The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Heraclitus and Pythagoras

[Dear attendees!]

[ 1 ] In the last two lectures, I took the liberty of presenting Heraclitus as a representative of the deepest insight, the deepest wisdom, as it was known in ancient Greece until the fifth or sixth century. And I tried to present what has been handed down to us from him, that wisdom which Aristotle says is not something to be absorbed intellectually, but rather something to be initiated into within the circle in which this wisdom was cultivated, something to be experienced with one's own personal involvement. The purpose of this Heraclitus reflection was to show how far a single personality such as Heraclitus could go, and how, on the other hand, the teachings of such a personality lead into the deepest spiritual life, against the background of which Heraclitus also had his views.

[ 2 ] Now, as a supplement and reinforcement of what I have said, I would like to add a few sayings, some of Heraclitus's teachings, which show us so clearly how, directly from these views — as I took the liberty of developing last time — the whole essence of Heraclitus's worldview flowed from the conditions of the outer world to human consciousness itself.

[ 3 ] I have shown that the essence of the mysteries consisted, first of all, in the fact that all the views that the great masses had about the origin and nature of the external world submerged into that view of man which man in everyday life grasps from his ego; that everything appears in a higher light, that man no longer seeks the light outside in space, but within himself, that the highest knowledge is no longer knowledge of the external world, but knowledge of oneself, that this “know thyself,” which runs through Greek wisdom, is not something incidental, but the cornerstone of all Greek wisdom. In self-knowledge, knowledge of God is to be found: that is, after all, the essence of the mystery teachings. If we are ultimately led back to our own self, to the soul as that which we find when we look within ourselves; if it is true that, as in the image at Sais, we find nothing but the human self, then this human self, which [human beings] believe to be enclosed in their physical life between birth and death, is not a finite self, but this seemingly finite self, this enclosed self, expands to the whole universe, so that it ultimately becomes nothing other than the self.

[ 4 ] This is the deeper meaning underlying the mysteries. The cosmologies, the doctrines of the origin of the world, represent nothing other than the human being who is capable of developing to the highest levels of consciousness. If the self is truly the ultimate being in the world, then one must say: this self has indeed been present in what is called the creation and development of the world. What constitutes the human being is not merely a reflection of reality, as is assumed in epistemology. It is assumed that the world entity is complete and that man is nothing more than a mere reflection. This [reflection] ceases immediately when this Self appears no longer as an individual being, but as a primordial being that has always been present throughout the entire process. It [is] therefore what man himself is.

[ 5 ] To the senses, any external fact appears in a very specific way. Human belief is attached to sensory knowledge. This [splits into individual events, into individual beings] in space and time. Now man takes this whole event out of time and immerses it in the fire of his consciousness. There it becomes what it is in its primordial being, so that the process of cognition is not merely something that runs parallel to the world process, but something that is within it, that is there before it. Cognition is therefore not a repetition of the world process, but a deepening back into the primordial essence of the world, into what actually underlies the world. So anyone who is convinced that they are not merely absorbing, but pouring out their own essence, connecting with the essence outside, recognises themselves in the world [...]. But human beings can only achieve this if they climb the various rungs [of spiritual development]. That Heraclitus saw nothing else in knowledge but the highest blossom that the world can produce, that he did not regard it as something that could also be absent, is evident from what has been handed down to us from him. Knowledge [normally] appears to us as something that has accidentally been added to the whole world process. This is not how it appears to Heraclitus. For him, the cognizant human being was the truly existing human being; and when we understand this, Heraclitus' worldview becomes completely clear to us.

[ 6 ] Except for Pfleiderer, his worldview was not clearly recognized because human beings themselves are in a state of constant flux. Pfleiderer could not help but think that Heraclitus was caught in a contradiction. He regarded the rising and falling, the coming and going, which Heraclitus has in his mental image of fire, as the eternal flow of things. The human ego, the human soul, is entangled in the cosmic world process. And yet, says Pfleiderer, it is as if Heraclitus assumed an eternal soul. On the one hand, we have the highest world principle, the primordial being, which completely excludes individuality, and on the other hand, we have the human being, who nevertheless has a certain immortality. On the one hand, we have the great world process in its continuous coming and going, and on the other hand, we have the individual self, which is enclosed between birth and death but can expand toward the divine. The mystic, the initiate, differed from the ordinary person precisely in that the observation of the world and the observation of one's own self was a contradiction for the latter but not for the former. The essence of the mysteries was precisely that, through life within the mystery world, this contradiction ceased to be a contradiction. People were to experience something that would make the deep disharmony of the world disappear. Initiation, participation in the mysteries, was precisely the way to make the contradiction inherent in the ordinary view of things disappear. Thus, for the mystics, for those who were initiated, the ultimate goal was this: to no longer view what causes ordinary people the greatest fear, because it seemingly makes the physical sensory world, the world of ups and downs, the eternal coming events and deeds disappear into nothingness, this phenomenon of death. That was the goal of the mystics. The mystic was to be brought to the point of learning to perceive this most terrible event not as a terrible event, but as a symbol of the deepest insight. Thus, what was most terrible and frightening for ordinary people was to be seen as an experience. Therefore, the god of death, Hades, was also the god of life, Dionysus. Death as a symbol, not as a fact, should be presented to the mystics. This is what hovers over all of Heraclitus' sayings, and they can only be understood from this point of view.

[ 7 ] When Heraclitus says: Corpses are to be regarded as ordinary things, nothing is to be given to the corpse — this leads you even deeper into Heraclitus' view. In Greek, there is a certain temptation to compare the human body with a burial mound, because such a comparison can be made through a slight play on words. Som means “body” and sema means “burial mound.” However, this play on words was used not only by Heraclitus, but by all those who were involved with Greek wisdom. This word takes us much deeper into the matter. Heraclitus is thoroughly imbued with the view that runs through all Greek mysticism, that what the wise man calls “soul” rests in the body as the body rests in the grave mound. With an almost sublime word, he says that the gods live what is death for ordinary beings. The immortals live the death of mortals.

[ 8 ] Here, in a Heraclitean saying, we have another form of the common view, the common Greek wisdom, which consists in seeing death as a symbol, not as a fact, because all the individual things of the outer world lose the meaning they have for everyday people, submerge into the spiritual world, and become something completely different there. Things in their ordinary meaning are killed, die under the hand of the discerning person. They appear in their infinite, eternal meaning. What the ordinary person calls life, that is, what is most fruitful and real for them, ceases to be real. Thus, what ordinary people call life, what people call sensory reality, can be nothing other than that which first gains life and causes the sensory to die. That is why death becomes a symbol for this higher view. Now, for Heraclitus, this is connected with another view, with which he, I would say, at the same time demonstrates what is the fundamental conviction of all mysticism, namely, the infinity of knowledge. Those who cling to ordinary everyday wisdom usually come to the conclusion that we cannot go beyond the sensory. We cannot penetrate the fundamental nature, the “thing in itself,” says [Kant]. Just a single glance at Heraclitus' fundamental view can show us that Heraclitus was much further ahead on this point than the followers of Kant's philosophy around the year 1900. Heraclitus is convinced that those who are truly able to follow this path will achieve a profound inner experience, which we also find in the German mystics, particularly in Tauler, namely that when we penetrate the true essence of the soul, when we immerse ourselves completely in it, we will encounter no limits. There are no limits to knowledge. External things are finite. We can only penetrate them to the extent of our senses. But with a certain depth of self-knowledge, we can go beyond to even greater depths. There are no limits to knowledge because self-knowledge cannot stand still. A God who knew everything, who knew everything, would be an obstacle for the mystic. Therefore, there cannot be an omniscient and all-wise God. For mystics, there must be something unfinished, there must be the possibility of becoming even more divine and ever more divine, of ascending to ever higher levels of perfection, of deepening oneself more and more.

[ 9 ] Thus, in Heraclitus' view, the world expands in the direction of self-knowledge to an infinite depth. This protects Heraclitus from any accusation of having said, “I know everything.” — For he was also convinced of the impossibility of ever reaching a limit. This shows that Heraclitus also possessed true, great, genuine humility, which is the result of true, genuine self-knowledge, which can never be perfect and complete. Thus, we see that on the path that constitutes the fundamental essence of all mystical perception, there is never despair in knowledge, but rather true, genuine confidence that through continuous deepening, ever new, ever deeper knowledge can be attained. This is what underlies Heraclitus' worldview. And Heraclitus describes this conviction, which comes over people when they become aware of it through continuous deepening within, by saying that the soul strives more and more to come out of the wet into the dry. The wiser a soul is, the more it moves away from the wet, the drier it is. Wisdom flashes through it like lightning.

[ 10 ] This shows that Heraclitus had arrived at the point where all external views of the world are melted down in the fire of knowledge, where they begin a higher life. Now what initially appears to us as a contradiction dissolves into a higher harmony. The contradiction that exists [on the one hand] between the cosmological worldview, which sees the world before it in

[ 11 ] constant coming and going, in a great world harmony, and [on the other hand] the [individual] human being, who is caught between birth and death, and which then forms an encroachment into the world of man, is resolved by the fact that the [individual] being is only a truth for the lower levels of knowledge and that this ceases for the higher [knowledge]. [It also ceases] within the temporal life between birth and death, [when] the light of the eternal shines into temporal life, so that it appears to be one and the same with the temporal. When [in this way] individual human life appears to be equal, synonymous [with the eternal], then the contradiction ceases. This happens because Heraclitus has great harmony on the one hand and, on the other hand, dissolves the individual entities into an immortal entity, into an eternal entity. To know means to live, and to live means to overcome a contradiction that has been present from the beginning. Those who believe that they can resolve a contradiction by speculating with their minds will not be able to overcome the contradiction; they cannot grasp the essence of mystical views. The mystic knows that a contradiction must first exist and that life consists of overcoming the contradiction in one's own life. This is what Heraclitus wanted to say with his various scattered sayings. But if we have the background of the mysteries, we can connect these sayings and then obtain a coherent worldview that shows us how this personality shines far into modern times, and that we can gain a great deal by delving into the philosophy of this wonderful personality and drawing inspiration from it.

[ 12 ] Now a few words about the Greek mystery teachings, after we have gone through Heraclitus, since I must deal with the Orphic teachings together with the Pythagorean school, which spread at about the same time that the Orphic teachings reached their peak. These Orphic teachings also developed a mysticism, and this appears to us, alongside the mysticism of the Pythagoreans, like one light beside another. We have [the Orphics] on one side and the Pythagoreans on the other. We learn about the confluence of these two currents about two hundred years later in the Platonic worldviews. In these, the two currents flow together.

[ 13 ] Suddenly, a higher balance between Pythagorean and Orphic mysticism appears to us. Greek mysticism had the goal of transforming the most terrible event, death as a fact, into a symbol of ever-deepening knowledge. This was only possible if the mystics were gradually introduced to the higher levels of knowledge. They were guided very slowly. Slow guidance was also common practice among the Pythagoreans. This had to be the case because it was not a matter of logical penetration, but of a lively passage through the individual stages of knowledge.

[ 14 ] When we consider the content of [their] worldview, the Orphics appear to us to be on a higher level of scientific development than that contained in the Greek belief in gods. When we consider the cosmogony of the Orphics, it appears to us at first glance to be a description of external processes. It appears to us to be nothing more than mythology translated into scientific language.

[ 15 ] Thus, in the profound Orphic worldview, we have a worldview that initially regards time as that which existed in the beginning. So it was time from which everything originated. From time sprang ether and chaos. The ether is roughly the same as what we know as fire in Heraclitus. Chaos is the whole fullness and diversity of the material world.

[ 16 ] From the connection of chaos with the ether, that is, the most unlimited and [the] most solid, becoming arises with chaos. Becoming, presented in a mental image, is the direct result of the most rigid. It presents itself as giving birth, as producing. It arises from the fluid. Becoming from the limited and the unlimited. From the egg, Chaos first gave birth to a male-female being. This produced from itself a purely female being. And from these two came forth the first beings we encounter in Greek mythology as Uranus and Gaia. Uranus and Gaia are devoured by [Cronus], so that Zeus absorbs all the earlier world beings I have just mentioned, [...] and revives them through himself.

[ 17 ] We can only translate this process of the creation of the world into inner processes of consciousness. With this description of external facts, we have what should first be presented to the mystic. We must realize that for the mystic, time, Kronos, [...] has become a vivid experience as an existing void, as that which is not yet, but can bring forth everything from itself.

[ 18 ] The most congruent image of becoming appears to be unfulfilled time. For consciousness, this is translated into a state of consciousness that can be translated into nothing other than memory, so that we have nothing else to create as a mental image under Kronos than the eternal memory of the world. If we now translate the individual entities, not the state of consciousness of the individual beings, but if we create a mental image of the humanly transcended being, then we attain a state of consciousness that consists only in the memory that things are behind and beside each other and can only be recorded in [coming] and going within time can only be recorded by connecting the individual with the other individual to the eternal world memory.

[ 19 ] From this eternal world memory arises an eternal separation ] into the most solid and the most rigid.

[ 20 ] Within memory, no distinction can be made between ether and chaos. This only happens when the possibility arises to distinguish between the material and the spiritual from the eternal. These two stand opposite each other in such a way that the spirit creates its own dualism. It is a matter of allowing consciousness to separate itself. This gives rise to the material and the spiritual, and only then does man gain the possibility of recognizing something of the lowest level of the world. The world is in a state of eternal becoming, and this is nothing other than the eternal transition from emergence to decay, from being to non-being. This eternal emergence of that which is not perceptible to the senses into a sensory existence is the interplay between spirit and matter.

[ 21 ] The highest minds have made this interplay a part of their fundamental teachings. Let us pause here for a moment with Goethe. As is well known, he also wrote about the metamorphosis of plants and animals. He believed that the beings of the animal and plant kingdoms arise from the fact that everything is in a state of eternal transformation. Goethe came to this conclusion because he believed that there is a constant interplay between spirit and matter.

[ 22 ] Goethe considers a seed, a small material grain, as it seems, a piece of formless matter, which is nothing more than substance enclosed within certain boundaries. But is that the truth? The same thing that we see before us today as a small material particle will soon stand before us as a fully developed plant, with leaves and flowers. The fully developed plant and the small seed are in reality the same thing, one and the same at two different points in time. In terms of substance, they are different, but they are still one and the same.

[ 23 ] What is one and the same? The small seed contains the same as the large plant. The whole plant is contained in the seed in spiritual form. The spirit has withdrawn into concealment. This same spirit, which is sensually manifested in the plant, has already been present. The spirit reveals itself in sensual existence and is later present in the plant.

[ 24 ] In our world of the senses, there is a constant diversity of spirit, which hides itself, withdraws into a point of matter, and then spreads out again and becomes visible, so that it places before us what it previously kept invisible. But only by distinguishing between the two entities of spirit and matter are we able to penetrate this interplay. The seed and the plant would fall apart. We would never be able to say that they are one and the same. We would not understand that. Those who cannot perceive spiritually will say: They have nothing to do with each other. The other will say: The whole plant is already present in the seed as the multiplying spirit that is once in sensory existence and then withdraws again. Only by peeling away the whole reality into spirit and matter and following the interplay are we able to understand the interplay.

[ 25 ] Then we arrive at the state that mystics describe as a state of becoming and giving birth. This is nothing other than the mystery of the presence of the spirit in the real world. We can create a mental image of this under the symbol of the egg, the thing that can produce another thing that is spiritually completely identical to it, but sensually different. Thus, the whole manifold world no longer presents itself as it does in the mental image, but as it appears to the spiritual eye before the soul.

[ 26 ] Now we have seen that what rises upward is in the seed, then ascends, becomes a plant, and thus has taken on sensory existence. When we have a plant before us, the plant is still something that conceals the spirit, that has more spirit than it shows. A higher being, an animal, shows even more spirit; and in humans, a great diversity of spirit comes into immediate sensory existence. But the whole essence of the spirit can only be perceived through spiritual work in self-knowledge, so that what lies dormant in the seed ultimately stands before self-knowledge in its true, unveiled form as its own spiritual entity, and the consciousness that contemplates itself, the soul that faces itself, recognizes nothing other than what is generally hidden in an obvious way. The spirit that is in the seed is the same spirit that self-consciously faces the other being, the male-female being that appears in the diversity of the world. Comprehending this being is a goal of the mystical worldview. It is to be understood in such a way that the entire consciousness of the human being who stands before it becomes spiritualized, that it becomes spirit, will, that it does not merely enter into the human being, but illuminates the outside world and presents itself to us. This is what presents itself to the mystic, who now gives birth to the whole world again from within himself. It is therefore like Zeus, who represents the highest state of consciousness, who has devoured everything and himself.

[ 27 ] Thus, for the mystic, the entire cosmogony was nothing more than a basis for understanding human progress and deepening. Yes, but the concept is nothing more than his own insight. Yes, there was the conviction that insight is not something that is added to the world, but that it is the essence itself. The mystical experiences should be raised to a higher level, for the mystic says that the spirit is present, but not yet sensually present, just as the spiritual is present in the seed, but has not yet spread in the plant, yet is already present as such. Therefore, all the Greek mystics say that the primordial being should not be sought in the past.

[ 28 ] Cosmogony is not structured in such a way that the primordial being stands as the creator, but appears in Greek mysticism as something that is ultimately attained as a stage of knowledge, so that the process of knowledge within Greek mysticism is not a kind of communion, not a connection of man with the eternal world being, but an actual creation. I emphasize: an actual bringing forth, so that for the Greek mystic, the most perfect indeed appears as a sensual creation of the world. Sensual creation and spiritual perfection could coincide for the mystic.

[ 29 ] The other side of the mystical worldview, which did not seek to penetrate the primordial being, but endeavored to recognize the world through deepening our inner world, emerges in the Pythagorean. One direction endeavored to plant the seed in moist soil. The Pythagoreans did not plant in the soil, but invented a method of discovering the spiritual plant in the seed itself without burying the seed in the soil before bringing it to development. How? By bringing the seed to development [spiritually]. How they wanted to discover the spirit already in the seed is something we will consider next time.

Answering questions:

[ 30 ] The question of “where from” is one that is instilled in human beings. We ask it because we see becoming in the process of coming into being. We see the thing becoming more perfect. There can be no doubt that the sensual plant is more perfect than the seed. The later is contained in the earlier, not in reality, but in a spiritual way. The word “beginning” is something future in the doctrines of the creation of the world. A final reflection of the approach of a perfect kingdom is present in early Christianity. It is the same as the kingdom of Zeus. There can be no cause without the corresponding effect. When we ask: Is one thing there earlier than the other, it is only because we consider one thing earlier. I add the force that is needed to write with a pencil because I feel it; and this exertion of force is projected out into the world. I also find forces in the outside world. One humanizes the outside world. I really put myself in things, I really stick in them. The act that you perform in your mind is the initial force of the world. The “before and after” loses its meaning. The seed can look back on the plant that brought it into existence. Its own cause already exists as its own cause, but not in a sensual way, but in a spiritual way. Every thing is its own cause and does not have a cause. The effect produces itself. We call it power because it is a sensual, dull striving. If we want to create a mental image of the power in the seed, it is already the plant.

[ 31 ] If God spread his work out over time, he would also have to strive for perfection. Only when he is above time and space is everything there at once, and then he is perfect. All opposites have a point where they touch. “He for whom time is like eternity and eternity is like time is freed from all strife” [according to Jakob Böhme]. Eternity broken down into individual moments is time. Time summarized is eternity. The circle is limited, the straight line is unlimited, infinite. The Orphics did not arrive at the numerical concepts of the Pythagoreans.

[ 32 ] Why did Plato present his views in dialogues? He could not have presented them any other way. If one takes Plato's “Phaedo” and follows it correctly, one finds that it is a conversation between a Socratic initiate and a Pythagorean. The method of the mysteries led to expression through conversation.