Rudolf Steiner
The Resurrection of the Soul Forces
1. On the Training of the Soul
“He who does not know the goal,
cannot have the path.”
—Morgenstern
If Rudolf Steiner had given nothing else but the revelation of the true image of the human being, he would have been the greatest spirit of his time by that deed alone. However, he did more. He not only pointed out the goal, he also showed the path by which this goal can be attained; a path that was revealed to humanity in full public view for the first time; a path of development that human beings can follow through the purposeful, systematic training of their soul powers—thinking, feeling, and willing.
Every true science demands of those who wish to practice it the training of the powers through which knowledge is gathered and organized, conclusions are drawn, and laws are derived. The young natural scientist must learn to observe and to organize his observations correctly. The young philosopher must learn to know and apply the laws of logic. It is not enough for the young natural scientist merely to have eyes with which he can see. He must learn to use his sight in the service of scientific observation. Likewise, it is not enough for the young philosopher to possess normal intellectual capacity. It is only through scientific training that this intellectual capacity is developed.
Spiritual science, too, demands of those who wish to practice it a training of the faculties necessary for this science. Only through this does it become a true science. Certain requirements are set, certain prerequisites must be fulfilled; arbitrariness and fantasy must be eliminated. In ancient times, spiritual science was revealed only to a few gifted individuals. Even for them, a long period of preparation was necessary. It was, in particular, the moral forces that had to be developed. One had to be free from base desires. The soul had to be wholly directed toward the divine force that flows through the universe. Then, after a long path of self-development and renunciation, came the initiation into higher knowledge.
Through Rudolf Steiner, the opportunity was given for the first time to all who desire it to walk a path of spiritual development through their own efforts and in complete inner freedom. What has been true for everyone in the realm of external science over the past centuries is now also becoming possible in the realm of spiritual science. That is why the building in Dornach, the “Goetheanum,” rightly bears the name “School of Spiritual Science.” Like any university, this one is also fully integrated into public life.
To determine the difference between this free university and an ordinary university, one must know what powers must be developed by those who wish to practice this spiritual science. In ordinary scientific development, sensory experience and intellectual thinking form the secure foundations. The senses convey manifold perceptions to the human being; thinking engages with these perceptions, connects them with one another, and creates the possibility of deriving laws. In the natural sciences and related fields, perception predominates; in the theoretical and spiritual sciences, intellectual thinking predominates. To a certain extent, other faculties are also indispensable. For example, the practice of theology would be impossible without religious and moral conviction. Nor can the study of law be undertaken without a sense of right and wrong. A certain appreciation for art is essential for the study of literature, while medicine requires both a moral and an artistic element. None of these faculties are further developed during the actual course of study. They are either present in the student’s soul or they are not. They can be further developed through life and practice, but their development certainly does not run parallel to the practice of the aforementioned sciences.
An education in the humanities, on the other hand, demands the development of the human being in his entirety. All the faculties of the soul, especially the three most important ones—thinking, feeling, and willing—must be systematically developed. In addition to perception and intellectual thinking, the intuitive aspect, which is inherent in all thinking though hidden, must also be brought to full expression. Artistic sensibility and morality must be linked to thinking and perception as powers of cognition. Thus, a general development of the soul takes precedence over a one-sided, intellectual education.
“Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge that seeks to lead the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe,” wrote Rudolf Steiner. (26) The spiritual in the human being will not be able to reach the spiritual in the universe unless the human soul itself becomes an organ through which the spirit beholds the spiritual world. Just as the eye and ear are organs for the human soul, so must the soul forces of thinking, feeling, and feeling, and willing must become organs of the spirit.
How can one imagine that thinking becomes such an organ? One need only recall the times when this was still the case. That time is not so long ago. In ancient Greece, the world still revealed itself to the seeking human soul in ideas, just as it reveals itself to us in colors and forms. (11) The world spirit was experienced in many ideas, and the human soul opened itself to these ideas through thinking. For Plato, who represents a spiritual high point of this Greek epoch, it is self-evident that the entire process of world creation can reveal itself to human thinking in the form of ideas. For him, a human being remains spiritually blind until he perceives the light of these thoughts. This light reveals itself in the form of ideas, which for Plato are a spiritual reality. In them, the creative work of the gods could be experienced. In the Middle Ages and especially in modern times, the ability to perceive thoughts directly is lost. Humanity begins to feel more and more like the creator of its own thoughts. Whereas earlier, as Rudolf Steiner says, it was “an inspired bearer of thoughts,” he now becomes an independent thinker. His consciousness is directed toward the process of thought generation, whereas in Greek times he still received thoughts as divine inspiration. Such a transformation was necessary for the development of the self-consciousness possessed by modern man if he was to attain freedom and independence in the world of the phenomena surrounding him. To this end, everything that did not belong to sensory perception in the narrower sense had to disappear. This is also happening in more recent times, especially since the advent of modern natural science. It brought pure empiricism and labeled everything that did not belong to the realm of perception as subjective.
As important as such a phase has been as a transitional period, its further development is nevertheless possible. Specifically, while fully retaining the strict scientific method, thinking can once again become an organ to which the higher connections of the world reveal themselves. One can learn that thoughts are only correct when the world spirit expresses itself through them. The free, self-conscious activity of the human being can turn toward a process of development through which thinking once again becomes an organ of the soul. What matters most, then, is to come to know the true nature of thinking itself. “Thinking has the same task in relation to ideas as the eye has in relation to light. It is an organ of perception,” writes Rudolf Steiner.
Human emotional life, too, can be placed at the service of the faculty of knowledge. At present, there is great fear of this. People fear that involving the emotional life in the scientific process of cognition will give rise to a high degree of subjectivity, which clouds the precision of scientific thinking. Of course, no one can overlook the fact that emotion can be employed in a very subjective manner. The question is simply whether an objective use of emotion is also possible. This may seem to contradict the subjective character that is is inherent in feelings, yet this contradiction is only apparent. Let us consider the human eye. It is such an exquisite sensory organ precisely because it is entirely free of egoism. Its glass- and water-like components allow light to stream in unimpeded, without the eye itself adding anything to it. If human feelings are freed from egoism, they can be employed as organs in the service of knowledge. Instead of surrendering to feelings of pleasure or displeasure and becoming completely absorbed in them, a person can also learn to relate to feelings in such a way that they reveal to him something about what they refer to. The person then experiences, in place of his own feelings of pleasure or displeasure, what is revealed to his soul through the mediation of these feelings. Feeling thus becomes an organ of the soul, just as important for knowledge as thinking and perception; indeed, one might say, in certain respects even more important, because the soul is connected even more deeply to its surroundings through the powers of feeling and can thus sense realities hidden even more deeply. “A pleasure to which I surrender consumes my existence in the very moment of surrender. But I should use the pleasure only to arrive, through it, at an understanding of the thing that gives me pleasure. It should not matter to me that the thing gives me pleasure: I should experience the pleasure and, through the pleasure, the essence of the thing. The pleasure should be for me only a proclamation that there is a quality in the thing that is suited to giving pleasure. I should learn to recognize this quality. If I stop at the pleasure, if I let myself be completely taken over by it, then it is only I myself who am indulging; if the pleasure is for me merely the opportunity to experience a property of the thing, then through this experience I enrich my inner self. For the seeker, pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain must be opportunities through which he learns about things.” (14)
Such a development of the soul will enable human beings to penetrate more deeply into the inner essence of things. In this way, one will be able to approach everything that manifests as a quality in the world of phenomena. The natural sciences, based entirely on sensory perception and rational thinking, have created a worldview in which quantities reign supreme. Qualities are scarcely taken into account in it. Consider, for example, colors. Over the past centuries, repeated attempts have been made to approach their essence by taking differences in ether waves or electrical voltages as a starting point. The qualities of yellow, blue, red, etc., were not discovered in this way. Only Goethe, in his “Theory of Colors”, describes their essence in a way that allows the soul to feel connected to them. Goethe provides the model for a scientific approach that is also built upon an emotional experience. Here, however, the feelings are not arbitrary, but rather soul forces trained with the utmost care.
The will, too, can become a power of cognition. This is yet another idea that must seem alien to our time, since the will plays no role in contemporary science. Whether a moral or even an immoral will pervades the soul has. To understand anything in higher mathematics, the study of electricity, or any other scientific field, it is entirely irrelevant whether one is a good or a bad person. With a sufficiently developed intellect, attention, and a certain amount of diligence, the necessary knowledge can be attained. No other demands are placed on the student. Although practical life in most cases makes other demands, this has nothing to do with science as such. The physician, for example, will need to possess character and moral strength if he wishes to practice his profession well. This, however, exclusively with the nature of his profession, which is based on service to humanity. The content of medical knowledge is not altered by this. Anatomy, pathology, and bacteriology are studied in the same way as any other science, free from any moral judgment. Here, too, there is a fear that the introduction of morality into science itself might cause a certain one-sidedness, in that a preconceived opinion might dominate the mind of the investigator. Here, too, however, it must be said that training the will, if done in the right way, will result in such one-sidedness being overcome. If the egoistic forces in the soul are overcome and a loving devotion to the world of phenomena is practiced, then what seeks to express itself as the true essence of things within phenomena will be able to reveal itself more and more to the researcher’s soul. It is understandable that many are skeptical of such an expansion of the cognitive process through the whole soul. The proponents of objective science, so highly esteemed in our time, will fear that the best achievements of this science over the past centuries will be lost as a result. However, with all due respect for the important results of modern science, one must not be blind to the fact that the deeper connections of the world are more hidden today than they were in times past. Even if the relationship to the deeper truths was highly subjective in those earlier times, for the people living at that time, the very fact of such a relationship was something through which their entire soul could feel connected to the world. This inner connection is lacking in the present, and the greatest scientific achievements, however formidable they may be, cannot fill this void. How, for example, can one expect to come to know nature if one studies only that which can be determined by measure and number, and completely disregards that nature acts as a creative artist? That all of nature is imbued with great beauty is just as much a part of its essence as everything that can be examined chemically and physically. Recall Goethe’s words: “To whom nature begins to reveal her manifest secret, there arises an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” And how can one expect to find the truth about the universe if one is not interested in its true foundation: if one does not seek to penetrate the moral will that permeates all of creation?
The ordinary cognitive faculties of human beings, based on perception and intellectual thinking, can undergo a development in three phases. Thinking must be trained in such a way that the spiritual connections of the world can once again be reflected within it ; feeling in such a way that the beauty living in qualities reveals itself to the soul; and the will in such a way that it reconnects the human being with the deepest ground of being. In his book “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”, Rudolf Steiner describes this path of development in a very concrete manner. (30, see also 17, 27–29) The starting point for such a higher path of development is the fact that it is possible for every human being to attain knowledge of the spiritual world. In ordinary soul life, this ability lies dormant. Undoubtedly, rigorous scientific thinking, a deep appreciation of artistic beauty, and a strong ethical will will exert a great influence on the development of the soul. However, this development will remain heavily dependent on external circumstances and, moreover, be in danger of remaining one-sided. Especially in our modern age, this danger is extraordinarily great. An almost endless fragmentation prevails in nearly every area of our cultural life. The thinking, feeling, and willing aspects of the human being have the greatest difficulty connecting with one another. The sciences go their own way in complete isolation and lose themselves in ever greater. The same one-sidedness prevails almost universally in the artistic and religious spheres as well. All of this, however, is an obstacle to the development of spiritual science.
The person seeking spiritual science will strive to feel fully immersed, with their whole soul, in everything that reveals itself to their soul through thinking, feeling, and willing. This is necessary in order to first become aware of the connection with the environment. In ordinary, everyday life, one rarely allows room for this. What confronts us from the diversity of phenomena has a highly numbing effect on the soul. Through the infinite multitude of sensory impressions, the whole world is as if covered by a dark cloak. Now and then it is pierced—during an experience of beauty or in moments when a higher insight flashes through the soul, as everyone is surely familiar with. Instead of leaving this “breaking through” to chance or circumstances, one can also consciously cultivate it as the beginning of a systematic training of the soul. This training begins the moment one withdraws from everyday life for a brief period. Anyone can do this without coming into conflict with the duties that life imposes upon them. What matters is to create moments of perfect inner peace. One will try to realize a certain mood of the soul within this. A mood of the soul in which reverence for the higher truth—which can reveal itself to us through nature, through humanity, and through the whole world—prevails. It is the mood of reverence and wonder, of openness to the miracle of creation, which has filled all great thinkers and artists.
The small child possesses such a mood by nature. It brings it with it from the world of prenatal forces, by which it is still completely permeated. It looks around and perceives its entire surroundings with a gaze in which complete devotion lives. Awe and wonder act as powerful forces in its soul. With great timidity, it approaches a person who is still unknown to it, ready to revere all that is good and beautiful in that person. Yet this childlike state of mind is in danger of being lost all too soon. Most often, the child experiences a critical, often even cynical attitude in the adults who surround it. The tendency toward criticism is, after all, one of the most characteristic traits of our time. It is so strongly developed that it is regarded as a matter of course to carry this critical tendency within oneself as a human being. Indeed, people are proud of it and believe that it expresses great independence and inner freedom. In the soul, however, this tendency toward criticism acts as a powerful negative force, robbing the soul of its connection to the world with which it actually coexists. Only by embarking on the spiritual path of training referred to here can it become fully clear to a person how extraordinarily necessary it is to combat this tendency toward criticism and to make room for the budding feeling of reverence and admiration for all that is true, beautiful, and good.
One might perhaps infer from this description that a certain mood must be cultivated, in which all discernment is lost. The opposite is true. Anyone who constantly carries a negative mood in their soul and judges all phenomena and events from that perspective will, in the long run, become completely blind to a large part of reality. On the other hand, anyone who practices connecting everywhere with that for which they can feel admiration and awe runs no risk of losing this large part of reality through their negative mood. They will learn to see everything that is true, beautiful, and good in its proper relation to the untrue, the ugly, and the evil. However, they will not make this distinction out of a mood or an emotion; rather, their judgment will arise from their entire, positively oriented soul. ““Unless we develop within ourselves the profound feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we will not find within ourselves the strength to evolve toward that which is higher.”(30)
Furthermore, it is of great importance that a person’s relationship with their environment becomes more controlled. Everyone knows how much modern people are consumed by their environment. The many impressions that constantly distract people, the many disruptive circumstances that affect them—all of this creates a state of constant restlessness within them. One need only imagine how many impressions one absorbs from a single newspaper, which is usually not even read but merely skimmed. Anyone who wants to keep up with the times cannot escape such things. Nor will it do them any harm if, alongside their ordinary external life, they carve out moments of inner peace and concentration. This can, in a sense, become a habit. Amid the restlessness of external life, a person can set themselves the task of spending a specific, brief period of time alone with themselves. They can then try to find an inner relationship to the phenomena that surround them. Rudolf Steiner used the image of a mountain that one climbs in the evening to survey, from its summit, the landscape through which one has wandered during the day. The objects then appear in their true proportions. Something that seemed large to us may now prove to be less so; what we considered small may be larger. The true proportions only reveal themselves once one has achieved a certain distance from the phenomena. Likewise, in moments of inner calm, things will reveal their true nature. The phenomena begin to instruct the human being about their actual being. The connection that the soul feels through joy and pain, through sympathy and antipathy, opens the gateway to the inner essence of things. Joy and pain, sympathy and antipathy become mediators through which phenomena begin to speak to the soul.
Thus, through practice, a selfless relationship with the world is gradually achieved in the soul, and only then can true knowledge be born. It is of the utmost importance to pursue this quest for inner peace with seriousness and great discipline. If it does not become a daily habit, one will not be able to achieve much. In moments of inner peace, one will increasingly learn to distinguish the unimportant from the important. The human soul, which was previously trapped in the events of daily life and the many sensory impressions, frees itself from them more and gains an independent relationship with its surroundings. A higher human being begins to awaken, one who faces everything differently and more freely. The experience of this awakening of the higher human being gives the soul a feeling of inner security, which is based on the connection of this higher human being with the spiritual world order.
In this inner peace, the soul can now not only find a free relationship to everything that concerns it, but it can also learn to rise above the purely human. The human being will then increasingly direct their gaze toward that which confronts them in the world as originating from a higher order. The higher human within them will recognize themselves as an inhabitant of a world in which this higher order reigns. Rudolf Steiner describes this in clear terms: “And thus the human being begins to feel, to experience, that he belongs to such higher worlds. These are worlds about which his senses, his everyday activities can tell him nothing. Only then does he shift the center of his being inward. He listens to the voices within him that speak to him in moments of stillness; he cultivates an inner connection with the spiritual world. He is withdrawn from everyday life. The noise of this everyday life has fallen silent for him. It has become quiet around him. He rejects everything that reminds him of such external impressions. The quiet contemplation within, the dialogue with the purely spiritual world, fills his entire soul.”(30)
Three forces are at work in the soul during such a dialogue. The pure power of thought, the power of feeling through which thoughts are internalized, and, thirdly, the power of love that connects people and the world. When thoughts are experienced in this way with the whole soul, they take on a whole new meaning for the person. “Soon he also ceases to to perceive this world of thoughts as something more unreal than the everyday things that surround him. He begins to treat his thoughts as he does the objects in space. And then the moment also approaches for him when he begins to feel that which reveals itself to him in the silence of inner thought work as far higher and more real than the things in space. He experiences that life expresses itself in this world of thought. He realizes that it is not mere shadows that play out in thoughts, but that hidden beings speak to him through them. It begins to speak to him from the silence. Before, it had sounded to him only through his ear; now it sounds through his soul. An inner language—an inner word—has opened up to him. The secret student feels inspired to the highest degree when he experiences this moment for the first time. An inner light pours over his entire outer world. A second life begins for him. The stream of a divine, a God-blissful world pours through him.
Such a life of the soul in thought, which expands more and more into a life in spiritual being, is called meditation (contemplative reflection) by Gnosis, the spiritual science. Meditation is the means to supersensible knowledge.”(30)
It is of the utmost importance to become acquainted with the concept of meditation in this form. After all, much is spoken of meditation in our time, and usually something entirely different is meant by it. The meditation of which Rudolf Steiner speaks is based on intense activity of the soul—an activity, however, that has become entirely inner and finds its power precisely in the fact that it silences the ordinary forces that act within the soul. Most people, however, understand meditation to mean a more or less passive surrender to whatever flows into the human soul, when this soul seeks to achieve complete surrender to the spiritual world. The dangers of such passive surrender are very great in our time. One easily enters a world of illusion and appearance. It is necessary to develop an even greater power of discernment toward the spiritual world than toward external appearances. For if one draws false conclusions in the world of external appearances, the appearances themselves will not cease to have a corrective effect. The result of mistakes made will become visible sooner or later. However, those who succumb to illusions regarding the spiritual world can become increasingly entangled in them without this leading to a correction visible to them. That is precisely why careful training of the soul’s powers is necessary. They must not only be strengthened but also purified, for only in this way can they develop into reliable instruments for the spiritual world. Thinking forms the only reliable foundation for the meditative life. “Clear, sharp, and determined should your thoughts be,” says Rudolf Steiner to the meditator.
An indispensable aid to the meditative life is the practice of concentrating one’s attention. Anyone who is honest with themselves knows how difficult it is for modern people to concentrate at will on an object with which they are not connected through desires or cravings. Even the course of daily duties can involve a semblance of concentration. But when it comes to engaging with a specific object in complete freedom, without being compelled to do so by desires or cravings or daily duties, then one first realizes how extraordinarily difficult this is. That is why Rudolf Steiner repeatedly describes the great importance of a concentration exercise. Take a specific object that does not particularly interest us in daily life—a pencil or a pin — and try to engage with it thoughtfully for several minutes. Anyone who practices this for a long time will notice that they gradually become master of their thought life. Control over it will no longer depend on external circumstances, but will come from within the soul.
Thus, concentration and meditation are the two paths leading to the further development of human consciousness. This development passes through various phases. Of course, only a few of these can be described here. The entire path of development is presented in detail in the literature cited. Only a few points may be highlighted.
Three main stages must be mentioned. These three stages signify a threefold expansion of consciousness, referred to as imagination, inspiration, and intuition. The word “imagination” points to the fact that, at this stage of development, the soul experiences just as much in images just as ordinary consciousness does in sensory perception. However, these are not images that spring from arbitrary fantasy. Such fantasy images arise from uncontrolled feelings that lead a life of their own within the soul and in which the soul acts out its wishes and desires. The images that arise in the soul within imaginative consciousness are quite different. Imagine that a person has, over a long period of time, repeatedly observed the laws governing plant growth and has made the entire process of blooming and dying, which manifests in the plant world in a regular rhythm, as the subject of his meditation. He repeatedly visualized the flowering of the plant in spring and summer in his soul, mentally tracing the various stages of plant development. The germination of the seed, the emergence of the first leaves from the ground, the development of the leaves on the stem, the formation of bud and flower, and finally of fruit and seed—he followed all of this in his thoughts. He also followed in thought the opposite process: the gradual discoloration of the plant, the withering of the flower, and the dying off of the leaves. After some time, it will possible for him to experience the blooming and withering, life and death, in his soul through thought alone, independent of specific mental images. After some time again, an image may emerge that expresses the process of unfolding as well as the process of withering. This image is then free from all contents of the sensory world. Yet it is no more a product of the imagination. It originates from the power of thought itself and possesses, in relation to thought, just as much objective reality as the sensually perceptible plant does in relation to the senses. A spiritual reality appears in the form of an image.
For those who call only that which their senses perceive reality, such a view will sound fantastical. However, for those who are convinced that reality has many facets and that the senses bring us into contact with only a very small part of it, the matter is different. Then it is entirely understandable that the entire process of blooming and withering is just as much a spiritual reality just as the visible plant is a reality in the physical realm. A person can enter into spiritual reality through contemplation if they perform the necessary exercises. What otherwise appears in the soul as a more or less abstract idea becomes vivid.
In Dutch, the word “thought” ” is “denkbeeld” (thought-image). This beautifully points to the transition of thought into a life within the spiritual image. Just as thoughts were spiritually perceived in ancient times, so too will the possibility return in the future for human beings to ascend from abstract thinking to the direct perception of thought that has become an image.
In the second phase of development, the phase of inspiration, these images must be banished from the soul once again. The spiritual effort required to bring them into being must now be surpassed by an even greater effort, through which these images are made to vanish. The result is a completely empty consciousness, into which, however, revelations from the spiritual world can then flow. Just as in imaginative consciousness the spiritual world does not appear in itself but in the form of images, so too does inspirational consciousness provide a revelation of this spiritual reality. Such an inspirational element has always been at work in all great artists and thinkers. Here, however, it is cultivated with consciousness. In imagination, the phenomena that operate in the realm of life—that is, in the laws governing life and death—become visible to the spiritual eye. Through inspiration, the soul becomes even more intimately connected with the essence of things.
Imagine paying the utmost attention, over a long period of time, to everything that comes to meet us from the world of tones and sounds. One distinguishes between the dull or bright noises that an inanimate object can produce, the various tones that speak to us from the animal world, and now try to discern from these noises and tones what they reveal about the inner being of the creature with which they are associated. It does not matter whether the sound strikes us as pleasant or unpleasant, but solely that it reveals something to us about the inner nature of things. Here, above all, the sounds produced by various animals provide many examples. For in the sounds the animal emits, the most elemental soul forces find their expression. Whoever learns to listen to them without sympathy or antipathy trains their soul to hear inwardly what lives in the essence of phenomena. Such an exercise gives strength for the development of inspirational consciousness.
The third stage, that of intuition, demands that the human soul be placed entirely at the service of the process of knowledge. Here, love itself must enter the realm of the powers of knowledge and take the lead. Only when the soul is capable of complete devotion to the world of the spirit can one expect spiritual reality to connect with the human being. Just as imaginative consciousness presents the image of this reality, and the inspirational consciousness reveals its essence, so in intuitive consciousness the soul enters into direct contact with spiritual reality itself. The human being learns to recognize how, behind everything that confronts him on earth and in the cosmos, spiritual beings are at work who represent the highest levels of reality. The vague concept of God that lives in most people is infinitely enriched by this development. In place of a general conception of the deity comes the concrete recognition of the hierarchy of spiritual beings, who all together stand in the service of the highest divine principle.
Much can be contributed to the training of intuitive consciousness if a person practices understanding others and learns to pay attention to everything that is revealed in the other person’s utterances. Whoever always reacts in a conversation with inner agreement or rejection, whoever sees in the other’s words only an occasion to set aside or oppose their own opinion, will remain blind to everything that lives in the other person’s words as an expression of their hidden inner being. If one practices complete devotion to the essence of the other person, then one prepares the intuitive consciousness.
It must be emphasized most strongly, however, that this threefold expansion of consciousness is achieved only when the individual also develops further in their entire moral life. Time and again, Rudolf Steiner pointed out the necessity of taking at least three steps forward in the realm of morality for every step one wishes to take forward in spiritual knowledge.
One will understand that, in general, a long path of practice is necessary to attain imaginative, inspirational, and intuitive consciousness. Yet even those who have not yet attained such an expansion of consciousness have taken an important step if they have recognized its significance. And this is possible for anyone who carefully studies the recommended literature.
2. The Resurrection of Thought
Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom
“The realization of the idea in reality
is the true communion of humanity.”
—Rudolf Steiner
For Rudolf Steiner, great spiritual courage was required to embark on the path he deemed necessary to follow. As we have already described in his biography, the spiritual world was a visible reality for him even in his childhood. How much easier it would have been for him to further develop his spiritual gifts and enrich the world with his revelations. This would undoubtedly have brought great satisfaction. However, he did not take this path, but chose the much more difficult one: the path of the modern scientific thinker. It was clear to him that, in this period of development, the first necessity was to redeem this very mode of thinking. To offer revelations from a spiritual world might perhaps have given many a certain satisfaction, but it would have served the actual course of human development only to a limited extent.
Scientific thinking, which has flourished greatly in recent centuries, is regarded rightly regarded as the most powerful weapon of the human spirit. What went unnoticed, however, was that this thinking increasingly fell into a state of captivity by placing itself entirely at the service of sensory perception. The inherent power that lives within thinking was thus lost to a large extent. At the same time, the courage to trust in thinking also waned. As soon as it had left the realms of sensory perception, it dared to proceed only through combination and analysis. Courageous forward-thinking, truly creative thinking, has become more and more the exception in recent times. All this was possible because the conviction had been lost that thinking itself is a supersensory process. The thinking human being lives in a realm that extends beyond the sensory world. By thinking, the human being already enters the spiritual world. Because of its confinement to the realm of sensory perception, thinking could no longer reach this supersensory world.
Rudolf Steiner’s discovery of the true nature of thinking marks a turning point for the entire culture. With the utmost seriousness and deepest sense of responsibility toward the work he wished to accomplish, he sought to justify every step he took philosophically and scientifically. We mentioned in his biography that he had an early interest in philosophical problems. His studies of Kant began at an age when other boys were still fully absorbed in their childish joys. Even before he was a student, he bought as many philosophical books as he could possibly afford. He studied Kant, Fichte, and Eduard von Hartmann, and later other well-known philosophers as well.
Gradually, a plan for a philosophy began to take shape in Rudolf Steiner, in which the human spirit could find in thinking the foundation for its entire relationship to the world surrounding it. This philosophy was to be built upon the realization that the human spirit carries within itself all the powers necessary for progress in the realms of knowledge, beauty, and morality. A thinking progression along the path of self-liberation is the task this philosophy should set before humanity.
Rudolf Steiner describes the period of his life in which these thoughts took on ever more definite form in his “Autobiography” with the following words:
“At that time, true knowledge, the manifestation of the spiritual in art, and moral will in the human being coalesced into a single whole for me. I had to see a center in the human personality, in which this is directly connected to the most primordial essence of the world. Will springs forth from this center. And when the clear light of the spirit works within this center, the will becomes free. The human being then acts in harmony with the spirituality of the world, which becomes creative not out of necessity, but only in the realization of its own being. In this center of the human being, goals of action are born not out of dark impulses, but out of “moral intuitions”—intuitions which are in themselves as transparent as the most transparent thoughts. Thus, by contemplating free will, I sought to find the Spirit through which the human being exists as an individuality in the world. Through the perception of true beauty, I sought to behold the Spirit that works through the human being when he acts in the sensible realm in such a way that he does not merely represent his own being spiritually as a free act, but in such a way that this spiritual being flows out into the world, which, though it is of the spirit, does not reveal it directly. Through the contemplation of the true, I wished to experience the spirit that reveals itself in its own being, whose spiritual reflection is the moral act, and toward which artistic creation strives through the shaping of a sensory form.
“A ‘philosophy of freedom,’ a view of life centered on the spirit-thirsting, beauty-seeking world of the senses, a spiritual contemplation of the living world of truth hovered before my soul.”(1)
This new philosophy of freedom, however, had to be prepared through a thorough and systematic engagement with the philosophy that almost completely dominated thought: the philosophy of Kant. Above all, the problem of the limits of knowledge, which Kant assigned to human cognitive capacity, had to be addressed. Thus, in 1891, Rudolf Steiner’s nearly one-hundred-page treatise “Truth and Science” with the subtitle “Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom.” The first sentence of the preface reads: “Contemporary philosophy suffers from an unhealthy belief in Kant. The present work is intended as a contribution toward overcoming it.”
Kant’s greatness was and remains untouchable. Living in an era in which there was truly no shortage of great figures, he acted as “the all-pervading and dominant spirit,” as Windelband called him. The greatest minds of his time admired him. Fichte, Schiller, Humboldt, and many others spoke in enthusiastic terms of his mighty genius. In an era when idealism flourished as never before, when a culture of the mind prevailed which has scarcely its equal in the entire history of the world, it was Kant who set the limits within which human reason could operate. What falls outside the realm of the thinking mind belongs to the realm of moral values. These, too, are recognizable to humans, even provable, but not accessible to the thinking mind. Divine laws permeate and govern humanity and the world. In the human soul, they are expressed in the strict commandment of duty.
Kant organizes his investigations according to the triad of mental faculties established by Tetens: thinking, feeling, and willing. His comprehensive mind produces three Critiques. The “Critique of Pure Reason” , which defines the limits of knowledge and cognition; the “Critique of Practical Reason,” which examines the laws of the will and moral action; and, thirdly, the “Critique of Judgment,” which deals with the realm of feeling, which extends between thinking and willing in the soul.
Is it possible for humans to possess knowledge that goes beyond sensory experience? And how does such knowledge come about? This question is posed in the “Critique of Pure Reason” as the first question regarding the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. Kant answers this question in the affirmative, but in such a way that the domain in which intellectual knowledge holds validity is simultaneously restricted to the utmost. Kant sees the fields that the human understanding can penetrate cognitively by virtue of a spiritual principle of its own primarily in mathematics, and also in pure natural science and metaphysics. Completely separate from this is the realm of moral values. Here, knowability depends on the divine principle, which, as a sense of duty, as a categorical imperative, active in the human soul.
Since Kant views the entire problem of knowledge from the perspective of consciousness, this consciousness must, in the course of his line of thought, appear as a separate whole standing in opposition to the external world. It is, as it were, enclosed by an impenetrable wall formed by the representations which arise in consciousness as reflections of all that exists. What value do these representations have? Only a very limited one, when compared to what they represent. They do not convey reality, but only an image, a reflection of it. Reality thus remains unknowable. Kant arrives here at the formation of the concept of a “thing-in-itself,” which must be at work behind the representations. Thus, human experience of the world dissolves into a duality of completely separate realms. Around him is the unknowable world of the “thing-in-itself,” within him the divine command of duty. Between these two realms, like a partition, stand the representations that form at the boundary between the world and consciousness.
We know how this doctrine of Kant’s was further developed by various thinkers. Schopenhauer’s brief formulation “the world is my idea” even became popular. One should not underestimate Kant’s moral power. His moral imperative: “Act in such a way that the maxim of your action, if it were to become a universal law of nature through your will, would be a universal law of nature” can only be understood as the utterance of a person in whom the deepest seriousness of life is combined with the highest idealism. And yet it is a moral imperative that, without the great religiosity from which it was born, must lose its foundation. A deep faith in God and the strong moral will arising from it give Kant’s intellectual edifice its true substance. If these two forces are removed, what remains is the critic who sharply—yet not sharply enough—distinguishes the knowable from the unknowable.
Goethe had already noted this when, in a discussion of “Kant’s fundamental error,” stating that it consisted in the fact that Kant “regards the subjective faculty of cognition itself as an object and distinguishes the point where the subjective and the objective meet sharply, but not quite correctly.” For Goethe, the main question was which forces are at work in this subjective cognitive faculty. He posed this question not as a philosopher, but as a practical natural scientist. His essay “Nature” provides the answer in poetic form. It is not the human being who speaks about nature from his subjective being, no, it is nature itself that “speaks” through man. Rudolf Steiner formulates this contrast with the words: “This is the antithesis of Kant’s worldview. In Kant, nature is entirely within the human spirit; in Goethe, the human spirit is entirely within nature, because nature itself is spirit.”(11)
“Truth and Science”(31) was intended to provide the philosophical refutation of Kant. Right from the preface, we are met with powerful language. This is not the style of a person taking their first steps on the difficult path of philosophical thought. It is the language of a master in the world of ideas. One paragraph is directed against the “Critique of Pure Reason.” What is truth? The reflection of a reality that lies outside of us, in the form of ideas? Or a free product of the human mind? Does truth possess an existence of its own somewhere, if we as human beings do not produce it ourselves? What is the task of the cognitive process? Answer: the creation of a new realm that, together with the sensually given world, constitutes the full reality. The highest of which man is capable—his spiritual creation—fits organically into the general course of world events. “Man is not an idle spectator of the course of the world, repeating within his mind what takes place in the cosmos without his intervention, but the active co-creator of the world process; and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe.”
The following paragraph is directed against the “Critique of Practical Reason.” Moral laws, too, are not to be regarded as a reflection of something that lies outside of us. No power that imposes commandments upon us, no voice that speaks within us from another world—no, our moral ideals, too, are our own creations. “The conception of truth as an act of freedom thus also establishes a moral doctrine whose foundation is the completely free personality.”
In the following chapters, the ideas that expose Kant’s fundamental error are then developed clearly and distinctly. This entire process is not to be presented here; only the conclusion shall be cited.
Rudolf Steiner starts from the immediately given picture of the world, in which nothing is yet determined by any concept. The opposites of matter and spirit, of conscious and unconscious, do not yet exist. Everything is appearance, including what reveals itself in the soul, indeed even consciousness itself. Within this immediately given picture of the world, one must seek a fixed point, a realm that distinguishes itself essentially from everything else. Thinking is found to be such a realm. It differs from everything else simply in that we bring it forth ourselves. We find the world around us already existing; it exists without our intervention. But within ourselves, too, we find ideas, sensations, feelings, and impulses that arise without our intervention. Only thinking forms an exception. It exists solely through our own activity. Yet it has another distinguishing feature. It is not formed by an activity that would be significant in and of itself, existing separately from all other worldly content; rather, the entire given worldly content can be absorbed into this activity. It is an activity “in which the content of the world itself enters into this activity.” Thus, through thinking, a connection is established between the two realms of the world that had been artificially created by the starting points of observation.
We come to know thinking further as a formative, shape-giving principle that brings order to the originally given chaos of worldly phenomena. Only through this formative thinking does reality come into being. The incomplete form in which the world appears to us is transformed by human thinking.
“It is thus part of the human vocation to bring the fundamental laws of the world—which otherwise govern all existence but would never themselves come into existence, into the realm of appearing reality. This is the essence of knowledge: that within it the foundation of the world, which can never be found in objective reality, is revealed. Our cognition is—figuratively speaking—a constant living into the foundation of the world.”
From here, the path now continues into the realm of living ideas bestowed by the "Philosophy of Freedom". What was, as it were, revealed in a single stroke as a central spiritual discovery in “Truth and Science” forms the starting point of a process of development that, as it passes through the conscious realm of the thinking soul, penetrates deeply into the whole being of the human being.
Dogmatic, rigid thinking, to which everyone is more attached than they suspect, is overcome through the ever-renewed experiencing and feeling of the thoughts that the "Philosophy of Freedom" presents in its ongoing development. The soul seeking truth will, through thinking, move ever further into the world in which ideas are active as living forces. With the "Philosophy of Freedom", a new epoch begins in the course of human wisdom’s quest. This quest simultaneously becomes the path to freedom for the thinking soul that is awakening in people in our time. Through thinking, the human being finds the realm in which their freedom can develop. The human being who is becoming free finds his connection to a world from which spiritual and moral impulses can flow into his soul. He recognizes these impulses as the same ones that reveal themselves in natural events. The gulf that was experienced between human being and nature is bridged through thinking.
The "Philosophy of Freedom" is built upon two fundamental questions. The preface, added to the new edition in 1918, places these two questions at the beginning of the entire work. One question is, “whether there is a way of viewing the human being such that this view proves to be a foundation for everything else that comes to the human being through experience or science, yet which he feels cannot stand on its own.” The other question concerns freedom. “May human beings, as volitional beings, attribute freedom to themselves, or is this freedom a mere illusion? These two questions are most closely connected. The answer, however, provided in the "Philosophy of Freedom" is not an answer in the theoretical sense. Anyone who expects to be able to simply absorb the answer into their knowledge by reading this book at a specific point will be disappointed. For these questions are so closely connected to the nature of humanity that a true answer can only be given through an inner transformation that the human being undergoes themselves. The answer is an act that must be accomplished within one’s own soul, an act of development.
One can possess a certain knowledge of nature as it exists outside of humanity. This knowledge is valuable for the moment in which it arises. If it relates to mechanical processes in the external world, then it also possesses lasting value. But if it attempts to determine something about the living processes of nature, then it will have to be constantly corrected. “Reason,” said Goethe, “depends on what is becoming; the intellect on what has become; the former does not ask: ‘Why?’; the latter does not ask: ‘Where from?’—It delights in development; it wishes to hold everything fast so that it may be of use.”
If it is not possible to readily acquire knowledge about the living in nature, but rather human thought must grow alongside nature itself and can only comprehend phenomena through this co-growth, then it is all the more impossible to define the relationship between humanity and the nature surrounding it using fixed concepts. This relationship can only be born within humanity itself, and specifically within each individual, as the fruit of an inner process of development. The preface also points to this. “No theoretical answer is given that, once acquired, one carries with oneself merely as a conviction preserved in memory. For the mode of conception underlying this book, such an answer would be only an apparent one. No such ready-made, finished answer is given, but rather reference is made to a realm of the soul’s experience where, through the soul’s own inner activity, the question is answered anew and vividly at every moment when the human being needs it.”
The "Philosophy of Freedom" is thus a path that the seeking soul must walk, a path of inner work, on which each chapter marks the milestone of a stage of development. The path consists of a series of soul processes. These are interconnected by the organic law that permeates all that is living and growing. Furthermore, they are united into a mighty whole by the high moral force that elevates every part to spiritual substance.
The entire human soul, with all the powers to be developed within it, is drawn into this process of development. Through thought, it enters into the clear forms of thought that are naturally interconnected, continually emerging from the whole, just as leaf after leaf unfolds from a plant stem.
Through feeling, the soul experiences the beauty revealed in the harmonious structure of this spiritually living organism. A true understanding of art opens the eye to the profound mystery that lives within these hidden laws.
Through willing, the soul actualizes the moral impulses that flow toward it. Creating in freedom it finds itself at the end of the path.
It is impossible to outline in a few words the entire development of the problems to which the "Philosophy of Freedom" leads. Attention should, however, be directed to a few key points: The work consists of two parts. The first part contains a “Science of Freedom,” while the second part discusses the “Reality of Freedom.” Right at the outset, the text points out the fundamental error that has repeatedly been made in attempts to solve the problem of freedom: the failure to recognize the fact that human beings do not merely perform certain acts based on motives acting within or outside them, but that they can be conscious of the motives that lead them to their actions. For a long time, the most diverse worldviews have addressed the question of human freedom from the perspective of so-called freedom of choice. Spinoza provided an answer to this question that, despite all the philosophers who came after him, must still must still be regarded as exemplary, precisely from the perspective of the problem of free will. According to him, everything that is created is governed by external factors. God, who exists solely out of the necessity of his own nature, is free because he exists through nothing else. Human beings, however, and likewise all other created beings, are unfree, because forces other than those connected to his own necessary nature are at work within him. Although human beings may live under the illusion of being free, in reality they are not.
In the first chapter of the "Philosophy of Freedom", Rudolf Steiner addresses the error hidden in such a view. He explains how the conscious motive of action establishes the connection, born of thought, between the acting human being and the human being seeking knowledge. What is an inseparable whole—the human being—has always been divided into two parts. “A distinction was made between the acting person and the knowing person, and the only one to come away empty-handed is the one who matters most of all: the person who acts out of knowledge.” For when a person learns to recognize the motives of his actions through thought, he will be able to distinguish between those motives that compel him and those that leave him free. With the realization that there are motives that are not compelling necessities for the person, an important step has been taken. Through thought, a person can come to understand how a decision is formed within him.
But what is the origin of this human thinking? Reference has already been made to the origin of all philosophy. The world constantly presents the human soul with riddles, which the soul seeks to answer on its own. What confronts us in the world as its content and what our soul seeks in the world do not correspond with one another. As human beings, we feel ourselves standing opposite the world. A contrast between the self and world arises. Bridging this contrast actually determines the whole of human striving. How is this contrast to be bridged? Only through the thoughts formed in our soul regarding the content of the world can the connections between the self and the world be reestablished. But in what way can the content of the world live in our thoughts? This is a question that can be answered in the affirmative in the spirit of Goethe. In his essay “Nature,” he speaks of the connection between human beings and nature. Nature lives and acts within human beings just as human beings do within nature. The natural being within us, as Rudolf Steiner calls it, must be found. “We can only find nature outside ourselves if we first know it within ourselves.”
Once one has come to the realization that human beings can bridge the contrast between themselves and the world through thinking, the next question one must ask is how thinking comes about within them. One fact immediately stands out. While human beings behave more or less passively in sensory perception, the situation is entirely different when it comes to thinking. Thinking is made possible only through one’s own activity. When a person perceives a certain process and forms thoughts about it, these thoughts are the product of their own inner work. This fact— that it is we ourselves who produce our thoughts, that we do not notice their production in ordinary consciousness. But if one succeeds in observing thinking, then one has arrived at one of the most important points in the process of cognition. One comes to know thinking as that in which human beings live through their very own activity. “It is therefore beyond doubt: in thinking we hold hold the events of the world by a thread, where we must be present if anything is to come to pass.” (32) Through our own activity, a counter-image is formed of what perceptions provide to the human being. This counter-image, however, arises entirely from the power of thinking. This thinking rests upon itself. It is “a principle that exists through itself,” or as it is said elsewhere, “thinking is a fact”.
Concepts and ideas are born from thinking. These concepts and ideas are added to perceptions. But does perception belong to reality? Philosophical thought has grappled with this question for more than a century. Under Kant’s influence, it was assumed that perception has only a subjective character. Rudolf Steiner offers a different answer. Although perceptions initially appear subjectively to consciousness , yet every attempt to prove that they cannot therefore also possess an objective character has been doomed to failure. The "Philosophy of Freedom" describes in detail the commonly accepted line of reasoning and simultaneously points out its flaws. One of the most frequent errors relates to the false opposition between what is subjective and what is objective in the process of cognition. In doing so, it is usually overlooked that the contrast between subjective and objective is established only through thinking. Thinking thus stands above this contrast. It stands, as Rudolf Steiner says, “beyond subject and object.”
Thinking arises intuitively in the soul. The relationship between thinking and perception can be compared to the relationship between waking and dreaming. The light that shines up in the soul through thinking illuminates the twilight of perceptions. In this spiritual awakening, one finds reality formed from the two sides that reality reveals: perception and thinking. “Perception is therefore not something finished or complete, but one side of total reality. The other side is the concept. The act of cognition is the synthesis of perception and concept. But it is the perception and concept of a thing that together constitute the whole thing.” Our mental organization is the cause of the separation of perception and concept. The synthesis of the two must therefore also arise again from our mental activity.
Now, humans do not merely participate in world events through thinking; feeling also plays a major role. Through thinking, we participate in world events as such, and are thus connected to the world. Through feeling, on the other hand, we are led back to ourselves; we experience ourselves as a personality. The entirety of human existence develops between this participation in world events and the experience of our individual being. The human personality will be all the greater, the further it reaches with its feelings into the realms of the ideal.
Rudolf Steiner answers the question of the limits of knowledge in a surprising way. The entire process of knowledge is by no means demanded by the world. Every human being must decide for themselves how far they wish to develop the answers to life’s questions through their own thinking. “Things do not demand an explanation.” They exist in their own way and are interconnected by laws that human beings can discover through thought. Nowhere in the entire process of cognition is there a point that would give cause to establish specific limits on the capacity for cognition. “The preconditions for the emergence of cognition are thus through and for the ego. The latter sets itself the question of cognition.” Thus Rudolf Steiner arrives at a worldview that he calls monistic, in which realism and idealism are united into a higher unity. Realism regards the world as a sum of perceptions to which full reality is attributed. Idealism sees as the starting point of the entire world process a sum of spiritual forces that can reveal themselves in the form of ideas. Steiner’s monism brings both together by emphasizing that perception and idea together constitute full reality.
The motto of the "Philosophy of Freedom" is: “Results of psychological observation according to the scientific method.” One can indeed speak here of a scientific method. The starting point of the philosophy of freedom lies in unbiased observation. An observation that is directed not only toward the content of the external world, but also toward the inner life of the person seeking knowledge. With this scientific method, thinking enters the realm of the soul just as it does everything perceived by the senses.
While the first part of the "Philosophy of Freedom" aims to be a science of freedom, the second part becomes a philosophical journey toward freedom. Its content is now the reality of freedom.
Through the concept, through the idea, the human spirit connects itself with the external world, which confronts it in the form of perceptions. Alongside conceptual thinking, feeling and will are the most important forces at work in the soul. They, too, have provided the foundation for certain philosophies, such as the mysticism of feeling and the philosophy of will. In both, however, only a part of reality can be experienced. Those who develop in the spirit of the "Philosophy of Freedom" learns a form of thinking in which feeling and will can live without reality being lost in the process. Whoever learns to experience thinking as a spiritual intuition will not have to do injustice to the emotional and volitional aspects that the soul possesses in such an intuition. This intuition has a purely spiritual content. The entire thought process born of intuition takes place in the purely spiritual realm. This shows that it cannot originate from the human physical organism. The latter is irrelevant to its coming into being. A purely spiritual process cannot be brought about by a physical organism.
The question arises as to what significance this physical organism has. Although it has nothing to do with the nature of thinking, it is nevertheless necessary for the emergence of the I-consciousness that arises from this thinking. The human ego lives in the realm of thinking proper. However, ego-consciousness can only arise through its connections with the human physical organism.
Human acts of will also arise from this physical organism. It is now of the utmost importance to trace how these acts of will are connected with the human organism on the one hand, and with thinking on the other.
Two things—as the "Philosophy of Freedom" describes—come into play in an act of will: the motive and the driving force. The motive is a factor belonging to ideas or concepts, while the driving force is more directly connected to the human organism. The motive is more the momentary determining factor of volition, whereas the driving force is more the enduring determining factor of the individual.
Such driving forces can be of various kinds. The simplest are those that are linked solely to sensory perception. These include hunger and the sexual drive. For the higher senses, a certain sense of rhythm, a moral taste, can develop. The motive for an action can also be directly linked to the emotional life. Feelings such as compassion and gratitude, shame and remorse can prompt certain actions. Thirdly, the motive for the action can be linked to certain thoughts and ideas. Since the highest level of individual life is thinking, one finds in the intuitions in which this thinking manifests itself, are seen as the actual motives of the moral will. At this level, therefore, motive and driving force coincide.
Here, Rudolf Steiner develops the concept of moral intuition. In doing so, he stands in complete contrast to Kant’s moral principle: “Act in such a way that the maxims of your actions can apply to all human beings.” That is Kant’s moral principle. Rudolf Steiner says in response: “This sentence is the death of all individual impulses for action. It is not how all people would act that can be decisive for me, but what I must do in the individual case.” One might believe that this advocates the right that allows everyone to live out their arbitrary inclinations. However, the opposite follows from the entirety of the philosophy of freedom. Yet it is emphasized that every human morality must ultimately be an individual one, since human beings only attain their spiritual humanity through the unfolding of their individuality. “The individual in me is not my organism with its drives and feelings, but rather the single world of ideas that shines forth in this organism. My drives, instincts, and passions establish nothing more in me than that I belong to the general human species; the fact that an ideal element expresses itself in these drives, passions, and feelings in a particular way is what establishes my individuality. Through my instincts and drives, I am a human being, of whom there are a dozen; through the particular form of the idea, through which I designate myself as “I” within that dozen, I am an individual.”
A truly great conception of human freedom is also expressed in the following words:
“An action is perceived as free to the extent that its motive arises from the ideal part of my individual being; every other aspect of an action, whether it is performed under the compulsion of nature or the coercion of a moral norm, is perceived as unfree.
Man is free insofar as he is capable of following himself at every moment of his life. A moral act is only my act if, in this sense, it can be called free.”
The foundations for the life of the free human being are summarized in the words: “Living in the love of action and letting things be in the understanding of the will of others is the fundamental maxim of free human beings!” Here, the human being on the path to freedom is portrayed magnificently. Freedom is not an abstract ideal whose existence can be debated, but rather a goal that stands at the end of the developmental journey of every truly spiritual human being.
“Who among us can say that he is truly free in all his actions? But within each of us dwells a deeper being in which the free human being expresses himself.
Our life is composed of acts of freedom and acts of bondage. Yet we cannot fully grasp the concept of humanity without arriving at the free spirit as the purest expression of human nature. We are truly human only insofar as we are free.
That is an ideal, many will say. Undoubtedly, but one that works its way to the surface in our being as a real element.”
Here again, a sharp contrast to Kant’s conception of morality becomes apparent. “When Kant speaks of duty: ‘Duty! You sublime, great name, which contains within you nothing beloved, nothing that carries flattery, but rather submission; you who “establish a law...., before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly oppose it,” then man responds from the consciousness of the free spirit: “Freedom! You friendly, human name, which encompasses all that is morally beloved and most cherished by my humanity, and makes me no one’s servant; you who do not merely establish a law, but await what my moral love itself will recognize as law, because it feels unfree in the face of any law that is merely imposed.” This is the contrast between merely legal and free morality.”
In the monism advocated by Rudolf Steiner, moral laws are thus human thoughts. For the monist, the moral world order is therefore neither a reflection of a purely mechanical natural order nor a world order outside of humanity, “but rather a thoroughly free human creation.” Every human being is called to this high ideal. It is written in “The Philosophy of Freedom”: “Each of us is called to be a free spirit, just as every rosebud is called to become a rose.”
One of the most beautiful concepts ever formed in philosophy is that of moral imagination. For the truly free person, moral imagination is the source of action. Just as human beings, through the power of imagination, move from the world of ideas to specific, formed concepts, so too can they become truly creative in the moral realm through imagination.
A person who possesses moral imagination is morally productive. The morally creative person thus contributes to the ever-becoming moral reality. The process of cognition discussed in the first part of the Philosophy of Freedom is now further developed into the moral realm. As a person connects with perception through the thinking that arises within them, reality is formed. If this thinking is born of moral imagination, then this newly formed reality will enhance the moral value of the whole world. Something that was previously absent as an active force in this whole world will now be added by the morally productive human being.
In a lecture Rudolf Steiner gave at the public anthroposophical congress in August/September 1921, this lofty task of humanity was formulated as follows:
“Reality is something that comes into being through cognition. Reality is not something we must seek. Reality is something we create, in which we take a creative part; and the mystery of the human being consists in the fact that, when he is born, he is surrounded by a world that is not full reality, and that he is born to add to what presents itself to him in the outer sensory appearance to add something that arises only within him. The process of cognition is that to which man must rise so that reality may be contained in his world.”
Only through this can human life receive its true value; there can be no room left for a pessimistic view of life. Pessimism can only be regarded as an individual trait. A pessimistic worldview can never arise from a human spirit that thinks freely.
The problem of free will is entirely subsumed within the other question: What is the true nature of human thought? Insofar as this thought is found in the world of the supersensible, it simultaneously points to where human beings, as spiritual beings, actually belong. When their will learns to draw its impulses and motives from this supersensible world, then human beings will be able to act out of freedom. “If freedom is to be realized, then in human nature the will must be sustained by intuitive thinking; at the same time, however, it follows that a will can also be determined by something other than intuition, and it is in the free realization of intuition flowing from human existence that morality and its value arise.”
This freedom will only be able to emerge slowly and gradually in the world. No human being is at present a completely free personality, but neither does any human being belong entirely to the human species. In accordance with the development of the free personality, the moral value of all humanity will increase.
“The moral life of humanity is the sum total of the moral products of the imagination of free human individuals. This is the result of monism.”
That the entire human soul must be involved in such a path of development can be recognized from this sketchy overview. Rudolf Steiner speaks of the fact that the intuitive character of thinking must be grasped “experientially.” This means, at the same time, that the insight which recognizes the element of freedom in intuitive thinking must also be experienced. Thus, the philosophy of freedom can simultaneously be developed as an art. At the very end of the work, one then reads the sentence: “How philosophy, as an art, relates to human freedom; what the latter is; and whether we share in it or can come to do so: that is the central question of my work.” The final words are: “One must be able to confront the idea through experience; otherwise, one falls under its bondage.”
The period in which the Philosophy of Freedom was written almost coincides with the time when Rudolf Steiner was engaged with Goethe’s worldview. The very close contact that the young student had with Karl Julius Schröer during his years in Vienna often provided the occasion to further develop the problems that had been stirred in his soul by Goethe’s natural science. On Schröer’s recommendation, Rudolf Steiner was invited by Professor Kürschner to edit and introduce the scientific writings in the major Goethe edition of the “Deutsche National-Literatur.” When, shortly thereafter, the invitation to collaborate on the Goethe Archive in Weimar arrived, he was given a new opportunity to delve even deeper into Goethe’s unique approach to the study of nature.
Even during his student years, Rudolf Steiner grappled with the question of how to think about the world of the living, of the organic. In Goethe, he now finds a perspective through which this problem is largely resolved. The way of thinking of those who were leading figures in the scientific field at the time could not go beyond thoughts about inanimate nature. Goethe, however, did not stop at such thoughts, but brought them to such inner vitality that they could find access to the world of the organic. In Goethe’s mind, the ideas became “ideational forms”. The “living form of the idea,” in which Goethe could grasp the organic, stands in contrast to the “formless idea,” in which only the inorganic can be recognized. In “Lebensgang,” Steiner describes this living approach of Goethe’s: “In the recognition of the inorganic, concept follows concept in order to survey the interconnection of forces that produce an effect in nature. With regard to the organic, it is necessary to to allow one concept to grow out of another in such a way that, in the progressive, living transformation of concepts, images arise of what appears in nature as formed beings. Goethe strove for this by attempting to hold fast in his mind an ideal image of the plant leaf that is not a rigid, lifeless concept, but one that can manifest itself in the most diverse forms. If one allows these forms to emerge separately in the mind, one constructs the entire plant. One recreates in an ideal way the process in the soul through which nature shapes the plant in a real way.
If one seeks to comprehend the plant being in this way, one stands much closer to the natural world with the spirit than when grasping the inorganic with formless concepts. For the inorganic, one grasps only a mental illusion of that what exists in nature in a spiritless way. But in the becoming of the plant, there lives something that already bears a distant resemblance to what arises in the human spirit as an image of the plant. One becomes aware of how nature, in bringing forth the organic, itself brings a spirit-like essence into action within itself.”
For Goethe, this way of relating to nature was a matter of course, something that was simply given to him. Rudolf Steiner, on the other hand, faced the task of transforming what was a natural experience for Goethe into a scientifically and philosophically grounded theory of knowledge. He took this task very seriously and thoroughly. At the same time that he was working on the introductions to Goethe’s scientific writings, he wrote a book titled “Fundamentals of a Theory of Knowledge Based on Goethe’s Worldview.”(33) In the preface to this book, the starting point of the entire work is clearly defined. It is pointed out that while one has come to the conviction that Goethe’s poetry provides a certain foundation for the whole of culture, nothing is seen in Goethe’s scientific endeavors that could provide such a foundation. In Goethe’s various scientific discoveries, one sees only the “premonitions” of truths that science would have discovered even without Goethe. Goethe’s genius, it is believed, intuitively made these discoveries only somewhat earlier.
For Rudolf Steiner, the matter is entirely different. For him, it is not the various discoveries that matter, however important they may be, but the method. The magnificently comprehensive way in which Goethe views nature is of infinite value to him; it is the source from which modern natural science must learn to draw.
In this book, as well as in the introduction to Goethe’s scientific works(34) and later in “Goethe’s Worldview,” these ideas are then further elaborated. Rudolf Steiner was well aware that the task he had voluntarily set himself here would be extraordinarily difficult. But for him it was clear that this work had to be done at any cost. The salvation of science in its deepest sense was at stake. In a magnificent way, ever-increasing specialization had been achieved in the various fields of the sciences. A universal science, however, which proceeds from the human being as such and in which the human being could recognize his connection with the world, was completely lacking.
Every educated person recognizes the spiritual value bestowed by the works of Schiller, Lessing, Herder, and Goethe in modern times. The immense universality that speaks from these works is rightly regarded as one of the most important pillars of modern cultural life. In the scientific realm, such recognition does not exist. Rudolf Steiner regarded it as his task to make this possible. First arose the important question of the very nature of science. What is science? It is the quest to answer the questions that the human spirit asks itself. The realm in which the spirit develops is that of thoughts and ideas. Questions arise before the human spirit in the form of thoughts; they can also be developed only through thoughts. The perceptions conveyed to us by the senses provide the material. However, they bring us neither the questions nor the answers, but only the outer garment in which both can be clothed. The thoughts in which the mind lives, take shape as concepts or ideas. “True science,” , says Rudolf Steiner, “can only be idealism.” It deals only with ideal objects. Thoughts arise in the human mind that contain the answers to the questions posed to human beings by their relationship to their surroundings.
Such a science is found in Goethe. For him, the highest truth is born from the relationship the human mind has with nature. It is not the facts as such that are what is most important to him, but rather the way in which one views them. From Italy, Goethe writes to Knebel: “After what I have seen of plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, if I were ten years younger, I would be very tempted to make a journey to India, not to discover new things, but to view what has been discovered in my own way.” ” This contemplation of nature has always sprung from the whole being of the human person. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Goethe’s scientific observations is that they always arise from the whole person and thereby also express what this person experiences in the fullness of nature. When Goethe stands before living organisms, every part becomes for him a member of a whole:
“How everything weaves itself into the whole,
Interacting and living as one with the other!
How celestial forces rise and fall,
And pass the golden buckets to one another!”
When applied to plants, this approach proved highly fruitful. Goethe viewed the entire plant world as a vast, interconnected whole, a world of natural phenomena revealing themselves in life. Every plant within it is to be regarded as a distinct being that expresses, in a specific way, the underlying idea that underlies everything. Here Goethe arrives at his concept of the primordial plant, which for him—as becomes clear from the well-known conversation with Schiller in Jena—was a spiritual reality. When Schiller describes the primordial plant not as a result of experience but as an idea, Goethe replies that he is glad not only to have ideas but also to see them with his own eyes. In his observation of nature, Goethe arrives at such concrete ideas that they become visible to his mind’s eye. A “sensual-super-sensual vision” develops in him. He also speaks of how the basic form, which manifests itself in plants through an infinite number of metamorphoses, becomes ever more vivid to him. He speaks of a “becoming aware of the form” with which nature constantly plays, as it were, to bring forth the manifestations of life in a playful manner. The thought increasingly presses upon him that it must be possible to find a plant that purely represents this archetypal form. He hopes to be able to behold the archetypal phenomenon in an archetypal plant. His journey to Italy brings him ever closer to this goal. In Palermo, he has achieved it. He discovers the primordial plant.
It was only through Rudolf Steiner that the significance of these discoveries, which Goethe made in the world of the living, was fully recognized. That Goethe possessed the ability to express in clear thought God’s creative work in nature and the whole life of nature in God—that was his great achievement. Through him it was shown that a living organism can never be understood except through the living idea.
In the “Philosophy of Freedom”, the supersensible, intuitive character of thinking was demonstrated. Goethe shows in practice that only thinking born of intuition is capable of approaching the essence of a living organism. If one wishes to arrive at an exact science of life, this will only be possible through the development of a mode of thinking that transcends sensory perception and is no longer held captive by it. While Goethe spontaneously demonstrated that this is possible, Rudolf Steiner developed this mode of thinking methodically and established its philosophically unshakable foundation.
One can well compare Goethe’s “contemplative power of judgment” with what the “Philosophy of Freedom” says about the connection between perception and idea. Contemplation and intellectual judgment merge into a unity. Ideas emerge from organic nature to meet him. The entire process of nature’s becoming lives within these ideas. Because Goethe, as a person fully immersed in life and gifted with intuitive thinking, approached nature, the essence of living nature could reveal itself to him in an ideal form. Through this, his spirit connected with nature in the most intense way. In this connection, the highest of which the human spirit is capable is expressed: the connection between the self and the world. “As thinking takes hold of the idea, it merges with the source of worldly existence; that which acts from without enters into the human spirit: he becomes one with objective reality at its highest potency. The realization of the idea in reality is the true communion of the human being.”
The unique relationship between art and science, which was self-evident to Goethe, was made into a conscious method by Rudolf Steiner, who pointed out a path of development for the whole soul. Ultimately, Goethe was concerned neither with art nor with science; rather, he wanted to bring his entire human being to full development in the world. As a spirit, he sought to permeate the spirit of the whole world. In doing so, he rose above the opposition between art and science. For him, both sprang from a common source. The source from which the theory of metamorphosis and the theory of colors flowed is the same as that from which he drew as the poet of Iphigenia. Recall the prose passage already cited: “Beauty is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which, without their manifestation, would have remained eternally hidden from us.” One of the most beautiful formulations of this thought is: “The great works of art have been brought forth by human beings according to true and natural laws, just as the highest works of nature. Everything arbitrary, and imagined collapses; there is necessity, there is God.” From this idea that nature and art have the same origin, one understands that the one who seeks to fathom nature cannot be separated from the artist.
At the end of his study on Goethe’s worldview, Rudolf Steiner says the following about this connection between art and science:
“The goal of art and science is the overcoming of sensuality by the spirit. Science overcomes sensuality by dissolving it entirely into the spirit; art does so by implanting the spirit within it. Science looks through sensuality toward the idea, while art beholds the idea within sensuality. A sentence by Goethe that comprehensively expresses these truths may conclude our reflections: ‘I think science could be called the knowledge of the general, the abstracted knowledge; art, on the other hand, would be science put into practice; science would be reason, and art its mechanism, which is why it could also be called practical science. And so, ultimately, science would be the theorem, art the problem.’ ”(33)
In summary, one may recall here Rudolf Steiner’s statement: “Goethe wanted neither science nor art; he wanted the idea.”
The fundamental laws regarding the nature of the natural world discovered in this way were able to find wide application after Rudolf Steiner had provided them with a philosophical foundation. Goethe’s method proved fruitful not only in the realm of living nature but in relation to all natural phenomena. Further development of this method was possible in scientific, artistic, and social spheres alike. This will be demonstrated in the following chapters.
It is virtually impossible to provide an overview of all the courses, lectures, and individual insights that Rudolf Steiner offered to specialists and the general public. Only a few of the most important courses and lectures will be mentioned here. In the field of physics, lectures on the theory of light and heat were held in 1919 and 1920; a course on natural science in general was held from 1 923–24 at the Goetheanum. A large number of courses for teachers at the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart covered natural history, chemistry, and mathematics. A special course on mathematics and astronomy was held in 1921, and a course for farmers in 1924. These impulses were taken up and developed by an ever-growing number of students and scholars from a wide variety of fields. However, the material offered is so extensive that decades will have to pass before one will have fully discovered the new possibilities that have been opened up.
In Dornach, Stuttgart, and other locations, various physical and biological research laboratories were established. Many publications report on the results achieved there. In the field of agriculture, the biological fertilization methods described by Rudolf Steiner are being successfully implemented on numerous estates and experimental fields in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, England, Denmark, Sweden, and other countries.
3. The Resurrection of Feeling
“From beauty comes,
To beauty leads
Your work.”
—Morgenstern
Feeling is the force that occupies the central position in the human soul. Through feeling, the human being is connected to the world; through feeling, they experience their relationship to this world in the most intimate way.
Just as science is founded on thinking, so art is founded on feeling. The work of art is born from the directly experienced connection between soul and world. The greater and deeper this connection is experienced, the more significant a work of art becomes. The artist’s subjective and individual experience expands into the objective and cosmic. This was the case with Raphael and Leonardo. The Sistine Madonna and The Last Supper are therefore works of art that endure for centuries because the most intimate personal experience of their creators reached into the unknown heights and depths of the mysteries of creation. The greatness of every true work of art is determined by its cosmic origin. The external inspiration that leads to a work of art may be taken from the earth—but if an extraterrestrial, cosmic light does not an extraterrestrial, cosmic light, one cannot speak of true art.
Man, as an inhabitant of Earth, is today a narrowly defined, self-contained personality. His consciousness, concentrated in self-consciousness, is sharply delineated. Within these fixed contours, human feelings and passions surge and break through the boundaries. Much of what is called art in our time has its origin, on the one hand, in these feelings and passions that burst forth from the soul and express themselves in unrestrained forms, colors, and sounds; on the other hand, many of these so-called works of art bear the stamp of a rigid, contoured self-consciousness. Since this self-consciousness culminates in a refined intellectuality in the present age, this also predominates in art. But the true sources of art do not lie there. They lie in the inner connection that the soul has with the whole of the world. Although the human soul has chosen the earth as its dwelling place, its true home is the cosmos. Time and again, the need will awaken within it to find the cosmic forces that permeate the entire earth.
It is understandable that a truly cosmic art had to be lost in our time. It disappeared along with the spiritual image of humanity. For the human souls born today, who live in the conflict between intellect and passion, it is difficult to rediscover such art. The art of our time suffers, as Rudolf Steiner called it, from an acosmism, just as science suffers from agnosticism and religion from atheism. The redemption of art from this acosmism is a task that can only be accomplished by a large number of artists. Rudolf Steiner took the first, most important step by creating works of art in various fields that arose from the experience of the cosmic forces in all earthly events.
In his reflections on the significance of art for human life, Rudolf Steiner drew on Goethe’s ideas from an early stage. During his years in Vienna, he was confronted with the question of what the true essence of artistic creation was. His study of the idealistic philosophy of Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte shed little light on this matter. On the contrary, as much as he had to acknowledge the courage and grandeur of this idealistic philosophy , in the realm of aesthetics he saw that they all proceeded from an error. Hegel, for example, found the essence of art in the fact that the “Idea” appears in a form perceptible to the senses. The Idea in a sensory form was thus to reveal itself as beauty. Now, for Hegel, the Idea was still, to a certain degree, a spiritual reality. In the times that followed idealism, however, the Idea was experienced only as a pale abstraction. Such an Idea could then no longer appear in a form perceptible to the senses without leading to abstract intellectualism. Or else one no longer strove for its development, and as a result, realism emerged in art, which presented an arbitrary image drawn from the natural soul experience of the human being.
For Rudolf Steiner, the path the artist must take was a path of the spirit. The artist must transform the sensory world toward the spiritual world flowing in from the cosmos. “He (the artist) starts from what is perceptible to the senses; but he transforms it. In this transformation, he is not guided by a merely subjective impulse, but seeks to give the sensually appearing a form that shows it as if the spiritual itself were present. It is not the appearance of the idea in the form of the senses that is beautiful, I told myself, but the representation of the sensuous in the form of the spirit.” Thus, in art, one sees the spiritual world entering the world that is accessible only to the senses. True art unfolds in a realm between the human being and the spiritual world. The artist is on the path to this spiritual world. Rudolf Steiner laid out these thoughts in a small book, “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetics” (35), which reproduces a lecture he gave in 1888 at the Vienna Goethe Society. He was able to build upon Goethe because the latter, in his entire creative approach, serves as a model for modern humanity. Goethe’s way of approaching nature and the world always sought the idea underlying nature and the world. Striving for the spirit in this way, he was both creative and inquisitive.
Following the model of Goethe’s method, Rudolf Steiner developed decisive thoughts on the nature of art. Human beings, he describes, live in two worlds. The senses provide them with access to the external world; their thinking mind reveals to them a world born from within themselves. Between these two, however, a third world is possible. This is not naturally present; it must first be created by human beings. This third realm is the world of art. “The divine, which natural things lack, must be implanted in them by human beings themselves, and herein lies a lofty task that falls to artists. They must, so to speak, bring the kingdom of God to this earth.”
This view is closely related to Schiller’s. The “Aesthetic Letters,” which were mentioned earlier, also refer to a third world as the true world of beauty; in which human beings live out their “play instinct.” Through the view of art that Rudolf Steiner developed in the wake of Goethe and Schiller, art is viewed from a completely different and much broader perspective than is usually the case. Just as Schiller’s “Aesthetic Letters” are a path of education for every human being, Rudolf Steiner also points to a new possibility of development in the realm of art. Art can become the noblest force acting within the human soul, connecting the two separate worlds of the senses and the spirit.
The word used in the "Philosophy of Freedom" regarding the “experiencing” of the idea must be quoted here. The philosophy of freedom and Goethean aesthetics are most closely connected. But one should not believe that because art is made into a generally human matter, a flattening must follow in the artistic realm. The opposite is the case. Precisely because art rediscovers its connection with the generally human, a standard for distinguishing between real and apparent art. Only such works of art will then still be regarded as true works of art, in which the human spirit, in its highest potency, elevates the phenomena of the sensory world into the realm of the living spirit and recreates them there in beauty a second time. Through the transformation of the sensory world—the spiritualization of matter—the external world will take on a form that the human spirit can experience with deeper satisfaction. The creative artist thus continues the natural process on a higher plane. The same forces that underlie nature’s process of becoming continue to work in his soul. What remains hidden in nature appears in the work of art in a form perceptible to the senses. Thus, art becomes “a sensory manifestation in the form of the idea,” as Rudolf Steiner puts it. “The beautiful is not the divine in a sensory-real guise; no, it is the sensually real in a divine guise.” The artist is the one who “elevates the world into the sphere of divinity.” Goethe’s words: “Consider the what, but consider the how even more” are once again guiding here. The world of beauty is an illusory world. It presents us with phenomena that appear to us as an ideal world. The “what” remains here in the realm of the sensory; the “how” is of an ideal nature. It is the “how” that matters most here. It is not the object that determines whether something is a work of art, but only the question of to what extent it succeeds in elevating this object into the world of the spirit. It is understandable that great artists will particularly choose motifs that enable them to bring the spiritual world into being in its most perfect form out of earthly phenomena. A theory of beauty based on the fundamental idea that “the beautiful is a sensuous reality that appears as if it were an idea,” as Rudolf Steiner formulated it, must still be further developed. Only the foundations for this have been laid.
In the present day, we are still very far removed from such a view. Art and science go their separate ways. In both fields, a rigid, killing force. This is not, of course, to deny the importance of thorough specialized training in the various fields. Yet while the acquisition of specialized knowledge currently stands at the beginning of the path, in a meaningful development of art and science this specialized knowledge can only signify the conclusion. Instead of being primary, it will have to take on a wholly secondary position. Whoever wishes to work in the natural sciences in the sense that Goethe did and Rudolf Steiner further developed, whose task will first be to bring his entire humanity to fruition. The human being himself is the starting point; his soul is the organ that opens up access to the world of ideas. Their character and moral personality form the only true foundation of this entire endeavor. Hand in hand with this general human development, and in part following from it, and partly following it, the necessary specialized knowledge can be developed. It is only in the course of such a general human education that it will become clear in which direction the human soul actually wishes to develop.
The same must be true of the art of the future. Anyone who wishes to be an artist must first become a human being. Here, too, training of the soul’s powers, the formation of character and personality, must come first. The necessary technical knowledge will be able to develop thereafter. The necessary technique will be able to emerge from art, just as every true scientific method has arisen from science itself. Of course, from time to time, divinely gifted artists and scholars will appear who, even without this general human, spiritual education, bestow their great gifts upon the world. Yet these are exceptions, of whom each century sees only a few, and who, by the very nature of their appearance, already reveal that what is significant for other people does not apply to them. For the many artists and scientific researchers of our time, however, what is presented here can be of extraordinary value. One would prefer to do away with existing terms, even the words “scientific researcher” and “artist,” since these words today denote specific professions and fields of study. The person for whom a particular branch of science is a profession is just as far removed from his actual task as the artist who practices his work as a profession.
For Rudolf Steiner, entering the world of beauty meant something special. It opened up a path for him to lead humanity to an experience of the spiritual world through art. In contrast to the abstract concepts in which certain circles of that time spoke of the spirit, this opened up the possibility of learning to find this spirit as reality.
A spiritual quest without art must always remain “unworldly.” In the “Theosophical Society,” within whose framework Rudolf Steiner worked at the beginning of this century, art was completely absent. He regarded it as a concrete task for himself to give the regular meetings an artistic character. Through his connection with Marie von Sivers, his future wife, great possibilities opened up in this field. Together with her, an entirely new artistic endeavor was established. In his “Life Story,” he writes about this: “Marie von Sivers was the personality who, through her very being, made it possible to keep any sectarian character away from what arose through us and to give the endeavor a character that places it within the general spiritual and cultural life. She was deeply interested in the dramatic arts and the art of declamation and recitation, and had undergone training in this direction—namely at the finest institutions in Paris—which had brought her skills to a beautiful perfection. She was still continuing her training at the time I met her in Berlin, in order to familiarize herself with the various methods of artistic speech.
Marie von Sivers and I soon became close friends. And on the basis of this friendship, a collaboration unfolded across the widest range of intellectual fields. Cultivating anthroposophy, as well as the arts of poetry and recitation together, soon became our life’s purpose.”(1)
The starting point was the entire realm of language and speech. Through language, human beings possess a rich means of expression. Language most directly reveals the divine origin of the human being. In speaking, the human being reveals his divine, spiritual nature.
In the words of the Gospel of John , “In the beginning was the Word,” points to a profound mystery of creation. The word, as used by human beings, is a final, solidified remnant of this creative Word. Just as the world-creating Deity gave form and content to the world through the Word, so does the speaking human being do this in his own small world. The human striving, through poetry and beautiful recitation, expresses his longing to rediscover this divine creative Word. Over the centuries, the experience of this Word has steadily diminished. The sense of the hidden forces at work in language was lost. Instead of finding in the word a reflection of the divine creative will, attention was increasingly focused on the external meaning, the content, that the word denotes. The speaking human no longer perceived himself as a creator in a spiritual-soul world, but as someone who uses an external means to make himself understood. Ancient poems, for example the Finnish pos Kalewala, still tell of the tremendous power of language. Wainemoinen, one of the heroes of this epic, is described as a spell-caster. Through the magic of his language, he can influence nature and the souls of human beings. To this day, peoples who have remained distant from our external cultural life have retained some knowledge of the powers that live within language.
The age in which humanity now stands is characterized by the development of the consciousness soul. This means that the forces at work in the soul are primarily those that lead the human being into the external reality of phenomena. Humanity has lost its connection to the cosmos and is linked to the earthly environment through its senses. In the earthly environment, everything is found in rigid, hard forms. Intellectual thinking attempts to connect these phenomena logically or causally. In this process, the word has become entirely subservient to ordinary everyday life and the intellect. The true meaning that every word possesses—or that can still be found within every word—is increasingly lost. Rudolf Steiner expresses this in his “Life Course” as follows: “The ‘word’ is exposed to danger in two directions that can arise from the development of the consciousness soul. It serves communication in social life, and it serves the communication of what has been recognized logically and intellectually. On both sides, the ‘word’ loses its own validity. It must adapt to the ‘meaning’ it is meant to express. It must make us forget how a reality lies in the tone, in the sound, and in the very structure of the sound itself. The beauty, the luminosity of the vowel, the characteristic nature of the consonant, is lost from language. The vowel becomes soulless, the consonant spiritless. And thus language steps entirely out of the sphere from which it originates, the sphere of the spiritual. It becomes a servant of intellectual-cognitive and spirit-shunning social life. It is completely torn away from the realm of art.
True spiritual insight falls quite instinctively into the “experience of the word.” It learns to find its way toward the soul-borne resonance of the vowel and the spirit-powered shaping of the consonant. It gains an understanding of the mystery of language development. This mystery consists in the fact that once, through the word, divine-spiritual beings were able to speak to the human soul, whereas now this word serves only for communication in the physical world.”
Just how little the mysteries hidden in language are experienced in our time can be seen, for example, in the tendency to form completely meaningless new words from the initial letters of various words, which are adopted and used by people without any inner content. Rudolf Steiner regarded it as a special task to bring the dying word back to life. He was supported in this endeavor in an extraordinary way by Marie von Sivers, who, through her great enthusiasm for the spiritual beauty of the true word, was particularly suited to stand by his side in this task.
Munich provided a very favorable environment for the development of this artistic work. It began in 1907 with a mystery play by Eduard Schur£, “The Sacred Drama of Eleusis” , which had previously been translated by Marie von Sivers and adapted by Rudolf Steiner for performance at a congress. This gathering had a completely different character from the preceding theosophical congresses, because here the aim was to provide an artistic setting. The large concert hall was decorated in an entirely new way to bring the surroundings in which the words were spoken into harmony.
Between 1910 and 1913, Rudolf Steiner’s four Mystery Dramas were performed one after another at the general congresses held at that time: “The Portal of Initiation,” “The Trial of the Soul,” “The Guardian of the Threshold,” and “The Awakening of the Soul.” These were not dramas that Rudolf Steiner had already completed and that were simply awaiting performance. No, he wrote them on the spot. Each completed scene was rehearsed immediately. Rudolf Steiner discussed the entire drama and the manner of presentation in detail with the performers—some of whom were amateurs, others professional actors—who felt connected to the movement. The necessary sets and costumes were made by the actors themselves, also according to Rudolf Steiner’s specifications. It is important to pay attention to this way of writing, as it is entirely consistent with the working method that Rudolf Steiner applied in other contexts as well. He never spoke or wrote without thereby responding to an existing need. What was spoken and written was always directly connected to specific people or groups of people who demanded it. For Rudolf Steiner, literature without a real connection to specific people or groups of people was an abstraction.
It is impossible to discuss the Mystery Dramas here in as much detail as would be necessary to gain an understanding of their significance. Only a few hints may follow.
What is unique—and initially disconcerting—about these dramas is that they depict the developmental path of a group of people; they do not limit themselves to portraying external life, but also trace the destinies of these people in the soul and spiritual worlds. The characters appear as they do in external life, yet one also comes to know them as their spiritual beings appear in the soul world or the spiritual world. Such images are not to be regarded as allegorical or symbolic; they are just as much “reality” as the scenes that unfold in external life. For example, Maria, one of the main characters, appears accompanied by the three forces at work within her soul. Maria is a highly developed soul who can immerse her entire being in the spiritual forces that permeate nature. The spiritual and at the same time moral impulses that work in nature flow through and inspire her. The three soul forces that appear in the figures of Philia, Astrid, and Luna can be regarded as representatives of love, wisdom, and will; yet they are just as real human beings as Maria is. At the same time, spiritually speaking, they are the bearers of the aforementioned elements.
It is not easy for modern people to accept such a dual mode of depicting human figures. They have become so accustomed to the idea that only what is perceptible to the senses is genuine and real that they can see only allegories and symbols in a depiction of soul and spiritual forces. But anyone who tries to immerse themselves in these Mystery Dramas with sufficient devotion will discover that they are created from a much deeper experience than the “realistic” dramas of our time.
The group of people who are experiencing a shared destiny here is gathered around a leading figure, Benedictus, whom they recognize as an initiate into higher spiritual knowledge. This Benedictus finds in Maria a great help for his sublime work. For the audience, the life development of three people is now depicted in particular: Johannes Thomasius, a painter, Professor Capesius, and Dr. Strader. The destinies of these people are most closely intertwined. The way in which the events are portrayed reveals how closely the development of the individual is connected to that of the entire world. The human being who strives for the full unfolding of his inner being influences world events in the most intimate way. Indeed, these world events are ultimately a result of the human striving for the full realization of the ego. The ego and the world are mirror images of one another. The future of the world depends on human striving, just as the present state of the world is the product of human striving in earlier times. The Mystery Dramas illustrate this through powerful images that span life and death, and repeated earthly lives. One sees how spiritual impulses that arose as early as the ancient Egyptian cultural epoch continue to exert their influence through the Middle Ages and into modern times. Opposed to the spiritual power that seeks to guide this entire development in accordance with the highest divine principles are the forces that wish to disrupt the divine work. They seek access to human souls and can indeed find this access as long as the souls cannot recognize the true nature of these forces. They appear as Lucifer and Ahriman. Lucifer is the power that, in the course of world development, seeks to lead the human soul to a freedom that finds its foundation not in the divine plan of creation but in the soul itself. It is the same power that is depicted in the story of the Fall as the tempting serpent. In every human striving for freedom, a Luciferic element is always hidden. Even in the desire for beauty; and only by the soul taking in forces emanating from Christ can this Luciferic element be brought within its proper bounds. The name Ahriman is taken from ancient Persian wisdom. Ahriman, the adversary of the God of Light, Ormuzd, rules over darkness. He is connected with earthly matter, and his effect on the human soul is such that the soul sees realities only in what is outwardly tangible and in the hard intellect. One could say that the person who follows the Luciferic impulses entirely wishes to let only the heart speak, while the one who follows only the Ahrimanic impulses follows the brain alone. These two figures, too, are not meant as allegories or symbols, but are portrayed as spiritual realities.
Although the Mystery Dramas are based on Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science, they can still be followed directly as dramas, even if many of the issues they touch upon can only be clarified through deeper study of spiritual science. As works of art, however, the Mystery Dramas speak directly to the human soul. The audience member may feel that they are participating with their own soul in the powerful events unfolding on stage. The often-used term “world theater” becomes a reality here. What takes place on this world theater can be experienced in the soul of the audience member.
The form of these Mystery Plays can be called entirely new in every detail. Above all, the way language is handled is new. The beings on the spiritual plane speak a language entirely different from those on the physical plane. While on the physical plane language may still have a close connection with the element of thought, on the spiritual plane every element of language—vowels and consonants—must become an expression of the spiritual itself. What was immediately revealed to the writer’s spirit was expressed in a form that is both artistically beautiful and spiritually true.
A completely new art form, eurythmy, is also closely connected to the endeavor described above: to express the actual speech-forming forces in a spiritual way. (36, 37) This new art of movement must not be confused with dance or the art of mime. Eurythmy takes the spoken word or the music being played as its starting point. When a person speaks or makes music, they express an inner soul content through sounds and tones. These sounds and tones are formed on the basis of certain spiritual laws. The sounds that make up a word—vowels and consonants—have properties through which, depending on their combination, a specific relationship of the human being to their environment is expressed. By speaking a word or a series of words, the human being expresses what they experience in their environment. Two factors play a role here: the human soul and the objects or events in their environment. In every word, the vowels reflect what lives in the soul as sensation, while the consonants express more what acts as a formative principle. The vowels express more the inner experience of the soul, while the consonants express more the outer form of what lies outside the soul. Together they form the word, in which the relationship between the soul and the external world is revealed.
In all good poetry, one will be able to find a reflection of this fundamental idea. Lyric poems, in which the poet’s inner mood is primarily expressed, will have a strongly vocal character. In epic poetry, the consonantal element will play a greater role. If one wishes to express the forces at work in nature, storms, thunderstorms, or the violence of the stormy sea, then the poet will naturally use a language in which consonants predominate.
But every vowel and every consonant has its own, deeper value, as Rudolf Steiner repeatedly stated in his lectures on eurythmy. He also explained how he had come to understand the deeper meaning of vowels and consonants. He derived this meaning, as it were, from the human organism. The most important organ that humans use when speaking is the larynx. In fact, every organ in the human organism can only be truly understood when viewed in relation to the organism as a whole. In his theory of metamorphosis, Goethe points out that the entire plant is to be regarded as a metamorphosis of the individual leaf. Conversely, the tendency toward a whole plant also lies within every leaf. The organs of the human organism are to be viewed in the same way. Every organ carries within itself the potential of the entire organism. In one organ this will be clearly visible, in another barely discernible. However, the larynx and its surroundings reveal themselves to the spiritual scientist as an organ in which this tendency toward the development of the entire human organism is very clearly recognizable. It is, as it were, a small human being situated between the chest and the head.9For a detailed description that goes into every detail, one must refer to anthroposophical literature. (55) Certain tendencies toward movement are at work in this larynx, which are most closely connected with the formation of speech. These are not fully executed movements, but rather movements that are held back, thereby making the utterance of sounds possible.
These tendencies toward movement can now be taken up by the entire human organism, especially by the limbs. Each vowel or consonant is then expressed through a specific movement. Although the character of these movements was described by Rudolf Steiner, anyone practices eurythmy can experience the accuracy of this character firsthand. The entire human organism thus becomes an instrument in eurythmy. What in speaking and singing is done only by the larynx is now taken over by the entire organism in fully formed movements. The movements held back in the larynx are fully revealed here. Sound and tone merge into movements, not arbitrarily, but according to specific laws that can be read from the human organism itself through a “sensory-super-sensory vision” in the sense of Goethe.
In this eurythmy, the arms and hands are the most important means of expression. The movements of the legs primarily express meter and rhythm. In so-called tone eurythmy, the same principle is followed. Here it is the tones and, above all, the intervals that are expressed through specific movements.
Individuals or groups of people can thus portray a recited poem or a piece of music. They do this by tracing forms, writing them onto the floor, as it were, which find their origin in the structure of the poem or the musical piece itself.
The person who practices eurythmy enters a whole new world, the world of the forces that shape sounds and tones. In the art of dance or the art of mime, the aim is usually to express certain feelings and moods evoked by a poem or a piece of music. In euryth , the focus is on the spirit of the poem or composition itself, by approaching the formation of sounds and tones. It is not the subjective experience that is most important, but the expression of the actual content. This naturally results in a certain degree of constraint for the eurythmist. However, this is no greater than that of a musician who also plays specific notes in the manner in which he does so, yet remains completely free. Eurythmy allows even greater scope, since, for example, when portraying a particular poem, one need not reproduce all vowels and consonants, but can limit oneself to those that are particularly characteristic of the poem. There will always be room for individual interpretation, for everyone experiences the characteristic features of a poem or a composition in a different way. From this experience a new creation in movement emerges as a free artistic act.
Eurythmy is performed in colorful robes and veils, with lighting that constantly changes to match the mood of the poem or composition. This can awaken a deep and pure experience of beauty in the soul of the viewer.
The performance of the Mystery Dramas in Munich gave rise to the need for a dedicated building where these Mystery Dramas could find a fitting setting, which would also serve as a center for eurythmy performances and for further anthroposophical work. Thus, the plan to erect such a building in Munich took shape. Various circumstances led then led to it ultimately being built in Dornach near Basel. Designed by Rudolf Steiner down to the finest details, a building emerged in a completely new, striking style.
In his lectures on architecture, compiled in the work “Paths to a New Architectural Style”, he speaks of the great impulses that have always dominated the golden ages of architecture. One always finds a specific worldview in the background, without which the true character of the architecture in question cannot be understood.
Our modern age lacks such a worldview. Technology has become the all-dominating force. The power of the machine permeates all of human life and directs attention toward the earth and everything that is earthbound. Thus, no architecture could emerge that is born of a genuine worldview. For modern architecture, right angles, concrete, glass, and iron are the characteristic elements. Functional architecture appeared and undoubtedly brought with it a certain beauty; the same beauty that a well-constructed machine can possess possess. The scope of this beauty, however, is very limited. The house as a dwelling machine, the department store as an enlarged shop window, the commercial building as a giant safe—all have a suffocating and breathless effect, despite their outward grandeur. Yet for the living human soul, even the tallest skyscraper is a cramped, rectangular sarcophagus in which the soul cannot live. It is merely a space for the earthbound and the needs associated with this body.
In ancient times, this was different. The Egyptian pyramid represents the power of a divine world active on earth. It arose from a powerful spiritual vision. The architectural concept of the Greek era was characterized by Rudolf Steiner in the aforementioned lectures with the words: “We live in the landscape, but the spirit is among us.” The deity lives within the temple itself. If we compare this with the Gothic era, we find an architectural principle that Rudolf Steiner describes as follows: “We dwell in the house, but we elevate the soul by intuitively rising to the spirit.”
The architectural style of the Goetheanum sought to express the worldview of human souls living today and in the future. In our time, the human soul seeks conscious union with the spiritual world. The Gothic impulse continued to develop and expand. The seeking soul encountered the world spirit itself in nature. The laws of the cosmos meet it on earth through nature. The human soul unites with the world spirit. This is expressed by the architecture of the first Goetheanum. Its forms speak a spiritual language.
This should not be understood as Rudolf Steiner wishing to symbolically express a specific worldview worldview. The entire architectural work of art arose as an immediate spiritual creation. Only upon later reflection does one rediscover the impulses that governed the entire creative work.
In certain circles, the term “temple” is used incorrectly. From the anthroposophical perspective, this word was certainly not chosen for the Goetheanum. Its purpose—to facilitate the performance of Mystery Dramas, eurythmy performances, and lectures on spiritual science, in no way justifies such a designation. Rudolf Steiner gave it the name “Goetheanum” with the addition “School of Spiritual Science.”
The cornerstone was laid in September 1913. A large number of artists, representing seventeen languages, soon flocked together to work at the Goetheanum under the direction of Rudolf Steiner. Although the outbreak of World War I caused a significant delay in the construction, work continued harmoniously throughout the war years. In September 1920, the Goetheanum, though not yet fully completed, was dedicated on the occasion of a college course in which many artists and scientists participated alongside Rudolf Steiner.
Anyone who looked at the old Goetheanum was immediately struck by the organic connection it had with the landscape. It rose in the foothills of the Swiss Jura Mountains and was situated there in such a way that it was, as it were, supported from behind by the higher parts of this mountains, while opening up toward the front together with the entire landscape,
It consisted primarily of two massive domes, the larger of which vaulted over the auditorium, while the smaller one covered the stage area. These two organically connected domes rested on a wooden central structure, which in turn rested on a broad concrete foundation. A wide terrace surrounded the building, into which three portals led. In the lower concrete structure large dressing rooms along with a series of smaller and larger rooms used as rehearsal spaces and studios. Two wide, monumental staircases led upward. They were supported by uniquely designed pillars. Upon entering, one could immediately discern from these pillars some of the new ideas underlying this architecture. They were not only constructed according to a principle of functionality, nor were they decorated in an arbitrary manner. Their form expressed a living, organically supporting principle. Just as the trunk of a tree is shaped by the forces of support itself, and just as the limbs of humans and animals are formed, so were these pillars designed.
As one ascended, the eye fell upon a beautifully designed, sculptural motif reminiscent of the vestibular system near the human ear—the three semicircular canals. Where a person’s spatial orientation changed as they climbed, they saw this process of directional shift artistically rendered in concrete.
The entire concrete substructure conveyed, through its distinctive shape, the impression of a mighty, supporting force. The wooden structure, crowned by the two domes and the three vaulted roofs of the portals, rose above it in forms that, despite their large dimensions, gave a light, fluid impression. Windows, repeatedly grouped into triads that continued upward in an organically connected wooden sculpture, subdivided the large exterior surface in a rhythmic manner. The roof was covered with Norwegian slate. The great hall could seat nearly a thousand people. The seats were all located on the ground floor, arranged as in an amphitheater.
The large dome was supported by two rows of seven wooden columns, which stood on carved pentagonal bases and flared upward into equally carved capitals. Massive architraves connected these capitals, their sculptural design serving as a continuation of the motifs found in the bases and capitals. The small dome was supported in the same manner supported by twelve columns.
The sculptural treatment of the wood, particularly the column bases and capitals, was very distinctive. In the motifs underlying these carvings, there was a connection that could only be understood through a Goethean concept of metamorphosis. To the casual observer, the motifs appeared unrelated. But anyone who tried to immerse themselves in them soon discovered how the following motif had repeatedly emerged from the previous one and, in a certain way, further developed the original motif. Just as the leaves and blossoms of a plant are connected yet always distinct, so it was here with these motifs. For anyone who observed them, it was a direct exercise in developing a true sense of art.
The windows were cut. The differences in glass thickness created an interplay of light and dark within the individual colors. The motifs of the stained-glass windows depicted inner phases of development of the human soul.
The domes were painted on the inside, also based on motifs specified by Rudolf Steiner that expressed the major phases of human development. One half of the small dome was painted primarily by Rudolf Steiner himself; the other half represented, in a certain sense, a mirror image of it. The paints used were derived from plant materials. The small dome, in particular, shone with an extraordinarily vivid palette of colors.
The impression one received upon entering the great hall was indescribable. The viewer was completely enveloped in the multicolored light streaming through the windows, evoking a sensation as if the soul had finally arrived here at its true home. As the eye then wandered along the columns, capitals, and architraves, one found no actual point of rest anywhere, but was, as it were, guided through the entire space by the unfolding motifs. It was as if one were encountering a living, spiritual being. The soul was stirred by a powerful inner movement that led to a profound experience of beauty and culminated in the sensation of having entered a spiritual cosmos, a building in which the spirit of humanity itself had found a dwelling place.
Rudolf Steiner intended to place a large sculpture in the smaller domed room. He worked on this artwork, which was carved in wood, for several years with the help of a few sculptors. It was to be a representation of the “Representative of Humanity,” who strides forward between the two great opposing forces, Lucifer and Ahriman. We have already touched upon the significance of these forces in a few words above. The human being of our time is exposed to two great dangers. On the one hand, he is in danger of falling into the captivity of the material heaviness that dominates the world around him; on the other hand, if he flees from this earthly heaviness into the realm of imagination, fall prey to fanaticism. One must consider these two forces, Ahriman and Lucifer, not from too narrow a perspective. They are most closely connected with the entire development of humanity and the world. Without the Luciferic impulse, the striving for independence would not have awakened in human beings; without the Ahrimanic influence, human beings would not have found a relationship to the outer world. Humanity’s task for the future is by no means to flee from or evade these two forces, but rather to find its way between them through the development of the Christ within themselves to find their way between these two powers. The representative of humanity, Christ, as Rudolf Steiner depicts him in this monumental group, is therefore not in conflict with these two powers; rather, one sees him striding forward, establishing a balance between the two and thereby overcoming the one-sided dangers they bring. The figure of Christ raises his left arm upward; his right arm points downward. The gesture is not one of cursing, but of blessing. Above the raised left arm, Lucifer plunges downward with broken wings. His world of appearance and illusion collapses in the face of selfless love. Beneath the right arm, Ahriman shrinks. He is depicted lying in hard, skeletal rock forms, entangled in a network of solidified rays of light. While Lucifer’s figure seems to be born from the metamorphosed forms of the heart, encompassing the entire chest with larynx and ears, Ahriman’s figure appears as a metamorphosis of the hardening forces of the head.
Christ, striding between the two, represents—through the very manner in which both the head and the body are rendered—the living love born of the Spirit. One can describe the flowing lines of the robe only by saying that they are waves of flowing love. Concentration and supreme wisdom are expressed in the forms of the face.
When the old Goetheanum went up in flames on New Year’s Eve 1922–23, this monument was not yet in the building. Various parts of it were still in the studio, where Rudolf Steiner was still working on it regularly. It was then installed in the new Goetheanum, though not where Rudolf Steiner had envisioned it in the old Goetheanum. The entirely different forms of the new building made such an installation difficult.
After the old Goetheanum was destroyed by fire, Rudolf Steiner very soon drew up the plans for its reconstruction. However, it could no longer be built in the same way. Not only because such a structure made of a material as delicate as wood did not seem safe enough at that time, but also because the Anthroposophical Society had grown significantly in recent years and other needs had become decisive. The new Goetheanum was to provide not only space for the Mystery Dramas, eurythmy performances, and lectures, but also space for the work carried out by the various “sections” of the “School of Spiritual Science.”
Although the new Goetheanum largely retains the same floor plan, it has become a completely different building. It is constructed entirely of reinforced concrete. Once again, one first enters a basement level containing cloakrooms, conference rooms, a large lecture hall, and many offices. A terrace now also surrounds the main building, which rises above this basement level. The forms, including those of the slate-covered roof, are, however, completely different from the earlier ones. Instead of the lively, organic-looking forms of wood, one now sees large, massive concrete surfaces. While the forms of the old Goetheanum were akin to those of the plant kingdom, the new Goetheanum is more reminiscent of the mineral kingdom. Yet with what mastery the heavy material has been used! The massive concrete structures rise, despite the enormous weight the material suggests, lightly and freely into the air. Like an impressive castle, this light-gray building stands on the Dornach hill.
In the large hall there are now no columns supporting the vault. The huge roof spans the hall space completely freely and impressively. A large, modern stage now stands where the small dome once was. The various rooms of the sections and the secretariat are housed on a mezzanine level. This new Goetheanum was opened during the Michaelmas season in September 1928. However, it is not yet complete; only parts have been sculpturally developed that they give a glimpse of what a rich and original work of art will be given to the world upon the completion of this building.
Finally, a few words should be said about the significance that art born of anthroposophy can have for the human soul.
The power of feeling experience is awakened in the soul in the purest way. This connects with the spiritual impulses that flow through the universe and is thereby raised to a higher reality. Not only the artist, but everyone who, out of an inner need, practices or contemplates one of the aforementioned arts, will be able to experience a redeeming power. While human beings in our time are strongly bound to the earth through their intellect and their life of instincts, their soul is freed from this earthly bondage through such art. They will learn to find their balance between heaven and earth.
One of the most beautiful lectures Rudolf Steiner ever gave was the one on “Truth, Beauty, Goodness” (January 19, 1923), shortly after the destruction of the old Goetheanum. The significance of experiencing beauty through art is conveyed here in a special way. It is shown that it is only through beauty that human beings can truly be reconciled with their existence on Earth. The three great ideals—truth, beauty, and goodness—have always been pursued together by human beings out of a sure instinct. All three are also in a special way with the essence of the human being. The experience of truth is possible for the human being through the connection he has with pre-birth existence. The material being of the human being on earth is formed from the world of pre-birth forces. Through this, the foundation is laid within him that makes an experience of truth possible. His soul, however, finds no direct access to this pre-birth realm. Through the experience of beauty, however, a semblance in the world. This beautiful semblance is what truly connects the soul to everything it encounters on Earth. Beauty, as it were, offers the soul a consolation for the loss of its pre-earthly existence. Life on Earth necessarily brings with it a certain sadness, in which the human being finds consolation only through the sense of beauty that blossoms in his soul. The sorrow that arises from the realization that here on earth there is only a reflection of the truth, not the truth itself, is overcome through the experience of beauty.
Goodness or virtue connects the soul with the future. Its reality will only be able to fully emerge in times to come. It gives the human soul the immediate possibility of connecting with the spiritual world. While truth is connected with the past and goodness with the future, beauty brings about the right connection with the present. “To be true, for a human being, means to be rightly connected with one’s spiritual past. For a human being, to have a sense of beauty means not denying the connection with the spiritual in the physical world. To be good means, for a human being, to form a seed for a spiritual world in the future.”
This view demonstrates the extraordinarily great cultural significance that lies in the development of a true sense of beauty.
4. The Resurrection of Will
“For the social question is essentially an educational question, and the educational question is essentially a medical question.”
—Rudolf Steiner
The highest thing a human being can achieve on earth is a life entirely in the service of humanity. Whoever lifts their soul into the world of the spirit through thought and then brings this world into being in the form of ideas thereby accomplishes an important deed. Even those who find impulses in the world of the spirit that allow them to reshape the phenomena of the earth in a beautiful form thereby render. But the most direct service to humanity is found in social practice. In doing so, the human being integrates his own will, directed toward the spirit, into the world will. He becomes creative in the areas that are most difficult to access—the areas of social life.
To be able to do this from true spiritual impulses and with fully human experience, a threefold resurrection of the soul’s powers is necessary. The motives for purely social action can spring only from the free human spirit. Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy of freedom identifies moral imagination as the source of this action. Through thinking, the human being finds access to the world of moral creative forces that flow into their soul in the form of intuitions.
The power of will, thus awakened and guided by spiritual impulses, is the most hidden force in human soul life, lying deep within the physical organism. At the same time, however, human beings are by nature most intimately connected with the world spirit precisely in their life of the will. To achieve a liberation of these forces of the will, long and arduous work is necessary. All factors that exert the greatest influence in human life work to to keep the life of the will captive. To grasp the bondage of the life of the will, one need only think of the power of heredity and the daily circumstances with which the human being has become intertwined from moment to moment. The forces that can lead to liberation here must penetrate so deeply into the organism that they overcome it right down into the physical connections. Only then can there be a true resurrection of the forces.
The philosophy of freedom can bring about such a resurrection for the realm of the entire cognitive process. But if this liberated life of the will is to be adapted to social practice, it will have to undergo further training, as we described in an earlier chapter.
The completely different ways in which thinking, feeling, and willing are connected to the physical organism were first clearly and coherently described by Rudolf Steiner. This spiritual conception of the threefold human being occupies a central place in his later works. A brief presentation of it should precede the further consideration of the practice of social work based on an anthroposophical path of development.
In 1917, a work by Rudolf Steiner was published under the title “On the Riddles of the Soul” (38), in which he concisely developed some fundamental ideas regarding the connection between the human soul and the physical organism—ideas that represent a discovery of the utmost significance. Rudolf Steiner emphasizes that he worked on the development of these ideas for over thirty years before writing them down.
The starting point is the triad of the soul’s powers: imagination, feeling, and will. Modern natural science already views imagination in connection with the processes of the nervous system and its extensions into the senses on the one hand and into the interior of the bodily organism on the other. This points to an extremely important connection, even if doubts remained regarding its nature. For feeling and volition, however, such a connection is entirely absent. For a long time, leading psychologists such as Ziehen and Ebbinghaus regarded feeling as a concomitant of imagination. They spoke of a specific emotional tone that was said to be inherent in an image. Feeling was thus not recognized as an independent soul force, but only as a property of imagination. From a spiritual-scientific perspective, feeling as an independent power of the soul demonstrates a connection with the processes that are expressed in the entire respiratory rhythm. This respiratory rhythm is connected to the nervous and brain processes, just as feeling is connected to imagination. For when a change in the respiratory rhythm occurs, this change is communicated to the nervous-sensory system via the fluid pressure of the cerebrospinal fluid.
To illustrate the connection between the breathing rhythm and feeling to some extent, Rudolf Steiner uses the example of the musical experience. One must distinguish between the content of a musical event and the emotional experience to which it gives rise. The content, namely, stimulates the formation of certain ideas conveyed by the ear. The emotional life, on the other hand, expresses itself directly in the breathing rhythm. In the encounter between the breathing rhythm and that that which is brought about by a nerve, the connection between feeling and imagination is reflected.
Just as the life of imagination finds an organic foundation in the nerve-sense processes, the soul’s emotional life is grounded in the breathing rhythm.
In the psychology mentioned above, the will as a soul force has completely disappeared. Indeed, it did not even possess a semblance of existence such as that still attributed to feeling in the so-called emotional tones; The soul’s expressions of will were regarded as reflexes, albeit very complex ones.10The new trends in psychology have adopted a much broader perspective regarding the doctrine of the soul’s powers. Particular mention should be made here of the works of Max Scheler. (56) If one traces how the will relates to the physical organism, one recognizes a connection with all the processes that constitute the metabolic system. This connection was long overlooked because both the metabolic system and the will elude conscious mental life. Human beings develop true, full consciousness only in their mental life. They perceive feeling only half-consciously; but with regard to the will, they are completely unconscious.
This can best be compared to the three degrees of consciousness that humans know as the states of waking, dreaming, and sleeping. Humans are awake only in the world of their imagination. With their emotional life, they find themselves in a state closely related to dreaming. A deeper psychological examination, in fact, finds in the world of human feeling the same laws that are characteristic of the world of dreams. With regard to their volitional processes, people are asleep. They are only conscious of their will to the extent that they have formed a mental image of it. When a person performs a simple action based on a volitional decision, this seems to be different. People then like to speak of a conscious will. But they usually forget that consciousness extends only as far as a mental image of both the volitional impulse and the action. The actual will remains entirely hidden.
Here it is of the utmost importance to ensure that the relationships described are not viewed in a schematic manner. The three soul forces—thinking, feeling, and willing—are in reality never active in the soul in isolation. Even in the formation of the simplest concept, feeling and willing are involved to a certain degree. Likewise, in a genuine feeling, thinking and willing play a role, while willing also necessarily occurs together with feeling and thinking.
The three organ systems mentioned above also completely interpenetrate one another within the organism. They do not lie next to or on top of one another, but within one another. One is constantly dealing with transitions from one to the other. The nervous-sensory processes spread throughout the entire organism, as do the rhythmic and metabolic processes. The brain, for example, belongs primarily to the nervous-sensory system. However, it cannot function without a certain degree of metabolic activity and without a certain degree of rhythmic circulation. The same applies to every organ; it can only be classified in broad terms as belonging to one or the other organ system. It is important, however, to recognize that the brain, insofar as it belongs to the nervous-sensory system, is the bearer of the life of imagination, while in its other aspects, as a component of the rhythmic or metabolic system, it is also the bearer of feeling and will. Thus, other organs, such as the kidneys, are integrated into the realm of metabolism and thus serve the life of the will. Insofar as they, however, encompass nervous-sensory processes and rhythmic processes, they serve the life of imagination and feeling. This perspective demonstrates for the first time that it is not a single organ or organ system that is the bearer of the human soul, but the entire physical organism.
The threefold nature already mentioned is a magnificent conception of the true essence of the human being. Externally, this threefold nature is expressed through the very different ways in which the head, chest, and limbs relate to the whole organism. The head manifests itself most clearly as the actual center of the nerve-sense processes. The entire central nervous system points toward the head as a true crown. Everything that lives in the senses and nerves unites here.
In the head, as the center of the nervous-sensory system, ideas are formed. What takes place here can be compared to a process of condensation. As a perceiving being, the human being stands constantly in a living and moving stream of perceptions that present themselves to him in colors and tones, in forms and lines, in smells and tastes. His soul would be completely absorbed in this stream of perceptions if there were not, somewhere within his organism, a condensation of these perceptions through which an inner point of rest is created. This coming to rest takes place in the transition from perception to imagination. The process of imagining thus signifies a condensation, a solidification of perception. Through this condensation and solidification, the stream of perception comes to rest and can now form the basis for the human being’s conscious relationship to his environment.
The human head already expresses in its very form that it constitutes a closed-off area in relation to the environment. Like a hard shell, the bony skull encloses the soft brain matter. Only through the narrow gates left open by the senses can the interior of the cranial cavity connect with the outside world. This self-enclosure through a hardening toward the outside is an expression of the function of the nervous-sensory system: the formation of a conscious foundation for the entire life of the soul.
The structure of the metabolic system is completely opposite. It is in constant, flexible connection with the environment. Rudolf Steiner emphatically linked it to the system of movement or the limb system. He spoke with preference of both a nervous-sensory system and a metabolic-movement system or metabolic-limb system. While the head is governed by a centering, concentrating principle, the limb system is formed according to a principle radiating outward. One need only consider a skeleton of the head, especially the skull, next to the skeleton of the limbs, which branches out radially in an ever-finer structure toward the periphery.
The nervous-sensory system, and above all the head, is to be regarded as the endpoint of the processes that are directed from the outside in, moving from the human being’s external world toward the human interior. The metabolic-limb system, on the other hand, is conversely the starting point of a stream of processes that flows from the inside out, leading from the human interior into the surrounding environment.
Through the nervous-sensory system, the human being connects with the spiritual qualities that surround them. On the basis of the nervous-sensory processes, these qualities are transformed into mental images, which build up human consciousness. From a certain point of view, this process, in which perception transitions into imagination, is a process of death. Human beings owe their consciousness to the ability to bring the flow of spiritual qualities, into which their soul is placed, to a standstill through a process of death. If he could not do so, his soul would constantly lose itself in these qualities.
The metabolic-movement processes in the organism, on the other hand, are above all the representatives of life phenomena. It is the metabolic processes that carry growth and reproduction within them. Thus, one finds in the human organism a polar opposition between these two organ systems described.
Between these two lies the rhythmic system, whose main representative is the respiratory rhythm. However, one cannot consider this respiratory rhythm without paying attention to the closely related blood circulation. Between respiration and blood circulation, the heart is again involved as the most important rhythmic organ. Thus, one can regard the chest as the center of the rhythmic processes, but here too it must be it must be emphasized that these rhythmic processes permeate the entire organism.
In this rhythmic system, the polar effects of the other two organ systems are constantly maintained in a dynamic equilibrium. The tempo of breathing and the heartbeat determines the relationship between the nervous-sensory system and the metabolic-limb system. Generally, there are about eighteen breaths for every seventy-two heartbeats, a ratio of one to four. This reflects the ratio that exists between the inhibitory influence of the nervous-sensory system and the activating influence of the metabolic system.
Just as breathing is connected to the nervous-sensory system, so the blood circulation is more closely connected to the metabolic system. The heart, which stands between the two, is, viewed dynamically, the center of the entire organism. Rudolf Steiner also made an important statement regarding this, long before scientific circles were inclined toward a similar idea, namely that the heart must not be regarded as a pump that causes blood circulation, but rather as an organ of balance. It is positioned between the two polar currents that permeate the organism in such a way that it perceives, so to speak, the relationship between the two organ systems. It can therefore also be called a sensory organ.
The rhythmic relationships between the heart and lungs also express the polarity of life and death in which the human being is constantly situated. With every breath, life-sustaining oxygen flows into the organism, and suffocating carbon dioxide leaves the organism.
These are only brief hints, but they may nevertheless make it clear that the foundations for a completely new anatomy and psychology, for a new medicine, are thus laid. (38, 39)
Modern medicine is very strongly influenced by the scientific thinking of the past centuries. In ancient times, medicine could hardly be called a science. It was priestly wisdom that originated from the ancient mysteries. All medical thought and practice was connected to these mysteries. The priest-physician drew his inspiration from the same source of wisdom from which the other priests also drew. His actions were consecrated by this wisdom and were driven by love for suffering humanity. These priest-physicians had to develop special spiritual and moral powers. They could emerge only from certain families. Hippocrates, in whom much of the ancient wisdom of the mysteries still lives, himself comes from such a line of priest-physicians. He bears, as it were, a dual face. The mystery tradition still exerts a powerful influence within him and forms the very foundation of all his actions. On the other hand, he is precisely the one who sees the dawn of the coming ages and creates a foundation for them through his precise observations and the conclusions built upon them.
Well into the 15th and 16th , the influence of the mystery tradition could still be felt in some, for example in Paracelsus and van Helmont. For Paracelsus, the saying still held true: “The highest principle of medicine is love.” A few centuries later, the golden age of medicine trained in the natural sciences dawned. Virchow introduced the doctrine of the organism as a cellular state, a doctrine was excellently grounded in the highly developed fields of anatomy, physiology, and pathology. Cellular pathology emerged and assumed a dominant role. A diagnosis of that time was only considered complete if it could be supported by pathological anatomy. Many diseases were named based on descriptions of what pathological anatomy revealed after the patient’s death. Thus, medicine increasingly developed into a science that human body as its object. It studied this body, on the one hand, under the microscope—that is, in a dead state—and, on the other hand, with the aid of physical-chemical methods, thus as a physical-chemical object. Just how much the primary goal of medicine—healing—had receded into the background is demonstrated by the so-called nihilistic school, which had its center in Vienna.
It hardly needs to be explained that this view applies only to the methods developed during that period. Despite all this, the physician was able to practice his service to humanity out of an honest inner calling. However, he then felt all the more acutely the imperfect foundation that modern medicine offered him, precisely where healing was at stake.
Of course, a reaction was inevitable. It came in the form of a more constitutional view of the living human organism, combined with the desire to combat diseases through constitutional or more specific treatments. As important as these reform attempts are, none was as profound as Rudolf Steiner’s. For while most preached a return, primarily to the approach of Paracelsus, Rudolf Steiner pointed the way to the future. The threefold view of the human being is at the center of his considerations and enables a completely new understanding of the relationship between illness and health.
Reference has already been made to the opposing directions in which the effects of the polar organ systems—the nervous-sensory and metabolic systems, manifest themselves in the body. These opposing directions can also be characterized by by pointing out how the forces in the metabolic system work to build up the organism, whereas the forces of the nervous-sensory system, on the other hand, bring about a constant breakdown. Constant growth and development take place within the organism. Even where external growth ceases to play a role after a certain age, the tissues in the organism are nevertheless continually renewed. This entire tendency toward growth and renewal tendency—in short, this entire development—originates in the metabolic system.
In addition to this development, however, the opposite also takes place: a “de-development ," as Rudolf Steiner put it. The growth and renewal of the organism are counterbalanced by the decay that occurs in the organs. Upbuilding is counterbalanced by breakdown. Since this breakdown is connected to the nervous-sensory system, the aforementioned connection between processes of death and human consciousness becomes understandable. The human being must undergo this process of breakdown in order thereby to become a conscious being. If only the processes of building up were at work within him, he would remain unconscious like the vegetative realm.
The two poles of the human organism thus reveal to us the contrast between spiritual consciousness and unconscious, organic life. Through this perspective, illness is organically integrated into the whole of human life. The causes of an illness are not to be found somewhere outside the organism or inexplicably hidden within it. They are just as much a part of human life as growth and reproduction. For by virtue of being a conscious being, the human being carries within themselves a constant tendency toward illness. This tendency toward illness is counterbalanced by the life forces associated with the processes of building up. The contrast between these two tendencies is kept in a constant, dynamic equilibrium by the forces connected to the rhythmic system. The tendency toward illness and the tendency toward health meet in the rhythmic system and are brought into balance there. The physician, who first feels the patient’s pulse, thereby ascertains—perhaps unconsciously—the relationship that prevails within the organism between illness and health.
In this rhythmic system, the forces that create balance—that is, the healing forces—are at work. Thus, in the three parts of the human organism, we encounter the carriers of the tendencies toward illness, health, and recovery.
One cannot therefore say that human beings are healthy by nature and that illness, as something foreign, threatens this health. No, the forces that lead to illness, health, and also recovery, are constantly at work together within the organism. Only when the entire organism can no longer balance this repeatedly disturbed equilibrium between the two polar organ systems does what is commonly called illness arise. This illness will then be characterized by the forces of one specific organ region overpowering those of another. For example, if in the region of the head, where the nervous and sensory processes normally predominate, the metabolic system becomes too active, a pathological condition will result. Thus, one is always dealing, as it were, with a displacement of processes that are in and of themselves normal. In a form of medicine that consistently views the organism as a whole in this manner, attention will be directed far more toward the processes within this organism than toward the final states , which, for example, pathological anatomy identifies. What is called disease today is usually nothing other than the final stage of a process that may have been active in the organism for many years and that could have been recognized earlier using the method described above.
Through the approach described, the problem of the cause of disease is placed in the context of the whole of human development. What are diseases other than the price that human beings must pay for their spiritual development? ““If we could not become ill,” Rudolf Steiner once said, “we would have to remain fools our whole lives.” He also called illnesses shadows cast by the light of this development. In connection with this, unimagined perspectives open up for the development of a medicine that seeks to grasp the whole human being in his development that overcomes life and death.
What is healing? In answering this question, only the results of spiritual scientific research can be of help to us. The perspectives that apply here cannot be chosen broadly enough. One can never approach the mystery of illness and recovery through an external observation of the human being, no matter how detailed it may be. Only when one has found the true position of the human being in the cosmos and on Earth within the ever-changing rhythm of spiritual and physical life, and in doing so follows the laws of reincarnation and karma, will one be able to penetrate this mystery. One will then understand that “healing a human being” actually means bringing them back into the connections with the Earth and the cosmos that are necessary for their present stage of development.
In this sense, anthroposophy as a whole already possesses a healing power, since it shows the human being the path of development necessary for this time. The philosophy of freedom and its application are healing. All art born of truly spiritual impulses also has a healing effect. The art of healing in the narrower sense provides all of this in concentrated form.
Therefore, in addition to the remedies it draws from the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, it will make use of all possible aids. For example, the practice of anthroposophical art will be integrated into treatment, particularly eurythmy, which was developed by Rudolf Steiner as therapeutic eurythmy. Painting, sculpting, speech formation, and similar activities can also play a role in this therapy.
On this foundation, medicine is restored to its true purpose. It is not actually a science nor an art, although it encompasses both. Its task lies in the social sphere, where it helps to overcome human suffering by transforming it into spirit-liberating forces. A general study of humanity, which comprehends the human being in body, soul, and spirit, is its foundation. Various sciences—anatomy, physiology, and pathology—are at its service. An artistic perspective must also be developed by the student, which will then help the physician to make diagnoses and find therapies. The art of healing, however, begins where love for the therapeutic act inspires the physician.
< p>If the art of healing sees its task in this direction, then a new hygiene can also emerge as a social practice. This new hygiene, however, cannot be built on vague generalities or on amateurish science. That is why Rudolf Steiner placed the greatest emphasis on ensuring that only licensed physicians practice this anthroposophical medicine. These physicians worked in various clinics, while the scientific foundations of these new ideas were investigated in laboratories affiliated with these clinics.Such healthcare, which aims to do more than merely take measures for the physical well-being of human beings, must be accorded a decisive role in education. A true hygiene of the future has its most important starting point in meaningful education. How much could be avoided or remedied through an art of education grounded in the entirety of human development. During childhood, a wide variety of factors threaten development. Heredity and environmental influences can disrupt this development.
The entire organism is built up from the child’s psychological and spiritual nature. In the early years of childhood, this development is still strongly influenced by hereditary forces. A struggle between the personality of the developing human being and hereditary factors can arise at an early stage. The stronger the personality is and the less it fits into the circle of its environment, the more intense this struggle will be. Proper education has the task of helping and supporting the child’s personality on its path of development. This education can have only one goal: to bring the child’s individual being to full development, but in such a way that this unfolding takes place in harmony with the great laws of human development.
Rudolf Steiner’s work in the field of education began very early. His tutoring of classmates, later his teaching, and above all his work with children with developmental delays have already been described. Later, he gave many lectures on issues in education. Important perspectives are summarized in the short book “The Education of the Child from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science”(40). There we read: “Life as a whole is like a plant, which contains not only what it presents to the eye, but also harbors a future state in its hidden depths. Anyone who has a plant before them that bears only leaves knows full well that after some time, the stem bearing leaves will also bear flowers and fruits. And hidden within, this plant already contains the potential for these flowers and fruits. But how can anyone say what these organs will look like if they have only sought to explore what the plant currently presents to the eye? Only those who have familiarized themselves with the nature of the plant can do so.”
In 1919, Rudolf Steiner had the opportunity to realize his educational ideas through the founding of the “Free Waldorf School” in Stuttgart.1 1Schools were later established in many cities on the same basis. Currently, there are sixty schools in twelve different countries. Originally, this school was intended only for the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, but it soon became accessible to all children. It included elementary and secondary school levels.
The new art of education cannot be described here in full detail. Only a few hints are intended to convey an impression of what is actually being sought.
The school comprises twelve grades, of which the first eight belong to the lower school and the following four to the upper school. In addition, there is a thirteenth school year for those who wish to take the graduation exam. To understand the educational principles practiced in this school, one must again grasp the concept of the threefold human being, particularly in connection with the developmental phases the child goes through. When observing a small child in the period before the change of teeth, one is dealing with a being who lives entirely in connection with its surroundings. The child is, as it were, still connected by invisible bonds to the world of prenatal forces from which it comes. It approaches its new environment on earth with perception and surrenders completely to everything that flows toward it from this world. It is, as Rudolf Steiner often called it, “entirely a sensory being.” Anyone who, for example, watches a small newborn child drink can experience how the sensation of taste spreads through the entire body; little hands and feet drink along with it. The child reacts to this stream of sensations by imitating everything that comes to it. It is an “imitating being”. This entire process of imitation takes place with such seriousness and such complete devotion that only the word “religious” can characterize the mood in which this occurs.
Childhood life becomes quite different after the moment of tooth replacement. Of course, this transition will not occur suddenly. The characteristics of the first seven years of life will remain more or less visible for some time, yet something entirely new begins to emerge. For while the child lived in the first seven years out of the forces that constitute the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system will now come strongly to the fore. The child is now no longer primarily a perceiving being, but lives in the forces of feeling. Nor can the child now develop solely through imitation, but must be guided by a purposeful authority. Since the forces at work in the rhythmic system are closely related to the creative forces that reveal themselves in living nature and in art, there lies dormant in this period an artistic, creative being in every child.
The child spends most of the years from seven to fourteen in the lower grades of school. If the child is to be able to unfold fully there, the entire curriculum must have an artistic character. If this is not the case, the awakening child’s soul enters an environment that is foreign to it and will consequently feel repelled. This will always be the case, for example, when instruction has an intellectual or abstract character. During these years, the teacher must create everything they wish to teach the children in their own, personal way. They must avoid all abstract scholarship in order to stand before the children as a living human being and work with the children. This principle should be applied with great rigor. Not only subjects that are artistic in nature, such as eurythmy and music—both of which play an important role in this instruction—should be handled in this way, but also all abstract subjects such as arithmetic and, later, mathematics.
When puberty begins around the age of fourteen begins, the child’s soul undergoes another major transformation. The child now awakens in a region of the organism that had previously been more or less dormant: the metabolic-limb region. For the soul life, this means that the powers of the will awaken and the child develops a need to form independent judgments. The child will need to find in the teachers who continue to support them friends and advisors who can answer all their questions. A more theoretical approach to the subject matter becomes possible from this time onward.
Of course, this refers only to three main periods of child development. In reality, many subtle distinctions will need to be made. Only when the educator can follow the child’s developing organism through a series of individually distinct metamorphoses will they be able to educate the child properly. “The principles of education will emerge of their own accord from the nature of the developing human being.”
It is necessary for the educator to undergo this development themselves, especially in the artistic realm. “If one wishes to penetrate the nature of the soul, one must penetrate the laws of nature with artistic creative power in one’s understanding. The one who understands must become an artistic beholder if he wishes to grasp the soul.” These words of Rudolf Steiner present the educator with a very difficult task. The demands thus placed upon the educator mean that only those who devote themselves fully to this task will find the strength to do what is necessary.
A few details may follow here. It is inherent in the nature of this teaching that children do not “repeat a grade” if they make insufficient progress by external standards. Since the curriculum is based on the children’s age, a child cannot remain in the same class for two consecutive years. The entire curriculum of the twelve school years forms an organically coherent whole. The children generally receive block instruction. A specific main subject is taught for two hours every morning over the course of several weeks. The following lessons primarily consist of language instruction, which is taught through speaking from the first grade onward. Grammar rules and the like come much later.
The teacher is completely free in the way he or she chooses to present the material and seeks to connect with the curriculum through his or her own personality. This is only possible if the school is under the autonomous leadership of the entire teaching staff. Only on the basis of fully realized intellectual freedom can this art of education flourish.
There is a very intimate connection between this art of education and the art of healing. For this reason, the school physician is also included in the teaching staff; he is simultaneously a teacher of certain subjects and is thus fully integrated into the school’s context. This creates a lively, effective connection between the art of healing and the art of education and enables the lessons to have profound hygienic significance. For the entire structure of the school community, this connection is of inestimable value. Many social problems cannot be solved without an understanding of this connection. “We need an art of education that, in all its measures, educates and instructs children in a hygienically correct manner. This is what makes hygiene a social issue. For the social issue is essentially an educational issue, and the educational issue is essentially a medical issue; but an issue only of that medicine which is enriched by the spiritual sciences.”
So-called “curative education,” which lies between the two fields of the art of education and medicine, has also undergone a new development. It encompasses the education of all children who, for one reason or another, require special care. This includes children who, as a result of a specific developmental disorder, are not in full possession of their intellectual or other mental faculties, such as the mentally retarded and the idiotic, but also children whose developmental disorder lies in the moral sphere, for example, children with criminal tendencies. In order to be able to do something for these children, a deep understanding of the interrelationships between body, soul, and spirit is necessary. In such children, the soul and spirit may be connected to the body too weakly or in an abnormal way; in other cases, they may be connected too deeply to the organs. Only careful medical and educational treatment will be able to restore the proper balance. Both the principles derived from anthroposophical medicine and those derived from the anthroposophical pedagogy can help here. At the institutes where this curative education is practiced, a number of curative educators work alongside the physician. The arts, especially eurythmy, music, and painting, also play a major role. Likewise, there is a great deal of manual work, particularly in training for specific professions such as agriculture, horticulture, and so on.
No sphere is more difficult to reach for the impulses arising from a free spiritual life than the social sphere. In scientific life, rigidity and self-importance can impair thinking; in artistic life, vanity and subjective arbitrariness can cloud feeling; in social life, egoism has a destructive effect on free will. Rudolf Steiner was to learn just how powerful the influence of this egoism was when, beginning in the summer of 1917, moved by the hardships of the time, he turned his attention to this field. The decision was made out of a deep, personal experience of the terrible catastrophes that had unfolded across Europe since the outbreak of the World War. Until then, he had not. Articles he wrote between 1897 and 1900 in the “Magazin für Literatur” demonstrated his keen interest not only in cultural issues but also in the political figures who played a role at that time. After the World War broke out in 1914, Rudolf Steiner gave a large number of lectures in Germany in which he pointed to the true tasks of the German people. These lectures build upon the powerful idealism that inspired Schiller and Fichte, and upon the new spiritual perspective made possible by Goethe. The impression these lectures left was very profound in certain circles. ‘Here was more than Fichte,’ writes Dr. Friedrich Rittelmeyer, ‘here was — in terms of content — the fulfillment of what Fichte had only intuited. More worldly and worldly-wise, more grounded in reality and living in the depths of the spirit, the German spirit spoke in Steiner’s speeches.” The number of those who took in what was offered here was, however, too small to make any difference against the vast majority who were caught up in the tide of mostly artificially stoked, false patriotism. For some time thereafter, Rudolf Steiner remained silent and gave only his regular lectures in Dornach. Then suddenly, in the summer of 1917, he sought and found access to a number of leading statesmen in Germany and Austria. He made two proposals to them. The first was that one should publish, in all honesty, how the war had come about. Hour by hour, the events leading up to the declaration of war should be revealed without reservation from the documents. Only in this way could it become clear what the actual course of events had been. Instead of continuing to issue misleading, exaggerated, and untrue statements, the sober sequence of facts should be laid bare. From this, the whole world should be able to see what Germany’s actual role had been in the outbreak of the World War. The question of guilt should thereby be cast in a completely different light. The second thing that should happen was of even greater significance. An act should be accomplished from within German intellectual life that demonstrated an understanding of what the times demanded. The state was still a body encompassing and dominating territories that, due to their dependence on this state, could not possibly achieve healthy development. Autonomy of the entire economic sphere, as well as autonomy of spiritual life, was to keep the state’s influence within the proper and necessary limits.
These attempts by Rudolf Steiner also failed to succeed. Although he found a sympathetic audience among many of the prominent figures of the time, they did not lead to a major, comprehensive initiative. The events that unfolded in rapid succession at that time brought about the long-feared catastrophe. The collapse of the old German Empire and the associated revolution brought about immense chaos, which a social democratic government could only with great difficulty establish some order. Since the will of the people was now being appealed to so directly, Rudolf Steiner decided to make a third attempt. In March 1919, an appeal titled “To the German People and to the Cultural World” was published, containing the words: “The forces of the times are pressing for the recognition of a social structure of humanity, which envisages something quite different from what is generally envisaged today. Social communities have hitherto been formed largely out of humanity’s social instincts. To penetrate their forces with full consciousness will be the task of the times.”
Once again, reference is made to the threefold structure of the social organism. Just as in the human organism, thinking must be carried out by the head and not by the lungs, so too in the social organism a “division” into different systems is necessary. Each system can only come to cooperate with the other systems out of its own independence. Economic life can be destroyed by politics only if political impulses act upon the economic sphere. Alongside these two spheres, the spiritual realm must also be given the opportunity for its own independent activity. The “Appeal” refers to a book that was soon to be published and in which these points of view were to be set forth.
The Appeal was signed by many hundreds of people from all parts of Central Europe and also from various other countries. Among these names are many who held important positions in scientific, political, and economic life. A large number of the signatories did not belong to the circles that had already come into contact with anthroposophy. Soon thereafter, in April 1919, the announced book appeared: “The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life for the Present and the Future” (41), of which 40,000 copies were sold in a very short time.
R udolf Steiner gave many lectures in Germany, often to large groups of workers. Ideas stemming from concrete spiritual knowledge were applied here to the social sphere. Such ideas were lacking at the time. Those who were leaders in the social sphere formed their ideas based on events. They attempted to formulate in laws what these events revealed to them. But if one wishes to understand the true nature of the social problem, one can be guided neither by party routine nor by so-called practical experience. Creative thinking is necessary here.
For Rudolf Steiner, the first question was which purely human impulses were alive in the modern labor movement. “Anyone who wants to understand the proletarian movement must first and foremost know how the proletarian thinks. For the proletarian movement—from its moderate reform efforts to its most devastating excesses—is not driven by ‘superhuman forces’ or ‘economic impulses,’ but by human beings; by their ideas and impulses of will."
The defining ideas and forces of will driving the current social movement do not lie in what the machine and capitalism have implanted in proletarian consciousness. This movement has sought its source of ideas in the newer scientific trends, because the machine and capitalism could offer the proletarian nothing that could fill his soul with content worthy of a human being.”
For the worker, the possibility of becoming wholly and completely connected to his profession had been lost. The medieval craftsman could still do this. Through this, he carried a sense of human worth in his soul. A religiously oriented worldview connected the human soul with the spiritual dimensions of existence. With the rise of the natural sciences, this religious-spiritual backdrop was lost. In the artificial light of these sciences, man is merely a natural being, in the midst of a world where only natural laws are recognized. For the worker who grows up amid these modern scientific concepts, there is no longer any possibility of feeling connected to the world as a whole. Neither in the realm of his work, amidst factories and machines, nor in the cultural sphere, within an increasingly abstract science, could he feel at home. Yet his starving soul seized upon scientific ideas, albeit in a popularized form. Thus it came to pass that, while the proletarian developed his own class consciousness in his life , yet in his thinking he remained trapped in the bourgeois mindset of his time. “He lives like a proletarian; but he thinks like a bourgeois. The new era makes it necessary not only to find oneself in a new life, but also in new thoughts. The scientific mode of thought will only be able to become life-sustaining content when it develops, in its own way, such a driving force for the formation of a fully human life’s purpose as old conceptions of life have developed in their own way.” In the soul of the worker lives an unconscious longing for a spiritual life through which he can feel fully supported and which can give him an awareness of his human worth. Only the impossibility of to find such an awareness is what awakened class consciousness.
Three major problems come to the fore through this perspective. The first question is what a healthy, spiritual life must consist of and what position it must occupy in relation to the other spheres of the social organism. The second question is what relationship the worker has to the community through his work; the third question is how economic life should fit into this whole. These three questions are examined in detail in the “Key Points ” from the perspective of the social “threefold order.” Although the image of the threefold human being is described there, this is not meant as a simple analogy, but follows from the realization that the human being and the state do indeed exhibit a certain kinship when viewed from a deeper, spiritual perspective. It goes without saying that here, too, the three parts of the social organism do not stand side by side in isolation. They are completely interwoven. Every human being will always have to deal with all three spheres. It is important, however, to recognize which activity belongs to one sphere and which to another. For these three spheres, entirely different perspectives must apply.
The three ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—can thus be understood in a deeper sense. These three ideals cannot simply be combined. Liberty and equality are simply incompatible within the same sphere. However, when these three ideals are applied to the spheres to which they pertain, they acquire their true meaning. For everything that belongs to spiritual life, freedom is the highest ideal. Spiritual life must include everything that springs from the creative human spirit. Every human being, insofar as they are active in one of the realms of science, art, or worldview, is actively engaged in it. It is clear that, first and foremost, education as such must also be fully integrated into this free spiritual life. The principles according to which a child is to be educated can stem from nothing other than free spiritual insight. — In economic life no ideal other than that of brotherhood can prevail. Here, people must work together if even the simplest product is to be produced. Countless people work together to produce the daily bread that one eats. No one knows these people. Unconsciously, however, everyone is dependent on this cooperation. An awareness of this dependence fosters a sense of brotherhood with these countless others. The third sphere, situated between these two—state or political life—has equality as its highest ideal. Every human being is placed within the state structure in the same way.
Following the “Key Points,” a second work by Rudolf Steiner was published: “On the Implementation of the Threefold Social Order.”(42) In addition to Rudolf Steiner, a large number of people associated with the anthroposophical movement gave lectures on these issues. A “League for the Threefold Social Order” was founded and established its center in Stuttgart. Although this work sparked great resistance against Steiner, the movement nevertheless—or perhaps precisely because of it—became increasingly well-known. In connection with the “League for the Threefold Social Order,” several enterprises were established in the economic sphere, including the joint-stock company “Der Kommende Tag,” which, however, could not survive for long due to its isolation.
Only that which was born out of the free spiritual life continued to develop. First and foremost, the aforementioned “Free Waldorf School” and the other schools founded on the same principles; then the medical and scientific institutes. The idea of threefolding in relation to the social organism did not find further application in its full scope. It waits, like a spiritual seed, for the time when enough people will be convinced of its validity and will find the strength to put it into practice. Just how urgent the need is for a meaningful, spiritual approach to social problems is currently all too evident. Rudolf Steiner himself regarded everything he presented in the “Key Points” as a series of suggestions, not as a party program. “Even if the realization of the ideas presented in this text and in the appeals were to lead to something quite different from what is immediately presented here, this would not be contrary to the author’s intentions. Ideas drawn from the perception of reality are meant to be suggestions, not programs that one imagines that they can be carried out according to their literal meaning. The author has said this to all those to whom, under the pressure of current events, he has spoken of these ideas. He has always said: perhaps, when one proceeds to implementation, much of what has been said will be modified; but what he believes is that with such ideas, present-day life would be approached in a realistic manner, and that therefore what results from this approach will be something that meets the real demands of the times.”