ANTHROPOSOPHY
A
Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science
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No. 2.
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MIDSUMMER 1932.
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Vol. 7
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Goethe
and the Evolution of Consciousness
By
RUDOLF STEINER
A lecture given at Dornach,
19th August, 1921. From a shorthand report unrevised by the lecturer.
All rights reserved by the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag,
Dornach, Switzerland. English translation published by permission of
H. Collison, by whom all rights are reserved.
THE
views which have to be developed in anthroposophical Spiritual
Science in order to comprehend man and the world are more easily
understood if we study the changes that have taken place in the
mental outlook of man through the centuries. If we tell people to-day
that in order really to know something about the nature of man, quite
a different outlook is necessary from that to which they are
accustomed, their first reaction will be one of astonishment and, for
the moment, the shock will make them put aside all such knowledge.
They feel that one thing at least remains constant, namely, man's
spiritual or mental attitude to the things of the world. This is very
evident in the outlook of many teachers of history at the present
time. They declare that, so far as his mental attitude is concerned,
man has not fundamentally changed throughout history and that if this
were otherwise there could really be no history at all. They argue
that in order to write history it is essential to take the present
mental attitude as the starting-point; if one were obliged to look
back to an age when human beings were quite differently constituted
in their life of soul, it would be impossible to understand them. One
would not understand how they spoke or what they did. Historical
thought, therefore, could not comprise any such period. From this the
modern historian infers that human beings must always have possessed
fundamentally the same frame of mind, the same mental outlook as they
possess to-day. Otherwise there could be no history.
This is obviously a very convenient point of view. For if in the
course of historic evolution man's life of soul has changed, we
must make our ideas plastic and form quite a different conception of
former epochs of history from that to which we are accustomed to-day.
There is a very significant example of a man who found it inwardly
and spiritually impossible to share in the mental attitude of his
contemporaries and who was forced to make such a change in his whole
outlook. This significant example and I mention his name
to-day merely by way of example is Goethe.
As a young man Goethe necessarily grew up in the outlook of his
contemporaries and in the way in which they regarded the world and
the affairs of human beings. But he really did not feel at home in
this world of thought. There was something turbulent about the young
Goethe, but it was a turbulence of a special kind. We need only look
at the poems he composed in his youth and we shall find that there
was always a kind of inner opposition to what his contemporaries were
thinking about the world and about life.
But at the same time there is something else in Goethe a kind
of appeal to what lives in Nature, saying something more enduring and
conveying much more than the opinions of those around him could
convey. Goethe appeals to the revelations of Nature rather than to
the revelations of the human mind. And this was the real temper of
his soul even when he was still a child, when he was studying at
Leipzig, Strassburg and Frankfurt, and for the first period of his
life at Weimar.
Think of him as a child with all the religious convictions of his
contemporaries around him. He himself relates and I have
often drawn attention to this beautiful episode in Goethe's
early life how as a boy of seven he built an altar by taking
a music-stand and laying upon it specimens of minerals from his
father's collection; how he placed a taper on the top, lighting
it by using a burning-glass to catch the rays of the sun, in order,
as he says later for at seven years he would not, of course,
have spoken in this way to bring an offering to the great God
of Nature.
We see him growing beyond what those around him have to say, coming
into a closer union with Nature, in whose arms he first of all seeks
refuge. Read the works written by Goethe in his youth and you will
find that they reveal just this attitude of mind. Then a great
longing to go to Italy seizes him and his whole outlook changes in a
most remarkable way.
We shall never understand Goethe unless we bear in mind the
overwhelming change that came upon him in Italy. In letters to
friends at Weimar he speaks of the works of art which conjure up
before his soul the whole way in which the Greeks worked. He says: I
suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to those laws by which
Nature herself proceeds, and of which I am on the track.
At last Goethe is satisfied with an environment, an artistic
environment enfilled with ideas much closer to Nature than those
around him in his youth. And we see how in the course of his Italian
journey the idea of metamorphosis arises from this mood of soul, how
in Italy Goethe begins to see the transformation of leaf into petal
in such a way that the thought of metamorphosis in the whole of
Nature flashes up within him.
It is only now that Goethe finds a world in which his soul really
feels at home. And, if we study all that he produced after that time,
both as a poet and a scientist, it is borne in upon us that he was
now living in a world of thought not easily intelligible to his
contemporaries, nor indeed to the man of to-day.
Those who embark upon a study of Goethe equipped with the modern
scholarship acquired in every kind of educational institution from
the Elementary School to the University, and with habitual thought
and outlook, will never understand him. For an inner change of mental
outlook is essential if we are to realise what Goethe really had in
his mind when, in Italy, he re-wrote Iphigenia in Greek metre,
after having first composed it in the mood of the Germanic North. Nor
is it possible to understand Goethe's whole attitude to Faust
until we realise the fundamental nature of the change that had
taken place.
After he had been to Italy, Goethe really hated the first version of
Faust which he had written earlier. After that journey he
would never have been able to write the passage where Faust turns
away from the
... heavenly forces rising and descending,
Their golden urns reciprocally lending,
where he turns his back upon the macrocosm, crying: Thou,
Spirit of the Earth art nearer to me. After the year 1790
Goethe would never have written such words. After 1790, when he set
to work again upon his drama, the Spirit of the Earth is no longer
nearer to him; he then describes the macrocosm, in the
Prologue in Heaven, turning in the very direction from which, in his
younger days he had turned away. When he speaks in suitable language
of heavenly forces ascending and descending with their golden urns,
he does not inwardly say: Thou Spirit of the Earth art
nearer, but he says: Not until I rise above the earthly
to the heavenly, not until I cease to cleave to the Spirit of the
Earth can I understand Man. And many other passages can be
read in the same sense. Take, for instance, that wonderful treatise
written in the year 1790, on the Metamorphosis of the Plants
(Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erkennen). We shall
have to admit that before his journey to Italy Goethe could never
have had at his command a language which seems to converse with the
very growth and unfolding life of the plants. And this is an eloquent
indication of the place of Goethe's soul in the whole sweep of
evolution. Goethe felt a stranger to the thought of his time the
moment he was obliged inwardly to digest the result of
contemporary scientific education. He was always striving for a
different kind of thinking, a different way of approaching the world,
and he found it when he felt that he had brought to life within him
the attitude of the Greeks to Nature, to the World, to Man.
The modern physicist rejects Goethe because he lives in the very
world which was so alien to Goethe in his youth. But, when all is
said and done, it is more honest to reject than to express hollow
agreement. Goethe could never fully find his way into the view of the
world which had grown up since the fifteenth century. In his youth he
was opposed to it, and after his Italian journey he let it pass,
because he had gained something else from his intimacy with Greek
culture.
What, then, is it that has permeated man's conception of the
world and his view of life since the fifteenth century? It is, in
reality, the thought of Galileo. This kind of thought tries to make
the world and the things of the world comprehensible through measure,
number and weight. And it simply was not in Goethe to build up a
conception of the world based upon the principles of measure, number
and weight.
That, however, is only one side of the picture. There is a certain
correlative to what arises in man when he views the world according
to measure, number and weight. It is the abstract concept
mere intellectualism. The whole process is quite evident: The
application of the principles of measure, number and weight in the
study of external Nature since about the middle of the fifteenth
century runs parallel with the development of intellectualism
the bent towards abstract thinking, the tendency of thought to work
chiefly in the element of reason. It is really only since the
fifteenth century that our thinking has been so influenced by our
partiality for mathematics, for geometry, for mechanics.
Goethe did not feel at home either with the principles of measure,
number and weight as applied to the world, or with purely
intellectualistic thought.
The world towards which he turned knew little, fundamentally
speaking, of measure, number and weight. Students of Pythagorean
thought will easily be misled into the belief that the world was
viewed then just as we view it to-day. But the characteristic
difference is that in Pythagorean thought, measure, number and weight
are used as pictures pictures which are applied to the cosmos
and in close relation always with the being of man. They are not yet
separated from man. And this very fact indicates that their
application in Pythagorean thought was not at all the same as in the
kind of thought that has developed since the middle of the fifteenth
century. Anyone who really studies the writings of a man like John
Scotus Erigena in the ninth century will find no trace of similarity
with our method of constructing a world out of chemical and physical
phenomena and theorising about the beginning and ending of the world
on the basis of what we have learnt by measuring, counting and
weighing. In the thought of John Scotus Erigena, the outer world is
not so widely separate from man, nor man from the outer world. Man
lives in closer union with the outer world and is less bent upon the
search for objectivity than he is to-day. We can see quite clearly
how all that unfolded in Greek culture since the age of Pythagoras
manifested in later centuries and above all we can see it in a man
like John Scotus Erigena. During this era the human soul lived in a
world of absolutely different conceptions, and it was precisely for
these conceptions that Goethe was driven to seek by a fundamental
urge connected with the deeper foundations of his life of Soul.
We can have no clear idea of what this really means unless we
consider another historical fact to which little attention is paid
to-day. In my book
Ratsel der Philosophie
I have spoken of this historical fact in one setting and will approach it
to-day from a different angle.
We men of modern times must learn to make a clear distinction between
concept and word. Not to make this distinction between
what lives in abstract reason and what lives in the word can only
pervert our clarity of consciousness. Abstract reason is, after all,
a universal principle, universal and human. The word lives in the
several national tongues. It is not difficult to distinguish there
between what lives in the idea or concept, and in the word.
We shall not succeed in understanding such historical records of
Greek culture as still remain extant, if we imagine that the Greeks
made the same distinction as we make between the concept and the
word. The Greeks made no sharp distinction between concept or idea,
and word. When they were speaking it seemed to them that the idea
lived upon the wings of the words. They believed that the concept was
carried into the word itself. And their thinking was not abstract and
intellectualistic as our thinking is to-day. Something like the sound
of the word although it was inaudible passed through
their souls, sounding inaudibly within them. The word not by
any means the abstract concept was imbued with life.
Everything was different in an age when it would have been considered
altogether unnatural to educate the minds of the young as we educate
them to-day. It is characteristic of our civilisation
although we seldom give any thought to the matter that a
large majority of our boys and girls between the ages of ten and
eighteen are engaged in absorbing Latin and Greek dead
languages. Can you imagine a young Greek being expected to learn the
Egyptian or Chaldean languages in the same way? Such a thing is
absolutely unthinkable! The Greek not only lived in his speech with
his thinking, but to him speaking was thinking. Thinking was
incarnate in speech itself. This may be said by some to have been a
limitation, but it is a fact nevertheless. And a true understanding
of the legacy that has come to us from Greece can only consist in a
realisation of this intimate union between the concept or idea, and
the word. The word lived in the soul of the Greek as an inward,
inaudible sound.
When the human soul is constituted in this way, it is quite
impossible to observe the world after the manner of Galileo, that is
to say, in terms of measure, number and weight. Measure, number and
weight simply are not there, they do not enter into the picture. As
an external symptom only, it is significant that the physics, for
example, taught to nearly every child to-day would have been regarded
as miracle by the Greeks. Many of the experiments we explain to-day
in terms of measure, number and weight would have been looked upon as
pure magic in those days. Any history of physics tells us as much.
The Greek did not enter into what we call inorganic Nature
in the way we do to-day. The very nature of his soul made this
impossible because he did not pass on to abstract thoughts as we have
done ever since the time of Galileo.
To live in the word as the Greeks lived in the word meant that
instead of making calculations based on the results of experiments,
they observed the changes and transformations taking place
unceasingly in the life of Nature. Their attention was turned not to
the world of minerals but chiefly to the world of the plants. Just as
there is a certain affinity between abstract thought and the
comprehension of the mineral world, so there is an affinity between
the Greek attitude to the word and the comprehension of growth, of
life, of constant change in living beings. When we conceive of a
beginning and an ending of a mineral Earth to-day and build up our
hypotheses, these hypotheses are an image of what we have measured,
counted, weighed. We evolve a Kant-Laplace theory, or we conceive of
the entropy of the Earth. All these things are abstractions, derived
from what we have measured, counted and weighed.
And now, by way of contrast, look at the Greek cosmogonies. One feels
that the ideas here are nourished and fed by the very way in which
the vegetation shoots forth in spring, by the way it dies in autumn
growing up and then vanishing. Just as we construct a world-system
out of our concepts and observations of the material world, so did
the Greeks construct a world-system from observation of all that is
revealed in vegetation. In short, it was from the world of the living
that their myths and their cosmogonies originated.
The arrogant scientist of modern times will say: Yes, but that
was all childish. We are fortunate in having got beyond it. We have
made such splendid progress. And he will look upon all that
can be obtained by measuring, counting and weighing as something
absolute. But those who are less prejudiced will say: Our way of
viewing the world has developed out of the Greek way of looking at
the world. The Greeks formed a picture of the world by contemplating
the realm of the living. We have intellectualism which
is also a factor in the education of the human race but out
of our way of viewing the world, based as it is on the principles of
measure, number and weight, another must unfold.
When Schiller had conquered his former dislike of Goethe and had
become closely acquainted with him, he wrote a characteristic and
significant letter in which he said: Had you been born as a Greek, or
even only as an Italian, the world for which you are really seeking
would have been about you from early youth. I am not quoting
literally but only according to the sense. Schiller perceived how
strongly Goethe's soul longed for Greece. Goethe himself is an
example of the change that can be wrought in a mind by entering into
the spirit of Greece with understanding. Goethe's attitude to
the thought of Greece was quite different from his attitude to the
period since the fifteenth century, and this is the point in which we
are more interested to-day. In our age, men live in the intellect
and, their knowledge of the world is derived, for the most part, from
the intellect; the phenomena of the world are measured, numbered and
weighed. But this age of ours was preceded by another, when the
intellect was far less such that the word was alive within him; he
heard the word inwardly as soundless tone. Just
as an idea or a concept arises within our minds to-day, so, in those
times, the word lived as inward sound. And because the content of the
soul was itself living, men were able to understand the living
world outside.
We can, however, go still further back than this. Spiritual Science
must come to our aid here, for ordinary history can tell us nothing.
Any history written with psychological insight will bring home to our
minds the radical difference between the mental attitude of the
Greeks and our own, the nature of the human soul before, say, the
eighth century B.C. outer history can tell us
nothing. Such documents as exist are very scanty and are not really
understood. Among these documents we have Iliad and the Odyssey but
they, as a rule, are not considered from this point of view. In still
earlier times the life of soul was of a nature of which certain men,
here and there, have had some inkling. Herder was one who expressed
his views on the subject very forcibly but he did not ever work them
out scientifically. In short, the period when men lived in the word
was preceded by another, when they lived in a world of pictures.
In what sense can speech, for example, and the inner activity of
soul revealed in speech, be said to live in a world of pictures? Man
lives in pictures when the main factor is not so much the content
of the sound, or the nature of the sound, but the rhythm,
the shaping of the sound in short the poetic element
which we to-day regard as something quite independent of speech
itself. The poet of modern times has to give language artistic form
before true poetry can come into being. But there was an age in the
remote past when it was perfectly natural to make speech poetic, when
speech and the evolving of theory were not so widely separated as
they were later on, and when a short syllable following a long, two
short syllables following a long, or series of short syllables
repeated one after the other, really meant something. World-mysteries
were revealed in this poetic form of speech, mysteries which cannot
be revealed in the same fulness when the content of the sound is the
most important factor.
Even to-day there are still a few who feel that speech has proceeded
from this origin and it is worthy of note that in spite of all the
confusing elements born of modern scholarship such men have divined
the existence of something which I am trying to explain to you in the
light of Spiritual Science. Benedetto Croce was one who spoke in a
most charming way of this poetic, artistic element of speech in
pre-historic or practically pre-historic times, before speech assumed
the character of prose.
Three epochs, therefore, stand out before us. The epoch
beginning with Galileo, in the fifteenth century is an age of inner
intellectual activity and the world outside is viewed in terms of
measure, number and weight. The second and earlier epoch is that for
which Goethe longed and to which his whole inner life was directed,
after his Italian journey. This was the age when word and concept
were still one, when instead of intellectuality man unfolded an
inwardly quickened life of soul, and in the outer world observed, all
that lives in constant metamorphosis and change. And we also look
further back to a third epoch when the soul of man lived in an
element by which the sounds of speech themselves were formed and
moulded. But a faculty of soul functioning with quickened instinct in
a realm lying behind the sounds of speech perceives something
else in the outer world. As I have already said, history can tell us
little of these things and the historian can only surmise. But
anthroposophical Spiritual Science can understand thoroughly what is
meant, namely, the Imaginative element of speech, the instinctively
Imaginative element which precedes the word. And when he possesses
this faculty of instinctive Imagination man can perceive in outer
Nature something higher than he can perceive through the medium of
word or idea.
We know that even to-day, when it has become thoroughly decadent,
oriental civilisation points to former conditions of life in its
heyday. We realise this when, for example, we study the Vedas or the
Vedanta philosophy. Moreover we know that this age, too, was preceded
by others still more ancient. The soul of the oriental is still
pervaded by something like an ethereal element, an element that is
quite foreign to the Western mind and which, as soon as we attempt to
express it in a word, is no longer quite the same. Something has
remained which our word compassion (Mitleid) can
only very poorly express, however deeply Schopenhauer may have felt
about it. This compassion, this love for and in all beings in
the form in which it still exists in the East points to a
past age when it was an experience of infinitely greater intensity,
when it signified a pouring of the soul's life into the life of
feeling of other sentient beings. There is every justification for
saying that the oriental word for compassion signifies
a fundamental element in the life of soul as it was in the remote
past, an element which expresses itself in an inward sharing in the
experiences of another, having a life of its own, manifesting not
only in a process of metamorphosis as in the plant, not only in a
process of coming-into-being and passing away, but as an actual
experience in the soul.
This inward sharing in the experiences of another is only possible
when man rises beyond the idea, beyond the sound as such, beyond the
meaning of the word, to the world where speech itself is shaped and
moulded by Imagination. Man can have a living experience of the
plant-world around him when the word is as full of life as it was
among the Greeks. He shares in the life of feeling of other beings
when he experiences not only the world of the living but the sentient
life of other beings and when he is inwardly sensitive not only to
speech but to the artistic element at work in the shaping of speech.
That is why it is so wonderful to find reference in certain
mythological poems to this primeval phenomenon in the life of the
soul. It is related in connection with Siegfried, for example, that
there was a moment when he understood the voice of the birds
who do not utter words but only bring forth a consequence of sound.
That which in the song of birds ripples along the surface like the
bubbling of a spring of inner life, is also present in everything
that has life. But it is precisely this element which imprisons the
living in an interior chamber of the soul and in which we cannot
share when we are merely listening to a word that is uttered. For
when we listen to words, we are hearing merely what the head of
another being is experiencing. But when we inwardly grasp what it is
that flows on from syllable to syllable, from word to word, from
sentence to sentence in the imaginative shaping of speech, we grasp
that which actually lives in the heart and mind of another. As we
listen to the words uttered by another human being, we can form an
opinion about his capabilities and faculties; but if our ears are
sensitive to the sound of his words, to the rhythm of his words, to
the moulding of his words, then we are hearing an expression of his
whole being. And in the same way, when we rise to a sphere
where we understand the process wherein sound itself is moulded and
shaped although it is a process empty alike of concept and of
word, unheard and simply experienced inwardly we experience
that from which feeling itself arises. When we thus begin to realise
the nature of an entirely different life of soul in an age when
audible speech was accompanied by living experience of rhythm,
measure and melody, we are led to an epoch more ancient than that of
Greece. It was an epoch when the mind of man was not only capable of
grasping the process of metamorphosis in the world of the living, but
of experiencing the sentient life connected with the animal creation
and of beholding in direct vision the world of sentient being.
If we study the civilised people in the age which stretches back from
the eighth century B.C. to about the beginning of
the third millennium B.C., we find a life of soul
filled with Imaginative instinct, prone by its very nature to
experience the sentient life of all beings.
Modern scholarship, with its limited outlook, tells us that the
ancients were wont to personify the phenomena of Nature. In other
words, a highly intellectual element is attributed to the human soul
in olden times and, the comparison often drawn is that a child who
knocks himself against the corner of a table will strike the table
because he personifies it, thinks of it as being alive.
Those who imagine that a child personifies the table as a living
being which he then strikes, have never really gazed into the soul of
a child. For a child sees the table just exactly as we see it, but he
does not yet distinguish between the table and a living thing. Nor
did the ancients personify the phenomena of Nature in this sense;
they lived in the element by which speech is shaped and moulded and
were thus able to experience the sentient life of other beings.
This, then, has been the way in which the souls of men have developed
during the period beginning about the third millennium B.C.
and lasting until our own time: from super-speech, through speech, to
the age of intellectuality; from the period of experience of the life
of feeling in other beings, through the age of sharing in the
processes of growth and becoming in the outer world, to
the time when attention is concentrated on the principles of measure,
number and weight. Only when we picture this process quite clearly
shall we be able to realise that in order to penetrate into the
nature of things in an age when we try to probe everything with the
conscious mind, we must deliberately adjust ourselves to an entirely
new way of viewing the world around us. Those who imagine that the
constitution of the human soul has never fundamentally changed but
has remained constant through the ages, regard it as something
absolute, and think that man would lose himself irretrievably if the
essential nature of his soul were in any way to undergo change. But
those who perceive that changes in the constitution of the soul belong
to the natural course of evolution will the more easily realise that
it is necessary for us to transform our attitude of soul if we are to
penetrate into the nature of things, into the being of man and into
the nature of the relation of man to the world in a way fitted to the
age in which we are living.
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