| 273. The Problem of Faust: The Problem of Faust
30 Sep 1916, Dornach Tr. George Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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| We see how Faust accompanied by his famulus, Wagner, goes out from his cell into the green world where, to begin with, he watches the country people celebrating the Easter Festival out-of-doors in the meadows, until he himself is affected by the Easter mood. |
| 273. The Problem of Faust: The Problem of Faust
30 Sep 1916, Dornach Tr. George Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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My dear friends, Today I should like to link on what I am about to say to the laboratory scene in Goethe's Faust just represented, and to connect it in such a way that it may form a unity, as well as a starting point for more thorough deliberations tomorrow. We have seen that the transition from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the sixteenth and seventeenth forms a remarkably significant and suggestive incision into the whole course of human evolution—a transition from the Greco-Latin age to our fifth post-Atlantean epoch in which we are now living, out of which flow the impulses for all our knowledge and all our action, and which will last until the third millennium. Now, from all that you know of Goethe's Faust, and of the connection between this Faust and the figure of Faust originating in the legend of the sixteenth century, you will see that not only this sixteenth century Faust but also what Goethe has made of him is most closely connected with all the transitional impulses introduced by the new age, both from a spiritual and from an external, material point of view. Now for Goethe the problem of the rise of this new age and the further working of its impulses was something very powerful, and during the sixty years in which he was creating his “Faust” he was wholly inspired by the question: What are the most important tasks and the most important trends of thought of the new man? Goethe could actually look back into the previous age, the age that came to an end with the fourteenth, fifteenth centuries, of which now so little is known even to science. As I have often said, what history tells of man's mood of soul, of his capacities and needs in former centuries, is indeed nothing but colourless theory. In the souls of men in the earlier centuries, even as in the centuries immediately preceding the age of Faust, things looked completely different from how they appear to the soul modern man, to human souls in the present epoch. And in his Faust Goethe has created a figure, a personality, who looks back in the right way on man's mood of soul in former centuries, in centuries long past, while at the same time he looks forward to the tasks of the present and those of the future. But although at first Faust looks back to an era preceding his own, he can actually only see the ruins of a culture, a spiritual culture that has come to an end. He can look back only on ruins. To begin with we must always keep in mind the Faust of the sixteenth century, the historical Faust who actually lived and then passed into folklore. This Faust still lived in the old sciences that he had made his own, lived in magic, in alchemy, and mysticism, all of which was the wisdom of former centuries, and also the wisdom in particular of pre-Christian times. In the age, however, in which lived the historic Faust of the sixteenth century, this wisdom was definitely on the decline. What was accepted as alchemy, as magic, as mysticism, by those among whom Faust lived, was already in a state of confusion. It all originated in tradition, the legacy of older ages, but it was no longer possible to find one's bearings in it. The wisdom contained there was no longer recognisable. There were,all kinds of sound formulas here from past ages, and much real insight, but these could hardly be understood. Thus the historical Faust was placed into an age of decaying spiritual life. And Goethe constantly mingled the experiences of the historical Faust with those of the Faust he was creating, the Faust of the eighteenth century, of the nineteenth and indeed of many centuries to come. Hence we see Goethe's Faust looking back to the ancient magic, to an older type of wisdom, mysticism, that did not deal with chemistry in the modern, materialistic way, hoping to make contact with a spiritual world through its dealings with nature but no longer having the knowledge enabling it to do so in the way that was right for an earlier age. The art of healing, as it was looked upon in centuries long past, was by no means so foolish as modern science sometimes makes it out to be, but the real wisdom contained in it has been lost. It was already to a great part lost in Faust's time and Goethe knew this well. He knew it not only with his intellect but with his heart, with those soul forces that have specially to do with the well-being, the soundness, of man. He wanted to find an answer to the questions, the problems, arising from it; he wanted to know how a man, continually advancing, could arrive at a different kind of wisdom with regard to the spiritual world, a wisdom adapted to the new age, as the ancients had been able to attain their kind of wisdom which in the natural course of human affairs had now to die out. For this reason he makes his Faust a magician. Faust has given himself up to magic like the Faust of the sixteenth century. But he is still unsatisfied for the simple reason that the real wisdom of the old magic had already faded away. It was from this wisdom that the old art of healing sprang; all dispensing, the whole science of medicine, was connected with the ancient chemistry, with alchemy. Now in touching on such a question we come at the same time to one of the deepest secrets of humanity—these secrets going to show that no one can heal diseases without also being able to produce them. The ways leading to the healing of disease are the same as those leading to its production. We shall shortly hear how completely in the ancient wisdom the principle prevailed that he who healed diseases was likewise able to produce them. Thus, in olden days, the art of healing was associated in men's s minds with a profoundly moral conception of the world. And we shall also shortly see how little what is called the new freedom in human evolution would have been able to develop in those days. Actually this freedom was not taken hold of until this fifth epoch of ours, the epoch following the Greco-Roman. We shall see what it would have been like if the ancient wisdom had persisted. But in every sphere this wisdom had to disappear so that man might make, as it were, a fresh start, striving towards freedom in both knowledge and action. This he could not have done under the influence of the old wisdom. In such times of transition as those in which Faust lived the old is passing away, the new has not yet come. Then arise such moods as may be seen in Faust in the scene preceding the one produced today. Here we see clearly that Faust both is and feels himself to be a product of the new age, in which the ancient wisdom still existed though it was no longer fully understood. We see how Faust accompanied by his famulus, Wagner, goes out from his cell into the green world where, to begin with, he watches the country people celebrating the Easter Festival out-of-doors in the meadows, until he himself is affected by the Easter mood. We see at once, however, that he refuses the people's homage. An old peasant comes forward to express this homage, for the folk think that Faust, as son of a former adept in the art of healing, must be distinguished in the same way, and be able to bring them health and blessing:
Thus speaks the old peasant, remembering Faust's connection with the ancient art of healing, not only the healing of physical diseases in the people but also the healing of their moral evil. Faust knows that he no longer lives in an age when the ancient wisdom could be really helpful to humanity, for it is already in decline. Humility begins to glimmer in his soul, and at the same time despondency over the falsity he is opposing. He says:
After the manner of those days Goethe had thoroughly studied how the “red lion” (mercury-oxide, sulphurated mercury) used to be dealt with, how the different chemicals had been combined, what the results of these processes were, and how medicines had been manufactured from them. But all that no longer represented the ancient wisdom. Goethe also knew their mode of expression; what was to be shown was put into pictures; the fusion of substances was represented as a marriage. Hence he says:
This was a technical expression; just as modern chemistry has its technical terms so in those days, when certain substances had reached a definite condition and colour, the result was called the young Queen. “Here was the medicine, but the patients died”; they died in the days of Faust as they still die today in spite of many medicines.
This is Faust's sell-knowledge. This is how ho sees himself, he of whom you know that he has studied the ancient magic wisdom in order to penetrate into the secrets of nature. And through all that he has become spiritualised. Faust cannot remain satisfied like Wagner his famulus. Wagner contents himself with the new wisdom, relying on manuscripts, on the written word. This Wagner is a man who makes far fewer claims on wisdom and on life. And while Faust tries to dream himself into nature in order to reach her spirit, Wagner thinks only of the spirit that comes to him from theories, from parchments, from books, and calls the mood that has come over Faust a passing whimsy:
He never wants to fly out on the wings of a bird to gain knowledge of the world!
A thorough bookworm, a theory-monger! And so the two stand there after the country folk have gone—Faust, who wishes to penetrate to the sources of life, to unite his own being with the hidden forces of nature in order to experience them, and the other, who sees nothing but the external, material life, and just what is recorded in books by material means. It does not need much reflection to see what has taken place in Faust's inner being as the result of all the experiences which, as described by Goethe, he has passed through up to this moment. When we consider all that we meet with in Faust, we can be sure of this, however, that his inner being has been completely revolutionised, a real soul-development has taken place in him and he has acquired a certain spiritual vision. Otherwise he would not have been able to call up the Earth-spirit who storms hither and thither in the tumult of action. Faust has made his own a certain capacity not only to look at the external phenomena of the outside world, but to see the spirit living and weaving in all things. Then from the distance a poodle comes leaping towards Faust and Wagner. The way the two see the poodle—an ordinary poodle—the way Faust sees and the way Wagner sees it, absolutely characterises the two men, After Faust has dreamed himself into the living and weaving of the spirit in nature, he notices the poodle:
Not only does Faust see the poodle but something stirs within him; he sees something that belongs to the poodle appearing as if spiritual. This Faust sees. It goes without saying that Wagner cannot de so; what Faust sees cannot be seen by the external eye.
In this simple phenomenon Faust sees also something spiritual.Let us keep this firmly in mind. Inwardly struck by a certain spiritual connection between himself and the poodle, he now goes into his Laboratory. Naturally the poodle is there dramatically represented by Goethe as a poodle, and so it must be; but fundamentally we are concerned with what is being inwardly experienced by Faust. And in Goethe's every word he shows us in a most masterly fashion how in this scene Faust is passing through an inner experience. He and Wagner have stayed out of doors till late in the evening, till outwardly the light has gone, the dusk has fallen. And into the twilight Faust has projected the picture of what he spiritually wishes to see. He now returns home to his cell and is alone. When alone, such a man as Faust, having been through all this, is in a position to experience self-knowledge, that is, the life of the spirit in his own ego. He speaks as though his inmost soul were stirred, but stirred in a spiritual way:
The poodle growls. But let us be quite clear that those are spiritual experiences; even the growling of the poodle is a spiritual experience, although dramatically it is represented as external. Faust has associated himself with decadent magic; he has associated himself with Mephistopheles, and Mephistopheles is not a spirit who can lead him to progressive spiritual forces. Mephistopheles is the spirit whom Faust has to overcome, and he is associated with him just in order that he may overcome him, having been given him not for instruction but as a test. That is to say, we now see Faust standing between the divine, spiritual world that bears forward the evolution of the universe, on the one hand, and on the other the forces stirring in his soul which drag him down into the life of the ordinary instincts, and these divert a man from spiritual endeavor. Directly anything holy stirs in his soul, it is ridiculed, the opposing impulses ridicule it. This is wonderfully presented now in the form of external events—Faust striving with all his knowledge towards the divine spiritual, and his instincts growling, as the materialist's mind growls, at spiritual endeavor. When Faust says: “Be quiet poodle,” he is really saying this to himself. And now Faust speaks—or rather, Goethe makes Faust speak—in a wonderful way. It is only when we study it word by word that we realise how wonderfully Goethe knows the inner life of man in spiritual evolution:
This is self-knowledge; seeking the spirit within itself.
A significant line, for whoever goes through the spiritual development Faust passes through during his life, knows that reason is not merely something dead within man, not only the reasoning of the head, but he realises how reason can become living—the weaving of an inner spirit that actually speaks. That is no mere poetical image:
Reason again begins to speak of the past, of what is left alive out of the past. “Hope, blooms again that seemed dead,” that means that we find our will transformed, so that we know that we shall pass through the gates of death as spiritually living beings. Future and past are dove-tailed together in a wonderful way. Goethe now makes Faust say that through self-knowledge he can find the inner life of the spirit.
And now Faust seeks to come nearer that towards which he is being pressed—nearer life's fountain-head. To begin with he seeks the path of religious exaltation; he picks up the New Testament. And the way in which he does so is a wonderful example of the wisdom in Goethe's drama. He picks out what contains the deepest wisdom of the new age—the John Gospel. He wants to translate this into his beloved German; and it is significant that Goethe should have chosen this particular moment. Those who know the workings of the deeply cosmic and spiritual beings realise that when wisdom is being put from one language into another, all the spirits of confusion make their appearance, all the bewildering spirits intervene. It is especially in the frontier regions of life that the powers opposed to human evolution and human well-being find expression. Goethe purposely chooses translation, to set the spirit of perversity, the spirit of lying (still inside the poodle) over against the spirits of truth. If we look closely at the feelings and emotions to which such a scene may give rise, the wonderful spiritual depths concealed in it become evident. All the temptations I have characterised as coming from what is inherent in the poodle, the temptation to distort truth by untruth, these go on working, and now they influence an action of Faust's which gives ample opportunity for such distortion, Yet, how little it has been noticed that this is what Goethe meant is still today made evident by the various interpreters of “Faust”; for what do these interpreters actually say about this scene? Well, you can read it; they say: “Goethe is indeed a man of external life, for whom the Word is not enough; he has to improve upon John's Gospel; he has to find a better translation—not: In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, but: In the beginning was the deed. That is what Faust after long hesitation decides on. This is a piece of Goethe's deep wisdom!” But this wisdom is not Faust wisdom, it is pure Wagner wisdom, genuine Wagner wisdom! Just like that wisdom quoted over and over again when, later, Faust speaks such beautiful words to Gretchen about the religious life:
And so on. What Faust says to Gretchen then is quoted repeatedly and represented as deep wisdom by the learned gentlemen who quote it:
These words of Faust's are often represented as deep wisdom! Now if Goethe had meant it to be accepted as such deep wisdom, he would not have put the speech into the mouth of Faust when he was trying to instruct the sixteen-year-old Gretchen. It is Gretchen-wisdom! We must take things seriously. The pundits are under a misapprehension and have mistaken this Gretchen-wisdom for deep philosophy. Faust's suggestion for the translation of the Bible is also taken for especially profound wisdom, whereas Goethe simply means to represent how men bandy about truth and error when they undertake much a task. Goethe has represented the two souls of Faust very profoundly indeed, here in this scene of the translation of the Bible. “It is written: In the beginning was the Word.” We know that this is the Greek Logos. That actually stands in the John Gospel. In opposition to it there rises up in Faust what is symbolised by the poodle and it is this that prevents him from reaching the inner meaning of the Gospel. Why does the writer of the John Gospel choose precisely the Word, the Logos? It is because he wishes to emphasise that the most important thing in the evolution of man on earth, what really makes him externally man in this Earth-evolution, has not evolved gradually but was there in the primal beginning. What is it that distinguishes man from all other beings? The fact that he can speak, whereas no other being, animal, vegetable or mineral, can do so. The materialist thinks that the Word, Speech, the Logos, through which thought vibrates, was required by man only after he had passed through animal evolution. The Gospel of John takes the matter more deeply and says: No, in the primal beginning was the Word. That is to say, man's evolution was planned from the beginning; he is not in the materialistic Darwinian sense, simply the highest peak of the animal world; in the very first design of Earth-evolution, in its primal origin, in the beginning, was the Word. And man can develop on Earth a ego, to which animals do not attain, only by reason of the Word being interwoven with human evolution. The Word stands for the Ego in man. But against this truth the spirit of falsehood which has entered Faust rebels; he must go deeper to understand the profound wisdom of John's words,
But actually it is the poodle, the dog in him and what dwells in the dog, that is holding him up. He can get no higher; on the contrary he sinks much lower.
Seeing Mephistopheles coming to him he thinks that he is being “enlightened by the Spirit,” whereas in reality he is beclouded by the Spirit of darkness, and sinking lower. “ ’Tis written: In the beginning was the Thought.” What is not higher than the Word. Sense, as we can easily prove, plays its part in the life of animals also, but the animal does not attain to the human Word. Man is capable of sense, thinking, because he has an astral body. Faust descends from the Ego to the astral body more deeply into himself.
He thinks he is rising higher but he is sinking lower.
No, he is descending lower still, from the astral body to the dense, more material etheric body; and he writes:
(Force is what dwells in the etheric body.)
(The spirit dwelling in the poodle. )
And now he has arrived at complete materialism; now he has reached the physical body through which the external deed is performed.
Thus you have Faust living and weaving in self-knowledge. He translates the Bible wrongly because the several members of man's being of which we have so often spoken—the ego, the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body are working together in him, through Mephistopheles' spirit, in a chaotic way. And now we see how these impulses prevail, for the external barking of the dog is what stirs him up against the truth. In all his knowledge he cannot yet recognise the wisdom of Christianity. This is shown the way he connects Word, Thought, Force, Deed. But the impulse, the urge, towards Christianity is already alive in him, and by making use of the living force of what dwells there as the Christ, he overcomes the opposing spirit. He first tries to do this with what he has received from ancient magic. But the spirit does not yield, does not show himself in his true form. He then calls up the four elements and their spirits—the salamanders, sylphs, undines and gnomes, but nothing of all this affects the spirit in the poodle. But when he calls upon the figure of Christ, “the shamefully Immolated, by Whom all heaven is permeated” then the poodle has to show its true shape. All this is fundamentally self-knowledge, a self-knowledge that Goethe makes quite clear. And what appears now? A travelling scholar! Faust is genuinely practising self-knowledge, he stands actually facing himself. Now for the first time the wild impulses in poodle-form, which have been resisting the truth, are working, and now he sees himself with a clearness that is still not clear! The travelling student stands before him but this is only Faust's other self, for he has not become much more than a travelling student with all a student's errors. Only now that he has learnt through his bond with the spiritual world to recognise the impulses more accurately,the travelling scholar—his own ego as up to now, he has developed it—confronts him as something more definite and solid. Faust has learnt like a scholar; he has given himself up to magic and through magic scholastic wisdom has been bedevilled. What has developed out of the old, good Faust, the old travelling student, is merely the result of his having added ancient magic to his learning. The travelling scholar is still present in him and meets him under a changed form; it is only his other self. This travelling student is himself. The struggle to be free of all that confronts him as his other self, is shown in the ensuing scene. Indeed, in the different characters whom Faust meets, Goethe is always trying to show Faust's other ego, so that he may come to know himself better and better. Many of the audience may remember how in earlier lectures I explained that even Wagner was to be found in Faust himself, that Wagner was just another ego of Faust's. Mephistopheles, also, is only another ego. It is all self-knowledge; self-knowledge is practised for knowledge of the universe. But, for Faust, none of this is yet clear spiritual knowledge; it is all wrapt in a vague, dull spirit seership, impaired by the old, atavistic clairvoyance. There is nothing clear about it. It is not knowledge full of light, but the knowledge of dreams. This is represented by the dream-spirits fluttering around Faust—really the group-souls of all the beings that accompany Mephistopheles—and represented also by his final waking. Then Goethe says, or makes Faust say, clearly and unmistakably:
Goethe employs the method of directing attention over and over again to the truth. That he is representing a spiritual experience in Faust, is clearly enough expressed in the above four lines. This scene shows us too how Goethe was striving for knowledge of the transition from the old era to the new in which he himself lived, that is, from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch to the fifth. The boundary line is in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries. As I have said before, whoever thinks as men think today can hardly picture—unless he makes a special study of it—the soul-development of past centuries. In the days of Faust only the ruins of it remained. How often we experience today that men are not trying to come to the new spiritual research for which we are striving; they are trying to renew the old wisdom. Many indeed think that by renewing what was possessed by the people of old they will be able to find a deeper, magical and mystical wisdom about nature. There are two errors closely connected with all human spiritual striving. The first is that men buy ancient books and studying them come to prize them more highly than the newer science. They generally prize them more highly simply because they do not understand them, the language in which they are written being actually no longer comprehensible. Thus, the content of old books that has become double-Dutch being often put forward when spiritual research is under discussion is the one mischievous thing. The other is that whenever possible old names are given to new endeavours in order to justify them. Look at many of the societies calling themselves occult, or secret, or something of the kind; their whole endeavour is to give themselves an early origin, to talk as much as possible about a legendary past, and they delight in the use of old names. That is the second mischievous error. We do not have to do all this if we really see into the needs and impulses of our own age and of the inevitable future. If we pick up any book where traditions still existed, we can see from the way they were presented that, through the legacy of the past, the memory of an ancient wisdom formerly possessed by man, was still there, this wisdom had fallen into decay. Its modes of expression, however, continued for a considerable time. I have at my disposal a book printed in the year 1740, that is, in the eighteenth century, from which I should like to read you a short passage, and we may be sure that many seeking spiritual knowledge today, coming upon such a passage will say: What depths of wisdom we have here! Indeed, there are many who believe they understand a quotation of this kind. Let me read you the one I am referring to:
This is the way chemical processes were described in olden days, the way to which Faust alludes when he talks of how Red Lion is married to the Lily in the glass. We should not make fun of such things for the simple reason that the way we speak of chemistry today will sound to those who come later just as this sounds to us. But we must be quite clear that this particular passage belongs to a late period of decline. Allusion is made to a “Grey Wolf.” Now this “Grey Wolf” stands for a certain metal found everywhere in the mountains, that is then subjected to a certain process. “King” is a name given to a condition of substances; and the whole paragraph describes a chemical process. The grey metal was collected and treated in a certain way; then this was called the “Greedy Grey Wolf”, and the other the “Golden King”, after the gold had gone through a process. Then an alliance was made and this is described: “And when he had devoured the King. ...” It comes about, therefore, that the Greedy Grey Wolf, the grey metal found in the mountains, is amalgamated with the Golden King, a certain condition of gold after it has been treated chemically. He represents it as follows:
—thus the Wolf who has eaten up the Golden King is thrown into the fire.
The gold once more makes its appearance.
In this way then he makes something. To explain what he makes, we should have to describe these processes in greater detail, especially how the Golden King is made; but that is not told us here. Today these processes are no longer used. But for what does the man hope? He hopes for what is not entirely without reason for he has already made something. For what purpose exactly has he made it? The man who had this printed will certainly not have done anything more than copy it from some old book. But for what purpose was it done at the time when such things were understood? That you may gather from the following:
Thus he praises what he has been the cause of producing. He has invented a kind of medicine.
(This describes the properties of what he has in the retort.)
This, you see, indicates that we are concerned with a medicine, but it is also sufficiently indicated that this also has to do with man's moral character. For naturally if a healthy man takes it in the right quantity then what is here described will make its appearance. This is what he means, and this is how it was with the men of olden days who understood something of these matters.
Thus, by means of the art he describes here, he strives to discover a tincture that can arouse an actual stirring of life in man.
I have read this aloud chiefly to show how in these ruins of an ancient wisdom one may find the remains of what was striven for olden times. By external means taken from nature men strove to stimulate the body, that is, to acquire certain faculties, not only through inner moral endeavour, but through the medium of nature herself, applied by man. Keep this in mind for a moment, for from it we shall be led to something of importance which distinguishes our epoch from earlier epochs. Today it is quite the thing to make fan of the ancient superstitions, for then one is accepted in the world as a clever man, whereas this does not happen should one see any sense in the old knowledge. And all this is lost, and had to be lost, for reasons affecting mankind; for spirit-freedom could never have been attained through what was thus striven for in ancient days. Now you know that in books of an even earlier date than this antiquated volume—that indeed belongs to a very late period of decline—you find Sun and Gold indicated by the same sign ⊙; and Moon and Silver by the sign ☾. To the modern man the application of the one sign used for Sun and Gold, and the other used for Moon and Silver, two faculties of the soul he necessarily has himself, is naturally sheer nonsense. And it is sheer nonsense as we find it in the literature that often calls itself “esoteric”. For the most part the writers of such books have no means of knowing why in the olden days Sun and Gold, Moon and Silver, were characterized by the same signs. Let us start from Moon and Silver with the sign ☾. Now if we go further back in time, say a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, before the Christian reckoning of time, men did not only possess the faculties later in ruins; at the time when such things came into existence they possessed still higher faculties. When a man of the Egypto-Chaldean culture said ‘Silver’ he did not mean only what we mean when we say ‘Silver’. In the language of that time, the word signifying a ‘Silver’ was quite differently applied. Such a man had the spiritual faculties, and he meant a certain kind of force-activity found, not only in a piece of silver that actually spread over the whole earth. What he wished to say was: We live in Gold, we live in Copper, we live in Silver. He meant certain kinds of living forces were there, and these flowed towards him especially strongly from the Moon. This he felt that something sensitive and delicate that was in its coarsest, most material form in the piece of silver. He really found these forces flowing from the Moon, but also spread out over the whole earth, materialized in a particular way in the piece of silver. Now, the enlightened man of today says: Yes, of course, the Moon shines with a silvery light so they believe that it consisted of silver. It was not so, however, but rather men had an aerosol experience, lost today, in connection with the Moon, in connection with something dwelling as a force in the whole terrestrial globe, and materialized in the piece of silver. Thus, the force lying in the silver has to be spread out over the whole earth. Naturally when this is said today it is regarded as absolute nonsense, yet, even from the point of view of modern Science it is not so. It is not nonsense at all, quite the contrary. For I will tell you something that science knows today although it is not often mentioned it. Modern Science knows that rather more than four lbs of silver, finally distributed, is contained in a cubic body the length of an English knot that you may imagine out of the ocean. So that, in all the seas surrounding the earth, there are two million tons of finally distributed silver. This is simply a scientific truth that can be proved today. The oceans of the world contain two million tons of finely distributed silver—distributed in an extreme homeopathic degree, one might say. Silver is actually spread over the whole earth. Today this must be substantiated—if one does so in the way of ordinary Science, by taking water from the sea and testing it by the most exact methods of investigation; then, with the means of modern Science itself it is found that there are two million tons of silver contained in the oceans. It is not that these tons of silver have been somehow dissolved in the ocean, or anything of that kind; they belong to it, belong to its nature and being. And this was known to the ancient wisdom through those delicate, sensitive forces originating in the old clairvoyance, at that time still in existence. The old wisdom also knew that the earth should not be looked upon merely in the way of modern Geology, but that in this earth, most finally dissolved, we have silver. I could go further; I could show how gold is also dissolved, how, besides being materially deposited here and there, all these metals finely dissolved are really present. Ancient wisdom, therefore, was under no misapprehension when it spoke of silver; it is contained in the sphere of the earth. It was known, however, as a force, a certain kind of force. The silver sphere contains certain forces, the gold sphere other forces, and so on. More still was known of the silver that was dispersed throughout the earth-sphere; it was known that in the silver lies the force controlling the ebb and flow of the tides, for a certain force animating the whole body of the earth lies within this silver and is relatively identical with it. Without it there would be no tides; this movement, peculiar to the earth, was originally set in motion by the silver-content. It has no connection with the Moon, but the Moon is connected with the same force, and hence ebb and flow appear in certain relation with the movements of the Moon, because both they and the tides are dependent on the same system of forces. And these lie in the silver-content of the universe. Even without clairvoyant knowledge we are able to see into such things, and to prove with a certainty unattainable in any other sphere of knowledge, unless it be Mathematics, that there used to be an old science knowing these things and knowing them well. With this knowledge and what it could do the ancient wisdom was connected, the wisdom that actually controlled nature has to be regained only through spiritual research, as it is today and as it goes on into the future. We live in the age in which an ancient kind of wisdom has been lost and a new kind only beginning to appear. What arose out of this ancient wisdom? Those consequences I have already indicated. If we knew the secrets of the universe we could make man himself more efficient. Think of it! By external means we could make man more efficient. It was possible simply by concocting certain substances and taking them in appropriate quantities, to acquire faculties which today we rightly assume to be innate in a man, such as genius, talent, and so forth. What Darwinism fantastically dreamed was not there at the beginning of earth-evolution, but the capacity to control nature existed, and from that to give man himself moral and spiritual faculties. You will now see that, for this reason, man had to keep the handling of nature within limits; hence the secrecy of the ancient Mysteries. The knowledge connected with these Mysteries, the secrets of nature, did not consist merely of concepts, ideas and feelings, nor merely of dogmatic imaginations. Whoever wished to acquire it had first to show himself wholly fitted to receive it; he had to be free from any wish to employ the knowledge selfishly, he was to use both knowledge and the ability derived from it solely in the service of the social order. This was the reason why the knowledge was kept so secret in the Egyptian Mysteries. In preparation for such knowledge, the one to whom it was to be imparted gave a guarantee that he would continue to live exactly as he had lived before, not taking to himself the smallest advantage but devoting the efficiency he would acquire, by his mastery over nature, exclusively to the service of the social order. On this assumption initiation was granted to individuals who then guided the ancient culture, of which the wonderful works are still to be seen, though, because men do not know their source, they are not understood. But in this way men would never have become free. They would, through their nature-influences, have been made into a kind of automata. An epoch had to supervene in which man would work through inner moral forces alone. Thus, nature becomes veiled for him because in the new age, his impulses, his instincts, having become free, he has desecrated her. It is at most since the fourteenth, fifteenth, centuries that his impulses have been thus freed. Hence the ancient wisdom is growing dim; there is nothing left but the book-wisdom and that is not understood. For no one who really understood such things as the passage I have just read you would refrain from using them for his own advantage. That, however, would call forth the worst instincts in human society, worse instincts than those produced by the tentative progress of what today is said to be scientific, where, without insight into the matter, it is in a laboratory, without being able to see deeply into things, they obtain some result or other, perhaps that one substance affects another in a certain way—well, just what goes on today in chemistry. They go on trying this and find that but it is spiritual science that will have to find a way back into the secrets of nature. At the same time it must found a social order quite different from that of today, for men to be able, without being led away into a struggle with the most unruly instincts, to realize what nature conceals and her inmost depths. There is meaning and there is wisdom in human evolution; I have tried to show you this in a whole series of lectures. What happens in history happens—although often by means of most destructive forces—in such a way that meaning runs right through historical evolution. It is often not the meaning man imagines and he has to suffer much on the paths history takes to its ends. Everything that happens in the course of time is sure to make the pendulum sometimes swing towards evil, sometimes towards the lesser evil; but by this swinging a certain condition of balance is reached. So then, up to the fourteenth, fifteenth centuries, a certain number of the forces of nature were known at least to a few; but this knowledge is now lost because the men of the newer age have not been attuned to it. You see how beautifully it is pictured in the symbol standing for the forces of nature in the Egyptian legend of Isis. This image of Isis—what a deep impression it makes upon us when we picture it standing there in stone, but covered from head to foot with a veil, also of stone—the veiled Isis of Sais. It bears the inscription: “I am the Past, the Present in the Future; my veil no mortal man has yet lifted”. That has given rise to an unusually clever explanation—and a very clever people have accepted this clever explanation. We are told that the image of Isis is the symbol of a wisdom that can never be attained by man. Behind this veil is a being must remain eternally hidden, for the veil can never be lifted. Yet the inscription is “I am the Past, the Present and the Future; my veil no mortal man has yet lifted”. All the clever people then say: no one can fathom this being—are speaking about as logically as anyone who was to say: “I am John Miller you shall never know my name”. To say this is on a par with what you thus always hear said about the figure of Isis. To interpret the inscription: “I am the Past, the Present in the Future; my veil no mortal man has yet lifted” in this way, is as complete nonsense as to say: “I am John Miller, you will never know my name”. For what Isis is, stands written—Past, Present and Future; Time in its flight. Something quite different, therefore, from the clever explanation referred to is expressed in the words: “By veil no mortal man has yet lifted”. It means that this wisdom must be approached as those women are approached who have taken the veil, the vow of chastity; it must be approached with the same reverence, with a feeling that excludes all egoistic impulses. This is what is meant. It is like a veiled nun, this wisdom of ancient days. This is the feeling behind what is said about the veil. Thus we see that in the days when the primal wisdom was a living thing, then either approached it in the proper way or had no access to it at all. But in the newer age men had to be left to themselves. They could no longer have this wisdom of old days, nor the forms of that wisdom. The knowledge of certain forces of nature was lost, those forces only to be known if experienced within—if they were at the same time lived inwardly. And at the time when materialism was at its height in the nineteenth century, at the beginning of the century, a force of nature appeared, the characteristic of which is recently expressed as follows: We have this nature-force but no one can understand it; it is even a secret for science.—You know how the force of electricity came to be used by man, and that electric power is such that no one can experience it inwardly through his normal forces; it remains an external force. And to a greater degree than one thinks that all the greatness of the nineteenth century arise through electricity. It would be quite easy to show how infinitely much in our present civilization depends upon electric power, and how much more, how very much more, will depend upon it in the future—even if it is employed in the present way without any inward knowledge. For in the evolution of human culture electric force has been put—as something by which man will be matured morally—in the place of the old, known force. Today in making use of electricity there is no thought of anything moral. There is wisdom in the progressive historical evolution of humanity. Man will mature by being able for a time to develop in his lower ego-bearer, in his uncontrolled egoism, what is deeply harmful—and in all conscience there is sufficient of this, as our own times clearly show. This would be quite out of the question should men have retained the ancient forces. It is electricity as a force in civilization which makes this possible. It is to a certain extent true of steam-power but to a lesser degree. Now this is how the matter stands as I have explained to you. The first seventh part of our culture-period, that will last on into the third millennium, has passed; the peak of materialism has been reached. The social framework in which we live, that has brought about such lamentable occurrences in our days, is such that man cannot be subjected to it for another half-century without a fundamental change taking place in soul. For those having spiritual insight into world-evolution, this electoral age is, at the same time, the challenge to seek greater spiritual depth, a genuine spiritual deepening. For, to that force which remains outwardly unknown to sense-observation, there must be added in the soul the spiritual force line as deeply hidden as the electrical forces that also have to be awakened. Think how mysterious electrical power is! It was first drawn out of its secret hiding places by Galvani and Volta. And what dwells in the human soul, what is explored by Spiritual Science, that, too, lies hidden. The two like poles must meet each other. And as surely as the electric force is drawn out as the force hidden in nature, so surely will the force hidden in the soul,the force that belongs to it and is sought by Spiritual Science, also be drawn forth. This will be so, although today there are still many who look upon the endeavors of Spiritual Science as—well, almost as they might have looked upon the experiments of Galvani and Volta in the days they prepared their frogs and observed in the twitching of a leg that some force was at work. Did Science know that in the frog's leg lay the whole of Voltaic electricity, of Galvanism, all that is known today of electricity? Think back to the time when Galvani, it his primitive laboratory, was hanging his frog's leg to the window-latch; think of the moment when it began to twitch, and for the first time he was sure of this! It is true that it is not a question here of electricity itself being stimulated, but of contact electricity. When Galvani established this for the first time, could he suppose that the force that moved the frog's leg would someday be used by railways as a means of transport all over the world, or that with its aid thought would someday encircle the globe? It is not so very long since Galvani noticed this force in his frog's leg. If anyone had been expected such results to flow from this knowledge, he would certainly have been considered a fool. Thus, in our day, a man who presents the first beginnings of a spiritual science is considered a fool. A time will arrive when all that comes forth from Spiritual Science will be as important to the world, the moral world of soul and spirit, as a result of Galvani's experiment with the frog's leg for material civilization. It is thus that progress is made in human evolution. It is only when we are aware of the things that we develop the will to collaborate in what can only be a beginning. If that other force, the force of electricity, which has been drawn out of its hiding place, has direct significance only for external, material culture, and only an indirect significance for the world of morality, what comes out of Spiritual Science will be of utmost importance in terms of its social significance. For the future, social institutions will be regulated by what Spiritual Science can give to humanity. Moreover, the whole of external, material culture will be indirectly stimulated by this Spiritual Science as well. I can only point to this today in closing. Today we have seen Faust standing, as I said today, half in the old world and half in the new. Tomorrow we will expand this picure of Faust into one that will be a sort of worldview. |
| 186. Social and Anti-social Forces In The Human Being
12 Dec 1918, Bern Tr. Christopher Schaefer Rudolf Steiner |
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| It is important that these objective necessities shall be clearly placed before us at this time. Goethe, in his Legend of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, has treated the forces of the human soul as three members, or forces; Power, Appearance, and Knowledge or Wisdom—or, as the Bronze King, the Silver King and the Golden King. |
| 186. Social and Anti-social Forces In The Human Being
12 Dec 1918, Bern Tr. Christopher Schaefer Rudolf Steiner |
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The times themselves speak clearly enough, demanding that we should apply to the conditions and activities of these times those feelings and modes of thinking which we have acquired from our studies of Spiritual Science. Not only do outward circumstances speak clearly, but our conceptions of Spiritual Science also justify us in a certain way, especially in what we have to say today. In many of our basic ways of looking at the world, we have started from one fundamental fact of human evolution, from the fact that this evolution is accomplished by successive stages of which the most important and most related to us began with the great Atlantean Catastrophe, namely this Post-Atlantean Epoch. Four periods of it have passed by, while we are now living in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Period. This period of development, which began in the 15th century of our Christian era, is the one which we can designate as the period of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul. Other soul forces have been especially evolved in other periods of civilization. In our civilization which has followed the Greco-Latin civilization from the first half of the 15th century, humanity must gradually develop the Spiritual Soul. The preceding period, which commenced in the 8th century B.C. and finished in the 15th century A.D., was pre-eminently the period in which humanity developed the Intellectual or Mind Soul. Now we need not give a full description of these cultural stages, but we will particularly look at what is a peculiarity of our age—this age which has comparatively few centuries behind it. Each age lasts on average about 2000 years. Therefore much remains to be done in this period of the Spiritual Soul. The task of humanity—of civilized humanity in this age of the Spiritual Soul—will be that of laying hold of the whole human being and making him entirely dependent on himself, of lifting into the full light of consciousness much of that which in earlier periods man felt instinctively and judged instinctively. Many present difficulties and much that is chaotic around us in our era, become quite explicable when one knows that the task of our era is to raise that which is instinctive to the plane of consciousness. What is instinctive in us happens to a certain degree by itself, but to achieve a conscious result one must make an inward effort, above all, to begin to think truly with one's whole being. Man tries to avoid this, he does not willingly take a conscious part in the shaping of world conditions. Here is a point over which many are indeed deceived today. Men today think the following: Well, today we live in the period of the development of thought. People are proud of the fact that there is more thinking nowadays than in the past. But this is an illusion—one of the many illusions in which humanity lives today. This comprehension on which people pride themselves today is mainly instinctive. Only when the instinctive nature which has appeared in the evolution of humanity and which so proudly speaks of thought—only when this instinctive nature becomes instead an active element, when the intellect does not depend merely on the brain but springs from the whole man, when it is separated from rationalism and is lifted to the plane of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—only then will that gradually emerge which seeks to emerge in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Period, the period of the Spiritual Soul. That which meets man today and which is clearly indicated even in the worldly thought of the present epoch is something which one continuously needs to mention the appearance of the so-called Social Question. But he who has earnestly studied our anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science will easily perceive that the essential impulse in the shaping of the social order (whether belonging to the State or not) must come from that which human beings can develop out of themselves, as it is this which regulates the relationship between people. Everything which the human being develops out of himself naturally corresponds to certain impulses which are ultimately found in our soul and spirit life. If one looks at the matter this way, one is able to ask: Must attention not then be directed above all to the social impulses or to the social instincts, movements or forces emerging in human nature? We can, if you like, call these social impulses, social drives; but we must keep in mind that they should not only be thought of as mere unconscious instincts since when we speak of social instincts today, we must take into account that we live in the age of the Consciousness Soul and that these drives seek to press up into consciousness. Now, if these things are to count for us, then we must find social impulses which seek to become reality. But in so doing we must recognize the terrible one-sidedness of our age, which should not of course be deplored, but which should be looked at calmly because it has to be overcome. Man has such a great inclination in our day to look at things one-sidedly. But a pendulum cannot swing from the central point out to one side without also swinging back to the other. Just as little as a pendulum can swing to one side only, can social impulses of men be expressed by only one side. This is because the social impulses are quite naturally opposed by anti-social impulses in the human being. Precisely because one finds social impulses or drives in human nature, one also finds the opposite. This fact must above all be considered. The social leaders and agitators, for example, live in the illusion that they need only spread certain ideas or need only appeal to a class of man who is willing and disposed (provided ideas are there) to help forward the social impulse. It is an illusion to act in this way, for in so doing one forgets that if social forces are working, then anti-social forces are also present. What we must be able to do today is to look these things straight in the face without illusion. It is only from the viewpoint of Spiritual Science that they can be looked at straightly without illusion. One is tempted to say that people are sleeping through the most important thing of all in life when they do not begin to look at life from the viewpoint of Spiritual Science. We must ask ourselves: What is the relation between people with regard to social and anti-social forces? We need to see that the relationship between people is fundamentally a complicated matter. When one person meets another, I would say we must look into the situation radically. Meetings of course point to differences which vary according to specific circumstances; but we must fix our eyes on the common characteristics, we must clearly see the common elements in the meeting, in the confrontation between one person and another. We must ask ourselves: What really happens then, not merely in that which presents itself to the senses, but in the total situation, when one person stands opposite another, when one person meets another? Nothing less than that a certain force works from one person to the other. The meeting of one with another leads to the working of a certain force between them. We cannot confront another person in life with indifference, not even in mere thoughts and feelings, even though we may be separated from them by distance. If we have any kind of relation to other people, or any communication with them, then a force flows between us creating a bond. It is this fact which lies at the basis of social life and which, when broadened, is really the foundation for the social structure of humanity. One sees this phenomenon most clearly when one thinks of the direct interchange between two people. The impression which one person makes on the other has the effect of lulling the other to sleep. Thus we frequently find in social life that one person gets lulled to sleepiness by the other with whom he has interchange. As a physicist might say: a “latent tendency” is always there for one man to lull another to sleep in social relationships. Why is this so? Well, we must see that this rests on a very important arrangement of man's total being. It rests on the fact that what we call social impulses, fundamentally speaking are only present in people of our present day consciousness during sleep. You are, in so far as you have not yet attained clairvoyance, really only penetrated by social forces when you are asleep, and only that which continues to work out of sleeping into waking conditions works into ordinary waking consciousness as a social impulse. When you know this, you do not need to be surprised when your social being seeks to lull you to sleep in your relationship with others. In the relationship between people the social impulse ought to develop. Yet it can only develop during sleep. Therefore in the relationship between people a tendency is shown for one person to dull the consciousness of the other so that a social relation may be established between them. This striking fact is evident to one who studies the realities of life. Above all things, our interchange with one another leads to dulling the consciousness of one another, in the interests of a social impulse between people. Of course you cannot go about continually asleep in life. Yet the tendency to establish social impulses consists in, and expresses itself by, an inclination to sleep. That of which I speak goes on subconsciously of course, but it nevertheless actually penetrates our life continuously. Thus there exists a permanent disposition to fall asleep precisely for the building up of the social structure of humanity. On the other hand, something else is also working. A perpetual struggle and opposition to falling asleep in social relationships is also present. If you meet a person you are continuously standing in a conflict situation in the following way: Because you meet him, the tendency to sleep always develops in you so that you may experience your relationship to him in sleep. But, at the same time, there is aroused in you the counter-force to keep yourself awake. This always happens in the meeting between people—a tendency to fall asleep, a tendency to keep awake. In this situation a tendency to keep awake has an anti-social character, the assertion of one's individuality, of one's personality, in opposition to the social structure of society. Simply because we are human beings, our soul-life swings to and fro between the social and the antisocial. And that which lives in us as these two forces, which may be observed between people communicating, can from an occult perspective be seen to govern our life. When we meet social arrangements and structures in society, even if these arrangements seem far-fetched from the seemingly wise consciousness of the present, they are still a manifestation of this pendulum between social and anti-social forces. The national economist may reflect upon what credit, capital and interest are. Yet even these things which make for regularity in social transactions are only outward swings of the pendulum between social and anti-social forces. The person who seeks to find healing remedies for these times must intelligently and scientifically connect with these facts. For how is it that social demands arise in our time? Well, we live in the age of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul in which man must become independent. But on what does this depend? It depends on people's ability during our Fifth Post-Atlantean Period to become self-assertive, to not allow themselves to be put to sleep. It is the anti-social forces which require development in this time, for consciousness to be present. It would not be possible for mankind in the present to accomplish its task if just these anti-social forces did not become ever more powerful; they are indeed the pillars on which personal independence rests. At present, humanity has no idea how much more powerful anti-social impulses must become, right on until the 30th century. For men to progress properly, anti-social forces must develop In earlier periods the development of the anti-social forces was not the spiritual bread of humanity's evolution. There was therefore no need to establish a counter-force. Indeed none was set. In our day, when a person on his own account, for his individual self, must evolve antisocial forces, which are evolving because man is now subjected to this evolution against which nothing will prevail, there must also come about that with which man resists them: a social structure which will balance this anti-social evolutionary tendency. The anti-social forces must work inwardly so that human beings may reach the height of their development. Outwardly, in social life, structures must work so that people do not totally lose their outer connections in life. Hence the social demands of the present. They can in a certain sense be seen as the demand for a justified outer balance to the inward, essentially anti-social evolutionary tendency of humanity in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch. From this you can see that nothing is accomplished by seeing things in a one-sided way. As men live nowadays, certain words (I will not say ideas or feelings), certain words have certain values. The word “anti-social” arouses a degree of antipathy. It is considered as something evil. Very well; we perhaps need not trouble ourselves whether it is considered good or bad, since it is quite necessary. Be it good or bad, it is connected with the necessary tendencies of evolution in our time. It is simply sheer nonsense to say that the anti-social impulses must be resisted, for they cannot be resisted. One must grasp the essential inner development of mankind in our time, understand the evolutionary tendency. It is not a matter of finding prescriptions for resisting the anti-social forces; but of so shaping, of so arranging the social order, the structure, the organization of that which lies outside of the individual, that a counter-balance is present to that which works as anti-social force within human beings. Therefore it is vital for our time that the individual achieves independence, but that social forms provide a balance to this independence. Otherwise neither the individual nor society can develop properly. In earlier periods there were tribes and classes. Our age strives against this. Our age is no longer able to divide people into classes but must consider them in their totality and create social structures which take this totality into account. I said yesterday in my public lecture that slavery could exist in the Greco-Latin Period; one was the master, the other the slave. Then men were divided. Today we have as a remnant just that which disturbs the working-man so much, namely that his power to work is sold; in this way something belonging to him is organized from outside. This must go; it is only possible to organize socially what does not integrally belong to the human being, such as his position or the function to which he is appointed, in short, something which is not an inner part of the individual. All this which we acknowledge with regard to the necessary development of social democracy is really so, and must be so understood. Just as no man can claim to do arithmetic if he has never learned his multiplication tables, so too he cannot claim to discuss social reforms and the like when he has never learned those things which we have just explained: namely, that socialism and anti-socialism exist quite concretely in the way described. People in some of the most important positions in society, when they begin talking about present social demands, often appear to those who know, as individuals who wish to begin building a bridge over a rushing stream without having the most elementary knowledge of mechanics. They may well be able to put up a bridge, but it will collapse at the first opportunity. It seems with social leaders or with those who look after social institutions, that their plans will be shown to be impossible; for the things of reality demand that we work with them, and not against them. It is therefore tremendously important that those things which form the backbone of our anthroposophical thought and consciousness should one day be taken seriously. One of the impulses which ensoul us in the sphere of our anthroposophical movement is that we, in a sense, carry into the whole of man's life that which most people apply only to youth. We sit on the “school-bench” of life long after we have become grey. This is one of the differences between us and others, who believe that at the age of 25, or sometimes 26, when they have finished lazying about with their education, that they are ready for the rest of life—at most there may still be some amusing additions to one's education. But when we approach the very nerve of Spiritual Science, we feel that the human being really must continue to learn throughout his whole life if he wishes to tackle the tasks of life. It is vital that we should be permeated with this feeling. If we do not get rid of the belief that people can master everything with the faculties they have developed up to their 20th or 25th year, that then one only has to meet in Parliament or some other forum to decide all affairs—as long as we do not get rid of this view, we shall never be able to establish healthy conditions in the social structure of mankind. The study of the reciprocal relation between the social and the anti-social is extremely significant for our time. Just this anti-social tendency is of the utmost importance to understand because it must make itself felt and must be developed in us. This anti-social spirit can only be held in balance by the social. But the social must be nursed, must be consciously cared for. And in our day this becomes truly more and more difficult because the anti-social forces are really in accord with our natural development. The social element is essential; it must be cherished. We shall see that in this Fifth Post-Atlantean Period there is a tendency to take no notice of the social in merely acting naturally. Rather it must be acquired consciously in working with one's soul forces, while formerly it was felt instinctively in man. What is necessary and must be actively acquired is the interest of man in man. This is indeed the backbone of all social life. It almost sounds paradoxical to say today that no clear conception of the so-called difficult ideas of economics can be gained if the interest of one for another does not increase, if people do not begin to compare the illusions which have sway in social life with present realities. One who really thinks about it recognizes the fact that simply by being a member of society one is in a complicated relation to others. Imagine that you have a $5 note in your pocket, and you make use of this $5 note by going shopping one morning, and you spend the full $5. What does it mean that you go out with a $5 note in your pocket? The $5 note is really an illusion—it is worth nothing in reality (even if it is metal money. At this point I do not want to discuss the theories of the Metalists and the Nominalists with regard to money; but even if it is metal money, it is still an illusion and of no real worth). Money is namely only a ‘go-between’. And only because in our day a certain social order exists, an order belonging purely to the State, therefore this $5 note which you have spent in the morning for different items is nothing else than an equivalent for so many days of labour of so many men. A number of men must have completed so many days of work, so much human labour must have flowed into the social order—must have crystallized itself into merchandise—in order for the apparent worth of the bank note to have any real value, but only at the command of the social order. The bank note only gives you the power to call into your service so much labour, or to put it another way, to command its worth in work. You can picture it in your mind: There I have a bank note, which assigns to me, according to my social position, the power over so many men. If you now see these workmen selling their labour hour by hour, as the equivalent value of that which you have in your purse as the $5 note, then you begin to get a picture of the real facts. Our relationships have become so complicated that we no longer pay attention to these things, especially if they do not concern us closely. I have an example which easily clarifies this. In the more difficult considerations of economics, in the areas of capital and interest and credit, things are quite complicated; so that even university professors and political economists, whose position should mean possession of adequate insight, really have no knowledge. Thus you can see that it is necessary to look at things correctly in these areas. Of course we cannot immediately take in hand the reform of the national economy, which has been forced into such a helpless condition by what is nowadays taught as political economy. But we can at least ask with respect to national education and other such matters: What must be done so that social life and forms are consciously established in opposition to anti-social forces? What is really required? I said that it would be difficult in our time for people to develop sufficient interest in each other. You do not have sufficient interest if you think that you can buy yourself something with a $5 note and do not remember the fact that this brings about a social relationship with certain other human beings and their labour-power. You only have an adequate interest when in your picture you are able to substitute for each apparent transaction (such as the exchange of goods for a $5 note) the real transaction which is linked with it. Now, I would say that the mere egoistic, soul-stirring talk of loving our fellow-men and acting upon this love at the first opportunity, that this does not constitute social life. This sort of love is, for the most part, terribly egoistic. Many a man is supported by what he has first gained through robbing his fellow-men in a truly patriarchal fashion, in order to create for himself an object for his self-love, so that he can then feel nice and warm with the thought, “You are doing this, you are doing that” One does not easily discover that a large part of the so-called love of doing good is a masked self-love. Therefore, the main consideration is not merely to think of what lies nearest to hand, thereby enhancing our self-love, but to feel it our duty to look carefully at the many-sided social structures in which we are placed. We must at first lay the foundations for such understanding. Yet few today are disposed to do so. I would like to discuss one question from the viewpoint of general education, namely: How can we consciously establish social impulses to balance those anti-social forces which are developing naturally within us? How can we cultivate the social element, this interest of man in man, so that it springs up in us—going ever further and deeper, and leaving us no rest? How can we enkindle this interest which has disappeared so pitiably in our age, the age of the Spiritual Soul? In our age true chasms have already been created between people. Men have no idea about the manner in which they pass one another by without in the least comprehending each other. The desire to understand the other in all his or her uniqueness is very weak today. On the one hand, we have the cry for social union; and on the other, the ever-increasing spread of purely anti-social principles. The blindness of people toward each other can be seen in the many clubs and societies which people form. They do not provide any opportunity for people to get to know one another. It is possible for men to meet one another for years and not to know each other better at the end than they did at the beginning. The precise need of the future is that the social shall be brought to meet the antisocial in a systematic way. For this there are various inner soul methods. One is that we frequently attempt to look back over our present incarnation to survey what has happened to us in this life through our relations with others. If we are honest in this, most of us will say: Nowadays we generally regard the entrance of many people into our life in such a way that we see ourselves, our own personalities, as the center of the review. What have we gained from this or that person who has come into our life? This is our natural way of feeling. It is exactly this which we must try to combat. We should try in our souls to think of others, such as teachers, friends, those who have helped us and also those who have injured us (to whom we often owe more than to those who, from a certain point of view, have been of use to us). We should try to allow these pictures to pass before our souls as vividly as possible in order to see what each has done. We shall see, if we proceed in this way, that by degrees we learn to forget ourselves, that in reality we find that almost everything which forms part of us could not be there at all unless this or that person had affected our lives, helping us on or teaching us something. When we look back on the years in the more distant past to people with whom we are no longer in contact and about whom it is easier to be objective, then we shall see how the soul-substance of our life has been created by the people and circumstances of the past. Our gaze then extends over a multitude of people whom we have known in the course of time. If we try to develop a sense of the debt we owe to this or that person—if we try to see ourselves in the mirror of those who have influenced us in the course of time, and who have been associated with us—then we shall be able to experience the opening-up of a new sense in our souls, a sense which enables us to gain a picture of the people whom we meet even in the present, with whom we stand face to face today. This is because we have practiced developing an objective picture of our indebtedness to people in the past. It is tremendously important that the impulse should awaken in us, not merely to feel sympathy or antipathy towards the people we meet, not merely to hate or love something connected with the person, but to awaken a true picture of the other in us, free from love or hate. Perhaps you will not feel that what I am saying now is extremely important—but it is. For this ability to picture the other in oneself without love or hate, to allow the other individual to appear again within our soul, this is a faculty which is decreasing week by week in the evolution of humanity. It is something which men are, by degrees, completely losing. They pass one another by without arousing any interest in each other. Yet this ability to develop an imaginative faculty for the other is something that must enter into pedagogy and the education of children. For we can really develop this imaginative faculty in us if, instead of striving after the immediate sensations of life as is often done today, we are not afraid to look back quietly in our soul and see our relationships to other human beings. Then we shall be in a position to relate ourselves imaginatively to those whom we meet in the present. In this way we awaken the social instinct in us against the anti-social which quite unconsciously and of necessity continues to develop. This is one side of the picture. The other is something that can be linked up with this review of our relations to others. It is when we try to become more and more objective about ourselves. Here we must also go back to our earlier years. Then we can directly, so to speak, go to the facts themselves. Suppose you are 30 or 40 years of age. You think, “How was it with me when I was ten years old? I will imagine myself entirely into the situation of that time. I will picture myself as another boy or girl of ten years old. I will try to forget that I was that; I will really take pains to objectify myself.” This objectifying of oneself, this freeing of oneself in the present from one's own past, this shelling-out of the Ego from its experiences, must be specially striven for in our present time. For the present has the tendency towards linking up the Ego more and more with its experiences. Nowadays man wants to be instinctively that which his experiences make him. For this reason it is so very difficult to acquire the activity which Spiritual Science gives. The spirit must make a fresh effort each time. According to true occult science, nothing can be done by comfortably remaining in one's position. One forgets things and must always be cultivating them afresh. This is just as it should be because fresh efforts need to continually be made. He who has already made some progress in the realm of Spiritual Science attempts the most elementary things every day; others are ashamed to pay attention to the basics. For Spiritual Science, nothing should depend on remembering, but on man's immediate experience in the present. It is therefore a question of training ourselves in this faculty—through making ourselves objective—that we picture this boy or girl as if he or she were a stranger at an earlier time in our lives; of bestirring ourselves more and more, of getting free of events, and of being less haunted at 30 by the impulses of a 10 year old. Detachment from the past does not mean denial of the past. We gain it in another way again, and that is what is so important. On the one hand, we cultivate the social instinct and impulses in us by looking back upon those who have been connected with us in the past and regarding our souls as the products of these persons. In this way we acquire the imagination for meeting people in the present. On the other hand, through objectifying ourselves we gain possibilities of developing imagination directly. This objectifying of our earlier years is fruitful insofar as it does not work in us unconsciously. Think for a moment: If the 10 year old child works on unconsciously in you, then you are the 30 or 40 year old augmented by the 10 year old. It is just the same with the 11, the 12 year old child and so on. Egoism has tremendous power, but its power is lessened when you separate the earlier years from yourself and when you make them objective. This is the important point on which we must fix our attention. The following pre-condition for social activity must be made clear to those people who raise social claims in unreasonable and illusory fashion: Understanding about how man can develop himself as a socially creative being must first be present in this period, when anti-social forces are growing ever stronger as part of human evolution. What will then have been achieved? You will discover the whole meaning of what I have now explained if you consider the following: In 1848 there appeared a social document which continues to work into the present day in radical socialism, and in Bolshevism. It was the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx, which contains ideas which rule the thoughts and feelings of many working men. Karl Marx was able to dominate the labour world for the simple reason that he wrote and said what the working man thinks and understands, as a working man. This Communist Manifesto the contents of which I do not need to explain to you, appeared in 1848. It was the first document, the first seed in what has now borne fruit, after the recent destruction of opposing movements. This document contains one slogan, one sentence which you will often find quoted today by most socialist writers: “Workers of the world, unite!” It is a sentence which has run through many socialist groups. What does it express? It expresses the most unnatural thing that could possibly be thought today. It expresses an impulse for socializing, for uniting a certain mass of people. On what is this uniting, this union, to be built? Upon its opposite, upon the hatred of all those who are not members of the working class. This associating, this banding together of people is to be brought about through splitting up and separating mankind into classes. You must ponder this, you must think about the reality of this principle which is a genuine illusion, if I can use this expression, and which has been adopted in Russia, now in Germany and the Austrian countries, and which will eat its way further and further into the world. It is so unnatural precisely because, on the one hand, it shows the necessity of socializing, but on the other it builds this socialization out of the anti-social instinct of class hatred, and class opposition. However, these things need to be considered from a higher perspective, otherwise we shall not get very far; above all, we shall not be able to participate in the healthy development of mankind in the present. Nowadays Spiritual Science is the only means of seeing things truly in their totality; it is the only means for understanding our time. Just as one is adverse to entering into the spirit and soul foundations of man's physical constitution, so one also avoids, out of fear and lack of courage, studying those things in social life which can only be understood out of the Spirit. People are afraid, cover their eyes and put their heads in the sand like ostriches when they are confronted by real and important things. Of what does human interchange in fact consist? As we have seen, it consists of one person trying to put the other to sleep, while the other tries to resist and stay awake. This is the archetypal phenomenon of social science in Goethe's sense. This archetypal phenomenon points to something which mere material thinking cannot grasp; it points to that which can only be understood when one knows that in human life one is not only asleep during sleep—when we slumber along for hours, oblivious to the world—but the same applies to daily waking life, where the same forces which lead to sleep and wakefulness also play into the social and anti-social forces of man. All thinking about social forms can bear no fruit if we do not make the effort to take these things into account. With this in mind, we must not be blind to the events taking place in the world, but must carefully watch what is coming to pass. What, for example, does the socialist of today think? He thinks that he can invent socialist slogans and call to men from all countries—“Workers of the world, unite!” and by so doing, establish a sort of international Paradise. This indeed is one of the greatest and most fatal illusions. People are not abstract, but concrete. Fundamentally, the human being is individual. I have tried to make this clear in my Philosophy of Freedom, in contrast to the relativism of Neo-Kantianism and socialism. Men are also different according to their groupings over the world. We will discuss one of these differences so that we may see that it is not possible to simply say:—“You begin in the West, and carry out a certain social system, then you go to the East and then home again, as if taking a world tour.” But the attitude of taking a world journey lives in those who wish to spread socialism over the whole earth. They look upon the earth as a globe on which they, by starting in the West, can eventually arrive in the East. But people on the earth are different—and exactly in this difference dwells an impulse which is the motive force of progress. You can see how, in this way, provision is made for the Consciousness Soul through birth and heredity. This actually comes to expression in the English-speaking people of today. They are organized for the Consciousness Soul through their blood, their birthright, and their inherited faculties. Because the English-speaking peoples have been especially prepared for the cultivation of the Consciousness Soul they are, in a way, representatives of the fifth Post-Atlantean period. People are thus differentiated according to where they live and how they are constituted. The Eastern peoples must effect and represent the true development of humanity in another way. Beginning with the Russian people, and passing on to the people of the Asiatic countries—one finds an opposition, a revolt against the instinctive elements natural to the evolution of the Consciousness Soul. The people of the East wish to save the soul treasure of intellectuality of the present age for the future. They do not want it to be mixed with experience, but wish to liberate and preserve it for the next period. During this period, a true union can take place between the human being and the evolved Spirit Self. Thus, if the characteristic force of our present period is in the West, and can indeed be best cultivated as a quality among the English-speaking peoples, the people of the east, out of their national inheritance, seek to prevent the coming-to-pass in their souls of that which is most characteristic of the present period—so that it may develop in them as a germ for the following period, which begins with the 30th century. From this we can see the fact that certain laws prevail in human life, and in human evolution. In the realm of nature people are not surprised that they cannot burn ice, that a regular law underlies this phenomenon. But with the social structures of humanity, people fancy that the same social form, based on the same social principles, can, for example, be made to work in Russia, as in England, Scotland, or America. This is impossible, for the whole world is organized by underlying principles so that one cannot simply create identical forms at will all over the globe. This is a point which we must not forget. In the Central European countries there is a middle condition of affairs. There, it is as if one were in a balanced condition, between the extremes of the East and the West. Looked at in this way, we see the Earth population divided into three parts. You cannot say: “Workers of the world, unite!” For the workers are of three sorts, are three varieties of people. Let us look at the people of the West again. We find a special disposition, a special mission for all who speak English by nature (single cases may be different)—a disposition for the cultivation of the Consciousness Soul. This disposition expresses itself in not detaching from the soul its characteristic quality of intelligence, but connecting this intelligence naturally, instinctively, with events in the world. To naturally, even instinctively, place oneself in the life of the world as a consciousness soul individual is the task of the English-speaking people. The expanse and greatness of the British Empire rests on this quality. Indeed herein lies the original phenomenon behind the expansion of the British Empire—that which is hidden in the impulses of its people exactly coincided with the inner impulses of the age. In my lectures on the European folk souls, you will find what is essential in this matter. Much is contained in this series of lectures which were given long before the war, but which provide material for judging this war-catastrophe objectively.1 Now, the very capacities connected with the evolution of the Consciousness Soul give the English-speaking peoples a special genius for political life. One can study how the political art of dividing society and creating social structure has spread from England to those countries where things have remained backward, where the remnants of the fourth Post-Atlantean period have remained. This influence has spread even to the division of Hungarian society, to this Turanian member of the European peoples. It is only from the English heritage that a foundation for the political thinking of the fifth Post-Atlantean period can come. The English are specially suited to the realm of politics. It is of no use to pronounce a judgment on these things, the necessities of the case alone do so. One may feel sympathy or the opposite—that is a private affair. Objective necessity determines the affairs of the world. It is important that these objective necessities shall be clearly placed before us at this time. Goethe, in his Legend of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, has treated the forces of the human soul as three members, or forces; Power, Appearance, and Knowledge or Wisdom—or, as the Bronze King, the Silver King and the Golden King. Many remarkable things are spoken of in this legend, regarding the governing relationships which are being prepared for the present and which will live into the future. We can point out that what Goethe symbolizes by the Bronze king, the force of Power, is that which spreads over the world through the English-speaking peoples. This is necessary because the culture of the Consciousness Soul coincides with the special qualities of the British and American peoples. In the Central European countries, which are now in such a state of chaos, there is an unmistakable equilibrium between the Leaning of the intellect toward the Consciousness Soul, and the desire to be free from it; there, sometimes one prevails, sometimes the other. None of the Central European nations is really suited for political life. When they desire to be political, they are disposed to lose contact with reality. Whereas the political thinking of the Anglo-American nations is firmly anchored in the soul, in the Central European countries, it is not, for the second soul force dominates—Semblance and Appearance. However, the people of the Central European countries manifest an intellectuality of special brilliance. Compare anything that the English-speaking people have to say about the nature of thinking—and you will find the thoughts strongly linked to solid earth-realities. But if you take the brilliant feats of the German mind—you will find that they are more an aesthetic shaping of thoughts, even if the aesthetic shaping has a logical form. It is especially noticeable how one thought leads to another so that thoughts of value appear in dialectical form, shaped by an aesthetic will. If one wishes to apply this to solid earth-realities—if one wishes by this means to become a politician—then one easily becomes untrue; one easily falls into a so-called dreamy idealism which seeks to establish united kingdoms, with decade-long calls for unity—but in the end sets up a mighty State by force. Never before has there been such a contrast in political life as the one between the dream of unity in 1848 and that which was really established in 1871.2 There you see the swing of the pendulum, the shift from that which really strives for aesthetic form, which can become untrue, an illusion, a dreamy picture when one wishes to apply it to politics. Here, there is simply no disposition for politics. When the Central European people become politicians they either dream or they lie. I should add that these things must not be discussed with sympathy or antipathy in order to accuse or to acquit. Rather, they must be said, because on the one hand they correspond with a need, and on the other with a tragedy. These are things that we must heed. And if we then look to the East, things are quite different again. We have seen that the German, if he wants to be political, falls into a dreamy idealism or, at its worst, into untruth. The Russian on the other hand becomes ill or actually suffers a death if he desires to be political. This may seem strange, yet a Russian person has a constitution which creates a disposition towards disease, towards death, with intensive political involvement. The Russian Folk Soul has absolutely no affinity with that quality in the English and American Folk Soul which creates a political capacity. But because of this, the East has the task of carrying the intellect separated from its natural connection with the world of sense experience into the future age of the Spirit-Self. One must therefore know how different abilities are spread among the people of the earth. This becomes visible in many areas. You have, for example, heard about the super-sensible experience called “The Meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold”. There are marked differences in this meeting with the Guardian. Where this meeting, this initiation, is effected entirely independent of nationality, then it is objective and complete. But when this initiation occurs through special groups or societies connected with a particular people or nation, then it is one-sided. The English-speaking peoples are those who, when not guided by higher spiritual leaders but by their own Folk Soul, are especially suited for bringing to the Threshold those spiritual beings who surround and accompany us in this world of Ahrimanic spirits, and whom we take with us when we approach the super-sensible world, if they have developed a certain liking for us. They then lead us primarily to an experience of the power of sickness and death. You will therefore hear it said by the greater number of Anglo-Americans initiated into the super-sensible Mysteries, that the first more important event in their cognition of the super-sensible world is the encounter with those powers expressing sickness and death. They learn to know this as an external, outward experience. If you turn to the Central European people what will you find, when those who are being initiated are not taken out of their nation and raised to universal humanity, but when the Folk Spirit co-operates with them? Then the first important experience which comes to our notice is a conflict between those spiritual beings who belong to higher worlds, to the other side of the Threshold, and certain other beings who are here in the physical world, on this side of the Threshold but who are invisible to ordinary consciousness. The Central Europeans will first become aware of this conflict. The experience of this conflict makes itself felt to the genuine seeker after truth in the Central European countries as a being penetrated with the powers of doubt. One becomes acquainted with all the powers of “many-sidedness”. In Western countries, there is a stronger inclination to be satisfied with exact truth; whereas in the Central European countries there is a tendency to immediately see the other side of the question. There, in the searching for truth, one trembles in the balance. Everything has two sides. One is regarded as a Philistine in Central Europe if one ventures a one-sided opinion. But this causes tragic suffering when nearing the Threshold. We must pay attention to this struggle which takes place at the Threshold, between spirits which belong only to the spirit world, and those belonging to the world of sense—this struggle which conditions all that calls forth doubt in man, this vacillation with regard to the truth. It is this experience of doubt which creates the European need to be trained in the truth—in philosophy—so as not to fall prey so easily to the generally recognized impulses of truth in society. When you turn to the Eastern countries—and the Folk Soul acts as sponsor at the initiation—then one primarily experiences the spirits that work upon human egotism. One sees all that gives rise to human selfishness. The Westerner who approaches the Threshold does not see this. Instead, he sees the spirits that permeate the world and humanity with sickness and death in the broadest sense, as injurious, destructive and degrading for humanity. The Neophyte of the East, however, sees all that comes forward to tempt man as selfishness. Therefore, the ideal which proceeds from Western initiation is making men healthy and keeping them healthy, and giving mankind the possibility of healthy development. In the East, on the other hand, there springs up, as instinctive knowledge in connection to a religious orientation toward initiation, a feeling of one's own insignificance when faced with the sublime powers of the spiritual world. The man of the East, when meeting the spiritual world, is shown how selfishness may be cured, and egotism destroyed because of its dangers. This is even expressed in the external character of people from the East. Much of the Eastern character which is inexplicable to people from the West arises precisely from what is expressed at the Threshold of the spiritual world. So we can see the differences in human qualities when we look at the inner development, the inner shaping of the psycho-spiritual development of humanity. It is important to keep this clearly in mind. In certain occult circles of the English-speaking people who were under the guardianship of the Folk Spirits, prophetic sayings could be found during the second half of the 19th century which referred to the things we have been discussing, things which are happening today. Think of what could have happened if the people of Europe, with the exception of those speaking English, had not stopped up their ears and blindfolded their eyes, so that their attention was directed from the truth of these things. I will tell you of a formula which was frequently repeated during the second half of the 19th century. The following was said:—“The State must be abolished in Russia, so that the Russian people may develop, for in Russia social experiments must be carried out, which could never be done in Western countries”. This might seem unsympathetic to non-English ears, but it contains a high degree of wisdom and insight. And he who can connect himself with these things so that he can believe in their efficacy as impulses in whose realization he can take part, this person is truly of the present age.3 Those who do not see the reality of these forces set themselves against the time. These matters must be clearly understood. It was, of course, the inevitable lot of Central and Eastern Europe to block their ears and blindfold their eyes to occult facts; to give no heed to them, to work on lines of mysticism, abstract teaching, and abstract intellectualism. But we are now in a time when this must cease. Pessimism and despair must not be created by such contemplations as these. Rather force, courage, and the will to help is needed. In this sense we should always remember that we do not work against, but rather with the issues of our time—out of the spiritual scientific impulse of the Anthroposophical Movement. Let us see to it that we do not sleep away our opportunities. Spiritual Science can lead us to the conscious cultivation of social faculties. It can, for example, show us the forces at work in the human being when he is free from the body, what he is experiencing between going to sleep and awaking. But more importantly it can give us a direction in conscious waking life for developing social capacities. We of course cultivate the powers most necessary for our age when we are consciously thinking about those things which can only forcefully penetrate into our soul during waking hours. We could not develop, we would be powerless, if we only had to evolve during sleep. It is for our waking life that the following is therefore important. Two powers are working in the present. One is the power which since the Mystery of Golgotha has worked in different metamorphoses through the ensuing periods of earth evolution as the Christ Impulse. We have often said that just in our age a reappearance of the Etheric Christ will take place. This reappearance of the Christ is indeed not far off. That He is coming again is no cause for pessimism, nor should it give rise to a nebulous longing and a desire for soul-warming, self-seeking, theosophical theories. The Christ Impulse has various forms, but in His present form He wishes to help humanity realize that spiritual wisdom now being revealed by the spiritual world. This wisdom wants to be realized and the Christ Impulse will be a help in this realization. It is on this realization that all depends. At this critical moment humanity is faced with a momentous decision. On the one side stands the Christ Being, calling us of our own free will to do what we have been speaking about today, to consciously and freely receive the social impulses which can heal and help humanity. Freely, to receive them. Therefore, we do not unite ourselves on those levels where hatred forms a foundation for love as in the cry, “Workers of the world, unite!” But we unite by striving to realize the Christ Impulse, by doing those things which are the will of Christ for this age. Opposed to this will stands the adversary who is called in the Bible “the unrighteous Prince of this World”. He makes his presence known in various ways. One of these ways is to take those forces which allow us as free beings to serve that which we have been talking about today, to take this force of free will and to place it at the service of the physical. This adversary, the Prince of this world, has various instruments; for example, hunger and social chaos. By this means, through external compulsion, and physical measures, the force of free will is subverted to the service of apparent necessity. See how humanity today shows that it will not of its own free will turn to a truly social life, and to a recognition of true progress for mankind. It wishes to be compelled. And yet, this compulsion has not even led people to make the basic distinction between the Spirit of the super-sensible world, the Christ Spirit and the adversary, the unrighteous Prince of this world. Look at this situation and see if this does not explain why in so many places today men oppose and struggle against the acceptance of any true spiritual teaching, against true spiritual deeds, and against Spiritual Science. They are possessed by the unrighteous Prince of this world. Now think for a moment; think how you of your own free will turn to spiritual life; think humbly of yourselves, but also earnestly and strongly as the missionaries of the Christ-Spirit today, who have to combat the unrighteous Prince of this world, who lays hold of all those who unconsciously allow themselves to use forces out of the future to realize their own aims. If you think of yourselves in this light there is no room for pessimism—indeed it leaves you no time for a pessimistic view of the world. It will of course not shut your eyes and ears to that which has happened, sometimes in a terrible manner—and which is tragic to behold in its true form. But you will preeminently keep the following before your souls—“I am, in any case, called to look at everything without illusion; I must be neither pessimistic nor optimistic, so that forces may awaken in my soul which give me the power to aid the free development of the human being, to contribute to human progress in the place and situation where I am”. Even if the faults and tragedies of the age are very visible to Spiritual Science this should not be an incitement to pessimism or optimism, but rather a call to an inner awakening so that independent work and the cultivation of right thinking will result. For above all things, adequate insight is necessary. If only a sufficient number of people today were motivated to say, “We absolutely must have a better understanding of things”; then everything else would follow. It is just in regard to social questions that there is a need to consciously strive for insight and understanding. The development of the will activity is planned for, it is coming. If we in daily life would only wish to educate ourselves about social issues, and develop new social ideas, then (according to an occult law), each of us would be able to take another human being along. Each one of us can therefore work for two if we have the will. We could achieve much if we had an earnest desire to acquire insight at once. The rest would follow. It is not so bad that not many people can do much about the situation of society today, but it is incredibly sad if people cannot at least make up their minds to become acquainted with the social laws of Spiritual Science. The rest would follow if serious study would take place. This is what I have desired to communicate to you today regarding the importance of knowing and recognizing certain things about the social situation of the present, and how such a recognition can lead to a life impulse for the future. I hope we will again have the opportunity of speaking together about the more intimate aspects of Spiritual Science.
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| 187. How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again?: Transformation of the Human Being in the Course of Evolution
29 Dec 1918, Dornach Tr. Alan P. Shepherd, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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| Just as Goethe did not stop at the blossom or at the green leaf, but related one to the other, so we may gain a perception that does not stop at the single form, but proceeds from form to form, with attention upon the metamorphosis. |
| 187. How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again?: Transformation of the Human Being in the Course of Evolution
29 Dec 1918, Dornach Tr. Alan P. Shepherd, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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Someone may think that the events described in connection with initiation are conjured up, as it were, by initiation itself. This would be particularly incorrect for our time. What can be described as the process of initiation, especially in our time, takes place in the soul, or in the relation of the soul to the world, for the majority of people in the world today. And they know nothing of it; it occurs unconsciously. The important fact, then, in connection with initiation is this: that some individual notices in himself an increasing consciousness of something that takes place in most other people unconsciously. That is, the difference between the initiate and the non-initiate lies in the perception of processes that most people of the present time experience as a matter of course but unconsciously. Therefore, when speaking of these things we are really speaking of something that concerns everyone more or less, especially in our time. Now I have said that from the very description of these events—that is, of what may be perceived when they are carefully followed by initiation science—from the description itself can be learnt what transformations man has gone through in the course of his development, even in historic times. We have pointed out a few features of these transformations, especially in relation to the evolution of Christianity. In our external daily life only the outer reflection of these changes is noticed, a reflection that is really hardly comprehended even by one who wants to understand and is developing the impulse in himself toward understanding. Let us consider this outer reflection, for example, in the development of the Christ concept during nearly two thousand years since the Mystery of Golgotha. If you are trying sincerely to understand, you will surely find much that is incomprehensible and you will have many questions calling for answers, unless you are willing to be superficial or to accept blindly some kind of dogma. But if you persevere, you will learn—it can even be learnt from external history—that when the Christ Impulse entered the world, a certain luminous remnant of the Gnosis still existed; and in the early centuries an effort was made to understand the Christ Impulse and its passage through the Mystery of Golgotha by the help of concepts acquired from gnosticism. These concepts contained much relating to things entirely alien to present-day concepts that come from the external world. They had much to say of the evolution of the world, of the place of Christ in this evolution, of what led to His descent to humanity and His union with the human being. Much was said also about the return of Christ to the spiritual world, which then was the beginning of the spiritual earth-world.15 In short, what the Gnosis had to say about the Mystery of Golgotha was contained in illuminating—broadly illuminating—comprehensive conceptions, the heritage of the primeval wisdom of mankind. The Church saw to it in the early centuries that the concepts of the ancient Gnosis should disappear, leaving only meager remnants that tell very little. And I have indicated to you that people are endeavoring today, wherever possible, to declare a certain world conception heretical, because it is becoming inconvenient, by saying that its intention is to warm up the ancient gnosticism—by which they think they are saying something very dreadful! Then in place of this conception of the Mystery of Golgotha there appeared another one, which recognized the fact that human concepts were becoming more and more primitive, that people were no longer able to bring to life within themselves anything of the comprehensive and illuminating teachings of the Gnosis. I told you that what remained of the Gnosis forms the beginning of the Gospel of Saint John: really nothing more than a suggestion that the Christ has some connection with the supersensibly-perceptible Logos, the Cosmic Word; that the Christ as such is the Creator of all that surrounds man, of all that man experiences. But for the rest, nothing remained but the Gospel narratives; these, to be sure, are found to contain much gnostic wisdom when they are penetrated by spiritual science, but they were not interpreted according to the Gnosis. In fact, in the early centuries they were entirely withheld from believers, reserved for the priesthood only. But from them a sort of world conception was built up that included the Mystery of Golgotha, but that was based upon the increasingly abstract ideas of the so-called cultured world—ideas with little tendency toward the spiritual. People wanted, I might say, more and more simple concepts, whose comprehension required little effort. That is the reason also for the peculiar development that has come about in Gospel interpretation. While in the earliest centuries people were fully aware that the Gospels were to be interpreted out of spiritual depths, the effort was made more and more to regard them as mere narratives of the earthly life of that Being concerning Whose cosmic connection nothing more was to be admitted—at least through human knowledge—than the beginning of the Gospel of Saint John and a few abstractions such as the Trinity abstraction and similar ones. These were culled from abstract forms, from the ancient gnostic concepts, divested of their gnostic impulse, and given to the faithful as dogma. Interpretation of the Gospels became more and more primitive. They were to become increasingly a mere narrative concerning that Being called Christ Jesus Who lived here on earth, but about Whose nature from higher, supersensible points of view people troubled themselves very little. Then it became more and more urgent to make the Gospels also available to the public; and out of this, Protestantism arose. At first this too held fast to the Gospels. And as long as a connection with the Gospel of John still existed, a connection of knowledge, there was still a sort of bond uniting individual souls with cosmic heights—heights into which one must look if one wishes to speak of the real Christ. But now not only the understanding for Saint John's Gospel disappeared more and more, but even any inclination toward it. The consequence was that a true relation to the Christ Impulse, to that Being Who lived in the body of Jesus, was altogether lost for later Protestantism, in fact, for all thinking Christendom. The Christ concept gradually faded away, since, to begin with, its interpretation was limited to a human narrative of the earthly destiny of Christ Jesus. The possibility completely vanished of having any concept of the Christ at all, because the subject was brought more and more into a materialistic channel. The human Jesus remained. Thus the Gospels were increasingly taken as mere descriptions of the human life of Jesus; and then the belief in immortality, in the divine nature, and so on, was attached to this description in very abstract form. (I spoke about the concept of belief yesterday.) It is not surprising that it gradually came about that people knew very little when the concept “Christ Jesus” was brought up. Christ was placed on one side, so to speak, and Jesus on the other, as synonyms signifying the same thing.16 And what was the inevitable consequence? It was this, that finally this description of the mere earthly life of Jesus, from which all consciousness of his connection with the Christ had vanished, also lost the essence of Jesus himself; in fact, it lost all connection with the beginnings of Christianity. For when people gradually reduced everything to the merely material Gospels, to nothing but these material Gospels, they reached the so-called Gospel criticism. And that could lead to no other result than to show that the Mystery of Golgotha and all that is related to it cannot be proved historically, because the Gospels are not historical documents. Finally the connection was lost with Jesus himself. Nothing could be proved, in the way proof is regarded by modern science. And since science was the authority, people—even theologians—gradually lost the Jesus-concept, because there are no external, historical, authenticated records. Harnack, who is a Christian theologian, even a leading one at the present time, has said: All that can be written historically about Jesus (the Gospels are not historical records) could be written on half a page… But even what can be written on half a page—the passage from Josephus, and so forth—does not hold up before modern historical research; so there is nothing left with which to prove the starting-point of Christianity. Those who have followed the development of Christianity with modern thinking could have taken no other path than that which finally led humanity away from Christ Jesus, even from Jesus. This emphasizes the necessity for seeking another path, a path of supersensible knowledge such as can be sought only through the modern spiritual life. For modern Gospel criticism and modern historical research can easily be brought forward to oppose all other ways of approaching the Christ Jesus today. They are in accord with the scientific conscience of our time, and cannot support the establishing of any historical event as the starting-point of the evolution of Christianity. Indeed, we have experienced in our time the strangely grotesque fact that Christian pastors (though Protestants, to be sure) such as Pastor Kalthoff in Bremen, have considered it their task to deny the Mystery of Golgotha altogether as historical fact, and to trace back the origin of Christianity to certain ideas that arose from the common social attitude of humanity at the beginning of the Christian era. Although Kalthoff was a Christian pastor, his preaching did not rest upon an historical Christ as the basis of his world conception or his interpretation of life. He believed that an idea had simply developed in people's heads from premises that heads contained at the beginning of the Christian era. Christian pastors without belief in a real Christ Jesus are the inevitable result. This could not have been otherwise, for it is connected with all the evolutionary impulses of which I have been speaking during these days, especially yesterday. It is absolutely necessary to keep in mind that the way to Christ Jesus in our time must be by a supersensible path, that this can only be pursued by a science which itself seeks supersensible methods, but which employs the scientific conscience of modern natural science. With regard to the modern method of finding a super-sensible path even to the Christ, it is well to bear in mind that up to our day transformations have occurred and have developed in the science and knowledge of initiation. For this reason I would like to allude once more to something to which I referred here a short time ago, but from a different point of view. We know very well in connection with these things that there needs to be understanding for the great change that occurred in more recent evolution, toward the beginning of the fifteenth century and particularly in the fifteenth century, although it was in preparation earlier than that. This is actually passed over in silence by external history. For us it marks the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, which replaced the fourth, the Greco-Latin period. Now the problem has arisen for external science (although only among a few of the more intelligent scholars), to provide an explanation for what is usually spoken of merely as the appearance of the Renaissance—and thereby characterized in a most superficial way—of the Renaissance which played its role with elemental power throughout the cultured world from the twelfth century into the fifteenth. A strange impulse, a strange longing—mentioned even by materialistic scholars—arose in the human beings themselves, that cannot be explained by external causes, but simply showed that some elemental force was heaving and surging in mankind to bring them to a certain state of soul. It is interesting and important to note the following: In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries we are still concerned with the expiring Greco-Latin period. Then the change came. At this point, then, something special had to become manifest; and what external science has discovered is exactly what did become manifest. Science took account not so much of the change as of the gradual fading-out during the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the soul-state that had been characteristic of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Science considered this very carefully, recognizing various riddles it presented. While the Renaissance was coming into being—the usual description of it stops with the external factors—something of extraordinary significance was taking place in the soul of European humanity. It was noticed that something must be dying out. Certain things were still experienced in the soul which after a time would have to be experienced differently. There was a feeling that humanity had to hurry to experience these things if they wanted to keep step with evolution, for later, after the change, they would no longer be able to experience them. It is this to which I referred at the beginning of today's lecture. What is occurring now subconsciously—when recognized, it is the process of initiation—is something constantly taking place, as I have said, in the vast majority of people. Through observation of the precept “Know thou thyself!”, a few individuals really succeed in becoming conscious of these things. There is a great difference between this event now and what took place in the human soul as an experience of the Mysteries in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, a greater difference than there was, for example, between that of the fourth epoch and that of the third epoch. A few days ago I characterized for you approximately what happened in the third post-Atlantean period when a neophyte passed through the "gate of man," then through the second stage, then the "gate of death," then still further until he became a “Christophorus.” These events, as I described them to you, occurred subconsciously, and then through initiation could be brought up into consciousness in the great majority of people in the third post-Atlantean epoch. But for the people of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the entire process had already become different. Actually it was not yet so very different in the first third of this new epoch, preceding the Mystery of Golgotha. (The fourth period began, as you know, in 747 B.C., and the Mystery of Golgotha occurred at about the end of the first third of it.) But then began a time—the Mystery of Golgotha was now an accomplished fact—a time in which a more significant change occurred in what took place in the subconscious, which could then be raised to consciousness through initiation. Up to the time, approximately, of the Mystery of Golgotha, in order to attain initiation and to pass through all the stages, it was necessary (with only a few exceptions) for a man to be chosen by one of the priest-sages connected with the Mysteries, who could make this choice by virtue of a certain discernment. This necessity gradually disappeared after the Mystery of Golgotha; initiation, although still oriented to the ancient Mysteries, was nevertheless adapted to the new conditions. There have always been Mysteries of this sort, which later passed over into the modern secret societies, where for the most part ancient ceremonies and processes of initiation are imitated, but only in abstract symbols, and they no longer affect people. Real initiation is less and less attained in them, because people do not penetrate to an experience of what is simply displayed symbolically before their eyes. There did occur, however, more and more extensively—and characteristically, just at the end of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch—initiations which were directed, I might say, from the spiritual world itself; that is, initiations in which the choice of the individual to be initiated was not made by a priest, but by the spiritual world itself. Naturally, it then had the appearance of being a self-initiation, because the guiding being was a spirit and not a man. (Of course, a man is a spirit too, but you know what I mean.) Thus, especially toward the end of the fourth post-Atlantian epoch, initiations very often took place under such direct spiritual guidance. I have previously pointed out that the initiation experienced in this way by Brunetto Latini,17 the teacher and master of Dante, is to be understood as a real initiation. You see, what Brunetto Latini related as an external occurrence of the greatest importance appears to be a tale of fiction, though a tale with a legendary character. But Brunetto Latini intended it as a description of his initiation. He describes it in somewhat the following way, and you can see how his experiences affected the whole composition and imaginative form of Dante's great poem, "The Divine Comedy." Brunetto Latini was ambassador from his native city, Florence, to the King of Castile. He tells how he was making the return journey from his ambassador's post and learned as he was approaching his native city that his party, the Guelphs, had been defeated; therefore all that had bound him to Florence had in a sense been undermined, and in his external relations he suddenly felt no ground under his feet. When such an experience is described by a man of the Dante period, we must not think of present-day conditions or of contemporary points of view. In this respect our soul-constitution has changed enormously. If in our day someone in Switzerland learns that the city of Cologne, for example, with which he has been connected for a long time, suddenly has entirely new world-relations, is governed on an entirely new basis, he does not feel—at least inwardly—that the ground has been taken from under his feet. But we must not form mental pictures of that time from our present state of mind. For a man like Brunetto Latini it was like the end of the world. His position in the world was conditioned by his connection with the world-relations of his native city. That was gone, as he learned when he approached Florence. The world in which he had worked simply no longer existed. After calling attention to these facts, he relates further that he was led into a wood, that by spiritual guidance he was brought out of the wood and led to a mountaintop which was surrounded by the whole of creation, so far as it was known to him. We perceive immediately what Brunetto Latini wishes to indicate. He had gone through life in such a way that at a certain moment when a shocking event confronted his soul, his soul-spiritual entity separated from his physical body: he went out of his physical body. He had a spiritual experience. You have here the intervention of a spiritual guide who led this man into the spiritual world, according to his karma, at a moment when he was so startled, so spiritually shocked, that the shock was able to separate his soul-spiritual entity from his physical body. Then Brunetto Latini describes how the created universe was spread out around the mountain, and how a gigantic feminine figure appeared to him on the mountain, at whose command and direction the creation round about the mountain changed and assumed other forms. We notice that Brunetto Latini speaks of this feminine figure in the way that Persephone was spoken of in the old Mystery initiations. Now the conception of Persephone had undergone a change between the time of ancient Greece and the end of the Greco-Latin period. Brunetto Latini did not describe her as the ancient Greek poets had described her, but as she existed in human souls at the end of the Greco-Latin age. Nevertheless, we may compare what an ancient Egyptian heard in initiation as the description of Isis, and what a Greek heard as the description of Persephone, with what Latini relates of this feminine figure at whose command the forms of creation transform themselves. Strong similarities are to be found here. In fact, anyone who merely observes superficially will surely assert that what Brunetto Latini says about the feminine figure and what the ancients say about Persephone is exactly the same. But it is not the same. If you look more closely, you will notice that when the ancient Greeks spoke of Persephone, or the Egyptians of Isis, they were more concerned with a description of something permeating all that is at rest, all that is enduring. Brunetto Latini's concern was to describe how a certain force, a certain impulse—the Isis impulse, the Persephone impulse—as the impulse of Natura (for that is what his figure is called) pervades everything, but in a way that sets it in motion, that constantly transforms it. That is the great difference. When Brunetto Latini saw everything changing, saw creation being transformed at the command of the Goddess Natura, the impulse was given him to practice self-knowledge in the new way—not in the easy way described by modern mystics, but in concrete details. He describes how, after beholding this ever-changing creation, he next saw the world of the human senses. He gradually learned to know the human being from without. There is a difference whether we see and describe the external world which our senses perceive in ordinary consciousness, or describe what happens in the senses, that is, what takes place within the human being. For with our ordinary consciousness we do not enter into the inner life of the senses: we only see the outer world. When we look at the senses within, we cannot describe the outer world, for we no longer see it. In the paintings of the larger dome here in our building,18 I have tried in a way adapted to our time—I will say more about this presently—to bring to effective expression this viewing of the inner being of man from the sense-world. The paintings will give you an idea of what is meant by “Know thou thyself!” in the realm of the senses. You will see clearly, for instance, that on the west side of the dome an effort has been made to capture the inner eye, the microcosmic element revealed in the inner eye. It is not what the eye sees outwardly, nor the physical part of the eye, but what is experienced inwardly when we are within the eye with soul-vision. This, of course, is only possible when we refrain from the ordinary use of our eyes as organs of external sense-perception, and perceive what is within them in the same way that at other moments we perceive the outer world through them. Brunetto Latini experienced this somewhat differently, not as it must be experienced today. He mentions it only briefly. Then he continues to penetrate from without into the essentially human within, and reaches the four temperaments. Here one learns to know man in a different way. One learns how man is affected by the interaction of melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic and sanguine impulses, and how people are differentiated externally when one of these four impulses predominates. Thereby one penetrates more deeply through the realm of the senses into the inner human being. The difference between observation of the sense realm and observation of the temperaments is that when we observe the sense realm the separate regions of the senses are sharply distinguished from one another; but through the temperaments we enter more deeply into the essentially human, where more of the universal nature of man is revealed. An attempt was made in the painting in the little dome to show at least one part, I might say, of this perception, but only one part of it, with orientation in definite directions, but again adapted to the supersensible perception of our present time. This is the way man must press forward. You see, Brunetti Latini describes his initiation step by step. Spiritual guidance underlies it. Next he arrived in a region where a man can no longer truly distinguish himself from the outer world. When he observes the realm of his senses and the realm of the temperaments, he can still make the distinction very well; but in this next region he can do so only slightly. There his being mingles with the outer world, so to speak: it is the region of the four elements. Here he experiences his own weaving within earth, water, fire, and air: how he lives with these in the universe. He no longer distinguishes very clearly between his subjective self and the outer objective world. At most he still experiences a distinction with regard to the earthly element, but with the watery, fluid element, he feels already that he is swimming in a sort of All. There was still a difference between subjective and objective, but much less definite in the experience of the temperaments than in that of the physical sense organs. Of the latter he knows that they exist in man only in the physical world, not also outside it. Brunetto Latini then describes how he went on into the region of the planets and passed through it. Afterward he came to the ocean, reaching a place that various mystics designate as the Pillars of Hercules. Now that the precept “Know thou thyself!” had brought him to the Pillars of Hercules, he went out beyond them. He was now prepared to receive enlightenment about the supersensible world. For the mystic, especially the mystic in that time of which I am now speaking, the Pillars of Hercules are the experience through which a man goes out of himself more completely than through the four elements or the planets. He enters the outer spiritual world, whose concrete beings reveal themselves only at the third stage of initiation. In the first stage, which Brunetto Latini is describing here, he enters the spiritual world as a widely extending ocean, a universal spirituality. Latini then goes on to tell how a strong temptation came to him—inevitable, of course, at this point. He describes it very concretely: how he was faced with the necessity of forming new conceptions of good and evil, because what had enlightened him about them while he was in the sense world was useless here. He then tells how he reached these new conceptions and thereby became a different man, how he became a participant in the spiritual world from experiencing all these things. We see quite clearly from his description how at that time, the end of the Greco-Latin period, the human being was led by a spiritual being out of the physical world into the supersensible world. Let us keep this description in mind. Even in the external development of humanity it had the immensely significant effect of inspiring Dante, Latini's pupil, for the Divina Commedia. If we remember that what Latini described was a typical initiation, that he actually described what was taking place in the subconscious of humanity at that particular time, and that it could also be attained through a real initiation, then we will understand what existed as soul-constitution when the fourth post-Atlantean epoch was dying out. Now it will be important to ask what changes have occurred since, within a rather brief space of time. For what I have described is not very far in the past, only a few centuries. In this short period, what changes have taken place in the experience that humanity goes through subconsciously, which rises up into consciousness through initiation? Certainly, my dear friends, the higher the stages of initiation that a man attains, the more do the important elements of the earlier stages disappear from his vision. But one must carefully consider what is significant in the first stages. For these first stages represent precisely what is taking place in the depths of the majority of human souls, even though they neither know it nor have any desire to know it through spiritual science, not to mention initiation. It is very important to give attention to the following example: I said that Brunetto Latini describes how he was brought before the Goddess Natura. Then he passed through certain stages: through the senses, the temperaments, the elements, the planets, the ocean. There, at the Pillars of Hercules, he was already at the boundary of the essentially human. Then, in the ocean, he passed over into what was spread out before him. And now there was not even the condition that had prevailed with the elements, when he could not distinguish himself. Now he had lost himself, in a certain sense, and simply floated in the ocean of existence. The Pillars of Hercules later play a prominent role in symbolism as the pillars of Joachim and Boaz.19 In this connection it should be noted that in the secret societies of the present time these pillars can no longer be erected in the right way. They should no longer be erected, because the correct way is only revealed in a truly inwardly-experienced initiation. Besides, they cannot be set up in space, as they are revealed in reality when the human being leaves his body. In what has now been given, you have the pattern—if I may use a prosaic expression—the pattern of events experienced at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, experienced also by those who went through initiation in the same way as Brunetto Latini, the teacher of Dante. This may be compared with what takes place today in the depths of men's souls. And indeed, it is not so very different. If, however, an individual in our time should wish at the first stage of initiation to approach the created universe directly, as revealed to him by the still-existing, gigantic feminine figure, the Goddess Natura, and should wish to be under her guidance, then his supersensible path only begins in the created universe. If an individual in our time should wish to enter into the senses directly, he would be very much in the dark in this realm. He would not have proper illumination, and would be unable to distinguish anything adequately. The point is that today it is necessary to go through another experience before approaching the sense-region, for only this makes it then possible to penetrate into the sense-region in the right way. I mentioned this experience yesterday. It consists simply in the ability to see the spiritually ideal as external reality in the metamorphosis of forms in this world. Thus, before entering into the sense-region one should endeavor to study the metamorphosis of forms in the outer world. Goethe gave only the first elements, but he did provide the method. As I have said, further study of the metamorphosis which Goethe discovered with regard to plants, and with regard to the skeleton in the animal kingdom, reveals the fact that our head points to our previous earth-life and our limb-organization to our coming earth-life. Thus, a necessary preparation for initiation at the present time is the ability not to think of the world as a finished static formation, but to see in whatever form lies before us an indication toward another form. At the very beginning of my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, you will find the essential facts for developing this kind of perception in the way best suited to our time. If you follow the instructions given there correctly, you will have the experience when you meet another human being that something like a picture of his previous incarnation will flash out of his head to you. You cannot help sensing in his head something of the form of his previous incarnation. If you follow him as he walks and notice how he puts his feet down and swings his arms, or if you are facing him and observe the gestures of his arms and hands, you will get a feeling of the way his body will be built in the next incarnation. Therefore I often said in public lectures years ago: the idea of repeated earth lives is really not so bad that materialism needs to oppose it so vigorously. If only a few things were understood about the human form, the idea of repeated earth lives would not make materialism bristle with opposition. For these things are obvious. If you are a phrenologist, for example—not by profession, but with experienced insight—then by means of the skull you are really inquiring into the form of the previous incarnation; it is quite obviously the previous incarnation. We must of course extend the metamorphosis aspect, the metamorphosis view of life into this region. We must acquire—I have often spoken of this from the social point of view—such a strong interest in the individual human being that something of a sense of his former incarnation flashes out of his skull to us. This is because the skull is in a certain sense the transformed human being of the earlier incarnation, especially with regard to the forms of the face and head. Thus we acquire a view of the world that does not stop at one form. Just as Goethe did not stop at the blossom or at the green leaf, but related one to the other, so we may gain a perception that does not stop at the single form, but proceeds from form to form, with attention upon the metamorphosis. I sought to arouse a feeling for this by applying it to our work on the pillars in the Goetheanum: in the transition from one capital to the next and on to the succeeding ones, and in the successive development of the architraves. It was all carved according to this principle of metamorphosis. Whoever looks at the sequence of the pillars in this building of ours, will have a picture of the flexible soul-attitude one must maintain toward the outer world. If someone will complete this first step which is necessary for present humanity, and which will still be necessary for a long time for future humanity, if he will find his way to a real, inner understanding of the emergence of the second column from the first—in pedestal, capital, and architrave, of the third from the second, and so on, then in this understanding he will have a starting-point from which to press forward (in accordance with present possibilities) into the inner nature of the sense-region. Thus, something connected with the present principle of initiation is preserved below in the pillars; and above in the domes, something else is connected with it. From this point, things proceed somewhat differently. At the time of Brunetto Latini, then, a man was spared what we shall call here the metamorphosis of life, after which one enters the region of the senses. If we presented the matter in outline, we might say: in Brunetto Latini's time a man could still enter directly into the eye (let us take the eye as representative), and feel this to be the first region. Today, we have first to concern ourselves with what envelops man. The metamorphoses of life are expressed in the sheath that covers the region of the senses externally. It lies in front of the senses and we must consciously pass through it. Also today, the human being passes through the regions of the senses, the temperaments, the elements, and the planets. Then, however, before he goes through the Pillars of Hercules into the open ocean of spirituality, he confronts a barrier. Here, (see tabulation below) something stands in the way, something is introduced that in Brunetto Latini's time did not need to be experienced.
This is not easy to describe because, of course, these things belong to intimate and subtle realms of human experience. Yet perhaps it may be done by referring again to Brunetto Latini. Latini experienced, as the first sign of his guidance by a spiritual being, the information that his native city was ruined. That was, to be sure, an event that affected Latini's inner being; nevertheless, it was external as to the facts involved. It invaded him from the outer world. It shocked him so greatly that his soul-and-spirit being left his physical body. Later he described the event as something that entered his life, something that happened in his life. We may say that he described it, though not consciously, as an event of destiny that came to him. Such an event, or a similar one, must be experienced today in full consciousness by anyone undergoing initiation. (You will find reference to this at the proper place in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.) But it must be an inner experience for him: not one in connection with the external world, as in the case of Brunetto Latini, but an experience he goes through inwardly, something that has a deeply transforming effect upon him. There are, of course, such events in the lives of the majority of people, but they get scant attention. Someone who truly observes his life will be able to see that there are events in it of the utmost significance, and especially one such event. Just try to look back upon such a happening in your life, not for its outer significance but for the inner change it produced. There is one thing to which attention should really be given: that is, that such events in people's lives are not taken seriously enough. They could be felt much more profoundly; they could have a far deeper and more noticeable effect in life than they do have today. A human being can reach a deeper understanding of many things in his life, simply through a kind of general thoughtfulness. If he maintains the usual human attitude, he will not get beyond a certain superficiality in his experiencing of events of the very greatest importance. For their full import cannot really be recognized by the ordinary consciousness. The human being must first go through the other stages; after he has experienced the metamorphosis of life, the regions of the senses, the temperaments, the elements, and the planets, then—having become a radically changed human being—he penetrates to his real depths. For now he has recognized that he belongs not only to the earth but to the heavenly worlds, to the planetary regions. Only now will he rightly recognize the significance of certain experiences he has had, which were of the very first importance. Only now will he understand what such an experience signifies for himself and for the world. When he has gone through all this, he will inevitably discover the most important event of his life. When he arrives at this place, before going out into the wide ocean of spirituality, unless he is a marked egotist and knows nothing else in the world but himself, he cannot fail to consider seriously this earlier happening. Before he goes out into the ocean of spirituality, this event appears before his soul in full force—it simply thrusts itself upon him. And at this point in his inner experience it has extraordinarily great significance. It means that only now can he go out into the immeasurable ocean of spirituality. It means that through this experience he can attain a certain center of gravity. I mean to say: After he has recognized himself as a citizen of the planetary world, if—in present spiritual conditions—he should simply launch out into the ocean of spirituality, he would find himself in a sea of surging waves, would nowhere feel sure of himself, would be tossed about in all kinds of spiritual experiences, would have no inner center of gravity. He must find this inner center of gravity by really experiencing with inner intensity the most important event of all, and in it inwardly experiencing himself. This will not as a rule take place in a realm of mere egotism, but will be of general human significance. It can be said today, if we express the facts quite exactly: the most momentous event in a man's life, the one that while it is being experienced affects the profoundest depths of his being, must come before him at the Pillars of Hercules before he passes through them. At this point in his life he feels a very special deepening of his being. Something comes over him of which we may say that it brings the objective world into his inner being. Something comes to him that can be described as follows: Even though, in spite of this experience, he may naturally fall back occasionally into an acceptance of life in the light of his ordinary consciousness, even though he may not be able to maintain at every step in his life this newly created soul-mood, yet, once it has been experienced, there will be moments again and again connected with it. For it would not be at all good for the human being to lose this soul-mood entirely after having once experienced it. What is meant by this mood may be characterized in somewhat the following way. In this matter, dear friends, we should be honest and admit that for our ordinary consciousness it does hold good that, however selfless a man may be, still the most important things for him, at least relatively, are those that occur inside his skin. What occurs inside one's skin is more important for our ordinary consciousness, as a rule, than what occurs outside of it. But the soul-mood that is to be created at one's entrance to the ocean of spirituality, so that it may be retained at least for the important moments of life, is the realization that there may be external things which do not concern the person subjectively at all, but in which he participates just as intensely as in the things that do concern him subjectively. Today an individual has abundant opportunity to prepare himself well, if he will, for the soul-mood indicated. For if he enters into a true understanding of nature—not a subjective study or anything of the kind—if he tries to start from this true understanding, then much of the mood is already created. But it must be produced at this stage in the way I have described. Then if the individual can have this mood, if he can experience deeply the most important event of his life just as it happened, then at least for many moments in his life he can have this mood of objectivity that I have described, in which something external can be as important to him as something within himself, in which it is true that something outside can be as important as something within. (Many persons make this assertion but they are deceiving themselves.) In attaining this, however, the individual has at the same time acquired a center of gravity, a direction—perhaps I could better say, a compass, that will enable him really to push out on the ocean of spiritual life. That is to say, at this point ( + in the tabulation) there must occur what may be called becoming equipped with the instrument for direction. Thus a man enters the Pillars of Hercules equipped with the instrument for orientation, the compass. Only then—that is, after he has had more experience—can present-day man start out toward spirituality. You can see from the instances I have described—the initiation of Brunetto Latini, and the changes in initiation up to our time, changes which will prevail for a long period—you can see that if we want to present the nature of man in the light of initiation science, it is even possible to present it as it is undergoing the process of transformation during short periods. But all that is so described is really happening within man. This is the important fact characterizing the change that the human soul-mood has been undergoing in the course of these centuries. But people fail to notice this and only a reflection of it is to be seen in external life. In the age of Brunetto Latini, whose pupil was Dante, people were the same kind of Christians as Dante: the whole heavenly world passed through their souls when they felt themselves to be true Christians. In our age there is no such forward jump; we hardly move. We must therefore have the experience of a region before that of the senses, before we go out again—so that we may enter the region we had formerly known from outside, but now enter it in a different way: before detaching ourselves further from the body, enter the region changed in our being, and taking our direction from a new instrument. The outer reflection of this process has been so altered in our time that the most thoughtful people, the very ones who are equipped with the scientific consciousness of our time—which, however, lacks this compass, really does not have it—these people have lost the Christ Jesus. He can no longer be "proved" by the means that are today called scientific. And religion itself, the Christian religion, has sunk into materialism. One of the most telling examples of the tendency toward materialism in Roman Catholicism has been the establishment of the dogma of infallibility, a purely materialistic measure. I spoke of this some time ago. Now you might say: In spite of all that, if one looks into the inner being of man, the jump forward can be seen! Man is indeed in his essential being somewhat outside the region of the senses; but on the other hand he has a sort of cavity in which the most important event of his life unconsciously exerts an influence upon his whole organism, so that his experience can then be such as I have described. For although a man may be totally unaware of it, it does have an influence upon him, and it can come to expression in the most varied ways. Perhaps one person, seven years after experiencing this event, will become an intolerable fellow, or commit all sorts of infamous deeds; another may fall in love—he need not do so immediately; or the falling in love may itself be the most important event; a third may suddenly have gall stones; and so on. When the event remains in the unconscious, the fact can come to expression in everyday life in the most diverse ways. What enters into the consciousness in the way I have described appears thus in the inner being of man; in outer life it appears in such a way that besides much else (I mention only one result) he loses the Christ Jesus. You may say: Then what appears in the inner man to a certain extent as something flowing inward from his body, has outwardly anything but a gratifying result! This, however, is only apparent. Everything in the world has two sides. From about the middle and during the last third of the nineteenth century there was theoretical materialism: the big fellow Vogt of Geneva, Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner—these were all theoretical materialists. Clifford was the first to express the opinion that the brain exudes thoughts just as the liver exudes bile. That is, Clifford saw in the formation of thoughts a purely material process: as bile comes from the liver, so thoughts come from the brain. That materialistic age saw only matter, but at least they thought about matter. They thought about matter, and we can look at this in two ways. In our time we can read the books of Clifford, of Ludwig Buchner, or if you like, August Comte, Vogt of Geneva, and so on. If we develop likes or dislikes from such reading, we may be fearfully angry that people see in the creation of thoughts only an excretion of the brain, and we may take it very much to heart. Very well, if we are not materialists, we may feel that way. But we may also look at it differently. We may say to ourselves: Nonsense! what Clifford and Comte and Vogt of Geneva, what they've all said about the world is tommyrot; I am not interested in it. But I will look into what goes on in the thinking process itself of Vogt and Clifford and Comte. What they tell of their thoughts—for instance, that thoughts are merely exuded from the brain as bile is from the liver—that is plain tommyrot! I shall not concern myself with what Vogt says, but with the way he thinks. If we can do that, something remarkable comes to light. We see that the kind of thinking those persons have developed is the germ of a very far-reaching spirituality. The thoughts are so terribly thin in substance because they are only reflected images, as I explained day before yesterday. They are thinner than thin because they are only images. They are so tenuous that the man must exert a tremendous spirituality to think at all, and to prevent his thoughts from sinking down and being laid hold of by the merely material element of existence. As a matter of fact, thinking is very frequently laid hold of by this material element nowadays; it does sink down. I am even convinced that the majority of today's materially-minded people, if they had not been drilled in school, and had not crammed at the universities to pass exams, and had not swallowed materialism because their professors required it as the correct world conception—I am convinced that the majority of these people would then have been spared the thinking that must be employed for the materialistic world-view. They would much rather not think! Most of them would rather go to the duelling-grounds or to fraternity jamborees than use their minds. And they simply repeat what they have heard. If you would once make the attempt to study all of the genuine, recognized “wisdom” relating just to matter written by the Monists—as the materialists now call themselves rather elegantly, who as members of monistic societies go about the world making long speeches—if you would study what they have actually thought, you would find it is precious little! For the most part they merely repeat what others have said. Actually only a few authorities have established materialism; the rest only repeat—for the simple reason that a vigorous effort of the spirit is necessary to sustain modern scientific thinking. The effort is a spiritual one, and is truly not exuded from the brain as bile is from the liver. It is a spiritual effort, and a good preparation for rising to spiritual things. To have thought honestly in a materialistic way, but to have done this thinking oneself, is good preparation for entrance into the spiritual world. I expressed this once in a lecture in Berlin, by saying that someone who only reads Haeckel's books—unless he notices much that can easily be read between the lines—quickly recognizes in him, of course, a materialist of the first water. But if he talks with Haeckel, he notices that all his thinking, so far as it is materialistic, only assumes this form really on account of the prejudices of the times; that even as Haeckel is now, his thinking already tends toward the spiritual. I said in that lecture: We understand Haeckel correctly, therefore, when we know that theoretically, as it were, he has that materialistic soul, but that he has another soul, one that tends toward the spiritual. Here among ourselves I can say that in the next incarnation that soul will quite certainly be reborn with a strong spirituality. The stenographer who was officially employed by us for that lecture, a typical professional stenographer, wrote that I had said Haeckel had a spiritistic soul in spite of materialism! You see, what I want to point out is that we may certainly combat what appears as a materialistic mode of thought; indeed, it cannot be combated strongly enough, for in the very combat lies a further development toward the spiritual. But this mode of thought does contain the essence of spirituality. And with souls who today, merely under the influence of external theology, have come to a Christ concept that is totally external, or one that is utterly untrue, there are faculties developing in a spiritual direction, faculties that will impel these souls to seek a Christ concept in the future. This is not to be taken as an invitation to ease! We are not to say: Oh, well, then it will come in time, the spiritual view will come all right, for the big Vogt fellow and Clifford and the others have made good preparation. Those who know the darkness that materialism signifies must work together to combat it. For the strength used in this fight is necessary to build up the disposition to spirituality in the theoretical materialists. You see how complicated things are, what different sides they have. Only when we try through initiation science to penetrate into the depths of the world, do we acquire a profound knowledge of the human being. Only then do we penetrate to what is working in the depths of human nature.
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| 258. The Anthroposophic Movement (1938): The Future of the Anthroposophical Society
17 Jun 1923, Dornach Tr. Ethel Bowen-Wedgwood Rudolf Steiner |
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| And this was most strikingly apparent when one started out from something which Goethe was only able to indicate pictorially,—half symbolically, one might say; when one started out, namely, from his Story of the Green Serpent and the Lovely Lily,2 through which he wished to show how spirit, spiritual agencies, are at work in the evolution of the world, and how the several spheres of the True, the Beautiful, the Good, work together, and that they are actual Spiritual beings one must grasp, not mere abstractions of the mind, if one wants to arrive at a view of the actual life of spirit. |
| 258. The Anthroposophic Movement (1938): The Future of the Anthroposophical Society
17 Jun 1923, Dornach Tr. Ethel Bowen-Wedgwood Rudolf Steiner |
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To-day we must bring our observations to a sort of conclusion; and the natural and proper conclusion of them will of course be, as I indicated yesterday, to consider the necessary consequence to be drawn for the conduct of the Anthroposophical Society in the future. In order to form a clearer notion of what this conduct should be, let us just look back once more and see how Anthroposophy has grown up out of the whole modern civilization of the day. You will have seen from the course of our observations during this past week, that in a way the public for Anthroposophy had necessarily to be sought in the first place amongst those circles where a strong impulse had been given towards a deepening of the spiritual life. This impulse came, of course, from many different quarters. But here one needed to look no further for the main impulse for these homeless souls, than to the things which Blavatsky, so to speak, delivered as riddles to this modern age.—Well, we have discussed all that. If, however, we must go back to this in the first place as the impulse for the Anthroposophical Society, on the other hand it must also have been plain, that for Anthroposophy itself such an impulse, or this particular impulse, was not the essential matter; for Anthroposophy itself goes back to other sources. And although—for the very reason that its public happened to come in the way I said—Anthroposophy at first employed outward forms of expression—even for its own wealth of wisdom—that were terms already familiar to these homeless souls, as coming from the quarter connected with Blavatsky,—yet these were just outward forms of expression. If you go back to my own first writings, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Mysticism at the Dawn of the New Age of Thought, you will see, that in reality these writings are in no way traceable to anything whatever coming from Blavatsky, or indeed from that quarter at all, with this one exception of the fact, that the outward forms of expression have been selected incidentally with a view to finding understanding. One must distinguish, therefore, between what was actual spiritual substance, flowing all through the anthroposophic movement, and what were outward forms of expression, incidentally required by the conditions of the time. That mistakes can arise on this point is simply due to the fact, that people at the present day are so disinclined to go back from the form of outward expression to what is the real heart of the matter.—Anthroposophy can be traced back in a straight line to the note already struck in my Philosophy of Freedom (though then in a philosophic form),—to the note struck in my Goethe writings of the 'eighties. If you take what is in these writings on Goethe and in the Philosophy of Freedom, the dominant note struck in them is this: That Man, in the innermost part of his being is in connection with a spiritual world; that therefore, if only he looks deep enough back into his own being, he comes to something within himself to which the usual natural science of that day, and also of this, is unable to penetrate, and which can only be contemplated as direct part of a spiritual world-order. And in face of the terrible, what I might call spiritual chaos of language which this modern civilization has created in all countries, it might really be recognized as inevitable, if one was sometimes obliged to have recourse to what sounded paradoxical terms of expression. And so I let glimmer faintly, so to speak, through these Goethe writings, that when one rises from contemplation of the world to contemplation of divine spirit, it is necessary to introduce a modification in the idea of Love. Already in these writings on Goethe, I indicated, that the Divinity must be conceived as having shed Itself abroad in infinite love through all existence, and that it has now to be sought in each particular existence;—which leads to something totally different from a confused pantheism.—Only, at that date, there was absolutely no possibility in any way of finding what one might call a philosophic ‘point of connection’. For, easy as it would have been to gain a hearing for a spiritual world-conception such as this, had the age possessed any philosophic ideas on to which to connect, it was equally difficult with the sort of warmed-up Kantianism that at that time existed,—with this sort of philosophy, it was difficult to find any point of connection. And accordingly it was necessary to seek this point of connection in a fuller, more intensive stream of life, in a spiritual life inwardly saturated, so to speak, with spiritual substance.— And this kind of spiritual life was just what one found manifested in Goethe. And therefore, when I had first had to make public these particular ideas, I could not connect-on with a Theory of Cognition to what was then to be found in the civilization of the day: one had to connect-on to the world-conception of Goethe; and by aid of this Goetheistic world-conception it became possible to take the first step into the spiritual world. In Goethe, one finds two doors which in a way open into the spiritual world,—which, to a certain degree, give access to it. One finds the first of these doors at the point where one enters upon the study of Goethe's natural-science works. For with the scientific conception of nature which Goethe worked out, he was able, within the bounds of the vegetable-world, to overcome just that disease under which the whole of modern natural science down to this day is suffering. He succeeded in putting living, flexible ideas in place of the dead and dried ones, for the observation of the vegetable-world. And then it was possible to go further, and indicate at any rate ... even though Goethe himself failed with his theory of metamorphosis when he came to the animal king-dom, still it was at any rate possible to indicate a prospect that a similar, only intensified, method of observation, not worked out so far by Goethe, might be applied to the animal kingdom as well. And in my book, Goethe's World-Conception,1 I tried to show how it was possible—only as a sketch to begin with—to push on as far as history, as far as historic life, with the live and live-making ideas from the source.—That was the first door. Now, in Goethe, one finds no direct line of continuance leading on from this starting-point into the actual spiritual world; from this starting-point one can only work on, as it were, to a certain definite level. And whilst thus working one has the feeling then of grasping the sensible world in a spiritual fashion. When employing Goethe's method, one is moving, rightly speaking, in a spiritual element. And though one is applying this method to the sensible plant-world, or the sensible animal-world, one grasps by this method the spiritual element living and weaving in the plant or in the animal-world. But Goethe had another door besides in contemplation. And this was most strikingly apparent when one started out from something which Goethe was only able to indicate pictorially,—half symbolically, one might say; when one started out, namely, from his Story of the Green Serpent and the Lovely Lily,2 through which he wished to show how spirit, spiritual agencies, are at work in the evolution of the world, and how the several spheres of the True, the Beautiful, the Good, work together, and that they are actual Spiritual beings one must grasp, not mere abstractions of the mind, if one wants to arrive at a view of the actual life of spirit. The possibility therefore existed, of connecting-on, to begin with, to this point in Goethe's world conception. Rut then, however, there followed a very particular necessity. For there is one thing above all, you see, which must necessarily present itself to anybody to-day, when it is a question of a world-conception for these homeless souls; and that is the moral and ethical problem, the moral conduct of life. 1 ‘Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung.’ ‘Cognitive Theory of Goethe's World-Conception.’ 2 See: ‘Goethes Geistesart in ihrer Offenbarung usw.’
In those old times, when men arrived by original clairvoyance at their view of the divine spirit-world, it was, then, a matter-of-course that this divine spiritual world, of which men could rise to a view, was the source of their ethical impulses also. If we look back to very old periods of human evolution, we find a state of things in which, when Man gazed up, say in the good old times, in his first primitive clairvoyance, to the world of Divine Spirit above him, he beheld on the one hand, those living Beings, those Powers, who rule the phenomena of the natural world; and in the phenomena of the natural world, in the workings of wind and weather, in the workings of earth, in mechanic workings, this man of a primal age could see the continuance, the prolongation of what he beheld in the divine spirit-world. But at the same time he could receive from this divine spirit-world the impulses for his own actions. This is the peculiar thing about the old world-conceptions, which still went along with a primitive clairvoyance, that, if we take, say, the Ancient Egyptian Age, men looked up to the skies in order to learn the workings of the earth, even to learn what they needed to know about the flooding of the Nile; they looked up to the stars; and from the courses of the stars, from the laws of the stars in their courses, they deduced what concerned them for the earth-world,—I mean, for the order of Nature in the earth-world. And in the same way, too, these people calculated—if I may use the expression—what the impulses should be for ethical life. The impulses of ethical life, too, were drawn from observation of the stars. And if we then look at things as they are now in recent times, we shall say: Observation of the stars is now carried on in its mathematical aspect only; which amounts to nothing more, than that men carry the mathematics of earth up into the stars of heaven. And they look on earth, and find on the earth what are called ‘laws of nature’. Well, these ‘laws of nature’, which Goethe found, too, in his time, and which he converted into live ideas,—these ‘laws of nature’ have a certain peculiarity, directly it comes to a view of the world,—to a world-conception. The peculiarity namely is this: that Man,—to go by the laws of nature,—is himself excluded from the World,—that he then, in his own truest, most characteristic being as Man, has no longer any place in the World. Picture to yourselves the old world-conceptions and how it was there. On the one side we have the world of Divine Spirit. This world of Divine Spirit permeated the phenomena of the natural world. People discovered laws for the natural phenomena; but these laws were recognized as being a kind of reflection from the action of Divine Spirit in the world of Nature. And Man, too, was also there. The same divine spirit-world shed its rays into Man. And so Man had his place within the whole order of the world. He derived, so to speak, the substance of which he was made from the same divine spiritual element of which the substance of the natural world was made.—What happened then?—My dear friends, what then happened, is something that one must regard in all its gravity; for what happened was, that, in a sort of way, a cut was made by natural science across the link that joined the world of Nature to the world of the Divine. The Divine is gone,—gone from the world of Nature. And in the world of Nature the reflections of Divine action are statuated as natural laws, and people speak of ‘laws of Nature’. To the people of old, these Laws of Nature were the Thoughts of Cod. To the men of to-day they are still of course thoughts, for one has to comprehend them by thoughts; but the explanation lies somehow or other in the phenomena of Nature, which of course are themselves contained under the laws of Nature:—law of gravitation, law of the refraction of light, and all these fine things,—these are what people talk of to-day. But all these things have nothing whatever underneath them, or rather, nothing whatever above them; for there is no sense in talking of all these laws; unless one can talk of them as reflections from the Divine Spirit's action in the natural world. This is what is felt by minds of greater depth, by homeless souls, in all the talk of the present day about Nature: they feel, with these people who talk about Nature, that one might rightly apply to them the words of Goethe,—or, more correctly, the words of Mephisto: they ‘laugh at themselves, and never know it’.1 People talk of laws of Nature, but these laws of Nature are what has been left behind from the views of the men of old. Only, the views of the men of old had something else beside these laws of Nature, something, namely, that made these laws of Nature possible. Suppose for a moment that you have a rose-bush. You can always go on having roses from this rose-bush. When the old roses wither, new ones grow again. But if you pick the roses and let the rose-bush die, you cannot still go on having new roses. But this is just what happened with the science of nature. A rose-bush was once there; it had its roots in God. The laws which men found in the natural world, were the separ-ate roses. These laws, men have picked; they have picked the roses; the rose-bush they have let die. And so we have now in the laws of Nature, something that remains like roses without a rose-bush. And people are blind to it; they have no notion of it in their heads, upon which they set such store in these days. But those people, who are homeless souls, have a very strong notion of it in their hearts: for they can make nothing of these laws of Nature; they feel: These laws of Nature are withered: they shrivel up, when one tries to look at them as a human being. And so the men of modern times, in so far as they can feel, in so far as they have hearts in their bodies, suffer unconsciously under an impression: ‘They tell us about Nature; but what they tell us withers in our grasp; indeed, it withers us, ourselves, as human beings.’ And mankind is compelled to accept this as pure truth. Mankind is compelled by fearful force of authority to believe,—whilst in their hearts they feel, that the roses wither, they are compelled to the belief that these roses are the eternal living World-Beings. And people talk about World-Laws! The phenomena pass away, the laws abide for ever!—Natural science, this ‘science of Nature’, ... since what Man is seeking to express as his own consciousness of Human Self is Anthroposophy, then natural Science is,—Anti-Anthroposophy! But let us look at the other side of it, at the ethical and moral side. The impulses of ethical and moral life came from the same divine source; but just as men had made withered roses of the laws of nature, so they made withered roses of the ethical impulses. The roots were everywhere gone; and so the ethical impulses went fluttering about the civilized world as moral commandments and customs, of which nobody knew the root. How could people possibly help feeling, ‘The moral commandments and customs are there;—but the divine origin is not there.’ And now arose the inevitable question: ‘Yes!—but what is to come of it, if these customs and commandments are not obeyed? It will come to chaos and anarchy in human society! ‘Whilst on the other side, again, there was this question: ‘What is the force of these commandments? What is at the root of them?’—Here, too, people felt this same withering and drying-up. 1 He has the bits then all in his hand: —One thing, alas! is missing however: The bond of the spirit to hold them together!
Laughs at itself, and never knows it! (‘Faust’ I.) That, you see, became the great question. That came to be the question, which arose out of Goetheanism, but to which Goetheanism, in itself, could give no answer. Goethe gave, so to speak, two starting points, which converged upon one another, but did not meet. What is wanted,—what was wanted,—is the Philosophy of Freedom. It needed to be shown that Man himself is the seat of the divine impulse, since in Man lies the power to go to the grounds of the spiritual principle both of the natural, as well as the spiritual principle of the moral law. This led to the intuitionalism of the Philosophy of Freedom; it led to what people termed ethical individualism; ‘ethical individualism’, because in each single human individual was shown to reside the source of the ethical impulses,—in that Divine First Principle to which every man in the innermost part of his being is united. Now that the age had begun, when the laws of Nature on one hand, and on the other, the moral commandments, had lost all life for men, because the Divine Principle was no longer to be found in the external world—(it could be no otherwise in the age of freedom!)—it was now in Man for we meet with Man in the first place in individual form ... it became now necessary to look in Man for the Divine Principle. And with this, one has reached a world-conception which,—if you only consider it clearly, you will see,—leads on in straight continuation to what to-day we call Anthroposophy. Suppose ... it is rather a primitive sketch, but it will do! ... that these are men. (Sketch in coloured chalks on the blackboard.) These men are connected in the inmost part of their being to a divine spiritual principle. This divine spiritual principle assumes the form of a divine, spiritual order in the world. And by looking at the inside of all men, conjunctively, one penetrates, now, to the divine spiritual principle, as, in old days, one penetrated to the divine spiritual principle when one looked outside one, and by primitive clairvoyance discovered the divine spiritual principle in the outer phenomena. What had to be done then, was to follow up what was given by Goethe's world-conception on the one hand, and, on the other, by the sheer necessities of human evolution at the end of the nineteenth century; and so push on to the spiritual principle;—not to push on by any external, materialistic means, but by actual direct apprehension of Man's essential being. Well, with this, the foundations were really laid of Anthroposophy,—if one looks at the matter in life and not in theory. For if anybody were to suggest that the Philosophy of Freedom is very far short of being Anthroposophy, it must seem to one exactly as though somebody said: ‘There was once a Goethe. This Goethe wrote all sorts of works. By “ Goethe ” we understand to-day the creator of Goethe's works.'—And another person were to answer, ‘That's not a logical sequence; for in 1749 there was a baby in Frankfort-on-Main; the baby indeed was quite black at its birth, and they said it couldn't live. If one considers this baby, and all the circumstances connected with it, it is impossible, logically, to deduce the whole of these “Goethe” Works. It is inconsequent:—one must trace Goethe back to his origin. And see whether you can discover Faust in the black-and-blue little boy who was born in 1749 at Frankfort-on-Main!’ You will agree that it is not very sensible to talk like this; but it is just as little sensible to say that Anthroposophy cannot logically follow from the Philosophy of Freedom. The black little baby in Frankfort went on living, and from its life proceeded all that to-day lives in the world's evolution as Goethe. And the Philosophy of Freedom had to go on living; and then, out of it, proceeded Anthroposophy. Just think what it would be if, instead of actual life, there were to come a professor of philosophic logic, and say that everything which is in East and Wilhelm Meister, etc., must be deduced logically from the blue-and-black little boy of 1749! Do you think he would be able to deduce anything? By no means! He would only demonstrate contradictions—terrible contradictions! ‘I can't make the two things agree! ‘he would say; ‘I find no sequence between this Faust, as written at some time by somebody or other, and the blue-black little boy, as he existed in Frankfort-on-Main.’ And so, too, say the people who deal in fusty book-worm-logic, not in life: ‘From the Philosophy of freedom there is no logical sequence to Anthroposophy.’—Well, my dear friends, if the sequence had been a logical one, then you might have seen how all the schoolmasters would have been busy in 1894, deducing Anthroposophy from the Philosophy of Freedom! They just did nothing of the kind! And afterwards they come, and confess that they cannot deduce it, that they can't bring the two together; and make out a contradiction between what came after and what went before.—The fact is that people in these days have absolutely no capacity,—at a time when so-called logic is cultivated, and philosophy, and such things,—they have absolutely no capacity for entering into real life, for observing what is springing and sprouting up around them, and has more in it than can be seen by the pedantry of logicians. The first thing to be done, then, in the next place, was to come to relations with all that was pushing its way up, so to speak, out of the present life of the day towards a progressive development of human civilization. Well, as you know, I tried to do this by picking out two very striking and remarkable instances as subjects for discussion.—The first of these was Nietzsche. Why this particular case should he chosen will be obvious to you from what has gone before. For Nietzsche, namely, presented a personality on the top-surface of the modern stream of civilization, who had grown into the whole evolutionary tendency of world-conception at the present day, and who, in opposition to all the rest, was honest. What did all the rest say? What did one find to be the general verdict, so to speak, in the 'nineties of the nineteenth century. The general verdict amounted to this:—Natural science must, of course, be right. Natural science, as constituted, is the great authority. We take our stand on the abiding ground of Natural science and peep up at the stars.—Well, of course as a leading instance, even before this, there was the conversation between Napoleon and the famous astronomer Laplace. Napoleon could not understand how, by looking up at the stars with a telescope, one can find God. And the astronomer replied: ‘I do not need the hypothesis’.Of course he didn't need such an hypothesis to see the heavens and their stars with a telescope. But he needed it, the moment he wished to be a man. But the sight of the heavens and the stars with a telescope gave man's own nature nothing, absolutely nothing. The heavens were full of stars; but they were stars of the senses. Otherwise they were empty. And men looked through the microscope as far as ever one can see, into the tiniest life-germ, into the tiniest part of a life-germ, and ever further. And the microscope was made more perfect, and more perfect still. But the soul they didn't find. They might look never so long into the microscope; it was empty of any soul. There was nothing there, either of soul or spirit. Neither in the stars was there anything of soul or spirit; nor under the microscope could they find any soul or spirit. And so it went on. And with this Nietzsche found himself faced.—What did the rest of them say?—They said: ‘Oh, well, one looks through the telescope at the stars, and one sees so many worlds of the senses,—nothing else. But then we have a religious life, a religion, and this tells us that there is a spirit all the same.’ David Friedrich Strauss may talk as much as he pleases and ask at the end: ‘Where, then, is this spirit to be found along any scientific road!’ We stand by the fact, that in the writings handed down to us they talk of the Spirit all the same. We don't find him anywhere, it is true; but nevertheless we believe 1 ‘Ihr Anblick gibt den Engeln Starke.’ ‘The sight gives strength unto the Angels, Though none may sound the depths thereof;’ (‘Faust,’, Prologue in Heaven.) in him. Science finds him nowhere; and we are bound to believe in Science; which is what it is, because it is bent upon reality;—if it were different, it would have no reality,—and there-fore everything that searches along any other road will come to no reality. We know about reality; and we believe, ... we believe in what is not indeed discovered to be a reality, but what old times tell us about as being a reality. It was this, you see, that in a soul like Nietzsche's, which was honest, worked downright distraction. There came a day when Nietzsche said: ‘One must cut the account!’—How did he do it? He did it thus: he said: ‘Well then, we have now the reality. The reality is discovered by natural science. All the rest is nothing. Christianity taught that Christ is not to be sought in the reality that one investigates with telescopes and microscopes. But there is no other reality. Therefore, there is no justification for Christianity. Therefore,’ said Nietzsche, ‘I shall write the Anti-Christ.’ When one looks through the microscope and telescope, one discovers no ethical impulses, People accept the old ethical impulses, however, as commandments that flutter around in the air, or are ordered by the official authorities. But they are not to be discovered by scientific research. And so Nietzsche proposed, as the next book to his Anti-Christ, which was the first in his Revaluation, of all Values, to write a second book, in which he showed that all ideals exist, strictly speaking, in Nothing,—for they are not to be found in Reality; and that, therefore, they must be abandoned. And he proposed then to write a third book: The Moral Principle, certainly, is not derived from the telescope and microscope; therefore, said Nietzsche, I shall argue the case for the Immoral principle.—And accordingly the three first books were to have been called: Revaluation of all Values; first book, The Anti-Christ;—second book, Nihilism, or The Abolition of all Ideals;—third book, Immoralism, or The Abolition of the Universal Moral Order. It was a dreadful thing, of course. Rut it is the ultimate honest consequence of what are really the other people's premises. One must put things in this way before one's soul in order plainly to perceive the inner nerve of modern civilization.—And this was something that required to be dealt with. One required to show in what a terrible error Nietzsche was involved, and how it must be rectified in each case by assuming Nietzsche's own starting-point, and showing that these starting-points must be taken as leading, in actual fact, not to Nothing, but to a Spiritual Principle.—It was a necessity, therefore, to settle relations with Nietzsche.' And the same, too, with Haeckel. Here again was a phenomenon with which it was necessary to enter into discussion. Haeckelism had followed up with a certain consequentiality all that natural science can make out of the evolution of sense-organisms. And this was a point to be connected onto in the manner I described to you at the beginning. I did it, as I said, by the aid of Topinard's book, in the very first anthroposophical lectures that I ever gave. One only needed to proceed in this way, and the actual progressive steps led on of themselves into the concrete spiritual world. And the details then came afterwards simply through further investigation, further life with the spiritual world. I have told you all this for the following reason, namely, to show this:—that in tracing the history of Anthroposophy one must go back to illustrations from the life of our modern civilization.—If one traces back the history of the Anthroposophical Society, one must go back and ask: Where were the people in the first place, who had received a kind of impulse that made them ready to understand spiritual things? And these were just the people who, from the character of their peculiarly homeless souls, had received such impulses from Blavatsky's quarter. 1 Fr. Nietzsche, ein Kampfer gegen seine Zeit. ( Nietzsche, the Antagonist of his Age.) Phil. Anthr. Verlag.
You see, my dear friends, what at the beginning of the century,—simply from the circumstances of the time,—had gone on side by side: the Theosophical Society and Anthroposophy, was something that now, in this third period (which began, as I told you about 1914), was completely outgrown and done with. There was absolutely nothing left, indeed, to remind one in any way of the old theosophist days. Down to the very forms of expression there was nothing, really, left. As it was, quite at the be-ginning of anthroposophic working, the tendency of the stream itself led the direction of spiritual study on to the Mystery of Golgotha, to the penetration of Christianity; and so, on the other side, the tendency which now set in brought these same spiritual means to bear upon natural science. Only,—I would like to say,—the acquisition of the spiritual means, by which true Christianity could be restored to its place before the eyes of the age,—the acquisition of these means belongs, as a fact, to an earlier time. It begins in the first period already, and is more peculiarly cultivated in the second. What was required for work in the various other directions did not really come out, in the manner I have been describing in these last few days, until the third stage. There then came to be people within the anthroposophic movement itself, who were seeking along the scientific path. Now for those who are seeking along this scientific path, it is quite necessary, ... I say this in order that fresh misunderstandings may not continually be introduced into the anthroposophic movement ... especially for those who are pursuing this scientific path it is pre-eminently necessary that they should be absolutely filled through and through with what I spoke of yesterday and this morning again, namely, this working from the central source of Anthroposophy. It is here really necessary that people should be quite clear about these things. My dear friends, it was in the year 1908, I think, that I said once in Nuremberg,—to give a quite definite fact as illustration:—We undoubtedly have a very great evolution in science, owing to the experiments made in recent times. Such investigations made by aid of experiment have brought an enormous amount to light. They turn out well everywhere, for the reason that all through the experimental process a spiritual element is at work, in the form of spiritual beings. For the most part, what happens is,—as I said then,—that the learned scientist goes up to the table of operations, and simply really goes through the manual performances, according as the practice may be, according to the regular methods of the mechanic routine. And then, besides him, there is a whole army at work,—so to speak—of spiritual beings. And it is they, who really do the thing. For, as for the person experimenting at the table, he only provides the opportunities, so that the different things can come out, bit by bit. If this were not the case, the thing wouldn't have gone so particularly well in recent times. For you see, whenever anybody struck upon something,—like Julius Robert Mayer on his voyage,—he proceeded to clothe it in exceedingly abstract formula. But the other people didn't even understand it. And when, in course of time, Philip Reis was forced upon the telephone: then again the other people didn't understand it. There is really an enormous gulf between what folks understand and what is continually being dug out by experiment. For the spiritual impulses are not the very least under Man's control. The fact of the matter is this:—Let us go back again to that very distinguished man, Julius Robert Mayer, who to-day, of course, as I said, is a great scientific discoverer, universally acknowledged, but who, so long as he was at school, was always at the bottom of his class. When he was attending the University at Tubingen, they thought of advising him to leave before taking his degree. With pain and grief, however, he succeeded in becoming a doctor, enlisted then as a ship's surgeon, and went on a voyage to India. They met with very rough weather on the voyage, the sailors fell ill, and on arrival he had to bleed a number of them. Now a doctor, of course, knows that there are two sorts of blood vessels: veins and arteries. Arterial blood spurts out red; veinous blood spurts out bluish. When one lets blood, therefore,—makes an incision in the vein,—the blood. that comes out should be bluish. Julius Robert Mayer had very often to bleed people. Rut with all these sailors, who had made the voyage with him and fallen ill from the exciting times they had gone through at sea, something very curious happened when he made the incision. ‘Good heavens!’ he said to himself, ‘I've gone and struck the wrong place; for it's red blood spurting out of the vein! I must have struck an artery!’ And now the same thing happened again with the next man; and he got quite perplexed and nervous, thinking each time that he must have struck the wrong place; because each time the same thing happened. Finally he came upon the idea that he had made the incisions quite rightly after all; but that the sea, which had made the people ill, must have had some effect upon them, which gradually caused the veinous blood to come out red instead of blue, or at least approximately red, approximately the colour of the arterial blood. And so, quite unexpectedly, in the process of blood-letting, a modern man, without any sort of spiritual motive leading him to look for any particular mental chain of connections, discovers a stupendous fact. But what does he say to it? As a modern man of science he says: ‘Now I must carefully consider what exactly takes place: Energy is converted into Heat, and Heat into Energy. It will be the same, then, as with the steam-engine. One heats the engine, and the result is Motion, Work; Work produced by Heat; and it will be the same in Man; and because Man is in the tropical zone (the ship had sailed to the tropics), where he is under other conditions of temperature, he therefore does not need to perform the process of con-version into blue blood. According to the law of the transformation of forces in nature, the thing takes place differently. The conditions of temperature in the human organism are different; the blood does not turn so blue in the veins, but remains red.’—The law of the transformation of substances, of forces, which to-day is a recognized law, is deduced from this observation. Suppose for a moment that something of the kind had happened to a doctor, not in the nineteenth century but, let us say, if we imagine quite different conditions, to one perhaps in the eleventh or twelfth century only. It would never have occurred to this doctor, when he observed such a fact, to deduce from it the ‘mechanical equivalent of heat’. It would never have entered his head to connect anything so abstract with a phenomenon of the kind. Or even, indeed, if you think of later times:—Paracelsus would certainly never have thought of such a thing,—not even in his sleep; although Paracelsus in his sleep was still a great deal cleverer, of course, than other people when awake,—but such a thing would most certainly not have occurred to him, my dear friends. A doctor such as Paracelsus might have been (and for the nineteenth century, Julius Robert Mayer was much the same as Paracelsus was for his age),—or a hypothetical doctor that lived, let us say if you like, in the tenth, or eleventh, or twelfth century,—what would he have said? Well, even van Helmont still talks of archeus, that is, of what to-day we should call, conjointly, the etheric and astral bodies; (we have to discover it again by means of Anthroposophy; these terms had been forgotten) ... . A doctor of the twelfth century would have said: ‘In the temperate zone we find in Man a very pronounced inter-action between red blood and blue blood. When we take Man to the torrid zone, the veinous blood and the arterial blood no longer make themselves so vigorously distinct from one another; the blue veinous blood has become redder, and the red arterial blood more blue. There is scarcely any distinction left between them. What can be the origin of this?’—Well, there the doctor of the eleventh or twelfth century would have said (in those days he would have called it archeus, or something of the sort,—what we to-day call the astral body): With Man in the torrid zone,—he would have said,—the archeus sinks less deep into the physical body than it does with Man in the temperate zone. A Man of the temperate zone is more saturated with his astral body, more densely permeated by it; with the Man of the torrid zone, the astral body remains more outside him, even when he is awake. And, as a consequence, this differentiation, which takes place through the action of the astral body upon the blood, takes place more strongly with the Man of the temperate zone, and less strongly with the Man of the torrid zone. The Man of the torrid zone, therefore, has his astral body more free. We have a sign of this in the lesser thickening of the blood. And so he lives instinctively in his astral body, because this astral body is freer. And he becomes, accordingly, not a mechanically-thinking European; he becomes a spiritually-thinking Indian who, at the full flower of his civilization (not now, when it is all in decadence, but at its full flower) naturally has a quite different, a spiritual civilization, a Veda-civilization; whereas the European naturally has a Comtist, or Darwinist, or John Stuart Mill-ist civilization. Yes, indeed, my dear friends; from this blood-letting a doctor of the eleventh or twelfth century would have arrived at some contemplation, such as this, of the Anthropos. He would still have sailed on into Anthroposophy. He would still have found his way on to the spiritual reality, to the living spirit. Julius Robert Mayer,—the Paracelsus, if you will, of the nineteenth century,—found, in his day, the law: ‘Nothing comes from nothing; therefore, there is a transformation of forces’,—an abstract formula. The spiritual principle in Man, which can once more be found by means of Anthroposophy, this spiritual principle leads on in turn to Epics. Here we link up with that quest for the moral principles which we started on in the Philosophy of Freedom. Thereby the way is once more opened to Man for a spiritual activity in which he no longer has a gulf between Nature and Spirit, Nature and Ethics, but in which he finds the direct union of both. One thing, however, will be plain from all I have been showing you, which is this:—The leading lights of modern science arrive at their abstract formulae. And these abstract formula are, of course, buzzing about in the heads of all the people to-day who have received a scientific training. The people who give this scientific training regard this tanglewood of abstract formula as something in which the modern man has to believe. And they look upon it as sheer lunacy for anyone to talk of leading up from the composition of the red and the blue blood to the spiritual principle of Man. From this, however, you can see all that it means for an actual scientist, if he proposes to come into Anthroposophy. It means something more, besides the mere goodwill. It means, in reality, immense and devoted application to a profundity of study to which people are not accustomed at the present day,—and least of all accustomed, when they have passed through a scientific training. What is wanted then, here, more especially, is courage, courage, and ever again courage. And with this we touch on the element which we above all things need for our souls, if we are to meet the necessary life-conditions of the Anthroposophical Society. This Society stands, in a way, to-day in diametrical opposition to all that is popular in the world. If it wants to make itself popular, therefore, it can have no possible prospect of succeeding. And therefore what we must not do,—more particularly if we want to spread Anthroposophy through the various branches of actual life; which has been the constant attempt since the year 1919,—we must not take the line of trying to make ourselves popular, but we must go out straight from the centre and essence, and pursue the road marked out by the life of the spirit itself,—as I described to you with reference to the Goetheanum this morning, in this one particular case.—But we must learn to think in this way in all matters; otherwise, we slide off the path; otherwise, we slide off it in such a way that people continually, with more or less justice, confuse us with other movements and judge us from the outside. But if we give ourselves with all energy our own form of structure, then, my dear friends, then we shall be following the road that runs in the direction of the anthroposophic movement and the conditions of its life. But we must teach ourselves the earnestness from which then the needful courage will come. And we must not forget what is made simply necessary by the fact that we to-day, as Anthroposophists, are only a little handful. It is the hope, truly, of this little handful, that what they are the means of spreading abroad to-day will spread to ever larger and larger numbers of people; and, amongst these people then, there will be a certain direction of mind and knowledge, a certain moral and ethical, a religious direction. But all these things, which will exist amongst people then through the impulses of Anthroposophy, and will be looked upon as, matters of course,—these things need to exist in a very much higher degree amongst those to-day who are only a little handful; these people must feel the very gravest obligations incumbent upon them towards the spiritual world. And one must understand that, quite instinctively, this will find expression in the verdict of the world around them. By nothing can the Anthroposophical Society do itself more harm,—intense harm,—than if this Anthroposophical Society fails to give itself, in its members, a general form and style, through which people outside are made aware that, in the very strictest sense of the term, the Anthroposophists will this and that; so that they are able to distinguish them from all other, sectarian or other, movements. So long as this is not the case, however, the Society cannot fail to call forth the kind of verdict from the outer world, which it does to-day. People don't really quite know what the purpose is of this Anthroposophical Society. They make acquaintance with some of the individual members; and in these there is nothing to be seen of Anthroposophy. Now suppose, let us say, that the Anthroposophists were to proclaim themselves by such a fine and marked sense for truth and circumstantial accuracy, that everybody saw at once: That's an Anthroposophist; one notices that he has such a very delicate sense in all he says, on no account to go further in his statements than strictly accords with the facts;—that, now, would give a certain impression.—However, to-day I don't wish, as I said, to make criticisms, but only to point out the positive things.—Are there signs of this happening? that is the question to be asked. Or, again, people might say: Yes, those are Anthroposophists! They are very particular in all little matters of good taste. They have a certain artistic sense; the Goetheanum in Dornach must have had some effect after all.—Then again people would know: Anthroposophy certainly gives its members a sort of good taste: one can distinguish them by that from other people. This is the kind of thing you see,—not so much what can be put into clearly defined propositions, but things of this kind,—that are all part of what the Anthroposophical Society, must study to develop, if it is to fulfil the conditions of its life. Oh, there has been a great deal of talk about such things. But the question that has again and again to be raised, and one that should occupy a great place in all that is discussed amongst Anthroposophists, is this: How to give the anthroposophic society a quite distinct stamp, so that everyone can tell: Here is something by which this society is so completely distinguished from all the others as to leave no possibility of confusion. One can only indicate these things as matters more of feeling; for where there is to be life, there can be no fixed programmes. Rut just ask yourselves whether, in the anthroposophic society, we have altogether got beyond the old: ‘One has to do this’, ... ‘One always does that’,... ‘One must be guided by this or the other’, and whether the impulse is always a strong one on every occasion to ask: What does Anthroposophy herself say?—There is no need for it to be set down in a lecture. But the things set down, or spoken, in lectures sink into hearts,—and this gives a certain tendency of direction. I must say it once more, my dear friends: Until Anthroposophy is taken as a living being, who goes about unseen amongst us, and to whom each feels himself responsible,—not until then will this little band of Anthroposophists go forward as a model band that leads the way. And they should lead the way as a model band,—this little band of Anthroposophists. When one came into any of the theosophic societies (of which there are many) they had, of course, the three well-known ‘principles’. I have spoken of these yesterday and how we must look upon them. The first principle was the establishment of universal human brotherhood, without distinction of race or nation, etc. I pointed out yesterday that it is a matter for consideration whether in future this should be set up in the form of a dogma. But still, my dear friends, it is significant that people make such a principle at all. Only it must become a reality. It must, little by little, become a reality in actual fact. And this it will do, when Anthroposophy herself is regarded as a living, supersensible, invisible being, going about amongst the Anthroposophists. Then perhaps there may be less talk of brotherhood,—less talk of universal love of mankind, but this love will be more living in men's hearts; and the world will see, from the very tone in which they speak of that which binds them together in Anthroposophy, from the very tone in which one tells the other this or that, it will be evident that it signifies something for the one, that the other too is a person who, like himself, is linked to the Unseen Being, Anthroposophy.—My dear friends, we can choose instead to take another way. We can take the way of simply forming a number of cliques, of going on as the fashion is in the world,—coming together for five-o'clock tea-parties or other social gatherings of the kind, where people drop in just for the purpose of mutual conversation, or at most to sit in company and listen to a lecture. We can do that, too, no doubt, instead. We can form little cliques, of course, instead,—little private circles. Rut an anthroposophic movement, of course, cannot live in a society of this kind. An anthroposophic movement can only live in an Anthroposophical Society which is a reality. But, in such a society, things need to be taken with very serious earnestness; there, one must at every moment of one's life feel that one is an associate of the Unseen Being, Anthroposophy. If this could become the tone of mind, the tone of actual practice; if,—not in twenty-four hours perhaps, but after a certain length of time,—this could become the tone of mind, then,—let us say in twenty-one years,—there would most certainly arise a certain impulse: The moment people heard anything like what I mentioned yesterday again from the opponents, then the needful impulse would awake in people's hearts;—I am not saying by any means that it need lead at once to any practical action, but the necessary impulse would be there, in people's hearts; and then in good time the actions would come too. When the actions do not come; when only the opponents act and organize; then it must be that the right impulse is not there; it must be that people still prefer well ... to live on in peace and comfort,—and of course to sit in the audience, when there are lectures on Anthroposophy. But this, at any rate, is not enough if the Anthroposophical Society is to prosper. If the Anthroposophical Society is to prosper, Anthroposophy must really live in it. And if that is the case, then indeed, in the course of twenty-one years, something of importance might come to pass,—or even in a shorter period. When I come to reckon,—why, the society has already existed twenty-one years! Well, my dear friends, since I do not wish to make criticisms, I would merely ask you yourselves to carry your self-recollection so far as to ask, whether really each single individual at each single post has done that which must be felt to proceed from the very centre of all that is anthroposophic? And if you should happen to find that one or other of you has not as yet felt this, then I would beg you to begin at once, tomorrow, or this very evening; for it would not be a good thing if the Anthroposophical Society were to go to pieces. And it will most certainly go to pieces if (now that in addition to all the other things it already has on hand, it proposes to rebuild the Goetheanum), it will most certainly go to pieces, if that consciousness does not awake, of which I have been speaking in these lectures,—if this self-recollection is not there. And then, my dear friends, if it does fall to pieces, it will fall to pieces very rapidly.—But that is entirely dependent on the will of the people who are in the Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy will quite certainly not be driven out of the world. But it might sink back for tens of years and more, so to speak, into a latent state, and then be taken up again later. An enormous amount would be lost for the evolution of mankind.—This is something to think over, if one intends in earnest to set about that self-recollection which was really my meaning with these lectures. It certainly was not my meaning, however, that there should again be a lot of big talk, and all sorts of programmes set up again, and declarations that ‘should this or that be wanted, we place ourselves entirely at disposal!’ ... those things we always did. What now is needed is that we should look into ourselves and find the inner centre of our own being. And if we pursue this search for the inner centre of our being with aid of the spirit to be found in the anthroposophic wealth of wisdom, we shall then find, too, that anthroposophic impulse, which the Anthroposophical Society needs as a condition of its life. I particularly wanted in these lectures, my dear friends, not to deal so much in criticism, of which there has been plenty in these last times;—a great deal has been said, scattered about, on one or the other occasion. This time I wanted rather, by a historical review of one or two things,—if I tried to say everything, these lectures would. not be long enough;—but by a historical review of just one or two things, I wanted really through a study of anthroposophical affairs to give just a stimulus towards the actual handling of them in the right way. And these lectures especially, I think, can afford occasion for being thought over, reflected upon, so to speak. That is a thing for which one can always find time; for it can be done between the lines of life,—the lines of a life that brings with it the calls of the outer world. This, my dear friends, is what I wanted to put before you in these lectures more especially, as a sort of Self-Recollection for the Anthroposophical Society, and to lay it very urgently to your hearts. We have absolute need to-day of this kind of self-recollection. We should not forget that if we go to the sources of anthroposophic life, very much can be done by means of them. If we neglect to do so, we are simply abandoning the paths on which it is possible to do anything. We are about to enter on tasks of so great a magnitude as the rebuilding of the Goetheanum. Here, truly, our hearts' considerations can go out only from really great impulses; here we can go out from no kind of pettiness. This is what I said this morning to those who were there; and this is what I wished to put before you again to-night from a particular aspect. |
| 68c. Goethe and the Present: The “Fairytale” of Goethe (Goethe's Secret Revelation Esoteric)
21 Jan 1909, Heidelberg Rudolf Steiner |
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| Yesterday I endeavored to show how the material to be presented here regarding Goethe's most intimate opinions and views on the development of the human soul is not arbitrarily worked into his works, and in particular into the material with which we are particularly concerned, his fairy tale of the green snake and the Beautiful Lily, but I have tried to show how the whole basis on which to build, the explanation of this fairy tale and Goethe's more intimate worldview, can be gained from a historical consideration of Goethe's life, from a historical tracing of the most important impulses of Goethe's ideas. |
| 68c. Goethe and the Present: The “Fairytale” of Goethe (Goethe's Secret Revelation Esoteric)
21 Jan 1909, Heidelberg Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
Yesterday I endeavored to show how the material to be presented here regarding Goethe's most intimate opinions and views on the development of the human soul is not arbitrarily worked into his works, and in particular into the material with which we are particularly concerned, his fairy tale of the green snake and the Beautiful Lily, but I have tried to show how the whole basis on which to build, the explanation of this fairy tale and Goethe's more intimate worldview, can be gained from a historical consideration of Goethe's life, from a historical tracing of the most important impulses of Goethe's ideas. I may say that an attempt has been made to establish the foundations for what is to be given today in a more freely developed form on the subject. If we allow the fairy tale we spoke about yesterday to arise before our soul, it appears to be completely immersed in mystery. And one would like to say that either one must assume that Goethe wanted to put a lot of mystery into this fairy tale, as he put a lot of mystery into the second part of his “Faust,” according to his own sayings, or that we could regard this fairy tale — which is quite impossible — as a mere play of the imagination. If the latter were not already excluded by Goethe's whole way of thinking, one would have to say that such an assumption is particularly prohibited by the fact that Goethe placed this fairy tale at the end of his story “Conversations of German Emigrants”. For it is basically the same idea that we found characteristic of Goethe's entire life yesterday, and which also lives in these “Conversations of German Emigrants,” which were written in the last decade of the eighteenth century. And from what immediately precedes the “fairy tale,” we can once again discern the theme of this fairy tale. We are presented with the conversations of people who have been forced to emigrate due to events in their French homeland, who look back in the most diverse ways on what they have experienced in terms of sadness. We see how the entire story comes to a head to show what people who are, in a sense, uprooted from their circumstances and surroundings can go through in the solitude of their souls; what people in such a situation can gain by reflecting on their emotional experiences, by self-observation. We need only highlight a few examples to show how Goethe brings everything to a head, how a soul that becomes a fighter within itself, that often asks itself through various prompts: What kind of guilt have I accumulated, how have I hindered the soul's development? How such a soul tries to find out about itself. First we meet an Italian singer who is to reveal her fate to us in this story because her destiny can serve to illustrate a human soul that, in a certain respect, must remain on the surface of world observation. A human soul that, although it attentively follows what is going on around it because it is forced to by its circumstances, is not yet mature enough to distinguish between what, in a sense, may be called an accident and the spiritual necessity of things. It does not yet know how the phenomena of life must be connected so that we can assume the presence of spirit and spiritual laws in our environment. This Italian singer behaved in such a way towards a man that he became seriously ill as a result of her repulsive behavior, and that he is actually dying because of her behavior. So she is summoned to his deathbed. She refuses to come to his deathbed. He must die without having seen her. Now, in the time following his death, many things happen that give a soul, which would have to be characterized in the same way as that of the Italian singer, something to think about; so much to think about that she does not really know what to make of what is going on, which could still be seen as connected with my whole behavior, with the whole way in which I behaved towards the dead man in relation to his fate. After death, something very strange happens. She hears all kinds of noises in her rooms, the furniture dances, and she is even slapped in the face by an unknown, invisible hand, so that she is really frightened by the strangeness and horror of these events. Is the dead person somehow there, wanting to assert himself because of the way I behaved towards him? A cupboard's top breaks open, and it is strangely revealed that at the very moment that cupboard's top broke open in this room, a cupboard in France, made by the same carpenter, burst into flames in its rooms. Mind you, my friends, it would never occur to me to try to explain these things in the light of a spiritual worldview, nor to suggest that Goethe wanted to express that there was something in such events that could give cause, for all I care, to assume all sorts of hidden spirits or the rumbling of the dead. Goethe merely wanted to show that there are certain souls that are so little enlightened that they do not know what to do with such strange events, that are not enlightened enough not to say: these things are nothing; but they are also not superstitious enough to say: the dead man is certainly stirring, but rather those who, because they are not developed, can only have an indefinite feeling about such things. We see how the soul fares in the external world, depending on its stage of development, which Goethe already demonstrates by steering the stories in “The Sorrows of German Emigrants” in the direction of “fairytales”. He shows us how a person is put in the position of having to heal a lady of her sensuality, her passion. He suggests the path of having her fast, of guiding her through asceticism, so to speak, in order to dampen the ardent passion in this way. This is another indication of what a soul can go through in order to experience development. Continue – and now notice how Goethe does indeed lead the matter upwards in stages. First, he shows a soul that is really digging around in the vague in the Italian singer; he shows an already more real thing in the lady that I just mentioned: It is indeed the case that many people come to a purification of their passions, to an upward development of their soul through fasting. Here we are moving from the indefinite into the definite, into reality, and this is fully the case when we ascend into the reality of human soul development in the physical world, as we see in the third story related by Goethe. He shows how a person is initially somewhat unscrupulous, and thus stands at a subordinate level of soul development, to the point where he says: What belongs to my father also belongs to me. The practical result of this is that he commits theft at his father's checkout. He grows, so to speak, precisely through this act. His soul ascends, and he becomes, precisely by doing this wrong deed, a kind of moral center for all the humanity that then groups around him. Thus, already in his stories, which lead up to the “fairy tale,” Goethe shows us how he wants to depict soul development, the soul's ascent from certain subordinate stages to higher stages of knowledge and world view. Now, as we saw yesterday, we are dealing with soul forces that are represented by the figures, the beings of the “fairytale”, and with the play of soul forces, which is to gradually purify itself into harmony, even into a symphony of soul forces, as the soul rises higher in the deeds performed by the figures and persons of the “fairytale”. In what happens in the 'Märchens', we are dealing with will-o'-the-wisps that want to be ferried across from the other side of the river to this side by the ferryman. They are initially filled with gold, but the ferryman does not want their gold as a reward because the river would be thrown into wild turmoil if gold pieces were to fall into it. Rather, he must demand fruits of the earth: three onions, three artichokes, and three cabbages. The will-o'-the-wisps have the ability to shake gold around them, and we have seen how they encounter the snake, which they call their aunt from the horizontal line, while they themselves are beings from the vertical line. By sprinkling gold, they give the snake something that becomes fruitful and beneficial within it, because the snake, by connecting the pieces of gold with its own substance, becomes inwardly radiant. That which it could not see before and which has something to do with the secrets of soul development, that it can illuminate that within itself. When I tried for more than twenty years to gain access to this fairy tale in every possible way, it was above all a liberating thought in the confusion of questions that arise from the “fairy tale” when it became clear that above all I had to pursue the gold. Gold plays a role of the most diverse kind in this fairy tale. First in the will-o'-the-wisp. The will-o'-the-wisp scatter it around; there it shows itself in a certain way as something that we may address as not beneficial in certain respects. In the snake, the gold becomes beneficial. Then again in the golden king, who is made entirely of gold, then we find it again on the walls of the hut where the old man with the lamp lives, and there the will-o'-the-wisp lick it down and make themselves thicker and more substantial by licking the gold down from the walls. So the gold comes up several times, and one time we are pointed to the fact that this gold has something to do with the power of the human soul, by being pointed to the temple, which is first below and then above ground, that the golden king represents the bringer of wisdom. It is something that we do not need to interpret or explain, but where we can say: Here Goethe himself says: the golden king refers to the giver, the bringer of wisdom. So the gold must have something to do with wisdom. It is the gold, by filling the being of the golden king, that makes him a wise being, that leads him to bestow the gift of knowledge
— this is transferred from the golden king to the youth, and the youth is thereby quickened. Gold is therefore something that the Giver of Wisdom is able to instill in man. The will-o'-the-wisps, if they represent a soul-power, must represent the soul-power that is able to receive wisdom, for they have the gold within them, the soul-power that can also cast wisdom aside. We learn how this wisdom can be stored by the fact that on the walls of this symbol of wisdom, gold, was stored for a long, long time before the will-o'-the-wisps licked it. We cannot help but say, since we know how well founded it is to see soul forces in the individual forms, that the will-o'-the wisp represent the abstract intelligence, the pure power of the intellect, which is capable of acquiring a certain amount of wisdom through what is usually called external science, what is called speculation, external experience. And now we also understand why gold, wisdom, plays such a role in the pure intellect of the will-o'-the-wisps: the person who absorbs what knowledge, science and wisdom is with the pure intellect absorbs it above all in order to have something personal with it, in order to be able to use it personally. We can look into Goethe's soul and recognize the way he related to something when we become aware of how he often congratulated himself, so to speak, for never having been in a position to officially represent as a teacher the science to which he so devotedly dedicated his time , that he was only able to give the world some of his wisdom when he was inwardly impelled to do so, was not called upon to cast wisdom aside as one casts aside clothing when one is destined to become a teacher or an abstract bearer of wisdom. In this way, Goethe presents human wisdom in the Irrlichtern that has developed one-sided intelligence and power of reason, and it is a peculiarity that – however much it may be denied – abstract knowledge, mere intelligence, especially when it increasingly moves into wisdom – and abstract intelligence can absorb vast amounts of wisdom – that this leads to vanity, to wanting to be able to deal with concepts everywhere. We are speaking entirely in Goethe's spirit when we realize why we still contrive such wise thoughts and think so cleverly: abstract concepts and ideas that are not drawn from the depths, from the richness of life, are unsuitable for ultimately leading us into true communion with the eternal riddles of existence. Where we need something that goes straight to our hearts from the eternal riddles of existence, we need something other than abstract ideas and concepts, as products of mere intelligence. When we stand before the boundary that separates the two realms, the realm of the sensually physical world, into which we feel transported, and the realm of spirituality, the realm of the supersensible, when we feel ourselves at this boundary, we are we are repelled by all abstract concepts and ideas. Indeed, these abstract concepts and ideas are not even capable of making comprehensible to us what is closest to us, for they alienate us from what is closest to us. How far removed the abstract thing is from grasping even the most everyday things that surround it; so it is incapable of giving in its concepts and ideas to that stream to which we are drawn when we want to cross over into the supersensible world. For concepts and ideas are not good for that. If you want to get to the very source of life, then it rears up and does not let us get close. Therefore, the river has no use for the gold that the will-o'-the-wisps are able to give, and we are told that none of them have ever confessed or served time. They are from the vertical line, while the old crone is from the horizontal line. This indicates how man removes himself from the ground through abstract concepts and ideas and cannot reach the ground of everyday life, which he is supposed to understand. We see how plastic these abstract figures of the will-o'-the-wisp are. But are ideas and concepts, are philosophical explanations under all circumstances that which separates us from the true source of existence? No, they are not, if man has the capacity to live in such a way that he combines his own life forces with things. Not to go out into the realm of abstract concepts and ideas, but to move correctly within things, to become a spirit, as Faust became one when he said:
Where man truly enters into an inner communion with the beings of nature, where he does not sever himself with all the powers of his soul from the beings of nature, there the same concepts that alienate him from the world when they become abstract serve him to penetrate ever deeper and deeper into existence. We must not, so to speak, turn things around and say: because abstract concepts and ideas alienate the abstract being from the true essence of things, concepts and ideas are worthless in general. No, on the contrary, where they fall into the soul power that rises, lives in and with things in a certain community, in such a soul power they are full of light at the same time. Therefore, gold, which in a certain sense is without blessing in the will-o'-the-wisps, becomes such a blessing, the light in the snake that lives in the clefts and has the horizontal line, clings to the earth. If man clings to the earth, if he loves all things, if he immerses himself in things, if he, to use the much-maligned word, “mystically” immerses himself in things, then clear ideas serve to guide him through things. Therefore, you can also see – I don't know how many of you have had such an experience, but it can be had – that sometimes scholastically presented philosophies seem cold and sober, but that the same ideas, when they come to us from simple primitive people who live outside as herb gatherers, root gatherers or the like – and who are usually very interested in the secrets of existence – to what lofty ideas such people, mystically united with nature, sometimes come. We shall see how, in the case of primitive people who are in communion with nature, ideas become luminous that are worthless, sober, frosty in the case of abstract people. Thus we are led away from the will-o'-the wisp that abstract intelligence presents to us, to that soul power that is deeply rooted in us and that has the mystical urge to plunge into things, as it were. This is vividly and vividly depicted to us, as the snake moves through the crevices: Man, in fact, even if he does not enlighten himself with concepts, does not live in abstract ideas, comes close to the heart of things, like the snake to an underground temple, where, because it cannot shine, it first perceives only through touching certain forms that it only later examines in the light. Man, when he has only an appreciation of the mysterious workings of the forces of nature, comes to the heart of nature and can experience something of what lives in the things around us. We experience this with the snake, which shows us how it is a representative of those soul forces in man that can live without ideas under certain circumstances, only then not illuminated by the light of knowledge, but which nevertheless lovingly delve into things and come to a certain understanding of the riddles of the world. When the balance is restored by the fact that ideas and concepts are absorbed into these mystical powers of our soul, then the time comes when a person who is lovingly inclined towards things also finds that which he previously only sensed from the sources of existence; that he can also illuminate it through his own inner light. Yes, he is only led deeper into it. You may recall a significant saying of Goethe's, where he says:
Where Goethe immediately points out how we must respond to the eye of the light, which is intended to illuminate the secrets of nature, if it is to shine back again, reflecting the secrets of nature within it, as it were. Therefore, we must absorb the preparation for knowledge within us, as the snake absorbs gold, then we penetrate into what otherwise remains dark, as man, when he inwardly preserves the sense, the open heart, for the spiritual, sees the insights more clearly, how he can only then also see the spiritual in his environment. And so the snake enters the underground temple. Here Goethe indicates to us in a wonderful way that there are subterranean places for the life of the human soul. One can only characterize such things as Goethe presents here if one enters somewhat more intimately into the strange workings of the human soul in its development. It can then be felt how our soul, before it is able to explain the things of the world outside and to prove the divine life and weaving of the spirit in all things, has to be inwardly certain that there is such a divine source, that there is a supersensible behind all that is sensible. She can experience the certainty of this supersensory within herself and yet be unable to see this supersensory shining throughout the universe. Oh, it is a lofty goal to behold the spirit in its form, as it is the creative source of all that surrounds us in the great world, as all that surrounds us in the great world wells up from the spirit. To do this, man must first develop the highest powers of the soul within himself. The supersensible, which sleeps hidden in the normal human consciousness as a higher self, must first be evoked by man in order to ascend to the higher level of his spirit's development. One can sense that something like this exists. But then one also comes to another realization: if one has any sense of reality, of true existence, one must say to oneself: I can only reach my ultimate goal if I see how everything lives and is permeated by the spirit, how spirit is in all things. But I myself, as I stand in the world with my sensual body, so I am, as it were, crystallized out, born out of the spirit — out of which I am born, without my being involved, which I can ultimately achieve again through the highest knowledge. In a mysterious way, unconscious to myself, I have come from this land of the supersensible, into which I want to penetrate again through my knowledge. There we have the other shore, of which the “fairytale” speaks, the land beyond the river, where the beautiful lily dwells, which represents the highest world and life view, which represents the soul power to which man can develop. From there comes the mysterious being, the ferryman, who brings the will-o'-the-wisps over from the other side. Through real powers, man is transported into this world, where he stands as if surrounded by darkness – hence the mysterious words spoken by the ferryman, who brings us from the transcendental world to the land on this side of the river, who may only bring the beings across, but no one over. In no way can man return to where he came from except through birth. Other paths must be taken. Then the will-o'-the-wisps ask how they can enter the realm of the beautiful lily, that is, how a single soul power can merge into the harmony of soul powers in such a way that it ascends to the highest. The snake then suggests two means: One is that which can be given by itself, when it allows itself to be transported by the Serpent at midday, when the sun is at its highest point. The will-o'-the-wisps say: 'That is a time when we do not like to travel. Yes, why? It is simply quite beyond the grasp of the Abstract-Lover, who wants to live only in abstract ideas and concepts, who wants to achieve everything only through combinations and conclusions, to make the transition as represented by the snake, through mystical devotion to things, through seeking mystical communion with things. This mystical communion cannot always be attained either. I recall that a great mystic of the Alexandrian school confessed in his old age that he had only experienced that great moment a few times in his life, when the soul feels ripe to delve so deeply that the spirit of the infinite awakens and that mystical moment occurs in which the God in the breast is experienced by the human being himself. These are moments at noon, when the sun of life is at its highest, when something like this can be experienced, and for those who always want to be ready with their abstract ideas, they say: anyone who ever has real thoughts must reach the highest level, for them such midday hours of life, which must be seen as a grace of earthly life, are no time to travel. For such abstract thinkers, there must always be a moment to solve the riddles of the world. Then the snake points out another way they can get across, namely through the shadow of the giant, that strange being that can do nothing for itself, cannot carry the slightest weight, not even a bundle of rice on its shoulder. At dusk, when half-light spreads, when the giant lets the shadow fall over the river that separates the sensual from the supersensual, then people can also cross over. What kind of a strange being is this giant? If we want to understand this giant, we must bear in mind that Goethe was well aware of those powers of the soul that lie, so to speak, below the threshold of consciousness. In the case of normal people, these powers only emerge during dreams. However, if we speak in a spiritual scientific sense, they belong to the subordinate clairvoyant powers that not attained through the development of the soul, but which occur particularly in primitive souls in the form of presentiments, second sight, and all that is connected with a soul that has not yet progressed very far, from which a certain uncontrollable and uncontrolled clairvoyance wells up. Through such clairvoyant powers, there is no denying that a person can get some ideas about the supernatural world, and many people today still prefer to come to the supernatural world through such ideas or through spiritualistic images than through development, through the real upliftment of the soul into the land of the supernatural. What belongs to the realm of the subconscious, to the realm of the soul, that is not illuminated by what one can call clear mind, what one can call the light of insight, what one can call self-control, what is also like dream-like knowledge in life, is represented to us in this giant. In fact, one cannot truly recognize anything through this subconscious, because it is very weak compared to real knowledge, something that cannot be controlled anywhere, something that cannot be relied upon, so to speak. If you wanted to personify this subconscious, you couldn't do better than a human being who is unable to carry the slightest weight. Through such subconscious knowledge, man — if he wants to develop it alone — is not able to recognize in a controlled way the slightest thing that stands on a sure basis, that has weight for our world view. But the shadow of this subconscious plays a great role in the whole of cultural life. Oh, that shows through everything — and only one word needs to be spoken to [characterize] the shadow, which for many human souls actually leads satisfactorily into the realm of the supersensible: the word 'superstition'. If countless people did not have superstition, which is the shadow of the subconscious, which prefers to operate not in the light of clear ideas but in the twilight, they would have no idea of the supersensible world, and for countless people today superstition is still the shadow of the subconscious, which leads them in the twilight hours of the soul life into the realm of the supersensible. One need not even enumerate the various manifestations of superstition in the history of civilization; one need only consider how people come to Theosophy, to spiritual science, which seeks to convey something to us from the supersensible world, something that only those people can comprehend who are willing to make great efforts to lift their soul higher. We want to ascend to the higher beings. But many make themselves comfortable, they want the spirits to descend to us instead of us rising to them. They are happy when a medium is found somewhere who, from the realm of the subconscious, testifies to the existence of the supersensible world. Not only inferior minds pay homage to what flourishes so abundantly as “spiritualism,” but even scholars who do not want to admit that the soul can be raised to the heights of the spirit through its own development. It is not said that the things that happen are not true, but distinguishing between truth and error is extremely difficult, and only for the initiated is it possible to exercise scientific control. Goethe wants to point out this shadow of the subconscious, this whole vast realm that eludes wise self-knowledge and self-control, this power of the soul. But he does not point it out like a polemicist – Goethe was never a polemicist – he is aware that every power of the soul, at its level, even if it has to be suppressed at another level, has its importance, so he does not say: Beware of the giant, but he even finds it useful here to have the snake give the advice to the erring ones that they should have themselves translated by the giant's shadow at dusk. Strangely enough, this advice is repeated today when scholars do not want to bite into theosophy. Then well-meaning people come and say: let a spiritualist session convince you of a supersensible world, then you will be introduced to it in a plausible way. But superstition plays a great role in attracting attention, in directing the human mind to the supersensible world, and it must be clearly understood that Goethe, who wanted to present the entire field of soul forces as in a symphonic harmony, really believed, as this superstition, when it does not degenerate into wild superstition, has its good reason in the soul forces, which do not all come with sober, clear concepts, but first say to themselves: We can penetrate deeply, deeply into the secrets of things - but we would rather first hold it with intuitions of their secrets. First sense these secrets, do not immediately find our way into sharp contours! This intuitive restraint in relation to things is very important, since it should play a part in the entire life and weaving of our soul development. Goethe wanted to show that what was expressed so clearly in outer nature was expressed in a higher way in the forces of the soul. I do not want to point out how Goethe, if he had not written a poem, a drama, a Wilhelm Meister, a Werther, would have been a shining personality for all time through his scientific discoveries. That in addition to his better-known scientific discoveries, he found a certain law that was not thought up or speculated by him, but which we will see is deeply rooted in the things themselves, like a leitmotif in all of nature's work, and which could be called the law of balance, in all external natural things as well. That nature has a certain measure of development for every being, can alter it on one side or the other, and can allow multiplicity and diversity to emerge from it. Look at the giraffe! Nature has used a certain measure of forces for the giraffe's activity, using more strength for the development of the front body, the neck, which is why the hindquarters are stunted! Look at the mole! Here nature devotes all its forces to the body, which is why the little feet remain stunted. Goethe showed how one can understand the difference in form between a dromedary and a lion and how different organs result from applying uniform measures in one direction one time and in the other direction another time. We see how a typical structure expresses itself in its diversity: in one case, the lower jaw develops teeth; in another, the lower jaw remains toothless and horns develop. When Goethe enunciated this law, it was naturally thought to be the saying of a poet who understood nothing of natural science, who was a layman, a dilettante. But in 1830, in the French Chamber, during his dispute with Cuvier, a French naturalist drew attention to this law under the name “balancement des organes”. The future will have much to say about this “balancement des organes” because it leads deep into the formal properties of the various entities. Goethe also applied this law to spiritual life. He recognized that there is also such a thing in the soul that expresses the individual at a higher level in the individual soul forces, so that he says: There are human beings who develop the special quality that is represented by the will-o'-the-wisps. They represent will-o'-the-wisps in life itself, false prophets who can do no other than communicate what they have learned to others and pour out their gold. Other people who can place a mystical light in nature, like the snakes that submerge themselves in nature. In short, Goethe wanted to show how, in general, normal life in the outer world, souls present themselves in such a way that they develop one-sided powers. How man can reach the higher level of knowledge by inwardly representing the type of the human soul, a balance, a right interaction of all soul forces, linked to the most sober soul force, the sense of foreboding. Not as superstition does, which loses itself in foreboding and lets the power of intelligence be enslaved by the foreboding of the nature of things. On the one hand, Goethe shows how man can become one-sided, but he also shows how, if he wants to attain higher knowledge, he must strive towards that summit, which is symbolized by the beautiful lily, the inner harmonious balance and the interaction of the individual soul forces. Now we know that the serpent, having received, so to speak, the inner radiance within, comes into the subterranean temple. Now it can distinguish between those spiritual worlds that approach man, that must inspire man, that can give strength, and those that the human soul must properly have within it if it is to ascend to a higher existence. There are certain powers in the human soul that it must have if it is to ascend to a higher level. But if a person wants to attain this higher level without having found the right path at the right time through the inspiration of these world powers, if he wants to grasp the highest that can be achieved in knowledge and world view prematurely, then this world view is something that can kill, confuse and paralyze him in his soul. Therefore, the youth who wants to unite with the lily before he is ripe, he will first be paralyzed, yes, killed. That is, Goethe has vividly expressed what he once expressed in a short saying:
There is a high level of human development through which the human soul can grow together with the fruits of all knowledge. It stands before us like a distant prospect. Our striving must be directed towards maturing, towards shaping ourselves in such a way that we are in the right mood, in the right inner state, and do not receive the highest in an immature way. So the youth is killed first and is to be led first through the endowment of soul powers, represented by the kings. Before he can connect with the beautiful lily, the snake leads him to the three kings. Meaningful conversations surround these kings like secrets. The golden king is the supersensible power that can be kindled in our soul, which gives the right wisdom so that the power of wisdom harmonizes with the other soul forces. The silver king represents piety. And for Goethe, piety means something quite different than in the ordinary sense. Those who know Goethe also know that for him, the cult of beauty and art were intimately connected with religious feeling; therefore, beauty is what always makes him feel pious, so that for him the king of wisdom is represented by gold. The king who is endowed with the soul power that generates religion through beauty is the silver one. But that which is to permeate our impulses of will, that which wants to penetrate us in the ordered life of the soul as the power of the will, is represented by the brazen king. Our soul forces must be under our complete control, so that we can distinguish them, so that we see the world in the right way, full of wisdom, and our feelings do not play tricks on us. That the life of feeling is not overcome by the life of wisdom and the life of wisdom in its turn by the life of the will and vice versa, but that the three soul powers arise separately, specified in the higher soul life. As for the fourth king, it may be said that every human being has wisdom, piety and willpower within him, but that they are mixed together in a chaotic way, like gold, silver and ore. Then a higher age of development begins for the soul when this chaotic mixing of soul powers ceases, and man is not even pushed by an impulse of will, at one time his feelings run away with him, at another time he is led by wisdom alone. No, when the non-chaotic, as it happens through the fourth king, is mixed, when man clearly separates within himself the realm of soul power, that of wisdom, that of the feeling of beauty, that of the religious mood, that that is imbued with the good will to do good, so that he rules over this realm and is not driven by it, then he will come to that point in time when one can say: It is time, I must undertake something else. A soul that is led unprepared before the realm of wisdom, beauty and power would hardly see anything of these things. The man with the lamp represents a soul force that, in a certain sense, prepares people for wisdom, beauty and strength. It is the peculiarity of this lamp that it can only shine where there is already another light. What kind of light comes from the lamp of the old man? The same light, the light of religious world view, which must precede the actual wisdom knowledge, radiates from our hearts, even if we have not yet penetrated into things. It is a light that can only shine where other light is already present. Religions can only produce faith where they arise through this or that preparation, or where they are adapted to what people feel under the climate, certain cultural epochs and so on. There, therefore, the serpent, which wants to penetrate through mere inner mystical soul power to wisdom, piety, power, must encounter the kings, the soul forces, with the light of faith, which leads the soul to higher knowledge, which prepares the soul. Thus Goethe shows how the right time must approach. How it must first be guided by the light of faith and how it can then, when the soul has prepared itself, guided by the light of faith, ascend to an age where it has experienced many things. How it can come to the direct grasp of the soul power in its separateness as well as in its harmonious interaction. It is shown how man can prepare himself here on the physical plane on this side of the river. How on the other side, if man connects himself prematurely with the heights of human emotional life, he suffers damage in his soul, so to speak, perishes. And now the strange figure of the old man's wife with the lamp. This woman, who is described to us as all too human, who is chosen by the will-o'-the-wisps to pay with fruits of the earth — she represents primitive human nature, which cannot rise to knowledge, but when connected to the man with the lamp, with the light, she can believe. What is the light of faith capable of? It can transform stones into gold, wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones. This is all characterized by the fact that the lamp-black pug that has eaten the gold that the will-o'-the-wisps have shaken off is transformed into precious stones by the old man's lamp. This shows the power of faith, this completely wonderful power of faith, this advancement of higher knowledge. Or how it is able to show us all things in such a way that they really present their divine aspects in a certain way. That they show what is in them even before they have reached the supersensible in them through knowledge. The dead stones show: what is endowed with wisdom is transformed into gold by the light of this lamp. This means that faith is able to already sense in things what wisdom later recognizes in full light, and how all things are not as they appear to us in the sensory world, but that they have a deeper side. This is symbolically indicated by how the light of faith in the old man's lamp transforms all things. Man, if he remains in his healthy nature, cannot attain to science, to knowledge, then he actually has something in him that is much more connected with the mysterious forces that stand at the border of the supersensible. Compared to the person who has come to abstract science and easily becomes a doubter and skeptic. How he loses his footing, becomes insecure, nervous about all knowledge. How secure some original primitive nature is, as represented by this old woman, who is so in touch with nature, who can give what the will-o'-the-wisps cannot give. Such people have an original feeling through which they are aware of the connections with the infinite, the divine, which lives and weaves in all nature as the supernatural. That is why, when learned people with their doubts come to some original people, there comes that compassionate smile that says: No matter how clever you are, no matter how much you know about nature with your learning, we know what you do not know; certain knowledge brings us together with that from which we ourselves originate. The woman can pay, which the will-o'-the-wisps cannot. The human being must attain not only emotional certainty. He is connected with a supersensible realm, as is represented by the rule of the temple with the kings, where there is not only an inner, mystical sense of security, but the human being must ascend so that he is truly introduced to the realm of the supersensible, sees the spiritual life and activity. The temple must be transported from the underground into the overground. The temple of knowledge itself must rise above the boundary line, above the river between the supersensible and the sensual world. And it is conceivable that a soul which has worked on itself in this way, has gone up the stages of development, has those holy midday moments of life in a certain way in hand, can pass through them into the spiritual and over into the sensual world. That it can draw attention to how the Divine-Spiritual reigns when an event of external nature is shown and can point again to the pure Divine-Spiritual that is in the supersensible realm, so that it is achieved that not only exquisite, particularly favored spirits can cross the river. This is to be achieved through spiritual science in modern culture. Goethe is a prophet of theosophy in his “Fairy Tale,” in that he shows that not only the favored mystical natures, who have innate mysticism, have midday moments of life when they can cross over the river and find the realm of the supersensible in the bright sunshine of life, but that there is a soul development that everyone can undergo. Every soul, naturally, even though it is laborious and full of renunciation, can all wander over and across, from and to the transcendental realm, when what the mystery of faith is has occurred.
This saying [of the revealed secret] often occurs in Goethe because Goethe, like all true mystics, was of the opinion that there is nothing spiritual that does not experience itself externally, materially, somehow, that one can find connections between the material and the spiritual everywhere. It is only a matter of finding the right point, the right place in the universe where the spiritual expresses itself externally, physiognomically. The secret, apparently! Not so much how to seek the spiritual in a roundabout way, but to connect with things, like the snake. And one also finds a way into the spiritual through communion with the material world. The revealed secret is the one that can be found everywhere and to which only a certain maturity of the soul belongs. The three secrets are none other than how wisdom, beauty and piety and virtue should live in us, not separately. Characteristically, a fourth is necessary, which the old man cannot know. But he can know that it is time to say it! What does the snake whisper in the old man's ear? That she is willing to sacrifice herself, that she is willing to sacrifice her own body, just to build a bridge over the river out of what arises from her. The great secret of the sacrifice of the lower soul forces, which should only be the path to the higher self: I want to sacrifice all that which is connected with the lower entities of nature, which I have sought, obedient to the laws of the world. Those who do not have this dying and becoming remain only a gloomy guest on the dark earth. First, man must go through all that leads him to the events and facts of nature, in order to then offer up what he has gained and experienced with his lower self as a sensual being, and ascend. Jakob Böhme expressed this mystery beautifully:
He who enters the supersensible world through the gate of death without having killed the lower powers of the soul, without having died to the lower self before passing through the physical gate of death, would not prepare himself in this embodiment to see the true spiritual being before death! The soul saves itself from ruin in the lower self when it becomes like the snake, which does not merely remain in the clefts, but sacrifices itself. This means that there is a power of the soul in us that can connect with all nature beings. This power must first be sacrificed, however, for the sake of higher knowledge, so that what must first be sacrificed is all that is lower egoism, all that base selfishness, in order to attain higher freedom. Thus that which first led us into the realm of this world itself becomes the path to the beyond. We ascend into the supersensible world only over that which we have sacrificed ourselves. The will-o'-the-wisps are only able to unlock the gate. They have the keys. Science has the keys, as Mephistopheles has the keys to the realm of the mothers; he can unlock, but not lead into, the real secrets. We can recognize the value of the sciences, appreciate the intelligent and abstract in human life, for it leads us to the gate. But then the higher soul forces must begin if we want to be admitted into the temple. Thus we see how these will-o'-the-wisp actually play out their role to the end, and how Goethe, in the development of his fairy tale poetry, captures the meaning of the soul forces down to the last details. The “fairytale” is such that with this kind of explanation, every word, every sentence is proof that a deeper meaning is being introduced into the fairy tale. Through the effect of the lamp, the old man's house is lined with gold. What remains of religion, of the different religions? Tradition! Let us try to imagine the whole thing in concrete terms in our cultural process. Let us go to our libraries and search in the historical works on this and that religion. How much of the gold is stored there, how much is illuminated by the light of the lamp, how the abstractions come in, licking up the gold, gleaning the history of religions from the books and making new ones out of old books. Even where wisdom becomes history, stored up in libraries, the will-o'-the-wisps can nourish themselves on it; they even walk around full of erudition with what comes first from these sources. It agrees less with the pug, the natural creature, the unlearned one, who dies from this wisdom and must first be revived. First, through the light of the lamp, he is transformed into precious stones and can be transformed from precious stone through contact with the lily. The lily can enliven everything that has gone through death, that has undergone this – what does not have this dying and becoming – a bright guest must have become this on this earth. He who wishes to endure the touch of the lily must have passed through the death of the lower self. Thus the young man only becomes ready to come into contact with the beautiful lily after he has been killed. He can only enter the Temple of Wisdom after the snake has sacrificed itself. When all this has happened, the young man can then be led to the temple. When the sacrifice has been made, the soul is led upwards from its subterranean existence to the realization that everything is permeated and interwoven by the spirit. Then the temple is led from below upwards, and the human being is endowed with that which the individual soul powers can give him. Wisdom gives him that which is expressed in the sentence of the golden king:
The symbol is the oak wreath. The silver king gives him the sceptre and says:
as a sign of his endowment with the power of piety. The king of brass hands him the sword and shield and tells him:
Right-hand virtue is not aggressive in its approach, but it stands strong and firm on its feet, and when it is a matter of human dignity and human destiny, it is ready to defend these and to work in the world in human love and beneficial human action. Now the young man unites with the beautiful lily. The individual powers of the soul are illuminated by true love. But the soul can only feel this when it has risen above ordinary love, when it is absorbed in love for the spiritual. Wisdom, beauty, piety, virtue, they develop and promote the soul's development. Love not only has to grow, it invigorates, shapes and harmonizes everything. It lifts the soul up a step. There we then see how the human being, when he ascends, when he finds himself in that temple where he can experience knowledge, how he comes to see, but now in holy awe, how the small temple in the large temple sees the highest, the secret of secrets, the human being himself, how he passes over as a spiritual being from the spiritual world to the hut of the , where man is placed as a small world, as a small temple in the larger temple, showing so beautifully when the soul moves up to the steps of higher knowledge, then he attains the secrets of the world through wisdom, piety, and virtue. What Goethe so beautifully felt as the Spinozian love of God, the development of the highest powers of the soul, comes to the riddles, the secrets of the world, but as the highest of the secrets, which we only see again as a small temple in the great, the secret of man himself and his connection with the divine being. The giant comes last, also groping around, and then becomes the hour hand of time. Our knowledge becomes spiritual, it dissipates when we ascend in our soul life, and what is external materialism is the consciousness of those laws that work mechanically. The giant basically stands for the subconscious, for everything that comes from the forces of the soul that also work in the subconscious. This may only remain in one when we look up at what is the utmost for our inwardness, how the times follow one another, what the outer rhythm of time is. This has its ultimate justification, and mere mechanical knowledge has a justification there. One would like to say: Goethe may have had in mind when he came up with this idea of the giant, who finally becomes the hour hand of the world, what superstition has been done with the art of numbers, the various structures in space, what is only a superstitious shadow of a greater knowledge that has remained from the old days of the old worldviews. But one thing remains as justified: to use what has been recognized to form a kind of chronometer for the processes that surround people. Thus, in a certain respect, we find everything that Goethe felt was necessary for the development of the soul's powers translated into vivid images. If you want to ascend to the highest, then you must develop the soul's powers in such a way that it can only be expressed symbolically in rich, meaningful images. Then you will come close to what Goethe wanted to say when you try to gain an insight into these images from the whole of Goethe's world view. But you must be aware that what is contained in the fairy tale is infinitely richer than I have said, and that all of this is actually only a suggestion of the kind in which Goethe's fairy tale should be sought and felt. But perhaps it is possible to get a sense of the inner wealth and greatness from which Goethe created with such immeasurable productive power. How right he is when he says that the true, the beautiful, the truly artistic can only be an expression of the general truth that permeates the world and that people can recognize. And this was also what lived in Goethe as a conviction, what led him from step to step in restless pursuit; this is what draws us to Goethe, so to speak. Goethe is one of those minds that work like only the very greatest. You read a work by Goethe once in your life. You think you have understood it. After five years you read it again and realize: I didn't understand it then, but only now. Then again after five years, and you realize how much you have discovered that you couldn't see before because you weren't mature enough. Only now, after you have experienced so much yourself, only now can you understand the work. Five years later you read it again, and then perhaps you are so happy that you say to yourself: At the time you did not understand it; you must, you can wait until you become more mature and more mature, to be completely satisfied as you grow into it more and more. This feeling is only experienced by the most exquisite minds in the development of humanity. In such people we see the leaders of human culture. One gets an inkling of the infinity of the soul's content by being able to penetrate ever deeper into it. Then one counts him among those spirits about whom, summarizing today's reflection, we can say:
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| 108. The Answers to Questions About the World and Life Provided by Anthroposophy: On Philosophy and Formal Logic
08 Nov 1908, Munich Rudolf Steiner |
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| The concept of a circle cannot be formed by going through various circles, green, blue, large and small, and then omitting everything that is not common, and then forming an abstraction. |
| 108. The Answers to Questions About the World and Life Provided by Anthroposophy: On Philosophy and Formal Logic
08 Nov 1908, Munich Rudolf Steiner |
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Of course, it is not possible to cover the topic of logic as fully as one would wish in the few days available. If one wanted to cover the subject exhaustively, one would have to hold a kind of course. Therefore, please take what I say here only as a few sketchy suggestions. I do not intend to proceed systematically either, but only to present some of the elementary logical truths to you, so that you may have something that you can perhaps make use of right now. We have formed a concept of the concept itself, have heard what a judgment is and how a conclusion arises, namely through the connection of judgments. It has been said that there are certain inner laws of the technique of thinking that determine how to connect the judgments if one wants to gain correct conclusions. We gave the original form of the conclusion in the first form of the conclusion using the example: All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal. In the major premise, “All men are mortal,” we have the first judgment; and in the minor premise, “Caius is a man,” we have a second judgment. The point now is to let a new judgment follow from the connection of these two judgments, through inner conformity to law: “Therefore Caius is mortal.” We call this last judgment the conclusion. We see what this concluding sentence is based on: we have two sentences that are given, that must be present; we know what they say. The point now is to omit the middle term from these two given sentences. The subject term of the antecedent was: “all men”, the predicate term “mortal”. In the consequent we had the subject term “Caius” and the predicate term “man”. In the final sentence, the two terms that were present in both sentences are omitted, namely the term “human”. The fact that we can form the final sentence depends on how this middle term “human” is included in the upper and lower sentences. Our scheme was: \(M = P\); \(S = M\); \(S = P\). The fact that we are allowed to construct the final sentence in this way is due to the distribution of the terms in the upper clauses. If it were different, it would not be possible to conclude as in the example given recently: “Photography resembles man” (upper clause); “Photography is a mechanical product” (lower clause). If we were to omit the middle term, which is contained in both sentences, then no valid conclusion could be formed here. This is because in both sentences the middle term is connected to the predicate in the same way as the subject. The middle term must be at the beginning in one case and at the end in the other; only then can we form a valid conclusion. Logic is a formal art of forming concepts. It is already evident in the arrangement of the concepts how one can arrive at valid conclusions. We must acquire as laws the way in which the concepts must be combined. We could also say that formal logic comprises the doctrine of concepts, judgments, and conclusions. Now we will deal with judgments in a few remarks. Certain laws can be established about judgments. The laws of inference will only be understood once the tenets about the concepts and judgments have been established. So today we will first deal with the laws of judgments and concepts. If we start with the law of concepts themselves, we can compare a concept such as “lion” with the concept of “mammal”. Both are concepts that we can form. They differ in the following ways. Think about what all falls under the concept of “mammal”. It is a large group of individual objects, for example, monkeys, lions, marsupials, and so on; that is much more than we summarize under the term “lion”, which gives us only a small part of the “mammal” concept. Thus, all concepts differ from each other in that some concepts cover a great deal and some only a small area. Here we say: The concepts differ in their scope; but they also differ in other respects. To define the concept of “lion”, many characteristics are needed, many features such as head, color, paws, teeth, and so on. All these things that are listed to get to the concept of “lion” are called the content of the concept. The concept of “mammal” has considerably fewer characteristics than the concept of “lion”. If you were to subsume animals with a certain hair color under the concept, that would no longer be correct. When you form the concept of “mammal”, you have to have as few characteristics as possible, a small content, for example, only the characteristic that it gives birth to live young and that it suckles them. Thus, in “mammal” we have a concept with little content and great scope, and in “lion” the opposite. There are therefore concepts with great scope and little content, and concepts with little scope and great content. The greater the scope of a concept, the smaller its content; the greater the content, the smaller the scope. Thus, concepts differ in content and scope. Let us now consider judgments in a similar way. When you pronounce the judgment: All men are mortal, you have a different judgment than: The crocodile is not a mammal. The difference between the two is that in the first case something is affirmed, the concepts are brought together in such a way that they are compatible. In the second case, the concepts do not agree; they exclude each other; here we have a negative judgment. Thus, we distinguish between affirmative and negative judgment. There are still other differences with respect to judgment. All men are mortal - the judgment is such that something quite different is given with it than with: Some flowers are red. In the first case, the statement of the property applies to the entire scope of the subject concept; in the second case, other characteristics can be added. The latter judgment is called a particular judgment, in contrast to the first, a general judgment as opposed to a universal judgment. So we have affirmative and negative, universal and particular judgments. Other distinguishing features can also be found in judgments. For example, a judgment can be made in such a way that it is along the lines of “All men are mortal,” or a judgment can be pronounced in such a way as “When the sun shines, it is light.” The first judgment unites the subject and predicate concepts unconditionally, whereas the second unites the subject and predicate concepts not unconditionally, but only conditionally. It only states that the predicate term is there when the subject term is also there, nothing else. The first - All men are mortal - is an absolute or unconditional judgment, the second - When the sun shines, it is light - is a hypothetical judgment. So there are absolute or unconditional judgments and hypothetical or conditional judgments. Many more such characteristics of judgments could be cited; but the point is to show that some of the knowledge depends on these differences. One must master the technique of concepts in order to be able to draw correct conclusions. If, for example, you take our conclusion after the first conclusion figure: All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal – we have a general judgment in the major premise and a singular judgment in the subordinate premise, because it is applied to only one individual, to Caius. This is a subform of the particular judgment. This arrangement of the judgments is permissible; it leads to a correct conclusion. But let us try a different arrangement. Take, for example, the proposition: Some women have red dresses – this is a particular judgment. And now let us say: Mrs. NN is a woman. – Now I must not conclude: Therefore Mrs. NN has a red dress. – I must not do that because it is impermissible to conclude according to this figure of speech when the antecedent contains a particular judgment. Only when the antecedent is a universal judgment is this figure of speech correct. Thus certain laws can be established here again. We could now also cite other properties of judgments. We have said that a judgment can be affirmative or negative. Let us take a negative judgment: The crocodile is not a mammal. This animal is a crocodile. Here we may conclude: Therefore this animal is not a mammal. The subordinate clause may thus be affirmative as well as negative. So there is a certain technique of thinking, a law of thinking, which is formal, that is, quite independent of content. If we observe this formal technique, we think correctly, but otherwise we think incorrectly. We have to follow this technique of thinking, this law of thinking, in order to come to the right conclusions. We now have a famous classification into analytical and synthetic judgments, which was originally proposed by Kant. Today, people who do a little philosophy can very often come across this classification. What is the difference in the Kantian sense? An analytic judgment is one in which the concept of the predicate is already contained in the concept of the subject. In a synthetic judgment, on the other hand, the concept of the subject does not necessarily contain the concept of the predicate. For example, the sentence “the body is extended” is an analytic judgment, because one cannot think of a body without also thinking of its extension. “Extended” is only one characteristic of the concept “body”. A synthetic judgment, however, is one in which the concept of the predicate is not yet contained in the concept of the subject. Subject and predicate are brought together by an external cause. For example: “The body is heavy” is, according to Kant, a synthetic judgment. For he believes that the concept of heaviness is connected with the concept of the body only through external reasons, through the law of attraction. In the synthetic judgment, therefore, the concepts are more loosely connected. Much nonsense has been made of the concepts of analytical and synthetic judgments in recent philosophy. It always seemed to me that the most enlightening thing was the story that is said to have happened to an examinee at a German university. He came to a friend on the evening before the exam and asked him to quickly teach him a few more logic terms. But the friend realized the futility of such an undertaking and advised him to leave as he was and take his chances. The next day, the examinee was asked: Do you know what an analytical judgment is? The sad answer was: No. To which the professor replied: That's a very good answer, because I can't say either. And what is a synthetic judgment? The student, growing bolder, answered again: “I don't know.” The professor said, very pleased: “You have grasped the spirit of the matter. I congratulate you, you will get a good grade!” In a certain respect, the matter seems to me to be indeed shedding light. For the difference between the two types of judgment is indeed a floating one: it depends on what one has thought with the concept. For example, one person adds the concept of extension to the body; on the other hand, the person who adds the concept of gravity brings more to the concept from the outset than the other person. The point now is for us to recognize what is really real in the combination of concepts into judgments, or rather what the secret goal of all judgment is. Judgment is in fact purely formal at first. But there is something connected with judging that will become clearest to you if you compare the following two judgments with each other. Let us assume – not that we are going to leave the physical plane – we have the judgment: The lion is yellow. When you form this judgment, it can be correct. But let us assume that someone imagines some concept out of his head, an animal half lion, a quarter whale and a quarter camel. He could quite well imagine it together; he calls it, let us say, “Taxu”. He could now form the judgment: This animal is beautiful. - This judgment is valid in a formal respect just as the judgment: The lion is yellow. - How do I distinguish valid judgment from invalid judgment? - Now we come to a chapter in which we have to find the criterion for the ability to form a judgment at all. You can change the judgment: “The lion is yellow” at any time, namely by saying, “A yellow lion” or “The yellow lion is”. - But we cannot say, “A beautiful taxu is”. This leads to a criterion for the validity of a judgment: one must be able to include the predicate concept in the subject concept and make an existential judgment out of it. The transformation of a formal judgment into an existential judgment by adding the predicate to the subject thus forms the criterion for validity. In the first case, [empirical] necessity unites the concept “yellow” with “lion”; in the second case, it is assumed when forming the concept that the subject has been taken from an existential judgment, whereas in fact it only arose from a formal judgment. This is a criterion for the validity of every judgment. The formal correctness of a judgment depends only on the correct connection of the concepts, but the validity of a judgment depends on the existential judgment. A formal judgment is transformed into an existential judgment by adding the predicate to the subject; one enriches the subject. And that is precisely the goal of judging and also of concluding: the formation of such concepts that have validity. Form the judgment: A yellow lion is - then you have thought not only in terms of formal correctness, but also in terms of validity. Now you see that formal logic does indeed offer us the possibility of filling ourselves with correct concepts, so to speak, but that the formation of valid judgments is what we must have in mind; and valid judgments cannot be gained from mere formal logic. The existential judgment in our example – The yellow lion is – was gained from external sense observation. Formal logic gives us the possibility of arriving at correct concepts; with its help we can create quite fruitful concepts. But for the validity of judgments, logic will have to be fertilized by content-related aspects. People usually do not really realize what logic is at all. But if one has learned to grasp the concept correctly, independently of content, it is extremely important. The validity and the formality of a judgment are two different things. Because people do not really understand the connection between these things, they spin out very grand theories, which some people regard as irrevocable, but which would collapse of their own accord if people were to realize the difference between “formal correctness” and “validity”. You know that there is a modern school of psychology that strictly denies the freedom of the human will. Every human action, it says, is strictly determined by previous events. There are certain methods of proving this, and these play a fateful role today in statistics, for example. For example, someone is investigating how many people in France die by suicide. That's easy, you don't even have to think about it; you just note the numbers over a period of about five years, then you examine it for another five years and so on. Then the person finds that there is a certain difference between these numbers. Now he takes larger numbers, compares twenty to twenty years and finds that here the suicide numbers are almost the same; of course not the same, because the circumstances change, - say, they increase in a certain proportion. A numerical law can be found according to which one can predict how many suicides will occur within a certain period, how many people will die by suicide in a certain period of time. Now there are people who say: if you can calculate in advance how many people would commit suicide, how can one still speak of human freedom? It is the same with estimating future crimes. According to an immutable causality - so they say - so many people would have to become criminals. It is not to be said here that the law is not valid. In a way, it is perfectly applicable in practice to certain cases. But the moment the law is applied, the worst misunderstanding will result, the essence of things or the human being will be investigated and fathomed. Let us think of insurance companies that work with probability calculations. They arrive at very specific formulas by deducing from experience that a certain number of every hundred married twenty-year-olds will lose the other spouse to death over the course of thirty years. They check the percentage rate within a certain period of time and use it to determine the insurance premiums. It is quite practical to apply such laws in the insurance business; they are true, these laws; but they do not go to something deeper. The matter becomes strange when we take the laws more deeply! Let us imagine that someone is presented with the material of such an insurance company and finds: There is still a spouse alive who should have died by now; but this person is healthy and, according to his inner being, it does not even occur to him to die yet. Nevertheless, the insurance company still has a right to its money, because the formal laws apply very well in the world, but one cannot see into the inner being of a person through such laws. And so it is with all the laws of nature, which are only gained through the collection of external observations. One only gains a concept of the external course of events, but cannot draw conclusions about the inner essence of a thing or a person, for example, whether it is healthy or sick. In the same way, you can never gain a concept of the essence of light by observing its phenomena. You have to keep this in mind, otherwise you will come to results such as those of Exner in his last rectorate speech in Vienna. External facts are not indicative of the inner essence of a thing. There is still a great deal of confusion in the thinking of humanity in this regard. It cannot be claimed that one can learn to think through logic; that is just as impossible as becoming a musician through the study of harmony. But logic is necessary for correct thinking, just as the study of harmony is necessary for composing for the right musician. One must know how judgments and conclusions are formed. But we must always remain in the same region if we want to make formally correct judgments. For example, the conclusion: All men are mortal. I am a man. Therefore I am mortal - is apparently not a fallacy, because here we are referring back to the subject. However, the laws of logic only apply if we remain on the same level. The conclusion “Therefore I am mortal” refers only to the body. However, our I belongs to another level; it is not mortal. The conclusion: “Therefore the I is mortal” is therefore wrong. Such formal errors are often found in the works of today's scholars. ABOUT PHILOSOPHY AND FORMAL LOGIC Munich, November 8, 1908 Today we will have a brief interlude in our lectures. We will not be speaking about an anthroposophical topic, but about a purely philosophical subject. As a result, this evening will have to bear the essential character of being boring. But it is perhaps good for anthroposophists to delve into such boring topics from time to time, to let them approach them - for the reason that they have to hear over and over again that the sciences, especially philosophical science cannot deal with anthroposophy because only dilettantes occupy themselves with it, people who have no desire to devote themselves to serious, rigorous research and serious, rigorous thinking. Dilettantism, amateurism, that is what is repeatedly reproached by learned philosophers of anthroposophy. Now the lecture that I gave in Stuttgart and which will be available in print here next Wednesday will be able to show you, from a certain point of view, how it will only be possible for philosophy to find the way, the bridge to anthroposophy, when it first finds its deepening within itself. This lecture will show you that the philosophers who speak of the dilettantism of anthroposophists simply cannot build a bridge from their supposed scientific knowledge to anthroposophy, which they so despise, because they do not have philosophy itself, because, so to speak, they indulge in the worst dilettantism in their own field. There is indeed a certain plight in the field of philosophy. In our present-day intellectual life, we have a fruitful, extraordinarily significant natural science. We also have to show purely scientific progress in other areas of intellectual life, in that positive science has succeeded in constructing exact instruments that can be used in various fields, measuring spaces and revealing the smallest particles. Through this and various other means at its disposal, it has succeeded in advancing external research to a point that will be greatly increased in the future by the expansion of methods. But the fact remains that this external research is confronted with a philosophical ignorance, especially on the part of those who are researchers, so that although it is possible, with the help of today's tools, to achieve great and powerful results in the external field of facts, it is not possible for those to whom are the ones who are supposed to make these discoveries, it is not possible for them to draw conclusions from these external results for the knowledge of the mind, simply because those entrusted with the external mission of the sciences are not at all at a significant level of education in terms of philosophical thinking. It is one thing to work in a laboratory or a cabinet with tools and an external method in research, and it is quite another to have educated and trained one's thinking in such a way that one can draw valid conclusions from what one can actually research, conclusions that are then able to shed light on the origins of existence. There were times when there was less philosophical reflection and when people who were called to it had trained their thinking in a very particular way, and when external research was not as advanced as it is today. Today the opposite is the case. There is an admirable external research of facts, but an inability to think and to work through concepts philosophically in the broadest sense. Yes, we are actually dealing not only with such an inability on the part of those who are supposed to work in research, but also with a certain contempt for philosophical thinking. Today, the botanist, the physicist, the chemist do not find it necessary to worry about the most elementary foundations of thought technology. When they approach their work in the laboratory or in the cabinet, it is as if one could say: Yes, the method works by itself. Those who are a little familiar with these things know how the method works by itself, and that basically it is not such a world-shattering event when someone makes a discovery of facts that may be deeply incisive, because the method has been working for a long time. When the empirical researcher comes across what is important, a physicist or chemist comes along and wants to report something about the actual reasons underlying what he is researching, then he starts thinking and the result is that something “beautiful” comes out, because he is not trained in thinking at all. And through this untrained, this inwardly neglected thinking, which clings to the scholar as well as to the layman, we have arrived at a state where certain dogmas are authoritatively bandied about, and the layman accepts them as something absolutely certain. Whereas the original cause that these dogmas have come into being at all lies only in this neglected thinking. Certain conclusions are drawn in an incredible way. We will take as an example such a conclusion, which has a certain historical significance. When a bell rings, people say to themselves: I hear a sound; I will investigate to see what the external, objective cause of it is. And now they find, and in this case through exact experiment, through something that can be established externally through facts, that when a sound comes from an object, then the object is in a certain way inwardly shaken, that when a bell sounds, its metal is in vibration. It can be demonstrated by exact experiment that when the bell vibrates, it also sets the air in certain vibrations, which propagate and strike my eardrum. And as a consequence of these vibrations – so the initial conclusion, quite plausible! – the tones arise. I know that a string vibrates when I have one; I can prove this in the world of facts by placing little paper tabs on the string, which come off when the string is bowed. Likewise, it can be demonstrated that the string in turn sets the air in vibration, the air that then strikes my ear and causes the sound. For sound, this is something that belongs to the world of facts, and it is not difficult to follow when it is explained. One need only put the facts together and draw conclusions from them, and then what has been said will emerge. But now the matter goes further, and there is a tremendous hitch. People say: Yes, with the ear we perceive sound, with the eye we perceive light and colors. Now it seems to them that because sound appears, so to speak, as an effect of something external, color as such must also be the effect of something external. Fine! The exterior of the color can be imagined similarly, as something that vibrates, like the air in the case of sound. And just as, let's say, a certain pitch corresponds to a certain number of vibrations, so one could say that something will also move at a certain frequency, which causes this or that color. Why should there not be something outside that vibrates, and not something that transmits these vibrations to my eye and causes the impression of light here? Of course, you cannot see or perceive through any instrument what vibrates in this case. With sound it is possible. It can be determined that something vibrates; with color it cannot be perceived. But the matter seems so obvious that it does not occur to anyone to doubt that something must also vibrate when we have a light impression, just as something vibrates when we have sound impressions. And since one cannot perceive what vibrates, one simply invents it. They say: Air is a dense substance that vibrates when sound is produced; the vibrations of light are in the “ether”. This fills the whole of space. When the sun sends us light, they say, it is because the sun's matter vibrates, and these vibrations propagate through the ether, striking the eye and creating the impression of light. It is also very quickly forgotten that this ether was invented in a purely fantastic way, that it was speculated into existence. This has taken place historically. It is presented with great certainty. It is spoken of with absolute certainty that such an ether expands and vibrates, so much so that the public opinion is formed: Yes, this has been established by science! How often will you find this judgment today: Science has established that there is such an ether, the vibrations of which cause the light sensations in our eye. You can even read in very nice books that everything is based on such vibrations. This goes so far that the origins of human thought are sought in such vibrations of the ether: A thought is the effect of the ether on the soul. What underlies it are vibrations in the brain, vibrating ether, and so on. And so, for many people, what they have thought up, speculated on, presents itself as the real thing in the world, which cannot be doubted at all. Yet it is based on nothing more than the characterized error in reasoning. You must not confuse what is called ether here with what we call ether. We speak of something supersensible; but physics speaks of the ether as something that exists in space like another body, to which properties are attributed like those of the sensual bodies. One has the right to speak of something as a real fact only if one has established it, if it really exists outside, if one can experience it. One must not invent facts. The ether of the modern scientist is imaginary, and that is what matters. It is therefore an enormous fantasy at the basis of our physics, an arbitrary fiction of mysterious secrets. The ether of the modern scientist is imagined, that is what matters.Therefore, at the basis of our physics there is an enormous fantasy, an arbitrary fiction of mysterious ether vibrations, atomic and molecular vibrations, all of which cannot be assumed to be possible because nothing other than what can actually be perceived can be regarded as actual. Can any of these ether vibrations be perceived as physics assumes them to be? We would only have an epistemological justification for assuming them if we could establish them by the same means by which we perceive other things. We have no other means of establishing things than sensory perception. Can it be light or color that vibrates in the ether? Impossible, because it is supposed to produce color and light first. Can it be perceived by other senses? Impossible; it is something that is supposed to produce all perceptions, but at the same time it cannot possibly be perceived by the concept that one has put into it. It is something that looks very much like a knife that has no handle and no blade, something where, so to speak, the front part of the concept automatically consumes the back part. But now something very strange is achieved, and you can see in it a proof of how justified – however bold the expression may sound – the expression 'neglected' is in relation to philosophical thinking. People completely forget to take into account the simplest necessities of thought. Thus, by spinning out such theories, certain people come to say that everything that appears to us is nothing more than something based on vibrating matter, vibrating ether, motion. If you would examine everything in the world, you would find that where there is color and so on, there is nothing but vibrating matter. When, for example, a light effect propagates, something does not pass from one part of space to another, nothing flows from the sun to us. In the circles concerned, one imagines: Between us and the sun is the ether, the molecules of the sun are dancing; because they dance, they make the neighboring ether particles dance; now the neighboring ones also dance; because they dance, the next ones dance in turn, and so it continues down to our eye, and when it dances in, our eye perceives light and color. So, it is said, nothing flows down; what dances remains above, it only stimulates to dance again. Only the dance propagates itself. There is nothing in the light that would flow down. - It is as if a long line of people were standing there, one of whom gives the next one a blow, which the latter in turn passes on to the third and the fourth. The first does not go away, nor does the second; the blow is passed on. This is how the dance of atoms is said to propagate. In a diligently and eruditely written brochure, which one has to acknowledge insofar as it is at the cutting edge of science, someone has achieved something nice. He wrote: It is the basis of all phenomena that nothing moves into another part of space; only the movements propagate. So if a person walks forward, it is a false idea to think that he carries his materiality over into another part of space. He takes a step, moves; the movement is generated again, and again with the next step, and so on. That is quite consistent. But now such a scholar is advised, when he takes a few steps and has to recreate himself in the next part of space because none of his body comes across, that he just doesn't forget to recreate himself, otherwise he could disappear into nothingness. Here you have an example of how things lead to consequences! People just don't draw the consequences. What happens in public is that people say to themselves: Well, a book has been published, someone has set out these theories, he has learned a lot, and that's where he concocted these things, and that's for sure! - That there could be something completely different in it, people don't think of that. So it is a matter of the fact that the matter is really not so bad with the dilettantism of anthroposophy. It is true that those who stand on the ground of intellectual erudition can only regard anthroposophy as dilettantism; but the point is that on their own ground people have spun themselves into concepts that are their thinking habits. One can be lenient when someone is led by their thought habits to have to create themselves over and over again; but nevertheless, it must be emphasized that on this side there is no justification for speaking from their theoretical point of view down to the dilettant antism of anthroposophy, which, if it fulfills its ideal, would certainly not make such mistakes as not to try to draw the consequences from the premises and to examine whether they are absurd. From anthroposophy you can draw conclusions everywhere. The conclusions are applicable to life, while they are not there, cannot be applied to life, only apply to the study! These are the kinds of things that should draw your attention to the errors in reasoning, which are not so easy to see for those who are not familiar with them. Today, the sense of authority is much too strong in the interaction between scholars and the public in all circles; but the sense of authority has few good foundations today. One should be able to rely on it. Not everyone is able to follow the history of science in order to be able to get from there the things that teach them about the scope of purely external research and of research into ideas. Thus it is perfectly justified to ascribe great significance to Helmholtz merely because of his invention of the ophthalmoscope. But if you follow this discovery historically, if you can follow what has already been there and how it only needed to be discovered, you will see that the methods have worked here. Today, basically, one can be a very small thinker and achieve great, powerful things if the relevant means and methods are available. This does not criticize all the work in this field, but what has been said applies. Now I would like to give you the reasons, from a certain point of view, why all this could have happened. There are an enormous number of these reasons; but it will suffice if we keep one or two in mind. If we look back in the history of intellectual life, we find that what we call thinking technique, conceptual technique, originated in Greek intellectual life, and had its first classical representative in Aristotle. He achieved something for humanity, for scholarly humanity, that was undoubtedly extremely necessary for this scholarly humanity, but which has fallen into disrepute: purely formal logic. There is much public discussion about whether philosophical propaedeutics should be thrown out of grammar schools. It is considered superfluous, that it could be done on the side in German, but that it is not needed as a special discipline. Even to this consequence, the snobbish looking down on something like the technique of thinking has already led. This technique of thinking has been so firmly established by Aristotle that it has been able to make little progress. It does not need it. What has been taught in more recent times has only been taught because the actual concept of logic has even been lost. Now, in order for you to see what is meant by this, I would like to give you an understanding of formal logic. Logic is the study of concepts, judgments, and conclusions. First, we need to understand a little bit about how concepts relate to judgments and conclusions. Man initially acquires knowledge on the physical plane through perception. The first is sensation, but sensation as such would be, for example, an impression, a single color impression. However, objects do not appear to us as such individual impressions, but as combined impressions, so that we always have not just individual sensations before us, but combined ones, and these are the perceptions. When you have an object before you that you perceive, you can turn away from the object your organs of perception and it remains as an image within you. When this remains, you will be able to distinguish it very well from the object itself. You can look at this hammer, it is perceptible to you. If you turn around, an afterimage remains. We call this the representation. It is extremely important to distinguish between perception and representation. Things would go very well if it were not for the fact that so little thinking technique is available that these things are made extremely complicated from the outset. For example, the sentence that is supported by many epistemologies today - that we have nothing but our representations - is based on error. Because one says: you do not perceive the thing in itself. Most people believe that behind what they perceive are the dancing molecules. What they perceive is only the impression on their own soul. Of course, because otherwise the soul is denied, it is strange that they first speak of the impressions on the soul and then explain the soul as something that in turn consists only of dancing atoms. When you tackle things like this, you get the image of the brave Munchausen, who holds himself up in the air by his own hair. No distinction is made between perception and imagination. If one were to distinguish, one would no longer be tempted to commit this epistemological thoughtlessness, which lies in saying: “The world is my imagination” – apart from the fact that it is already an epistemological thoughtlessness to attempt to compare perception with imagination and then address perception as imagination. I would like someone to touch a piece of glowing iron and then to state that he is burning himself. Now he should compare the idea with the perception and then say whether it burns as much as this one. So the things are such that you only have to grasp them logically; then it becomes clear what they are. We must therefore distinguish between perception, in which we have an object in front of us, and the idea, in which this is not the case. In the world of ideas, we distinguish again between idea in the narrower sense and concept. You can get an idea of the concept of a concept from the mathematical concept. Imagine drawing a circle. This is not a circle in the mathematical sense. When you look at what you have drawn, you can form the idea of a circle, but not the concept. You have to imagine a point and then many points around it, all equidistant from the one center point. Then you have the concept of a circle. With this mental construction, what is drawn, what consists of many small chalk mountains, does not match at all. One chalk mountain is further away from the center than the other. So when you talk about concept and idea, you have to make the distinction that the idea is gained from external objects, but that the concept arises through internal mental construction. However, you can read in countless psychology books today that the concept arises only from the fact that we abstract from this or that, which confronts us in the outside world. We believe that in the external world we only encounter white, black, brown, and yellow horses, and from this we are supposed to form the concept of a horse. This is how logic describes it: we omit what is different; first the white, black, and so on color, then what is otherwise different and again different, and finally something blurry remains; this is called the concept of “horse.” We have abstracted. This, it is thought, is how concepts are formed. Those who describe the matter in this way forget that the actual nature of the concept for today's humanity can only be truly grasped in the mathematical concept, because this shows first what is constructed internally and then found in the external world. The concept of a circle cannot be formed by going through various circles, green, blue, large and small, and then omitting everything that is not common, and then forming an abstraction. The concept is formed from the inside out. One must form the thought-construction. Today, people are just not ready to form the concept of the horse in this way. Goethe endeavored to form such inner constructions for higher regions of natural existence as well. It is significant that he seeks to ascend from representation to concept. Anyone who understands the matter knows that one does not arrive at the concept of the horse by leaving out the differences and keeping what remains. The concept is not formed in this way, but rather through internal construction, like the concept of a circle, only not so simply. What I mentioned in yesterday's lecture about the wolf that eats lambs all its life and yet does not become a lamb, occurs here. If you have the concept of the wolf in this way, you have what Aristotle calls the form of the wolf. The matter of the wolf is not important. Even if it eats nothing but lambs, it will not become a lamb. If one looks only at the matter, one would have to say that if it consumes nothing but lambs, it should actually become a lamb. It does not become a lamb because what matters is how it organizes the matter, and that is what lives in it as the “form” and what one can construct in the pure concept. When we connect concepts or ideas, judgments arise. If we connect the idea “horse” with the idea “black” to “the horse is black,” we have a judgment. The connection of concepts thus forms judgments. Now it is a matter of the fact that this formation of judgments is absolutely connected with the formal concept technique that can be learned and that teaches how to connect valid concepts with each other, thus forming judgments. The study of this is a chapter of formal logic. We shall see how what I have discussed is something that belongs to formal logic. Now formal logic is that which discusses the inner activity of thinking according to its laws, so to speak the natural history of thinking, which provides us with the possibility of drawing valid judgments, valid conclusions. When we come to the formation of judgments here, we must again find that more recent thinking has fallen into a kind of mousetrap. For at the door of more recent thinking stands Kant, and he is one of the greatest authorities. Right at the beginning of Kant's works, we find judgments in contrast to Aristotle. Today we want to point out how errors in reasoning are made. Right at the beginning of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, we find the discussion of analytical and synthetic judgments. What are analytical judgments supposed to be? They are supposed to be where one concept is strung on to another in such a way that the predicate concept is already contained in the subject concept and one only has to extract it. Kant says: If I think the concept of the body and say that the body is extended, then this is an analytical judgment; for no one can think the concept of the body without thinking the body extended. He only separates the concept of the predicate from the subject. Thus, an analytical judgment is one that is formed by taking the concept of the predicate out of the subject concept. A synthetic judgment, on the other hand, is a judgment in which the concept of the predicate is not yet so wrapped up in the concept of the subject that one can simply unwrap it. When someone thinks the concept of the body, they do not think the concept of heaviness along with it. So when the concept of heaviness is added to that of the body, one has a synthetic judgment. This is a judgment that not only provides explanations but would also enrich our world of thought. Now, however, you will be able to see that this difference between analytical and synthetic judgments is not a logical one at all. For whether someone already thinks the predicate concept when the subject concept arises depends on how far he has progressed. For example, if someone imagines the body in such a way that it is not heavy, then the concept “heavy” is foreign to him in relation to the body; but anyone who, through his mental and other work, has already brought himself to think of heaviness in connection with the body, also needs only to unwrap this concept from his concept of “body”. So this is a purely subjective difference. We must proceed thoroughly in all these matters. We must seek out the sources of error with precision. It seems to me that the person who does grasp as purely subjective that which can be isolated from a concept, will not really find a boundary between analytical and synthetic judgments and may find it difficult to give a definition of them. Something quite different is important. What is it that matters? That later! It seems to me, in fact, to be quite significant what happened when, during an exam, the two judgments were discussed. There was a doctor who was to be examined in logic as a subsidiary subject. He was well-versed in his subject, but knew nothing about logic. Before the exam, he told a friend that the latter should tell him a few things about logic. But his friend, who took this a little more seriously, said: If you don't know anything yet, it's better to rely on your luck. Now he came to the exam. As I said, he did very well in the main subjects; he was well-versed in them. But he knew nothing about logic. The professor asked him: So tell me, what is a synthetic judgment? He didn't know the answer and was now very embarrassed. Yes, Mr. Candidate, don't you know what that is? the professor asked. No! was the answer. An excellent answer! exclaimed the examiner. You see, people have been trying to figure out what that is for so long and can't figure out what a synthetic judgment actually is. You couldn't have given a better answer. And can you tell me, Mr. Candidate, what an analytical judgment is? The candidate had now become more impertinent and confidently replied, “No!” “Oh, I see, you have penetrated to the heart of the matter,” the professor continued. People have been searching for so long to find out what an analytical judgment is and have not been able to figure it out. That is not known. An excellent answer! The fact has really happened; it always seemed to me, though it cannot necessarily be taken as such, as a very good characteristic of what distinguishes both judgments. In fact, nothing distinguishes them; one flows into the other. Now we still have to realize how we can speak of valid judgments at all, what such a thing is. This is a very important matter. A judgment is initially nothing more than the connection of ideas or concepts. “The rose is red” is a judgment. Whether a judgment is correct or not, does not determine whether it is valid. To do that, we have to realize that if a judgment is correct, it does not necessarily follow that it is a valid judgment. In this case, it is not only important to connect a subject concept with a predicate concept. Let us take an example! “This rose is red” is a correct judgment. Whether it is also valid is not certain, because we can also form other correct judgments that are far from being valid. According to formal logic, there should be no objections to the correctness of a judgment; it could be completely correct, but it could still lack validity. For example, someone could imagine a creature that is half horse, a quarter whale, and a quarter camel. We will now call this animal “taxu”. Now it is undoubtedly true that this animal would be ugly. The judgment, “The taxu is ugly,” is therefore correct and can be pronounced in this way according to all the rules of correctness; for the taxu, half horse, quarter whale, and quarter camel, is ugly, that is beyond doubt, and just as the judgment “This rose is red” is correct, so is this. Now, one should never express a correct judgment as valid. Something else is necessary for that: you must be able to transform the correct judgment. You must only regard the correct judgment as valid when you can say, “This red rose is,” when you can take the predicate back into the subject, when you can transform the correct judgment into an existential judgment. In this case, you have a valid judgment. “This red rose is.” There is no other way than to be able to include the concept of the predicate in the concept of the subject. Then the judgment is valid. ‘The taxus is ugly’ cannot be made into a valid judgment. You cannot say, ‘An ugly taxus is.’ This is shown by the test by which you can find out whether a judgment can be made at all; it shows you how the test must be done. The test must be made by seeing whether one is able to transform the judgment into an existential judgment. Here you can see something very important that one must know: that the mere combination of concepts into a logically correct judgment is not yet something that can now be regarded as decisive for the real world. Something else must be added. We must not overlook the fact that something else is required for the validity of the concept and judgment. Something else also comes into question for the validity of our conclusions. A conclusion is the connection of judgments. The simplest conclusion is: All men are mortal. Caius is a man - therefore: Caius is mortal. The subclause is: Caius is a human being. The conclusion is: Caius is mortal. This conclusion is formed according to the first figure of conclusion, in which the subject and predicate are connected by a middle term. The middle term here is “human being,” the predicate term is “mortal,” and the subject term is “Caius.” You connect them with the same middle term. Then you come to the conclusion: Caius is mortal. This conclusion is built on the basis of very definite laws. You must not change these. As soon as you change something, you come to a train of thought that is no longer possible. Nobody could find a correct final sentence if they were to change this. That would not work. Because it does not work that way, you can see for yourself that thinking is based on laws. If you were to say: The portrait is an image of the person, photography is an image of the person, you would not be allowed to form the final sentence from this: Photography is a portrait. It is impossible to draw a correct final sentence if you arrange the concepts differently than according to the specific laws. Thus you see that we have, so to speak, a real formal movement of concepts, of judgments, that thinking is based on very specific laws. But one never comes close to reality through this pure movement of concepts. In judgment, we have seen how one must first transform the right into the valid. In the conclusion, we want to convince ourselves in another form that it is impossible to approach reality through the formal conclusion. For a conclusion can be correct according to all formal laws and yet not valid, that is, it cannot approach reality. The following example will show you the simplicity of the fallacy: “All Cretans are liars,” says a Cretan. Suppose this Cretan says it. Then you can proceed according to quite logical conclusions and yet arrive at an impossibility. If the Cretan says this, then if you apply the premise to him, he must have lied, then it cannot be true. Why do you end up with an impossibility? Because you apply the conclusion to yourself, because you let the object coincide with purely formal conclusions, and you must not do that. Where you apply the formality of thought to itself, the pure formality of thought is destroyed. That doesn't work. You can see from another example that the correctness of thought goes on strike when you apply thought to itself, that is, when you apply what you have thought up to yourself: An old law teacher took on a student. It was agreed that the student would pay him a certain fee, a portion of which would be paid immediately and the rest when he had won his first case. That was the agreement. The student did not pay the second part. Now the law teacher says to him: “You will pay me the fee under all circumstances.” But the student claims: “I will not pay it under any circumstances.” And he wants to do this by taking the teacher to court for the fee. The teacher says: Then you will pay me all the more; because either the judges will order you to pay – well, then you have to pay – or the judges will rule that you do not have to pay, then you have won the case and therefore pay again. – The student replies: I will not pay under any circumstances; because if I win the case, then the judges grant me the right not to pay, and if I lose, then I have lost my first case and we agreed that if this were the case, I would not have to pay. - Nothing has come of a completely correct formal connection because it goes back to the subject itself. Formal logic always breaks down here. Correctness has nothing to do with validity. The mistake of not realizing that one must distinguish between correctness and validity was made by the great Kant, and that was when he wanted to refute the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God. This proof went something like this: If one imagines the most perfect being, it would lack a property for its perfection if one did not ascribe existence to it. Thus, one cannot imagine the most perfect being without existence. Consequently, it is. Kant says: That does not apply, because the fact that existence is added to a thing does not add any more property to it. - And then he says: A hundred possible dollars, dollars conceived in thought, have not a penny more or less than a hundred real ones. But the real ones differ considerably from the imagined ones, namely through being! - So he concludes: One can never infer existence from a concept that has only been grasped in thought. Because - so he argues - however many imagined thalers one puts into the wallet, they will never become actual. So one must not proceed with the concept of God by trying to extract the concept of being from thinking. But in transferring the purely logical-formal from the one to the other, one forgets that one should distinguish between, that dollars are something that can only be perceived externally, and that God is something that can be perceived internally, and that in the concept of God we must disregard this quality of being perceived externally. If people agreed to pay each other with imaginary dollars, they would not need to distinguish between real and imaginary dollars. If, then, in thinking a sensory thing could be ascribed its being, then the judgment would also apply to this sensory thing. But one must realize that a correct judgment does not necessarily need to be a valid one, that something must be added. So we have today passed by some of the fields of philosophy, which does no harm. It gave us a sense that the authority of today's scientists is somewhat unfounded and that there is no need to be afraid when anthroposophy is presented as dilettantism. For what these authorities themselves are capable of saying when they begin to move from facts to something that could lead through a conclusion to a reference to the spiritual world is really quite threadbare. And so today I wanted to show you first how vulnerable this thinking is, and then to give you an idea that there really is a science of thinking. Of course, this could only be done in sketchy form. We can go into it in more depth later, but you have to be prepared for the fact that it will be somewhat boring. |
| 174b. The Spiritual Background of Human History: Ninth Lecture
11 May 1917, Stuttgart Rudolf Steiner |
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| Now, when speculating on the most blatant ignorance and on the will to the most blatant ignorance, people can, of course, be told all kinds of beautiful fairy tales: that one has turned green and blue, especially in the legs, by following such principles. And for those who want to make something esoteric out of thin air, these things can, of course, be used as slander. |
| 174b. The Spiritual Background of Human History: Ninth Lecture
11 May 1917, Stuttgart Rudolf Steiner |
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In my presence today, I intend to speak to you about things that can help the seeking human mind to understand the events of the present a little more deeply. These things should not be discussed in an external way, but rather, some should be pointed out that can help man, so to speak, in a spiritual expansion of understanding of our present time. This intention, which I have had for a long time for this visit to Stuttgart, we also want to carry out. We still have the lecture next Sunday. In view of the many things that, I would say, like waves of our time — I say this with full deliberation — play into our movement from the outside, it seems necessary to me, however, to begin today with a kind of introduction to present some principles that may be suitable to dispel some misunderstandings which can arise all too easily in our time, which hates the depth of thought and feeling, about anthroposophy, which on the other hand can be suitable for gaining a correct relationship within ourselves to what anthroposophy can be for us. Let us try to pose the question as follows: What are we seeking when we choose the path into the anthroposophical movement? — In this way, we seek to gain the opportunity to find a relationship to the spiritual world that corresponds to the needs for this spiritual world that arise in us from the forces and living conditions of the present. No one comes to us who cannot gain access to the spiritual world by more direct routes than those we have at our disposal. No one comes to us who cannot gain access to the spiritual world by the routes that have been fully recognized for centuries and that are only as direct as people have forgotten to reflect on the justification for what has become part of the general necessities of life. On the other hand, there is much discussion about the justification for something that must, as it were, first appear in the world. We cannot often enough bear in mind what, out of the spirit of our time, anthroposophy should be and wants to be, and bring it into connection with what is in us that can push towards anthroposophy, that wants to bring us to anthroposophy. You see, my dear friends, Anthroposophy would not be there if it were only for the one or other person who finds it appealing to agitate for such ideas, as they live in Anthroposophy, now, we use the unofficial expression. Anthroposophy arises entirely from the realization that there are searching souls in our time who can only find what they are seeking through the path of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is not pursued because someone wants it, but because souls long for it. The fact that some may deny this does not count against it, for much that is subconscious and unconscious lives in the soul and, when interpreted correctly, represents nothing other than the longing for Anthroposophy. Above all, if we single out one thing from this anthroposophy, it is the longing to recognize the greatest impulse of earthly development, the Christ impulse, in a way that is appropriate to the needs of the present, to find the path to the Christ impulse in the way that the heart must long for if it really wants to understand itself within the living conditions of the present. Now such general, abstract sentences, as I have just uttered, are certainly plausible to someone who has been grounded in anthroposophy for years. But what it is about is this: to really permeate one's soul with the spirit of these words in such a way that they do not remain merely abstract, merely theoretical in us, but that they become the content of our whole life, above all the content of our way of thinking. I have already given an example here that is particularly characteristic: I once gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany on the subject of 'Bible and Wisdom', in which I tried to explain how a positive Christian, especially if he understands himself correctly, can find his way to anthroposophy. I described how anthroposophy, through its presuppositions, can penetrate more deeply into the great and inexhaustible secrets of the original book of humanity, the Bible. After the lecture, two Catholic priests who had attended the lecture approached me. And from what they said, it was clear that they could not really object to anything in particular from their Christian doctrine, as they understood it, as they knew it as theologians - perhaps not so much as priests bound by any obligations as theologians. So they went off on a side track and said: Yes, you see, there is nothing special to be said from our point of view against what you have just said today, except this: When we speak, we speak in such a way that everyone can understand what we are saying. They also speak of Christianity, but only for those who have reached a certain level of education or have specially prepared themselves for this kind of thing. “I replied: Yes, you see, Reverend, what you or I think about the question of what should be said to all people is not the point, because that leads the whole topic down the path of personal opinion. It is not particularly remarkable that everyone believes that what they do is universally valid for all people. Why should one be surprised at that; otherwise they would not do it! But what you or I think is right is not the point. Our way of doing research on the spirit begins with rising above personal opinion and facing reality, true reality. In our case, this reality is very close. It lies simply in the answer to the question: Do all the people for whom you believe you speak – you do believe you speak for all people, don't you? – still come to church with you? The question answers a fact – the question of whether you think you speak for all people. That it should apply to all people is only your opinion; the other corresponds only to a fact. Tell me whether all people go to church! — They could not answer me except that a number of people do not go to church. That 185 refutes you, I said, because then you are not speaking for those who do not go to church. And among them are numerous people to whom I have to speak, and who also have the right to find the way to Christ in the present. This means not judging according to what one personally considers to be true or false, but subordinating one's judgment to the demands and tasks of reality. It is, however, much more comfortable to theorize about what is right or wrong than to study reality in detail, constantly listening attentively to what reality demands of us. Anthroposophy does not want to be something other than an answer to questions that it does not ask itself, but that the hearts and souls ask in the present, when they understand each other properly. And I am aware that the questions that are asked in my writings, which are already very numerous, are not asked by me. The answers are given by me in many cases, but the questions are not asked by me. The questions are posed by what the culture of the time brings forth, by what, for example, natural science in the culture of the time brings forth, by what anyone who is interested in the demands of the time must ask, and who, above all, is serious about the most important needs of the souls of the present. If we call these conditions to mind, then it becomes clear that a basic intention, a basic view, a basic tendency and a basic attitude prevail throughout the anthroposophical literature. If one goes through all these writings, not with the benevolent attitude that we may have gained within our circle, but with the critical eye that one can gain from the present-day culture, then one will find one thing as the core of all this anthroposophical literature. That is, that everything aims to bring the human soul that which this human soul must long for above all in the present: independence, the power of judgment from one's own inner being. I have often had to resist the urge to write popularly from this or that side. I have always resisted this urge for the simple reason that the point of anthroposophical literature is not to give people articles of faith that they can accept at will in a lightly veiled form, but rather to call on them to use their own powers of judgment and search their own souls. Anyone who wants to can see that this is the case throughout all of this anthroposophical literature. Nowhere is the aim to evoke blind faith. Of course, there are things told that cannot be verified without further ado, but they are told as facts of the spiritual world that anyone can accept as messages and to which they can apply their critical standard, to ever greater and greater extent, if they wish. And we have seen that in recent times friends who have sympathetically examined the matter have managed to approach even the most subtle things to a high degree with the probe of an unprejudiced criticism. What is contained in the anthroposophical literature referred to here need never shrink from this unprejudiced criticism. This unprejudiced criticism will pass it; it will pass it all the better, the more unprejudiced this criticism is: Never will anyone hear anything different from me when it comes to this question than this: Test, test, test, but do not stop at testing, but seek to test by trying to get deeper and deeper into things with the means of present thinking. Because this is the aim, the writings of this literature can make people independent. Now, however, one experiences many things when one surveys the way in which anthroposophy is received. I met people again and again who listened to one or the other lecture, read one or the other small writing, and then no longer showed themselves. That is their right, of course, and no one should be reproached for it. And when they were asked by an acquaintance why they no longer appeared - in all friendship, of course, not as if they were being reproached - they replied: “Yes, if we go into the matter in more detail, we fear being convinced.” This is certainly a significant word, but it also points to significant facts. What is being attempted is precisely this: to break away from the hereditary evil of our time, from the positing of personal opinions, from the positing of personal thecri, and to direct souls to that which the spirituality of the world itself says, if we find the possibility to surrender ourselves to this spirituality of the world with all our soul and to speak of the methods, to speak of the means by which the soul can attain to listening to the spirituality of the world itself. A world view that emerges in this way from the deepest needs of the time, but which so thoroughly contradicts what people of the present believe, will only slowly and gradually find its way into the souls of men. Human souls cling to what is familiar; human souls prefer to hear their own water-clear thinking from the pulpit and to be able to say of what they hear: “I have thought that for a long time.” The anthroposophical teachings that are emerging in the present are certainly not truths that have been “thought for a long time”. But in the eyes of many people this is precisely the main mistake, that they cannot say to themselves: “I have thought that for a long time” — and that they do not want to say to themselves: “If I dig deep enough within myself, I will not express a personal opinion, but something that is connected with the developmental factors of humanity.” — We will come back to such developmental factors of humanity many times during my stay in Stuttgart this time. So it is understandable that many obstacles and hindrances arise when people try to approach anthroposophy, to approach spiritual science. My book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is widely read over time, not only within those who belong to the various circles of the Anthroposophical Society, but it is also widely read outside the Society at the present time. When reading this book in particular, an experience can be made again and again that is extraordinarily characteristic. Someone reads the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and writes me a letter about it. And of course, I am always pleased when someone writes me an intelligent letter about any book or about anything else, but especially about the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But the usual thing is that the letter that is written is the clearest proof, the clearest proof that the person concerned has not understood the book at all and has translated the most important things of the book into the most materialistic attitude of the present. Because what people usually go for when they come across this book is the following. But let us send something in advance: a whole host of doubts can arise in the mind of someone reading the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and there are already many people who can testify that I am always ready to discuss these doubts with people, and so I certainly do not want what I am saying now to appear as if it should deter anyone from writing the letter I just mentioned. No one should be deterred from writing this letter, but the letter is very often written with people getting stuck on one particular thing, where the thing immediately turns into materialism for them. Much is said in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', which, when properly observed, leads people to find their own way into the spiritual world, from within themselves, from their soul. This book is designed to make people as independent as possible, not to impose anything on them in any subjective way, but only to remove the obstacles so that they can find the truth themselves. The best way to begin to take in this book would be to appropriate its content in inner deed. But then people get stuck on the sentence: The one who has attained the necessary maturity will find his spiritual teacher if only he searches for him correctly. — So, there we have it! I write a letter to the one who wrote the book, and he becomes my spiritual teacher; that's the simplest thing! There we have the materialistic explanation. The fact that this passage could be the most sacred incentive for a person seeking independence to continue searching in order to find the path, which might consist of something completely different than writing a letter to someone: You, give me instructions - that is very uncomfortable for many readers of the book. They do not search enough in the book. And so this book, How to Know Higher Worlds, is one of the most widely read books in the German-speaking world today, and has been translated into many foreign languages, despite the fact that it is one of the most misunderstood books. And yet it is child's play to understand if you just let it sink in without prejudice. And don't translate it into materialistic comfort. To some extent, people today are looking for what they are accustomed to seeking in other areas. How deeply ingrained it has become in people today not to help themselves, that is, not to learn what can help them in one situation or another, but to be helped and not to worry about the principles by which they are helped. Why should we trouble ourselves today about the best way to live in terms of our health? We let ourselves be prescribed for by someone who is there for that purpose, and then we do not need to check the principles according to which he prescribes; we hand over our fate to the one who is set up as an authority. Why should we not be particularly inclined to surrender our destiny to someone else when we are on the spiritual path, the most important human path? But what if the very work that inspires us to do so is dedicated above all to making the human soul independent! It may be said that scientific research in particular has reached a certain level today, and that this level of scientific research would be accessible to those who are called upon today to represent the natural sciences if most of them did not simply become absorbed in their subject and did not go beyond the boundaries of their subject. If only, I might say, a dozen of the official representatives — and only these are listened to today — would make an honest effort to examine with the most profound honesty what is contained in my 'Occult Science: An Outline of the Fundamental Principles of the Science of Man and Nature', ' and in my 'Theosophy', they would find everything confirmed from the side that can be characterized by saying: Look at life, whether life does not confirm what can be experienced through spiritual science, what is sought here from the spiritual world! — Anyone who really masters natural science today comes to the verification of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science gives. This is absolutely a truth. But we are faced with the peculiar fact that precisely those who could undertake such an examination are absolutely not concerned about it, have not been concerned about it until now — I am ignoring those who, in our circles, have received the stimulus for it — that no one has set themselves the task of really testing the spiritual-scientific results of anthroposophy against the, fully understood, natural-scientific research of the present! The spiritual-scientific research really has no need to fear this test; it will pass it. It should only be employed, it will be passed. But admittedly, in a time when one is not even inclined to go into the most primitive truths, this test will perhaps take a long time. The urge not only to be logical, but to be realistic, that is, to form one's judgment not only according to abstract logic, but by immersing oneself in reality, this urge is possessed by few in our present time. Many strive to be logical, but only after going behind logic a certain way is it possible to see the scope of logic itself; otherwise one does not even realize what confusion one can create with such very consistent judgments. You see, it is logical to be always consistent with one's own judgment or consistent with someone else's judgment, but it can lead to rather strange collisions. Charles V, the Austrian, and the French king Francis I came to the same conclusion. They were, so to speak, in complete agreement with regard to a certain idea that they wanted to realize. Francis said: “My dear brother wants exactly the same as I do. We both want exactly the same thing. — They both wanted to conquer Milan! Yes, you see, you notice it — namely when you say the postscript. But that such judgments are swarming around and dominate precisely contemporary thinking, to the detriment of this present, few in the present have the inclination to even think of it. It is remarkable how – forgive the philistine image – enlightened minds today sometimes approach judgment by going at it from the wrong end, as if someone were to put a horse's bridle on by the tail instead of by the head. But such a bridling is immediately accepted if the person concerned is officially authorized. Anyone with a sense for the living in thinking, feeling and willing could have suffered real torments for many years from the way much thinking is done in the present. I still remember hearing my first lecture in Vienna on elliptic function theory – forgive the word, but it depends on the mind of the person what I want to express, and not on whether one or the other understands what I am using now. So I heard lectures by Professor Leo Königsberger, who was already famous at the time. He was so famous that after being appointed a professor he could write to the government right away to request to be appointed a court councillor, not just a professor. So when I attended his first lecture, he came to the question: What about numbers? People assume positive and negative numbers. Positive numbers correspond to the money I have, negative numbers to the money I don't have, the money I owe. But there are other numbers. Now mathematicians use a line with an O in the middle to denote positive and negative numbers: plus 1, plus 2; minus 1, minus 2. And then the famous Gauss added a new line of numbers so that you can fill the plane with different types of numbers. I don't want to talk about the justification of this number level, but Leo Königsberger began his lecture on elliptic functions by saying, “It could now be that someone would say today that one could just as well take numbers perpendicular to this plane.” When I, as a very young badger of sixteen or seventeen, learned about the story of the plane of numbers, I immediately raised an objection: I said that then one could also think of space as being filled with numbers. The teacher kindly reassured me by saying, “Well, just wait until the next few centuries!” — which, of course, made a great impression on me, the young badger. Now I heard Leo Königsberger in Vienna address the same question. He said, “Let's assume there are these three types of numbers, not just the numbers that lie in the plane of the two lines, but the numbers that lie in the third dimension. We hypothetically assume that such numbers exist, and I would multiply such a number by another number. Now I will show you that when you multiply them, the product can sometimes be zero. But since that can never be the case, there can be no such number. Well, you see, having to listen to this is torture. I don't want to talk about whether the whole story is right or not, but if you accept one thing and don't accept the other, and claim that because the product is zero, there can be no such number, then having to listen to this is torture, because of course the correct thing is that if you have two numbers that equal zero, you have to assume that zero can be created by multiplication, not the opposite; that is the most obvious thing. But whether these judgments live in mathematics, whether these judgments live in political notes, for example in Mr. Wilson's notes, they always lead back to the same forms of thought. But if these forms of judgment live in those judgments that want to be effective for the fate of humanity, then an error in judgment means something quite different from an error in a merely limited scientific speculation, as it is in many respects the teaching of Leo Königsberger. It must be emphasized, as it is characteristic of our time, that people do not want to adapt their judgment to reality. They do not want to live in reality because they do not want to in the simplest things. They want to assume that the simplest things are what they want, not what reality dictates. It is of the greatest importance that we should learn to think differently in many respects, in order to escape from much of the mischief of the present time. We must learn not merely to think differently, but to think differently. If people with their old habits of thinking could really grasp anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then they would be able to familiarize themselves more quickly with spiritual scientific truths. But these should not be grasped with the old habits of thinking, but rather with the new thinking, and people find that extremely difficult. Now, these are some of the reasons why it is so difficult at present to get through with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, simply because it has to confront the very, very nearest prejudices. But precisely because this is the case, spiritual science is not really fought against, because, it must be admitted, the fight against spiritual science is on very shaky ground. Go and look for those scientific discussions that seriously and thoroughly try to deal with spiritual science as it stands; go and look for treatises or the like of this caliber! Anyone who has ever looked into it will see how little there is in this direction. But perhaps it is not convenient to proceed in this way. You see, a few years ago a student told me that he was preparing to do his doctorate in philosophy at a very well-known university: he wanted to write a dissertation that had been recommended to him by a famous professor. This dissertation was to be about the great Russian thinker Solowjow. At that time, not much more had been printed by Solowjow than a few things that had been published by Nina Hoffmann; much more came out later. I asked the student: Why does the professor advise you to write your dissertation about this Solowjow? “Yes,” said the student, ‘the professor knows nothing about this philosopher and would like to learn something.’ ‘So that's the best way: you let the student write a doctoral thesis on Solovyov, if the student knows Russian; then you learn something about him.’ So the doctoral thesis on Solovyov was written. But a great many doctoral theses are written out of the same sentiment. In many cases, this is a maxim for how topics for doctoral theses are given. But in this way a certain scientific attitude is cultivated, one might say bred. The professor in question could only have really got to know Solowjow if he had intended not only to be a professor of philosophy but also to get to know contemporary philosophy through one of its most outstanding representatives. He would have had to try to study Solowjow himself as best he could, even though only a small part of Solowjow's work has been translated and he does not know Russian himself. It is an uncomfortable path, but it can be said that for many people who want to come to their own conclusions about spiritual science, the path to getting to know spiritual science is much more uncomfortable today. Because there is still a difference between a professor having a dissertation written about Soloviev or about spiritual science. With Soloviev it is still more or less possible to form an opinion by the time the dissertation is finished, because the student is well trained to give this opinion in the sense in which philosophy is taught. But what should a modern professor do with a dissertation about spiritual science, for example? He would be completely at a loss. And even more uncomfortable, of course, is the way of not getting to know the subject indirectly through a dissertation, but rather by studying the subject itself exhaustively in some way. But all these things are no obstacle for the honest seeker of truth in the present day; he may be longing for spiritual science. Many of you know this, my dear friends. But for most people in today's world, it is an obstacle to recognize this spiritual science, to do anything other than to drill this spiritual science to the ground. They do not approach it, and since it does not come from them, it must be drilled to the ground. You cannot do that in a matter-of-fact way; today, the facts already show that. For those who have tried to approach spiritual science have not, as a rule, become opponents; they have certainly not become blind followers, but they have not become opponents either. There are those too. But a large part of our contemporaries simply have a personal interest in extinguishing this spiritual science, in making it impossible in the present. If they try to do this through honest literary debate, using whatever arguments they have against it, whatever arguments someone else has, then of course there is nothing to be said against it. But that is just what they do not want, it is too inconvenient. It is much more convenient to play the whole thing over into the personal sphere, not to talk about what is said in spiritual science, but to talk about all kinds of other things. And that, you see, is precisely what is being attempted in our immediate present today and will be attempted more and more in the near future, and to which I would like to draw your attention. Because this will lead to a situation in which numerous dissatisfied people, who become dissatisfied for personal reasons within our society, can easily be turned into tools for those who want to eliminate anthroposophy from the world, but do not strive for it in an honest way – they would not achieve their goal by honest means either – they do not strive for scientific discussion, but avoid the honest path, and instead seek to attach some kind of scandal to the spiritual science movement and to personalize everything. Since my time for talking about factual matters has expired, so that no one can say that I am taking up your time for matters related to the Society and its interests instead of dealing with the factual questions, I may add the following now: There are more and more people who are suitable to be used by those who are characterized in this way, and if one is honest about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, one has an obligation to point out these things more precisely. There is a person – many years ago his name first appeared before our eyes – who comes from a small town. One day Dr. Steiner received a letter, as they so often occur: “I feel unhappy in my situation, I would like to improve my situation”. And one of the letters that had this tone asked for advice on how the person concerned should act: whether he would do better to marry into a house or a business, or whether he should seek his way in the world in some other way. Yes, you have to tell the truth, unembellished, if you want to get to the bottom of things, and if you do not want to be blind to what will happen in the near future. Now it was made clear to the man that we cannot deal with the question of whether he should marry into a family or not, but since he did not let up, we willingly provided him with some information that was suitable to meet his need for spiritual instruction, which he claimed to have. By devoting himself to such spiritual things as he imagined them to be, he very soon came to the conclusion that it would be beneath a great mind like his to take care of a business in a small town. He longed for larger circles. He had apparently saved some money and came to Berlin. He found that "It is quite nice to pursue the humanities alone, but he also felt a special artistic talent in himself, and he now demanded that society promote this. It's nice to help people, isn't it. The samples that the person in question gave of his art spoke against any talent, but some people learn so much even without talent that it sometimes meets strict requirements. And so it came about that the person in question was recommended to various members who could create this or that for him, that he should be supported. But it always turned out that the matter failed precisely because the person in question wanted to practice an art but not learn anything, because he thought he could do more than all the teachers who wanted to take care of him. And the consequence was that, because he ran away from every teacher, in the end nothing could be done at all. One had indulgence after indulgence, but nothing special could be done, nothing pleased the person concerned. For, of course, in his eyes this was again such a blatant case of how the world misunderstands the nascent genius! That no one else could honestly share this view, yes, my dear friends, it was truly not our fault. That is the main thing, all other things are secondary. And so it was with this person as it is with many. They first seek advancement within our society, and when this advancement is not granted to them according to their mind, they become opponents. And then they come forward with all kinds of things. Of course, they never talk about what is behind things. They come up with all kinds of things that are best refuted by first explaining the reasons. Of course, in this case it was pure offended vanity and incompetence. And everything else that was added as a fuss was the most foolish invention, the most foolish fantasy. But today, of course, you find the journals that take up these things. Because the person I mean is called Erich Bamler. And if you really get to the bottom of things in such undertakings, then you don't need to take on such an essay, which mostly doesn't mean anything, because all the individual things don't express what they say, but 41n0 they arise from quite different things. And it is actually foolish to seriously want to refute the non-essential. Because that is not what is important, but what lies behind it. Let us take another case: a man who is not exactly lacking in vanity found himself years ago, after first objecting to anthroposophy in general, in this anthroposophy. I was the very last person to have sought out this personality. He presented himself. It turned out that there were many things that did not exactly mean that this personality was striving for completely impersonal goals in our society. That cannot be demanded, of course, so it cannot be criticized if sometimes personal goals are also accommodated to some extent. Sometimes such personal aims are accommodated because in this way many people can be led to what is right after all. And so it happened that at first the person concerned was quite satisfied with us. He wrote a pamphlet, in fact. I even condescended to write an epilogue to it, and the pamphlet was also taken up by our publishing house. He was on good terms with us; we were people who could be talked to. Then the person in question had another work printed, and after this work had had various fates, which are now of no concern to us, he offered it to the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House again. However, it was impossible to include this work in the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House. On the first pages of this writing, it says that I had only hinted at certain things about the Christ problem, and that the gentleman in question would like to elaborate on them. I am not saying this out of hurt vanity, although in this case I am being accused of it; but the sentence in which it is attributed to me is a blatant untruth, because the matter mentioned did not take place. Without taking into account the fact that I might have had reason not to go further, things are then elaborated in a way that may remind one of another story that took place, of which this story is at least a miniature version. I will have to come back to this other story as well, and I will do so briefly in a moment. In this writing by the gentleman in question, all kinds of things that I had only said in lectures were simply stated. Dr. Steiner was quite right to take umbrage at this and rejected the manuscript for publication. And because his manuscript was rejected, the man became an opponent. Now, of course, if you are writing an article for a journal, you cannot say: The Anthroposophical Society is fundamentally bad because the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House rejected my manuscript. That won't do! But that would have been the truth! So, despite the fact that the person concerned has been informed about the matter countless times, the fairy tale about contradictions is invented. The person concerned knows very well what the situation is regarding these contradictions, but he writes newspaper articles about them! What these newspaper articles say is of no significance, because the person concerned did not become an opponent because of this matter. He could have known about this long before he joined. He became an opponent for the stated reason. Some doubt whether one can so easily make the hypothesis: What is afterwards is also causally conditioned by what went before; but it remains conspicuous, nevertheless, that the antagonism of Mr. Max Seiling followed immediately upon the rejection of his writing by our publishing house. Of course it is easy to deny such a thing, to object to it in all sorts of ways, but it is not a matter of what one or the other objects to, but of what the facts are. It is indeed reminiscent of a somewhat more ingenious case; this is only a miniature version of it. The more ingenious case is that of a gentleman who had been to America but is a good European. He was summoned here to Germany by a long-standing member and listened to all kinds of lectures. He tried hard to get the lectures that had been given years ago by demanding them from this person or that. After he had faithfully packed up everything he had copied, he went back to America. He said there that he had been here, that he had familiarized himself with my teaching, but that he could not be satisfied with my teaching, but had to go much deeper, so one would find in his work many things that are not yet to be found in my books. For when he had exhausted everything that could be found with me, he was called to a master who dwells somewhere in the Transylvanian Alps; he then told him many things that he is now incorporating into his book. But now everything that he incorporated into his book was what he had overheard here in the lectures and copied down! And then the book was called: “Rosicrucian Worldview”. It was published in America and caused a great stir: the book, that was a combination of what he had heard from me here, and what the master was supposed to have told him in the Transylvanian Alps. People did not need to check what I had said, nor could they, because it had been said in part in our internal lectures. But not only did this appear as a book written in English and American, but a German bookshop was also found that translated the book and published it as “Weltanschauung der Rosenkreuzer” (The Rosicrucians' World View). The editor was Dr. Vollrath. These are just a few examples of how it is done, my dear friends! These things may well be pointed out. Attention must be paid to them, because they show the means by which, on the one hand, we make use of what is growing on our soil and, on the other, how we fight it. It may well be said that perhaps never before have worse means been used to fight against anything than are now being used to fight against us, especially against anthroposophically oriented spiritual science! You will therefore understand that we have been forced, as it were, to resort to the only means of averting the disaster, although it may not bring about any improvement if everyone joins forces to cause the greatest possible difficulties for the personalities associated with the matter. But one thing must be considered: too much has been said about this matter, but always actually for deaf ears. Therefore, there is no other choice than to submit to a certain iron necessity in order to serve the matter, to which we must all be devoted, in an appropriate way. This iron necessity simply arises. Suppose spiritual science were to appear as literature, were there as literature. It would then be quite impossible – in theory it is possible, but in view of the concrete facts it would be quite impossible – for all these things to attach themselves to spiritual science, as they have done and will continue to do in the most terrible and unworthy manner. What we have to distinguish from the spiritual science movement, which wants to be a pure knowledge movement, a world view movement of the present day, is the Anthroposophical Society. The idea of the Anthroposophical Society is a good one, but in practice, as I see it, it is developing in many ways, not as I see it, but as the facts teach us, in many ways, so that every day we are confronted with things that show, and this is no exaggeration, how within this Anthroposophical Society, cliques develop with a certain ease, especially personal interests for and against, in the most extensive way. It is difficult to separate personal interests from purely factual ones in the context of a society. But think that precisely through the social activities, the floodgates are opened to those people who do not want to confront spiritual science through honest discussion, but who want to bring down spiritual science by the detour of personal defamation, through personal slander. Because one can say this: they want to bring down spiritual science. Years ago, I decided to accommodate the wishes of various members for personal meetings, to the youngest and oldest members in the broadest way. Only in recent years, when things were already so close, did I sometimes have to deviate sporadically from the old practice; but only sporadically, in exceptional cases. Despite the fact that it has been emphasized time and again that what is available in the literature and what is said here in the lectures contains plenty of material that the individual needs for his or her own development, so that personal consultations could only relate to an expression from person to person to person, it will happen time and again that the most outrageous lies — excuse the expression — are told within the Society in connection with the personal contact of members with me, and outsiders then seek ways to all kinds of defamation and slander. By this I mean that all too often within the Society people are quite inclined to use a nice-sounding little word for their own deep satisfaction when they have one. How good it does some people, for example, when they can say: I have become an esoteric disciple. — And how good it does some people when they can say: Yes, you know, that is something very mysterious, I am not allowed to tell you that; I am not allowed to tell you anything about it. — Putting oneself in the limelight, giving oneself a certain prestige, that is what is behind many an expression that is used and which is then often misused by outsiders in a quite malicious way. All these things, which are now being used with malicious intent, could never have happened if what was being put in a false light were not in line with legitimate desires and perhaps an equally legitimate accommodation of these desires, but which, in view of what the outside world is making of it, cannot be maintained, however difficult it may be for me, my dear friends. Of course, everyone can maintain friendly relations in society, but the iron necessity compels me to stop giving private audiences. I am particularly sorry for this because some will say: Why should the innocent suffer with the guilty? But if you are in a society, that is of course the karma of the society, and the matter cannot be done differently. All those private conversations that were sought out, in view of those malicious slanders, must simply stop. | Don't think that I am any less sorry for that than you are, but I know that, just as everything I have said about such things was spoken in vain, my speaking today would also be spoken in vain if measures were not taken that simply force people to realize the seriousness of the matter. It is easy to fabricate slanderous stories about what is said in private conversations with individual members, if these slanderous stories reach the point where, for example, it is said here or there that this or that member has been hypnotized. Now, my dear friends, in the face of these things I shall have to take a different line altogether, from which you will see — and I am really speaking out of a simple sense of duty towards our movement — that I am now and in this matter, in the very bitterest seriousness, for the sake of the sanctity of spiritual science. If a movement like this is based simply on the principle of not encroaching on anyone's sphere of freedom, and if this is strictly observed, if everything that encroaches on a person's sphere of freedom is strictly rejected, and if one then proceeds with these very things, then it is necessary that one day everything that is to grow on our soil will grow in the full light of day. When things grow in full public view, then the ground will be cut from under the slanderers. But there will be no other method in the future. Therefore, I will strive, as far as it depends on me, to ensure that in the future anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will increasingly take place in the full light of the public. It does not have to shy away from the public. And today I declare explicitly: With regard to the private conversations that have taken place with members for years, I release everyone from the promise not to speak about the content of the conversation. Everyone can share, as much as they themselves find appropriate, what has ever occurred in a private conversation with a member. Nothing will be found that should be kept from the light of day. Then one will no longer be able to pussyfoot around with things that are on the following ground. I will give you an example of how these things can be used against the most blatant ignorance and the will to be most blatantly ignorant. Not only Erich Bamler, but also others who are fighting just as “honestly” as he is, have put forward and basically believe that among all sorts of esoteric principles this one would also have been given to them: “Look at everything around you in the light of necessity, as if it were necessary, as a given necessary fate.” It is comforting for a time, as long as one believes oneself to be supported within society, when one has been given such a rule to say: “I am an esoteric disciple, for I meditate continually: ‘See everything around you in the light of necessity’.” But why has this rule been given to those people, why has this rule been advised to them? For the simple reason that they needed it according to the state of their soul! It was a piece of advice that did not encroach on their freedom at all, but a piece of advice whose scope and esotericism you may judge if I point out the following to you: Schopenhauer says in his essay on the freedom of the will, towards the end of his essay, concerning our attitude towards the course of the world and fate: “Everything that happens, from the greatest to the smallest, happens necessarily”; and he speaks of the calming effect of the realization of the inevitable and necessary. So people have been advised to do nothing other than what Schopenhauer himself considers a proven way of overcoming certain forms of depression. Now, when speculating on the most blatant ignorance and on the will to the most blatant ignorance, people can, of course, be told all kinds of beautiful fairy tales: that one has turned green and blue, especially in the legs, by following such principles. And for those who want to make something esoteric out of thin air, these things can, of course, be used as slander. But precisely when we know that the things that are being done in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science are actually required by necessary needs, then we will be able to understand that such a measure as the one mentioned above must one day be taken, simply for the reason that it must be seen that the things at issue are meant seriously. Do not complain to me, who feels it just as hard as you do; complain to those whom I have clearly pointed out to you, and who make it impossible for such a measure to be avoided. Today it is very difficult for me, for reasons of principle, to have to refuse private conversations, which numerous members desire. Of course I also know that this will in turn be used against me, but I cannot act according to personal reasons, but according to what is necessary for our movement. That means that I must submit to the principle of taking what is said seriously, for whatever reason it may be taken as a pretext for calumny or slander by those who do not honestly want to refute spiritual science but who want to do away with it in some other way. Examine much of what has occurred; you will find that the causes always come from society. It is very rare for society to be attacked; the point of attack is usually me or my immediate surroundings. Examine the things. But by attacking me, it is the case that they want to attack spiritual science in me. Because one way or another, it is of no importance to them whether a foolish esoteric piece of advice is given here or there; there are enough of those in the world. But what people do care about is that spiritual science in the anthroposophical orientation is a cultural factor of our time, that it wants to have a say. People do care about that. They do not care about esoteric Winkel esoterics, but they do care about someone who, according to his destiny, cannot remain an esoteric Winkel esoteric. You would not want to meet an esoteric Winkel esoteric if he sat in front of fifty people in Berlin and gave them advice. The attacks only began when the number of books exceeded a certain number. It would be a sin against the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to let it perish when it might be possible to prevent it by having to do without certain things, perhaps only for a while, because the morality of people today turns out the way it has now turned out. We have often seen how things are misrepresented; but how it is done in the case of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, how things are invented that are not there at all and something quite different from what has taken place is told, that is one of the greatest rarities, even in the history of mankind. And one must have an inclination not just to see the avalanche when it buries the villages below, but one must have the inclination to see the snowball that falls from above, because it becomes an avalanche. Certainly, I have watched for a long time and admonished again and again, but the admonitions were not really heard or at least not taken very seriously. People outside our Society reproach me that one of my greatest faults was – today they already mention greater ones, that was a year ago – that I make blind followers, that I have blind followers who blindly believe in authority. I may well say: when it comes to something where the members of the Society should place some trust in me and do one thing or another in response to that trust, I usually do not find very many followers. As a rule, the opposite of my opinion happens. It has been that way all these years. Actually, the opposite of my opinion has always happened. You just don't notice it, because in many circles a special method has been followed: people didn't ask for my opinion so much as for their own opinion and then told people: 'That's what he said.' I was very far from saying it, but the person concerned would have liked me to have said it, so he told them that I had said it. It is true that when it is said in the outside world that I have blind followers, the practice of the Society shows that the complete opposite is the case, at least with regard to matters where I should be approached with some trust, because I have sometimes been trying to reach a judgment for years, and the other person has not done so.All this is not said to, as they say in Austria, grumble or gripe, or to some extent to rant, but it is said because the symptoms are now appearing daily that the intention is to put an end to our spiritual movement in the way indicated, and because the tendency must arise to see the snowball at the top, and not just the avalanche when it has reached the bottom. Just a few hours before I came here, among other things, a letter was read to me in which it was once again related that two people had come together; I will not mention any names, so such a case can simply be cited as an example. The one is accused of hypnotizing the other, of even sitting behind the other and meditating into the other's neck so that all kinds of harmful things arise in the soul of the person concerned. And then the matter is pursued further. It is only one case, the last one, no, not the last one, there was another one after that, but it is the one that I read about three hours ago. Today it is a harmless matter, but in a few years it may no longer be so: that one person is supposed to have sat behind another in order to meditate all kinds of harmful things into the neck of the other person and thereby exert influence. There is no doubt that the person concerned is as harmless as possible in this matter. But today, my dear friends, this plays between two members; in a few years it will be made into a “Steiner case”, which in turn provides a very nice case for such “studies”. Perhaps it will happen more quickly and will not take a few years. So, please understand that I am truly faced with an extremely difficult dilemma if I have to resort to saying, on the one hand, that an attempt must be made to make spiritual science fully public. Nobody will be left wanting as a result, nobody will somehow not find what they need to find because everything is in the public domain. But all the gossip: that is something mysteriously mystical, you must not say that and so on – that should no longer be able to give rise to all kinds of slander. No matter how friendly our dealings may be, they must not be any other than those between friends for the time being, because private conversations must stop as a matter of principle for the time being. Perhaps this will force our dear members, however inconvenient it may be, to pay a little more attention to things and take care of the matters that have been neglected so far. As I said, please forgive me for bringing up these matters here today; I only did so after the actual lecture was already over, but I had to bring them up because they are related to the vital issues of the Anthroposophical Society and the anthroposophical movement. This, and not any lack of friendliness, is why I very much regret not being able to hold the private conversations with our dear members, which I have always been happy to do, in the near future. Then it will not be possible, really not possible in the concrete, to create what the malicious enemies are so keen to seek. — Because, my dear friends, you could of course make an objection, and everyone does it of their own accord in an understandable way, namely by saying: But he could talk to me. This has been said by each of those who are now launching their attacks in the most abusive manner; and some of those who are now the tools of their protectors were brought into society by very, very respected members of society. In some respects, it must change, but it can only change through the members. |
| 336. The Big Questions of our Time and Anthroposophical Spiritual Knowledge: The Supernatural Essence of Man and the Development of Humanity
26 Jul 1919, Mannheim Rudolf Steiner |
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| Nature is constantly making leaps. Look at a growing plant: the green leaf makes the leap to the colored petal, to the stamens, to the pistil and so on in further growth. |
| 336. The Big Questions of our Time and Anthroposophical Spiritual Knowledge: The Supernatural Essence of Man and the Development of Humanity
26 Jul 1919, Mannheim Rudolf Steiner |
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Dear attendees! When people of the present reflect on today's plight, today's misery, they first ask about the causes of this plight, this misery. And he also asks: How can we escape from the confusion, from the chaos of social human development that we have fallen into? Such questions will usually be directed towards the particular inclinations of today's man and towards the most immediate external causes, which lie in the terrible events of the last five to six years. Or their thoughts will be directed to measures that address the external factors in order to alleviate the suffering and chaos in which we find ourselves. However, many people will not be satisfied with what the very last few years can tell them. He will turn his attention to a longer period of time, to the last decades, perhaps centuries, during which, albeit less vividly for humanity, what has come to expression so terribly in recent years has prepared itself, as, figuratively speaking, a thunderstorm prepares itself over a long period of sultriness, and then suddenly discharges. But even here, we get stuck in seeking external causes and in seeking external measures to alleviate the misery. In a way, one-sidedly, with such thinking, with such a feeling, one is quite right. And to what extent one is right, what can fruitfully arise from an understanding of our world situation with regard to the external, I will take the liberty of talking about in more detail the day after tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen. Today, however, I would like to speak of those causes that were at work in the human inner life and that present humanity will have to consider changing if it wants to escape from the chaotic situation in which it finds itself. Is it not, then, readily apparent to any observer who takes a somewhat closer and benevolent look at what is going on in humanity today, that we are in this age, in which we hear from so many hearts, from so many souls, we hear the call for a more social organization of our conditions than those we have had so far, is it not strange that, despite hearing this call, we see intense anti-social impulses prevailing everywhere in our present humanity? Yes, that is precisely the difficulty that confronts the serious observer of our world situation: the fact that one is supposed to direct one's energies towards a more social organization of our human life at a time when, from the depths of the soul, anti-social drives are rising up throughout our entire civilized world. This emergence of anti-social instincts is connected with the fact that it is very difficult for today's human being to fulfill a longing that is not even consciously, but more or less unconsciously, in his soul, but which, even if unconsciously, asserts itself so strongly in today's humanity that it often comes to the fore in a pathological way, both morally and even outwardly physically. The longing — as I said, it is not easily recognized, because for many people today it still expresses itself unconsciously — the longing is this: in a new way, in the way that people have been educated over the past decades, and even through the last three to four centuries, in the way of gaining a relationship to that which, as an inkling at least, if not as a fully articulated consciousness, lives in every soul, as an inkling of a superhuman being in our transitory, in our sensual human existence. One could say that today's human being is in search of the supersensible human being. And anyone who looks more deeply into the needs of our present time will, above all, feel that it is the first duty of the spiritual aspirant to meet this yearning and longing of contemporary humanity. One of the most important tasks of our time is to satisfy this inner soul longing, which expresses itself in this yearning and longing. But the way in which people in the broadest circles still want to meet this longing today is not how I will speak to you this evening. What I will have to say to you is spoken from a point of view that I have been presenting for years now as anthroposophical spiritual science. The task of anthroposophical spiritual science is to seek a path into the supersensible world for people who have absorbed the ideas, sensations, feelings and will impulses of modern times that have emerged from the scientific worldview. From this point of view, what can be said about present-day humanity is either found incomprehensible or unnecessary in the broadest circles today. The spiritual researcher is told: “You are offering something understandable; well, yes, but I won't be able to offer you anything that is so easy to understand, as many still offer today's people, who start from the inner comfort of the soul, which, with regard to the highest goals of spiritual human striving, exists in today's people. Everyone today admits that one must make some effort if one wants to get to know the scientific work that leads to knowing something, say, about the mountains of the moon or the moons of Jupiter; or about the cells of the organism. But when it comes to knowing something about the supersensible world, one rejects out of inner laziness the idea of going a similar difficult path. Today many still say: Man must come to the supersensible foundations of the human being and the world through simple confession or through simple, simple belief in the Bible. What anthroposophical spiritual science has to say is considered too complicated. But this is precisely one of the main problems of our time; one of the problems that underlie our confused social aspirations. Those who are familiar with human life know that it is insufficient to remain at this simplicity of faith and confession; insufficient because if one cannot regard to the supersensible, if one remains in this comfort zone, then one cannot master the great questions of social life that are confronting humanity in our present time. We do not yet see it, but we will soon see how those who always want to remain with the “simple faith of the confession” cultivate the kind of thinking in humanity that is now manifesting itself in the social turmoil across Europe and in the civilized world in general. They are calling on people to return to the simple faith of the confession, because they do not know that remaining with this simple faith has produced what appears today as chaos and confusion. Therefore, anthroposophical spiritual science regards it as a first duty to speak to the present human being about these things from its very different point of view. When the present human being hears the intimation in his heart, in his soul, about the supersensible human being, then he looks up at himself in a kind of self-knowledge, away from the world. What presents itself to the human being, according to the state of the present consciousness? Today, when a person reflects on his own being, he expresses what presents itself to him when he reflects on his own being by saying: This human being consists of body and soul. And then the person believes that he gets to know his body by observing it with his senses; by then seeking to grasp the sensory observation with the thinking mind. And for that which man cannot attain by this path, he turns to current science, to natural science, to that which biology, physiology and so on have to say about the human body. And then man believes that he really knows something about the one part of the human being, about the human body, when he has taught himself in this way. And then he may also reflect on what lives in the depths of his soul as thinking, feeling and willing. But when he brings to consciousness what is in the depths of his soul, he is immediately confronted with the great mystery of the human being. For he must find that Yes, that which appears to me externally as my body is something quite different, something radically different, from that which reveals itself within my soul as thinking, feeling and willing. And then the human being asks: What is the relationship between what reveals itself to me inwardly as soul and what is external to me as body? And underlying this human puzzle lies something great and powerful in human nature. At the root of it lies the great question of the meaning of life; the question: How can I, if I believe that life should have a meaning, ever believe that what lives in what appears to me as the transient, sensual human body can arise and disappear with this external, sensual body? What is the relationship between the soul and this external, sensual body? When this question confronts him, in most cases man cannot perceive it as anything other than a comprehensive mystery. And if he turns from his own, as a rule impotent, thinking about this question to those who, in accordance with today's thinking, want to scientifically determine the relationship between body and soul, he usually finds that they have no more to say than what he has already encountered in such a mysterious way: Philosophical and other worldviews leave the serious questioner in this field truly quite unsatisfied. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, therefore takes completely different paths to the supersensible, and it cannot speak about this supersensible in any other way than in a way that is very different from the way of external science. For hardly anyone becomes a true spiritual researcher who has not learned, learned in his own way, how impossible it is to recognize anything about the supersensible human being through ordinary reflection and ordinary external science. Not only must one speak differently when discussing these things from the standpoint of anthroposophical spiritual science than what the senses and the mind offer to man, but one must also speak in a different way. And that is precisely why one is still little understood today because this way is unfamiliar. What is understood better, at least one believes this, is simple, unadorned faith. But this no longer satisfies humanity, which has been educated over the last three to four centuries. If you want to hear the spiritual researcher talk about the very first starting points of his spiritual science, you will hear something different from him than you hear from those who have gone through the external science of nature today. Isn't it the case that when someone who has become a “specialist” in some field, as they say, tells us about what he has gone through in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the observatory, that he he speaks about everything he is talking about with a certain calmness, so that one can see that his state of mind was quite even while he was working on this or that scientific subject in the laboratory or in the clinic or in the observatory. The spiritual researcher cannot speak to you in this way about his way of knowing. Ask him how he arrived at his insights, and he will not be able to speak to you of that indifferent research that is of the kind I have just characterized. Instead, the spiritual researcher will have to speak to you of the inner soul struggles, the suffering and pain that his soul went through in surmounting them before he could take any step towards the insights we will be talking about this evening. The spiritual researcher who has come to real knowledge of the supersensible has repeatedly faced inner abysses in the face of which it seems as if the soul must plunge into nothingness. And he knows how to tell what it means to muster all one's strength in order to develop that in the soul which carries the soul into those regions in which the real supersensible human being, not just an illusion, can be seen. This is what the spiritual researcher really has to go through within himself. For he must have a different relationship to external nature and to himself than the ordinary researcher. I do not wish to be misunderstood, my dear audience, so I will say from the outset: the one who has become a spiritual researcher in the sense meant here does not disdain the natural science of the present day, which has achieved such great triumphs. On the contrary, he regards it as the fundamental condition for his spiritual research that he has first familiarized himself with the great and powerful results of natural science of the last few centuries. And he fully recognizes this natural science. For only in this way does he know how to look beyond this natural science in order to penetrate into the spirit to which the human being also belongs. The natural scientist is right to speak of certain limits to his knowledge of nature. And it is precisely the most cautious natural scientists who have said that natural science always leads people to concepts and ideas that cannot be taken further in the study of nature. Hasty people then speak of such limits as a restriction of human knowledge in general. The cautious natural scientist knows that he cannot go beyond these limits with natural research alone. He will therefore, as long as he remains a natural scientist, stop at these limits; let us say, at such concepts that present themselves to natural research as unbridgeable gaps, such as the essence of matter, the essence of force, and many others; the natural scientist stops there. The spiritual researcher cannot do that. The spiritual researcher begins his work precisely where the natural scientist must stop, by fighting out inner struggles with what is the limit of natural science. The whole inner life of the soul must be brought into activity. And while the natural scientist stops at such limits, the spiritual researcher begins to find his way vividly into ideas and concepts and perceptions and feelings of such limits. Then he experiences something by delving ever deeper into that which science cannot or should not say anything about; then he senses what it actually means to live with the limits of natural knowledge. What I am going to say now, my dear audience, can of course be seen as not being logically provable in the usual sense. For it is not something that has been thought up. It is what spiritual research experiences at a certain point in its development. In this inner, living experience, the spiritual researcher comes to a great, shattering conclusion by experiencing what can be experienced at the limits of natural knowledge: He has to give himself the answer out of inner experience, out of his own experience, that we as human beings could never become social beings in our physical-sensual life between birth and death if we were to transcend the limits of natural knowledge. In a remarkable way, we are adapted to the way of the world as human beings. We would not have something – this is recognized by the spiritual researcher in experience – we would not have something in our human nature if we were not stopped by limits when we want to explore nature; we would not have something very essential; we would not have that which is a basic condition of our social, human coexistence; we would not have in us the power of love. You see, dear attendees, that is the first harrowing experience on the path into the supersensible world, that you get to know human nature in such a way that you say to yourself: We must be limited in our view of nature, then from us in looking at nature, the power that submerges into everything without limits; then we humans would pass each other by in physical life, could not develop sympathy and antipathy, could not develop the most diverse nuances of love, without which life cannot be. In order for man to live between birth and death, it is necessary that he be limited with regard to his knowledge of nature. Within this limit, the power of love can then arise. But this also points the way in which the path can nevertheless be followed, which, in a sense, leads to the knowledge of the supersensible world. We have the power of love in ordinary life because we are physical human beings to a certain degree; and this degree is more or less sufficient for our external social life – admittedly very little in some epochs, as in the present – but when it is fully developed, it is sufficient for our external social life. What is necessary with regard to this power of love and other things in order to take the spiritual path into the supersensible, I have described in detail in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'; today I can only hint at a few fundamental things, but that shall be done. Above all, it is necessary that when one has gone through what I have just mentioned, one can be imbued with a certain inner state of mind that a person in ordinary life has only to a very limited extent; I would call this state of mind 'intellectual humility'. If you go through what I have described, you come to say to yourself: No matter how talented you are in terms of ordinary thinking and research skills, you have to admit to yourself: You cannot penetrate into the supersensible world at all with these ordinary thinking and research skills. That is what a person wants. That is why he is intellectually immodest in ordinary life. But it is precisely this intellectual immodesty that must first be combated. We must be able to say the following, for example. Let us assume that a five-year-old child has a volume of Goethean poems in his hand. With his abilities, he will not be able to do with this volume of Goethean poems what should be done with it by virtue of the essence of this volume of poems. Just as this five-year-old child faces the essence of this book of poems, so — we must admit in intellectual modesty — we face the world and ourselves in relation to the supersensible essence with our ordinary abilities to think, feel and research. Just as a five-year-old child must first develop the abilities that will enable him to approach the essence of a book of poetry, so too, in full intellectual humility, must the human being, if he wants to become a spiritual researcher, first develop ordinary thinking, ordinary feeling and ordinary will. And just as the soul and physical abilities of a five-year-old child are developed from the outside through his education, so anyone who wants to know something about the supersensible world from direct perception must take his soul development into his own hands. But that means, my dear audience, that one must be able to make the confession in a real inner soul modesty: The strength you need to recognize the supersensible must be developed within yourself. And it must be developed in detail. As a rule, one will not come to this development at all if one is not made aware of it through the experiences I have already described today, that no matter how deeply one has penetrated into the outer world of natural phenomena, that with this thinking, with the achievements about the outer natural phenomena, one can know nothing about what is going on in the human body, in order, for example, to gain a relationship to what we, as thinking, call an important soul activity. There one must first bring this thinking to a completely different level than it is in ordinary life. One must develop this thinking further. This can be done if one performs certain of the soul that one does instinctively and unconsciously in ordinary life, if one gets into the habit of making these actions more and more conscious. I will pick out two things from the many things that the spiritual researcher has to do in this regard. The first is that the spiritual researcher must develop the powers of attention and interest in a completely different way than they are developed in ordinary life. In ordinary life, we become aware of something when our senses are drawn to it. We then direct our attention to the thing when we are made aware of it by external impressions. But as a rule we do not exert ourselves out of the innermost power of our soul to strengthen the power of attention; something from outside awakens our interest. In ordinary life, it is always the case with a person that the interest aroused from outside makes his soul attentive. If a person now practices earnestly and worthily to be attentive, to pay constant and long attention to that which he wants to be attentive to only out of the inner power of thought, if he turns his interest to things that do not impose themselves on him, to which he turns out of his very own, innermost initiative , he does such exercises as I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” The path into the supersensible worlds is a long one, but if a person practices for a long time, he will finally notice that his thinking becomes quite different from what it is in ordinary life. He notices that this thinking begins to acquire an inner vitality. And he notices that he actually has a completely new kind of inner, living thinking in him, thinking that is set in motion from within. One really sees through what develops as a new thinking through effort, through a development; one really sees this when one patiently and gradually sees it arise in the soul: You have your old thinking; your thinking that more or less passively joins in with things, that continues even when you are not making an effort, when you are not somehow exerting your senses or your mind as the basis of this thinking. This thinking continues, it does not sleep. But as if standing above this thinking, observing it going on beside it, like a kind of dream, there then stands the other, the completely bright, never dreamy thinking, which one develops in the way I have just characterized. Then one comes to an inner discovery, to an inner experience, which I would now like to describe as the second shattering event on the way into the supersensible worlds: one experiences inwardly that one's ordinary thinking cannot be distinguished from one's outer physical activity; but that the thinking that one develops through one's own power, that proceeds in such a way that one experiences it: It has nothing to do with any external physical activity; it has nothing to do with any nervous or other activity. When you think as I have just described, you know that you are moving in a purely spiritual element with your thinking, and you have your physical self beside you; you have really stepped out of your body. And now you realize that this human being, when it carries out its thinking in this way, when it carries out its inner soul activity, as it is often described in the everyday illusions of human beings. People also believe in many cases, based on today's popular science, that they are indulging in materialistic ideas: we have developed the nervous system into the wonderful brain; in this brain one can see how research in human development is progressing; with each stage of thinking, the brain develops further. And then people say: So thinking, imagining, arises through the activity of the brain, through the activity of the nervous system. And basically, people who know nothing of the independent bodiless thinking that I have just described to you cannot help it, if they are somehow religious, but think of the illusory body. But the one who gets to know bodiless thinking knows from direct experience another. Let me give you an image: Imagine you are walking along a muddy path; on this path you find furrows; you find impressions in the softened soil that resemble human footsteps. Do you think that someone who now believes that down there, below the surface of the earth, there are forces at work that cause something like impressions of human footsteps to appear on the surface is saying something correct about this fact? No, the person who judges the situation correctly is the one who knows that the furrows have been pressed into the soft soil from the outside. The person who has come to know independent, bodiless thinking knows that the spiritual soul is as independent of the nervous system and the brain as the carriage rolling down the street is independent of the feet of the person walking down the street. Body-free thinking carves furrows into the brain. It is no wonder that, as thinking unfolds in the course of human development, the brain shows imprints of that which develops thinking everywhere. But it is a terrible illusion, one that misleads humanity, to believe that what the brain fears and thereby causes thinking in some way arises from within the nervous system. Only the living, body-free thinking that develops and unfolds out of intellectual modesty can provide insights into that which leads to the immortal human being. Then, through this body-free thinking, one gets to know the first supersensible part of the human being, that which I have mentioned in my writings - names are not important, but one must have names for things - the etheric body or formative body. This is something that the human being carries within them, just as they carry their physical body, but it is something that cannot be grasped by the external senses and by ordinary thinking; it can be grasped when the human being develops this imaginative thinking - as I call it - which I have been talking about today. Then this imaginative thinking becomes a [mental organ] with which he sees the spiritual human content, the formative forces that permeate the human being, just as the human being has the physical body. Thus one ascends to the first supersensible aspect of human existence. But one cannot ascend in this way without undergoing other experiences as one ascends to body-free thinking. From the relationship between the limits of knowledge and the power of love in the human being, of which I have spoken to you, you will be able to divine that there are deep, mysterious relationships between the powers of knowledge in the human being and social human life. If a person acquires supersensible thinking, as I have just described it, then he finds a new way in which social life, which takes place between human souls and human beings, is shaped. We meet people in life. We develop a strong sympathy for some people and a less strong sympathy for others; we may even develop antipathy for some people. But a network of relationships with other people, shaped by the power of love, runs through our entire lives as we interact with others. If one learns to recognize the power of supersensible thinking, then this leads to the realization that the sympathies and antipathies we develop for the people we meet in the physical world come from the fact that we were already connected with these souls before we went through birth or conception. Through the development of thinking, the spiritual view of the world in which we have lived opens up from the physical life – we have lived spiritually and soulfully just as we live here physically and corporally – in which we have lived as in a spiritual world before we descended into the physical world through conception and birth. In our time, it is possible to see into the spiritual world from which we descended before our birth, through a powerful development of thinking out of intellectual modesty. It is neither speculation nor fantasy when we say from such knowledge: How you meet people here in life, soul to soul, is the continuation of how you met them, now entirely in the spirit, in the supersensible world, before those people who enter into relationships here descended into this sensual world. Just as man has been seeking out natural scientific connections in a new way for three to four centuries, so from today onwards he will have to seek them out - otherwise he will never feel his suspicions about the supernatural satisfied - he will have to seek out spiritual connections to the supernatural worlds. It must be admitted that, when we speak in these terms today, we are still speaking of something quite incomprehensible and incredible to present-day humanity. But anyone who is familiar with the history of cultural development knows the significant way in which people relate to the great cultural advances. It was in the first half of the nineteenth century when a college of physicians and other scholars were asked whether railways should be built. They delivered the verdict – I am not telling a fairy tale, but something that is documented – that railways should not be built because they would undermine the health of those who travel in them due to the great vibrations during the journey. And if they are to be built after all, they said, if people are to be found who will travel in the railways, then at least large, high board walls must be erected to the left and right of the railway so that those who pass the railroad will not suffer from concussion. — Thus fear expressed itself against real progress. Such fear lives unconsciously in humanity today before the supersensible. We will not be able to fight the anti-social instincts of humanity until we engage in this field, not believing that we get mental concussion when the supernatural is spoken of. That, dear attendees, is the one link of the human being that looks into prenatal life. In yet another way, man can take his development into his own hands through the modesty of his soul. This is when, as in the first case I described, he can further develop his thinking if he further develops his will. There is something again that the whole human being develops unconsciously in the course of his life. Let us just admit, my dear audience, that basically we change from week to week, from year to year, from month to month in the purely external development of the human being. We are always learning from life. Just look back at how different you are from ten or twenty years ago. But what we developed in ourselves then, we developed unconsciously. We did not learn to take our further development as human beings, our higher development as human beings, into our own hands. And again, there are methods – you can also read more about this in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – by which one can learn continuously from life; whereby one looks at everything that presents itself in life in such a way that we intervene actively; then we say to ourselves: What we have done there – if we ourselves were higher, more maturely developed, we could do it better. If we constantly develop this modesty in relation to the will – our development can go on and on – and take the opportunity to take our will development into our own hands in the same way that we took our thinking development into our own hands in the way described above, then it turns out that we find our way into the supersensible world in a different direction. What we are now developing within us by further developing our willpower is that, as we go through life, we can always become our own spectator. We then become, as it were, as if we were floating above ourselves asleep at night and looking at our body lying in bed from the outside. Thus, through the inner development of the willpower of the soul, we learn to see ourselves in everything we do. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a strong human power. By immersing yourself in this power, you become independent of your body to a higher degree than simply by developing your thinking. In this way you get to know the higher supersensible being of the human being; that which I would like to call the body of movement, or - don't shudder back, it's just a name - the astral body of the human being. We learn to recognize what is supersensible in us by merely making an effort to move our hands, by working, by developing our will in our own growth, in our own human development. Then, in addition to the etheric body, we get to know the astral body of the human being, which, because we have it, uniquely and solely enables us to truly express the will in the outer world. But when one experiences within oneself what willpower, developed in this way, actually is, then one looks into the supersensible world in a different direction. Then you first experience: You behave in one of two ways towards people you come into social contact with; you do them good or you do them little good; you do them something purposeful or inappropriate; you act towards them in such a way that they experience the consequences of your action. By developing the powers of will as I have just described, we learn to recognize that we experience what lives through the astral body, through the actual spiritual-soul. The expression 'body' is just an expression. What we develop there carries our supersensible being through the gate of death; and we will experience the continuation of what we have developed in our relationships with people here in the physical world in the manner just described in the spiritual world after death. That is to say, in the spiritual vision, there is an immediate insight into the world that we experience when we have passed through the gate of death. That which connects man with the spiritual world becomes visible when he develops the powers of his soul as I have described. But then, my dear audience, these two powers come together. The power that develops out of thinking, out of living thinking, and the power that develops out of the will, they enter into an inner marriage, as it were. And then, then the contemplation of one's own development becomes something new for man; then something quite new becomes what we call the history of mankind. Oh, the ordinary, external knowledge knows little about this history of mankind, only the external facts. But what is called history today is actually nothing more than a fable convenante. What lives in history, what advances humanity through history, is only really learned in its truth, with the forces that I have just described to you. There one learns to recognize how the spiritual rules in the historical development of humanity. Now, I do not want to describe to you in abstract terms what I have to say in this field, but I would like to present to you what can have a direct bearing on the great tasks of humanity in the present day. The one who, as I am now doing, looks at more recent human history from the spiritually developed soul forces finds a significant turning point in the development of humanity in the middle of the fifteenth century. You see, in life, things are often said that are actually illusions or one-sided truths. For example, it is often said that nature – and what is meant is basically the whole of world affairs – nature does not make leaps. In a sense this is true, but in another sense it is completely untrue. Nature is constantly making leaps. Look at a growing plant: the green leaf makes the leap to the colored petal, to the stamens, to the pistil and so on in further growth. So it has also happened in history, leaps and bounds continually; these leaps are not noticed because man does not follow the workings of history in a spiritual way, but only externally. The one who follows the development in history in a spiritual way can clearly see that since the middle of the fifteenth century the human spiritual condition in the civilized world has become quite different than before. We have to distinguish a long period of human development from our own, which began in the middle of the fifteenth century and in which we are still immersed in our developmental epoch. The immediately preceding developmental epoch began around the eighth century BC and lasted from the seventh century BC to the middle of the fifteenth century AD, which external history does not tell. If you look at history as I have described it today, it becomes clear that people were very different in the epoch that began in the eighth century BC and ended in the middle of the fifteenth century. People were so different then that I will briefly illustrate this with an image. You all know, dear attendees, that today, as he develops in his childhood years, the human being goes through parallel stages with his soul and spirit in relation to his physical development. Just consider – and you can read about what this means in my little booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science' – how deeply the change of teeth towards the seventh year intervenes in what is developing in the child. And for those who are able to observe well, how important it is that what intervenes in the life of the child intervenes in the soul and spirit much more intensively than people usually believe. This is the first epoch in which, alongside physical development, the human being undergoes a parallel development in relation to his soul and spirit. Man ends the second epoch with sexual maturity in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Man develops quite differently between the seventh and fourteenth year. And again differently, but in such a way that he still has parallelism with physical development, up to the twenty-first year. And anyone who is able to observe closely in our time will see that today's humanity still shows a parallelism in terms of the spiritual and soul up to the age of twenty-seven. Then this parallelism ceases. Then, to a certain extent, we emancipate ourselves inwardly from the physical and bodily in relation to our spiritual and soul. Then these developments no longer go hand in hand. But what I am now describing as a characteristic of present human development, and on which everything that happens between human beings, everything in the human totality depends, was different before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was different throughout the whole long period, although it developed from the eighth century BC to the middle of the fifteenth century. For a much longer time, the human being was afflicted with a parallelism. Even into one's early thirties, one could still experience physical changes that corresponded to psychological changes, although not as strongly as during the change of teeth and sexual maturation. And anyone who really wants to understand what was there in the world with Greek culture, what entered human development with Greek culture, must know that what is usually called Greek human nature, what one perceives as the harmony of Greek culture, what has been felt in such a way that the offspring and also the aftermath of Greek culture are carried into our time, that this is based on this longer ascending developmental capacity of the bodily-physical of human nature. This goes parallel with that which the spiritual-soul qualities are. In the case of the Greeks and Romans, the spiritual-soul qualities were such that one can say: The powers of understanding and feeling developed more instinctively; instinctive feeling, instinctive logic, instinctive understanding, instinctive powers of research are found in that period. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, the instinctive understanding has been replaced by the self-conscious powers of understanding and feeling. Everything in the state and in society, in the social organism, was different in the period from the eighth century BC to the fifteenth century AD than it can be in our age. From the innermost core of human development, that which stands for today's humanity in the outside world developed. The newer natural science with all that lies in the human soul could never have developed, the new industrialism could never have developed if, around the middle of the fifteenth century, something had not happened in human development that can be called the transition from instinctive to independent soul and emotional powers. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, therefore, man has wanted to place himself at the apex of his personality out of his inner nature. From these inner impulses of human development follows that which is outer economic life, which is economic, industrial order, which is also a scientific direction of knowledge; follows that which can be characterized in such a way that one says: Man, because he was to become self-conscious since the middle of the fifteenth century, had to develop a kind of materialism more or less in the realms of the intellect and also in the practical realm. To a certain extent, he had to be abandoned by the instincts of spiritual life. But today the time has come again when man, self-consciously, must also rise from the attainment of orientation in the material to the conscious grasping of spiritual life, as I have described it. Now, the best way to see what has changed in the development of humanity is to turn one's gaze to the most significant event that has occurred within this development in the course of the entire human evolution on earth, to the event that gives the actual meaning to the evolution of humanity and the earth, when one turns one's gaze to the Mystery of Golgotha, through which Christianity was founded. What did humanity, which developed its soul and physical powers as I have described from the eighth century BC to the fifteenth century AD, what did this humanity, which also remained capable of physical development, feel until the 1930s in the face of what mysteriously took place at the Mystery of Golgotha? With the powers of the soul that arise from the instinctive mind and instinctive soul, that arise from a body that, like ours, was only capable of development until the end of the 1920s, was capable of development until the 1930s, this humanity of the Greco-Latin age was able to look at the Mystery of Golgotha and feel a supersensible event in the event of Golgotha. This humanity of the Greco-Latin age could look at the mystery of Golgotha and feel a supersensible event in the event of Golgotha, which broke into human earthly development. In those days people instinctively understood that not just any man had lived in Nazareth or in Palestine at all, but that in this man Jesus of Nazareth a supersensible entity had lived, which the human beings before the development of Christianity could not look at because they were not yet connected with the earth. Through the event of Golgotha, a spiritual essence that had not previously been connected with human development on earth entered this human development through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Humanity, which was capable of development until the middle of the fifteenth century in the way I have described, understood this instinctively. The development from the mid-fifteenth century to the present should have been different. There was no rule of instinctive understanding or instinctive powers of mind. Unlike the period up to the end of the 1920s, our bodies did not develop into our 30s; but instead of becoming independent today after about the 27th year, we develop the human personality to full freedom through the physical nature. But this education to freedom must find the spirit within itself. Therefore, it must look outward for a while and see only matter. If the spirit were to reveal itself to us through matter, we would have no need to educate ourselves to become spiritual. But under the influence of these human developmental impulses, even the truth of Golgotha has been subject to change. He who, inwardly, does not consider the prejudices of present-day external knowledge, but who inwardly considers the development of humanity's thoughts about Christianity throughout the centuries, knows that in the materialistic age that had to come over humanity since the middle of the fifteenth century, but that must be overcome again from today on, he knows that with that also the views on the mystery of Golgotha had to be materialized. We have already experienced it in the course of the nineteenth century and particularly at the beginning of the twentieth century that people, including theologians, were almost proud no longer to speak of Christ as a supersensible being who lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth; but they found it better, as they say, for the enlightened man of the present to speak merely of the 'simple man of Nazareth'. They have lost the Christ and describe the man of Nazareth in materialistic terms, as if the Christ had not lived in him as a supersensible, supermundane entity. They describe him only as a highly developed human being, but still only as a developed “human being”. Modern humanity also had to go through this test. But it is a test, ladies and gentlemen. And by finding our way out of self-conscious reason, out of self-conscious powers of mind, out of intellectual modesty into the supersensible worlds, as I have described it, we will also find our way back to a supersensible understanding of Christianity. We will consciously learn to look at the Mystery of Golgotha as the people of the Greek era did, as people until the middle of the fifteenth century instinctively looked at the Mystery of Golgotha, which broke into human development after the first third of that Greek-Latin period as the earth's actual meaning. It will be a significant event in the more recent development of humanity when, through the conquest of the spiritual world, through the knowledge of the supersensible human existence, man will also find his way to the mystery of Golgotha in a new way. Then this new knowledge of Christ will be able to take hold in the souls of the whole civilized world. Then this new Christ idea will overcome what today adheres to the conceptions of Christ out of conventional narrow-mindedness, even out of narrow-mindedness of religious creeds. People, however they may otherwise stand in terms of races and nations, if the path to the mystery of Golgotha is confidently found, they will find this path throughout the civilized world. Then, starting from this impulse, something will come that is being sought today, but from a utilitarian point of view. Today we hear of people who cling to the external, to the pursuit of a League of Nations. And one of those people, who unfortunately were also quite overestimated in Germany at a certain time, one of those who lead people into such abstractions, one of those people is Woodrow Wilson. When one speaks as he does about the founding of a League of Nations, one speaks about something for which one does not first create the conditions out of reality. Those who today speak of the fact that a League of Nations should arise from the aspirations of individual peoples speak in such a way that one can see that they have never grasped the great parable of the Tower of Babel. For what does he actually want? He wants to continue building the Tower of Babel. He wants to leave the nations as they are; he wants to found the League of Nations through the very thing by which they have become nations out of the unified whole. This will result in an illusion, in an abstraction. But it is the other way around. Through a new spiritual life, it is necessary to establish that which can be common to all human souls: the realization of the spiritual center of human development; the realization of the supersensible nature of the Mystery of Golgotha in its significance for all humanity, without distinction of religion and race and nationality. From this perception, from this looking to the Christ-event, the unique Christ-event, will come the real power for the new League of Nations. And people throughout the world, throughout the civilized world, will not find harmony until they have found the path to a new Christianity out of a new conquest of the spirit, a new Christianity that can unite people throughout the world. So we see: This provides the insight that I was able to describe to you, that it leads beyond birth and death to the eternal, supersensible nature of the human being. We see that this realization leads at the same time to such a penetration of human development that it must be one of the most important tasks of the present time. And if one grasps human nature at such a depth that one does not merely encounter the outer human being that today's outer scientific knowledge encounters, if one grasps the human being in such a way that one, out of intellectual modesty, the strength to develop further, as one has developed from childhood to the point where one has arrived in ordinary life, then one also finds the words that unite people. A strong chaos lives over the civilized earth, a terrible confusion. In every soul must arise the longing to find the way out of such confusion, out of such chaos, confusion and chaos are great. The power that must be applied to escape from them must also be great; it must overcome strong, great prejudices. Even today, for many people, the prejudice that must be overcome may seem too strong, the path to the new understanding of the supersensible event of Golgotha must be taken. For humanity today has before it – we will now have to illuminate this from the outside in the next lecture – two paths. One path goes to the left, the other goes to the right. We can take a one-sided approach by letting the pendulum swing between the two, that which has developed in materialism, in the egoistic personality forces, since the middle of the fifteenth century. But we can also go to the right and consciously conquer the spirit again from our industrial and scientific age. If we learn to recognize that social, supersensible life is inherent in the development of humanity, then what many today still consider a superstition or an illusion will become a realization, that which Lessing pointed out, namely, repeated earthly lives. Lessing, the enlightened man, was the first to point out, as in the dawn of modern times, in his 'Education of the Human Race', that human beings go through repeated earthly lives as long as the earth is in its development. Between these repeated earthly lives, he lives in a spiritual-soul world from which he descends into the physical world through birth or conception, and from which he then ascends again through the gate of death. To find one's way into the great that has already begun with such thoughts with Lessing, with Herder, with Goethe and so on, leads in the right direction. And we in Central Europe, we must now, since the time of external adversity and external misery has perhaps begun for us, [that must] already be said in our difficult time, we must learn to tie in again with those steps that were taken in Central Europe by the great German minds that I have just mentioned, into the supersensible world. And we must have the courage to take further such steps, to go further into the supersensible world. Otherwise humanity will fall back into what can be characterized in the following way. If humanity wants to go only to the left, then it will continue to develop that which had to come over humanity for a time so that the human being could develop his free personality. From a different point of view, I already described this in the early nineties in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”. In order to achieve freedom, man had to develop what led him into the newer age in such a way that he mechanized his spirit. He only overlooks that which is machine-like in the outer world and comprehends it. If he stops at this, he cannot awaken his soul to what I have described today as awakening out of intellectual and volitional modesty; then, in addition to the mechanization of the spirit, there is the vegetarianization of the soul, the drowsiness of the soul. But then, because the body becomes ignoble if it is not glowed through by the spirit-illuminated soul, animalization occurs for the body in addition to the drowsiness of the soul. Then the social demands arise out of the animal instincts. This can be seen in the present. We have a mechanized spiritual life. But we also have the drowsy, plant-like soul, the vegetative soul, with regard to the supersensible human being. And we have what is currently emerging in Eastern Europe, on the large-scale Russian folk soul, as this folk soul is killing; emerging like a new set of social demands, but which is nothing more than the speech of animalized man. That is the third. If we really want to find a way out of today's chaos and confusion, then we must look without prejudice at the fact that we in Central Europe, and that Western civilization have developed the mechanization of the mind and the drowsiness of the soul, and that as a result, in the East, the animalized passions , which man today only fears but must learn to understand in order to overcome them, so that he can come out of this illusionary, this corrupt socialism of the East and into a true socialism, which we want to talk about the day after tomorrow, a socialism that is permeated by the spirit and the soul. It is necessary for human beings not to go the way of mechanizing the spirit, of making the soul become like that of a vegetable, of animalizing the body, but to go the way that leads them to a penetration of the supersensible human nature and the supersensible nature of the world in general. That he may receive from his higher developed self-consciousness of modern times in his spirit the light, in his soul the warmth, the spiritual, and thereby in his body the ennobling that will lead to real social love, to genuine brotherhood. Only if we find the way to the illumination of the spirit, to the spiritualization of the soul, to the ennobling of the body, only then will we be able to enter into a better future. Then it will not be external matter, the economic process, but spirit and soul that will lead us into this new order. However, the spirit can only guide man if man meets the spirit halfway; if man allows his intellect to glow with humility through the spirit; if man allows the soul to be permeated by what he can experience as spirit. And do not believe that everyone in our time should become a spiritual researcher themselves, although to a certain extent anyone can become a spiritual researcher today; as I explained in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. But while in all other fields one can only look to the belief in authority of scientists in science, what people would like to claim is not true: that supersensible truths, when they are researched, can only be found to be true on the basis of belief in authority. No, human nature is so created that if it only removes the prejudices that the last four centuries have piled up before the human soul, then every single human soul, even if not yet today, will be able to look into the supersensible world and accept what the spiritual researcher has investigated. What the astronomer or the physiologist investigates is accepted by other people. Today, based on common sense, every soul can find the path into this supersensible world through the mere revelation of those who have researched this supersensible world. Then this soul will also find the path into a true social life. Because this social life can never be based on mere natural necessity, on mere external economic or economic necessity. The purified social life can only be based on freedom. But the freedom of external life can only be based on that highest freedom, which must be developed in the innermost part of the human soul. All external freedom may only be in the future, so that humanity may emerge from confusion and chaos. All external freedom may only be the direct announcement of the inner liberation of the human soul. May man find the way to this inner liberation through the path of the spirit and of soul-searching, so that he can also find it to the outer social liberation. |
| 68b. The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit: The Wrath of Zeus. The Chained Prometheus
21 Oct 1909, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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| The person who, from the point of view of spiritual science, looks at what passes through the ages as legends and myths of the peoples, as a transmission of the peoples, makes a remarkable discovery in his soul. What might be called the “science of the green table” can answer when you ask where this or that myth comes from: “That is folk poetry.” Only someone who is unfamiliar with folk poetry can speak of folk poetry in this way. |
| 68b. The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit: The Wrath of Zeus. The Chained Prometheus
21 Oct 1909, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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Those who reflect on such questions of human mental life as those on our winter program this year, on character, conscience, on the healthy and sick soul, on life and death, mysticism and so on, those who reflect on such questions will perhaps be able to be reminded again and again of a saying of an old sage from the fifth century BC, Heraclitus, whom is called the “Dark” because of the significantly deep nature of his thinking. He, Heraclitus, spoke the words:
We are reminded of this depth of the soul in many ways when dealing with matters of the soul. But only slowly and gradually, over the course of this winter, can we, so to speak, engage with the deeper questions of the soul life. Today and tomorrow, we will deal with phenomena of human inner life that are perhaps no less interesting precisely because they are closer to the most everyday and because one thinks about them less. It is in such phenomena that the noblest and highest core of human inner life, which we call self-consciousness, is obscured for certain periods of time in a certain relationship, obscured by all kinds of feelings, but mainly by affects. Today we will deal with one of these affects, which plays a significantly profound role in the human soul. We will deal with the force within us that underlies anger and everything related to it. When speaking of the soul qualities and expressions of the human soul, one can ask: How is it that the human soul, which is supposed to lift itself ever higher and higher intellectually and morally through its self-awareness, is repeatedly thrown back by impulses of the kind that anger is? Is a quality of the soul like anger a mere hindrance on the path of human beings upwards to the great ideals of life? And in a practical sense, too, such questions are of the greatest importance in our immediate lives. The educator, anyone who is entrusted with the care of another person, will readily admit and will recognize how important it is to know what role an emotion like anger plays in the soul's life. Once we recognize such a thing, we can treat everything connected with it in a correspondingly tactful and wise manner. However, our present consideration of the soul life will encounter the greatest difficulties in dealing with such a question as the meaning of anger. Only a deeper penetration into the undercurrents of existence, into the winding paths of the spiritual life, allows us to provide some insights into such a question. So today we will first have to allow something to enter our soul that those of our revered listeners who are present at these lecture cycles have heard from a certain quarter, who have been present more often at these lecture cycles. But it will be necessary again and again to allow the unique nature of the human being to enter our soul if we want to understand human expressions and effects of force. From a spiritual point of view, the mission of anger is to be considered today. Here we must consider man, not only as he presents himself to our outer senses, to the intellect that is bound to the instrument of the brain, and which is limited to processing the impressions that direct sense observation provides. For such a spiritual-scientific consideration, that which the senses see and which the human intellect, conscious in this sense, can comprehend, is only a part of the human being. That part of the human being that we can perceive with our senses – external science is only concerned with the physical body insofar as it is a science of nature, and in a certain respect it is right with this limitation – spiritual science calls the physical human being. But beyond that, it distinguishes the higher nature of the human being. What we call the physical body has the same composition of substances and forces as everything we call the mineral kingdom, the seemingly dead nature around us. The same world of forces is in our physical body as it is out there in the world. But there is also a question that the ordinary human mind can ask and to some extent answer, namely, whether these forces and substances that are at work in the human body and that are the same as those in the rest of mineral nature act in the same way as they do in the rest of mineral nature. The answer is no, they do not. When the human physical body – and the physical body of any living being, for that matter – is left to itself, it follows the laws of the mineral world. We see this when the physical body is left to itself at the point of death. We see the way in which the composition of the physical body works when it is left to its own physical and chemical forces. That which, from the beginning of physical life to the end, fights against the physical and chemical forces so that they cannot follow their own path, which they only follow in death, we call the first link of higher human nature – do not be put off by expressions, stick to the concepts – we call the etheric body or the life body. With this, we ascend to the first supersensible link of human nature. Even for someone who merely employs logic and the instrument bound to the physical, such a life body can be reasonably inferred. For someone who stands on the ground of spiritual science, this life body is a fact of the same reality as the world of sounds and colors. And the spiritual researcher can say to those who reply: “This etheric or life body does not exist at all.” It is not perceptible to the ordinary senses, just as color is not perceptible to someone who is blind. But it exists for the person who has developed the corresponding powers in his soul so that he can really perceive this life body as a fact. All these things can be discussed in the course of winter in a different context. Today it must be left at that. — Then we come to the third link of the human being, which is called the astral body. This astral body is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain, of urges, desires and passions. This astral body is what humans have in common with animals, just as they have the etheric or life body in common with plants and the physical body in common with minerals. For reason, this astral body, if it is to make use of logic in an unbiased way, can be something that can be logically deduced. For spiritual research, it is a fact, something that is just as present for the perception of the spiritual researcher as color is for the eye and sound is for the ear. Thus, in the astral body we have a second link in the supersensible human being. And if we ascend further in the composition of human nature, we come to what he no longer has in common with the other realms of nature around him, what we call human self-consciousness or its expression, the ego. This ego is that which, so to speak, every sensible human nature is surprised by when it perceives it for the first time. I would like to quote again the beautiful saying of Jean Paul, when he was still a boy and stood in the courtyard of his parents' house and felt the 'I' for the first time [gap]. From now on, the question of God and immortality was understandable to him. It would be so easy to arrive at the human 'I', at an understanding of it, if one were to say to oneself: There is something expressed in the I that is distinguished from all other concepts or names by the very fact that it is spoken. Anyone can call a table a 'table' and a chair a 'chair'. But when you say the word 'I', it denotes something that only refers to itself, but that has no meaning and cannot be applied to your higher self-awareness when it is spoken by another. Your “I” can never sound sweet to your ear if it is not meant to signify your own soul. This is truly the expression for the “shrouded sanctuary” of the human soul. This is the expression that, as in a short monologue, describes the essence of the human being within, or what can also be described as the divine in human nature. We have thus placed the four aspects of the human being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, before your soul. When we look at the person as he stands before us, these four elements are what constitute his interaction, his mutual interpenetration. What is significant is that the human being is not a closed being, that he is not a being who is finished at any given moment, but a being who is in the process of living development, a being who progresses from this or that stage of progress to another stage. What then is the nature of this human development? What is the interplay between these aspects of the human being, which we can call the wonder of human development? They interact in the way that presents itself to our minds when we consider what an astral body might look like in a person at a low level of cultural development, and in a person at a higher level of cultural development, in that he does not live in his wild desires and instincts, that he does not desire and crave everything that comes to him in terms of the senses, but that he has purified his urges and desires through the ideals of moral life. You can place two people side by side: the one whose senses are still covetous, who still desires what his senses present to him; and the other, with fine tact and a sense of duty, who shows that he has undergone a refinement of his soul, has purified and cleansed it. What is this purification based on? It is based on the fact that the human being works from his ego on the other members of his being. The ego has done this, which has become out of instincts, desires and passions. The ego has purified the astral body, transformed instincts, desires and passions, made them into something different from what they were before. In spiritual science, the part of the astral body that the ego has already transformed – insofar as the ego has worked with full consciousness on the transformation of drives and passions, on its moral perfection, on the transformation of the astral body – is called the “spirit self”, or, in an expression of oriental philosophy, the “manas” of the human being. In general, we can say that in present human development, the human ego has only just reached the point of working on the manas or spirit self, consciously working. In the future, the high spiritual ideal for human beings will be to consciously work not only on the astral body, on the purification of passions, instincts and desires, but also on the transformation of the etheric or life body. Today, human beings can only work unconsciously on this etheric body. What he once transformed in his life body is called the spirit of life or Budhi in spiritual science. And now an even higher ideal in the sense of spiritual science arises before the human soul; this is an ideal in which the human soul today, when it has a sense of it, can be overcome by a sense of vertigo at the height and grandeur and sublimity of the future of human development. When man is able to work consciously on the physical body, then he will also rework the physical body from his ego or self-awareness. Today, a person can only do this unconsciously. But you can see it happening in everyday life. You just have to look at life impartially. Imagine a person who feels shame, that is, he feels something in his soul as if he wanted to hide something about himself; a blush of shame rises to his face. What does that mean? A purely inner experience has triggered a physical process, a redistribution of the blood. It is the same when a person turns pale. The blood then moves from the surface to the inner parts. This is a process in the physical body that takes place unconsciously. What a person consciously works on in his physical body is referred to in spiritual science as the Atma or spiritual man. If we describe the course of human development in this way, we can say that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I. If the I transforms something of the astral body, the spirit self or manas arises. If something of the etheric body is transformed, the life spirit or budhi arises. And if the physical body is transformed, then the spiritual man or Atma arises. But that is not the only thing that comes into consideration. When a person can also look at his ideal, in which he has completed the transformation of the astral body, then he has unconsciously already worked on this astral body from his I. He already has something within him that can be described by saying that the I lives in the astral body. That part of the astral body that is not consciously transformed by the I, but which - as we shall see is correct - is already an instrument of the I, is called the sentient soul by spiritual science. But the etheric or life body has already been transformed to a certain extent by the I, and today it already serves the I as an instrument in a certain way. The I has already sent its power into the etheric or life body. Insofar as this body is merely an etheric body, it is connected with the forces of reproduction and growth. But insofar as the etheric body is transformed by the I, we call it the mind soul or emotional soul of the human being. But the physical body of the human being is also transformed and becomes an instrument of the I. This physical body of the human being, insofar as it is an instrument of the I, serves precisely as a sensory organ; through the wonderful apparatus of the sensory organs, it serves the consciousness of the I. That is why we call that part of the physical body that is capable of being an instrument of the ego the consciousness soul, which thus dwells in the physical body. Thus, in the sense of spiritual science, we first have three bodily members: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body; then three soul members in which the ego lives to a certain extent: the sentient soul , the soul of feeling, and the soul of mind; and finally, by making use of these three members, the I works them over in a conscious way to become the spiritual self, the spirit of life and the spiritual human being. This is a meaningful scheme. But it is not just a scheme, it is an active force. Only the one in whom it becomes so alive that he sees the forces of the individual human members interacting, comprehends human development. Yes, this human nature is deep, deep, as Heraclitus correctly said. Thus we see the human ego at its work, and within the human body we see the transformation of the inner soul-elements of the human being. If we want to understand this ego, we must ask ourselves, above all, what is the present stage of the human ego, what has it achieved, conquered by working, partly unconsciously, on its astral body? What it has conquered lies in what we can describe with the words: The I makes the human being a being capable of judgment, a being that judges from within, be it judgments of the intellect, feelings or will; this makes the human being a being capable of judgment. This says a great deal when one says that it makes a human being a being capable of judgment, a being that can think, feel and want from reasonable judgments. It is said that one really learns to distinguish between what is the sensation of a physical being and what is the impulse of a human being. When we look at animals, we can find all the qualities of the human soul in animals to a certain extent. We find sympathies and antipathies in animals, even what is analogous to one of the highest feelings of the human soul, an analogy to love. We find analogies to what we call human intellectual activity. It is easy to observe in the animal kingdom how everything works similarly to that in humans; but who could fail to recognize the difference between what is present in humans and what is present as a quality in animals? We can say with certainty, based on the animal's organization and form, what it will be driven to do in this or that case. Necessity is quite different in the case of a human being who ponders the question: Should you do this or should you not do it? He weighs it up before coming to a decision. Only those who do not look closely at the matter can fail to see the enormous difference. In the course of his development, man has acquired the power of judgment through the interplay of his development, which has just been characterized. If we want to place before our soul the highest ideal of this discerning human being in relation to an area, in relation to human coexistence, in relation to the way two people relate to each other, two things arise. If we look at the judgment that confronts people, it is the concept of justice and the concept of love. When the human being places the concept of justice before him, he will be able to say to himself: Justice is something that can be regarded as a higher ideal. This means harmony, balance in life's circumstances. One need only think of good and evil, right and wrong. But what is it that afflicts the human soul when it utters the word “justice,” when it surrenders to the concept of justice? It is something cold that the human soul experiences in its feeling when it surrenders to this concept. It feels justice as a necessity, as something that must be, as something that man must submit to based on his sound judgment. The soul feels differently when it contemplates the concept related to justice, so to speak, the concept of love. Here the soul does not feel coldness, but inner warmth, something of what elevates human nature, because it must say to itself: That is only a truly human ideal when justice is no longer practiced because it is perceived as a necessity, but because one loves what is right, because one loves to do what should be done. Thus, justice and love stand side by side as a cold ideal that is nevertheless recognized as necessary, and as a warm ideal that fills our soul with inner fire. And in them is contained what the human soul sees as the two ideals when it asks itself: In what direction must it develop its power of judgment first? That through her judgment, through her deliberations, through what lives in her, she experiences the coexistence of human beings in such a way that it is in the sense of justice and love. - In this sense, man looks up to justice and love as two lofty ideals of development, and he sees, enclosed in the interplay of his forces, that which leads to justice and love in coexistence. That is how it is. But one cannot understand human development, or development in general, without another feeling, which provides insight into the actual nature of development. Development is something that, if it is to flourish, must include something else. And this other process can perhaps best be described by the word maturing. Maturation over time is something that cannot be separated from the concept of development. And we understand each other best when we apply the concept of maturation to the concept of the human ego itself. Take the life of a single human being, take it in the sense that a serious observer of existence should take it. Is it possible to expect the same of a person in their third year as in their twelfth or sixteenth year? That is impossible. The same cannot possibly be expected of a developing being when the interplay of forces is such that it is developing. There is a time for every stage of development, and it is detrimental to the being's overall development to transgress this law of maturation. It is also detrimental to the individual's human development between birth and death to expect something of the ego at one stage of life that should only be expected at a different stage of life, according to the degree of maturity. But it is also unhealthy to expect a person at a lower stage of development, who has not yet sufficiently purified his passions and instincts, to do things that can only be expected of such an ego in a truly fruitful way after it has gone through the various stages of purification. This is how it is when the human ego sees such significant ideas as justice and love as ideals and says to itself: You must rise up — so that they work like two great guiding stars in the life of man. But the path must be traveled in the right way. If we now consider not the individual life, but the whole of human life over the course of centuries and millennia, how the human ego returns and works on the human being, then we will have a complicated fact before us, which is very compelling to draw attention to the maturing process. If – and this can only be stated today, but will be touched on from various points of view during the winter lectures – if the human being not only lives once between birth and death, but returns again and again, then what spiritual science recognizes as a necessary consequence of development, that the I does not live only once between birth and death, but returns again and again, then it is [conceivable] that spiritual science recognizes as a necessary consequence of development, that the I does not live only once in this life between birth and death, but undergoes successive embodiments. During all these embodiments, the I works in such a way that it has worked in the distant past on the astral body, etheric body and physical body, so that the sentient soul, mind or mind soul and consciousness soul; let us continue to work so that spirit self, spirit of life and spiritual man will arise. The forces of this development permeate each other in interplay and unite in the ideals of justice and love. This work is done by the “I”. Thus, if we take the word experience in the right way, we must understand that at every moment of life – if we speak of different embodiments, in every single embodiment – the soul acts on the other members of the body in the right way, that the “I” works on every work on every single development, that it does not do too much in terms of acquiring justice and love; for the ego should never go further in relation to what is capable of judgment within it, and it cannot go further than its degree of maturity makes possible. But what is the regulator in this relationship? What ensures that the ego does not go beyond the degree of maturity at certain stages? Do we understand what the regulator is, what ensures that the ego can at least do the right thing at each stage? What is said here can only be understood if we turn our attention to something that is becoming clearer and clearer to people through spiritual science: If we turn our attention to what man's knowledge, his insights, his ideas and concepts (to name briefly the means by which we know the world) give him, we see that these are not found in man alone, but are poured out over the whole world. Man tries to understand the world by forming concepts and ideas about the world. Just as you cannot scoop water out of a glass that does not contain water, you cannot scoop wisdom out of a world that is not full of wisdom. Man draws wisdom out through his judgment, through his capacity for knowledge. He comprehends the plant because it is constructed in a way that is full of wisdom. He forms concepts. It is nonsense and foolish to believe that man could form a concept about the plant if the plant itself were not built according to this concept. What man draws out of the world is poured out into the world and underlies things. In the human soul, what is poured out in the rest of the world or in nature outside appears in a different form as wisdom. If you want to visualize this, all you need to do is think about the following. It took a long time in the development of mankind for man to reach a certain stage of historical development, let us say, to produce paper. Try to imagine the sum of thoughts and work that were necessary to produce paper so that it could enter human development. One could say, if one wanted to speak grotesquely, that within the wasp world this paper was not invented thousands of years ago, but much longer before, because the wasp nest is built from the same material that we have as paper. We have real paper there. What man produces in his materials is worked out into the outer nature. As such stages, you can realize how what man has acquired as wisdom is poured out into the world. The world is permeated by wisdom and built up of judgments. Wisdom is a rediscovery of judgments that are spread like a net over all existence in nature. Wisdom-filled furnishings are not only to be found in what human consciousness works out, what human beings shape in their souls; wisdom-filled furnishings can be found everywhere. They were already there when the human ego could not yet consciously work. And it was this wisdom-filled work that made it possible for the human ego to work on the physical body, the etheric and astral bodies, even before it was able to work consciously. But this wisdom must also be out there in life today. The human ego is not yet so far advanced that it can find the right thing all by itself, that which would correspond to a much higher power of judgment. What I want to say becomes clear when you consider the following. Imagine a person standing before a child that he wants to educate. The child does something that it should not do. It becomes necessary for an action to take place; it can be punishment or something else. Such a thing is possible. One possibility is that the educator says that the pupil is doing something incorrectly. The educator dislikes this, and it is possible that he may become angry and that this anger may develop to a certain degree, in an impulse to a certain action. That is one possibility. The other possibility, however, is that the educator, although he has seen the injustice and felt displeasure, remains calm, feels composure and, based on mere judgment and a certain maturity of soul, does what is necessary as a punishment or otherwise in the case in question. Outwardly, the same can happen. The difference lies in the soul being filled with anger one time and with composure the other. When we consider this difference, we will ask ourselves: Why is there anger in the one case and composure in the other? Would the person who looks at what the child is doing with anger be able to do the right thing in the case in question because of the maturity of his or her self? If you look at life, you will say to yourself that as a rule he will not be able to do the right thing. It takes a certain degree of maturity of the ego to do the right thing despite not feeling any emotion and remaining cold and calm, but still loving the matter at hand and loving what should be. A certain degree of maturity is required for this. And every person stands at a certain point in relation to this maturity. The human ego cannot always have the degree of composure that enables it to do the right thing despite not feeling any emotion. To do so, the human ego must develop to a certain level. What would the educator do if he were calm and did not feel anger? Then the educator would stand by with his composure, do nothing, and leave the matter be. The wise order of the world ensures that the I is guided towards what is right, at least to some extent, by forces other than those to which it has not yet matured. Before the I is mature enough to act from serenity, it acts out of affect, out of anger. Here we see that in the course of development, the human ego does work on the human astral body, so that in the course of development the astral body develops in such a way that composure blossoms; but as long as the ego is not yet able to attain this maturity, it does not want to work on this composure, then the human being should be driven by something within him to do something. One such mechanism, and a very important one at that, which allows the ego to mature within the astral body and yet still drives it to enter into a certain relationship with its fellow human beings before it is mature, is anger. Just as, for example, the outer nature in its plant kingdom, in its animal kingdom, is wisely arranged, so is everything that we can call the astral nature of human beings wisely arranged. It is arranged in such a way that people enter into a relationship with each other before they can build themselves up completely on the basis of their ideals of justice and love, using their power of judgment. The forerunner of serenity is anger. In development, it must be the case that what leads up to higher levels of development can also lead to error. If man did not now enter into error, he could not work his way to the truth. So even if anger gets out of hand, if we consider it in its full significance, we can see how it works. Take a young person in his youth, who is not yet able to develop certain ideals; but he sees this or that injustice in his environment; he comes to what one can call a noble anger. And what one can call noble anger at what he cannot approve of, that works in him to help the soul mature into working out in itself what the great ideals of life can become. Like a mother substance, the self, left to its own devices, is made mature through qualities such as anger. That the self is made mature can also be seen from other facts. Because the young man never sees his ideals realized in his environment in the case of things that he cannot yet have any concept of, he repeatedly feels the same noble anger at what displeases him. When people look into life, they can perceive that all the noble surges of anger in youth later come out as love and gentleness. He who views life in its entirety sees the transformation of youthful anger into the love and gentleness of old age. Thus we see how love and justice, which stand before the human soul as lofty ideals, but which the ego must mature — for it takes an enormous effort to develop the system of human justice and the truth, the real of love, which is not burdened by clouded feelings, we see how justice and love, these high ideals, have set up wrath as a champion in the human social order. It is wrath's [mission] to prepare love. This is understandable when you consider that what is supposed to become judgment in reality threatens to degenerate into extremism. If we consider the various embodiments, we can say that what a person brings with them in the way of justice and love goes back to a time when they were not yet able to recognize what the right balance should be, when they had no idea of the true feeling of love, but when what arises is anger. Like the dawn of the sun, so shines the nobility of anger, the noble anger that precedes love. In wisdom, the powers that rule the world have placed the nobility of anger in the astral body before a full consciousness of love can be developed, before love can become full justice in the soul. In times when things were examined more closely than today, it was possible to determine what was in the soul members just by their names. If we go back to the great Greek philosopher Plato, we will find that Plato calls that which we call the consciousness soul, the reasonable soul. But what we call the intellectual or mind soul must be endowed with the ideals of justice and love, and Plato calls this the wrathful soul. What we call the sentient soul, Plato calls the desires soul. If we turn to Aristotle, we find that he uses similar terms in a similar way; we can also see that they correspond exactly to the expressions of spiritual research. Why does Plato call the soul that precedes the consciousness soul, the wrathful soul? He calls it that because not only wrath but also all wisdom-filled institutions are written into this soul, because he found the wisdom that was poured out into the world also poured out in the human astral body, precisely as a wrathful soul. In the case of those who have looked more deeply into the nature of the soul, we find that the essence is already indicated in the name. The person who, from the point of view of spiritual science, looks at what passes through the ages as legends and myths of the peoples, as a transmission of the peoples, makes a remarkable discovery in his soul. What might be called the “science of the green table” can answer when you ask where this or that myth comes from: “That is folk poetry.” Only someone who is unfamiliar with folk poetry can speak of folk poetry in this way. But anyone who delves deeper and shines a light into this or that saga or myth will make the remarkable discovery that it contains great wisdom. Before humanity was educated by logical judgment, by pondering and counting, as is right today, before this ability to judge led to the contemplation of truth, another, clairvoyant recognition led to it, to contemplate the truth. So the myths and legends are something quite different than they initially appear. They become an expression of profound truths. A saga that leads us into the depths of the truth that interests us today was processed by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus in his “Prometheus Bound”. When we delve into the life of this poet, who lived two thousand years before us, we are seized by the world view that permeates his poetry, the world view that is poured out in the Greek myths, the world view of the Greek people. I could fill the entire lectures over the winter if I wanted to tell you what there is to say about “Prometheus”. This poem ties in with the myths that the name Prometheus encompasses. You are all familiar with the Prometheus myth. Let us briefly recall it. When the Greeks looked back in time, they saw ancient generations of gods at work within our earthly nature, within our earthly and cosmic evolution. Today it is not intended to explain what is meant by this. Imagine that they are personifications of natural forces, or whatever and however you want; that is not the point today. The Greeks saw two ancient dynasties of gods: Uranus and Gaea; these ancient dynasties of heavenly gods, who brought about the first processes on our Earth, were replaced by the dynasty of Titans; the dynasty of Titans to which Cronus and Saturn belonged. Kronos was the son of Uranos. We are told that the Titans, with Kronos at their head, seized power and overthrew the old Uranos. We can assume from the outset – and this is pointed out, and it is true – that according to Greek belief, certain forms of life existed in ancient times that were subject to different rulers then than in later epochs of development. Anyone who is aware that the forms of events change over time will admire the ingenious view of Greek myth, which expresses the beginning of [earthly] development, that interplay of simple primal forces of the world, through the marriage between Uranus and Gäa, and then expresses a later epoch by saying that the Titans appear. The whole face of the earth changes, so that other forms of life, of happening and becoming are there. Thus, in the Titans, we have a second generation of gods, forces that work within the development of the earth. Why is the generation of Titans replaced by the generation whose leader is Zeus? He is, so to speak, a member of the youngest of the generations of gods. He therefore overthrew Kronos and his followers into an unknown world, a hidden world to which the Titans belong, and in which Zeus is the one who exercises world domination. In Zeus's fight against the Titans, Prometheus, a descendant of the Titans, sided with Zeus. It was he who helped Zeus to achieve his goal. But Prometheus experiences a bitter disappointment, so to speak. He helped Zeus to achieve world domination. Within what the Greeks imagined as a succession of these three corporations of the gods: Uranus, Titans and Zeus's generation, human beings developed into various abilities, they developed into certain stages. When Zeus had taken over the rule, human beings had developed to the point where they could absorb the impressions of their surroundings into their consciousness. If we understand this Greek myth in the right way, if we really engage with it in a spiritual-scientific way, then we find that the Greek genius, where it expresses itself mythically, takes the concept of development into account in a wonderful way. People who can see what is a few steps in front of their noses believe that as long as man and his consciousness have moved up from the animal to the human form in the sense of today's natural science, they have always been as they are today. So human consciousness is also in a state of development. It has only gradually taken on the forms it has today. If we go back on the basis of research that is no longer accessible to external natural science, but [rather] to spiritual science, we would come to ancient stages of human consciousness where judgment and deliberation were not yet present. Instead, however, there was an image consciousness, an image consciousness that works differently, that works in such a way that when a person encounters an impression, an image arises within him. He knew directly through the images, through the impressions that the image made on his feelings, he knew in an old, dim consciousness that is preserved like an old relic, like a traditional heirloom in a dream. An old, dim, clairvoyant consciousness was there in those days. It was only into this consciousness that man first acquired the ability to conceptualize. Everything was in development; above all, human consciousness. This is expressed in the fact that Zeus has taken power. Consciousness increasingly makes way for what is to develop into judgment and deliberation. The sure insight that was conveyed by images was lost. Man only began with the first facts of calculating and counting and considering. People were clumsy. They became dull in relation to their old consciousness. They could no longer grasp their environment. They lived in an almost inhuman way. But out of this dullness there developed more and more that which, as we have indicated, was present in the first beginnings and which worked in man in such a way that it gradually brought him to judge, brought him to posit out of his ego into the world something that was not there before. Call it power, call it essence. The Greek genius expresses it by saying: Prometheus works in human nature that sense which makes it possible for human nature to process the individual things of life into art productions by means of tools. Prometheus is the great benefactor of mankind who, in the name of love, has given humanity what it will continue to develop ever further. Zeus, that is the disappointment that Prometheus experiences, would only have developed in man what is independent of judgment, independent of calculation and deliberation, what has not led to the arts. Zeus had left man without fire. Travelers will tell you that higher animals, for example monkeys, were spectators and saw travelers warming themselves by the fire. If the travelers leave the fire while it is still burning, they will also warm themselves; but what they do not do is to bring wood and make a fire themselves. This is closely related to the making of fire, to the foresight to bring about something that will serve one later. The foresight is interpreted in Prometheus, who is the forward thinker. The becoming is interpreted by the Greek genius in the form of Prometheus. In Zeus, we see that which is not active in the human ego, that which does not make the human being capable of judgment, but which only works in the human astral body. The Greeks focus on human nature, and they say to themselves: the threefold nature of man — whether they say it to themselves in this form or not is irrelevant — is made up of drives, desires and instincts. These must play against each other. What permeates the astral nature with wisdom was seen by the Greeks in Zeus. What penetrates the human I, what leads the I to a higher level, was seen in Prometheus. Thus Zeus and Prometheus faced each other, like the I reflecting judgment and intellect and the astral body. Thus they fight against each other in the I, which purifies the astral body. When the Greek allows us to see the whole astral nature, he says to himself: When we look at the human being with his astral body and his I — he stands in the world, suffering pain and joy, doing good and evil; pain and joy, good and evil, are in need of balance. It causes displeasure in the human soul when good is unrewarded and without success, and evil goes unpunished or is successful in the wrong way. It is justice that brings about balance in suffering and joy, in good and evil. But when we survey the world, says the Greek Genius, then we see that in the world, within human nature and the human astral body, justice is very limited. Man is powerless; that is how the Greek genius felt with regard to justice. Now he looks out into nature, sees and says: Development is what comes before our soul in the sunrise and sunset, in the rise and fall of the plant world; what comes before us is everything that does not comes up to the human astral body; that something is at work in it that is connected with human nature, that is connected with the whole world as something that is a far deeper justice than man in his powerlessness can realize. — He then looked up and said to himself: There must be hidden forces and powers after all, that are behind what we can see, and that have a balancing effect. These powers are the ones that are powerful in the face of the human impotent being; they are the powers of justice, so that they prevail everywhere, that they can count on these powers that work with might and power to bring about balance and that do not succumb to human powerlessness. They are hidden, and there they must be. The Greek genius saw them and called them the Titans for the reason that they do not have human powerlessness; and Themis, the goddess of justice, belongs to the special female Titans. Thus, before the eyes of the Greek genius, there is an all-pervasive justice in the realm of the Titans. But then it must transform itself into love. The warm feeling of love must absorb it. That is why it is not Themis who is worshiped as the figure who also penetrates into man, who leads him to the ideal of justice, to love, but the son of Themis, Prometheus. He is the one who takes hold of human beings in their very essence. While Zeus belongs to the realm that pours wisdom and balance into human knowledge on earth, insofar as the astral comes into consideration, Prometheus pours into the human I that which should bring this I ever further forward. However, we can recognize a force in the individual human being that prevents the I from going too far in its development, a force that stands in its way. Just as anger precedes the still immature composure, the Greek genius saw the interplay of Prometheus' deed with Zeus' anger in the great cosmic context. Zeus is the one who has to watch over the human development of the self so that it does not advance too quickly. Therefore, he must create balances. Prometheus provides people with what is common to ordinary people: understanding, reason, feeling, that is, what comes from the ability to judge. But this means that something else has emerged in human development. In the human being who has advanced from the earlier to this stage, his consciousness has narrowed. When man still had his old consciousness, the clairvoyant one, man saw through his image consciousness into his spiritual, at least into his soul world. This is connected with a conscious appearance of image forms, so that man can see into a soul world that is hidden from the mind and sense consciousness. Thus a world withdrew from human consciousness. The gaze was tied down on earth, while at the same time advancing to a higher level. What man had implanted as his ideals of justice and love had to pay the price of being banished to the outer sensual world, to earth. This was the counteraction of the astral. As man developed his ego further, the astral worked like a counterblow. Whereas man could formerly see into the world of the soul, this counterblow obscured the view into the world of the soul, and the view remained limited to the outer physical world. He was chained to the world of the earth. What was in Prometheus chained him to the earth. And so Prometheus was chained to the earth in human nature through what works as a counterbalance in the astral nature in the realm of Zeus, through the wrath of Zeus, forged to the earth. He had developed a higher ability. But it was darkened by the wrath of Zeus. There are all possible degrees between the brightness of consciousness that a person has during the day and the darkness during sleep. What occurs in affect is, to a certain degree, its darkness. And the cosmic degree of darkness was that human consciousness was chained to the physical world. The consciousness that should have looked into the spiritual world was paralyzed. This paralysis was the chaining of Prometheus to the rock. The forward-looking in Greek human nature is precisely depicted in the myth in the Prometheus myth. And the Greek tragedian presents this in such a powerful way in the “Prometheus Bound”. If you let the nerve of this wonderful drama take effect on you, then you will see what confronts you in it; what you encounter is something of which one can say: it stands in the world like an old heirloom from earlier times. Certainly, man has developed in a certain way, but all development does not proceed in a straight line. There are always heirlooms from old developments; they do not fit into later times; they seem out of place. Imagine a being with the old image consciousness in our time – it is an impossible being; it cannot possibly find its way in today's world. It is not for nothing that the human soul's powers change. They change so that they are adapted to human conditions on earth. The image consciousness is adapted to the earlier earth conditions. The mind consciousness corresponds to the present time. The artist presents this to us in the form of Io. She represents a being that has emerged from the level of consciousness of the ancients. What will become of this [image consciousness when it occurs in our time]? Madness! What is the image of the earlier time supposed to say? It may be that one also has the ability to say it, but these abilities are not good. They produce error and deception for the soul. The Greek genius represents such an awareness, which has remained like an old heirloom, so that error and deception and illusion arise, by seeing the hundred-eyed Argus. Images confront her. But these are deceptions, illusions, that is illusion. Even if this consciousness, when it has seized the human soul abilities, when this consciousness would also fall into madness, one must not believe that it will not have a meaning. That which the developed consciousness has grasped has only grasped one part of the human being, the brain, and has made it its organ. But the Io is still working on people today. This is human future development, that all the forces that can be there will appear in later times in new forms, like the Io with its consciousness in ancient times. So she is a madwoman. But how she will be when that in human nature which the subconscious works on connects with what is higher human nature, then human judgment will be conscious; the Prometheus in human nature will be redeemed. The Greek sets this whole thing in the past, and in a way it also refers to past events. Just as he was able to extract the meaning of each individual move of the drama from this train of Prometheus bound with Io, he could also extract it from the drama. I could only hint at where the drama's nerve lies. I could show how the playwright's mind was filled with what is in human nature and how it interacts. That is why Aeschylus was able to show how anger arises from the astral body when the ego is bound in the cosmos, so that it can mature and develop the abilities that are appropriate to it, as it were, projected out of the cosmos into inner human nature. Through this powerful drama, we will see how anger has the mission of being a harbinger of love. In a certain respect, this is also what connects us with the noble word truth, which is related to human nature in a different way to anger. We will see how Goethe has incorporated into his “Pandora” what he himself felt in his deepest soul about these riddles of life. But because humanity today is so far removed from spiritual science, from that which lives in the soul of a poet, the poems like “Pandora” were not understood. This was already the case in Goethe's time. That is why Goethe felt lonely at the height of his life. In this loneliness, he also felt many dangers – as people still say today: In his youth, Goethe still wrote understandably, but in his old age he came down and wrote [unintelligible]. – In contrast to this, Goethe once broke out in words that you will find spoken in his works: “There they praise my Faust and what else is in my works... and there the old rag-tag believes it is no longer.” That is how he felt about the misunderstood spiritual world. Especially when you are looking at the human soul and want to understand it practically, then you have to start from spiritual science. You have to be able to observe the interplay of forces and the meaning of the individual forces, as spiritual science presents them to us. Then we can look into the deep abysses of the soul in such a way that we can apply it practically. Only then do we understand as different fruits that which speaks to us spiritually from this point of view [through] Aeschylus in his drama [of] Zeus towards Prometheus, whom we will only understand when we understand what the mission of anger is in the astral body for the development of the I into the ability to love. The veil that we must lift if we want to penetrate to our satisfaction and to the right practical life is lifted so that we can say: Certainly, when we look at the soul in a spiritual scientific way, we feel how deep the fundamental tone is, and we also feel that we are on the way to penetrating into this ground. Spiritual science will first advise us to strive for the right thing little by little in order to penetrate the ideals and insights of the soul life that are to be attained; it will show us how to make the words of the ancient sage from the fifth and sixth century, whom we can remember when we explore the depths of the soul to find the boundaries of the soul, understandable in a new way, starting from these ideals. It will be difficult if we also travel a distance, because the soul's ground is infinitely deep. |
| 282. Speech and Drama: Some Practical Illustrations of the Forming of Speech
11 Sep 1924, Dornach Tr. Mary Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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| Yellow—grey—no indeed, what shall I say? Grey-green, to be exact, with deep-set eyes And stubborn brow—a simple, little man, Nothing compared with Danton! |
| 282. Speech and Drama: Some Practical Illustrations of the Forming of Speech
11 Sep 1924, Dornach Tr. Mary Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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My dear Friends, I would like today to centre our study around a scene from a play of Hamerling's that can serve to illustrate many things that I have been explaining. A course of lectures on a subject of this kind is necessarily all too short, and I can in any case do no more than make a few suggestions in the hope that these may stimulate you in your work. None the less, although our time is short, I propose to use the present hour to throw light by practical example upon the importance of what I have said about developing, in preparation for speaking on the stage, a feeling for word and a feeling for sound, in contradistinction to the feeling for sense and idea. today, therefore, we will take this practical demonstration as a basis for our study; and it is my intention to speak the parts in such a way as will enable you to glean at least an elementary understanding of how a reading rehearsal should go, if it is to prepare the ground for the actual performance of the play on the stage. Thus, having in the first part of our course given our attention to the forming of the speech, we shall now be considering all that has to do with production as such, with the right forming of the stage-picture. It goes without saying that before any such rehearsal, the explanations I have been giving of what is required for an artistic way of speaking must have already taken root in the unconscious, and be present there as artistic instinct. Where mention is made of these matters at all in rehearsal, it will be presumed that in those who are to take part, the feeling for sound and the feeling for word have, by long practice, become a complete matter of habit. It will, in fact, be of quite other matters that one will have to speak there, alluding only as need arises to the fundamental principles of speech formation; for of these the actor should bring with him an intimate knowledge, no less surely than a pianist who is preparing himself—or, maybe, a pupil—for a concert brings with him the faculty he has acquired for piano-playing. The scene I propose to take is the opening scene of a drama of Robert Hamerling, entitled Danton and Robespierre, a play that is concerned, as the title tells us, with the French Revolution. I have chosen it because I think the moods that come into consideration for this scene—and I need not remind you how important it is for the moods to find clear expression in the performance—are such as can easily be conveyed to the minds and hearts of people in general. For they are unmistakable and sharply distinguishable in their colouring. The scene is moreover also valuable for us, in that the moods give opportunity for transforming, by stage technique, even the most prosaic content into an artistic formation of sound and word. We are here transported into an important moment in the history of the French Revolution, when the mood of the public was undergoing a change. That stage in the revolution is just being reached when the popularity of Danton is beginning gradually to give way before the popularity of Robespierre. A great number of people are on the point of transferring their loyalty and devotion from the one to the other. Let us first of all see that we understand the true nature of the people's loyalty to Danton. Some were loyal to him out of a sincere and faithful devotion, in others their loyalty was prompted rather by their own political aspirations; but all might be said to regard him with what I may almost call a savage admiration. Consequently, we find permeating the scene something of the sound- and word-feeling—I am speaking here from the point of view of stage technique—that results from the working together of a (wonder and admiration for Danton) and o (a certain rude affection for the man). The scene is pervaded by an a-o (ah-oh) mood, in the sense in which I have explained this to you in the earlier lectures. Tune your feeling to the sounds a-o, and you will have the mood that prevails at the beginning of the scene. Loyalty to Robespierre was of quite another kind. At first it only reached men's hearts in a fitful, spasmodic way. The lean and lanky man, looking so like a schoolmaster, whose words cut like knives, did not easily inspire admiration in his fellowmen; he had to seize on every opportunity to win it. In fact, the first stage of Robespierre's popularity was marked by a kind of wariness and caution. In the case of individuals as well as of the masses, it was out of a certain defensive attitude that admiration for Robespierre was born. Translated into feeling for sound, it is a sounding together of e (ay in ‘say’) and a. So that in the people's feeling for Robespierre we have the mood that you can hear in e-a. In this scene, therefore, which evinces throughout a delicate instinctive feeling on Hamerling's part for sound and word, we have to find the transition in the whole speaking of the parts from a-o to e-a. And we shall be able to do so if we look into the scene carefully. That is indeed the reason I have chosen it, because of all we can learn from it. Hamerling built up the scene with an instinctive discernment for what is required in dramatic art. I shall draw attention, as we go along, to features that would require to be noted in the reading rehearsals. My remarks will naturally be rather sketchy; in actual rehearsals, the various points would need to be further elucidated. For we have here a scene that can provide us with an excellent lesson in the very things we are concerned with in these lectures. Note how we are introduced, first of all, to a countryman who had been in Paris fifteen years before and never once since. The man has been deaf during the last six years, and on this account it has easily come about that he has as good as slept through whatever echoes of the big events penetrated into the provinces; he has heard nothing of all that went on. He was treated for his deafness by the village barber who was also something of a surgeon, as was still usual in those days, but with no particular success; and he was advised to go to Paris. One can certainly have one's doubts as to whether even in Paris the cure would be such an easy matter! However, here he is again in Paris, cured of his deafness and bearing his part in the change-over of moods that I have described—but all the time as one who has only just become able after six years to hear what is being said around him. You will find at once the basic tone for this man's speaking if you give yourself up to an a feeling that is tinged with o. Let us see what this will mean. For throughout the first part of the scene, the countryman will be the chief figure. The whole attention of the audience will be centred upon him. It might even be said that the other characters are present only in order to give colour and variation to the main interest that attaches throughout to this man. Actually, the success of the play as a whole will depend to a great extent upon how the part of the countryman is played in this first scene. We know of course that a signifies wonder and admiration. The mood is a little modified in this character of the countryman, but the actor will do the part well if he takes pains to speak, as much as he can, with his mouth open. (I shall be dealing with gesture and mime in the later lectures; today I will confine my remarks to the speaking.) This will allow the a mood, which is the prevailing mood of the scene, to pass almost imperceptibly into o, which is what the part requires. From the very outset, we sense also that a change of mood is imminent; we are moving towards the transition from the a-o to the e-a mood. This is portrayed for us with wonderful artistic skill. You can feel here with what a delicate touch Hamerling works; and that is what I want you to notice before all else—the artistic achievement, quite apart from the prose content of the scene. The countryman is put there on purpose that we may be still hearing the echo of the mood connected with Danton, while at the same time having our expectation aroused for the gradual transition to the mood that is connected with Robespierre, the mood that we can clearly detect in the second part of the scene where the conversation of the various characters goes clanging back and forth like sounding brass. So much for a rough sketch of the mood in which you will have to experience this scene if you want to take part in it and form your speaking in the right way. The scene is laid in an open space in front of Notre-Dame.
These citizens are fellows of quite another stamp than our countryman. They are Parisians, who exhibit to the full the mood that was then uppermost in Paris; and they give a new colouring to the countryman's words that have set the motif at the beginning of the scene. We are to think of the first citizen as having a kind of i (ee) mood, and the second a rather quieter and more serious ii (French ü in ‘du’) mood. You will remember how I explained these in the earlier lectures.
Yes, you are right! The audience will laugh at these words; but they must be spoken with all the seriousness of one who is taking a responsible part in a revolution. And that is a seriousness of an altogether different stamp from the seriousness with which we are accustomed to approach everyday affairs. You have to picture the countryman saying those first words of his alone, to himself. Then the citizens come an the scene. They stand at a little distance from him, and now he goes up to them.
The name of the month is not after all a matter that touches him very nearly; that he can accept. Now he is called upon to grasp the further fact that there are no longer any Sundays!
And now a sansculotte makes his appearance. When you come to look carefully at this sansculotte, you will find you can best enter into his part by combining the a mood with the i mood. For he has undoubtedly wonder and astonishment, and these have fired him with enthusiasm; but he has at the same time, as it were in the background, the pleasure and enjoyment that his own self-consciousness affords him.
The sansculotte has noticed that the countryman does not hear very well.
In those days anyone who dared in Paris address a man as ‘gentleman’ was hung up on the nearest lamp-post.
The day of the Girondists is past and over. The sansculotte imagines that the countryman is thinking of the autonomy that was enjoyed by the provinces when they were in power.
Momoro is a citizen too, and moreover, as we shall see, a man of some importance who stands with the whole force of his personality right in the immediate moment of the revolution. He is, however, at the same time, beginning to feel that the ground under his feet is getting a bit shaky. Fresh people now come forward and prepare the way for a new mood, the mood that I characterised as reminiscent of sounding brass. We are, in fact, at the moment when loyalty to Danton is passing away, in favour of loyalty to Robespierre. We must accordingly watch for die transition from the a—o mood to the e—a mood. Loyalty to Robespierre is quietly stealing in, and that fact must find expression in the whole mood of the scene from now on.
Momoro talks the most naturally of them all, and helps to lead over to the new phase of the revolution. He is, at the moment, in high esteem, and this must be apparent to the audience.
For at this point, in order to show how the mood is changing, moving all the time in the direction of the note that has been sounded by Robespierre, a new speaker steps forward from among the crowd, who is under a certain disability—a man with a wooden leg. The crowd, we shall find, is gradually working its way free of the completely different mood that has hitherto prevailed and beginning to enter into the mood that is connected with Robespierre. The i (ee) mood that belongs to him, begins to be heard.
Note the skilful way in which the personality of Robespierre is introduced. The sansculotte abandons his role as sansculotte, and suddenly shows himself as a marvellous portrayer of character. If this moment in the scene is rendered with the colouring that it has been my intention to give to it in my reading, then in this speech that the sansculotte addresses to the people around him, the audience will eel the swing-over of loyalty of which we have spoken. The critical moment of transition has come; and as we go on, I shall indicate here and there some of the points that it would be important for a producer to have in mind The second mood is now upon us, it overwhelms the scene as though with a confused and deafening noise; I compared it, you will remember, to the clash of sounding brass.
Here we have the ö (French eu in ‘feu’) mood. It has to be spoken forward; we must let the speaking strike on to the front part of the palate.
From now on, the women speak more in the ei (as in ‘height’) mood. With the entry of Robespierre into the conversation, the revolutionary impulses begin to be imbued with a sort of coy and affectionate enthusiasm—e a.
I wanted to show you by practical example how a scene like this should be treated. I have laid on the colouring a little more strongly than would be necessary in a performance, because I wanted you to have a particularly clear picture of how the different moods come severally to expression in the treatment of sound. We saw, for example, that the countryman has to be spoken throughout with the mouth open, for he is to reveal the a mood; a slight intoning of a should even be audible in every sound he utters. Similarly, you will find the clerk has to speak so that something of an i enters into each one of his sounds. His voice is always in front of that i-boundary in the mouth, of which I was speaking the other day, and is continually striking the front part of the palate. It is by paying careful attention to details like this, that we can gradually learn to give form and style to our speaking on the stage. |