naturwissenschaftliche Schulung an einem wichtigen Tatsachengebiet anwendet, verfällt noch in einen anderen Fehler: daß er in einer Weise, wie es sich vor einer wirklichen Beobachtung nicht rechtfertigen läßt, die Traumvorstellungen für die Diagnose der Seele verwendet. Da handelt es sich darum, daß man auch durch wirkliche Beobachtung und durch wirklichkeitsgemäße Begriffe richtig in diese merkwürdige, mysteriöse Traumeswelt eindringt. Man dringt nur dann ein, wenn man weiß, wie der Mensch nicht bloß in derjenigen Umwelt wurzelt, an welcher sein gewöhnliches Bewußtsein Anteil hat, sondern - schon in dem Vorstellungsleben, wie wir gesehen haben, später werden wir noch einiges andere sehen — in einer geistigen Welt. Wenn auch im Schlafe das gewöhnliche Bewußtsein auf hört, die Beziehung zu der Welt, die unterbewußt bleibt, hört im Schlafe nicht auf.
Und durch einen Vorgang, den ich auch der Kürze der Zeit willen nicht ausführlich charakterisieren kann, geschieht es, daß dann durch die besonderen Bedingungen, die der Schlaf darbietet, eingekleidet wird dasjenige, was im Zusammenhange mit der geistigen Umwelt erlebt wird, in die symbolischen Vorstellungen des Traumes. Diese Traumvorstellungen sind ihrem Inhalte nach ganz gleichgültig. Derselbe Vorgang — der in einer Beziehung des Menschen zur geistigen Umwelt besteht — kann sich bei dem einen Menschen in eine solche, bei einem anderen in eine ganz andere Folge von symbolischen Darstellungen einkleiden. Wer Erkenntnisse auf diesem Gebiete hat, der weiß, daß typische unterbewußte Seelenvorgänge bei den verschiedensten Menschen sich in die verschiedensten Lebensreminiszenzen einkleiden und daß es nicht auf den Inhalt des Traumes ankommt. Man kommt nur darauf, was da eigentlich zugrunde liegt, wenn man sich darin schult, von dem Inhalt des Traumes ganz abzusehen, wenn man sich darin schult, ich möchte sagen, die innere Dramatik des Traumes ins Auge zu fassen: ob der Traum davon ausgeht, in einer gewissen Traumvorstellung zuerst eine Grundlage zu legen, dann eine Spannung zu schaffen und einen Ablauf, oder ob eine andere Folge da ist, ob zuerst eine Spannung und dann eine Auflösung da ist.
Es bedarf einer großen Vorbereitung, den Ablauf des Traumes in seiner Dramatik, ganz abgesehen von dem Inhalt der Bilder, ins Auge zu fassen. Wer Träume verstehen will, muß in der Lage sein, etwas auszuführen gegenüber dem Traume, das gleich käme dem, wenn man ein Drama vor sich hat und sich für die Bilder nur insoferne interessiert, als man dahinter den Dichter ins Auge faßt, in dem, was er auf- und abwogend erlebt. Erst wenn man aufhört, den Traum durch eine abstrakte symbolische Ausdeutung der Bilderwelt ergreifen zu wollen, erst wenn man in die Lage kommt, sich einzuleben in die innere Dramatik des Traumes, in den inneren Zusammenhang, abgesehen von der Symbolik, von dem Inhalte der Bilder, erst dann merkt man, in welchem Verhältnisse die Seele zu dem steht, was geistige Umwelt ist. Denn diese kann nicht durch die Traumbilder gesehen werden, in die derjenige, der kein imaginatives Schauen hat, durch die abnormen Verhältnisse des Schlafes das Wirkliche kleidet, sondern nur durch das imaginative Bewußtsein. Was sich abspielt jenseits der Traumbilder als Traumdramatik, das ist nur durch das imaginative Bewußtsein zu erkennen.
Sie wissen ja vielleicht, daß die analytische Psychologie - in einer gewissen Weise sehr löblich — ihre Forschung auch ausgedehnt hat auf die Mythenforschung, und daß sie da allerlei zutage gefördert hat, manches Interessante, manches so, daß einem die Haare dabei zu Berge stehen können, Auf das einzelne will ich ja durchaus nicht eingehen, aber wichtig ist, daß heute der einzelne Forscher noch immer so arbeitet, daß er ein gewisses enges Gebiet einseitig ausbildet und nicht Rücksicht nimmt auf das, was bereits vorliegt in der Forschung, und was manchmal viel mehr die Sache beleuchten könnte, als man sie beleuchtet.
Ein alter Freund von mir, der längst nun gestorben ist, hat ein sehr schönes Buch geschrieben über Mythenforschung: Ludwig Laistner, «Das Rätsel der Sphinx». Indem er sozusagen die ganze Welt durchwandelt hat in bezug auf die Entstehung von Mythen, hat er in sehr interessanter Weise gezeigt, daß es, wenn man die Mythen verstehen will, gar nicht darauf ankommt, den Inhalt der Mythen, das, was erzählt wird - da so, dort so und so -, diese konkreten Mythenbilder also ins Auge zu fassen, sondern daß es auch da darauf ankommt, den überall wiederkehrenden dramatischen Vorgang, der sich auf die mannigfaltigste Weise durch die verschiedenen Mythenbilder ausdrückt, zutage zu fördern. Und da Laistner auch den Zusammenhang der Mythenbilder mit der Traumeswelt in einer noch elementaren, aber immerhin richtigen Weise ins Auge gefaßt hat, so bildeten seine Forschungen eine vorzügliche Grundlage, die Traumforschung auf die Mythenforschung überzuleiten. Würde man sich auch in der Mythenforschung darüber klar sein, daß dasjenige, was in das Traumbewußtsein hereinspielt aus dem Schöpferischen des Mythos, eigentlich nur Bilder sind, die in willkürlicher Weise, möchte ich sagen, den eigentlichen Vorgang darstellen, so würde man viel gescheiter sein. So müssen auch auf dem Gebiete der analytischen Psychologie — trotzdem ich die Bedeutung ünd den allerbesten und allerehrlichsten Willen der Forscher auf diesem Gebiete voll anerkenne - diese Forscher, weil sie mit unzulänglichen Erkenntnismitteln arbeiten, zu schiefen, einseitigen Versuchen kommen.
Es ist eben überall wenig Neigung vorhanden, wirklich in die Tiefen der Sachen einzugehen und das geistige Leben zu Hilfe zu nehmen, um die Wirklichkeit mit wirklichkeitsgemäßen Begriffen zu verstehen. Allerdings, die neuere psychoanalytische Forschung hat ja, absehend von dem gewöhnlichen Erinnerungsbegriff, absehend von jenen Träumen, die aus dem individuellen Leben angeregt werden, auch mit einem «überindividuellen Unbewußten», wie man sagt, rechnen wollen. Aber da kommt doch diese Forschungsmethode, die mit so unzulänglichen Erkenntnismitteln arbeitet, zu einem ganz sonderbaren Resultate: hier wird einmal geahnt in der Gegenwart — und man muß dankbar sein, daß es wenigstens geahnt wird -, daß dieses menschliche Seelenleben mit einem Geistesleben außer ihm in einer Beziehung steht, aber es ist nicht möglich, etwas zu tun, um diese Beziehung in ihrer Wirklichkeit zu erkennen. Ich möchte diesen Forschern wahrlich nichts am Zeuge flicken, die ich sehr verehre ob ihres Forschermutes, der noch immer groß genug sein muß innerhalb der vorurteilsvollen Welt der Gegenwart, um solche Dinge geltend zu machen; aber es muß eben — namentlich weil die Dinge auf das praktische Gebiet übergreifen - aufmerksam gemacht werden darauf, wie man aus der Einseitigkeit herauskommen kann.
Da hat denn ein sehr verdienstvoller Forscher, Jung, der hier in Zürich lebt, seine Zuflucht gewissermaßen zu transindividuellen, überindividuellen unbewußten Geistes- oder Seeleninhalten genommen: daß die menschliche Seele nicht nur zu dem in Beziehung stehe, was sie individuell irgendeinmal in die Erinnerung hinuntergebracht hatte oder dergleichen, sondern auch zu dem, was außer ihrer Individualität ist. Ein sehr schöner, ein kühner Gedanke: dieses menschliche Seelenleben nicht nur durch die Mittel des Körpers, sondern an sich mit Seelischem in der Außenwelt in Beziehung zu bringen, durchaus im höchsten Maße anzuerkennen. Aber dieser selbe Forscher führt das, was da in der Seele auftritt, doch wiederum auf eine Art, ich möchte sagen, Erinnerung zurück, wenn auch auf eine überindividuelle Erinnerung. Man kommt von dem Begriff der Mneme, der Erinnerung, nicht los, trotzdem man eigentlich nicht mehr von Erinnerung sprechen kann, wenn man über das Individuelle hinausgeht. Man kommt dazu, wie Jung sich ausdrückt: daß in der Seele leben, ohne daß es ins gewöhnliche Bewußtsein hereinkommt, «urtümliche Bilder», Bilder von dem, was einmal, sagen wir, der griechische Geist ersonnen hat als die griechischen Mythen, urtümliche Bilder, um diesen Jacob Burckhardtschen Ausdruck zu gebrauchen. Sehr bedeutsam sagt Jung: Alles, was nicht nur der individuelle Mensch, sondern was die Menschheit durchgemacht hat, kann in der Seele tätig sein; und indem das gewöhnliche Bewußtsein nichts davon weiß, stürmt und wogt das unterbewußt gegen das Bewußtsein herauf, und es entstehen die merkwürdigen Erscheinungen, die heute als hysterische oder andere Erkrankungen auftreten. Alles, was die Menschen je an Göttlichem oder auch an Teufelei erlebt haben, so sagt Jung in seinem neuesten Buche, komme wiederum herauf; der Mensch weiß nichts davon, aber es wirkt in ihm.
Nun ist es sehr interessant, hier einmal eine Forschung, die mit unzulänglichen Erkenntnismitteln arbeitet, anzupacken, gerade in einem charakteristischen Fall. In außerordentlich bedeutsamer Weise kommt dieser Forscher dazu, sich zu sagen: Wenn der Mensch in seiner Seele keine bewußte Beziehung herstellt zu einer göttlichen Welt, so stellt sich diese Beziehung in seinem Unterbewußten her, wenn er auch nichts weiß davon. In seinem Unterbewußten, unter der Schwelle des Bewußtseins, da leben die Götter; und das, wovon er nichts bewußt weiß, kann sich sogar so äußern, daß er es auf seinen Arzt oder eine andere Person, wie man sagt: projiziert. Während also die Erinnerung an irgendeine Teufelei in seinem Unterbewußten waltet, kommt sie ins Bewußtsein nicht herauf; aber sie stürmt in ihm; er muß sich davon befreien; er überträgt sie auf irgendeine Person. Die Vorstellung macht diese zum Teufel, den Arzt, oder, wenn ihm das nicht gelingt, sich selber.
Von solchen Dingen ausgehend ist es nun sehr interessant, an einer Stelle in einem der neuesten Bücher auf dem Gebiete der Psychoanalyse, «Die Psychologie der unbewußten Prozesse» von Carl Gustav Jung, zu sehen, wie ein Forscher sich diese Dinge zurechtlegt. Jung sagt: «Der Gottesbegriff ist nämlich eine schlechthin notwendige psychologische Funktion irrationaler Natur» — eine sehr verdienstvolle Anerkennung, denn es ist damit einmal anerkannt, daß der Mensch in seinem Unterbewußten so beschaffen ist, ‚daß er in diesem Unterbewußten Beziehungen zu einer göttlichen Welt herstellt! - Dann fährt er fort: «Der Gottesbegriff ist nämlich eine schlechthin notwendige psychologische Funktion irrationaler Natur, die mit der Frage nach der Existenz Gottes überhaupt nichts zu tun hat. Denn diese letztere Frage gehört zu den dümmsten Fragen, die man stellen kann.»
Dabei kommt nicht in Betracht, wie sich der Forscher selbst zu dem Gottesbegriff stellt. Er kann ein sehr frommer Forscher sein. Hier kommt nur in Betracht, wie sich auf diesem Gebiete das unterbewußte Vorstellungsleben, wenn man so sagen darf, dieses Forschers selbst auslebt! Durch die unzulänglichen Erkenntnismittel wird eigentlich nichts Geringeres als dieses erzielt, daß man sich sagt: Die menschliche Seele muß in ihrer Welt unter der Schwelle des Bewußtseins Beziehungen zu den Göttern herstellen; aber diese Beziehungen muß sie so gestalten, daß sie mit der Existenz Gottes nichts zu tun haben! Also: die Seele muß notwendigerweise auch zufrieden sein mit einer bloß illusionären Beziehung, die ihr aber im eminentesten Sinne notwendig ist, ohne die sie krank wird! Von einer ungeheuren Tragweite ist, was hier steht, von einer gar nicht zu unterschätzenden Tragweite! Ich habe damit nur angedeutet, wie auf einem sehr breiten Gebiete mit unzulänglichen Erkenntnismitteln gearbeitet wird.
Ich fahre nun fort in der Schilderung des Menschen, wie er sich in den sozialen Lebenszusammenhang hineinzustellen hat: Das Gefühlsleben — jetzt nicht das Vorstellungsleben, sondern das Gefühlsleben des Menschen - hat auf der einen Seite, wie ich schon ausgeführt habe, sein leibliches Gegenstück in dem Atmungsrhythmus, auf der anderen Seite aber hat es seine Beziehung zu geistigen Inhalten. Was auf der geistigen Seite dem Gefühlsleben entspricht, wie auf der leiblichen Seite das Atmungsrhythmusleben, das kann als ein geistiger Inhalt, als Inhalt von geistigen Wesenheiten, geistigen Kräften, nur mit dem durchdrungen werden, was ich in diesen Vorträgen das inspirierte Bewußtsein genannt habe.
Mit diesem inspirierten Bewußtsein aber kommt man nicht bloß zu einem geistigen Inhalte, der unser Dasein erfüllt zwischen Geburt, oder sagen wir Empfängnis und Tod; sondern da kommt man zu der Anschauung desjenigen, was durch Geburt und Tod hindurchgeht, was zu tun hat mit unserem Leben zwischen dem Tod und einer neuen Geburt, des Wesens also, das auch dann lebt, wenn der Mensch diesen physischen Leib nicht mehr trägt.
Legt der Mensch diesen physischen Leib durch die physische Vererbung an, dann schafft sich dasjenige, was aus der inspirierten Welt herausgeboren ist, einen leiblichen Ausdruck in dem Atmungsrhythmus. Aber es spielt in dieses Gefühlsleben — während in das Vorstellungsleben, das der Mensch im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein kannte, wirklich zunächst nur hereinspielt, was zwischen Geburt und Tod liegt — alles herein, was als Kräfte, als Impulse tätig ist in der Zeit zwischen dem letzten Tode und dieser Geburt, und was wiederum tätig sein wird zwischen diesem Tode und einer neuen Geburt. Es spielt der ewige Wesenskern des Menschen in dieses Gefühlsleben hinein.
Und als drittes muß geltend gemacht werden, daß das Willensleben des Menschen auf der einen Seite eigentlich zu der niedersten Betätigung des menschlichen Organismus in Beziehung steht zu dem Stoffwechsel, zu dem, was im weitesten Umfange in Hunger und Durst sich ausdrückt, auf der anderen Seite aber geistig zu der höchsten geistigen Welt, zu der intuitiven Welt, wie ich sie hier in diesen Vorträgen schon öfter erwähnt habe. So daß in der Tat eine völlige Umkehrung der Verhältnisse stattfindet.
Das Vorstellungsleben steht zunächst unterbewußt mit der imaginativen Welt in Berührung, mit dem Nervenleben nach der anderen Seite. In einer Welt, die über unser persönliches leibliches Leben als unser Wesenskern hinausragt, steht das Gefühlsleben drinnen nach der geistigen Seite hin. Und das Willensleben, das seinen leiblichen Ausdruck immer, wenn ein Willensimpuls stattfindet, in irgendeinem Stoffwechselvorgang findet, das sich also in den niedersten Vorgängen des Organismus ausdrückt, steht nach der geistigen Seite im Zusammenhange mit der höchsten geistigen Welt, der intuitiven Welt.
Und auf diesem Gebiet erst kann erforscht werden, was man wiederholte Erdenleben nennt. Was aus einem Erdenleben in das andere hinüberspielt, das ist kein Impuls, der erfaßt werden kann durch Imagination, geschweige denn durch gewöhnliches Bewußtsein, nicht einmal mit dem inspirierten Bewußtsein, sondern erst mit dem intuitiven Bewußtsein. In unser Leben spielen die Impulse herein aus früheren Erdenleben. Aus diesem Leben spielen die Impulse in spätere Erdenleben. Was dieser Forschung allein das Gepräge geben kann, das ist der erweckte Sinn für wirkliche, nicht bloß für verschwommene Intuitionen, von denen man im gewöhnlichen Leben spricht.
So stellt sich vor dem vollständigen menschlichen. Bewußtsein der vollständige Mensch dar, wie er als geistig-seelischer Mensch sich nach dreifacher Weise auslebt in den auf und ab wogenden Vorstellungen, Gefühlen und Willensimpulsen, und wie er in dreifacher Weise nach der Leibesseite hin seinen Boden und aus der geistigen Welt sein Hervorgehen findet. So führt Geisteswissenschaft zum Ewigen des Menschen nicht durch Spekulationen, nicht durch Hypothesen, sondern indem sie zeigt, wie das Bewußtsein sich entwickeln muß, um den ewigen Wesenskern in den durch wiederholte Erdenleben sich darlebenden Entwickelungen des Menschen zu schauen.
Dieser volle Mensch nun - nicht ein abstrakter Mensch, der von der Naturwissenschaft oder den Naturwissenschaftern hineingestellt wird in einen leeren, abstrakten, nicht von der vollen Wirklichkeit erfüllten Vorstellungszusammenhang -, dieser volle Mensch steht in dem sozialen Lebenszusammenhang. Und während man mit dem gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein voll auskommt, um die äußere Natur zu verstehen, insoweit sie nicht organisch, sondern Ausgestaltung des Leblosen ist, des Mechanischen — was ja die heutige Naturwissenschaft oftmals allein gelten lassen will, wenigstens allein durchdringen will —, kann man keine Begriffe finden, die volle Lebensfähigkeit für das soziale Leben haben, wenn man sie nach dem Muster seines gewöhnlichen Bewußtseins aufbaut. Denn das ist das Geheimnis des sozialen Lebens, daß es sich nicht aufbaut nach den Begriffen, welche das gewöhnliche Bewußtsein hat, sondern daß es sich außerbewußt aufbaut, in Impulsen, die nur erfaßt werden können mit den höheren Bewußtseinsarten, von denen ich Ihnen gesprochen habe.
Diese Einsicht kann aufhellend wirken auf vieles, das sich im sozialen Leben der Gegenwart ad absurdum führen muß, weil die Begriffe, mit denen man dieses soziale Leben fassen will, keine wirklichkeitsgemäßen sind. Da steht man heute mit diesen Begriffen, die an der Erziehung der naturwissenschaftlichen Vorstellungsweise gewonnen sind, will schaffend handeln im sozialen Leben. Aber dieses soziale Leben hat weitere Begriffe notwendig — wie das charakterisierte, vor der Psychoanalyse auftretende unterbewußte Seelenleben auch weitere Begriffe verlangt - als die Begriffe des gewöhnlichen Bewußtseins.
Und drei Gebiete treten einem zunächst entgegen in den sozialen Gemeinschaften, welche ihre Beleuchtung finden müssen durch die anthroposophisch orientierte Geisteswissenschaft. Gerade diese Dinge werde ich nur skizzieren können; allein Geisteswissenschaft ist ja am Anfange, und manches wird erst erforscht werden müssen, so daß ich nur im allgemeinen den Charakter der Fäden charakterisieren werde, die von den geisteswissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen zu der Erkenntnis des sozialen Lebens gezogen werden müssen.
Drei soziale Lebensgebiete treten einem entgegen. Das erste soziale Lebensgebiet, das dem Menschen entgegentritt und auf das das Anwendung findet, was ich eben charakterisiert-habe, das ist das ökonomische Gebiet. Wir wissen ja, daß in der sozialen Struktur die ökonomischen Gesetze leben, und daß diese ökonomischen Gesetze beherrscht werden müssen. Von demjenigen, der als Gesetzgeber oder als Staatsmann tätig ist oder auf irgendeinem Gebiete als Leiter irgendeines Unternehmens, das sich eben in die soziale Struktur des Gesamtlebens hineinstellt, von ihnen allen muß dasjenige gestaltet werden, was in ökonomischer Gesetzmäßigkeit sich auslebt.
Nun, die ökonomische Struktur, wie sie sich auslebt, kann nicht erfaßt werden, wenn man nur die an der naturwissenschaftlichen Vorstellung gewonnenen Begriffe, von denen heute fast alles menschliche Denken beherrscht wird, auf dieses ökonomische Leben anwenden will. In diesem ökonomischen Leben herrschen schon ganz andere Impulse als in der Natur, als selbst in der menschlichen Naturgrundlage. In der menschlichen Naturgrundlage liegen der Betrachtung zum Beispiel die Bedürfnisfragen zugrunde. In der äußeren ökonomischen Ordnung liegen die Befriedigungsfragen zugrunde. Habe ich ein soziales Gemeinwesen mit seiner ökonomischen Struktur wirklich zu erkennen, so habe ich zu erkennen, wie nach der geographischen und sonstigen Beschaffenheit für menschliche Verhältnisse befriedigende Mittel da sind. Von der Bedürfnisfrage geht man aus, wenn man den Menschen individuell betrachtet. Gerade aber von ‚der entgegengesetzten Seite muß man ausgehen, wenn man die ökonomische Struktur betrachtet. Da hat man nicht zu betrachten, wessen Menschen bedürfen, sondern was da ist für Menschen auf einem bestimmten Gebiete, wenn sich ein Gemeinschaftsleben entwickelt. Das ist nur eine Andeutung. Vieles müßte gesagt werden, wenn nun die ökonomische Struktur in ihrer Gesamtheit besprochen werden sollte. Allein, was da eigentlich der Organismus der ökonomischen Struktur eines Staates oder eines Gemeinwesens ist, das kann nicht beherrscht werden mit den Begriffen, die der gewöhnlichen Naturwissenschaft entlehnt sind.
Da können ganz sonderbare Dinge passieren! Ich darf da eine Sache besprechen, weil ich sie wirklich nicht bloß aus Anlaß etwa der heutigen Ereignisse berühre. Da könnte man mir vielleicht den Vorwurf machen, ich stünde unter dem Einfluß dieser heutigen Ereignisse; aber das ist nicht der Fall. Denn ich habe dasselbe, was ich jetzt sagen werde, bereits bevor diese Kriegsereignisse hereingebrochen sind, in einem Vortragszyklus, den ich in Helsingfors gehalten habe, auseinandergesetzt, so daß dasjenige, was ich nun sagen werde, in der Veranlassung ohne alle Beziehung zu den Kriegsereignissen ist. Das mußte ich voraussenden, damit ich nicht mißverstanden werde.
Ich habe dazumal - also vor dem Ausbruch dieser Kriegsereignisse — in Helsingfors angedeutet, wie man fehlgehen kann, wenn man aus bloßen naturwissenschaftlichen Vorstellungen heraus die soziale Struktur in Menschengemeinschaften erfassen will, und ich habe als Beispiel eine Persönlichkeit gewählt, welche im eminentesten Sinne diesen Fehler macht: Woodrow Wilson. Und zwar habe ich darauf aufmerksam gemacht, daß Woodrow Wilson — Gelehrsamkeit ist in diesem Falle zur Staatsmannschaft aufgerückt —in sonderbarer Weise sagt: Zu der Zeit des Newtonismus, als man die ganze Welt mehr mechanisch betrachtet hat, da kann man bemerken, wie die Menschen auch in ihren Staatsvorstellungen, in ihren sozialen Vorstellungen, die mechanischen Vorstellungen drinnen haben, die Newton und andere an die Tagesordnung gebracht haben. Aber es ist falsch, das soziale Leben mit solchen engen Begriffen zu erfassen, sagt Woodrow Wilson; heute muß man das anders machen: heute muß man die darwinistischen Vorstellungen auf das soziale Leben anwenden! Also er macht dasselbe, nur macht er es mit den heute geltenden naturwissenschaftlichen Vorstellungen!
Aber ebensowenig wie die Newtonschen Vorstellungen in der Lage waren, die soziale Struktur zu umfassen, ebensowenig sind es die darwinistischen Vorstellungen, die, wie wir gehört haben, nicht einmal alle anwendbar sind auf das organische Leben. Das bleibt Wilson aber im Unterbewußten, und er merkt gar nicht, daß er denselben Fehler, den er vorher rügt und tadelt, im nächsten Augenblicke selber macht.
Da haben wir ein eminentes Beispiel, daß Menschen nicht in der Lage sind, zu erkennen, wie sie mit unzulänglichen, die Wirklichkeit nicht beherrschenden Erkenntnismitteln arbeiten, wenn sie anfangen, das soziale Leben heute verstehend meistern zu wollen. Solches aber, wie mit unzulänglichen Mitteln heute nicht etwa bloß erkannt wird, sondern Weltgeschichte gemacht wird, das findet man auf Schritt und Tritt. Und würden die Menschen durchschauen, wie das stattfindet, so würden sie tief hineinschauen können in die der heutigen Mitwelt zumeist verborgenen tieferen Ursachen der Phrasenschneiderei der Gegenwart.
Ökonomische Strukturen durchschaut man nicht mit naturwissenschaftlichen — sei es am Darwinismus, sei es am Newtonismus gewonnenen — Begriffen, die nur auf Naturfakten gehen können. Sondern da muß man zu anderen Begriffen fortschreiten.
Und diese kann ich nur so charakterisieren, daß ich sage, zugrunde liegen muß diesen Begriffen, wenn auch nicht vielleicht ein deutliches Vorstellen, so doch ein Gefühl des Sich-Hineinversenkens in die soziale Struktur, so daß auftauchen Vorstellungen, die dem imaginativen Leben angehören. Nur mit Hilfe von imaginativen Vorstellungen kann ein Bild geschaffen werden einer konkreten sozialen Struktur, die irgendwo auftritt. Sonst kommt man zu wesenlosen, zu wertlosen Abstraktionen.
Mythen bilden wir heute nicht mehr. Aber inder mythenbildenden Kraft war ein menschlicher Seelenimpuls vorhanden, der hinausging über die gewöhnliche Wirklichkeit. Aus demselben Seelenimpuls, mit dem unsere Vorfahren Mythen gebildet haben, mit dem sie also, wenn ich sagen darf, durch ihre zur geistigen Wirklichkeit im Verhältnis stehende Phantasie Bilder von dieser Wirklichkeit geschaffen haben, aus demselben Impuls muß heute derjenige, der etwas verstehen will von ökonomischen Ordnungen, imaginative Vorstellungen haben. Nicht Mythen kann er bilden, aber er muß die geographischen, die anderen Bodenverhältnisse, die Charakterverhältnisse der Menschen, die Bedürfnisse der Menschen so zusammendenken können, daß dieses Zusammendenken mit derselben Kraft geschieht, mit der einstmals die Mythen gebildet worden sind, mit der Kraft, die als Imaginieren im Geistigen webt und lebt, und die im Abbilde erscheint in der ökonomischen Struktur.
Ein zweites Gebiet des sozialen Lebens ist das moralische, die moralische Struktur, der moralische Impuls, der sich in einer Gesamtheit auslebt. Wieder taucht man hinunter in alle möglichen unbewußten Gebiete, wenn man jene Impulse erforschen will, die in den menschlichen moralischen - im weitesten Sinne moralischen — Aspirationen zutage treten. Wer da eingreifen will, sei es als Staatsmann, sei es als Parlamentarier, sei es auch, indem er irgendeinem Unternehmen vorsteht und leitend sein will, versteht die Struktur nur, wenn er sie beherrschen kann mit Begriffen, die in inspirierten Erkenntnissen wenigstens ihre Grundlage haben.
Es ist also mehr notwendig, als man heute oftmals glaubt, um in dieses Soziale insofern einzugreifen, als moralische Impulse mitspielen. Diese moralischen Impulse müssen wahrhaft ebenso aus der Wirklichkeit heraus studiert werden, wie die Impulse des organischen Lebens nicht erfunden werden können, sondern studiert werden müssen aus dem Organismus selbst heraus. Würde man in einer ähnlichen Weise über die Löwennatur, über die Katzennatur, meinetwillen die Igelnatur, aus dem menschlichen Geistesleben heraus Begriffe spinnen, wie man Begriffe spinnt, indem man heute den Marxismus oder andere sozialistische Theorien ausdenkt, ohne die Natur in Wirklichkeit zu studieren, würde man in solcher Weise rein a priori über die tierische Natur Begriffe konstruieren, so würde man auf sonderbare 'Theorien über die tierische Organisation kommen.
Das Wesentliche ist, daß in seiner vollen Konkretheit der soziale Organismus auch da studiert werden muß, wo moralische Kräfte im weitesten Sinne walten. Auch die Bedürfniskräfte, die der Mensch geltend macht - sie sind immer auch im weiteren Sinn moralische Kräfte —, können nur gemeistert werden, wenn man in seiner Konkretheit den sozialen Organismus aus solchen, wenn auch dunklen Vorstellungen heraus erforscht, welche in der inspirierten Welt wurzeln. Wie weit ist man heute entfernt von einer solchen Vorstellungsweise!
Geisteswissenschaft kommt dazu, im einzelnen wirklich zu studieren, worinnen die Impulse der Bevölkerung Mitteleuropas, der Bevölkerung Westeuropas, Osteuropas bestehen. Sie kommt dazu, im Konkreten zu sehen, wie die verschiedenen Seelenimpulse, die aus dem sozialen Organismus heraufsteigen, ebenso begründete konkrete Impulse sind wie die Impulse, die aus dem physischen Organismus heraufsteigen. Sie lernt erkennen, daß auch das Zusammenleben der Völker mit diesen aus der Tiefe heraus studierbaren Impulsen zusammenhängt. Geisteswissenschaft findet eine ganz andere Seelenstruktur als im Westen bei dem Menschen des europäischen Ostens und weiß, wie sich eine solche Struktur im ganzen europäischen Leben einleben muß. Ich kann darauf aufmerksam machen, daß ich seit Jahrzehnten über die verschiedenen Seelenstrukturen gesprochen habe, die dem sozialen Leben Europas zugrunde liegen, rein aus geisteswissenschaftlichen Vorstellungen heraus; aber das, was so gefunden wurde, wird bestätigt durch das, was empirische Kenner sagen, die in dem konkreten Leben drinnenstehen. Lesen Sie in der gestrigen und heutigen «Neuen Zürcher Zeitung», was als Dostojewskische Anschauungen über die russische Volksseele, über die russischen Ideale gesagt wird, und Sie haben da — was ich nur anführen kann, die Zeit reicht'nicht aus, im einzelnen zu schildern — einen vollständigen Beleg: die äußere Beobachtung eines Resultates im eminentesten Sinne desjenigen, was durch Geisteswissenschaft seit Jahren vertreten wird.
Da kommt man dazu, aus dem wirklichen Leben heraus die sozialen Impulse, sozialen Kräfte zu studieren. Dieses fehlt heute. Weil man aber das Leben nicht meistern kann mit wirklichkeitsfremden Begriffen, sondern nur mit Begriffen, die aus der lebendigen Wirklichkeit heraus geboren sind, wächst dieses Leben den Menschen über den Kopf. Sie wissen nicht mehr das Leben zu umspannen mit den Begriffen, die den gleichen Abstraktionsgrad haben wie die Begriffe auf naturwissenschaftlichem Gebiete. Diese reichen auf sozialem Gebiete nicht aus. Und so führte gerade dieses in den Untergründen wallende und wogende, aber vom Bewußtsein nicht erfaßte Leben zu den Katastrophen, die wir heute in so furchtbarer Weise erleben.
Und weiter: ein drittes Gebiet, das uns im sozialen Leben entgegentritt, ist dasjenige, das wir das Rechtsleben benennen. Aus ökonomischem, moralischem und Rechtsleben besteht im wesentlichen die soziale Struktur einer Gesamtheit. Nur muß man diese Begriffe alle im geistigen Sinne nehmen. So wie das ökonomische Leben nur wirklich studiert werden kann, wenn die imaginativen Vorstellungen zugrunde gelegt werden, das moralische, in dem, was es wirklich enthält, nur, wenn die inspirierten Vorstellungen zugrunde gelegt werden, so kann das Rechtsleben nur mit intuitiven Vorstellungen, die wiederum aus der vollen konkreten Wirklichkeit heraus gewonnen werden, begriffen werden.
Dasjenige also, was die Geisteswissenschaft für die übersinnlichen Gebiete zu erkennen anstrebt, woran sie ihre Bewußtseins-, ihre Erkenntniskräfte übt und schult, das zeigt sich in seiner Anwendung auf den verschiedenen Gebieten des sozialen Lebens. Auch auf pädagogischem Gebiete, das ja im wesentlichen dem sozialen Gebiete angehört, wird man fruchtbare Begriffe nur bekommen, wenn man fähig ist, Imaginationen in seine Begriffe aufzunehmen, um das noch ungestaltete Leben durch Imaginationen, die in einem angeregt werden — nicht nach abstrakten Begriffen, wie sie heute so vielfach in der Pädagogik spielen, sondern nach wirklichen Imaginationen -, sich vorzustellen und danach auch zu leiten.
Das Rechtsleben, die rechtlichen Begriffe! Was alles ist gerade in der letzteren Zeit über diese Rechtsfragen geschrieben, gesprochen worden! Und wie wenig ist die Menschheit heute im Grunde genommen über die einfachsten Begriffe im Rechte irgendwie im klaren! Man braucht auch auf diesem Gebiete nur hinzublicken auf solche Menschen, welche ganz aus naturwissenschaftlicher Schulung heraus arbeiten wollen, wie Fritz Mauthner, der Verfasser des sehr interessanten «Wörterbuches der Philosophie». Lesen Sie in diesem Wörterbuch gerade die Artikel über das Recht, die Strafe, kurz, alles was damit zusammenhängt, und Sie werden sehen, daß er alles das auflöst, was Ihnen bekannt ist an Begriffen und Vorstellungen, auch an Einrichtungen, die in der Gegenwart herrschen, und daß er zeigt, daß gar nicht die Möglichkeit, die Fähigkeit vorliegt, irgend etwas an die Stelle zu setzen. Man kann auch nur irgend etwas an die Stelle setzen, wenn dasjenige, was in der Rechtsstruktur gesucht wird, aus der Welt herausgeholt wird, die als die intuitiv zu erkennende Welt gerade den sozialen Strukturen zugrunde liegt.
Hier in Zürich kann ich ja gerade auf ein Buch hinweisen, das den Anfang gemacht hat mit einer solchen Rechtsbetrachtung: «Der Gesamtarbeitsvertrag nach schweizerischem Recht» von Dr. Roman Boos. Da haben Sie den Anfang gemacht, den konkreten Rechtsfragen wirklich die in der Rechtsstruktur, in der sozialen Struktur liegenden Verhältnisse, wie sie in ganz ausgezeichneter Weise in diesem Buche dargelegt werden, zugrunde zu legen und zu konkreten einzelnen Rechts-Detailvorstellungen zu kommen. Wenn man solche Anfänge studiert, wird sich zeigen, was eigentlich gemeint ist, wenn auch die Forderung aufgestellt werden muß, das soziale Leben als Rechtsleben in konkreter Weise, nicht in abstrakter Weise, zu studieren, es herauszuholen aus dem, was wirklich ist, es zu umspannen, zu umfassen mit wirklichkeitsgemäßen Begriffen. Das ist freilich unbequemer, als utopistische Programme aufzustellen, utopistische Staatsstrukturen zu konstruieren. Denn da muß der ganze Mensch in Betracht gezogen werden, da muß wirklich Sinn vorhanden sein für das, was in der Wirklichkeit sich abspielt.
Ich habe deshalb den Freiheitsbegriff als Fundamentalbegriff hingestellt, um zu zeigen: trotzdem hier Gesetzmäßigkeiten in der geistigen Welt gesucht werden, kann dieser Freiheitsbegriff vor der Geisteswissenschaft voll bestehen. Unbequemer wird es sein, diese Dinge wirklich zu studieren! Denn da kommt man vor allen Dingen dahin, einzusehen, wie kompliziert die Wirklichkeit ist, wie diese Wirklichkeit nicht umfaßt werden kann mit einseitigen, nach der einen oder anderen Seite hingepfahlten Begriffen, sondern wie man diese Wirklichkeit, sobald man über den individuellen Menschen hinauskommt, mit Begriffen umfassen muß, wie sie als die Begriffe der Geisteswissenschaft in diesen Vorträgen geschildert worden sind.
Ich kann ein drastisches Beispiel hier anführen. Die Menschen leben gern in einseitigen Begriffen, in Begriffen, die einmal aus ihrer Denkgewohnheit hervorgegangen sind. Als zum erstenmal eine Eisenbahn gebaut worden ist in Mitteleuropa, da wurde auch ein Ärztekollegium, ein gelehrtes Kollegium also — die Sache ist dokumentarisch, wenn es auch märchenhaft klingt! —, um seinen Rat gefragt. Das gelehrte Kollegium hat gefunden, man solle keine Eisenbahnen bauen, weil sie dem Nervensystem der Menschen schaden würden. Und wenn sich schon doch solche Menschen finden würden, die durchaus Eisenbahnen haben wollten, so müsse man wenigstens links und rechts die Eisenbahnen mit hohen Bretterwänden umgeben, damit diejenigen, an denen die Eisenbahnen vorbeifahren, nicht Gehirnerschütterungen bekommen. Dieses noch in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts abgegebene Urteil ging aus den Denkgewohnheiten der damaligen Zeit hervor. Dem heutigen Menschen wird es selbstverständlich leicht, über ein solches einseitiges Urteil zu lachen; denn selbstverständlich haben die gelehrten Herren unrecht gehabt. Die Entwickelung ist über sie hinweggeschritten. Die Entwickelung wird über so manches hinwegschreiten, was die «gelehrten Herren» als richtig ansehen.
Und dennoch, es gibt eine andere Frage, so paradox es klingt: Haben die gelehrten Herren bloß unrecht gehabt? Das ist auch nur scheinbar! Sie haben gewiß unrecht gehabt nach der einen Seite hin, aber nicht bloß unrecht haben sie gehabt. Wer für die feineren Eigentümlichkeiten in der Entwickelung der Menschennatur einen Sinn hat, der weiß schon, daß mit der Entwickelung mancher nervösen Erscheinung, unter der die Gegenwart leidet, die Entstehung der Eisenbahnen in eigentümlicher Weise zusammenhängt, daß, wenn auch nicht in so radikaler Weise ausgesprochen, wie es die gelehrten Herren getan haben, doch die Tendenz des Urteils in einer partiellen Weise richtig ist. Wer wirklich einen Sinn hat für die Lebensdifferenziertheit, für den Unterschied des heutigen Lebens von dem Leben an der Wende des i8. zum i9. Jahrhundert, der weiß, daß Eisenbahnen den Menschen schon nervös gemacht haben, daß also nach einer gewissen Seite hin das gelehrte Kollegium schon recht hatte.
Jenes «Recht» und «Unrecht» aber, das noch anwendbar ist, wenn irgendwie ein Naturvorgang, irgendeine natürlich-menschliche Erscheinung in Betracht kommt -— der sozialen Struktur gegenüber ist es nicht anwendbar! Da handelt es sich darum, daß der Mensch wirklich durch ganz andere Schulung seines Seelenvermögens die Fähigkeit für umspannendere Vorstellungen entwickelt, die umspannen können das soziale Leben, das in seiner Erscheinung weiter greift als alles, was einseitig abstrakte naturwissenschaftliche Vorstellungen — die abstrakt sein müssen — zu umspannen vermögen.
Ich konnte ja selbstverständlich wegen der Kürze der Zeit nur andeuten, daß das Gebiet der Sozialwissenschaft, der Ökonomik, des sozialen Moralismus im weitesten Sinne, der Rechtswissenschaft, und alles, was damit zusammenhänst, erst bemeistert werden kann, wenn die Bequemlichkeit überwunden wird, die heute noch entgegensteht. Denn es ist im Grunde genommen Bequemlichkeit und Scheu vor wirklichen Erkenntniswegen, die von der geisteswissenschaftlichen Betrachtung der Welt zurückhalten. Ich habe, trotzdem ich einen Zyklus von vier Vorträgen hier halten durfte, natürlich nur auf einiges hinweisen können. Ich bin mir wohl bewußt, daß ich nur Anregungen geben konnte. Ich wollte auch nur in Anregungen die Fäden zu den einzelnen heute gepflegten Wissenschaftsgebieten ziehen. Ich weiß, daß man sehr vieles einwenden kann, und kenne die Einwände, die man machen kann, durchaus. Der auf dem Boden der Geisteswissenschaft steht, muß sich selbst fortwährend auf Schritt und Tritt die Einwände machen, die möglich sind, denn nur dadurch, daß er das, was er erkennt, an dem Einwand mißt, wird auch aus der Tiefe der Seele das geistige Schauvermögen entwickelt, das die Wirklichkeit meistern kann.
Aber wenn ich auch weiß, wie unvollkommen meine Darstellungen waren — denn viele Wochen wären notwendig, um alle die Einzelheiten anzuführen, die ich nur als Ergebnis kurz andeuten konnte -, so darf ich vielleicht doch glauben, daß ich wenigstens nach einer Richtung hin eine Vorstellung hervorgerufen habe: daß es sich in der Geisteswissenschaft nicht um irgendwelche Agitation handelt, die man aus dem oder jenem abstrakten Ideal heraus treiben will, sondern um ein Forschungsgebiet, welches gefordert ist von dem Gang der menschlichen Entwickelung selbst in unserer Gegenwart. Derjenige, der drinnensteht in diesem Forschungsgebiet, der seine Impulse wirklich durchschaut, der weiß, daß gerade auch diejenigen Gebiete, die, von der Gegenwart gefordert, auftreten — wie das eine, das ich hier genannt habe: das der Psychoanalyse —, wenn sie wirklich durchdrungen werden, darauf hinweisen, daß sie überhaupt erst ihre Vollendung finden können in der Beleuchtung durch das, was hier anthroposophisch orientierte Geisteswissenschaft genannt wird. Daß es sich nicht um etwas handelt, was auf blinden Einfällen, auf irgendeiner verschwommenen Mystik beruht, sondern um etwas, das in ernster Weise von ernstem Forschersinn wenigstens in seinen Absichten getragen ist, das ist es, was ich als eine Vorstellung hervorrufen wollte, indem ich von verschiedenen Einzelheiten her gezeigt habe, wie die heute gewohnten wissenschaftlichen Vorstellungen durch das befruchtet werden können, was als Geisteswissenschaft auftritt.
Ich glaube, diese Geisteswissenschaft ist durchaus nicht etwas Neues. Denn man braucht nicht weiter zurückzugehen als bis zu Goethe, so findet man in seiner Metamorphosenlehre die elementaren Ansätze, die nur ausgebaut werden müssen durch die Geisteswissenschaft — allerdings nicht durch logisch-abstrakte wissenschaftliche Hypothesen, sondern durch lebensvolle Ausgestaltung desjenigen, was dort angeregt worden ist.
Daher, da ich selber seit mehr als dreißig Jahren ausgehe von einem Ausbauen der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, nenne ich sehr gerne für mich diejenige Weltanschauung, die ich als anthroposophisch orientierte Geisteswissenschaft vertrete, die ausgebaute Goethesche Weltanschauung. Und den Bau in Dornach, der gewidmet ist dieser Weltanschauung, den möchte ich am liebsten, wenn es nach mir bloß ginge, ein Goetheanum nennen: andeutend, wie diese anthroposophisch orientierte Geisteswissenschaft durchaus nicht bloß als etwas aus einem einzelnen Einfall herausgeholtes willkürliches Neues in die Welt tritt, sondern als etwas, was gefordert wird durch den Geist der Gegenwart, aber auch gefordert wird durch den Geist der ganzen Menschheitsentwickelung.
Denn ich glaube, daß diejenigen, welche mit dem Geiste in der Menschheitsentwickelung gegangen sind, zu allen Zeiten in ihren besten Bestrebungen auf dasjenige hingewiesen haben, was als Früchte und als Blüten wissenschaftlichen Strebens heute hervortreten muß, damit wirkliche, ernste Einsicht in das Leben des Geistes begründet werde, so ernst, so würdig begründet, wie sich die von der Geisteswissenschaft durchaus nicht bekämpfte oder herabgesetzte, sondern gerade hochgeschätzte Naturwissenschaft in den letzten Jahrhunderten, und insbesondere bis in unsere Zeit herein, gestaltet hat.
Nicht um andere Wissenschaften zu bekämpfen oder irgendwie anzufechten, habe ich diese Vorträge gehalten, sondern um zu zeigen — wie ich schon in der Einleitung _ gesagt habe —, daß ich sie zu schätzen weiß, indem ich nicht bloß den Glauben habe, sie seien groß in dem, was sie schon sind, sondern den Glauben, sie seien auch groß in dem, was aus ihnen hervorwachsen kann. Ich glaube, daß es eine noch höhere Schätzung der naturwissenschaftlichen und auch der anderen Denkweisen der Gegenwart ist, wenn man nicht bloß glaubt, man müsse bei ihnen stehenbleiben, sondern den Glauben hegt: ein richtiges Einleben in das, was gut ist in den verschiedenen Wissenschaftsgebieten, ist nicht nur fähig zu irgendeiner logisch entwikkelten Weltanschauung, die dann doch nicht zu mehr kommt als zu dem, was in der Grundlage schon drinnen ist, sondern fähig, Lebendiges aus sich hervorzubringen. Und ein solches Lebendiges, nicht bloß ein Erschlossenes, will anthroposophisch orientierte Geisteswissenschaft sein.
Aus der Fragenbeantwortung
nach dem Vortrag in Zürich, 14. November 1917
Frage: Wie erklärt der Herr Vortragende den Vorgang des Vergessens?
Nun, über diese Frage kann ja ganz kurz gesprochen werden. Der Vorgang des Vergessens beruht im wesentlichen darauf, daß jenem Vorgang, den ich als Parallelvorgang erwähnt habe für das Vorstellungbilden und auf dem die Erinnerung beruht, zugrunde liegt eine Aufstiegs- und eine Abstiegsphase des Geschehens. Ich könnte, um mich verständlicher zu machen, darauf hinweisen, daß zwar nicht derselbe Vorgang, wohl aber der Vorgang gewissermaßen vorgebildet in dem vorliegt, was Goethe das «Abklingen der Sinneswahrnehmungen» nennt. Dieses Abklingen der Sinneswahrnehmungen — wenn die Sinneswahrnehmung vorüber ist, klingt die Wirkung noch ab ist zwar nicht dasjenige, was dem Vergessen zugrunde liegt, aber man kann sich dadurch verständlich machen: sie ist gewissermaßen ein Vorbild für den ganzen Vorgang, der sich da abspielt, wobei ich ausdrücklich bemerke, daß ich unter diesem Vorgang nicht einen physiologischen, sondern einen zwar bis ins Physiologische sich hineinerstreckenden, aber doch geistig-physischen Vorgang verstehe. Das Genauere darüber können Sie in meinen Büchern finden. Aber das, was da als Vorgang sich abspielt, hat auch eine abklingende Phase, und die abklingende Phase liegt eben dem Vergessen zugrunde. Also wie die aufsteigende Phase dem Erinnern zugrunde liegt, so liegt die absteigende Phase dem Vergessen zugrunde. Der Vorgang des Vergessens ist nicht weiter, ich möchte sagen, wunderbar, wenn man die Erinnerungsanschauung hat, von der ich gesprochen habe.
Frage: Was bedeutet es, wenn ein Mensch nie träumt, respektive wenn ihm nie Träume ins Bewußtsein treten? Wie ist diese Erscheinung psychologisch und wie anthroposophisch zu deuten, das heißt, wie unterscheidet sich ein solcher Mensch geistig von anderen Menschen?
Die Tatsache, auf die hier gezeigt wird, ist eigentlich eine recht problematische. Denn es wird zwar leicht behauptet, daß man nie träume, aber das ist eigentlich nicht der Fall; sondern hier liegt nur eine gewisse Schwäche zunächst zugrunde gegenüber jenen unterbewußten Vorgängen, die dem Träumen zugrunde liegen, ein gewisser Schwächezustand, der nicht in der Lage ist, aus dem Unterbewußten das heraufzuholen, was aus diesem Unterbewußten heraus, wie ich mich bildlich ausgedrückt habe, gelesen werden soll. Träumen tut jeder Mensch. Aber wie andere Schwächezustände vorliegen, so liegen bei manchen Menschen solche Zustände vor, die es unmöglich machen, das Geträumte wirklich heraufzuholen und es dadurch ins Bewußtsein zu tragen. Man braucht diese Schwäche aber nicht in demselben Sinne als Schwäche aufzufassen wie, sagen wir, irgendeine organische Schwäche; denn diese Schwäche kann sehr leicht herbeigeführt werden durch einen geistigen Vorzug auf einem anderen Gebiete. Von Lessing wird zum Beispiel erzählt, daß er nie geträumt haben soll. Und bei ihm würde es darauf beruhen, daß er ein im eminentesten Sinne kritisch angelegter Kopf war, welcher dadurch, daß er seine Kräfte in einer so starken Weise, wie man das bei Lessing kennt, konzentriert und dadurch nach der einen Seite seines Wesens hin verwendet hat, sie dadurch geschwächt hat nach einer anderen Seite. Also man muß nicht über diese Schwäche in sehr schlimmem Sinne denken, auf die hier hingewiesen ist; sie kann zusammenhängen mit anderen Stärken des Menschen.
«Psychologisch» und «anthroposophisch» eine solche Sache zu deuten, ist ja natürlich für den Geisteswissenschafter ein und dasselbe. Man kann auch nicht einmal sagen, daß derjenige, der eine gewisse Schwäche hat, einen Traumvorgang ins Bewußtsein hereinzuholen, daß der zum Beispiel auch eine Schwäche haben müßte für die Vorgänge aus dem imaginativen Erkenntnisvermögen. Das braucht gar nicht einmal der Fall zu sein. Es kann jemand wenig Anlage haben zu dem, was man im gewöhnlichen Sinne das Träumen nennt,.und er kann dennoch — durch Anwendung der Vorgänge, die ich in meinen Büchern, namentlich in «Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?» anführe, und die jeder bei sich anwenden kann -, er kann dennoch zu imaginativem und so weiter Bewußtsein kommen. Und dann kann sich herausstellen, daß, weil er nun seine Kräfte ganz besonders verwendet zum imaginativen, also vollbewußten Erkennen der geistigen Welt, zum Hineinschauen, sagen wir, wenn der Ausdruck nicht im abergläubischen Sinne genommen wird: zum hellsichtigen Hineinschauen in die geistige Welt, dann kann gerade dadurch erst recht das gewöhnliche Träumen unterdrückt werden, obwohl auch das Umgekehrte der Fall sein kann.
Ich kenne sehr viele Menschen, die die Übungen, die in meinem Buche «Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?» beschrieben sind, auf ihre Seele anwenden, und die das erleben, was dort auch beschrieben ist: eine Umwandlung des Traumeslebens. Das gewöhnliche Traumesleben enthält ja eigentlich nur Vages, währenddem es sich in einer merkwürdigen Art umwandelt unter dem Einfluß der erwachenden imaginativen Erkenntnis.
So deutet eigentlich die Unfähigkeit, Träume ins Bewußtsein zu holen, auf nichts anderes hin als eben auf eine partielle Schwäche der menschlichen Natur, die so aufzufassen ist, wie auf anderen Gebieten der eine auch starke Muskeln, der andere schwächere Muskeln hat. Es ist eben etwas, was in den Nuancen der menschlichen Ausbildung durchaus begründet ist.
Spiritual scientific findings on law, morality, and social forms of life
From the three lectures I have given here to characterize the relationship of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to three different areas of human scientific endeavor, it will have become clear that this type of spiritual science is primarily concerned with develop concepts and ideas that correspond to reality and are suitable for immersing oneself in full, real life in order to attain knowledge of reality through such immersion. It can be said — and this will have emerged from the overall meaning of my lectures — that for a relatively long time in the development of human science, concepts in accordance with reality have only been gained in the field of external, sensory natural science. And in a certain respect, these concepts gained for external sensory existence are scientifically exemplary. However, they extend in relation to reality only as far as — one might say — inanimate nature is concerned, which is not only present where it occurs directly as such, but also as a mineral influence in living beings and in the spirit beings that live on the sensory earth. Today, we understand nature in an exemplary scientific way. But we only understand what can be determined within the mechanical, lifeless laws. There is, I would say, quite clear proof that we understand this in an exemplary way: the perfected, enormously successful applications of natural science to human life. For when concepts are applied to human life, the reality-based character of these concepts is proven under certain conditions by their applicability. A clock cannot be constructed with false mechanical and physical concepts; it would immediately reveal that false concepts had been applied.
This is not the case in all areas of life, but precisely in the areas of life that concern us today, reality does not immediately reveal whether we are dealing with concepts that are true to reality and derived from reality or not.
Within the field of natural science itself, the use of concepts that do not correspond to reality is relatively safe, because these concepts prove their fallacy or inadequacy as long as one remains within the field of natural science itself, that is, within theoretical discussion, which can then also form the basis for practical life. But when social life, human community life in general, comes into consideration, then one is not merely faced with the acquisition of certain concepts, but with the realization of those concepts in life. And under today's circumstances, one is dealing with areas of life into which one can very well introduce inadequate concepts. The inadequacy of concepts, ideas, feelings, and so on then becomes apparent; but nevertheless, in a certain respect, if one lives under purely scientific prejudices, one can be helpless in the face of what occurs as the result, as the consequence of such concepts. In a certain sense, it can be said that the tragic events that have now befallen the human race are fundamentally connected with the fact — more than one might think, and more than can be hinted at in such brief remarks as those made today — that for a long time people have failed to develop realistic concepts that would have been suitable for comprehend the facts of real life. These facts of real life are now beyond the comprehension of humanity. And these tragic events are in many ways an ad absurdum conclusion, in the most terrible way, of the inadequate ideas that have developed in humanity over the course of centuries.
One can only arrive at what actually underlies this if one — now once again, let us do this from a different perspective than in the lectures given — first of all directs one's gaze to how, again and again in recent times, attempts have been made to establish a comprehensive worldview of humanity based on natural science, how attempts have been made to to introduce scientific thinking, which is so exemplary in its own field — I repeat this again and again — into all areas of human life: into the areas of the soul, education, politics, social science, history, and so on.
Anyone familiar with developments in this direction knows how natural scientists have striven to apply the ideas and concepts they have developed in their natural sciences to all the areas of human life mentioned above. Although what I have just said can be supported by hundreds of examples, I would like to mention just a few characteristic ones. Even if they are of older date, it can still be said that the tendency expressed in them has been preserved to this day and has even expanded.
An excellent natural scientist, in my opinion, gave lectures at two natural science conferences in the 1870s, in 1874 and 1875, on the field of law, on questions of morality and justice, on the social context of human beings, and in the course of these lectures he made some very characteristic statements. He went so far as to demand that anyone who is mature in the sense of modern scientific education must demand that the scientific way of thinking be transferred into the general consciousness of humanity as a kind of catechism; so that what arises in human beings as feelings, needs, and impulses of the will, and thus forms the basis for social aspirations, must gradually be brought into close connection with an ever-expanding, purely scientific view of the world. This is what Professor Benedikt said at the forty-eighth Natural Scientists' Assembly. The scientific worldview must achieve the breadth, depth, and clarity necessary to create a catechism that governs the spiritual and ethical life of the people. His ideal, then, is that everything that expresses the spiritual, emotional, and volitional needs of human beings in social life should be an imprint of scientific ideas!
And with regard to the science of the soul, the same researcher says: Psychology, too, has become a natural science since, like physics and chemistry, it has thrown off the ballast of metaphysics and no longer chooses hypotheses that are unfathomable for our present-day organization as premises.
Although many natural scientists—including Oscar Hertwig, mentioned the day before yesterday, Nägeli, and many, many others—repeatedly emphasize that natural science can only do justice to its own field, natural scientific ideas are formed in such a way that, in a sense, the way they are formed rejects research humanity's striving for other realms of reality than those currently accessible to natural science. And one could, as I have quoted older statements, quote statements from today: one would find them to be held in exactly the same spirit.
I would like to mention Benedict, the criminal anthropologist, in particular because, although he wants to take a purely scientific standpoint in his view of social life, he still has so much purely naive, realistic conceptual material in him that much of what he puts forward — actually contrary to his theoretical propositions — truly intervenes in the reality of the world. But on the whole, it can be said that this inclination, this tendency to construct an entire worldview using scientific concepts that are excellent in their field, has gradually given rise to something very special as a worldview, so that one could almost be considered a bad person if one were to express what has become a worldview under this tendency: Today, someone achieves excellence in their field, and when they then establish a worldview, they extend this excellent knowledge in a specific field to the entire world, especially to those areas of which they understand nothing. So that one can already say: Today, there is gradually an excellent science that contains the content of what people understand well; and there are worldviews that generally contain what people do not understand!
This is truly not without significance when it comes to the social sphere of life. For the social sphere of life has human beings themselves as its reality factor. Human beings are inside these social spheres of life, and what they do is such that what lives in their worldview flows into their impulses, into what forms as a structure in human coexistence, as a social structure. And this has created things such as those I indicated at the beginning of my discussion today.
In these considerations today, as in the first three, I want to proceed more from concrete details, from the results of what I call spiritual research, in order to try to show, with the help of such results, the relationship that this spiritual research must also have to the social fields of knowledge.
A particular difficulty arises for modern people who are well versed in the natural sciences, whose imagination has been educated in the natural sciences, when they approach the social sphere of life and immediately have to grapple with a fundamental concept: the concept of human freedom. This concept of human freedom, which certainly appears in a wide variety of nuances, has in a certain sense become the crux of modern worldview considerations. For on the one hand, it is extremely difficult to understand the social structure of humanity without coming to terms with the concept of freedom; but on the other hand, those who think in scientific terms, according to the habits of thought of the present day, are hardly able to do anything with the concept of freedom. It is well known that there have been long-standing disputes about the concept of freedom, that there have always been two parties with different nuances: the so-called determinists, who assumed that all human actions are predetermined in a certain way—in a more naturalistic or other way—so that humans only carry out what is required of them by an unknown but nevertheless existing compulsion, a causality; and the indeterminists, who denied this and adhered more to the subjective facts, to what humans experience within themselves as they develop their consciousness, and who asserted the independence of truly free human actions from such fixed determinations that could exclude the concept of freedom.
However, given the way natural science has developed to date, it is actually impossible to do anything with the concept of freedom in a scientific context; so that when one bases sociological science on a scientific education, one is in many respects compelled to misunderstand the concept of freedom and to construct a structure of life that does not take the concept of freedom into account, that reduces everything to certain causes that lie outside or within human beings. Such a way of looking at things is convenient in a certain respect, because it allows one to determine the social structure in a certain way from the outset: because it is easier to assess human action when it is determined than when one has to reckon with the fact that free will plays a role in human beings.
Now, one cannot establish any enthusiastic concepts as a concept of freedom, nor can one present any mystical ambiguities that might contradict what modern science offers! It must be noted that if spiritual science is to have any justification, it must not come into conflict with the true meaning of scientific progress. Therefore, I must also proceed today from the assumption that the fundamental concept of social life, the concept of freedom, must be related to those scientific ideas that can be gained with the help of spiritual science.
According to the usual scientific concepts, human beings are dependent in their actions on the peculiarities of their organization. And since these peculiarities of their organization are being researched to such an extent that, as I explained last time, the law of conservation of energy is being applied to the life of the soul, this leads to a dilution of the concept of freedom. If human beings can only develop from within themselves those forces that are a transformation of what they have absorbed, as I indicated in my last lecture, then it goes without saying that the soul cannot develop any force from within itself — which would be a prerequisite for the realization of freedom.
Spiritual science shows, however, that natural science very much needs to place the entire scope of its knowledge in the relevant field on a different basis than it stands on today. Natural science — as I have already indicated in previous lectures — has opened up admirable areas of fact. But these cannot be comprehended by the narrowly defined concepts and ideas that we have of nature today. In the course of the previous lecture, I took the liberty of pointing out how spiritual science leads to relating the entire spiritual and soul life of the human being to the entire physical and bodily life, and how it turns out that the actual life of imagination must be related to the life of the nerves, the life of feeling to the ramifications and dependencies of the respiratory rhythm, and the life of the will to the metabolism.
If, by way of introduction, we proceed from a continuation of the scientific view of the relationship between the human soul's life of imagination and the life of the nerves, then those accustomed to today's scientific ideas will naturally have to say: certain processes take place in the life of the nerves; these are causes or parallel processes of the life of imagination. — And since, according to these scientific assumptions, every mental process of imagination must correspond to a nervous process — which, however, as such, has its causal origin in the whole organism — then, since the nervous process apparently follows with causal necessity from the conditions of the organism, the corresponding mental process cannot be free, but must be subject to the same necessity as the corresponding nervous process.
This is still the case today. From a scientific point of view, however, this will not be the case in the future! Certain approaches that already exist today in the field of scientific research will be viewed in a completely different way. However, it will be necessary for the guidelines for research to be laid down by spiritual science, because only in this way can a truly unbiased examination of scientific results be achieved.
The remarkable thing that emerges for the spiritual researcher is that our nervous life has a very special relationship to the rest of the organism, which must be described by saying that in nervous life, the organism breaks down in a certain way, rather than building itself up; and in nervous life — if we understand it as pure nervous life, not as nutritional life in the nervous system — we first consider those processes that are not growth processes, not ascending developmental processes, but rather regressive processes, breakdown processes, retrograde developmental processes.
It is very easy to be misunderstood in this field, as it is still completely new today. And in such a short lecture, it is difficult to convey all the concepts that rule out such misunderstandings. One must expose oneself to this danger of being misunderstood. It can be said that nervous life as nervous life proceeds quite differently from other organic processes that serve growth, reproduction, or the like. These latter organic processes are processes of ascending development. This includes cell development, the processes that can be observed in reproduction and growth as cell division, as the juxtaposition of cells that are still in the process of reproduction, at least partial reproduction. However, as the human organism extends into the life of the nerves — the animal organism is similar, but of less interest to us today — it partially dies in the life of the nerves. A breakdown of the ascending processes takes place in the nervous life. So that one can say that, purely from a scientific point of view, it is evident — and the life of the red blood cells runs parallel to the nervous life in a certain way — that the processes of division cease in the nerve cells and in the red blood cells. And this is already a purely factual indication of what the contemplative consciousness recognizes: that the nerve cannot be involved in anything productive, but that the nerve internally stops life, so that where the nerve branches out, life dies.
By carrying the nervous system within us, we carry death, so to speak, organically within us. If I were to compare what actually takes place in nerve life with something else in the organism — strange as it may sound — I would have to say: what goes on subconsciously in nerve life cannot be compared with the process that takes place when a person has taken in food and this food is now being processed in the organism for further development; No, the actual nervous process — as a nervous process, not as a nervous nutritional process — can be compared to what happens in the organism when the organism breaks down its tissue during starvation. So that it is not something constructive but something destructive that extends into the nervous system.
Nothing can develop from this nervous system, nothing can arise directly from it; rather, this nervous system represents a suspended process that appears in its continuous course in the cell life of the reproductive cells, in the growth cells: there it is continuous; it is suspended in the nerve organs. So that nerve life in truth only provides the foundation and ground on which something else can spread.
That which spreads on this nerve life, but which also draws this nerve life along, as it were, is that which now enters into this nerve life as the life of imagination, initially stimulated by the outer senses. And only when one understands that the nerves are not the cause of imagination, but only provide the ground by having broken down organic life, only when one understands this, does one understand that something foreign to nerve life itself develops on the basis of this nerve life.
What develops as spiritual-soul life at the foundation of this self-degrading nervous life is so foreign that one can say: It is really as if I were walking across a street and digging my footsteps into it as tracks. If someone then follows, they must not derive what is visible there as the forms of my footsteps from any forces that are in the earth itself, which would, as it were, mark these footprints from within the earth. Although, like my footsteps in the ground, every expression of soul life can be seen in the nervous system, what spiritual-soul life is cannot be explained by an inner “rising up from the nervous system.” Rather, traces are dug into the prepared ground by spiritual-soul life, into the ground that is prepared by the fact that within the nerve, so to speak, it is “renounced” — if I may express it symbolically — to continue its own organic productivity.
What develops from the ground of degradation, of dying in the human being as spiritual-soul life, initially as imaginative life, also presents itself to the observing consciousness in connection with organic life, initially nerve life; but in such a way that it has only its prerequisite, its foundation, in this nerve life, that which must be there, under the prerequisite of which it can be active in this place. On the other hand, what is active—although it seems to emerge from the nervous system for external observation, seems to be bound to the nervous system—is as independent of the nervous system as the child is of the parents, developing independent inner activity, even though the parents are the fertile ground on which the child must develop. Just as one can see the cause of the child in the parents when looking at it from the outside, but the child stands in the completely free development of its individuality and one cannot say: when the child grows up to independence, there is no activity in it that is detached from the parents — in exactly the same sense one must say: What stirs and develops in the spiritual-soul sense becomes independent of the soil in which it must flourish.
I am only hinting here at a system of ideas that, in the course of time — spiritual science is, after all, in the early stages of its development — will be expanded precisely by raising certain scientific ideas to their highest level. And it is precisely these scientific ideas that will not lead to the exclusion of human freedom, but to the scientific explanation and understanding of freedom — because they will lead not only to the observation of constructive, progressive processes in the organism, as is done now, but also to the observation of destructive and self-paralyzing processes — because they will show that, in order for the spiritual-soul to arise, the organic cannot progress in a straight line of development and bring forth the spiritual from itself, but that this organic, as the spiritual rises into the organic, must first prepare the ground by destroying itself, by breaking down within itself.
The fact that ideas about destructive life will be added to the ideas about constructive life that are currently the only ones taken into account will be linked to great advances in the scientific view of the world in the future. And this will build a bridge that must be built, because science cannot be ignored today, a bridge from the understood nature to the social sphere of life that needs to be understood.
Only incomplete natural science is an obstacle to gaining the concepts necessary for the social sphere of life; complete natural science, precisely because of its inner solidity, its inner greatness, will help to establish a true social science.
Having thus developed, at least in outline, the fundamental concept of social life, the concept of freedom — how it must be seen more inwardly, I already explained in detail in 1894 in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” and this inner foundation is completely consistent with what I have now shown in a more scientific manner, as can be seen from the explanations of these relationships that I gave in my book The Riddle of Man, published almost two years ago — I would like to continue the discussion of the connection between human spiritual and mental life and other areas of existence.
Last time and today, I hinted at how this spiritual-soul life is connected: as the life of imagination with the life of the nerves, as the life of feeling with the life of the respiratory rhythm, as the life of will with the life of metabolism. But that is only the connection on one side. Just as natural science, when it reaches completion in this direction, will relate the threefold soul as a whole — as I have described — to the entire human organism, so spiritual science will be able to seek out the relationships of the human spiritual-soul life to the spiritual on the other side, the side of the spirit.
Just as the life of imagination has its physical basis in the nervous system on the one hand, so on the other hand, the life of imagination is connected to a world to which it belongs on the spiritual side. But this world, with which the life of imagination is connected on the spiritual side, can only be recognized through contemplative consciousness, namely through the first stage of this contemplative consciousness, through what I have called imaginative cognition, imaginative seeing, which is drawn out of the soul itself, like a spiritual eye opening. I characterized this in the first lecture.
Just as the life of imagination is related to the life of the body and nerves, having its basis and foundation in it, so it emerges from the spiritual, from a purely spiritual world, which is recognized as a real world when one observes this reality with imaginative consciousness. This real world is not confined within the sensory world. It is, in a sense, the first supersensible world that lies before us.
And here we come to the realization that the relationship of the human being to his environment, as he becomes aware of it through his ordinary consciousness, is only a part of his overall relationship to the world; for what we carry within us in ordinary consciousness is only a fragment of the reality in which we stand. Beneath this consciousness lies another relationship between human beings and their environment, the natural world, and the spiritual world. The relationship between the life of imagination and the physical nervous life is already pushed below the threshold of consciousness and can only be brought up with difficulty if one wants to characterize it as I have done today. But on the other hand, the relationship between human imaginative life and the spiritual world, which can be grasped imaginatively, is one that does not enter into ordinary consciousness, but does enter into human reality.
In human consciousness, we first have everything that is stimulated by our senses and by the mind connected to the senses; This comprises our ordinary consciousness. But beneath this, a series of processes take place which do not initially enter into this ordinary consciousness, but which are the influx of a spiritual element that can only be grasped imaginatively into our soul being, just as the influx of sounds, colors, smells, and so on into our ordinary consciousness takes place in our soul life. In a sense, ordinary consciousness is lifted out of another realm, which can only be brought into this consciousness through imaginative representation. The fact that human beings know nothing about these things does not mean that they are not real in their essence. As we walk through the world, we carry the contents of our ordinary consciousness with us; but we also carry with us everything that comes in from the imaginative, or spiritual, world, as I will call it.
It is particularly important in the present day to realize that this is the relationship between human beings and their environment. For a field of research — and I am far from underestimating this field of research, I appreciate its significance — a field of research that is particularly relevant at present, is indeed relevant at present: as a powerful indication of the relationship between human beings and the environment, which I have just characterized as the imaginative spiritual world, a relationship that is still quite unknown to the present. But it is precisely a peculiarity of the present that much enters into human consciousness that can actually only be grasped and comprehended with the means of knowledge of spiritual science. Human beings are currently called upon to recognize these things because, if I may use the trivial expression, they are confronted with them, because life is developing in such a way that human beings are confronted with them. But within our contemporary society there is still an insurmountable aversion for many to approach these things with the means of knowledge provided by spiritual science. And so they want to approach areas that today's people are demanding with all their energy to be researched with concepts trained in ordinary natural science or other fields.
The field I am referring to here is the field of analytical psychology, also known as psychoanalysis, which is so well known in this city. This psychoanalysis is remarkable in that it presents the psychoanalytic researcher with a demanding field that is not covered by ordinary consciousness, which must point to something that lies below the threshold of this ordinary consciousness. But now attempts are being made to grasp this field with what I would call inadequate means of knowledge. And since these inadequate means of knowledge are also being used in practical applications, including interventions in the social structure of life—albeit initially only in a therapeutic and educational context, and perhaps also in pastoral care—it must be said that the matter is not only of theoretical significance, but also has important practical implications. Now, of course, I cannot cover the entire field of psychoanalysis. That would require many lectures. But I would like to point out a few concrete, fundamental points in this context. For psychoanalysis is a field where, in a sense, research and social life meet at a single point, as we will discuss in other fields of this kind today.
Above all, you may know that analytical psychology essentially works with bringing certain, I would say lost, memories into ordinary consciousness for therapeutic purposes. It therefore assumes that certain elements are present in the soul that are not present in ordinary consciousness. It then largely assumes that these are memory images or similar things that have sunk into the subconscious, and then seeks to use the ordinary concept of memory to reach below the threshold of consciousness, to shine below the threshold of consciousness into areas where ordinary consciousness does not shine.
Now, I have already indicated in these lectures that spiritual science has a very important role to play in illuminating the human process of memory. In this area, too, it will of course not be possible to rule out all misunderstandings that may arise from a brief presentation. For example, I have heard — more than once — that psychoanalysis is actually on the same path as the spiritual science I represent; only psychoanalysts take certain things symbolically, while I take these things, which the psychoanalyst takes symbolically in his enlightenment, as realities. This is a grotesque misunderstanding, for nothing could be worse for characterizing the relationship between psychoanalysis and the spiritual science I mean than to say this.
However, in order to understand this, it is necessary to return once more to the nature of the process of memory. I must emphasize once again: the process of imagination, the activity of imagining, is something that, in essence, belongs only to the present within the human psyche. An idea never sinks into the subconscious as such, any more than a reflection in a mirror sinks somewhere so that it can reappear when one passes the mirror a second time. The emergence of an idea is a phenomenon that begins and ends in the present moment. And if one believes that memory consists of the idea “being” somewhere and “reappearing,” then one may be a very good Herbartian psychologist, or even a psychologist in many other respects, but one is not standing on the ground of a truly observed fact.
What is at stake here is something quite different. The world in which we live is not only permeated by what enters our present imaginative life through our eyes, ears, and senses, which only gains a present life; but underlying this whole world — including, of course, the external natural world — is a world that can be grasped imaginatively, which does not initially come to consciousness. What is in this imaginative world acts in parallel to our immediate life of imagination: while I imagine, that is, while I allow these immediate, present processes to take place within me, another process acts in parallel to them, as a stream of subconscious life flows through my soul. And this other process leads to the formation of inner traces — I could describe them in great detail, but I must limit myself to hints here — which are observed later when memory occurs.
So when memory occurs, it is not the old idea, as if it had been stored somewhere, that is brought back to mind, but rather what has remained through a parallel process is looked at inwardly. Memory consists of an inner perception.
In the subconscious, the human soul is capable of many things that it is not capable of in the conscious mind in ordinary life. And if I want to compare the process that occurs when a so-called forgotten event “comes back to memory” in a rough sense — I emphasize: in a rough sense! — with something, I would say that this process is very similar to the process of external perception; except that when I have an external perception, I reproduce what I have perceived in a temporary, purely present image; but what I reproduce in memory is an expression of inner perception: I perceive the remaining remnants of the parallel process internally. Memory is, roughly speaking, a reading of the soul at a later time of what went parallel with the formation of the idea. The soul has this subconscious ability to read within itself what has been formed while I was imagining. At the time, I did not know this, because it was covered by the imagination. Now it is remembered. Instead of perceiving the thing from the outside, I perceive my own inner process. That is reality.
I know very well that a fanatical psychoanalyst — but none is fanatical in his own opinion, I know that too, of course — will say that he can very well agree with such an interpretation of memory. But in the practice of his arguments, he never does. Anyone familiar with the literature knows that this never happens, and that this is precisely the source of countless errors: because people do not realize that these are not past ideas floating around somewhere in the subconscious, but a process that can only be understood if one truly comprehends the process of an imaginative world entering our world, which runs parallel to the life of ideas.
This is where the first significant errors arise, because what is called analytical psychology is based on a misinterpreted process of memory and is used in practice. When one delves into the actual process of memory, it is by no means a matter of searching for what occurs in the soul of the individual considered sick by the psychoanalyst in vague memories, but rather of discovering how the patient relates to a real, objective world of mental processes that he perceives only abnormally. This makes a big difference, which must be thought through from all sides.
However, the psychoanalyst, who applies his scientific training in a one-sided manner to an important area of fact, falls into another error: that he uses dream images for the diagnosis of the soul in a way that cannot be justified by real observation. The point is that one must also penetrate this strange, mysterious world of dreams correctly through real observation and realistic concepts. One can only penetrate it if one knows how human beings are rooted not only in the environment in which their ordinary consciousness participates, but also — as we have seen, and as we shall see later — in a spiritual world. Even though ordinary consciousness ceases during sleep, the relationship to the world that remains subconscious does not cease during sleep.
And through a process that I cannot describe in detail for reasons of brevity, it happens that, due to the special conditions presented by sleep, what is experienced in connection with the spiritual environment is clothed in the symbolic images of dreams. The content of these dream images is completely irrelevant. The same process — which exists in a person's relationship to the spiritual environment — can be clothed in one sequence of symbolic representations in one person and in a completely different sequence in another. Anyone who has knowledge in this area knows that typical subconscious mental processes in different people are clothed in the most diverse life reminiscences and that the content of the dream is not important. One can only discover what actually underlies this if one trains oneself to disregard the content of the dream entirely, if one trains oneself I would say, to grasp the inner drama of the dream: whether the dream starts by first laying a foundation in a certain dream image, then creating tension and a sequence of events, or whether there is a different sequence, whether there is first tension and then a resolution.
It requires a great deal of preparation to grasp the sequence of the dream in its drama, quite apart from the content of the images. Anyone who wants to understand dreams must be able to do something with the dream that is equivalent to watching a drama and being interested in the images only insofar as one perceives the poet behind them, in what he experiences as he weighs things up. Only when one ceases to try to grasp the dream through an abstract symbolic interpretation of the imagery, only when one is able to immerse oneself in the inner drama of the dream, in the inner connection, apart from the symbolism, from the content of the images, only then does one realize the relationship between the soul and the spiritual environment. For this cannot be seen through the dream images, in which those who lack imaginative vision clothe reality in the abnormal conditions of sleep, but only through imaginative consciousness. What takes place beyond the dream images as dream drama can only be recognized through imaginative consciousness.
You may know that analytical psychology — in a certain way very commendable — has also extended its research to the study of myths, and that it has brought to light all kinds of things, some of them interesting, some of them so hair-raising that it makes your hair stand on end. I don't want to go into the details, but it is important to note that individual researchers today still work in such a way that they focus on a certain narrow field and do not take into account what is already available in research, which could sometimes shed much more light on the matter than is currently the case.
An old friend of mine, who has long since passed away, wrote a very beautiful book on myth research: Ludwig Laistner, “Das Rätsel der Sphinx” (The Riddle of the Sphinx). By traveling, so to speak, throughout the world in relation to the origin of myths, he showed in a very interesting way that if one wants to understand myths, it is not at all important to consider the content of the myths, what is being told—this way or that way—but rather to take a look at these concrete mythical images. It is also important to consider the recurring dramatic process that is reflected in the most diverse ways through the various myths. there, in such and such a way – that is, to focus on these concrete mythical images, but that it is also important to bring to light the dramatic process that recurs everywhere and is expressed in the most diverse ways through the various mythical images. And since Laistner also considered the connection between mythical images and the world of dreams in a still elementary but nevertheless correct way, his research formed an excellent basis for transferring dream research to myth research. If mythological research were also to recognize that what enters into dream consciousness from the creative power of myth are actually only images that represent the actual process in an arbitrary manner, I would say, then we would be much wiser. Thus, in the field of analytical psychology—even though I fully recognize the importance and the very best and most honest intentions of researchers in this field—these researchers, because they work with inadequate means of knowledge, arrive at skewed, one-sided experiments.There is simply little inclination anywhere to really delve into the depths of things and to use spiritual life to help understand reality with concepts that correspond to reality. Admittedly, recent psychoanalytic research has sought to take into account not only the usual concept of memory and dreams inspired by individual life, but also what is referred to as the “supra-individual unconscious.” But this research method, which works with such inadequate means of knowledge, comes to a very strange result: here, for once, it is suspected in the present—and we must be grateful that it is at least suspected—that this human soul life is related to a spiritual life outside of it, but it is not possible to do anything to recognize this relationship in its reality. I truly do not wish to criticize these researchers, whom I greatly admire for their courage as researchers, which must still be great enough within the prejudiced world of the present to assert such things; but attention must be drawn to how one can escape from this one-sidedness, especially because these things spill over into the practical realm.
A very meritorious researcher, Jung, who lives here in Zurich, has taken refuge, as it were, in transindividual, supra-individual unconscious contents of the mind or soul: that the human soul is not only related to what it has individually brought down into memory at some point or the like, but also to what is outside its individuality. A very beautiful, bold idea: to relate this human soul life not only through the means of the body, but in itself to the spiritual in the outside world, to recognize it to the highest degree. But this same researcher traces what occurs in the soul back to a kind of, I would say, memory, albeit a supra-individual memory. One cannot escape the concept of mneme, of memory, even though one can no longer really speak of memory when one goes beyond the individual. One comes to the conclusion, as Jung puts it, that “primordial images” live in the soul without entering ordinary consciousness, images of what, say, the Greek spirit once conceived as Greek myths, primordial images, to use Jacob Burckhardt's expression. Jung says something very significant: everything that not only the individual human being but also humanity as a whole has gone through can be active in the soul; and since ordinary consciousness knows nothing of this, it storms and surges up from the subconscious against consciousness, giving rise to the strange phenomena that today appear as hysterical or other disorders. Everything that humans have ever experienced in terms of the divine or the devilish, says Jung in his latest book, comes back up again; humans know nothing about it, but it has an effect on them.
Now it is very interesting to tackle a piece of research that works with inadequate means of knowledge, especially in a characteristic case. In an extraordinarily significant way, this researcher comes to say to himself: if man does not establish a conscious relationship with a divine world in his soul, this relationship is established in his subconscious, even if he knows nothing about it. The gods live in his subconscious, below the threshold of consciousness; and what he is not consciously aware of can even manifest itself in such a way that he projects it onto his doctor or another person, as they say. So while the memory of some devilry reigns in his subconscious, it does not rise to consciousness; but it storms within him; he must free himself from it; he transfers it to some person. The imagination makes this person the devil, the doctor, or, if it fails to do so, himself.
Based on such things, it is now very interesting to see how a researcher arranges these things in a passage in one of the latest books in the field of psychoanalysis, “The Psychology of Unconscious Processes” by Carl Gustav Jung. Jung says: “The concept of God is, in fact, an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature” — a very commendable recognition, because it acknowledges that human beings are constituted in their subconscious in such a way that they establish relationships with a divine world in this subconscious! He then continues: “The concept of God is, in fact, an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing to do with the question of the existence of God. For the latter question is one of the most stupid questions one can ask.”
What is not taken into consideration here is the researcher's own attitude toward the concept of God. He may be a very devout researcher. What is taken into consideration here is only how the subconscious imagination, if one may say so, of this researcher himself is expressed in this area! Due to the inadequacy of the means of knowledge, the result is nothing less than this: one says to oneself that the human soul must establish relationships with the gods in its world below the threshold of consciousness, but it must shape these relationships in such a way that they have nothing to do with the existence of God! In other words, the soul must necessarily be content with a merely illusory relationship, which is nevertheless essential to it in the most eminent sense, without which it becomes ill! What is written here is of enormous significance, of a significance that should not be underestimated! I have only hinted at how inadequate means of knowledge are used in a very broad field.
I will now continue with my description of how human beings must position themselves in the social context of life: the life of feeling — not the life of imagination, but the life of feeling in human beings — has, on the one hand, as I have already explained, its physical counterpart in the rhythm of breathing, but on the other hand it also has a relationship to spiritual content. What corresponds to the life of feeling on the spiritual side, as the life of the breathing rhythm does on the physical side, can only be permeated as spiritual content, as the content of spiritual beings, spiritual forces, with what I have called inspired consciousness in these lectures.
With this inspired consciousness, however, one does not merely arrive at a spiritual content that fills our existence between birth, or let us say conception, and death; rather, one arrives at a view of that which passes through birth and death, which has to do with our life between death and a new birth, that is, of the being that lives even when the human being no longer carries this physical body.
When human beings put on this physical body through physical inheritance, that which is born out of the inspired world creates a physical expression in the rhythm of breathing. But everything that is active as forces and impulses in the time between the last death and this birth, and everything that will be active between this death and a new birth, plays into this feeling life — whereas in the life of imagination, which the human being knew in ordinary consciousness, only what lies between birth and death really plays in at first. The eternal core of the human being plays into this emotional life.
And thirdly, it must be emphasized that the human being's life of will is, on the one hand, actually related to the lowest activity of the human organism, to metabolism, to what is expressed in the broadest sense in hunger and thirst, but on the other hand, spiritually, to the highest spiritual world, to the intuitive world, as I have already mentioned several times in these lectures. So that in fact a complete reversal of circumstances takes place.
The life of imagination is initially in subconscious contact with the imaginative world, with the nervous life on the other side. In a world that transcends our personal physical life as the core of our being, the life of feeling stands within, on the spiritual side. And the life of the will, which always finds its physical expression in some metabolic process whenever a will impulse occurs, that is, which is expressed in the lowest processes of the organism, is connected on the spiritual side with the highest spiritual world, the intuitive world.
And it is only in this realm that what is called repeated earthly lives can be researched. What carries over from one earthly life to another is not an impulse that can be grasped by imagination, let alone by ordinary consciousness, not even by inspired consciousness, but only by intuitive consciousness. Impulses from previous earthly lives play into our lives. From this life, impulses play into later earthly lives. What can give this research its character is an awakened sense of real, not just vague, intuitions, which are spoken of in ordinary life.
Thus, before complete human consciousness, the complete human being presents himself as a spiritual-soul human being who lives out his life in threefold ways in the ebbing and flowing of ideas, feelings, and impulses of will, and who finds his ground in threefold ways on the physical side and his emergence from the spiritual world. Thus, spiritual science leads to the eternal in human beings not through speculation or hypotheses, but by showing how consciousness must develop in order to see the eternal core of being in the developments of human beings that unfold through repeated earthly lives.
This complete human being — not an abstract human being placed by natural science or natural scientists in an empty, abstract conceptual context that is not filled with complete reality — this complete human being stands in the context of social life. And while ordinary consciousness is sufficient for understanding external nature, insofar as it is not organic but rather the manifestation of the inanimate, the mechanical — which is what today's natural science often wants to accept as the only valid view, or at least the only one it wants to penetrate — one cannot find concepts that are fully viable for social life if one constructs them according to the pattern of one's ordinary consciousness. For that is the secret of social life, that it is not built up according to the concepts of ordinary consciousness, but that it builds itself up outside of consciousness, in impulses that can only be grasped with the higher types of consciousness of which I have spoken to you.
This insight can shed light on many things that must lead to absurdity in contemporary social life because the concepts used to grasp this social life are not realistic. Today, we are faced with these concepts, which have been gained from the education of the scientific way of thinking, and want to act creatively in social life. But this social life necessarily requires further concepts — just as the subconscious life of the soul, which existed before psychoanalysis, also required further concepts — than the concepts of ordinary consciousness.
And three areas initially confront us in social communities, which must be illuminated by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. I will only be able to sketch these things; spiritual science is still in its infancy, and much will first have to be researched, so I will only characterize in general terms the threads that must be drawn from spiritual scientific insights to the understanding of social life.
Three areas of social life present themselves. The first area of social life that confronts human beings and to which what I have just characterized applies is the economic sphere. We know that economic laws live in the social structure and that these economic laws must be mastered. Those who are active as legislators or statesmen, or who are leaders in any field of enterprise that is part of the social structure of life as a whole, must shape what is lived out in economic lawfulness.Now, the economic structure as it plays out cannot be grasped if one tries to apply to this economic life only the concepts derived from the natural sciences, which today dominate almost all human thinking. In this economic life, impulses quite different from those in nature, even from those in human nature itself, prevail. In human nature, for example, the question of needs forms the basis of consideration. In the external economic order, the question of satisfaction forms the basis. If I am to truly understand a social community with its economic structure, I must recognize how, according to geographical and other conditions, there are means available that satisfy human needs. When considering individuals, one starts from the question of needs. But when considering the economic structure, one must start from the opposite side. One must not consider what people need, but what is available to people in a particular area when community life develops. This is only a hint. Much would have to be said if the economic structure were to be discussed in its entirety. However, what actually constitutes the organism of the economic structure of a state or a community cannot be grasped with the concepts borrowed from ordinary natural science.
Very strange things can happen! I would like to discuss one thing here, because I am not merely touching on it because of today's events. One might perhaps accuse me of being influenced by today's events, but that is not the case. For I already discussed what I am about to say in a series of lectures I gave in Helsinki before these war events broke out, so that what I am about to say has no connection whatsoever with the war events. I had to say this in advance so that I would not be misunderstood.
At that time—that is, before the outbreak of these war events—I indicated in Helsinki how one can go astray if one tries to understand the social structure of human communities based solely on scientific ideas, and I chose as an example a personality who makes this mistake in the most eminent sense: Woodrow Wilson. I pointed out that Woodrow Wilson—in this case, erudition has risen to statesmanship—strangely says: At the time of Newtonianism, when the whole world was viewed more mechanically, one can see how people also had mechanical ideas in their conceptions of the state and society, ideas that Newton and others had brought to the fore. But it is wrong to understand social life in such narrow terms, says Woodrow Wilson; today we must do things differently: today we must apply Darwinian ideas to social life! So he does the same thing, only he does it with the scientific ideas that are valid today!
But just as Newtonian ideas were unable to encompass social structure, so too are Darwinian ideas, which, as we have heard, are not even all applicable to organic life. But Wilson remains unaware of this in his subconscious, and he does not even notice that he is making the same mistake that he previously criticized and condemned.
Here we have an eminent example of how people are unable to recognize that they are working with inadequate means of knowledge that do not master reality when they begin to want to understand and master social life today. But such things, which are not merely recognized with inadequate means today, but are making world history, can be found at every turn. And if people could see through how this happens, they would be able to look deeply into the deeper causes of the present-day rhetoric, which are mostly hidden from today's society.
Economic structures cannot be understood using scientific concepts—whether derived from Darwinism or Newtonian physics—which can only apply to natural facts. Instead, we must move on to other concepts.
And I can only characterize these by saying that these concepts must be based, if not on a clear idea, then at least on a feeling of immersing oneself in the social structure, so that ideas emerge that belong to the imaginative life. Only with the help of imaginative ideas can a picture be created of a concrete social structure that occurs somewhere. Otherwise, one ends up with insubstantial, worthless abstractions.
We no longer create myths today. But in the myth-creating power there was a human soul impulse that went beyond ordinary reality. From the same impulse of the soul with which our ancestors created myths, with which they created images of spiritual reality through their imagination, which was related to that reality, from the same impulse, those who want to understand economic systems today must have imaginative ideas. They cannot create myths, but they must be able to think together about geographical conditions, other soil conditions, people's character traits, and people's needs in such a way that this thinking together occurs with the same power with which myths were once created, with the power that weaves and lives as imagination in the spiritual realm and appears in the economic structure.
A second area of social life is the moral, the moral structure, the moral impulse that is lived out in a community. Once again, one delves into all kinds of unconscious areas when one wants to explore those impulses that come to light in human moral aspirations – moral in the broadest sense. Anyone who wants to intervene, whether as a statesman, a parliamentarian, or even as the head of a company, can only understand the structure if they can master it with concepts that are at least based on inspired insights.
It is therefore more necessary than is often believed today to intervene in this social sphere insofar as moral impulses play a role. These moral impulses must truly be studied from reality, just as the impulses of organic life cannot be invented but must be studied from within the organism itself. If one were to spin concepts about the nature of lions, cats, or hedgehogs in a similar way, or, for that matter, the nature of hedgehogs, spinning concepts out of human intellectual life, as one spins concepts today by devising Marxism or other socialist theories without actually studying nature, one would be constructing concepts about animal nature purely a priori, and one would arrive at strange ‘theories about animal organization.’
The essential point is that the social organism must also be studied in its full concreteness where moral forces in the broadest sense prevail. Even the forces of need that humans assert — which are always moral forces in the broader sense — can only be mastered if one studies the social organism in its concreteness from such, albeit obscure, ideas that are rooted in the inspired world. How far removed we are today from such a way of thinking!
Spiritual science comes to study in detail what the impulses of the population of Central Europe, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe consist of. It comes to see in concrete terms how the various soul impulses that arise from the social organism are just as well-founded and concrete as the impulses that arise from the physical organism. It learns to recognize that the coexistence of peoples is also connected with these impulses, which can be studied from the depths. Spiritual science finds a completely different soul structure in the people of Eastern Europe than in the West, and knows how such a structure must become established in European life as a whole. I can point out that for decades I have been speaking about the different soul structures that underlie social life in Europe, purely from spiritual scientific ideas; but what has been found in this way is confirmed by what empirical experts who are involved in concrete life say. Read in yesterday's and today's Neue Zürcher Zeitung what is said about Dostoevsky's views on the Russian national soul, on Russian ideals, and you will have there — which I can only mention, as there is not enough time to describe in detail — complete proof: the external observation of a result in the most eminent sense of what has been advocated by spiritual science for years.This leads one to study social impulses and social forces from real life. This is lacking today. But because life cannot be mastered with concepts that are divorced from reality, but only with concepts that are born out of living reality, this life grows over people's heads. People no longer know how to encompass life with concepts that have the same degree of abstraction as concepts in the natural sciences. These are not sufficient in the social sphere. And so it was precisely this life, surging and swelling in the underground but not grasped by consciousness, that led to the catastrophes we are experiencing today in such a terrible way.
And further: a third area that we encounter in social life is what we call legal life. The social structure of a community essentially consists of economic, moral, and legal life. However, all these concepts must be taken in a spiritual sense. Just as economic life can only be truly studied if imaginative ideas are taken as a basis, and moral life, in what it really contains, only if inspired ideas are taken as a basis, so legal life can only be understood with intuitive ideas, which in turn are gained from full concrete reality.
What spiritual science strives to recognize in the supersensible realms, on which it exercises and trains its powers of consciousness and cognition, is revealed in its application to the various areas of social life. Even in the field of education, which essentially belongs to the social realm, fruitful concepts can only be obtained if one is able to incorporate imagination into one's concepts in order to imagine the still unformed life through imaginations that are stimulated in oneself — not according to abstract concepts, as is so often the case in education today, but according to real imaginations — and then to be guided by them.
Legal life, legal concepts! How much has been written and spoken about these legal issues, especially in recent times! And how little humanity today is actually aware of the simplest concepts in law! In this area, too, one need only look at people who want to work entirely from a scientific background, such as Fritz Mauthner, the author of the very interesting “Dictionary of Philosophy.” Read the articles in this dictionary on law, punishment, in short, everything related to it, and you will see that he dissolves everything you know about concepts and ideas, including institutions that prevail in the present, and that he shows that there is no possibility, no ability to replace anything. One can only replace something if what is sought in the legal structure is taken out of the world that, as the intuitively recognizable world, underlies social structures.
Here in Zurich, I can refer to a book that started this kind of legal analysis: “The Collective Bargaining Agreement under Swiss Law” by Dr. Roman Boos. There you have made a start on basing concrete legal questions on the conditions inherent in the legal structure, in the social structure, as they are excellently presented in this book, and on arriving at concrete, detailed ideas of individual laws. If one studies such beginnings, it will become clear what is actually meant, even if the demand must be made to study social life as legal life in a concrete way, not in an abstract way, to extract it from what really is, to encompass it, to embrace it with concepts that correspond to reality. This is, of course, more inconvenient than setting up utopian programs and constructing utopian state structures. For here the whole human being must be taken into account, and there must be a real sense of what is happening in reality.
I have therefore presented the concept of freedom as a fundamental concept in order to show that, even though laws are sought in the spiritual world, this concept of freedom can fully stand before spiritual science. It will be more uncomfortable to really study these things! For above all, one comes to realize how complicated reality is, how this reality cannot be grasped with one-sided concepts that are fixed on one side or the other, but how, as soon as one goes beyond the individual human being, one must grasp this reality with concepts such as those described in these lectures as the concepts of spiritual science.
I can give a drastic example here. People like to live in one-sided concepts, in concepts that have emerged from their habitual way of thinking. When the first railroad was built in Central Europe, a council of doctors, a learned council in other words — the story is documented, even if it sounds like a fairy tale! —, was asked for its opinion. The learned council decided that no railroads should be built because they would damage people's nervous systems. And if there were still people who wanted railroads, then at least high wooden walls should be erected on both sides of the tracks so that those passing by would not suffer concussions. This opinion, expressed in the first half of the 19th century, was a product of the thinking of the time. It is easy for people today to laugh at such a one-sided opinion, because it is obvious that the learned gentlemen were wrong. Development has overtaken them. Development will overtake many things that the “learned gentlemen” consider to be correct.
And yet, as paradoxical as it may sound, there is another question: Were the learned gentlemen simply wrong? That is only apparent! They were certainly wrong in one respect, but they were not simply wrong. Anyone who has a sense of the finer peculiarities in the development of human nature already knows that the emergence of the railways is strangely connected with the development of many nervous phenomena from which the present day suffers, and that, even if not expressed as radically as the learned gentlemen have done, the tendency of their judgment is correct in a partial way. Anyone who truly has a sense of the diversity of life, of the difference between life today and life at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, knows that railways have already made people nervous, and that in a certain respect the learned colleagues were right.
However, that “right” and “wrong” which is still applicable when some natural process or some natural human phenomenon is considered — it is not applicable to the social structure! The point is that humans, through a completely different training of their mental faculties, develop the ability to form more comprehensive ideas that can encompass social life, which in its manifestation reaches further than anything that one-sided abstract scientific ideas—which must be abstract—are capable of encompassing.
Due to the limited time available, I could of course only hint that the fields of social science, economics, social moralism in the broadest sense, jurisprudence, and everything related to them can only be mastered once the complacency that still stands in the way today has been overcome. For it is basically complacency and shyness about real paths to knowledge that hold people back from a humanistic view of the world. Although I was allowed to give a series of four lectures here, I was of course only able to point out a few things. I am well aware that I could only offer suggestions. I also only wanted to draw connections to the individual fields of science cultivated today in the form of suggestions. I know that there are many objections that can be raised, and I am well aware of the objections that can be made. Those who stand on the ground of spiritual science must continually raise possible objections at every turn, for only by measuring what they recognize against these objections can they develop from the depths of their soul the spiritual vision that can master reality.
But even though I know how imperfect my descriptions have been — for it would take many weeks to list all the details that I have only been able to briefly hint at — I may nevertheless believe that I have at least evoked an idea in one direction: that spiritual science is not about some kind of agitation that one wants to drive forward from this or that abstract ideal, but rather a field of research that is demanded by the course of human development itself in our present time. Those who are involved in this field of research, who truly understand its impulses, know that precisely those areas that are demanded by the present — such as the one I have mentioned here: psychoanalysis — when they are truly understood, point to the fact that they can only find their fulfillment in the light of what is called anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. That this is not something based on blind ideas or some vague mysticism, but something that is seriously supported by a serious spirit of research, at least in its intentions, is what I wanted to convey by showing, from various details, how the scientific ideas we are familiar with today can be enriched by what appears as spiritual science.
I believe that this spiritual science is by no means something new. For one need only go back as far as Goethe to find in his theory of metamorphosis the elementary approaches that need only be developed further by spiritual science — not, however, through logical-abstract scientific hypotheses, but through a lively elaboration of what has been suggested there.
Therefore, since I myself have been working on developing Goethe's worldview for more than thirty years, I am very happy to call the worldview that I represent as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science the developed Goethean worldview. And the building in Dornach, which is dedicated to this worldview, I would like to call a Goetheanum, if it were up to me: indicating that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not enter the world as something arbitrary and new, drawn from a single idea, but as something demanded by the spirit of the present, and also demanded by the spirit of the whole of human development.
For I believe that those who have walked with the spirit of human development have, at all times, in their best endeavors, pointed to what must emerge today as the fruits and blossoms of scientific endeavor, so that a real, serious insight into the life of the spirit may be established, as serious so worthily established as natural science, which has by no means been opposed or disparaged by spiritual science, but has been highly valued in recent centuries, and especially up to our own time.
I have not given these lectures in order to combat or in any way challenge other sciences, but rather to show — as I already said in the introduction — that I appreciate them, believing not only that they are great in what they already are, but also that they are great in what they can grow into. I believe that it is an even higher appreciation of the natural sciences and also of other contemporary ways of thinking if one does not merely believe one must remain with them, but to believe that a true immersion in what is good in the various scientific fields is not only capable of producing a logically developed worldview, which then amounts to nothing more than what is already contained in the foundation, but is also capable of bringing forth something alive. And such living things, not merely things that have been discovered, are what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims to be.
From the question and answer session
after the lecture in Zurich, November 14, 1917
Question: How does the speaker explain the process of forgetting?
Well, this question can be answered quite briefly. The process of forgetting is essentially based on the fact that the process I mentioned as a parallel process for the formation of images, and on which memory is based, is founded on an ascending and a descending phase of events. To make myself clearer, I could point out that although it is not the same process, it is, in a sense, prefigured in what Goethe calls the “fading of sensory perceptions.” This fading of sensory perceptions — when sensory perception has passed, the effect still fades — is not what underlies forgetting, but it can be used to make oneself understood: it is, in a sense, a model for the entire process that takes place, whereby I expressly note that by this process I do not mean a physiological one, but rather a process that extends into the physiological, yet is nevertheless a spiritual-physical process. You can find more details about this in my books. But what takes place as a process also has a declining phase, and this declining phase is precisely what underlies forgetting. So just as the ascending phase underlies remembering, the descending phase underlies forgetting. The process of forgetting is not, I would say, wonderful if one has the view of memory that I have spoken about.
Question: What does it mean when a person never dreams, or when dreams never enter their consciousness? How can this phenomenon be interpreted psychologically and anthroposophically, that is, how does such a person differ spiritually from other people?
The fact that is being pointed out here is actually quite problematic. For although it is easy to claim that one never dreams, this is not actually the case; Rather, there is initially a certain weakness in relation to the subconscious processes that underlie dreaming, a certain state of weakness that is unable to bring up from the subconscious what, as I have figuratively expressed it, is to be read from this subconscious. Every human being dreams. But just as there are other states of weakness, some people have states that make it impossible to really bring up what they have dreamed and thus carry it into consciousness. However, this weakness should not be understood in the same sense as, say, any organic weakness, because this weakness can very easily be brought about by a mental advantage in another area. It is said, for example, that Lessing never dreamed. In his case, this was due to the fact that he was a highly critical thinker who concentrated his energies in such a powerful way, as we know from Lessing, and applied them to one side of his being, thereby weakening them on the other side. So we should not think of this weakness, which is referred to here, in a very negative sense; it may be related to other strengths of the person.
Interpreting such a thing “psychologically” and “anthroposophically” is, of course, one and the same thing for the spiritual scientist. Nor can one even say that someone who has a certain weakness in bringing a dream process into consciousness must also have a weakness for processes arising from imaginative knowledge. That need not even be the case. Someone may have little aptitude for what is commonly called dreaming, and yet he can still attain imaginative consciousness and so on by applying the processes I describe in my books, particularly in How to Know Higher Worlds, which anyone can apply to themselves. And then it may turn out that, because they now use their powers specifically for imaginative, i.e., fully conscious, recognition of the spiritual world, for looking into it, let us say, if the expression is not taken in a superstitious sense: for clairvoyant looking into the spiritual world, then precisely because of this, ordinary dreaming can be suppressed, although the opposite may also be the case.
I know many people who apply the exercises described in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” to their souls and who experience what is also described there: a transformation of their dream life. Ordinary dream life actually contains only vague elements, while it undergoes a strange transformation under the influence of awakening imaginative knowledge.
Thus, the inability to bring dreams into consciousness indicates nothing more than a partial weakness of human nature, which can be understood in the same way as in other areas where one person has strong muscles and another has weaker muscles. It is simply something that is entirely justified in the nuances of human development.