| 259. The Fateful Year of 1923: Circular letter from the Executive Council to Prospective Trusted Representatives
Stuttgart |
|---|
| An unusual degree of responsibility arises here, because it is important to enable the many people who long for anthroposophy in their essential being to enter our circles, and even to find such people. But at the same time, the greatest care is needed to avoid harming our society through new members joining. |
| But surely there is a way to do justice to these tasks through a close collaboration between the trusted individuals, the leaders of the working groups and those friends who give introductory courses and public lectures on anthroposophy, insofar as these activities do not coincide. It will always be necessary for those friends who are involved in the admission of new members to make it their heartfelt concern that the newly admitted are also received in the right way within the Society. |
| We would be grateful if you would comment on the questions briefly outlined here, as this will lead to many beneficial results for the task of our society of creating space for anthroposophy in people's hearts. With warmest anthroposophical greetings The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society Jürgen von Grone, Dr. |
| 259. The Fateful Year of 1923: Circular letter from the Executive Council to Prospective Trusted Representatives
Stuttgart |
|---|
The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society As you already know, we, the undersigned, took over the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society as the new Executive Council at the Assembly of Delegates of the Anthroposophical Society, which met here in Stuttgart from February 25-28. This took place with the unanimous consent of the meeting and by cooption by the old Central Council. Since we still need an active co-worker in the midst of all the work, we have coopted Dr. Walter Johannes Stein into the Council after the fact. Accordingly, he has co-signed this letter. One of our most urgent duties, as set out in the 'Draft Principles of an Anthroposophical Society', is to create a body of trusted individuals. The first step in this direction is to approach those of our friends in whom we recognize the same ideals for our cause, and by whom we ourselves wish to be guided in our work. To this end, we wish to establish two institutions:
The purpose of this letter is to ask you to join the circle of trusted individuals and to let us know of your agreement. The extended board is in the process of being formed, and we will let you know which friends will be on it as soon as it has been constituted. The extended board will form a body whose relationship to the local board will develop in the course of the lively cooperation of all those involved. The members of this extended board will have to represent the views of the Society as a whole, but they will be involved in the work in the individual localities to a much greater extent than would be possible with a single central management. The members of the extended board will also have all the powers that are intended for the trusted representatives. Since we understand our tasks entirely in the sense of the “Draft Principles of an Anthroposophical Society” 1, what is said about this on pages 4 and 5 of the draft will also be decisive for the work of the trusted personalities. It will therefore be their “responsibility to accept the registration of members” and they will “take over the guarantee for the members they propose to the board.” In view of the seriousness of the situation in which our society finds itself, we may well assume that you are aware of the importance of admitting new members. An unusual degree of responsibility arises here, because it is important to enable the many people who long for anthroposophy in their essential being to enter our circles, and even to find such people. But at the same time, the greatest care is needed to avoid harming our society through new members joining. Our worst opponents draw on the material provided by former members. Of course we know from our own experience how tremendously difficult it is to do the right thing when admitting members. But surely there is a way to do justice to these tasks through a close collaboration between the trusted individuals, the leaders of the working groups and those friends who give introductory courses and public lectures on anthroposophy, insofar as these activities do not coincide. It will always be necessary for those friends who are involved in the admission of new members to make it their heartfelt concern that the newly admitted are also received in the right way within the Society. In larger working groups, special arrangements will have to be made for this. We will take the liberty of sharing some thoughts on this at the earliest opportunity, and we are always grateful for friends sharing their experiences with us. The Anthroposophical Society draws its life from the spiritual impulses at work within it. For each person, joining our Society marks an important stage in their life. The welcome in our midst can become an expression of this spiritual fact; then we will grow in our community-building power. Dr. Steiner spoke of this community-building power in his lectures on February 27 and 28.2 We must seek ways to give effect to these impulses in the handling of such concrete matters as the admission of members. It will make the tasks of the trusted representatives easier if they see themselves as a cohesive body that can provide support to the individual in their togetherness. We would like to be in close contact with each trusted personality, but we would also be delighted if the trusted personalities of one place and neighboring districts could establish a lively relationship with each other and with the members of the extended board. Here, too, a piece of joint anthroposophical work can emerge. We would be grateful if you would comment on the questions briefly outlined here, as this will lead to many beneficial results for the task of our society of creating space for anthroposophy in people's hearts. With warmest anthroposophical greetings The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society Jürgen von Grone, Dr. Eugen Kolisko, Emil Leinhas, Johanna Mücke, Dr. Otto Palmer, Dr. Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, Dr. Carl Unger, Wolfgang Wachsmuth, Louis Werbeck. A list of those personalities who have received the same letter is attached. Provisional list of trusted third parties:
n October 1923, the definitive list of trusted persons was published in No. 8 of the “Mitteilungen”. Of the 109 names listed above, those marked with an asterisk (*) no longer appeared. The following new ones had been added:
|
| Esoteric Development: Introduction
Translated by Gertrude Teutsch, Olin D. Wannamaker, Diane Tatum, Alice Wuslin |
|---|
| Knowledge of these higher worlds is, therefore, “occult,” hidden from ordinary consciousness, and hence the term “occultism” used in the opening lines of this book to distinguish this knowledge from the comprehensive term “anthroposophy,” which Rudolf Steiner uses to describe his work as a whole. Now occultism, referring as it does to something ordinarily inaccessible to us, has a strong fascination for some people. |
| It should be remembered, however, that Steiner had already written a book on this subject, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and the people who heard the lectures reproduced here would, for the most part, have been familiar with that book, and with anthroposophy in general. To begin with, then, it needs to be said that as these higher worlds are indeed “hidden” from ordinary knowledge and consciousness, the reader would be well advised to get some information about them before embarking on a quest for higher knowledge. |
| Such a study of the information about the higher worlds, already existing in what are called the “five basic books” of anthroposophy, is itself the first step to such knowledge. A reading of the first chapter of Occult Science, an Outline will do much to explain this. |
| Esoteric Development: Introduction
Translated by Gertrude Teutsch, Olin D. Wannamaker, Diane Tatum, Alice Wuslin |
|---|
This book is about how to obtain super-sensible knowledge, or knowledge of “higher” worlds. It contains ten lectures on that theme given by Rudolf Steiner to different audiences in different places, but arranged here in a certain evolving depth of content. In a time like the present, therefore, when so many people are looking for a spiritual understanding of life—and when many are being led astray by unscrupulous teachers—it is a matter of no little importance that such a book should appear now, a book that demands nothing of the reader but an independent, open-minded judgment of what it has to say. As this book is likely to come to the attention of those who know little or nothing about Rudolf Steiner, and perhaps even less of super-sensible knowledge, it may be well to introduce it by saying something about both its author and his subject. This kind of prospective reader will then be better able to adapt himself to what it has to say, while those more familiar with Steiner can plunge straight into the book without spending any more time with this introduction. Rudolf Steiner was a philosopher with a strong scientific background who attracted a great deal of attention in the first quarter of this century with his books and lectures on the nature of the super-sensible. He not only gave detailed descriptions of higher worlds and their beings that are inaccessible to ordinary sense-perception, but he explained how knowledge of these worlds could be acquired by anyone willing to follow a strict and guided development of the ordinary powers of cognition. Steiner based all that he said on the ability of the human mind to know. He would have nothing to do with any method that imposed strange, mystical practices on the aspirant for higher knowledge, or that demanded implicit obedience to the will of a teacher or guru. Everything he suggested can be explored only on the basis of the consciousness that modern man has acquired in the pursuit of knowledge of nature. We are accustomed to calling this knowledge of nature “scientific,” and though this knowledge was to Steiner merely the outer aspect of a world of phenomena and beings active “behind the scenes,” as it were, he was so much in accord with the basic principles of scientific methodology that he called this higher knowledge spiritual science. The spiritual scientist directs thinking to what is given, as does the natural scientist, but does not confine himself only to that which is given to the senses. He applies thinking to thought itself as the primary manifestation of super-sensible reality. The world that spiritual science explores, therefore, is the world of creative purposes and intentions in contrast to the world of sense-perceptible phenomena, or the “wrought work,” as Steiner called it on one occasion. Knowledge of these higher worlds is, therefore, “occult,” hidden from ordinary consciousness, and hence the term “occultism” used in the opening lines of this book to distinguish this knowledge from the comprehensive term “anthroposophy,” which Rudolf Steiner uses to describe his work as a whole. Now occultism, referring as it does to something ordinarily inaccessible to us, has a strong fascination for some people. Others, of course, are just as strongly repelled by it. As it is the former who are likely to be attracted to this book (the others will hardly get beyond the title), we can proceed at once to offer certain cautionary remarks to the former, for just because of this strong fascination one might attempt to embark forthwith upon the discovery of this extraordinary knowledge without further reflection. It should be remembered, however, that Steiner had already written a book on this subject, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and the people who heard the lectures reproduced here would, for the most part, have been familiar with that book, and with anthroposophy in general. To begin with, then, it needs to be said that as these higher worlds are indeed “hidden” from ordinary knowledge and consciousness, the reader would be well advised to get some information about them before embarking on a quest for higher knowledge. Rudolf Steiner's two books, Theosophy and Occult Science, an Outline, are excellent sources of such information. There are several reasons for this suggestion. One is that Steiner himself held it as a sine qua non for the acquisition of higher knowledge that the aspirant should get some idea beforehand of these worlds from those able to speak of them from firsthand experience. This is not only important in light of much that is referred to in the book itself, but it is also a matter of common sense. Anyone contemplating traveling to a part of the world that he has never visited will invariably find out as much about it as he can beforehand from those who have already been there. He will then not only know what to expect, but he is likely to understand all the better what he sees when he gets there. This is even more relevant in the quest for knowledge of higher worlds, for one is seeking access to worlds that not only one has never seen, but that are utterly unlike anything one could see with physical eyes. There is another and even more pressing reason. Such a study of the information about the higher worlds, already existing in what are called the “five basic books” of anthroposophy, is itself the first step to such knowledge. A reading of the first chapter of Occult Science, an Outline will do much to explain this. If the reader finds in such a preliminary study something to which he can with sound judgment say, Yes, he will be able to proceed on solid foundations with what this book has to offer. The reader will discover by such study the reality of something with which he has long been familiar as a figure of speech, but which he now recognizes as an inner faculty—his sense of truth. He will have learned something of the knowledge-potential of the inner nature of thought, and what can happen in thinking will take on a new depth of meaning for him. If he can combine this with a study of Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom, he will find his confidence in thinking enhanced, even in thinking about matters of which he has as yet no direct experience. This is important, because he will find as he reads this book that thinking itself is not only a super-sensible activity, but is the very vehicle by which he finds his way to experience of these worlds. There is something else the reader will have to determine for himself before he takes up a quest such as this book describes—that is, whether he is both ready and able to embark upon it. While this might seem to call into question the statement already made that anyone can take this path, it does not really. The exercises outlined in this book are indeed such that anyone can practice them, but they are not easy. One must be aware of this. They are quite strict, and no one should embark on them without carefully weighing what that strictness involves. We have already touched on the fact that the occult has a fascination for people. Many would like to have such knowledge, but it is of the utmost importance to understand why one wants to obtain this knowledge. The aspirant must be able to put that question to himself and to answer it with the utmost honesty and sincerity, for if anything of the nature of mere curiosity or personal advantage should lie at the root of that desire, harmless as that might be in itself, it will become an obstacle in the attainment of higher knowledge. We touch here on the moral aspect of the acquisition of higher knowledge, a matter to which the reader will find Rudolf Steiner calls attention again and again throughout this book. It is not a matter, however, of Steiner laying down moral injunctions, but rather of the aspirant discovering the morality which is implicit in the attainment of knowledge. Here the strictest scientific integrity, demanding the exclusion of all personal gratification and desire, is essential. If the aspirant is not yet ready to accept that morality, then it would be better for him to continue studying the literature of spiritual science (which he should be doing in any case) until he is ready. Here self-knowledge precedes self-development, and if that knowledge is objective and thorough enough, it will be found to be essential to self-development. As Carl Unger, a pupil of Rudolf Steiner, once put it, “Every knowledge transforms the knower,” and the path to higher knowledge is primarily a transformation of the self. A word or two on what was meant by being “able” to embark on this quest would not come amiss here, particularly regarding the “strictness” already mentioned. Being “able” refers primarily to regularity in carrying out the exercises described by Steiner. Once having embarked on this path there should be no, but no, “letup.” Whether the reader has the ability to do that, especially if he is young, is something that needs careful reflection. “Able” here has nothing to do with superior intelligence; it is exclusively a matter of the will. This is why Steiner sets such a modest time limit on the duration of these exercises: a quarter of an hour, or even five minutes, is enough if used properly. But the exercises must be done every day. Regularity is everything; and if one considers all the eventualities that might upset that regularity, one might well reflect on whether one will be able to carry this through. There is nothing quite so discouraging as having to face having reneged on such work as this, even with the best reason in the world. It is like dropping from a great height a ball of string that one has just carefully wound, and having to face the prospect of winding it all up again. The reader should also be aware of what will be happening to him if he decides to follow this path, and although Steiner makes this abundantly clear, it will not hurt to underline one thing. One is engaged in transforming the soul into an organ of perception, and one is doing this largely as the result of exercises based on thinking. We usually imagine perception and thinking to be two entirely different activities, but we cannot really keep them apart. One need only recall how, after a strenuous bout of thinking, when the concept for which we are searching at last appears, we invariably say, “Ah! Now I see!” to realize that perceiving (in this case, perceiving concepts) is closely interwoven with thinking. One does “see” the concept that has appeared in consciousness; and it is this seeing in thinking that the aspirant will be exercising in everything he does. “As color is to the eye,” says Steiner in Goethe the Scientist, “and sound to the ear, so are concepts and ideas to thinking: it [thinking] is an organ of perception.” Finally, one must discover that the satisfaction in doing these exercises should be in the feeling they engender. There can be no setting a goal for oneself, such as, “I will do these exercises for a certain length of time, and then see what happens,” or of drawing an imaginary chart to plot one's progress, as business executives do to show whether their profits are going up or down. Paradoxical as it may seem, although one undertakes these exercises in order to achieve a certain result, that result should be the last thing with which one is concerned. For, again paradoxically, that result is not something one can acquire; it is something that is given when the higher powers deem that the time is ripe for enlightenment to be given. And that is something no man can foresee. It may take months, it may take years. The satisfaction, therefore, that one can legitimately hope to feel is only that which can be found in the work itself. It is “love for the action” that must be discovered. One must come to the point where one would rather omit anything else in the course of the day than miss the satisfaction which comes from this work. Then and then only will one become aware that something is beginning to happen in the soul, a genuine intercourse between oneself and higher worlds; and although one may still not be able to “see a thing,” that will not be important. One will know that such seeing will and must come, as come it only can, “in God's good time.” There is just one more thing that should be said about this book and that should recommend it regardless of what the reader does about the book otherwise: that is, the way it reveals what I can only describe as the inner logic of knowledge. No one who reads this book with an open mind and the attention it deserves can lay it down without being convinced not only that such knowledge is possible, but that it is only really possible in the way the author describes. The reader may not want to advance to such knowledge himself—there may be reasons best known to him why he should not attempt it yet—but there can be no doubt that this knowledge is possible to anyone who has the determination to see it through. And to know just that from reading such a book is something unique. Furthermore, the material in this book is offered by a man who knows from personal experience what he is talking about, who “lays all his cards on the table” with regard to what is involved, and yet never once uses that authority to impose upon the freedom of the reader as to what he does about it. There are two things with which our time has yet to come to grips: one is the extension of man's knowledge and human consciousness into regions of the mind hitherto declared forever inaccessible; and the other is the real nature of human freedom. In this book the author lays out a plan of approach for the one, and by the way he does so he acknowledges the indisputable existence of the other. Alan Howard |
| 300b. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner II: Thirty-Sixth Meeting
04 Oct 1922, Stuttgart Translated by Ruth Pusch, Gertrude Teutsch |
|---|
| and perhaps some of the others, have been impertinent and that they asked how it is that people say that there is no anthroposophy in the instruction. How did you understand that? What did you think about all those questions? |
| Everybody told him time and again that there is no Anthroposophy in the instruction. But Anthroposophy is just what he wanted. It would have been just the thing for him as he sought the opportunity to learn about Anthroposophy. |
| 300b. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner II: Thirty-Sixth Meeting
04 Oct 1922, Stuttgart Translated by Ruth Pusch, Gertrude Teutsch |
|---|
Dr. Steiner: I have called you together to discuss the recent situation that occupies you so much. Otherwise we could have waited a few days. It seems important to me that we do not discuss such things as a specific case. We cannot do that, but instead we need to treat all of these things in this difficult time for us in connection with the anthroposophical movement. We should be careful that it is not used against the anthroposophical movement. We are actually sitting in a glass house and should avoid all such things that can lead to all kinds of opposition to the anthroposophical movement. What is now important is that we gain some clarity about what occurred and how we should judge it. A group of students from the 9th, 10th, and 11th grades had been involved in some lying, thefts, and drunkenness. One of the students had given another student some injections and attempted to hypnotize her. Upon discovery of what had been occurring, the faculty had discussed the situation with Dr. Steiner in Dornach by telephone. The faculty then questioned the students in detail and sent Dr. Steiner a detailed report. The students involved were temporarily suspended from school. Dr. Steiner asks about the age of each of the students involved, about which class they were in and about how long they had been in the school. He also asks about the parents and the home environment. Dr. Steiner: When was the first time that something was said against these children? How did you discover what had been happening? A teacher: Through the business with the hypnotizing by G.S. One student wanted to speak with me alone and told me that there were things that occurred in S.’s house that we should know about. Dr. Steiner: In your opinion, had G.S. ever hypnotized anyone? A teacher: No, at least not completely, although he has often attempted it with various students. Dr. Steiner: We can hardly assume that if he did not exercise some unfavorable influence, that he could have caused any real harm with those he attempted to hypnotize. There was certainly moral damage, but he did not do things that would cause real damage. In any event, there is not much to be done with this whole hypnotizing business. I had the impression from the report that this whole thing was simply a bunch of dumb tricks that got out of hand due to G.S.’s craziness. Does anybody know anything about this hypnotizing that is more serious? A detailed report is given about G.S. and his home situation. Among other things, one teacher reports that the boy has been interested in such things since he was ten years old and that his father has some books about such matters. The boy likes to experiment and has made a small laboratory. Dr. Steiner: Other than the fact that he was very diligent, is there nothing more to say about how G.S. is at school? A teacher: I used to be quite satisfied with him, but he has slacked off in the last three or four months. Dr. Steiner: To the extent that G.S. is concerned, the business with the injections seems to be like that of the hypnotizing. We should now take a look at how things are with H.B. From all that I have read, he seems to be a real gang leader and is behind a number of things. It also appears that he was the main motivator in this socalled club. Were you satisfied with him here at school? A teacher: He did not participate with much interest. He avoided conflicts, but was not really with things. There is then a detailed discussion about the student. Dr. Steiner: What does N.G. say to all this? Why was he readmitted to school after he had already left? A number of teachers report. Dr. Steiner: Now there is one other thing I would like to know. I had asked Mr. J. about some report or another and he told me about an evening where there was a discussion between the students and teachers. How is it that a student association has a chairman and the teachers met with them and asked the student president to speak? I nearly fell off my chair. There is a discussion about this. Dr. Steiner: Now N.G., O.R., U.A., and F.S. have been suspended because they are cutting school. H.B. and S.K. were suspended because of their black-market activities, and G.S. has been expelled. How is it possible that there has been so little contact with the students in these upper grades recently? The lack of contact was what caused these classes to come to me in May. What is happening here? The discussion I had with them showed me that the teachers no longer had any contact, particularly with the 10th grade. Why is that? Undoubtedly, there is a considerable difference between these classes and the lower grades where there has always been a strong contact between the class teacher and the children. There is a significant difference in the way that the relationship developed toward these 9th- and 10th-grade classes. There is no doubt that these classes have gotten out of the control of the faculty. That evening discussion did not lead to the faculty gaining control over the children. Instead, it is quite clear that the students have taken the helm. To have such discussions! A number of teachers report about the discussions between the students and faculty. Dr. Steiner: It must have begun somewhere. Mr. S. has left. Somewhere, there must be a beginning. The difficulty is that there is a whole group of students that we do not need here at school, but if we throw them out, then the same sort of thing will happen as did earlier. The whole situation will result in a new affair connected with the anthroposophical movement. Of course, the thing with N.G. is not so easy. He must have known that old G. was planning some activities against the anthroposophical movement. He is not really so bright, but he is planning something nevertheless, and that should have been a warning for us to be cautious with regard to N.G. It is certainly a difficult thing for the other students to reject the student association. N.G. is a rascal, the result of an unbelievable family life. There are a number of cases where the home situation is not good, but this particular situation is one of the worse excesses to be seen in modern social life. He grew up in that and is now psychopathic, totally sick. It is really difficult to decide which one is worse, F.S. or N.G. I have to admit that it is really a problem that these children did not find it possible to gain a natural connection to the faculty. They had no trust in the faculty. I certainly need to say that in fact these children were not filled with any trust in the faculty. You will seldom find a boy who is inwardly so torn apart as N.G. is, in spite of the fact that there are today so many children who are torn apart. What you have told me about are simply stupid, boyish tricks, and you certainly know that there are such boys in every school. However, there are certain inner or soul things here but what you have told me about today belongs in the category of things that occur in every school. There appears to be a misunderstanding of the situation here. You have told me that N.G. and G.S., and perhaps some of the others, have been impertinent and that they asked how it is that people say that there is no anthroposophy in the instruction. How did you understand that? What did you think about all those questions? A teacher: When N.G. asked about those things, I had the feeling that he wanted to know the truth, but that he also wanted to trip us up. Dr. Steiner: The situation with N.G. is such that he is now grown up. At the time when he was a small child and learning to speak, he did not hear one true word in his family. His mother is a complete lie, just as his father is. They were totally contradictory, so that N.G. one day when he was quite young, perhaps only seven or eight years old, asked himself, “What is the world, then? My father, who is such a terrible boor, still made it through graduate school. How is that possible?” Now, N.G. is in the school where he also found that all the teachers are boors. He came here and said to himself that it is said that the teachers here at the Waldorf School are not boors, but I want to see for myself if they are boors or not. Everybody told him time and again that there is no Anthroposophy in the instruction. But Anthroposophy is just what he wanted. It would have been just the thing for him as he sought the opportunity to learn about Anthroposophy. He wanted to know why everyone withheld that and he perceived it as an untruth. He then soon left and worked to earn money. After a long time, N.G. came to me and said, “I don’t know what I should do. I had a great hope that I would become a better human being when I went to the Waldorf School. I rode my bicycle over to Dornach and had a look at the building there. That building made me into a better human being, but I am not getting anywhere. I do not see any difference between good and evil and I see no reason why I should be good now. Why should I not be a person who is intent upon destroying everything?” Now recently since he returned again, something has happened to the boy. Either we should not have accepted him again, or he should have been able to gain some trust in the faculty. He is in a terrible position. Think about what kind of trophy that is for people who gather data against the anthroposophical movement. I have to admit that as I learned of the situation I thought of it as being one situation at school like many others. You would have to really look for schools where such things do not come up. It is also easy for other schools to cope with such things. For us it is not so easy because we have to really be aware of how the anthroposophical movement is affected by such things. We thus have the choice between removing the student from the school with all justification and publicly, or of coping with such cases. The opinion that the world has about us in such cases needs to come from us. We need to stop turning people away because of the difficulties they bring, since they become our enemies. A reason for expelling a student is really something quite different from what we now have before us. There is not much that we can do with the information we now have. The things that G.S. has done were really just stupid, boyish pranks and lead to the situation where people could ask what kind of a school this is that would allow the children so much time that they could get drunk. A teacher: The children have forty-four hours of school per week. Dr. Steiner: If you look at what you have presented, it would appear as though the children had no time at all to come to school. It is not only the fact that the children do not have any feeling that they are at school, it is also the fact that they do not feel that they are at a school where they cannot do such things. I think that this is something you should have noticed. Here in the report, you state how G.S. formed a detective club over Christmas. This all occurred outside the school, but was there no effect upon the school? You should certainly be able to notice when there is a student of the sort who would form a detective club. Now people can say that the children have been thrown out. I was in the 10th and 11th grade classes today, and I think they are quite well-behaved. You should be able to do anything with them. A teacher: It is now really enjoyable to work with the class. Dr. Steiner: The 11th-grade class is very upright and you should be able to do anything with them. To what extent has the situation with these children who have left affected the remainder of the class? A teacher: They are all terribly happy about it. Dr. Steiner: If you were to ask them, what would they say? A teacher: They would say that they are happy the others are gone. Dr. Steiner: The impression I have from all the questioning is that these delinquents did nothing more during the questioning than to lie out of both sides of their mouths, and certainly not much can result from that. It was rather unpleasant for me today to hear the discussion that someone had with one N.G.’s school comrades. What was said points to things that occurred last Christmas. I need to ask if you noticed nothing about all the things that this schoolgirl said. It is really difficult to find a way to rectify things in this case. What would you do if in six months time one of those members of that clique of clerics were to handle H.B.’s case in the following way? H.B. is an upright student until he went to the Waldorf School. Afterward, he was also quite honorable. It took three years until he began his black-market activities. It is quite clear in this instance that it was not immediately possible to make such an honorable student into something so bad. It took three years of Waldorf School indoctrination—what would you say if that were to be said? A teacher: I would see no possibility of working with such people in the school. Dr. Steiner: What was actually the cause of all this? The reason is that contact was lost with the boys and girls. I had thought that after I spoke so seriously and that in some way we should again try to accept N.G. into the school, that a connection would then form with him. There must be some reason that we lost the boy. N.G. has been at school for two years. A teacher: We could never find the proper relationship to him. I have often had the impression that we place ourselves above the children and not alongside of them. Dr. Steiner: Why do you say that you have placed yourself above the children? What should have happened is that the children placed you above themselves. That is how things should be. The children should place you above them as a matter of course. That is the only possible proper relationship as then there will no longer be any discussions in which the children tell you that they reject the whole school. We cannot glue things together again. We must nevertheless remove eight of the children. We cannot mend things in any other way. Nothing else can be done. We need to be able to justify the situation and represent it in such a way that it cannot be used against us. We must have the possibility of treating the situation in such a way that we can justify that we have expelled these eight children. It is really very difficult to cope with this situation. We need some firm ground under our feet, but what is important is that people hear how the situation is with the remainder of the class. A teacher: The experience has been a relief and a freeing for the children in the 11th grade. Dr. Steiner: Then we can handle it in the following way. We must come to a decision in the next few days. Tomorrow morning I will have a look at the 11th-grade class and then the tenth. The whole thing is so frustrating. It’s a dead end. It was a major mistake that the situation was handled by individuals. It should have been done with groups. I told that to Mr. R. and in spite of it I received this interrogation report. Just look at this report about S.H. Four-and-a-half pages long. Look at the report and you will see that it was just a joke for her. She said things and then laughed behind her hand. I do not think that she thought for one moment that the teachers stand above her. I need to look at the 10th- and 11th-grade classes. A teacher: Did I understand you properly that it would be less of a blemish were we to keep the children? Dr. Steiner: You cannot keep the children, but how can we get out of this? We cannot simply decide to expel them if we have no reasons for doing so. We need to find a reason. There must be some way of stopping a repetition of this. There must be some way of not allowing the children in the upper grades to get out of the faculty’s control, but that has now happened. If there is no will to keep the children under control, then they will get out of our control, especially due to the advantages of our methods. The disadvantage of those methods is that the children become too clever. Laziness occurs in other schools also, but with the understanding common among the students and teachers in those schools, this loss of control does not occur there. The real error lies in the way you have held discussions. We need to protect ourselves from those people who seek every opportunity—and you cannot imagine how much attention is paid by them—to rid the world of the anthroposophical movement. We need to be able to counter that by avoiding such things in the future. I am not totally convinced that they will not recur. I can only believe that the boys and girls by the time they reach the age of fifteen or sixteen will time and again slip out of the teachers’ hands. We need to undertake something that will give a breath of life throughout the instruction. I don’t want to be preaching, but a breath of life must go through the teaching and into the classes. There is still some breath of life in the lower grades and it could also be in the upper grades. Basically, we have really quite good students here. These two classes made a quite good impression upon me. It is very frustrating when no one understands that the whole thing should be coming from another impulse. It should be impossible that students come to you and say that they reject the whole school. There needs to be some will to change such things. A teacher: Couldn’t you say some more about that? We are confronted here with our own lack of ability. Dr. Steiner: There is no will. If you were to concentrate your entire will upon this matter, then things would go differently. From an external perspective, there is a noticeable difference between the lower and upper grade classes. In the lower classes, what occurred with Miss U. occurs often and the children make quite a spectacle so you do not have the feeling that they are asleep. That was really a quite noteworthy example in your class. In the upper grades, the class is asleep. They don’t know anything, not even the simplest things. There was not one person there who knew that there had been the crusades. I understand something different with the idea of being awake. They had no idea at all about how the Crusades began. We need to have a different kind of will. At a certain point in time, we come out of the proper understanding of the class and fall into simply lecturing. We leave the living connections behind. Things would have been more understandable had you brought up Jakob Böhme today. You should not bring up so many details that one covers up the other. At 10:00 o’clock there was a whole lot of dictation and questioning. You need to round it out to form a picture and it is the picture that should remain. Had you added Jakob Böhme to everything else today, then they would certainly have been confused. Why is it that when we have three hours one after the other, what is done in the second hour wipes out what was done in the first? In history, you could do an hour and a half of something new and then illuminate it through other things the children have already learned. We need to develop the will to keep the children lively, so that they will have something from all these things when they learn them. That is something that we need to achieve, since otherwise we cannot dare to keep these higher grades. I am not saying all of this simply to complain. The fact is that the class is asleep. |
| 261. Our Dead: Eulogy at the Cremation of Hermann Linde
29 Jun 1923, Basel |
|---|
| At such moments, my dear friends, it is up to us to make real, in a deeper, moral-religious sense and in a deeper sense of feeling and perception, what anthroposophy can trigger in our souls, what anthroposophy can inspire in our souls. It is, after all, our whole endeavour to get to know the spiritual world, to learn to live in the soul with the spiritual world. |
| Only then do the powers of perception that can be triggered in us through anthroposophy have the right strength, if we are able to do so. We should also be able to keep the memories of a dear dead person alive in a different way than someone who has not taken in spiritual knowledge into the depths of his soul as we have set ourselves the goal. |
| And if we do not understand this metamorphosis of love, then we do not understand in the right sense the metamorphosis of life, which we think we understand when we join a spiritual movement like anthroposophy. And so let us reflect today on how beautifully Hermann Linde has realized in his own heart the conviction that what a person is and does here on earth comes from the divine: Ex deo nascimur. |
| 261. Our Dead: Eulogy at the Cremation of Hermann Linde
29 Jun 1923, Basel |
|---|
Dear Mourners! Now that our dear friend has been escorted by the clergy into the realms of light, words of farewell are spoken from the hearts of those who were most closely connected to our dear friend: to his dear wife, daughter and to you, dear friends, who were so closely connected to Hermann Linde. These words, which may resonate in the soul of our dear friend, are spoken:
Dear mourners! Our dear friend was one of the first of our spiritual community to join us in heartfelt intimacy. And we got to know his kind, good heart, whether it was in such a effectively accomplished, sacred work duty for all of us, or whether it was in walking side by side in the confession of our spiritual knowledge, we got to know this good, dear heart, we learned to appreciate it, and we should know to remain connected to it, even after our physical eye can no longer look into his physical eye. And so let our soul's eye look into his in the future, remembering him with all our heart and love, into his dear spiritual eye. Dear friends! On his earnest path to spiritual research, Hermann Linde has found many doubts and many other soul obstacles on the way. But he has possessed a spiritually inclined, soul-warm inner heart power. With strong inner power, it led him to what he then found as his spiritual word, his spiritual insight, in which we were united with him in intimate friendship. One could say that Hermann Linde walked in loyalty with the three epochs of anthroposophical life. First he found this spiritual life. Then came the times when he worked in Munich as one of the most effective, devoted and sacrificial collaborators on our festival mystery plays, which, together with others, were also his work. My dear friends, there are many things we have to say: at the time when we had to work on them, they would not have come about without Hermann Linde. And then, when the call came to build the Goetheanum, which was so dear to all of us and also died on the Dornach hill, he was again one of the first to offer advice and help, giving everything he had: his art, his being, to the work. We have seen how Hermann Linde, outgrowing his artistic life, ultimately sacrificed everything he was able to give in art to the work with which he had completely identified. And anyone who is able to appreciate and love human loyalty and human devotion could not help but appreciate and admire the quiet, gentle, and yet so energetic soul of Hermann Linde, and feel him as the dearest friend soul who walked with us on our spiritual path. Many are the hours that come to mind's eye, when I met Hermann Linde working, working at the side of his dear wife, our friend, up in the dome of the Goetheanum, and when he sacrificed his best for the work, whose downfall he and we had to experience with such deep pain. And when you saw Hermann Linde quietly working in his studio, completely absorbed in the Goethean idea, everything he could feel as an artist, mysteriously enmeshed in this Goethean idea, then you knew: he was one of the best who work among us. Dear mourning friends, Hermann Linde stands before us. But we also had to accompany him in such a way that we always saw in him how a strong soul, a soul with many desires, nevertheless lived in a weak body. And this weak body took Hermann Linde from us early, much too early, for all of us: this weak body, which those who were more intimately connected with Hermann Linde knew, that everything that stood in Hermann Linde's life, that even doubts arose in him, that sometimes did not allow the intentions of the work to come into full effect, came from him. Those who were very close to Hermann Linde knew that his soul was great and that he himself often felt an inner tragedy due to his weak body, But that is precisely why he belonged to a spiritual community that is able to look beyond everything that physical-earthly sensuality alone gives, that is able to look up to that which, as a supermundane ability, the spiritually willing soul longs for and hopes for as its great goal. And in my intimate friendship with Hermann Linde, I often had the thought: You may tell yourself that not everything you want in your earthly existence will be granted to you, but you may take comfort in the fact that in spiritual regions your will to transcend the earthly will be strengthened and that you are able to give to the earth all that you would like to give to it. But we had to remind ourselves that we cannot make the same demands on ourselves that Hermann Linde made on himself. And we were truly always in complete agreement with this gentle and quiet soul. We appreciated what he did for us as one of the best. And, my dear mourners, Hermann Linde can be a role model for many. He wrestled in his quiet mind, wrestled with earnest strength, wrestled with solemn dignity beyond all doubt, beyond all inhibitions, to that knowledge that brings man the certainty: That which you live on earth comes from divine heights of existence. But Hermann Linde appreciated the sacredness of the divine heights of existence, Hermann Linde knew how to see through what secrets these divine heights of existence hold, and he therefore knew how little of that which we carry into this existence from heavenly heights through earthly birth enters into human consciousness of earthly existence. It is true that we are all born of God into earthly life. But during this earthly life, the human consciousness is too thin to be permeated with divine power. And only in this death, experienced with earthly consciousness, can the divine power rediscover the strong soul power that feels connected to the impulse of Christ, give birth again, resurrect the God in the human breast, the connection with Christ. And so did Hermann Linde feel. Just as he knew that he had been led from divine existence into earthly existence, so he knew that in earthly death the awakening Christ lives, with whom the human soul, the human heart, can connect. And so today, in this solemn hour, we look up with you, beloved soul, into spiritual regions, knowing that he who retains in earthly existence the awareness of divine origin, who conquers for earthly existence the permeation with the power of Christ, will be reawakened, will resurrect in bright, luminous spiritual heights. Dear friend soul, our friendly glances from the depths of our hearts longingly accompany you. We want to let our best thoughts, which were connected to you, follow you there. We know you in the heights of spirit in the future. It will be for us to seek again and again from the depths of our hearts the thoughts that go to you, that may unite with your thoughts of purpose in the light of spirit, that want to remain with you for all time, that you will have to go through for all the worlds, that you will have to permeate. Yes, our thoughts may be with Your thoughts, out of the earthly labor, which we could feel, with which You were spiritually connected to us through Your own choice in this earthly life. May Your thoughts, my dear mourners, always follow the spiritually connected one in his future earthly joyful existence, preparing himself for a new earthly existence full of light. So may it be. And so may our thoughts follow you, may they stay with you, our dear Hermann Linde, and may we understand to stay with you, even when our soul must seek you in the bright heights of the spirit.
This morning we had to see off our dear friend Hermann Linde at the gate through which he will now enter the spiritual world. At such moments, my dear friends, it is up to us to make real, in a deeper, moral-religious sense and in a deeper sense of feeling and perception, what anthroposophy can trigger in our souls, what anthroposophy can inspire in our souls. It is, after all, our whole endeavour to get to know the spiritual world, to learn to live in the soul with the spiritual world. In the moment when a dear soul departs from physical existence and enters into that life, in order to gain knowledge of which we strive, we must also feel the strength and the power to sustain in the full sense of the word all that which should have become ingrained in us during that time while we were here on earth in a spiritual bond with a soul that has now passed away from us. And we should learn to understand in the right sense that we should maintain the community in which we have found each other, beyond the bonds that are woven through earthly life. We should be able to hold that love warmly, which connects us with such souls, even when that warmth of feeling cannot be kindled by external impulses as it can when the soul in question is still walking among us in a physical body. Only then do the powers of perception that can be triggered in us through anthroposophy have the right strength, if we are able to do so. We should also be able to keep the memories of a dear dead person alive in a different way than someone who has not taken in spiritual knowledge into the depths of his soul as we have set ourselves the goal. And Hermann Linde is indeed bound to our souls by many beautiful memories. A large number of those sitting here know this without a doubt, some perhaps in a looser way. But Hermann Linde was a personality of whom it may be said that even those who knew him only briefly grew to love him. Those who have been part of our society for longer know Hermann Linde as one of the first to join the society in order to follow a shared spiritual path with the other friends united in it. And those who knew Hermann Linde more intimately know that he was not one of those who joined this spiritual path in a mere effervescence of feeling, in an inner-soul sensation, but that he strove, out of innermost self-knowledge, to find the possibility of uniting his path with the path of this spiritual current. Hermann Linde was a mild nature, but a nature that also had a strong, justified critical spirit within the mildness of his soul, a nature that examined what came its way, and a nature that had to examine because other impressions that were already there had stuck in the soul in a strong way. And so Hermann Linde had to fight his soul's battles with what lived in his soul, what warmed his soul, what often filled his soul with bitter doubts on the one hand, and with what, because it differs so much from everything else that one encounters in the present, on the other hand, with anthroposophy, he had to fight his soul's battles with these two currents. And today, when his life on earth is complete, we can look back on it and say to ourselves: When a soul so noble, mild and inwardly earnest has found its way into this spiritual movement, not from overflowing sentiment but from inwardly true self-knowledge, then this spiritual movement can regard it as a kind of testimony that confirms its inner strength. A movement that is in a position to point out that good people have found the opportunity to unite with it can consider itself fortunate in the most beautiful sense. And it was indeed the case that our anthroposophical movement in its first period could, by the nature of things, be nothing other than a place where souls found themselves and their connection with the spiritual world. In view of the tasks that the anthroposophical movement has had to take on in later times, many older members may well say to themselves: Oh, if only it had always remained so, if the Anthroposophical Movement had remained in that first epoch, when it was basically a gathering of people who interacted as people, who formed an inwardly cohesive association that initially looked to the spiritual current flowing through it. Hermann Linde knew how to unite with his own soul that which flows through the Anthroposophical Society as a spiritual current; but he was also one of those who, with an open heart and an unlimited willingness to make sacrifices, devoted themselves to every new task that arose from this spiritual movement. And for many who enter this spiritual movement, it should be so that they look to the example of such a personality. Hermann Linde entered the anthroposophical movement as an artist. He first placed his entire artistic being at the service of this movement and then, in the third phase of this movement, sacrificed it at the altar of the same. We look back because what happened through the personalities working within our movement must be of value to us. We look back to the time when the Anthroposophical movement in Munich, steeped in true inwardness, had to be led into artistic channels. At first we needed people who could infuse it with artistic life. And now I would like to call upon those of you who remember the Mystery performances in Munich to recall in your inmost soul how marvelously unified were the stage sets that Hermann Linde contributed to the individual scenes of these Mystery Dramas out of his, I might say, natural willingness to make sacrifices. For some of those who were present at those performances, these images will be unforgettable, for they arose out of a real experience of what was to arise at that time before the soul-vision of our anthroposophists. And the words I spoke this morning from a deeply moved heart, I would like to repeat them here: We know very well that much of what was to be done back then could not have been done without a subsidy like the one that came from Hermann Linde. And when the idea arose in some people's minds to erect a building for the anthroposophical movement, it was again a matter of course to call upon Hermann Linde in the circle of those who wanted to devote themselves above all to the construction and management of this building, because they knew that they would find a willingness to make sacrifices, a willingness to work, above all, what is most needed: a reconciling, loving spirit that balances differences. And so Hermann Linde joined the small community of those who, as a kind of committee, led everything that was initially connected with the intention in Munich and then with the reality here in Dornach: to build up the anthroposophical cause. And he was also one of the foremost in the ranks of those who took on the work of this construction. He was imbued with such inner love for the cause that he now linked his entire existence in these last years with this construction. And again I would like to repeat a word that I said this morning: When I think back to the hours when I met Hermann Linde, working up in our now-defunct dome room, working in harmony with our dear friend, his wife, when I discussed the most diverse matters with him up there that were related to the management of the building and to the role he held within this leadership, then in all of this lay, firstly, the revelation of his unlimited willingness to make sacrifices, the unlimited application of his artistic skill to what was to be built there, and on the other side there was also that reconciling spirit that balanced out the contradictions, which was always there with advice, rather than criticism. Many a person has thought that either they themselves or others – as is always the case in life – could have done better what Hermann Linde has done. But these things are vain illusions. What matters when something real is brought into the world lies much more in what Hermann Linde had in such an outstanding degree than in what some believed he did not have. It would not have been possible to work with the things that were often criticized. Hermann Linde's approach to our work, which was so self-sacrificing and lovingly conciliatory, allowed us to work on every detail and as a whole. And if we are to talk about the workers in our cause, then Hermann Linde must be mentioned in the first row. But then it must not be concealed how great our sorrow must be that he left us so early, for a difficult time that undoubtedly lies ahead of us. But he was so intimately connected with everything that concerns us here in our earthly existence that we may hope for the help that the souls from the spiritual realm can provide for those who have remained here from him to the greatest extent possible, if only we prove worthy of this help. Many people are unaware of the extent of the individual concerns that weighed on the leading personalities during the last few years of the Dornach building work. Today it is self-evident to point out that Hermann Linde was one of those who bore these worries in the most beautiful way, but that Hermann Linde was also one of those who followed everything that happened here with a broad-minded interest and who would have liked to see many things develop into greater fruitfulness, precisely by reconciling the differences, than has been possible so far. Many of us will remember how Hermann Linde was always among those who had the sincere desire to bring about a union of artists here among us. He was certainly not a person who would have excluded or restricted any individual activity. Out of the infinite kindness of his heart, he wanted to create a collaboration. And much of what has been achieved in this direction can be traced back to his initiative. And the fact that many of the seeds he has planted in this regard have not come to full fruition is truly not due to a lack of his own zeal. Let us remember with what heartfelt love and devotion he reported on the progress of the artistic work at our Goetheanum during the meetings of the Goetheanum Association here in this hall. Let us remember such things as what is most intimately connected with the history of our movement. We must not forget, especially at this moment, that it was Hermann Linde, for example, who gave the impetus for the small further training school established here at the Goetheanum, and that he devoted his special care and attention to this further training school. But this is just one of the many gaps that arise in our ranks as a result of Hermann Linde's passing away from the physical plane. And those who will have the task of filling these gaps in some way will feel what Hermann Linde meant to us. Because what we take for granted in certain areas of life – that wherever a gap is created by a person, another will step in – is not the case at all. And finally, Hermann Linde had to go through with us the pain that affected our and his work. He had to be among those who, in a short time, saw what had been built out of love and devotion dwindle to ruin. And it is truly true in the deepest sense, as I had to speak this morning, that for his earthly existence this broke his heart. This impression, which he experienced on New Year's Eve and which was a death for much of what our cause is, was deeply burning in Hermann Linde's soul. And the short span of time that he was still granted to spend on earth after the Goetheanum fire was entirely under this impression. The last time he spent here on earth was a time of suffering. He also felt deeply in his innermost heart all that is being done against the anthroposophical movement by various opponents. That is why the last time he was allowed to dwell on earth was a time of suffering. And if pain is what deepens life in the spiritual world that follows on from the time on earth, Hermann Linde has taken much of noble pain into the form of existence that he has now entered. All this, my dear friends, should fill our soul today. And it should be the starting point for thoughts of devotion for this soul to remain in our souls. Then we will worthily find again the dear soul that has been taken from our physical sight, but that should remain with us in the most intense way in our spiritual sight. If we can do this, if we can love Hermann Linde with the same intensity with which we loved him here, and with an ever-increasing strength, then in this case we fulfill the anthroposophical view of life that we should be able to fulfill. The starting point for a spiritual community with this soul should be the days when he is snatched from our physical sight. He left behind his dear wife, our dear friend, and his dear daughter. We must understand the pain they feel over his death, in true inner warmth. We must understand that we make our thoughts about him, which are devoted to him, quite precious by remaining connected in the most intimate love, as long as we are granted this on earth, with these, his friends who have survived him. We must make it our will and his spiritual joy to be for those who remain behind what can serve him, when he looks down on what is happening on the site where he worked for so long, to give him inner spiritual and soul satisfaction. This is truly practical anthroposophy for the soul. If we know in the right sense that death is not the destroyer of life but the beginning of another form of life, then we must understand in the right sense that the love that has been assigned to one who is now dead to earthly life also enters into another form of existence with this death. And if we do not understand this metamorphosis of love, then we do not understand in the right sense the metamorphosis of life, which we think we understand when we join a spiritual movement like anthroposophy. And so let us reflect today on how beautifully Hermann Linde has realized in his own heart the conviction that what a person is and does here on earth comes from the divine: Ex deo nascimur. It should be borne in mind that he found in his heart the strength to recognize, for earthly consciousness, that in this consciousness the power of Christ must come to life, so that what begins to die in man at birth may, through the experience of the power of Christ, gain the right to a new life: In Christo morimur. And in thinking of Hermann Linde today, we share the conviction that when the consciousness of our divine spiritual descent unites with the consciousness of union with the Christ impulse, we may live in the conviction that human existence is God-conscious and imbued with Christ: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus. These thoughts affirm that in us which enables us, for all time, to look up in loyal thoughts to the soul of Hermann Linde, which will continue to work in the spiritual existence as a continuation of its earthly existence. As a sign of this, my dear friends, we rise from our seats. My dear friends, perhaps it is appropriate on this day, in the short span of time that remains to us, to reflect on an event like this. We must be clear in the innermost part of our soul about how what we live through in our physical existence on earth, and also live through in our soul, is bound to the outer senses and to what the mind makes of the impressions of the outer senses. But the outer senses, with everything that the mind makes of them, do not follow us into the after-earthly existence. We hand over the external senses to the earthly existence with physical death. What the mind makes of the impressions of the outer senses, we hand over to the etheric world a few days after physical death. It melts away from us, and in all that follows, we are dependent on continuing to live out that which is immersed in the darkness of the unconscious while we live our earthly life. To some extent, a person lives their life in the state between waking and sleeping. They are filled with what is experienced through the senses and through the mind, and what they find extinguished with death in the form in which they experience it here on earth. Every day, people experience the other side of existence between falling asleep and waking up. But even if the experiences within are immersed in the darkness of the unconscious for earthly consciousness, what appears to some to be of little importance for earthly existence: for what comes to life in the human soul when it has passed through the gate of death, it is precisely these experiences, which then transform into full consciousness, that are the most essential part of earthly life. What we go through here on earth in unconsciousness, we carry through the long time between death and a new life on earth. The greatest difference between what we perceive, see and think here on earth and what we see on the other side after we have passed through the gate of death is in relation to the outer nature. Anyone who believes that they can exhaust what is hidden and revealed in nature with their physical senses and earthly mind while they are awake is mistaken. They only know the smallest part of nature. Nature has another essential side, the side that we live through between falling asleep and waking up, which is deeply hidden from the conscious mind, which in the truest sense of the word represents another side of our existence. The one side of existence that nature assigns to our earthly senses and our earthly mind is extremely different from the other side, which is assigned to our soul, our spiritual nature, which belongs to eternity. He who can form a correct idea of this radical difference, he who realizes to what a high degree it is the case that, while nature reveals to our senses a completely unspiritual, un-animated entity, seen from the other side it is through and through an infinite abundance of spiritual entities in themselves, he can also comprehend what an enormous difference there is between the human being when it is clothed here in the physical body, and the human being when it has discarded the physical and etheric bodies and lives on in its soul-spiritual part beyond the gate of death. Not only in itself, but in the whole relationship to ourselves, there is a radical difference. We face a human being in earthly life, we experience together with him what happens in earthly life. What he experiences is imprinted on our earthly thoughts. Through our earthly thoughts it becomes our memory. During our time on earth, we carry this other person within us in our memory. But every time we see him again, it is not just the earthly memory that works in us, but what flows out of his soul as a living being and is poured into this earthly memory. Consider how the memory of a person that we carry within us is enlivened when we are face to face with him in earthly life, how infinitely more alive for earthly thinking is that which streams from him into our memory than is this memory itself. And now he leaves us, out of the physical existence on earth. We are left with the memory, to which he himself adds nothing metamorphosing, nothing transforming, nothing enlivening after his death. We are left with the memory, just as we are left with thoughts of the outer nature when we see it with our physical senses, grasp them with our physical minds, where the things of nature add nothing to our knowledge, to our thoughts, where we must keep our thoughts all the more objective, the more we want to faithfully depict that which is, and where we must not be led astray by that which could modify these thoughts from life. But just as the other side of nature is different from what it assigns to us for the senses and for the earthly mind, so is that which a human being is when it has become merely an earthly memory for us, different from what it was when it lived these earthly memories day after day, from time to time. For from this point on, this human being now appears to us, to our experience, entirely on the other side of existence. Just as we live in our sleep, so we live with the natural beings, who are inwardly spiritually alive, in contrast to what is dead and assigns its dead countenance to us for the earthly senses. So that part of the human being that which for our earthly life has now become only a memory, lives on this other side of existence, in that realm which we experience when we are pushed into unconsciousness, into the darkness of unconsciousness, in that realm which we pass through in our sleep. Yes, my dear friends, just as our thoughts are invigorating and our impressions are vivid when the physical human being steps before us and we consciously experience him in his earthly consciousness, so we experience — unconsciously, but no less real for that — the approach, the coexistence with us in sleep of the one who has passed from earthly existence. To the same extent that the deceased disappears from our waking consciousness, he enters our sphere of life for our sleeping consciousness. And if we human souls, based on anthroposophical knowledge, know how we have to learn to adopt a completely different attitude to life for sleep than we do for waking, then we will feel what has been said. If we could only live in such a way that the later always follows the earlier in physical time, we would never be able to experience the true spiritual. We only learn to experience the true spiritual when we can change the direction of life in the opposite direction. As paradoxical as it may seem to the physical thinker, all life in the spiritual takes place in the opposite direction. The wheel of life comes full circle. The end comes together with the beginning at last. This seems so incredible to people on earth only because they have distanced themselves so far from any spiritual view. But every time we fall asleep, even if it is only for a moment, we experience time running backwards. For the path leading back to the spirit from which the world originates is a path leading forward. And even what older cultural movements recognized as correct, namely that those born later return to the forefathers in death, is more correct than the idea we have in our seemingly so enlightened time. But then, when we set out on our journey to the spiritual realm every night, in the opposite direction to the physical, those who have gone before us in physical death are the ones who precede us. And as we enter a spiritual world every night, we find, so to speak, figuratively speaking, the entities of the higher hierarchies at the front, who never incarnate on earth, and then, below them, the procession of those souls with whom we were fatefully connected and who passed through the gate of death earlier than we did. And that part of the journey, which, if not consciously, then at least in our unconscious thoughts we are allowed to follow in every state of sleep, that is the part in reality we follow them. And if we can keep the memory of our dear dead alive and vivid, if we also have these thoughts in a vivid imagery again and again in our waking state, then what we lovingly carry within us as memories during waking hours makes it possible for the dead to have an effect in this world, to pour their will into it, and that the will of the living continues to live in the will of the dead. But also what we fully awaken again and again in our memories during waking hours for the dead, goes with us into the state of sleep as forces with a lasting effect. It is different for the dead when we fall asleep from a life in which we have forgotten our dead, or from a life in which we have lovingly called the images of our dead to our soul again and again. For what we carry into the world of the spirit every time we fall asleep becomes a sensation for the dead. There their soul perceives the images that we carry through the portal of sleep into the spiritual world every day. And so we can bring it about that the perceptive faculty of the dead unites with the images that we faithfully preserve for them during sleep. In this way we can bring it about that the will of the dead unites with our will through our thoughts, if we cherish and care for them in loyal remembrance when we are awake. And so we can learn in a real way to live with the dead. Then the dead will find us worthy of living with them. And only then will the true human community arise, which is instinctive only within the physical world, but which also becomes spiritual for this physical world when the extinguishing of physical life on earth does not loosen or even break any spiritually formed bonds, when everything that is bound in the soul can remain, even though the outer earthly bonds are loosened or broken. This means that through the human soul the reality of the spirit is preserved when we admit the truth to the spirit in life by not depriving it of its reality, by not surrendering to the physical and sensual alone, but by finding the possibility to live freely in the spiritual and soul, as if compelled to do so in the physical and sensual. This is what every death, and in particular the death of a dear friend, can remind us of, what it can call us to, not just as a dead memory, but as a lasting, living sensation, memory. |
| 270. Esoteric Instructions: Tenth Lesson
25 Apr 1924, Dornach Translated by John Riedel |
|---|
| If one just exerts oneself with sufficient strength, free of preconceptions, one can grasp all that Anthroposophy will present. But straightaway in the pursuit of this apprehension by healthy human understanding, the question immediately comes to mind of whether any particular individual is in reality karmically called today to take part in Anthroposophy, or whether not. |
| For if and when you honestly identify, innately within yourself, the sort of common sense grasped in Anthroposophy, then this common sense of Anthroposophy is grasped in its immediacy, regardless of one’s general liking for it. And this common sense, grasped honorably in Anthroposophy, is actually the beginning of esoteric pursuit. And one should really appreciate that attaining this common understanding is the beginning of esoteric pursuit. |
| 270. Esoteric Instructions: Tenth Lesson
25 Apr 1924, Dornach Translated by John Riedel |
||
|---|---|---|
My dear friends! Included in esoteric development, and in true insight, is all that may be found along the way of a person’s attempting to attain an understanding of what it means to live and actually exist in a world in which the senses and the entire corporeal organization are not mediators, and so therefore to live in one’s spiritual-soul nature, which really is a person’s natural state as a member of the spiritual-soul world. Now to this end, and in general to attain this, to live in the world in a spiritual-soul manner, to this end the multifaceted, more or less meditative soul-life exercises have come, exercises for our souls that are to be pursued vigorously and tenaciously. And a picture of this should be developed, of what a person’s soul can undergo along the way from an experience of the world of physical sensation, the world known through the senses, to an experience of the spiritual world. A picture should initially be developed in these class-sessions, by means of the various deliberations and individual verses appended to the deliberations, a certain picture that includes the possibilities and the prerequisites, from one to the next, of how they are enabled into becoming objects of meditation. When, after the elapse of a certain time, these Class lessons, which really are impartations from the spiritual world, as I have very often already spoken about, these Class lessons will come together, so that what can be described in the lessons and accomplished through meditation, and it is a karmic fulfillment for those who can accomplish it, what can be accomplished through these meditations will come together as a clear picture and will become for you a first step in esoteric development. And now it proceeds, from the very different considerations cultivated here in previous lessons, already put forth, how the person in this way can gradually lift himself out of his earth existence-awareness into an experience of being with the cosmos, the feeling, the development of an inner sense that can carry him to the ends of the world, to where the spiritual may be confronted. As long as a person shrinks from this, only entering into a relationship merely through reasoning and understanding with the things around him that are sense-perceptible, persisting in this manner it is impossible, taking the soul-spiritual so lightly, it is impossible for him to truly connect to spirit-soulfulness, the content of which most certainly is the human approach to truth. You see, my dear friends, as I have very often stressed, healthy human understanding can grasp it all. If one just exerts oneself with sufficient strength, free of preconceptions, one can grasp all that Anthroposophy will present. But straightaway in the pursuit of this apprehension by healthy human understanding, the question immediately comes to mind of whether any particular individual is in reality karmically called today to take part in Anthroposophy, or whether not. You see, there are two possibilities. It may happen that a person hearkens unto the content of anthroposophical truth, and such a person may allow the content of anthroposophical truth to work effectively on himself, so as to find himself illuminated. It is of course self-understood, my friends, that all here present belong to this group of men and women. For those who do not belong to this group of men and women, but nonetheless somehow take part in the class as members, these people would certainly not be taking part honorably. And all, all initially rests on honor in esoteric life, on a person’s soul and spirit manner of being completely saturated with honor. There is another group of men and women however, that finds what is offered by Anthroposophy to be fantasy, belonging more or less to the visionary realm. People in this group show, through their attitudes, that their karma does not align them with the others, with those who with healthy human understanding far removed from corporeality and the senses can grasp truth free of the senses, who can grasp inner knowing free of the senses. Being bound together, either in having the sense in common of being bound to corporeality, or of having the sense of not being so bound, this certainly constitutes a great differentiation today between human beings. For if and when you honestly identify, innately within yourself, the sort of common sense grasped in Anthroposophy, then this common sense of Anthroposophy is grasped in its immediacy, regardless of one’s general liking for it. And this common sense, grasped honorably in Anthroposophy, is actually the beginning of esoteric pursuit. And one should really appreciate that attaining this common understanding is the beginning of esoteric pursuit. One should not overlook this point. When, by means of this attainment, one goes out and acts in accordance with this initiatory common understanding, which is given in this school, convened for this purpose, then one will be following the esoteric path ever more and more closely. As the case may be, someone may find this or that meditative verse given here personally suitable and applicable, and may utilize it. In doing this, however, one must do it in accordance with the given explanations and clarifications, which fully delineate and characterize the utilization of these meditative verses for inner human life. Now today I would like once again to give something of a helpful nature, which can help to bring people out of their bodies, if only as a sort of jolt. I would like to give something that might not have been noticed or appreciated up to now. It is about really perceiving quite a bit more deeply and good-heartedly. Although this can also happen merely in thoughts, it is about perceiving and taking note of the mineral environment around us, and of the plant environment, and of whatever else is in our immediate earth environment. It is about making ourselves directly aware of how this earthly environment is close to us. In relationship to us it is very close. It is about how we as people of earth, bearing our physical embodiment, are closely, very closely, related to everything around us, with everything that has mineral qualities, plant-like qualities, animal qualities, and so on. And so we might say, with inner honesty, we might ask ourselves the question, what is this all about? Why do I take on the physical substance of the earth after I have been born? Why do I keep dragging myself through earth existence from birth to death until my organism is no longer capable of struggling with its earth-bound material nature, until my physical life on earth comes to an end with death? In order to comprehend this personal human conundrum, we must seek out and perceive in depth our closely associated physical surroundings. In doing this we will also come to know more and more what sort of departure point that esoteric life can be, for we will feel, in doing things in physical life upon the earth, we will feel that in reality we ourselves are blind, as if groping about in the dark. And please consider carefully, my dear brothers and sisters, please consider carefully the people nurtured into adulthood today in the customary way. They are born, then they become situated in earthly life, and then they become known purely through the external relationships associated with this or that sort of work. They don’t really grasp the inter-relationships of their work with the whole of human existence. It probably doesn’t cross their minds at all, except in knowing that they work in order to eat. It doesn’t cross their minds, truth be told, that the plants they eat contain cosmic forces from the depths of space, forces that wend their way through the human organism, and in a certain sense, by eating they bring into being a cosmic inner development and progression. Most people today cannot identify at all with this first glance leading away from the materialism of the times. They stand firm, at least initially, in the simple observation of earth relationships, and in life they remain spiritually blind to what lives in the darkness, to what is the starting point of a true esoteric development. And then one may then turn one’s glance away, turning from what lives all around about on the earth, whether engaged merely in thoughts or in the reality of it, one may then turn one’s glance up and out into the heavens, the heavens beset with stars. One gazes at the wandering stars, one gazes at the fixed stars, one is filled with and dwells in the unending grandeur out there confronting a person while gazing out at the world-all, at the universe. One says inwardly that as a human being, I am innately related to and interconnected with what is there resplendent in outer space, just as I am innately related to and interconnected with what surrounds me in the material world. In reality, in this outward glance at the heavens beset with stars, we have the feeling of not just living in the darkness, but rather also of ourselves becoming free in living in the darkness, of our vaulting up with our spiritual-soul nature into and among the stars, vaulting ourselves out and up to what is in place there, to the stars in their grouped images. And please note, if a person can really and enthusiastically take up this viewing of the starry heavens, then the starry heavens will become an overabundance of imaginations. You have probably seen various old paintings, in which not merely starry groups are portrayed, but in which the star-groups are formed up together in animal symbols. Someone has drawn the group of stars standing in Aries or in Taurus not just as star-groupings, but rather as symbolic arrangements picturing a ram, a bull, and so forth. Today people think that of course this was present as a free-form unfolding of the will of the ancient inhabitants of the earth, and due to the constellations having been called by these names, then the pictures were made accordingly. This was certainly not the case, but rather just the opposite, for in ancient times, the shepherds on the moors were not simply gazing out upon the star-beset heavens with physical eyes, but rather, they were also deeply immersed in dream-awareness or in sleep-awareness while out there with their herds, and they were wandering eyes-closed in soul out in the depths of space. And what they saw there was not just the star-groupings of visible observation. They took in the actuality, which was somewhat later differently portrayed in pictures. They took in the actuality of the imaginations, the actuality of the depths of space filled with truth. Today, we can no longer return, creeping back to the instinctive clairvoyance just described in such a manner, to the actual experiences of simple shepherds of long ago. But we can do something else. With a great deal of concerted effort, we can place ourselves, whether in thoughts or in reality, into the starry heavens themselves. We can perceive the depths, and at the same time the enormity of majesty shining down upon us, presenting itself there before us as illumination. And we can come gradually to revere what spreads out there before us in the depths of space. And the reverence itself, the fervor of reverence, is what can call forth out of our souls an experience, an experience of the external sensory image of the stars being swept away and the starry heaven becoming an imagination for us. And then, when the starry heaven becomes an imagination for us, then we feel ourselves being taken up, up and along by our soul-gazing. You see, up to the time of Plato, when gazing about, one still also felt something quite different in regard to the physical eyes. Plato himself described seeing in such a way, so that when looking out upon a man and seeing in the sense described by Plato, something flowed out from the eyes, a tracing of the man spread out, in ancient times, forming a spread-out connection. Something streamed forth from the eyes and encompassed the other person. The etheric streamed out. As when I stretch out my physical hand and grasp something, and I know in the grasping that with my physical hand I am connected, just so in the times of ancient instinctive clairvoyance, a person knew that etheric substance went out of the eyes and fastened upon what was being looked upon. Today a person merely believes that the eyes are here, and that what is seen is over there. Over there the seen object sends light-waves out through the intervening space, waves that impinge on the eyes, impinging in some way or another so as to be taken in by the soul. Please note that materialists most definitely speak of the soul, but it is placed way down within, and not at the forefront, and they speak of this impingement as somehow being taken in by the soul as truth. But this is not really the case. It is not simply a working into the person from what is present around him. It is also, quite definitely, an outward streaming of a human being’s inner etheric nature. And we should take our etheric body as the truth in its connectedness to the great world around us, when the star-beset heaven becomes the great folio of the world, the tome on which the imaginative mysteries of world existence have been inscribed, if and when we have the ability to behold it. The perception may come to us, however, that when present here upon the earth, present in this robust sensory reality, that in reality it is a sort of blindness. It is living in darkness. When your heart and mind soar aloft, you live within what otherwise just shines upon you from the great world all around. You live within the shining of the great surrounding world. But you take your own etheric existence-awareness out there into the broad flowing streaming of this shining of the world. You yourself go along with your etheric existence-awareness. And the shining ceases to be a shining. It can no longer remain nothingness, when we ourselves sink completely into it. We extend our inner experience of reality out into this shining. And this experience (about which I have written) becomes an enmeshment, a weaving into the shining of the cosmos. Previously we lived blind in the darkness of earth existence. Now we live out there, our etheric existence-awareness having been woven into the shining of the cosmos. So, we can have this experience, that we weave into the shining of the cosmos. Initially I will draw this as a picture: [It was drawn on the board.] the life of blindness in the darkness of existence-awareness on earth [as a white arch], living out and beyond in the far reaches of the world [gold rays], then the shining of stars at the end, in which world-imaginations can be perceived by us in reverence [red waves]. But having woven ourselves out and beyond, we are certainly out there now in our etheric nature within this imaginative fabric of the world. When we actually get to being within the imaginative fabric of the world, we are certainly no longer in our physical bodies. We have struggled through the empty ether into the experience of world-imaginations. It happens straightforwardly, you see, as when someone here in the physical world writes something down, and having learned to read, then just reads it. Through our weaving out and beyond into the cosmos, since the gods have inscribed for us world-imaginations in the cosmos, we arrive there and we see these world-imaginations from the other side [drawn as arrows in the first drawing]. We live first here upon the earth [second drawing, in the inner circle], then we soar aloft up to world-imaginations [second drawing, outside the wavy circle], but there we read from the outside. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] Yes, my dear friends, brothers and sisters, the zodiac speaks a meaningful speech, if and when looked upon from the other side and not from the earth. It speaks as Ares the Ram, Taurus the Bull, Gemini the Twins, Cancer the Crab, and Leo the Lion, if and when one encompasses it from the outside. And for our understanding, it is a deed, this encompassing of it from the outside. And we begin to read the mysteries of the world. And what we read are the deeds of high spiritual beings. In a novel we read about the deeds of men and women. When looking and seeing things from the other side of the zodiac, things are seen otherwise than as seen from the earth outward, as seen by Moses, who always looked upon God merely from behind, from the earth outward. Initiation consists of seeing from the other side. It is not merely a sort of outward gazing. It becomes a reading. And what one reads are the spiritual deeds of the high spiritual beings, who have brought it all into its present state. And when we read in this silence sufficiently long, when we nourish and broaden our souls inwardly in this reading, then we may begin to hear in a spiritual manner. Then the gods speak to us. Then we dwell within the spiritual world, when the gods speak to us. Now look, my dear brothers and sisters, it can be done, as the adept can tell you; the soul can broaden itself out and beyond, can be enmeshed in the depths of the cosmos, can come to world-imaginations, can gaze from the other side upon the deeds of gods. It is so; it is possible to hearken in a spiritual manner unto the gods’ speech. But perhaps someone really gets to the state the adept has described, really deepening, deepening oneself in understanding, deepening oneself in full-blooded courage, deepening in the heart, not simply approaching it stubbornly, not merely saying, well, if I could do it, well, then it would also please me, it would interest me, but I can’t worry about it now. When someone quite differently really takes this description up, takes it up as something that is actually possible, when one begins to take it up as something not just to be considered, but to be revered and loved, then one can take it up as a meditation. Ever and again it then becomes one’s way, finally, to actually come into the esoteric life. And you will find this way, if and when in meditating you deepen yourself in the words. [The first lines were written on the board.]
With the necessary feeling this inner meditative way is lived, experienced, works wonders in, and transforms the human soul. It must flow rhythmically again and again through the soul, for it actually leads a person through to his own world-being, contained within himself. But it is necessary that it should come to light within properly, so that after one has spoken it quite a while in one’s head, it should also be taken up by, should start coursing within one’s heart, for it is there that one makes the journey out into the etheric world-all, and then into the spiritual world-all on the other side of the etheric world-all. It is necessary, in coursing along such a pathway, to take one’s heart along in one’s experiencing, and to allow it to rule, to allow one’s heart to rule in the perceiving, so that it can join according to its nature in the translation of oneself out and beyond. But in coming into ruling our perceptions properly in this way, it is good initially, in traveling along this whole meditative pathway, it is good thoroughly and inwardly to observe what lies in these words.
You should try to imagine this as if someone were speaking to you from a great spiritual distance, as if you were not thinking it, but rather as if you were listening to and hearing another being speaking to you. One should imagine, really imagine, that another being is speaking to you out of unknown depths. Then the right feeling may be developed for what one hears here. This proper feeling lives in the second part of the verse. [The second part of the verse was written on the board.]
In that I am aware, that most certainly I am living upon the earth in the darkness as if blind, then I yearn to get out. Out there, the shining of the stars is my consolation, broadening my very existence.
Now from the other side,
And when I read them,
Now you know how to utilize this correctly. Call this inner meditation up with vigor into your heart and mind as you are employing it. As if out of depths of spirit, as if someone were speaking to you, in this manner listen to and hear the lines of the upper verse, bringing to bear on each line the corresponding feeling, so that you experience in the meditation the following: first listen carefully to it, then bring it vigorously to the forefront of your heart and mind as a perception, then again listen carefully, and again bring it vigorously into your heart and mind, … and so forth. [During the speaking of the following lines, connecting lines consisting of long curves were drawn on the board connecting lines 1 and 5, 2 and 6, 3 and 7, and 4 and 8.]
This meditation is at first a dialogue, a meditation in which the first line is always taken objectively, while the second streams out as a feeling from the heart. Then, while trying once again to bring them to the forefront, enmeshed and working in each other, try to experience with moderate force of will the experience contained within the dialogue. [The third part of the verse was now developed and written as lines 9, 10, 11, and 12.] From depths of spirit sounds forth:
The heart answers:
And the will perceives the impulse in the dialogue between lines 1 and 5:
Then one remembers back, after having progressed through this dialogue, to the interchange between lines 2 and 6, and to the experience contained within:
Then one remembers back, while carrying all this, to what sounds forth from spirit depths, and the answer of heart-felt courage:
And the resultant experience by means of the will:
distantly from the spiritual world. And now the most sublime, wherein one feels in dialogue with the gods themselves, wherein the gods not merely allow a reading, but rather actually speak:
It not only witnesses me, it begets, it brings forth, engenders, delivers me. Now let us envision the entire meditation. The meditation in its entirety progresses as a dialogue, line for line, with one in dark spiritual depths under the dominion of spiritual beings, standing there in the lines at the top of the verses, speaking to us. The heart always gives answer:
Now I remember each individually and connect the outflow of the will to it, as a memory of what has already happened.
This is the correct way to proceed, to come to the stage of the dialogue in the meditation, the dialogue in memory, and then by means of the will to a reinforcement of this memory. When one actually starts with an inward demeanor of devotion, doubly so, with one’s entire soul inwardly constituted and brought into conformity with what I have just written, when one inwardly envisions it and begins to experience it, when one takes it up not as a mechanical meditation, but rather as a true experience of the soul, then setting things up in this way specifically awakens a relationship of the soul with the spiritual world. One must really appreciate, however, even in the last set of verses, the specific manner I have just described. It should be experienced as discourse and answer, the discourse of the spirit and the answering discourse of the heart. But one must properly appreciate that initially one’s awareness, which will certainly be attained, is extinguished through the darkness of earth. One must feel as if awareness is overcome, in an instant of extinguishing sleep, and as if there in the second line there is an awakening, as if after the awakening, the calling of the gods to return to them is heard by us, as if one feels, henceforth, that the gods are calling out to us. They are summoning us, out of their own being’s word emerging from the word of worlds, in order to place us as beings of soul and spirit in the spiritual world, there to bear us, there to bring us forth, there to engender us. When these nuances of inner experience are played out in soul, attention centered on the spiritual beings who speak to us, our heart’s vitality brought forth in devotion to the spiritual beings, then yes, then our souls are in motion, and gradually our souls are in fact brought onto the esoteric path. And we must be clear, as we experience the three stanzas in our souls, as well as we are able, in the manner described, we must be clear that something subliminal, yet powerful, is coming into being in our souls. If we would only live faithfully in these three stanzas, as I have described, our soul would thereby be fashioned, unbeknownst to us, so that when the first line is intoned, we would be just at the point of origin of life on earth, where the etheric body has just been constituted. Were we to picture this with quick inner vitality, then it would sound forth from the spirit.
Then more or less unconsciously we hearken unto and approach in spirit the moment our etheric body was constituted. And out of pre-earthly existence, out of the existence between death and a new birth, a force is working in our hearts, which we bring to bear in simple purity.
And yearning after the spiritual is without doubt a legacy of ours from pre-earthly existence. And it is always the same, when placed at the beginning of earth existence, what is felt within the heart and works outwardly, that is what flames up in us from pre-earthly existence.
Here we again align with the beginning of our life on earth. The proper consolation, perceived by us, can be given to us by the shining of the stars. Through it, we will be placed back into our hearts’ answer.
Again, there is a return to one’s beginnings on earth:
The heart remembers being instructed by high spiritual beings in pre-earthly existence.
under whose care and among whom I lived and moved, before I descended down upon the earth.
We hearkened unto the gods between death and a new birth. We perceive now that what is spoken by the gods is not to be imparted as that which is spoken by men and women. We bear witness, we recognize7 that the gods’ speech is fashioning, creating, quickening, making:8
Finally, if and when we can appreciate it, then the right sense also comes into lines 9,10,11, and 12.
[Line 9 was written down once again, just to the right of the curved line connecting lines 1 and 5 together.]
it puts out, extinguishes my present earth-life, as I am transported back past the time between death and being reborn, back into my earlier incarnation. Then I understand, this is why my awareness has been extinguished, for until now my awareness was that of the present incarnation. The moment I fall asleep I will be transported back again, so that I can divine and sense myself moving within my earlier earth-incarnation.
[Line 10 was written down once again, just to the right of the curved line connecting lines 2 and 6 together.]
I will be placed back as I was then, as I was in the preceding incarnation, if it were to wake me. For me, it depends on karma, it depends on what is appropriate for my destiny, for me it depends on the other side.
[Line 11 was written down once again, just to the right of the curved line connecting lines 3 and 7 together.]
[Line 12 was written down once again, just to the right of the curved line connecting lines 4 and 8 together.]
[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] All that I am becomes clear to me, when into my present existence, my earlier earth existence floods in, gleams, moves, rumbles, becomes enmeshed. Then there I am. At first, I am present merely as a future becoming, germinative, only to achieve full apparency when eventually passing through the portal of death. Then from the previous earth existence into the present something gleams, interpenetrates, works effectively, making me into the human being I really am, summoning me to be the human being I really am. Thoroughly infused with this, with its reality, so that really, while we seem to be in the customary world of physical earth existence, our soul takes the journey back, back until it arrives at the former earth life, then we will come to know the importance of what we experience in such a thing. And in the awareness of this importance, that as a gleaming-stream washes through the whole of our thinking, feeling, and willing, in this awareness we will then be infused in our meditation with the feeling of enchantment. This enchantment is essential, for in this way the meditation works effectively in the right way. One may name it an inner feeling of enchantment, a magical feeling, on the grounds that nowhere else on the earth do we find such a comparable feeling, for this feeling is totally disconnected from all corporeality. Even if we cannot yet come out of the physical body with our thinking, with our imagination, this feeling of enchantment, this magical feeling that we experience, coming out of the importance of all that we are doing soulfully, this stands there in the pure spiritual world. In this feeling of enchantment, in this magical feeling we experience the pure spiritual-soulful element. There we stand, drawn into the spiritual-soulful world. In such manner, as we experience it, esoteric striving is fulfilled for us. And that, for the time being, that is what I have attempted to lay before your souls today, my dear brothers and sisters.
|
| 171. Goethe and the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century: Fifteenth Lecture
29 Oct 1916, Dornach |
|---|
| This was the most intense endeavor of this Troxler, especially in the area I have indicated: to work towards an anthroposophy. One might say that Troxler appears as a kind of harbinger in this area in particular. Now just consider how things would be different if Troxler, who worked in Lucerne, Bern and Basel, had been heard at the time when he wanted to introduce anthroposophy, albeit in his own way. If that had gained ground, how different it would be now that anthroposophy, which has progressed to the point of concrete spiritual knowledge, is being presented here with a building. When you consider such things, especially when you study this wonderful case of direct anthroposophy, which was taught in the 1930s by name, wanting to appear again, and as now in the same Aarau, where this book was published, in which the sentences about anthroposophy are found as they could be at that time, a lecture is given on “Recent Mysticism and Free Christianity”, in which it is said: These anthroposophists want to make it their principle to unlearn thinking and become all Christs - if you think about it, you will get an idea of the materialistic crisis that occurred in the course of the 19th century. |
| 171. Goethe and the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century: Fifteenth Lecture
29 Oct 1916, Dornach |
|---|
In including some contemporary historical observations in the present discussions, it is really not my intention to criticize or to find fault with this or that. Rather, what it is about is to tie in with external phenomena of the physical plane in such a way that one can see how certain great aspects, which we do indeed consider from a spiritual-scientific point of view, are shown to be true in this or that individual phenomenon. For it is my concern that, precisely in these reflections, we gain an understanding of the essential in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantic period, how the forces that have been at work in the last few centuries are flowing into our present and how they can and must be observed by those who really want to understand how spiritual science has a specific task for each individual in our present. I shall only include such episodes to illustrate the larger points of view when I insert such contemporary historical observations. I would also like to point out that those of our contemporaries or their immediate predecessors who, after all, must be presented in a certain way in their powerlessness in the face of real spiritual impulses, that these, which must apparently be criticized, are not intended to be criticized in order to somehow personally offend them, but to show how such people are captured, as it were, by the offshoots of the materialistic world view and world shaping. For it is indeed not easy for the modern human being to find the path to real spiritual-scientific insight. The way the spiritual culture of our time has developed makes it difficult for many people to find a connection, as it were, to what spiritual science has to give to our present and immediate future. From a certain point of view, it is easy to see how people who are now completely absorbed in contemporary thinking cannot find any connection between their thinking and that which must after all underlie our movement, must underlie it as a real engagement with the spiritual worlds. One can see that even people who are well-disposed towards our movement often say: Well, what these people want to achieve by elevating idealism and ethical human culture is all very well, but in doing so, these anthroposophists — as even well-disposed people say — go so far as to come up with all kinds of fantastic theories about the spiritual worlds. Even well-meaning people do not realize that this engagement with the spiritual worlds must really be the foundation on which work must be done today, and they cannot see it if they cannot free themselves from certain prejudices of our time. It is extremely difficult for someone who is so completely immersed in the intellectual life of the present day to imagine that the human being itself is a kind of switch for impulses that flow down from spiritual beings into the world of physical life and have an influence on this physical life. And we can particularly well imagine this if we point out the difficulties that stand in the way of understanding the spiritual world for people who, with great dedication and also with certain insights taken from contemporary culture, devote themselves to reform ideas or similar endeavors with regard to contemporary life. It is true that today, and for a long time, there have been many people who know that social conditions in the world have become such that the rest of life has also become the same, and that many things need to be tackled in order to give life, especially the social structure, a new shape. We, who recognize the nerve of spiritual science, must be clear about the fact that the most incisive questions of the present can only be grasped by our soul in the right sense if they are based on the foundation of spiritual-scientific insight. But many people who are working energetically in the present cannot come to this insight, to this knowledge. And so they are left without a foundation on the one hand, and on the other hand they are left in such a way that they cannot be given an answer to the most important questions. Let us also present an example in this regard. There was a man who, more than any other, was sincere about the great social problems of the present day: Jaurès, who met a mysterious death on the eve of that ill-fated war, a death that may never be fully explained by external investigation. Jaurès, the socialist, who was certainly one of the most honest of the ambitious personalities of the present, was intensively concerned with all the fundamental questions of social life in the present. And it can be said that he gathered together for his understanding everything that a person today can gather from knowledge of nature, from history, from social observation, in order to arrive at views on what needs to be done to solve the issues facing people today in a practical way. Jaurès was not one of those superficial people who develop a social system out of a few subjective ideas they happen to like, a system they then want to impose on the world. He was not someone who just wanted to get to know contemporary human life in order to gain social insight; rather, J Jaurès was one of those people who also look at history, at how various social and other problems in the lives of different peoples have developed and led to crises and change, so that we can see what becomes of certain conditions when they are shaped in this way. Jaurès carefully studied these things. Now, for a person who is considering such things, the most important thing is to understand what has happened in the course of human life in the last three to four centuries. For if, on the one hand, a transformation of all human striving in the field of knowledge has taken place in these three to four centuries and the two one-sided impulses, as I have presented them to you in these reflections, have gradually emerged for knowledge, it is equally true, on the other hand, that a similar development has taken place for social currents and social longings. Anyone who wants to understand the situation in which humanity finds itself today, one can already say the whole earth, must understand how the impulses that now dominate people's minds have gradually crept into the human soul since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, largely unconsciously, they know nothing about it. But when people like Jaurès, who could not but build his honest endeavors on the materialistic outlook of the present, look at this period in particular, questions arise for him everywhere, which he does not really know how to deal with. Thus, I would say, in the case of such an honest endeavor as Jaurès', we can discover two remarkable dark spots – among others that we cannot list here – that should be considered from a spiritual-scientific point of view. Before Jaurès' soul, as he surveys the life of the past five post-Atlantic periods, stands as a question: What has actually led the people of the present time to the members of a certain caste, class, having this or that feeling, and another class or caste having different feelings? Such a person looks at what preceded the fifth post-Atlantean period, looks at life, which was confined within narrow limits in those days. One need only recall how much has changed in the world of human life since the 14th or 15th century; how much impact was made by the discovery of America, by more recent scientific discoveries and institutions, by the art of printing, and so on. What has come upon humanity! Think back to the times when there was no printing, when people could not read the Bible, but only gathered in their own church and heard what had been personally communicated to them by those who wanted to convey something to them personally in a very specific direction. Far too little attention is paid to this very different way of life before the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period. And what lives in the souls today, what forms the principles of governments today, what forms the principles of those who lead the commercial, industrial and other enterprises, what forms the principles of those who in turn educate people for these enterprises, but what also forms the principles for those who, as the working population, are involved in these undertakings, what principles are for those who own the land and so on, all this, as it lives in the soul today, has only emerged over the course of the last few centuries. The radical difference between the present thinking and feeling of even the simplest peasant and what it was in the past is far too little considered. But of course, people who face the great, burning social questions realize this. And so we see that Jaurès is faced with the following question: What has actually caused this peculiar thinking of civilized humanity today? What has happened since the relatively small circle of people who used to have direct access to the spiritual life and who led the others now only guides the others with regard to the external material life, but in a certain way no longer guides them with regard to feelings and emotions? There is a great difference, an enormous difference, when we think of earlier conditions, where the person who provided people with work also provided them with a chaplain who said what needed to be said, what they needed to be told according to his meaning, compared to later times, when certain things became accessible to everyone. The question arose in Jaurès' soul: How has the thinking and feeling of modern humanity actually changed in this regard? — Admittedly, this question arose in his soul first in a form that is completely colored by the color nuance that modern socialist thinking has; but we can detach it from that. Jaurès first asks himself: why should we accuse the people in the small circle who give work to the others, so that we might say: well, they have made the means of education available to the people who are supposed to work for them, in schools and through reading and so on, precisely in order to get more profit out of them. – Certain socialists have always repeated that it was actually a ruse of the employing population to make the means of education accessible to the workers, because educated workers work more and work more rationally than the other way around. But Jaurès does not agree with the thoughts of some socialists. Therefore, in a certain way, what he has to think becomes an unsolvable problem for him. And it is very interesting to see how Jaurès comes to terms with the question of how to deal with the impulses of feeling, thought and soul that have emerged in recent centuries. In one of Jaurès' most interesting political writings, we find the following passage. He says: "That the bourgeoisie in these times of their development believed they were being fair to the workers is proven by the fact that they gave them schooling from the very beginning: that is, they wanted to give them as much education as possible. The Reformation, of which the bourgeoisie was a powerful agent, was enthusiastic about popular education. If the bourgeoisie had had secret pangs of conscience, it might have doubted the judgment that the workers, whom it rigorously educated through the power of its example as well as the compulsion of laws, would pass on it and its work: it would have kept them in ignorance as much as possible. At the risk of obtaining less useful labor from an untrained mass, she would not have exposed herself to the terrible judgment of the proletariat she exploited. She would not have opened up for her work of injustice all those thousands of eyes that were accustomed to long darkness." So Jaurès says to himself: No, the bourgeoisie cannot be accused of wanting to dupe the workers in order to make useful tools out of them; on the contrary, it wanted everyone to be able to read. And now comes the significant part, the part that, so to speak, opens the eyes of a modern, educated person, who is fully immersed in knowledge, and immediately closes them again because he has not come to spiritual science. He says: "But on the contrary, it wanted everyone to be able to read. And what book! The same one from which it also drew life. From the reading of the Bible, which was translated everywhere into the vernacular, the nations should learn to think: From that Bible full of struggle and harshness, full of grumbling, of the cry and rebellion of an unlearned people, whose pride, even when it chastises and breaks it, seems to love God; from that Bible, in which even the chosen leaders are continually haranguing the people and in which they must win the right to command by their service; in that strangely revolutionary book in which the dialogue between Job and God is such that God appears as the defendant, who can only defend himself against the righteous man's outcry with the crude noise of his thunder; from that Bible in which the prophets have left their appeal to the future and their curses against the unjust rich, their Messianic dream of universal brotherhood, all the heat of their anger and hope, the fire of all the glowing coals that burned on their lips. This terrible book has put the industrial bourgeoisie into the hands of the people, into the hands of poor workers in the cities and villages - the same ones who were or were to become their laborers - and told them: See for yourselves, hear for yourselves! Do not rely on intermediaries; the connection between God and you must be direct. Your eyes must see his light, your ears must hear his word! I repeat: how could a class that doubted itself, the word and the justification of its work, have freed the conscience of the people it was preparing to guide for their own good from all sense of authority? If it had a 'guilty conscience', if it had come into the world like a thief, it would have come by night, fur in nocte. But her first concern was, on the contrary, to increase the light. She was obviously convinced that the order of work, activity and strict moral discipline, which she brought to a world full of laziness, superstition, disorder and infertility, was useful precisely for those who occupy the lowest rank in this order." Then we see the question raised by a reformist thinker of our own time, who asks: How did all the ideas that dominate the masses today come into the world? — They came about, we can now discard political nuances, because people got their hands on the Bible, the most revolutionary book the world has ever known; it is so revolutionary because it is so effective. Jaurès finds in the minds of men the consequence of reading the Bible, which only came about because Bibles were printed; for in earlier centuries the people did not have the Bible, and the church even carefully guarded that the people did not get their hands on the Bible. It is far too little considered that all newer questions are connected with the fact that only since the times of the fifth post-Atlantean period have the people known the Bible, known it in such a way that the Bible impulses have now become impulses in the souls of people. Christianity was handed down to the people in a completely different way in the past than through the Bible. So a thinker who is completely immersed in the present looks at the development of the fifth post-Atlantic age and asks: Yes, what actually happened? What is the connection between the fact that the Bible has been made accessible to people and the other facts that we now see around us? He finds no real connection. Incidentally, he expresses this very precisely. He says: “It would be a great enticing problem - far more complicated and much more human than the one Marx was concerned with - to examine how this kind of moral certainty, this certainty of conscience, could become comfortable with all the violent and deceptive practices, the cruelties in the colonies, the swindling in trade, the whole variety of forms of exploitation, which characterized the first period of capitalism, its appearance and growth. This problem is beyond my ability; one would have to extract the countless elements of a moral-philosophical investigation from the documents of all kinds that the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries have left us. And only a highly intuitive and divinatory talent could get to the bottom of the problem."He does not ascribe this to himself. So you even see, admittedly, the powerlessness of one of the most honest seekers to solve the question: What have souls become in the present day? The other point we must consider is that, of course, a person striving in this way cannot have the intuitive and divinatory gift that would be necessary for this problem because he is quite distant from the basic problem of spiritual science. To understand how the spiritual flows down from the spiritual worlds, as it were through the switch, through the human soul, and flows into the physical world, this real flowing down of spiritual impulses from the forces and labors of the beings of the higher hierarchies, is indeed quite far removed from such a mind. Therefore, such a spirit sees that and that has been going on since the beginning of modern times, since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period. But he does not see what lives and weaves in it; nor does he see, in a concrete case, the conscious penetration of spiritual impulses, as it were, from the undertakings of the beings of the higher hierarchies. This can only be traced with spiritual science. But everything is preparing itself. The world was never without spirit, even if this spirit has worked unconsciously in one way or another. I have often drawn your attention to the fact that everything that has flooded over a certain area of modern Europe has been deeply influenced by spiritual powers. From external history, too, it can be shown that at a certain time, at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, something truly wonderful actually happened, something that the materialistically thinking person must regard as a fantasy if the matter is taken seriously. But again, if he does not take it seriously, he cannot explain the whole course of modern history. This event, to which I have often referred, is the appearance of the simple country girl with a great historical task, Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. The map of Europe today would be quite different – the historian knows this very well – if Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, had not appeared. Why are people today amazed — one need only think of Anatole France — by an impulse, or even a system of impulses, sent from the spiritual worlds through a kind of half-tavistock, half-visionary clairvoyance at a time when this could not yet consciously happen? But they cannot do anything with it! A man like Anatole France, of course, comes to terms with it by saying, “Well, it does happen that people do all sorts of things under the influence of suggestion, of fantastic powers that come from people like the Virgin of Orleans.” Such a point of view recalls that of modern theologians, who curiously resign themselves to the emergence of Christianity through Paul's vision before Damascus, who declare this Pauline suggestion before Damascus as a proven fact and should ultimately be able to trace all of Christianity back to it, but they are careful not to do so, because otherwise they would have to admit that Christianity stems from a suggestive experience of Paul's. And they would be careful to avoid saying that. This half-heartedness is extremely detrimental to the entire intellectual life; this half-heartedness is an expression of the fact that one is powerless in the face of such questions. It is good to look around for an answer on this point from someone as honest as Jaurès. He is trying to understand the significance of the impulses that emanated from the landowners in the fifth post-Atlantic period, and those that emanated from the urban population. We do not need to touch on this socialist nuance again; I just want to point out that Jaurès believes that during this period it matters less whether the social question is considered by the landowning class or by the industrial class: this is not the issue here. Peasant uprisings were the movements dependent on land ownership; these are not the most important thing to him. And that is precisely what he wants to see in Joan of Arc, that although she is a peasant girl, she does not work for the landowning population, that is, the peasant population, but for the larger group of the urban population. Jaurès says: "Joan of Arc fulfills her mission and sacrifices herself for the salvation of the fatherland in a France where land is no longer the only source of vitality; the municipalities already play an important role, Louis IX had sanctioned and solemnly proclaimed the letters of craftsmanship and the guild law, the Parisian Revolution under the governments of Charles V and Charles VI, had seen the mercantile bourgeoisie and the artisanry emerge as new powers on the scene. The most far-sighted among those who wanted to reform the kingdom dreamed of an alliance between the bourgeoisie and the peasantry against lawlessness and arbitrariness. In this modern France, which was soon to be ruled by the “citizen king” – the son of the ruler whom Jeanne d'Arc was about to save - was about to reign, in this diverse, sophisticated and refined country, touched by the delicate, literary pains of Charles d'Orleans, whose captivity touched the heart of the good Lorraine, in this society, which was rural rather than anything else, Joan of Arc appeared. So she appeared, in a sense, to Jaurès, not for the peasant population, not for the population that was connected to land ownership, but precisely for that which was connected to modern life, to urban life. Jaurès says: "She was a simple country girl who had seen the pains and hardships of the peasants around her, but to whom all these afflictions were only an example of the greater and more sublime suffering that the plundered kingdom and the invaded nation were enduring. In her soul and in her thoughts, no place, no piece of land plays a role; she looks beyond the Lorraine fields. Her peasant heart is greater than all peasantry. It beats for the distant, good cities that the stranger surrounds. To live in the fields does not necessarily mean to be absorbed in the questions of the soil. In the noise and bustle of the cities, Jeanne's dream would certainly have been less free, less bold and less comprehensive. Solitude protected the boldness of her thinking, and she experienced the great patriotic community much more intensely because her imagination could fill the silent horizon with a pain and a hope that went beyond, without confusion. She was not inspired by the spirit of peasant revolt; she wanted to liberate the whole of France in order to consecrate it to the service of God, Christianity and justice. Her goal seems so lofty and pleasing to God that in order to achieve it she later finds the courage to oppose even the church and to invoke a revelation that she claims is superior to all others. Thus the other, I would say, is immediately evident to Jaur&s. He lets his gaze wander over what has happened and finds that what has happened there happened under the influence of a spiritual impulse, so to speak, was switched through the soul of Joan of Arc and penetrated into the physical world. But it is self-evident that a person who thinks in this way cannot fully recognize that spiritual impulses and spiritual forces are the most important things. So he again does not know what to do with what is even vividly shown to him. You see, the failure to recognize what is actually there, even by the best minds of the present day, the failure to recognize the spiritual impulses that they grasp with their hands, that is, the failure to recognize what can be grasped historically with hands, lies at the root of the great life-lie of modern times, which has infected even the best striving people. They want to grasp what is there; but they cannot grasp it because they cannot see the spirit at work in it. Those who think like Jaurès cannot do that. But neither could the others, even in the time of Joan of Arc, who, based on traditional wisdom, stood before the direct appearance of a spiritual fact in the Maid of Orleans, because, as paradoxical as it sounds, the fact that someone is a theologian does not make him a spiritualist, and the fact that someone defends theological dogmas does not make him a recognizer of the spiritual world. The theologian, of whom I gave you some examples yesterday, is of course not a recognizer of the spiritual world, but is just as much a materialist as Büchner or Moleschott, except that Büchner and Moleschott were truer than such a theologian with his materialism. What you say is not important, but what you absorb in your living experience is important: whether you really recognize the spiritual when it comes to you. But even the theologians could not do that when they were confronted with Joan of Arc, and this fact is something that Jaur&s points out very well when he says: “Her goal seems so high and pleasing to God that in order to achieve it, she later finds the courage to oppose even the church and to invoke a revelation that stands above all other revelations. To the theologians who urge her to justify her miracles and her mission from the holy books, she replies—” So the theologians, these exponents of spiritual life, who once had a revelation of spiritual life before them, did not argue about this revelation of spiritual life, but came with the parchment, which is the source from which divine revelation flows, and said: “Prove to us from the Holy Scripture that what you tell us can be true.” Not from the living connection with the spiritual world was the Maid of Orleans to be allowed to prove that she had any mission, but she was to prove it from the old books. And she answers: "There is more written in the Book of God than in all your books.” Jaurès says: “A wonderful saying, which in a certain respect stands in contrast to the soul of the peasant, whose faith is rooted above all in tradition. How far removed is all this from the dull, narrow-minded, limited patriotism of the landowner! But Jeanne hears the divine voices of her heart by looking up to the radiant and gentle heights of heaven.” Imagine on the one hand honesty and on the other profound falsehood; for of course, a person of the present day recognizes only as self-suggestion, as fiction, what is in the Virgin of Orleans, and only pictorial, poetic expressions he sees in what he says: “How far removed from the dull, narrow-minded, limited patriotism of the landed gentry!” Joan hears the divine voices of her heart by looking up to the radiant and gentle heights of heaven.These divine voices of her heart are something quite abstract for such a man. It is not something real that flows down: the powers of life flowing in through a source like the Virgin of Orleans, so that one absorbs it in order to do reformist social science with this spiritual impulse! No, Joan of Arc speaks of it; but if he wants to do anything, he does not look up to what flows in from the radiant heights of heaven, but he sums, divides, potentiates and reasons abstract terms, purely materialistic thoughts. That is the profound untruth that people do not even realize, that does not even occur to the best of them. Examples such as these make it clear how people who are immersed in the intellectual life of the present cannot possibly arrive at an appreciation of the most important thing: the spiritual facts themselves, which they must consider fantastic in the light of contemporary life. I said: In the 19th century, what has been indicated here, the prevalence of the materialistic attitude, experienced a crisis. It came to a certain climax. And it is good to see how things are looming; for you will have seen from the example of a theologian just yesterday how 'theology is most strongly influenced by what has emerged from the materialistic attitude of natural science. It is most fatally influential because it most strongly leads to insincerity, to unconscious insincerity. That is the important thing to realize. And a theologian like the one who represented the reformed Christianity in Aarau in May of this year, who said that we all want to unlearn thinking and that we all want to become Christs, is just a personality who stands on the ground of the same attitude. For example, his pamphlet contains the view that these people want to explore the mysterious; but that is precisely what we do not want, this man believes from his point of view, the mysterious is valuable precisely because it remains mysterious. We want to leave the mysterious as it is; we do not want to reveal it. For if we are once confronted with the revealed mystery, then it is no longer mysterious and that is irreligious, that is unchristian to reveal the mystery. — The man takes this view. And yet, in a sense, this man is typical, also for our time, which develops intellectual defects right into the sphere of moral defects; for what he says about our understanding of the Christ-principle and much of what he says otherwise borders not merely on misunderstanding, but on conscious deliberate falsification, since he could know otherwise and does not feel conscientiously enough obliged to look at this other, to get to know it, but instead says what is incorrect: the intellectual misunderstanding begins to become a moral defect, which then draws itself quite fatally into the souls. What he said there is so right a plant of our time, and it is still interesting to realize how it was not always so. If you look at things in detail, you can see that it has not always been so. This brochure reproduces a lecture given in Aarau on 22 May 1916 on the subject of “Modern Mysticism and Free Christianity” at the Swiss Reform Day. So that is the attitude that was incorporated into the aura of Aarau in May 1916. Now, in such a case, it is good to really study and look in the same aura to see how things have developed: In Aarau, in 1828, with Heinrich Remigius Sauerländer, Dr. Troxier's “Naturlehre des menschlichen Erkennens” (Natural History of Human Cognition) was published! So we see that this 'Natural Science of Human Cognition' found a place within the same aura in those days, in 1828. At least most of you know Troxler from my last book 'The Riddle of Man'. This Troxler was born in Switzerland, was first a professor in Lucerne, then in Basel and in Bern, and died in 1868. He is not yet on the standpoint of present-day spiritual science, that is to say, he lacks the possibility of presenting the worlds that spiritual science can describe to people in concrete terms. But he is, I would say, on the way. And it is interesting to see how the same subject was once spoken of differently. For this, I will just quote a few passages from Troxler that I am bringing before you today so that you can see how differently the same subject was spoken of. I would like to say first that Troxler admittedly does not yet have spiritual science, but that he does put forward concepts that are initially like hypotheses, which may not be accurate, but can essentially be found again when viewed from the standpoint of spiritual science. There we speak of the physical body, of the etheric body, of the astral body and of the I. These four concepts roughly correspond, even if Troxler has no concept, with what he calls the body in man, the body, the soul and the spirit. He divides man into four parts: body, soul, and spirit, and he sharply criticizes the philosophers who have worked before him for not realizing that it is nonsense to say that man consists of spirit and body, but that one only understands man when one regards him as this four-part system: body and soul as the internal, body as the external, lower, spirit as the upper. And as I said, even if Troxler did not advance as far as spiritual science, he still managed to recognize the human being to a high degree through an insight into the mind. And from this point of view, the man says the following, for example. Referring to earlier philosophers who had mixed up everything in man, he says: "In general, we criticize this philosopher, as well as all the philosophers and theologians mentioned above, for drawing their anthroposophy more from reflection and speculation, or authority and dogmatics, than from their original consciousness, or their own spirit perfected in religion. Only the original and direct knowledge of the divine in its nature leads man to self-knowledge of his essential personality and living spontaneity, for which only individual derived and indirect works and forms of subordinate and one-sided species and degrees of consciousness have been regarded so far." He continues: "The theosophists are as little united among themselves as the philosophers. Thus, for example, Daumer opposes Boehme, Schelling and Baader in the following, which seems to me to be a very correct observation that approaches our view. He says on page 39: “It is to be noted that in the case of Böhme, as in that of Schelling, there is a confusion of the God who has been divested (the Ungrund) with the unconditional in God, and the error prevails as if God had found and investigated Himself through the reason.” So, once again, the confusion of these very things that are at issue here. “Here it is also worth mentioning how mysticism, while usually losing the human being in God, and philosophy, while losing God in the human being, has transferred this primal relationship of human nature, which the human being should content himself with fathoming anthroposophically, to God himself in theosophical speculations” and so on. This was the most intense endeavor of this Troxler, especially in the area I have indicated: to work towards an anthroposophy. One might say that Troxler appears as a kind of harbinger in this area in particular. Now just consider how things would be different if Troxler, who worked in Lucerne, Bern and Basel, had been heard at the time when he wanted to introduce anthroposophy, albeit in his own way. If that had gained ground, how different it would be now that anthroposophy, which has progressed to the point of concrete spiritual knowledge, is being presented here with a building. When you consider such things, especially when you study this wonderful case of direct anthroposophy, which was taught in the 1930s by name, wanting to appear again, and as now in the same Aarau, where this book was published, in which the sentences about anthroposophy are found as they could be at that time, a lecture is given on “Recent Mysticism and Free Christianity”, in which it is said: These anthroposophists want to make it their principle to unlearn thinking and become all Christs - if you think about it, you will get an idea of the materialistic crisis that occurred in the course of the 19th century. And it is good to get an idea of such things, to know that today, when one stands on the ground of the outer spiritual life, one has no right to speak otherwise than by being aware that one is expressing a Wagnerian spirit and not a Faustian spirit when one says:
For just imagine, the man who spoke in Aarau, looking at Troxler, who had his book published in Aarau, would now say – he would certainly say it from his point of view – the present-day speaker on newer mysticism and free Christianity:
The Troxler, who has not yet come so far as to realize that these anthroposophists want to unlearn thinking and become all Christs, that they want to reveal the secret and not leave the secret, and thereby rebel against all honest, human endeavor. Troxler would not say: I have finally realized that these anthroposophists are to be condemned because they all want to become Christs, want to give up thinking and feeling and want to reveal the secrets; but man is not there to research anything, but he is there, as the theologian believes, to think, which the anthroposophists want to give up! As you can see, mutual understanding will not be possible; but it is still an example of whether or not there was a crisis, a materialistic crisis, in the 19th century, and to what extent it is true that we have come “so wonderfully far”! I believe that we have come wonderfully far from Troxler to Joß in the field of the Aarau aura! But not forward, but backward! We will continue this discussion tomorrow. |
| 197. Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind: Lecture VIII
21 Sep 1920, Stuttgart Translator Unknown |
|---|
| You know that everything that is presented here from the point of view of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is thoroughly scientific in spirit and asks to be considered as fully equal to the science relating to the physical world. |
| The reasoning is that no bridge shall ever be built between outer knowledge or science and anything to do with faith. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy on the other hand is aiming to do just that, to find the way from a science of the physical, sense-perceptible world to a science of the spirit. |
| The strength inherent in spiritual science working towards anthroposophy should give anthroposophy the strength to gain more than just names from words—a feeling for the truth. |
| 197. Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind: Lecture VIII
21 Sep 1920, Stuttgart Translator Unknown |
|---|
As you are well aware, it is often said today that spiritual science cannot have anything to do with real knowledge, with genuine perception, and that it can only be a matter of faith, a subjective way of believing things to be true. This kind of attitude then leads to a distinction being made between knowledge and belief, as is the general custom. A frequent objection raised against spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is that a kind of subjective knowledge that really can only be a matter of belief—perhaps one should not even call it knowledge but merely the subjective belief that something is true—is to be elevated, jumped up, to the level of certain and exact knowledge, to the level of a genuine science. This distinction that is made between science and belief is quite a recent development. The view is that science should only concern itself with things perceptible to the senses, or at most with things that can be established and explored on the basis of experiments, and that certain knowledge can solely and exclusively come from such depths. Belief is seen as going beyond the physical realm and it is said that one should never assume that anything that is the subject of belief can be transformed into certain knowledge. Thus we have science on one side, a science limited to the physical world, and a supersensible, non-physical world on the other that may be accepted by anyone who finds it acceptable but cannot be known with certainty and must remain a matter of subjective faith. Anyone who takes life seriously really ought to feel that the supposed distinction made by so many people between knowledge and belief poses a riddle which must be solved. Fundamentally speaking, however, only initiation science can genuinely show the reason for the efforts that are being made at the present time—and indeed have already been made for a long time, for centuries—to teach humankind the difference between knowledge of the finite, transitory realm of the senses and belief in something that is infinite, permanent, supersensible. You know that everything that is presented here from the point of view of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is thoroughly scientific in spirit and asks to be considered as fully equal to the science relating to the physical world. It represents knowledge, perception, of the supersensible. Initiation knowledge has to look far back into human evolution, however, if it is to help us understand why in the present age humankind has been taught that there is such a difference between knowledge and faith. Going back a long way in human evolution we come to a time when People had a primal knowledge—we have discussed this a number of times—that was inherited from the gods, as it were. Such things as proof, as demonstrating the truth of something, were not known then. Knowledge came to people at that time when a power arose in their hearts and minds that was not the power of empty, abstract thinking, or something like that, but a power filled with divine light substance, divine life substance, that felt itself to be in communion with divine worlds. Human beings knew that they were connected with divine spheres; they felt this and perceived it the way we perceive colours and sounds outside us. There was no need for proof, for there was perception of the immediate presence. People knew nothing of proof, nor of logical demonstration. All they knew was that as human beings they were filled with what the gods instilled into them. This certainly was ‘knowledge’ in the earliest stages of human evolution, and it had to do with perception of the divine origin of human beings. Knowing themselves to be united with the gods, and being given the Power by their initiates to look up to this union with the gods, people were also aware of the divine origin of man. They were aware that humankind had descended to earth from the world where it had existed as soul and spirit. The divine and spiritual origin of humankind was taken as a matter of course when this primal knowledge existed all over the globe in the early times of human evolution. This primal knowledge had to develop further, however. If it had remained as it was, people would in a sense have continued to be filled with the divine spirit for ever, but they could not have achieved freedom, the ability to make free decisions. As soon as their arms moved, they would have had to say: ‘A god within me is moving my arms.’ When they were walking, they would have had to say: ‘A god within me is moving my feet.’ Those early human beings certainty. felt like that. They felt, as it were, that a divine spirit was present inside their skin. That is also the origin of the idea that the human body is a temple. In early times a human being was indeed like the earthly home of a god who descended to earth to take up his abode among human beings. Human beings had to become independent, however. As a result this primal divine knowledge gradually faded and the divine heritage grew less and less. To achieve freedom, human beings had to develop knowledge, perception, thinking, feeling and will activity out of their own resources. In a way the gods abandoned them, but it was for their own good, if I may put it like this. Divine knowledge withdrew so that human knowledge might develop. In later times the whole path to be taken by the divine knowledge that had once existed all over the globe, the path to earthly and human knowledge, had to be watched over from the mystery centres. It was the task of initiates to regulate the way humankind were to be trained, as it were, so that human beings would find the right way of growing out of that ancient divine knowledge and into earthly and human knowledge. At a time when much of the original divine knowledge had faded and the mysteries had assumed the task of guiding human beings—by and large instructing them in such a way that the right transition could be made from primal wisdom to human knowledge and ultimately freedom—it happened that a certain number of people came together from the far reaches of the earth to look for a way in which the purpose of guiding humankind in the right way, purposes originating in the mystery centres, could be crossed. Human associations were formed, in a way, that considered it their mission to go against the proper course of progress. We really have to use spiritual science if we want to consider the activity of a widespread association of human beings in post-primeval times. History does not go that fax back and there are no documents to bear outer witness to that time. Such an association developed and adopted the mystery knowledge in a certain way, still using the methods that had been employed in the mysteries to maintain contact with the divine source and origin. By that time however the mystery centres where honest work was being done had long since been concentrating on guiding the transition from the divine knowledge of the ancients to human and earthly knowledge. Thus there was a time in earthly history when the rightful representatives of mystery knowledge were totally involved in guiding the transition from the divine knowledge of the ancients to human and earthly knowledge. That was the healthy feeling and attitude, healthy for that time. Mingled into this was an element arising because a well organized association wanted to restore to humankind an antiquated primal divine knowledge at a time when it was out of date, when the murmur of ancient divine knowledge was no longer supposed to reach human ears. At a time when they had grown beyond the state where they had divine knowledge, people found that there Was a group that still wanted the old knowledge to be widely accessible. Why did the members of this association in post-primeval times want such a thing? They wanted to strike at the root, as it were, of the knowledge then evolving. They did not want humanity to achieve freedom. Efforts were indeed made in post-primeval times to prevent humankind from developing the faculties that would lead to freedom, and for that purpose the aim was to strike at the root of earthly and physical knowledge. These people, who may be called the 'enemies' of human evolution in post-primeval times, made the distinction between human knowledge and divine knowledge, a divine knowledge that was no longer legitimate at the time. To deluge human beings with divine knowledge, which they had grown out of by that time, meant to induce a dreamy, visionary state of conscious awareness. Vast masses of people lived in that kind of fanciful, visionary state in post-primeval times. Their inclinations to develop human knowledge were stifled. The reason why human knowledge came to be so deficient in many respects as time went on—I have given many examples of this—and why defects have even crept into the development of speech and language, was that a form of divine knowledge was presented to people in a way that appealed to their vanity. Let us investigate the influences that made people endeavour to befog the minds of the masses and strike at the root of the new knowledge that was evolving and also at the root of a language that arose from the depths of human nature. It has to be said that the individuals concerned were totally under the influence of luciferic powers. Luciferic powers were alive in them, luciferic powers that did not want human thinking, feeling and will activity to descend as far as the earth, as it were. Human beings were supposed to grow more and more physical, but these individuals wanted to keep theft) spiritual, to stop them from achieving their mission on earth. The individuals concerned were the spiritualists of post-primeval times. They were against human progress. The divine intention was that human beings should find ways of letting their souls and spirits enter more and more deeply into physical bodies. The individuals of whom I am speaking wanted to prevent this, however. Considering this in present-day terms—because it is difficult to give an accurate characterization of the state human beings had reached during the post-primeval period—we might say that more than a little of a certain unconscious untruthfulness was apparent in those individuals. The impulse to descend into the material world, to make it part of oneself, had of course been given through the mysteries. The Lucifer-dominated individuals of post-primeval times certainly could not deny this. They therefore did not call themselves 'spiritualists' but actually ‘protagonists of the material world’—to put it in present-day terms; these words would have to be translated into the terms in which people thought in primeval times. They told people: 'You will come to materiality if you follow us, if you make use of the power we provide in the form of later divine knowledge, if you use it to strengthen your soul and spirit. You will then find yourselves the conquerors of all that this earth holds for you; you will conquer the earth quickly and easily when you have a share in the power of the gods.' The Lucifer-dominated leaders of certain parts of humanity gave themselves the honourable title ‘fighters for the material world.’ Those individuals created a certain schism between human evolution as it was intended and the wrong notions which they presented to humanity, notions that the ideal was to conquer materiality rather than coming to be at home in it gradually. They said people should make certain divine powers their own by having supersensible knowledge at the wrong time, and that they should use this knowledge to conquer the material world that is perceptible to the senses. Today we have the reverse picture of what existed in those primeval times. Certain confessions have started to oppose the regular progress of science, the acquisition of knowledge. Science has had its roots damaged, as it were. The result is that science and language show Certain defects throughout the course of Earth evolution. Science has nevertheless come about, for sufficient numbers of people who were under the influence of the true mysteries and corrupted initiation knowledge stood up against the individuals whose real aim was to strike at the root of knowledge and eradicate it. Science has come about. It has taken the road I have often characterized in detail. It reached the level it did by the middle of the 15th century, when the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, and it has continued to the present time. According to present-day initiation knowledge, however, science has now reached a further turning point. Today it is ripe to enter into human freedom, as it were. Essentially modern science still considers only physical things to be valid and exact; it is only prepared to consider things that are perceptible to the senses or may be established on the basis of experiments. As I have often said, this science is now ripe to develop to a point where it can grasp Imagination, the inspired, the intuitive world; where it can find its ways to experience, to grasp the spirit. This science is ordained to grow and in growing to assume the form of spiritual vision. It is ripe for this today. For the regular progress of science it will however be necessary for humanity to develop an inner attitude that wants to use the same conscientious approach to investigation and research that is used in botany, physics, chemistry and so on to explore the outer world of the senses and make outer science triumph. People must want to use that same attitude when it comes to the inner life of human beings. We must want the attitude and approach used in outer science to be transformed into a way of taking hold of the supersensible world in a living way. I have pointed the way in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, in Occult Science53 and other books of this kind. It has to be clearly understood that the true aim we have at the bottom of our hearts, the only viable aim for spiritual science working towards anthroposophy, differs from Jesuitism, which is more or less its polar opposite. The difference is that Jesuitism in particular wants to keep science, knowledge as such, at the level of pure experimentation and observation. Take a look—but a careful look—at the scientific literature from Jesuit sources. The approach, the way of thinking, is as materialistic as it can be. It aims to keep knowledge entirely in the world of the senses, and strictly separate the knowledge that can only be obtained by observation based on the physical senses and by experimentation from anything that is a matter of belief or revelation. The reasoning is that no bridge shall ever be built between outer knowledge or science and anything to do with faith. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy on the other hand is aiming to do just that, to find the way from a science of the physical, sense-perceptible world to a science of the spirit. This science of the spirit would however apply the same stringent standards as the outer science of the sense-perceptible world. The picture, then, is as follows: The science of the physical, sense-perceptible world is the root. Supersensible knowledge is to evolve from the same impulses that govern botany, physics, chemistry and so on, except that they will be applied in a different field. In certain quarters it was foreseen that this was to come. It was however in the interests of these people to prevent it happening, and they therefore introduced something into human evolution that now presents itself as a sharp contrast. This is the sharp contrast I have spoken of earlier: the distinction made between ancient ways of knowing that in the regular course of events became human knowledge, human science, and a divine knowledge used to drug human minds. The sharp distinction between knowledge and belief was presented to human minds and the true aim turned into its opposite. Knowledge of the sense-perceptible world was to be firmly retained and given great emphasis. It simply has to be admitted that Jesuit literature on materialistic science is extraordinarily brilliant in the clarity of its reasoning, its sheer readability. The Jesuit literature on the material world is much more brilliantly written than the works of many others writers on the subject today. Father Erich Wasmann's54 work on ants, for example, is really good, you will gain more from reading it than from the pedantic, uninspired writings of other scientists. Many more examples could be given. The [work of the] Jesuits would be excellent if they confined themselves to the material world; it is a deliberate aim [of the Jesuits] to use their description of the material world to encourage people to associate knowledge with the materialistic aspect of the physical world only. The intention is to pretend to human minds that the methods used to gain knowledge cannot be used to investigate the supersensible world. In ancient times Lucifer-dominated individuals suggested that human beings would gain mastery of the world if they made use of ancient divine knowledge, yet evolution had already gone beyond this point. Now we have late followers of those people from post-primeval times pretending to the world that it is not possible to extend knowledge to the supersensible sphere and that knowledge cannot go beyond the sense-perceptible world. In those early times the intention had been to drug people with supersensible knowledge. Now human beings of the same ilk want to use all possible means to push humanity into the physical world; they want human beings to be stuck in that world and grasp the supersensible world only with the nebulous impulse of faith. In post-primeval times the aim had been to inundate humankind with an excess of supersensible knowledge. Today those late followers want human beings to have less than the right amount of knowledge in this sphere. Past intent was to provide supersensible knowledge that was no longer appropriate. Present intent is to let people have only sense-bound knowledge, making the supersensible world an area where every individual may hold whatever views he or she likes. What would be the outcome if the group of people to whom we are referring were to achieve some kind of victory? These are the people who deliberately make a sharp distinction between knowledge and belief. There are of course large numbers of easily led people who come across the diatribe on the 'clear distinction between faith and knowledge' and repeat it; they merely repeat it. What is all this about? The aim is to do the opposite of what those individuals in post-primeval times did in their way. In the old days the intention was to prevent humanity from descending completely and taking up its mission on earth. Today the intention is to keep people tied to that mission on earth to prevent their further development, for which the earth would provide the basis. The very people who are now supporting materialism call themselves ‘spiritualists’, or priests of some faith or other, representatives of the supersensible world. In those ancient times the people offering a life in the spirit that was no longer justifiable called themselves materialists. They did so from the point of view which I have characterized. Today a large number of people who really wish to keep humanity bound to the material world call themselves representatives of the spiritual world. The most powerful source of materialism today does not lie in the ideas put forward by Buechner, Moleschott or Vogt. The most powerful source is Rome and anything that is in any way connected with this centre of materialism. They achieved their aims not by saying: ‘I want to encourage materialism’, but by keeping people bound to materialism. This is done by letting them develop faith merely as a nebulous impulse towards supersensible spheres and making sure that no impulse enters into humanity that could lead to comprehension of the supersensible sphere. The idea that Rome might lead the way in conquering the supersensible sphere for humanity is the historical untruth of the present age. This must be clearly and firmly understood. It must also be understood that Protestantism as it has evolved out of Roman Catholicism in recent times contains much that is of Roman Catholic origin. The desire to keep supersensible knowledge nebulous by making it a matter of faith, so that people cannot comprehend the supersensible world, has strongly persisted in the Protestant church. Quite apart from this, the signs of the times may be read to indicate clearly that Rome will overcome the Protestant element, and Rome will continue to make great efforts in the direction I have characterized. So you see that if one wishes to achieve something in the world that goes against the normal progress of humanity one calls oneself by the opposite name, as it were. Humanity must learn to get beyond putting its trust in mere names, and it is indeed in the process of doing so. Humanity must go to deeper sources than merely living in words and phrases. Basically this is already beginning to happen. Imagine someone calls and you are brought a visiting card on which it says ‘Ernest Miller’. Surely you would not expect to see someone come through the door whose clothes are covered in flour. Nor would you expect ‘Richard Smith’ to come straight from shoeing horses. If you have lived in a village you may still recall people saying ‘There comes the miller’—and that would have been a genuine miller—or 'There comes the smith', meaning a real blacksmith. There names were still more than an outer label. The names we bear have taken a road where it is no longer possible to draw conclusions as to the nature of the individual who calls himself by a particular name. The words that make up people's names give no clue as to the essential characteristics of the person or persons concerned. The name Smith does not tell us whether the person called by that name is a smith or not, nor can we conclude someone is a miller when we hear that his name is Miller. That is the road names have taken. The rest of the language will follow the same road, and people will have to learn to develop their ideas on principles other than words or phrases. You can draw no conclusions as to the nature of a person from the fact that his visiting card says he is Mr Miller. In the same way you will have to get used to the fact that the characteristics of words will not tell you what your ideas about the world ought to be. If you seriously act in a way that is in accord with the urgent necessity of the present time you find yourself little understood. If I were to present the things I have to present by way of spiritual science in a way that meets the modern desire for scientific terminology, I would not be doing what I have in fact always made efforts to do. This is to present a subject from all kinds of different angles, sometimes more in their material aspect and at other times more in their spiritual aspect, always remembering the principle which Goethe expressed as follows: ‘The truth will certainly never be found exactly half-way between two contradictory statements.’55 At the stage we have now reached in our evolution it simply is no longer possible to think that a particular content can be adequately defined by using words to give a one-sided characterization. The subject has to be characterized from different aspects, and the procedure used to characterize it in words must be similar to that used to make a photographic record of a tree, for instance, by taking pictures of it from a variety of angles. The photographs will look very different, but putting them together one sees something that conveys the tree as a whole. Read the various courses of lectures and you will see that I have adhered to the principle and presented the subject matter from many different angles. If we wish to present the things human beings need today, things that will serve the progress of humankind, we must get into the habit of proceeding in this way. There are certain groups of people who are against this and want to continue to use rigid terminology. Human concerns cannot be defined in rigid terms and that is why we now see forms of socialism developing that want to go further into terminology definition but can only lead to destruction. Concerning events in Eastern Europe, people think the danger has passed now that the Poles have won; before that the Bolsheviks had the upper hand for a time, but the whole has been the most dreadful tragicomedy of human behaviour. The present war between Russia and Poland provides a good demonstration of the extent to which human beings have lost their moral fibre today. My book Towards Social Renewal was genuinely based on the social life of the present time and the style was chosen to meet the needs of this present-day life. Yet people come and ask for word definitions more or less the way words are defined in most schoolbooks nowadays—much to the detriment of education and training. Words have more and more come away from the original inner experience, and it is increasingly necessary to draw one's conclusions as to the reality from other sources than the words used. After all, when we hear the name Miller we do not base our conclusions as to the nature of the individual on an analysis of the name Miller but on quite different aspects. It will be necessary for human beings to come away from words and judge the existing world by other criteria. This had been in preparation for a long time, but it has not always been applied in a sense that would be in accord with human evolution. The outcome has been that widespread societies now say: ‘We declare ourselves for Christ’, yet after all the word used need not apply to the spirit they say they are worshipping. The point is not that something or other is called the Christ and that people have ideas about this Christ. The point is the real nature of the spirit towards whom human feelings are turning. And if one develops a very mundane image of this Christ, if one even undergoes militaristic initiation during one's training to learn how the soul has to be prepared before one forms an idea of the Christ, if one is shown the image of Jesus the King, seeing oneself and other followers as King Jesus' army, it may happen that having created such a material image of Christ one then gives the name of Christ to quite a different spirit. The truth is that one's soul is then turned towards quite a different spirit who is wrongfully called Christ. This happens a great deal nowadays and it happens in such a way that people sometimes have a peculiar awareness of it. Many years ago I had a conversation in Marburg one day with a Protestant clergyman who had travelled a great deal.56 We talked of the way the real idea of the Christ has gradually disappeared from modern theology, of the way this modern theology is on the one hand using certain initiation ceremonies to bring Christ down and make Him a physical Jesus even in the picture one has of Him, and how on the other hand certain theologians see Christ only as the ‘simple man of Nazareth’. This Protestant theologian, a man who had travelled widely and seen something of the world, then said to me: 'The younger generation of theologians really no longer have the Christ, they really should no longer called themselves Christians or followers of Christ; they really ought to call themselves Jesuits, except that that name already has another meaning, because all they are left with is Jesus.' Those were not my views but the views of a Protestant theologian who has travelled a great deal. To stop you from developing prejudices and taking too poor a view of theologians, let me add that the man was a Swabian and was also married to a Swabian, a lady from Stuttgart to boot. That is just to stop you from getting prejudiced. We have tried to see how the separation of knowledge and belief came about. This separation of knowledge and belief also prevents people from knowing that there is a life before birth, or before conception. I also spoke of this yesterday.57 All that is permitted is belief in life post mortem, i.e. after death, for that is an idea that can be presented to human minds even if one reckons only with egotistical elements in the human soul. The concept of life before birth, the life we have gone through between our last death and our birth into the present life, needs perceptive insight if it is to be grasped; it is no good putting one's money on egotistical soul instincts if one wishes to teach it. The way people are here on earth is that they do not care to know what they have gone through before; egotistical reasons make them interested to know what will happen after death, however. It is easy to preach on what people may expect after death, therefore, for that appeals to the egotistical instincts in their souls. It is difficult to preach on life before birth; instead one must assume that human beings desire to know the truth and want to live a life that is worthy of human beings. This will of course lead us to see education and then also the whole of life on earth in a new light. Life on earth must be seen as the fulfilling of a mission we have been given before we descended from the spiritual world into physical existence. This new approach that simply must come to be widely accepted in the outside world, an approach that will also have to create new social forms, has many enemies. You can guess this from various hidden trends. I want to end today be telling you something—this is something I am forced to do—of the murky sources and origins of the elements that want to destroy our spiritual science. The sheer effrontery is staggering and there will be more and more of this unless souls come awake to a much greater degree than has been the case until now. You know, and our friends here have fought against it, that the abominable slander has been spread about all over Germany and beyond of German officers being betrayed to the Entente due to the efforts of the Threefold Order people and so forth.58 I have recently been supplied with copies of some of the abominable documents that are widely distributed at present—fake letters reputedly written by our people, cunningly designed to spread the most dreadful slander, and faked interviews. Their character will be obvious to you as soon as I tell you that one of them concludes with the words: ‘D.H. is not in fact part of the Steiner fraternity. He has merely infiltrated the organization to spy on them, to get on to their tricks. He has reported his findings to a small group of patriotic people, and the word is that Steiner is committing high treason and is in league with the Entente.’ That is just a small sample of the murky work that is being done, and it it much more widespread than you would think. Another very pretty example comes from someone in this area59 whom I once called a swine in a public lecture—because everything this person is instigating against me simply cannot be called by any other name. This person is now using the black art of printing to spread things against me in an article headed ‘Threefold Order Plagiarized’. This says no less than that a lady had created a threefold order some time ago. (The lady was not quite careful enough, however, for she failed to find out from the literature that my threefold order was known before that in certain circles; she gives a time that is somewhat later than the time when I was talking to a great many people about the threefold order in question.) This lady, then, is said to have created a threefold order and to have sent the manuscript to a philanthropic society; it is then said to have gone to Hamburg where the person Concerned kept it for four weeks rather than two, and that I probably read it in that time and took the threefold idea from that manuscript. Of course the lady cannot very well say that there is any agreement between the threefold order I am presenting and whatever she had put in her manuscript. She therefore maintains that the threefold idea was plagiarized from her manuscript, but that it has been messed about. Oh yes. He's pinched my watch, but that one looks quite different! She has now written a work about her threefold order. According to her this consists of the golden section ‘state, cultural sphere, church’, with everything again determined by the golden section. So we get a centralized state and within it two parts—exactly the same as postulated in the threefold order; so the threefold order is a botch job.—if you want to get an idea, let me recommend this work to you; the title is 3:5, 5:8 = 21:34. The secret of clearing the debts in reasonable time’ [English rendering of the original German title] by Elisabeth Mathilde Metzdorff-Teschner,60 published by the author in 1920. Maybe you could make amends by saying: ‘We have been working for the threefold order, but we really only did this in Mrs Elizabeth Metzdorff-Teschner's name.’ That is another thing she expects of us, and she is writing letters to all kinds of people. That is Mr Rohm's source, and the things he writes are now reaching Switzerland where they are presented to the people by every Roman Catholic parish priest. No one of course has even the least idea of the actual source. These articles say something very different, and people find it quite easy to believe, for the idiocy at the source of it is not apparent. That is the way people work nowadays and they know very well what they are doing. They are deliberately working against the sincere efforts that are being made to serve the true progress of humankind. In Switzerland it is above all the Roman Catholic Parish priests who are using that style, reprinting everything that comes from the centres run by Mr Knapp61 and others, everything disgorged from the rubbish bins of Mr Rohm and so forth. I cannot help remembering that until recently there have been—and indeed still are—many people even among anthroposophists who are faithful subscribers to Mr Rohm's Leuchtturm [Lighthouse]. They keep dishing up Mr Rohm's views, keep coming up with one thing or another I am sorry, I had to give you some small samples—there are plenty more—so that you can see the methods that are used. The strength inherent in spiritual science working towards anthroposophy should give anthroposophy the strength to gain more than just names from words—a feeling for the truth. Once you have a feeling for the truth you will find the road, and it lies in a very different region from what people generally find comfortable in the present time. It is a road to be sought in the kind of way I have described today. It would be more comfortable in this day and age to talk of other things rather than refer to the powerful adversaries who are responsible for distinction being made between knowledge and belief and who aim to block the road by which knowledge of the sense-perceptible world can become knowledge of spheres beyond the senses.
|
| 306. The Child's Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education: Introduction to a Eurythmy Performance
15 Apr 1923, Dornach Translated by Roland Everett |
|---|
| 5 For whatever springs from the impulses of anthroposophy must, by its very nature, find practical application in life. As you already know, many other practical activities are the outcome of anthroposophical work—for example, in the field of medicine. |
| As a matter of course, this goal will be resolutely pursued by all those who are serious about anthroposophy. As soon as official matters have been finalized, we shall certainly make every effort in that direction. |
| But those who stand behind these lies about Dornach and anthroposophy know very well that they are scattering lies. Thus, to prove them wrong would cause them the greatest of discomfort. |
| 306. The Child's Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education: Introduction to a Eurythmy Performance
15 Apr 1923, Dornach Translated by Roland Everett |
|---|
Once again we would like to try to give you an impression of eurythmy. It is an artistic movement that draws on previously unfamiliar sources and makes use of a new language of forms. Therefore it may be appropriate to say a few words first. I do not intend to explain the performance, which would be inartistic. Every art must speak for itself, and, one should especially not attempt detailed explanations of an art form created to be seen. It should simply be watched. You will see human figures performing gesture-like movements on stage, primarily with their arms and hands—the most expressive of our limbs—but also with other members of the human organism. You will see individual figures as well as groups of eurythmists, the groups spread in certain spatial relationships and performing various forms and patterns as they move around. None of all these movements and gestures, however, should be viewed as arbitrary or fortuitous, because they are intended to communicate a definite, visible language, or visible music.1 This is why eurythmy is accompanied either by recitation and declamation—as in the case of poetry—or by various kinds of music. During the course of life, a human being progresses from the first babbling sounds of a baby, which express only feelings and sensations in primitive form, to articulated speech later on. Similarly, it is also possible to progress from the primitive and natural gestures (“babbling gestures,” I would call them) of ordinary life, which lend clarity, emphasis, or feeling to the spoken word, toward a visible form of speech, created by movements of the entire human organism. Therefore, what you are about to see on stage is not based on artificially contrived movements, but on exact and careful study (according to Goethe's method of what he called “sensible-supersensible seeing”) of how the spoken word and human song come to be; because, in this case also, one is involved with a kind of gesturing. This form of gesturing, however, does not occur within the ordinary visible human organism, but within the outflowing breath. Naturally, the breath is always directed, partly by human will forces aided by the relevant physical organs, and partly by human thought. We know that, in speaking, air is moved. If we made a detailed study of the forms of these air movements through which human beings communicate with each another, we would find that a definite flow-form of out-streaming air corresponds to each sound, to each word figuration and to the configuration of each sentence. Air-forms that flow out more radially from a speaking person arise from the region of the human will, though always through the agency of physical organs, of course, as already mentioned. Sounds that shape these air-gestures into waves of a more “cross-sectional” type—if I may use such a term—stem from human thinking. If we could see these moving-air gestures, just as we can see the human being in motion (and this is possible through sensible-supersensible seeing) we would be presented with a kind of air-image of the human being, or at least of part of the human being. And within this image we would see movement, the movement of flowing air. These air movements are being studied carefully. But instead of letting the larynx and the other speech organs transform the air-gestures into speech or song, they are turned into gestures performed by the arms, the hands, or the entire human figure, and also by groups of eurythmists moving in specific patterns. Through this arrangement, what happens in ordinary speech or song has now been made visible, and the only difference is that the thought element has been left out of these movements. The thought element always tends to be inartistic and prosaic. Poets have to struggle against the thought element to express themselves artistically through the medium of language. They have to extract from the thought sphere what language offers them. In a certain sense they try to loosen thoughts from language, retaining only its will element, which they then use to express their soul experiences. This is why we do not express the more undulating forms of air gestures, which emanate from the thoughts, but rather those that stream radially outward in sound, word, or sentence formation. In performing the appropriate eurythmy movements that accompany the spoken word, a unique opportunity is presented for outwardly expressing, clearly and visibly, what poets have experienced within the soul. The belief that human souls and spirits are linked to any particular part of the physical body is certainly a kind of prejudice, because in reality the human soul permeates completely the entire organism, even the outermost periphery. It lives in everything expressed outwardly, in every physical manifestation. Poets experience the meaning of a poem with their entire being, but, strictly speaking, they have to restrain what wants to flow into their limbs. Admittedly, there are only a few poets who really go through this experience. I think one could safely say that of everything being produced in the art of poetry, some ninety-nine percent could just as well be ignored without causing too great a loss in the field of art. But any deeply experienced poetry is encountered by the whole human being, and then soul and spirit are pouring into the individual's entire being. What a poet tries to accomplish through imagination, through the formative, pictorial qualities of sound formation, or through the element of rhythm and beat, as well as through the musical and thematic treatment of sound production, is all achieved basically by allowing the prose meaning of the words to recede, while giving voice to what is truly poetic and artistic. Consequently, for the art of speech to do justice to a poet's work, it must not place the primary emphasis on prose meaning—something that has become much too popular in our inartistic time—but it should concentrate on how the spoken word is formed. This has been strived for in the art of speech being cultivated here, to which Mrs. Dr. Steiner has devoted herself for a considerable while. If the meaning of the spoken word is stressed in speech, the result will be essentially prose. Although this may seem interesting and intriguing, because it is believed that the personality of the speaker will then be in the limelight, it nevertheless remains inartistic. The artistic approach is in the speaker's ability to bring out various qualities, such as passionate feelings, emotions, and, in the case of thoughts, communication of the ideas themselves, through the pictorial element and plasticity of the sounds as they follow one another; and this is also done through the way diverse sound-nuances mutually affect each other. This cannot be achieved by concentrating on meaning alone. For a thought to be expressed poetically, the form of the thought has to be toned down. The poetic quality of language has to be looked for solely in the way speech is formed. Apart from the image-creating quality and the plasticity of speech, the essence of recitation is found equally in its musical, beat-directed, and rhythmical aspects. In prose, verses are obviously out of place, but in poetry they are very much necessary, because they offer a kind of meeting ground that, with its rhythmical and musical qualities, is fundamentally important in speech. In the work of a genuine poet, therefore, a hidden eurythmy is already present in the way language is treated. Thus, there is nothing artificial in eurythmy—indeed, it is entirely natural—and it manifests outwardly what the true poet has subdued, at least to a certain extent. With their entire being poets want to give to the world what they bring down into earthly incarnation. But, being restricted to the medium and use of language, they must artificially restrain certain aspects of what they want to express with a full human quality. This is all released again when transformed into visual expression through the medium of eurythmy. Hearing the speaker's recitation while, at the same time, seeing the soul-spiritual counterpart (which ordinarily flows into the spoken word) in the movements of the performing eurythmists, a direct picture of the full poetic experience is received. Eurythmy really wants to make this inherent poetic experience visible through movement “painted in space.” If you want to allow eurythmy to work on the soul properly, you must not confuse it with the neighboring arts of mime and dancing; eurythmy is neither one. However, nothing derogatory must be read into my words, because the importance of those two arts is not meant to be minimized or disputed in any way. Nevertheless, eurythmy has its own and distinctly different aspirations. And if some of its gestures appear close to mime, it can only be the result of what I would like to call a “mood of mockery” or scorn inherent in the poetry, or because of an attempt to rise above a given situation. One could compare it to someone making a wry mouth or winking an eye while speaking. Any quasi-mimic eurythmy gestures need to be regarded in this light, and if eurythmists choose to make them, they are justified in doing so. However, I am not referring to the actual art of mime, but only to the odd occasion when eurythmy may slide into a style akin to mime, which, strictly speaking, is unwarranted, because eurythmy then loses its innocence. Likewise, what I am going to say does not refer to dancing as an art in and of itself, but only to an improper aberration of eurythmy into dancing. It is certainly possible for eurythmy movements to pass over into dancelike movements—for example, if a poem speaks of a person hitting or attacking another, or displaying otherwise passionate conduct. In such instances, eurythmy movements, which are usually entirely contained within the realm of the physical body, can turn into dancelike movements. However, if eurythmy unjustifiably degenerates into dancing, if dancing invades the realm of eurythmy for its own sake, it has a brutalizing effect. Again, I am not saying that the art of dancing is brutal, but that, if eurythmy slides into a form of dancing, it is being brutalized. A genuine appreciation of eurythmy certainly entitles one to state very clearly: Eurythmy is neither a form of mime, which is communicated through suggestive movements, nor is it a form of dance with extravagant and passionate movements, no longer contained within the dancers' sphere of consciousness. Eurythmy occupies an intermediate position. It neither indulges in ardent or exuberant dance movements, nor does it use pantomimic gestures, which always lean toward becoming intellectual. In eurythmy, expressive and meaningful gestures are performed, which are meant, in their own way, to have an esthetic and artistic effect. These gestures are neither intellectually thought out, nor are they excessive by nature. They are neither to be explained away, nor should they be overpowering to the eurythmist or the onlooker. Through the immediacy of its line and through the entire mode of movement, eurythmy should appear both pleasing and beautiful in the eye of the beholder. Seeing song or music expressed in movement will also convey a proper impression of what eurythmy is. Soon you will hear pieces of music performed in eurythmy. This tone eurythmy is not dancing either. If done properly, it differs essentially from any kind of dancing. It is singing, not with voices, but with physical movements. It is precisely this singing transformed into visible movement that enables one to differentiate eurythmy from its neighboring arts. Seeing it on stage will help you to gain a true idea of what I have been talking about. Eurythmy is only at the beginning of its development, and it will need a long time to reach some stage of perfection. This is why, before each performance, I have to ask the audience to be tolerant. During its earlier stages only one side of eurythmy was developed. But, for example, we have added stage lighting to enhance the visual effects of the performing eurythmists. These changing colored lights on the stage are intended to work as a kind of “light eurythmy,” to serve and accompany the movements of the eurythmists, so that the entire stage picture actually becomes one eurythmic expression. However, there is no doubt that stage presentation of eurythmy will be improved in many ways during the coming years. One can be confident of this future perfecting because eurythmy uses the most perfect instrument available for any artistic expression—that is, the human being, who is a microcosm, a whole world in a small space, containing all the secrets and inherent laws of the universe. For this reason, if all the potentialities offered by the human organism were fully realized, the moving eurythmist would essentially present a true and artistic image of all cosmic secrets and laws. The art of mime uses only one side of the human being, as do the other arts, which also treat the human individual as an instrument, each in its own way. One could say: Eurythmy does not depend on an external instrument, nor on any one part of the human being, but transforms the human entity, and especially the most expressive members—that is, the arms and hands—into visible speech and visible song or music. One may hope that when the possibilities inherent in eurythmy have been fully developed, a time will come when this youngest of arts will find its place, side by side with the older arts, in its own right. Regarding Recitation and Eurythmy: Rudolf Steiner: It is a pity that Mrs. Dr. Steiner, who has developed the art of recitation here in Dornach, has been ill these last few days, and is therefore unable to give us examples of recitation.2 The point is this: eurythmy requires one to revive the kind of recitation and declamation cultivated in times more open to an artistic approach to speech than our present times. Our current age is hardly sensitive to artistic refinement. For example, people today would not readily understand why Goethe, like a musical conductor, used a baton when rehearsing his iambic dramas with his actors. In our time, in recitation and declamation—which have to be strictly distinguished from one another—the prose meaning is usually given primary consideration. At least, since the 1890s a strong tendency has developed to assign a more secondary place to the artistic formation of speech, while the prose meaning of a poem is considered to be most important. And yet, the essentials in speech have to be seen in the imaginative formation of the sounds, in the structure of the verses, in the musical and thematic treatment, in rhythm, beat, and in the melodious themes, all of which are fundamental aspects of poetry. Through the way speech is treated, they all have to be lifted to a higher level than possible through prose meaning alone. The feeling for the artistic element in speech has declined completely in more recent times, as some of our present cultural phenomena will confirm. For instance, I don't believe there are many today who remember, or who have noticed, which university chair the well-known Professor Curtius originally occupied at the University of Berlin. He has been lecturing on art history and other related subjects, but these were not the subjects for which he was originally engaged. In fact, he began his university career as “Professor of Eloquence,” and his real task was to lecture on rhetoric. But interest in this subject waned to the extent that it eventually appeared unnecessary that he continue lecturing about it, and so he quietly slipped into another university chair. Similar symptoms can be encountered frequently today. If the art of speech is to be resuscitated—preferably more in form of a narrative style, or as the kind of poetry developed by the ancient Greeks—and to revive also the art of declamation, which the older Germanic poetry is based on, it is necessary to do something about speech formation. This is the point. I don't know what caused this question to be raised, but what matters is that one achieves, through the way speech is treated, what is achieved in prose through the word meaning. Here the emphasis is not on the prose meaning, but on the way different sounds follow each other, or the uses of rhymes, alliterations, and rhythms—in other words, the element of form in language—which must draw out what the present emphasis on prose meaning achieves today. Recitation is more closely allied to measure and to the plasticity of language. Its qualities are realized through either a lengthening or shortening of syllables, something that can be especially significant in ballads. In declamation, on the other hand, particular qualities are created by altering the pitch to a higher or lower tone of voice.3 This is not a question of art, but merely a matter of interpretation. It depends entirely on whether the speaker places the main value on the first syllable or on both syllables equally; in other words, “Tell her I send greet-ings,” or, “Tell her I send greet-ings.” Question: Doesn't this shift the weight of the rhyme? Rudolf Steiner: This could happen only if one neglected to adapt the other syllables accordingly. It is all a question of mood rather than of how speech is treated. Question: Isn't there an inherent law expressed in a person's interpretation? Rudolf Steiner: No; one's interpretation must remain free. It is completely possible to render artistically the same poem in the style of either declamation or recitation. There is room for a great variety of views, just as a musical work can be interpreted in very many ways. There is not just one way of dealing with a poem. What matters is its innate essence, so that when either reciting or declaiming, one no longer has the feeling of doing this with the larynx but of speaking with the air. To develop the gift of shaping air is most important in recitation. When singing, one shapes the air. When reciting there has to be the same tendency, but in speech the melody is already within the sound. The essentials have to be brought out in the way speech is treated, and not through meaning. In this context it is helpful to consider what happened when Schiller wrote his most important poems—that is, he had a general melody in his soul to which he could then write the text he was looking for.4 One has to aim at expressing the essentials, on the one hand, through the musical element and, on the other, through the formative and painterly qualities of language. Question: In the art of dancing, various dancers have different styles. This, presumably, is not the case in eurythmy—or are its movements not always the same? Rudolf Steiner: You would hardly say that if you saw very much eurythmy! Let us say, for example, that you recited a poem, and another person recited the same poem. Even if you treated the poem in the same way, from an artistic point of view there would still be two different vocal ranges, and so on. This kind of difference already shows very strongly in eurythmy, where you could soon perceive individual characteristics of the various eurythmists; for these differences are there. And if they have not yet become more prominent, it is only because eurythmy has not been developed far enough. That will happen when eurythmy has advanced to the point where eurythmists really become one with their art. Then a more individual interpretation will become more noticeable. Certainly, in eurythmy all movements are based on fundamental laws. You could find a parallel in speech. If I wish to say “man,” I must not say “moon.” I must not pronounce an oo instead of an a. The eurythmist therefore has to make the appropriate eurythmy gesture for a, but this underlying law in eurythmy still permits a multiplicity of possibilities for bringing out an individual interpretation. We are not concerned here with pedantic or stereotypical movements. You will also see a great difference between a beginner practicing eurythmy and someone who has done it for years, not only in regard to movement skills, but also in the artistry demonstrated. Likewise, an inborn artistic gift will also be clearly perceptible, even more than in other art forms. Eurythmy is essentially built into the human organism. The human organism incorporates so that—like the other arts, such as painting—it is not absorbed rationally, but nevertheless consciously, whereas dancing goes into the emotional sphere. Other difficulties may arise there. Dancing is not really purely artistic. Eurythmy is an art already. The course participants expressed the wish to start an association in order to open a Waldorf School in Switzerland. During various discussions the question was raised about the priority to be given the rebuilding of the Goetheanum and to starting a Swiss Waldorf School, since the realization of both projects seemed completely unrealistic. Rudolf Steiner: To build the Goetheanum again is more or less a matter of course, not just among Swiss circles, but among the wider circles of anthroposophists in the world. During the years when it was standing, the Goetheanum gradually came to be seen as something intended to represent the center of the entire anthroposophical movement. And there will hardly be any doubt among the majority of anthroposophists in the world that the Goetheanum will have to be built again. Hindrances toward this goal could come only from the Swiss authorities. There can be no other hindrances. Unless the authorities make it impossible for us, the Goetheanum will certainly be rebuilt. On the other hand, while the Goetheanum was standing, the need was felt to open at least a small school.5 For whatever springs from the impulses of anthroposophy must, by its very nature, find practical application in life. As you already know, many other practical activities are the outcome of anthroposophical work—for example, in the field of medicine. I want to mention this only for the sake of clarification. Regarding the possibility of anthroposophical medicine, I also had to stipulate that, if the thought should ever arise of working in medicine on the basis of anthroposophical research, it would be essential for those wishing to dedicate themselves to such a task to be in constant touch with those who are ill through their personal care. This is why our hospitals were opened here in Arlesheim and in Stuttgart. This is only one example to show that, if any impulses in one or another direction are to grow out of anthroposophy, these and other institutions are certain to spring up from sheer necessity. And so, in building this small school, which is closely affiliated with the Goetheanum, and which we shall endeavor to keep going, we have done the only possible thing; we started it because a number of parents, who were convinced of the rightness of Waldorf education, wanted to send us their children. These children were taken away from us again only through the interference of the local authorities. Due to Swiss legislation we were unable to do, even on a smaller scale, what had been possible in Stuttgart, where, due to less restrictive local educational laws, we could open the Waldorf School. In this regard, world progress has shown some very strange features. Please do not think I am trying to promote conservative or reactionary tendencies by what I am going to say, but it is true that, inasmuch as education is concerned, there was greater freedom during the times when liberalism was nonexistent—not to mention democracy. Lack of freedom has crept in only during the times of liberalism and democracy. I do not even maintain that a lack of freedom and liberalism, or a lack of freedom and democracy, definitely belong together, but that during the course of history they have shown themselves to be closely connected. And the least free of all educational systems (shall I say “in the civilized world?”) is in that part of Europe looked upon by so many West-European “democrats” as a kind of paradise—in Soviet Russia. There freedom is being exterminated root and branch through the most extreme form of “democracy” (as it is called), and an educational system has been set up that presents a caricature of human freedom and activity. To return to our question: I want to strongly emphasize that rebuilding the Goetheanum is a necessity and that it could be prevented only by outer circumstances. In any case, it should be strived for. As a matter of course, this goal will be resolutely pursued by all those who are serious about anthroposophy. As soon as official matters have been finalized, we shall certainly make every effort in that direction. One can take only one step at a time, if one does not want to proceed in a theoretical way. It is possible, of course, to make all kinds of decisions, and to think up all kinds of plans, but if one stands firmly on the ground of reality, this can be done only if and when there is a strong enough basis to warrant it. Naturally, the ideal solution would be to complement naturally what can begin toward a general spiritual and social life through building a new Goetheanum, by also building a Waldorf School. But to move forward in this way, one would first have to overcome the obstacles put in the way by inhibiting interests in this country. For my part, I feel convinced that, if only enough people can be found—and here I am not thinking in terms of majorities—who recognize that such a school is necessary, it will eventually be opened. There is no question that ways and means will be found for it to come into being. Concerning the building of the Goetheanum, matters are not so simple. To bring that about out of the will-forces of Switzerland—if I may put it this way—is not so easy. This would have to be a matter of international effort and cooperation. Primary schools, on the other hand, arise from the various folk cultures, and in such cases, neither our Waldorf teachers nor I, nor anyone else, has any say in the matter except our dear Swiss friends and visitors. And because of this we feel a great need to hear more about their feelings and attitudes about this point.6 After further contributions from various conference members, Rudolf Steiner was asked to speak some final words. Rudolf Steiner: It is our chairman's opinion that I should say a few words in conclusion. In response, I express my deep inner satisfaction about the best of will and the best of intentions that our honored visitors, gathered here, have shown during this conference. And I must say that every time we come together like this is a joyful event, because it causes those who participate to realize that what is being cultivated here in Dornach is very different from the current misrepresentations among so many people. If there are enough people who, through their own experience, come to realize how many falsehoods are being spread about what is really happening in Dornach, then the time will come when the intentions here—however feeble our beginnings may be—will reach the world more freely. Of course, not everyone is in a position to perceive clearly the strange distortions of what is happening here in Dornach. There are moments when one cannot help feeling amazed at the lack of morality shown by the public, and at the general indifference toward flagrant distortions and falsifications, which really belong to the realm of immorality. One can only wonder how it is possible that such perversions of truth are taken in with particular apathy. Matters have gone so far that if this subject is touched on, one is almost met with incredulity. Just yesterday the name of a person who commands a large audience here in Switzerland was mentioned. If now one feels it necessary to state that this person criticized my book Towards Social Renewal even before it was published—that is, before he could possibly have read a single word contained in it—the untruth of such criticism spread by a considerably famous person will hardly raise an eyebrow.7 This is how great and widespread the general apathy is today concerning ethical matters. Through such apathy, these negative influences gather momentum. They increase tremendously. About two years ago, a certain matter was spoken of repeatedly—that a theologian had written a booklet in Switzerland, in which the bizarre words were printed that, here in Dornach, a wooden sculpture was to be erected, which could already be seen in the studio, and which bore luciferic features in the upper part and animal-like features below.8 The fact is that the main figure of this sculpture shows the features of Christ in ideal form, while the lower part of the carving is still incomplete. When he was called on it, the author of the booklet simply declared that he had copied the offending words from somebody else's writings; and this despite the fact that the author of the pamphlet was a well-known person in Switzerland! This incident has been brought to the notice of our circle here several times, and not without a decisive edge. But, due to the general indifference concerning moral matters, our words have fallen on deaf ears, instead of being passed to widest circles as an example of how strong the inclinations are—even in famous people—to distort anthroposophy and everything belonging to it by spreading untruths and gross inaccuracies. Well, one could continue in this vein, but I am afraid that if I were to tell you even a small part of the untruths, real untruths being spread about anthroposophy, we could not go home before sunrise and, naturally, we have no desire for that. Nevertheless, the situation is such that it must again be pointed out how everything is becoming so difficult for us because of the falsehoods about Dornach and all that belongs to it, untruths being disseminated in most underhanded ways, and also because of the general indifference toward these perversions of the truth. I am not begging you to come to the defense of Dornach—certainly not. And yet, there is something of real significance in all this. Many people hold the view that there must be complete freedom to express one's opinion. Certainly, everybody is entitled to a personal opinion, and no one can support this point of view more strongly than I do. It is a matter of course that everyone must be free to have an individual opinion and also to express it. But no one should spread lies in the world without hearing an appropriate and authoritative answer. It is the spreading of lies that causes the greatest disturbances in the world. To make people see this is one of the most difficult things we have to contend with here in Dornach. We have very many good friends, but the enthusiasm for defending the truth by rectifying false accounts of what emanates from Dornach has not yet become very strong. Our difficulties are more connected with these things than one might think. For example, not long ago I was faced with a large number of lies, of untrue judgments, personally aimed at me. Since, in this particular case, it was very important for me to rectify judgments that people might form on the basis of these lies, I asked, “What would happen if, in order to disprove all these untruths, I were to submit within a short time documentary evidence, clearly set out and concisely written for quick and easy reading?” The answer was: “It would not alter the situation in any way.” Here you have some indication of the difficulties that could be said to be at the root of our troubles. Rectifying the many falsehoods about Dornach, scattered far and wide, would certainly be a most desirable thing. The collection of funds for the creation of a Swiss School Association would not be so difficult if there were less distrust everywhere. But I believe this lack of trust will persist as long as one is not in the position of placing the actual facts side by side with lies, and as long as one cannot count on a enough people who are not only capable of discriminating between truth and untruth, but who are also willing to stand up for the truth. Things have come to such a state that, very recently, I had to say to a number of people: “To prove the truth about our anthroposophical cause would bring us the greatest of harm because we would be much less unpopular if the lies about us were correct. In that case people could vilify us without any qualms. But those who stand behind these lies about Dornach and anthroposophy know very well that they are scattering lies. Thus, to prove them wrong would cause them the greatest of discomfort. This is also how things are where personal matters are concerned. I am not exposing this situation to you merely to talk about it once again, but rather to look at it as the shadow cast by light. In order to give light its proper brightness, there has to be some shadow, and the brighter the light, the darker the accompanying shadow. I put these things before you as the counterpart of the positive side. But just because they are there, you may believe me that it gives me all the more joy to have witnessed how so many among you have spoken tonight about your deeply-felt desire to do something for the cause represented here. In expressing my heartfelt satisfaction to you, I also wish to put the light next to the shadow, which—as already said—was placed before you only to let the light shine more brightly. Because so many of our honored visitors, dear to us, have spoken with voices of such deep concern about our anthroposophical cause, this light has been shining especially brightly.
|
| 310. Human Values in Education: Diet for Children, Four Temperaments
23 Jul 1924, Arnheim Translated by Vera Compton-Burnett |
|---|
| For we can only learn to know the spiritual when we acquire this knowledge in the realm of the spirit; and anthroposophy must deal in many ways with spiritual realms and spiritual beings which have nothing to do with the physical world of the senses. |
| It is actually a question of being able to gaze with the spirit into the material. And Anthroposophy, Spiritual Science, is in this respect largely a matter of looking into the material with the spirit. |
| Now idealists, so-called, very likely reproach anthroposophy and maintain that it is materialistic. They actually do so. When for example an anthroposophist says that a child who comprehends easily but does not retain what he has learnt, should have his potato ration gradually decreased, then people say: You are an absolute materialist. |
| 310. Human Values in Education: Diet for Children, Four Temperaments
23 Jul 1924, Arnheim Translated by Vera Compton-Burnett |
|---|
From the lectures which have been given here, dealing with an art of education built upon the foundation of a knowledge of man, you formed a clear idea of what should be the relation between teacher and taught. What lives in the soul, in the whole personality of the teacher, works in hundreds of unseen ways from the educator over to the children his pupils. But it only works if the educator bears within his soul a true and penetrating knowledge of man, a knowledge which is approaching the transition leading over into spiritual experience. And today I must precede my lecture with a few remarks which may serve to clarify what is to be understood in the anthroposophical sense by spiritual experience, for just in regard to this the most erroneous ideas abound. It is so easy to think that in the first place spiritual perception must rise above everything of a material nature. Certainly one can attain to a deeply satisfying soul experience, even though this may be coloured by egotistical feeling, when, rising above the material, one ascends into the spiritual world. We must do this also. For we can only learn to know the spiritual when we acquire this knowledge in the realm of the spirit; and anthroposophy must deal in many ways with spiritual realms and spiritual beings which have nothing to do with the physical world of the senses. And when it is a question of learning to know what is so necessary for modern man, to know about the life between death and a new birth, the actual super-sensible life of man before birth or conception and the life after death, then we must certainly rise up to body-free, super-sensible, super-physical perception. But we must of course act and work within the physical world; we must stand firmly in this world. If we are teachers, for instance, we are not called upon to teach disembodied souls. We cannot ask ourselves, if we wish to be teachers; What is our relationship to souls who have passed through death and are living in the spiritual world?—But if we wish to work as teachers between birth and death, we must ask ourselves: In what way does a soul dwell within the physical body? And indeed we must consider this, at any rate for the years after birth. It is actually a question of being able to gaze with the spirit into the material. And Anthroposophy, Spiritual Science, is in this respect largely a matter of looking into the material with the spirit. But the opposite procedure is also right: one must penetrate with spiritual vision into the spiritual world, penetrate so far that the spiritual seems to be every bit as full of “living sap” as anything in the sense world; one must be able to speak about the spiritual as if it radiated colours, as if its tones were audible, as if it were standing before one as much “embodied” as the beings of the sense world. In anthroposophy it is first this which causes abstract philosophers such intense annoyance. They find it exceedingly annoying that the spiritual investigator describes the spiritual world and spiritual beings in such a way that it seems as if he might meet these beings at any moment, just as he might meet human beings; that he might hold out his hand to them and speak with them. He describes these spiritual beings just as though they were earthly beings; indeed his description makes them appear almost as if they were earthly beings. In other words, he portrays the spiritual in pictures comprehensible to the senses. He does this in full consciousness, because for him the spiritual is an absolute reality. There is some truth in it, too, because a real knowledge of the whole world leads to the point at which one can “give one's hand” to spiritual beings, one can meet them and converse with them. That strikes the philosopher, who is only willing to conceive the spiritual world by means of abstract concepts, as being paradoxical, to say the least of it; nevertheless such a description is necessary. On the other hand it is also necessary to look right through a human being, so that the material part of him vanishes completely, and he stands there purely as a spirit. When however a non-anthroposophist wishes to look upon a man as spirit, then this man is not only a ghost, but something much less than a ghost. He is a sort of coat-hanger on which are hung all kinds of concepts which serve to activate mental pictures and so on. In comparison a ghost is quite respectably solid, but a human being as described by such a philosopher is really indecently naked in regard to the spirit. In anthroposophy physical man is contemplated by means of purely spiritual perception, but nevertheless he still has brains, liver, lungs and so on; he is a concrete human being; he has everything that is found in him when the corpse is dissected. Everything that is spiritual in its nature works right down into the physical. The physical is observed spiritually, but nevertheless man possesses a physical body. He can even “blow his nose” in a spiritual sense; spiritual reality goes as far as this. Only by becoming aware that in contemplating the physical it can become completely spiritual, and in contemplating the spiritual it can be brought down again so that it becomes almost physical, only by this awareness can the two be brought together. The physical human being can be contemplated in a condition of health and illness; but the ponderable material vanishes, it becomes spiritual. And the spiritual can be contemplated as it is between death and a new birth and, pictorially speaking, it becomes physical. Thus the two are brought together. Man learns to penetrate into the real human being through the fact that there are these two possibilities, the possibility of beholding the spiritual by means of sense-perceptible pictures and the possibility of beholding spiritual entities in the world of the senses. If therefore the question arises: How may spiritual vision be understood in its real and true sense?—the answer must be: One must learn to see all that appertains to the senses in a spiritual way, and one must look at the spiritual in a way that is akin to the senses. This seems paradoxical, but it is so. And only after entering into what I have just said and realising its truth, can one reach the point of looking at the child in the right way. I will give you an example. A child in my class becomes paler and paler. I see this increasing pallor. It shows itself in the physical life of the child, but we gain nothing by going to the doctor and getting him to prescribe something that will bring back the child's colour; for, should we do so, the following may well be the result: The child grows pale and this is observed, so the school doctor comes and prescribes something which is intended to restore the lost colour. Now even if the doctor has acted perfectly correctly and has prescribed a quite good remedy, which he must do in such cases, nevertheless something rather strange will be observed in the child who is now “cured.” Indeed in a sense he is cured, and anyone in a position of seniority to the doctor, who might be called upon to write a testimonial for the authorities, could well say that the doctor had cured the child—later, however, it is noticeable at school that the child who has been cured in this way is no longer able to take things in properly; he has become fidgety and restless and has lost all power of attention. Whereas previously he used to sit in his place, pale and somewhat indolent, he now begins to pommel his neighbour; and whereas previously he had clipped his pen gently into the inkwell, he now sticks it in with so much force that the ink spurts up and bespatters his exercise book. The doctor did his duty but the result was the reverse of beneficial, for it sometimes happens that people who have been “cured” suffer later on from extraordinary after-effects. Again, in such a case it is important to recognise what actually lies at the root of the trouble. If the teacher is able to penetrate into the soul-spiritual cause of what finds its outer physical expression in a growing pallor, he will become aware of the following. The power of memory which works in the soul-spiritual is nothing else than the transformed, metamorphosed force of growth; and to develop the forces of growth and nourishment is just the same, albeit on a different level, as it is, on a higher level, to cultivate the memory, the power of recollection. It is the same force, but in a different stage of metamorphosis. Pictured systematically we can say: During the first years of a child's life both these forces are merged into one another, they have not yet separated; later on memory separates from this state of fusion and becomes a power in itself, and the same holds good for the power of growth and nourishment. The small child still needs the forces which later develop memory in order that he may digest milk and the stomach be able to carry out its functions; this is why he cannot remember anything. Later, when the power of memory is no longer the servant of the stomach, when the stomach makes fewer demands on it and only retains a minimum of these forces, then part of the forces of growth are transformed into a quality of soul, into memory, the power of recollection. Possibly the other children in the class are more robust, the division between the power of memory and of growth may be better balanced, and so, perhaps, the teacher pays less heed to a child who in this respect has little to fall back on. If this is the case it may easily happen that his power of memory is overburdened, too much being demanded of this emancipated faculty. The child grows pale and the teacher must needs say to himself: “I have put too much strain on your memory; that is why you have grown so pale.” It is very noticeable that when such a child is relieved of this burden he gets his colour back again. But the teacher must understand that the growing pale is connected with what he has done himself in the first place, by overburdening the child with what has to be remembered. It is very important to be able to look right into physical symptoms and to realise that if a child grows too pale it is because his memory has been overburdened. But I may have another child in the class who from time to time becomes strikingly red in the face and this also may be a cause for concern. If this occurs, if a hectic red flush makes its appearance, it is very easy to recognise certain accompanying conditions in the child's soul-life; for in the strangest way, at times when one would least expect it, such children fall into a passion of anger, they become over-emotional. Naturally there can be the same procedure as before: A rush of blood to the head—something must be prescribed for it. Of course, in such cases too, the doctor does his duty. But it is important to know something else, namely, that this child, in contrast to the other, has been neglected in respect of his faculty of memory. Too many of these forces have gone down into the forces of his growth and nourishment. In this case one must try to make greater demands on the child's power of memory. If this is done such symptoms will disappear. Only when we take into our ken the physical and the spiritual as united do we learn to recognise many things in the school which are in need of readjustment. We train ourselves to recognise this interconnection of physical and spiritual when we look at what lies between them as part of the whole human organisation, namely, the temperaments. The children come to school and they have the four temperaments, varied of course with all kinds of transitions and mixtures: the melancholic, the phlegmatic, the sanguine and the choleric. In our Waldorf education great value is laid on being able to enter into and understand the child according to his temperament. The actual seating of the children in the classroom is arranged on this basis. We try for instance to discover which are the choleric children; these we place together, so that it is possible for the teacher to know: There in that corner I have the children who tend to be choleric. In another, the phlegmatic children are seated, somewhere in the middle are the sanguines and again somewhere else, grouped together are the melancholies. This method of grouping has great advantages. Experience shows that after a while the phlegmatics become so bored with sitting together that, as a means of getting rid of this boredom, they begin to rub it off on one another. On the other hand the cholerics pommel one another so much that quite soon this too becomes very much better. It is the same with the fidgety ways of the sanguines, and the melancholies also see what it is like when others are absorbed in melancholy. Thus to handle the children in such a way that one sees how “like reacts favourably on like” is very good even from an external point of view, quite apart from the fact that by doing so the teacher has the possibility of surveying the whole class, for this is much easier when children of similar temperament are seated together. Now however we come to the essential point. The teacher must enter so deeply into the nature of the human being that he is able to deal in a truly practical way with the choleric, the sanguine, the melancholic temperament. There will naturally be cases where it is necessary to build the bridge of which I have already spoken, the bridge between school and home, and this must be done in a friendly and tactful way. Let us suppose that I have a melancholic child in the class, with whom I can do scarcely anything. I am unable to enter into his difficulties in the right way. He broods and is withdrawn, is occupied with himself and pays no heed to what is going on in the class. If one applies an education that is not founded on a knowledge of man one may think that everything possible should be done to attract his attention and draw him out of himself. As a rule however such a procedure will make things still worse; the child broods more than ever. All these means of effecting a cure, thought out in such an amateurish way, help but little. What helps most in such a case is the spontaneous love which the teacher feels for the child, for then he is aware of sympathy, and this stirs and moves what is more subconscious in him. We may be sure that anything in the way of exhortation is not only wasted effort, but is actually harmful, for the child becomes more melancholic than before. But in class it helps greatly if one tries to enter into the melancholy, tries to discover the direction to which it tends, and then shows interest in the child's attitude of mind, becoming in a certain way, by what one does oneself, melancholic with the melancholic child. As a teacher one must bear within oneself all four temperaments in harmonious, balanced activity. And this balance, which is in direct contradiction to the child's melancholy, if it is continued and is always present in one's relationship to the child, is perceived by him. He sees what kind of man his teacher is by what underlies his words. And in this way, creeping in behind the mask of melancholy, which the teacher accepts, there is implanted in the child his teacher's loving sympathy. This can be of great help in the class. But now we will go further, for we must know that every manifestation of melancholy in a human being is connected with some irregularity in the function of the liver. This may seem unlikely to the physicist, but it is nevertheless a fact that every kind of melancholy, especially if it goes so far in a child as to become pathological, is due to some irregularity of this kind. In such a case I shall turn to the parents of the child and say: “It would be good to put more sugar in his food than you usually do.” He needs sweet things, for sugar helps to normalise the function of the liver. And by giving the mother this advice: “Give the child more sugar”—I shall get school and home working together, in order to lift this melancholy out of the pathological condition into which it has sunk and so create the possibility of finding the right constitutional treatment. Or I may have a sanguine child, a child who goes from one impression to another; who always wants what comes next, almost before he has got hold of what precedes it; who makes a strong start, showing great interest in everything, but whose interest soon fades out. He is not dark as a rule, but fair. I am now faced with the problem of how to deal with him at school. In everything I do I shall try to be more sanguine than the child. I shall change the impressions I make on him extremely quickly, so that he is not left hurrying from one impression to another at his own sweet will, but must come with me at my pace. This is quite another story. He soon has enough of it and finally gives up. But between what I myself do in bringing impressions to the child in this very sanguine way, and what he does himself in hurrying from one thing to another in accordance with his temperament, there is gradually established in him, as a kind of natural reaction, a more harmonious condition. So I can treat the child in this way. I can present him with rapidly changing impressions, always thinking out something new, so that he sees, as it were, first black, then white, and must continually hurry from one thing to another. I now get in touch with the mother and I will certainly hear from her that the child has an inordinate love of sugar. Perhaps he is given a great many sweets or somehow manages to get hold of them, or maybe the family as such is very fond of sweet dishes. If this is not so, then his mother's milk was too sweet, it contained too much sugar. So I explain this to the mother and advise her to put the child on a diet for a time and reduce the amount of sugar she gives him. In this way, by arranging with the parents for a diet with little sugar, co-operation is brought about between home and school. The reduction of sugar will gradually help to overcome the abnormality which, in the case of this child also, is caused by irregularity in the activity of the liver in respect of the secretion of gall. There is a very slight, barely noticeable irregularity in the secretion of gall. Here too I shall recognise the help given me by the parents. So we must know as a matter of actual fact where, so to speak, the physical stands within the spiritual, where it is one with the Spiritual. It is possible to go into more detail and say: A child shows a rapid power of comprehension, he understands everything very easily; but when after a few days I come back to what he grasped so quickly and about which I was so pleased, it has vanished; it is no longer there. Here again I can do a good deal at school to improve matters. I shall try to put forward and explain something which demands a more concentrated attention than the child is accustomed to give. He understands things too quickly, it is not necessary for him to make enough inner effort, so that what he learns may really impress itself on him. I shall therefore give him hard nuts to crack, I shall give him something which is more difficult to grasp and demands more attention. This I can do at school. But now once more I get in touch with the child's parents and from them I may hear various things. What I am now saying will not hold good in every case, but I want to give some indication of the path to be pursued. I shall have a tactful discussion with the mother, avoiding any suspicion of riding the high horse by talking down to her and giving her instructions. From our conversation I shall find out how she caters for the family and I shall most likely discover that this particular child eats too many potatoes. The situation is a little difficult because now the mother may say, “Well, you tell me that my child eats too many potatoes; but my neighbour's little daughter eats more still and she has not the same failing, so the trouble cannot be caused by potato-eating.” Something of this kind is what the mother may say. And nevertheless it does come from eating potatoes, because the organisation of children differs, one child being able to assimilate more potato and another less. And the curious thing is this. The condition of a particular child shows that he has been getting too many potatoes; it is shown by the fact that his memory does not function as it should. Now in this case the remedy is not to be found by giving him fewer potatoes. It may even happen that this is done and there is some improvement; but after a time things are no better than before. Here the immediate reduction of the amount of potato does not bring about the required effect, but it is a question of gradually breaking a habit, of exercising the activity needed in order to break a habit. So one must say to the mother, “For the first week give the child a tiny bit less potato; for the second week a very little less still; and continue in this way, so that the child is actively engaged in accustoming himself to eating only a small amount of potato.” In this case it is a question of breaking a habit, and here one will see what a healing effect can be induced just by this means. Now idealists, so-called, very likely reproach anthroposophy and maintain that it is materialistic. They actually do so. When for example an anthroposophist says that a child who comprehends easily but does not retain what he has learnt, should have his potato ration gradually decreased, then people say: You are an absolute materialist. Nevertheless there exists such an intimate interplay between matter and spirit that one can only work effectively when one can penetrate matter with spiritual perception and master it through spiritual knowledge. It is hardly necessary to say how greatly these things are sinned against in our present-day social life. But if a teacher is open to a world conception which reveals wide vistas he will arrive at an understanding of these things. He must only extend his outlook. For instance it will impress a teacher favourably and help him to gain an understanding of children if he learns how little sugar is consumed in Russia and how much in England. And if he proceeds to compare the Russian with the English temperament he will readily understand what an effect sugar has on temperament. It is advantageous to learn to know the world, so that this knowledge can come to our assistance in the tasks of every day. But now I will add something else. In Baden, in Germany, there is a remarkable monument erected as a memorial to Drake. I once wanted to know what was specially significant about this Drake, so I looked it up in an encyclopaedia and read: In Offenburg a monument was erected in memory of Drake because he was thought, albeit erroneously, to be the man who introduced the potato into Europe. There it stands in black and white. So a memorial was erected in honour of this man because he was considered to be the one who introduced the potato into Europe. He didn't do so, but nevertheless he has got a memorial in Offenburg. The potato was, however, introduced into Europe in comparatively recent times. And now I am going to tell you something about which you can laugh as much as you like. Nevertheless it is the truth. It is possible to study how the faculties of intelligence in human beings are related in their development from the time when there were no potatoes to the time when they were introduced. And, as you know, the potato is made use of in alcohol-distilleries. So potatoes suddenly began to play an important part in the development of European humanity. If you compare the increasing use of the potato with the curve of the development of intelligence, you will find that in comparison with the present day people living in the pre-potato age grasped things with less detail, but what they grasped they held fast. Their nature tended to be conservative, it was deeply inward. After the introduction of the potato people became quicker in regard to intelligent mobility of comprehension, but what they took in was not retained, it did not sink in deeply. The history of the development of the intelligence runs parallel with that of potato-eating. So here again we have an example of how anthroposophy explains this materialistically. But so it is. And much might be learned about cultural history if people everywhere could only know how in man's subconsciousness the external physical seizes hold of the spiritual. This becomes apparent in the nature of his desires. Let us now choose as an example someone who has to write a great deal. Every day he has to write articles for the newspapers, so that he is obliged “to chew his pen” in order to produce what is necessary. If one has been through this oneself one can talk about it, but one has no right just to criticise others unless one speaks out of personal experience. While cogitating and biting one's pen one feels the need of coffee, for drinking coffee helps cohesion of thought. Thoughts become more logical when one drinks coffee than if one refrains from doing so. A journalist must needs enjoy coffee, for if he does not drink it his work takes more out of him. Now, as a contrast, let us take a diplomat. Call to mind what a diplomat had to acquire before the world war. He had to learn to use his legs in a special, approved manner; in the social circles in which he moved he had to learn to glide rather than set his foot down firmly as plainer folk do. He had also to be able to have thoughts which are somewhat fleeting and fluid. If a diplomat has a logical mind he will quite certainly fail in his profession and be unsuccessful in his efforts to help the nations solve their dilemmas. When diplomats are together—well, then one does not say they are having their coffee but they are having tea—for at such times there is the need to drink one cup of tea after another, so that the interchange of thought does not proceed in logical sequence, but springs as far as possible from one idea to the next. This is why diplomats love to drink tea; tea releases one thought from the next, it makes thinking fluid and fleeting, it destroys logic. So we may say: Writers are lovers of coffee, diplomats lovers of tea, in both cases out of a perfectly right instinct. If we know this, we shall not look upon it as an infringement of human freedom. For obviously logic is not a product of coffee, it is only an unconscious, subconscious help towards it. The soul therefore remains free. It is just when we are bearing the child especially in mind that it is necessary to look into relationships such as these, about which we get some idea when we can say: Tea is the drink for diplomats, coffee the drink for writers, and so on. Then we are also able gradually to gain an insight into the effects produced by the potato. The potato makes great demands on the digestion; moreover very small, almost homeopathic doses come from the digestive organs and rise up into the brain. This homeopathic dose is nevertheless very potent, it stimulates the forces of abstract intelligence. At this point I may perhaps be allowed to divulge something further. If we examine the substance of the potato through the microscope we obtain the well-known form of carbohydrates, and if we observe the astral body of someone who has eaten a large portion of potatoes we notice that in the region of the brain, about 3 centimetres behind the forehead, the potato substance begins to be active here also and to form the same eccentric circles. The movements of the astral body take on a similarity with the substance of the potato and the potato-eater becomes exceptionally intelligent. He bubbles over with intelligence, but this does not last, it is quite transient. Must one then not admit, provided one concedes that man possesses spirit and soul, that it is not altogether foolish and fantastic to speak of the spirit and to speak of it in images taken from the world of sense? Those who want always to speak of the spirit in abstract terms present us with nothing of a truly spiritual nature. It is otherwise with those who are able to bring the spirit down to earth in sense-perceptible pictures. Such a man can say that in the case of someone bubbling over with intelligence potato-substance takes on form in the brain, but does so in the spiritual sense. In this way we learn to recognise subtle and delicate differentiations and transitions. We discover that tea as regards its effects on logic makes a cleavage between thoughts, but it does not stimulate thinking. In saying that diplomats have a predilection for tea one does not imply that they can produce thoughts. On the other hand potatoes do stimulate thoughts. Swift as lightning they shoot thoughts upwards, only to let them vanish away again. But, accompanying this swift up-surging of thoughts, which can also take place in children, there goes a parallel process, an undermining of the digestive system. We shall be able to see in children whose digestive system is upset in this way, so that they complain of constipation, that all kinds of useless yet clever thoughts shoot up into their heads, thoughts which they certainly lose again but which nevertheless have been there. I mention these things in detail so that you may see how the soul-spiritual and the physical must be looked upon as a whole, as a unity, and how in the course of human development a state of things must again be brought about which is able to hold together the most varied streams of culture. At the present time we are living in an epoch in which they are completely sundered from one another. This becomes clear to us however when we are able to look somewhat more deeply into the history of the evolution of mankind. Today we separate religion, art and science from one another. And the guardians of religion, do all in their power to preserve religion from being encroached upon in any way by science. They maintain that religion is a matter of faith, and science belongs elsewhere. Science has its base where nothing is based on faith, where everything is founded on knowledge. But if one is to succeed in separating them in this way, the spiritual is cut off from science and the world is cut off from religion, with the result that religion becomes abstract and science devoid of spirit. Art is completely emancipated. In our time there are people, who, when one would like to tell them something about the super-sensible, assume an air of clever superiority and regard one as superstitious: “Poor fellow! We know all that is sheer nonsense!”—But then a Björnson or someone else writes something or other in which such things play a part; something of the kind is introduced into art and thereupon everybody runs after it and enjoys in art what was rejected in the form of knowledge. Superstition sometimes appears in strange guise. I once had an acquaintance—such actual examples should most certainly be brought into the art of education, an art which can only be learned from life—I once had an acquaintance who was a dramatist. On one occasion I met him in the street; he was running extraordinarily quickly, perspiring as he went. It was 3 minutes to 8 o'clock in the evening. I asked him where he was going at such a pace. He was, however, in a great hurry and only said that he must rush to catch the post, for the post office closed at 8 o'clock. I did not detain him, but psychologically I was interested to know the reason for his haste so I waited until he returned. He came back after a while in a great heat, and then he was more communicative. I wanted to know why he was in such a hurry to catch the post, and he said, “Oh, I have just sent off my play.” Previously he had always said that this play was not yet finished, and he said the same again now; “It is true that it is still unfinished, but I wanted particularly to get it off today, so that the director may receive it tomorrow. I have just written him a letter to this effect asking him to let me have it back. For you see, if a play is sent off before the end of the month it may be chosen for a performance; there is no chance otherwise!”—Now this dramatist was an extremely enlightened, intelligent man. Nevertheless he believed that if a play was despatched on a definite day it would be accepted, even if, owing to being unfinished, it had to be returned. From this incident you can see how things which people are apt to despise creep into some hole and corner, out of which they raise their heads at the very next opportunity. This is especially the case with a child. We believe we have managed to rid him of something, but straightaway there it is again somewhere else. We must learn to look out for this. We must open our hearts when making a study of man, so that a true art of education may be based on an understanding and knowledge of the human being. Only by going into details shall we be able to fathom all these things. Today then, as I was saying, religion, art and science are spoken about as though they were entirely unrelated. This was not so in long past ages of human evolution. Then they were a complete unity. At that time there existed Mystery Centres which were also centres for education and culture, centres dedicated at one and the same time to the cultivation of religion, art and science. For then what was imparted as knowledge consisted of pictures, representations and mental images of the spiritual world. These were received in such an intuitive and comprehensive way that they were transformed into external sense-perceptible symbols and thereby became the basis of cultic ceremonial. Science was embodied in such cults, as was art also; for what was taken from the sphere of knowledge and given external form must perforce be beautiful. Thus in those times a divine truth, a moral goodness and a sense-perceptible beauty existed in the Mystery Centres, as a unity comprised of religion, art and science. It was only later that this unity split up and became science, religion and art, each existing by and for itself. In our time this separation has reached its culminating point. Things which are essentially united have in the course of cultural development become divided. The nature of man is however such, that for him it is a necessity to experience the three in their “oneness” and not regard them as separate. He can only experience in unity religious science, scientific religion and artistic ideality, otherwise he is inwardly torn asunder. For this reason wherever this division, this differentiation, has reached its highest pitch it has become imperative to find once more the connection between these three spheres. And we shall see how in our teaching we can bring art, religion and science to the child in a unified form. We shall see how the child responds in a living way to this bringing together of religion, art and science, for it is in harmony with his own inner nature. I have therefore had again and again to point out in no uncertain terms that we must strive to educate the child out of a knowledge that he is in truth a being with aesthetic potentialities; and we should neglect no opportunity of demonstrating how in the very first years of life the child experiences religion naturally and instinctively. All these things, the harmonious coming together of religion, art and science must be grasped in the right way and their value recognised in those teaching methods about which we have still to speak. |
| 326. The Origins of Natural Science: Lecture IX
06 Jan 1923, Dornach Translated by Maria St. Goar, Norman MacBeth |
|---|
| Then we shall not establish a physicized or chemicized Anthroposophy, but a true anthroposophical chemistry, anthroposophical physics. Then we shall not establish a new medicine as a mere variation on the old, but a true anthroposophical medicine. |
| Then the methods gained from anthroposophy can be properly nurtured. This is also the main point of our medical therapy; namely, that the old, confused physiology finally be replaced with a real chemistry and psychology. |
| If one does not want to recognize this potential in anthroposophy, then one only wants something a bit out of the ordinary and is unwilling to get to work in earnest. |
| 326. The Origins of Natural Science: Lecture IX
06 Jan 1923, Dornach Translated by Maria St. Goar, Norman MacBeth |
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
It is in the nature of the case that the subject of a lecture course like this one is inexhaustible. Matters could be elaborated and looked at more thoroughly. But since, unfortunately, we must come to an end, we have to be content with given guidelines and indication. Today, therefore, I shall only supplement the scanty outlines and hints already discussed to that in a certain sense the picture will be rounded out. Proceeding once again from the being of man as viewed by spiritual science, we must say that we member man into physical body, etheric or formative forces body, astral body (which essentially represents the soul life) and ego. Let us be clear that properly speaking the physical body resides only in the small part of the human organization that we can describe as solid and sharply defined. On the other hand, all that pertains to liquid or fluid forms is taken hold of by the etheric body in such a way that it is in a constant process of blending, separating, combining, and dissolving. It is in perpetual flux. Then there are the gaseous, aeriform elements, such as are active in oxygen and other gases. In these, the astral body is at work. Finally, the ego organization is active in everything that has to do with warmth. What I have just outlined cannot, however, be reduced to a diagram. We must clearly understand, for instance, that because the formative forces body pulsates through all fluid and liquid elements of the body, it also sweeps along the solid substances. Everything in the human organization is in close interaction, in constant interplay. We must always be aware of that. But now let us also remember that this human organization has been experienced in different ways in the course of evolution. This was one of the main themes of these lectures. What is described today as the subject matter of external physics or mechanics, was originally attained through an inward experience of the physical body. Our present-day physics contains statements that originated because there once existed an internally experienced physics of the physical body. As I have explained a number of times, this inward physics was divorced from man and now continues to function merely as a science that observes outer nature. During the decline of the medieval alchemy the same thing happened with what lives inwardly in man by virtue of the etheric body. The work of this body in the fluids was once experienced, but now it is only dimly perceptible in the fantastic, alchemistic formulas that we find in ancient writings. Originally this was intelligent science, but inwardly experienced within the etheric. In a way, this is still in the process of being divorced from man, because as yet we really do not have a fully developed chemistry. We have many chemical processes in the world that we seek to understand, but only in a physical and mechanical way. In the beginning man experienced all this inwardly by means of his organization, but in the course of time he cast it all out of himself. In this process of casting out all our science developed, from astronomy to the meager beginnings of modern chemistry. On the other hand, thinking, feeling and willing, the subject matter of abstract psychology (which today is no longer considered real) was in former times actually not experienced inside man. Man felt himself at one with the external world outside his own being, when he experienced the soul life. Thus what was corporeal was once experienced inwardly, whereas the soul element was experienced by leaving one's being and communing with the outer world. Psychology was once the science of that aspect of the world that affects man in such a way that he appears to himself as a soul being. Physics and chemistry were cast out of man, whereas psychology and pneumatology (which I shall discuss directly) were stuffed into him and lost their reality. They turned into subjective perceptions with which nothing could be done. What was experienced together with the cosmos through the astral body (which leaves us in sleep) has become the subject of psychology. What man experienced as spirit in union with the universe was pneumatology. Today, as I have already pointed out, this has shrunk down to the idea of the ego or to a mere feeling. Therefore we now have as science of external nature what was once inner experience, while our science of man's inner nature is what was once external experience. Now we must call to mind what is needed, on the one hand for physics and chemistry, and on the other for psychology and pneumatology, in order to develop them further in a conscious way, since man today finds himself in the age of the development of the consciousness soul. Take physics, for example, which in recent times has become mostly abstract and mechanical. From all that I have said you will have seen that the scientific age has increasingly felt impelled to restrict itself to the externally observed mechanics of space. Long ago, man accompanied motion by means of inward experience and judged it according to what he felt within as movement. Observing a falling stone, he experienced its inner impulse of movement in his own inner human nature, in his physical body. This experience, after the great casting out, led to the measuring of the rate of fall per second. In our attitude toward nature, the idea prevails that what is observed is what is real. What can be observed in the outer world? It is motion, change of position.83 As a rule, we let velocity vanish neatly in a differential coefficient. But it is motion that we observe, and we express velocity as movement per second, hence by means of space. This means, however, that with our conscious experience, we are entirely outside the object. We are not involved in it in any way when we merely watch its motion, meaning its change of position in space. We can do that only if we find ways and means to inwardly take hold of the spatial, physical object by an extending of the same method with which we separated from it in the first place. Instead of the mere movement, the bare change of position, we have to view the velocity in the objects as their characteristic element. Then we can know what a particular object is like inwardly, because we find velocity also within ourselves when we look back upon ourselves. This is what is necessary. The trend of scientific development in regard to the outer physical world must be extended in the direction of proceeding from mere observation of motion to a feeling for the velocity possessed by a given object. We must advance from motion to velocity. That is how we enter into reality. Reality is not taken hold of if all we see is that a body changes its position in space. But if we know that the body possesses an inner velocity-impulse, then we have something that lies in the nature of the body. We assert nothing about a body if we merely indicate its change of position, but we do state something about it when we say that it contains within itself the impulse for its own velocity. This then is a property of it, something that belongs to its nature. You can understand this by a simple illustration. If you watch a moving person, you know nothing about him. But if you know that he has a strong urge to move quickly, you do know something about him. Likewise, you know something about him, when you know that he has a reason for moving slowly. We must be able to take hold of something that has significance within a given body. It matters little whether or not modern physics speaks, for example, of atoms; what matters is that when it does speak of them it regards them as velocity charges. That is what counts. Now the question is: how do we arrive at such a perception? We can discuss the best in the case of physics, since today's chemistry has advanced too little. We have to become clear about what we actually do when, in our thinking, we cast inwardly experienced mechanics and physics into external space. That is what we are doing when we say: The nature of what is out there in space is of no concern to me; I observe only what can be measured and expressed in mechanical formulas, and I leave aside everything that is not mechanical. Where does this lead us? It leads us to the same process in knowledge that a human being goes through when he dies. When he dies, life goes out of him, the dead organism remains. When I begin to think mechanistically, life goes out of my knowledge. I then have a science of dead matter. We must be absolutely clear that we are setting up a science of dead matter so long as the mechanical and physical aspect is the sole object of our study of nature. You must be aware that you are focusing on what is dead. You must be able to say to yourself: The great thing about science is that it has tacitly resolved that, unlike the ancient alchemists who still saw in outer nature a remnant of life, it will observe what is dead I minerals, plants, and animals. Science will study only what is dead in them, because it utilizes only ideas and concepts suitable for what is dead. Therefore, our physics is dead by its nature. Science will stand on a solid basis only when it fully realizes that its mode of thinking can take hold only of the dead. The same is true of chemistry, but I cannot go into that today because of the lack of time. When we look only at motion and lose sight of velocity, we are erecting a physics that is dead, the end-product of living things is then our concern, and the end-product is death. Hence, when we look at nature with the eyes of modern mechanics and physics, we must realize that we are looking at a corpse. Nature was not always like this. It was different at one time. If I look at a corpse, it would be foolish to believe that it was always in this condition. The fact that I realize that it is a corpse proves to me that once it was a living organism. The moment you realize that modern mechanics and physics lead you to view nature in this way, you will see that nature is now a corpse so far as physics is concerned. We are studying a corpse. Can we attain to something living, or at least an approach to it? The corpse is the final condition of something living. Where is the beginning condition? Well, my dear friends, there is no way to rediscover velocity by observing motion. You may stare at differential coefficients as long as you will but you will not find it. Instead, you must turn back to man. Whereas formerly he experienced himself from within, you must now study him from without through his physical organism, and you must understand that in man—and especially in his physical and etheric organizations—the beginning of a living condition must be sought. No satisfactory form of physics and chemistry will be attained save through a genuine science of man. But I expressly call attention to the fact that such a genuine anthropology will not be reached by approaching man with the methods of present-day physics and chemistry. That would only carry death back into man and make his body (his lower organization) even more dead than before. You must study what is living in man, and not revert to the method of physics and chemistry. What is needed are the methods that can be found through spiritual-scientific research. Briefly stated, spiritual-scientific research will meet the historic requirements of natural science. This historic requirement can be put in the following words: Science has reached the point of observing what is corpse-like in nature. Anthroposophical spiritual science must discover in addition to this the beginning of a living condition. This has been preserved in man. In former periods of evolution it was also externally perceptible. At one time, the processes of nature were totally different. Today, we walk around on the corpses of what existed in the beginning. But in the two lower bodies of man, the beginning condition has been preserved. There we can discover all that once existed, right back to the Saturn condition. An historical approach leads beyond the present state of science. It is quite clear why this is so. We are in the midst of a period of development. If, as is so frequently the case, we consider today's manner of thinking to be the most advanced and do not realize that the real course of events was very different, then we are looking at history the wrong way. As an example, a twenty-five year old person need not only be observed in the light of the twenty-five years that he has been alive,—one must also observe the element in him that makes it possible for him to live on. That is one point.
The other point is that our psychology has become very thin, while pneumatology has nearly reached the vanishing point. Again, we must know how far it has gone with these two sciences in the present age. If one speaks today of blue or red, of C-sharp or G, or of qualities of warmth, he will say that they are subjective sensations. That is the popular attitude; But what is a mere subjective sensation? It is a “phenomenon.” Just as we observe only motions in outer nature, we study only the phenomenon in psychology and pneumatology. And just as velocity is missing from motion in our external observation, the essential thing—the living essence—is missing from our observation of the inner soul life. Because we only study phenomena and no longer experience the living essence, we never get beyond mere semblance. The way thinking, feeling and willing are experienced today, they are mere semblance. Modern epistemologists have the man who wants to lift himself up by his own pigtail, or like the man in a railroad car who pushes against the wall without realizing that he cannot move the carriage in this way. This is how modern epistemologists look. They talk and talk, but there is no vitality in their talk because they are locked into the mere semblance. I have tried to put a certain end to this talk. The first time was in my Philosophy of Freedom,84 where I demonstrated how this semblance, inherent in pure thinking, becomes the impulse of freedom when inwardly grasped by man in thinking. If something other than semblance were contained in our subjective experience, we could never be free. But if this semblance can be raised to pure thinking, one can be free, because what is not real being cannot determine us, whereas real being would do so. This was my first effort. My second effort was at the Philosophical Congress in Bologna, when I analyzed the matter psychologically. I attempted to show that our sensations and thoughts are in fact outward experiences, rather than inward ones, and that this insight can be attained by careful observation. These indications will have to be understood. Then, we shall realize that we must rediscover being in semblance, just as we must rediscover velocity in movement. Then, we will understand what this inwardly experienced semblance really is. It will reveal itself as the initial state of being. Man experiences this semblance; experiences himself as semblance and as such lives his way into semblance and thus transforms it into the seed of future worlds. I have often pointed out that from our ethics, our morals, born of the physical world of semblance, future physical worlds will arise, just as from today's seed the plant will grow.85 We are dealing with the nascent state of being. In order to have a proper natural science, we must realize that psychology and pneumatology must understand what they observe as nascent states of being. Only then will they throw light on those matters that natural science wants to illuminate. But what is this “nascent” or “initial state?” Now this nascent state is in the outer world, not within. It is what I see when I behold the green tapestry of plants, the world of colors—red, green and blue—and the sounds that are out there. What are these fleeting formations that modern-day physics, physiology and psychology regard only as subjective? They are the elements from which the worlds of the future create themselves. Red is not engendered by matter in the eye or the brain, red is the first, semblance-like, seed of future worlds. If you know this, you will also want to know something about what will correspond in these future worlds to the corpse-like element. It will not be what we found earlier in our physics and chemistry, it will be the corpse of the future. We shall recognize what will be the corpse of the future, the future element of death, if we discover it already today in the higher organization of man, where astral body and ego are active. By experiencing the final condition there in reference to the initial one, we at last gain a proper comprehension of the nervous system and the brain insofar as they are dead, not alive. In a certain sense, they can be more dead than a corpse, inasmuch as they transcend the absolute point of death—especially in the case of the nervous system—and become “more dead than dead.” But this very fact makes the nervous system and the brain bearers of the so-called spiritual element—because the dead element dwells in them, the final state not yet even reached by outer nature—because they even surpass this final state. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] In order to find psychology and pneumatology in the outer world, we shall have to discover how the inanimate, the dead, dwells in the human organism; namely, in the head organization and in part of the rhythmic organization, mainly that of breathing. We must look at our head and say of it that it is constantly dying. If it were alive, the growing, sprouting living matter could not think. But because it gives up life and constantly dies, the soul-spiritual thoughts, endowed with being, have the opportunity to spread out over what is dead as new living, radiant semblance. You see, here lie the great tasks that, by means of the historical manner of observation result quite simply from natural science. If we don't take hold of them, we move like ghosts through the present development of science, and not with the consciousness that an epoch that has begun must find a way to continue. You can imagine that much of this is contained implicitly in what science has discovered. Scientific literature offers such indications everywhere. But people cannot yet distinguish clearly; they like what is chaotic. They don't care clearly to contemplate physics and chemistry on one hand, and psychology and pneumatology on the other, because then they would have to consider seriously the inner and outer aspects. They prefer to vacillate in the murky waters between physics and chemistry. Due to this, a bastard science has arisen that has become the darling of natural research and even philosophy; namely, physiology. As soon as the real facts are discovered, physiology will fall apart into psychology on the one hand—a psychology that is also a perception of the world—and on the other, into chemistry, meaning a chemistry that is also a knowledge of man. When these two are attained, this in-between science, physiology, will vanish. Because today you have a morass in which you can find everything, and because by juggling a bit to the left or the right, it is possible to find a bit of a soul or a corporeal element, people do quite well. The physiology of today is what above all must disappear as the last remnant of former conceptions that have become muddled. The reason physiological concepts are so abstruse is that they contain soul and corporeal elements that are no longer distinguished, thus they can play around with words and even juggle the facts. One who aims for clear insight must realize that physiology amounts in the end to fibbing with words and facts. Until we admit this, we can't take the history of natural science seriously. Science does not proceed only from undetermined past ages to our time, it continues on from the present. History can only be understood, if one comprehends the further course of things, not in a superstitious, prophetic sense but by beginning now to do the right thing. And infinitely much needs to be set right, particularly in the domain of science. Natural science has grown tall; it is like a nice teenager, who at the moment is going through his years of unpolished adolescence, and whose guidance must be continued so that he will become mature. Science will mature, if murky areas like physiology disappear, and physics and pneumatology arise again in the way outlined above. They will come into being, if the anthroposophical way of thinking is applied in earnest to science. This will be the case, when people feel that they are learning something, when somebody speaks to them of a real physics, a real chemistry, a real psychology and pneumatology; when they no longer have the urge to comprehend everything concerning the world and the human being through bastardized chaotic sciences like physiology. Then, the development of human knowledge will once again stand on a sound basis. Naturally, therapy is particularly affected and suffers under present-day physiology. You can well imagine this, because it works with all manner of things that elude one's grasp, when one begins to think clearly. We cannot confront the great challenges of our time with a few anthroposophical catchwords and phrases. It also does not suffice to dabble with physiology on the borderline between psychology and chemistry. The only way to proceed is to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific anthroposophy to physics and chemistry. If you are lazy—forgive me for this harsh expression, I don't mean it in such a radical sense in this case—you say: These matters can only be correctly judged, if one is clairvoyant. Therefore I will wait until I am clairvoyant. I won't venture to criticize physics and chemistry or even physiology. My dear friends, you need not have insights that surpass ordinary perception in order to know that a corpse is dead and that it must have originated in life. Neither do you need to be clairvoyant in order to analyze properly the true facts of today's physics and chemistry, and to refer them back to their underlying living element, once your attention is directed to the fact that this living element is to be found by studying the “lower man.” There you will have the supplement you need for chemistry and physics. Make the attempt, for once, really to study the mechanism of human movement.86 Instead of constantly drawing axis of coordinates and putting the movements into them apart from man; instead of multiplying differential coefficients and integrals, make a serious attempt to study the mechanics of movement in man. As they were once experienced from within, so do you now study them from without. Then you will have what you need, to add to your outer observation of nature, in physics and chemistry. In outer nature, those who proclaim atomism will always put you in the wrong. They even work themselves up to the very spiritual statement that when one speaks about matter in the sense of a modern physicist, matter is no longer material. The physicists, themselves are saying it;87 our very opponents are saying it. In this case they are right, and if we in our replies to them stop short at the half-truths—that is to say, at the final conditions of being—we shall never be equal to that which issues from them. Here lie the tasks of the specialists, here lie the tasks of those who have the requisite preliminary training, in one or another branch of science. Then we shall not establish a physicized or chemicized Anthroposophy, but a true anthroposophical chemistry, anthroposophical physics. Then we shall not establish a new medicine as a mere variation on the old, but a true anthroposophical medicine. The tasks are at hand. They are outlined in all directions. Just as the simple heart can receive the observations that are scattered everywhere in our lectures or lecture cycles, and that give spiritual sustenance, so too the need is to take up on every hand the hints that can lead us to the much-needed progress in the several domains of science. In the future, it will not suffice if man and nature do not again become one. What physics and chemistry study in nature as the final state of being, must be supplemented by the state of being in “lower man” belonging to the realm of physics and chemistry—in man who is dependent on the physical and etheric bodies. It is important that this be sought. It is not important to single out as essential the valences of the structural formulas or the periodic law in chemistry, because these are but schemata. While they are quite useful as tools for counting and calculations, what matters is the following realization. If the chemical processes are externally observed, the chemical laws are not within them. They are contained in the origin of chemical processes. Hence, they are found only, if, with diligent effort, one tries to seek in the human being for the processes that occur in his circulation, in the activity of his fluids, through the actions of the etheric body. The explanation of the chemical processes in nature lies in the processes of the etheric body. These in turn are represented in the play of fluids in the human organism and are accessible to precise study. Anthroposophy poses a serious challenge in this direction. This is why we have founded research institutes88 in which serious, intensive work must begin. Then the methods gained from anthroposophy can be properly nurtured. This is also the main point of our medical therapy; namely, that the old, confused physiology finally be replaced with a real chemistry and psychology. Without this one can never assert anything about the processes of illness and healing in human nature, because every course of illness is simply an abnormal psychological process, and each healing process is an abnormal chemical process. Only to the extent that we know how to influence the chemical process of healing and how to grasp the psychological course of illness will we attain to genuine pathology and therapy. This will emerge from the anthroposophical manner of observation. If one does not want to recognize this potential in anthroposophy, then one only wants something a bit out of the ordinary and is unwilling to get to work in earnest. Actually, everything that I have sketched here is only a description of how the work should proceed, because a genuine psychology and chemistry come into being through work. All the prerequisites for this work already exist, because very man facts can be found in scientific literature that researchers have accidentally discovered but don't understand. Those of us who work in the spirit of anthroposophy should take up these facts and contribute something to their full comprehension. Take as an example what I emphasized yesterday89 in speaking to a smaller group of people. The essential point about the spleen is that it is really an excretory organ. The spleen itself is in turn an excretion of the functions in the etheric body. Countless facts are available in medical literature that need only be utilize—and that is the point: they should be utilized—then the facts will be brought together and what is needed will result. A single person might accomplish this if a human life spanned six hundred years. But by that time, other tasks would confront him and his accomplishments would long since be outmoded. These things must be attained through cooperation, through people working together. So this is the second task—we must see to it that this becomes possible. I believe that these tasks of the Anthroposophical Society will emerge most clearly and urgently from a truly realistic study of the history of natural science in recent times. This history shows us at every turn that something great and wonderful has arisen through modern science. In earlier times, the truly inanimate dead aspects could never be discerned, hence, nothing could be made of them. In those times inward semblance could never really be observed; therefore, it couldn't be brought to life by human effort, and hence, one couldn't arrive at freedom. Today, we confront a grandiose world, which became possible only because natural science studies the dead aspects. This is the world of technology. Its special character can be discerned from the fact that the word “technique” is taken from the Greek. There, it still signifies “art,” implying that art reveals, where technology still contains spirit. Today, technology only utilizes spirit in the sense of the abstract, spirit-devoid thoughts. Technology could be achieved only by attaining a proper knowledge of what is dead. Once in the course of humanity's evolution it was necessary to concentrate upon the dead; it thus entered into the realm of technology. Today, man stands in the midst of this realm of technology that surrounds him on all sides. He looks out on it and realizes that here at last is a sphere in which there is no spirit in the proper sense. In regard to the spiritual element, it is important that in all areas of technology human beings experience this inner feeling, almost akin to one of pain over the death of a person. If feeling and sensation can be developed in knowledge, then such a feeling will arise, somewhat like the sensation one experiences when a person is dying and one sees the living organism turn into a corpse. Alongside the abstract indifferent cold knowledge, such a feeling will arise through the true realization that technology is the processing of the inanimate, the dead. This feeling will become the most powerful impetus to seek the spirit in new directions. I could well imagine the following view of the future: Man looks out over the chimneys, the factories, the telephones—everything that technology has produced in wondrous ways in the most recent times. He stands atop this purely mechanical world, the grave of all things spiritual, and he calls out longingly into the universe—and his yearning will be fulfilled. Just as the dead stone yields the living fiery spark if handled correctly, so from our dead technology will emerge the living spirit, if human beings have the right feelings about what technology is. On the other hand, one need only understand clearly what pure thinking is; namely the semblance from which can be brought forth the most powerful moral impulses—those individual moral impulses that I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom. Then, in a new way, man will face the feeling that was once confronted by Nicholas Cusanus and Meister Eckhart. They said: When I life myself beyond everything that I am ordinarily accustomed to observe, I come to “nothingness” with all that I have learned. But in this “nothingness” there arises for me the “I.” If man really penetrates to pure thinking, then he finds in it the nothingness that turns into the I and from which emerges the whole wealth of ethical actions, that will create new worlds. I can imagine a person who first lets all knowledge of the preset, as inaugurated by natural science, impress itself on him and then (centuries after Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus) turns his gaze inward and with today's mode of thinking arrives at the nothingness of his inner life. In it, he discovers that the spirit really speaks to him. I can imagine that these two images merge. On the one hand, man goes to the place where barren technology has left the spirit behind. There he calls out into cosmic expanses for the spirit. On the other hand, he stops, thinks and looks within himself. And here, out of his inner being, he receives the divine answer to the call he sent out into the distances of the universe. When we learn, through a new, anthroposophically imbued natural science, to let the calls of infinite longing for the spirit, sent out into the world, resound in our inner being, then this will be the right starting point. Here, through an “anthroposophized” inner perception, we will find the answer to the yearning call for the spirit, desperately sounded out into the universe. I did not want to describe the development of natural science in recent times in a merely documentary fashion. Rather, I wanted to show you the standpoint of a human being, who comprehends this natural-scientific development and, in a difficult moment of humanity's evolution, knows the right things to say to himself in regard to the progress of mankind.
|