PART III
THE WISDOM OF THE SPIRIT (Pneumatosophy)
Berlin, December 12–16, 1911
LECTURE I
Franz Brentano and Aristotle's
Doctrine of the Spirit.
HIS lecture cycle is to deal with the being of man from a particular
point of view. Two years ago the physical nature of man was discussed
from the viewpoint of anthroposophy; last year, in the lectures on
psychosophy, our subject was the nature of the human soul; this year
we shall discuss the spiritual nature of man. Today's lecture will be
in the nature of a preparatory introduction.
Contrasting as it does with current usage, our division
of the totality of the human being into his physical, soul and
spiritual nature might attract notice, but within the realm of
spiritual science there is naturally nothing startling about this. In
fact, it is our aim to bridge by means of these lectures the gap
between spiritual and external science.
Outside the circle of spiritual science, as you know,
the total nature of man is thought of as consisting of but two parts,
the bodily-physical and the psychic. In the realm of recognized
science it is not customary nowadays to mention the spirit. Indeed,
following certain premises, the result of reverting to the threefold
organization of man (body, soul and spirit), as did the catholicizing
Viennese philosopher, Günther, in the nineteenth century, raised
scientific misgivings and also the blacklisting, in Rome, of
Günther's interesting books. This was done because as early as
869, at the eighth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople, the Catholic
Church, in contradiction to both the Old and the New Testaments, had
abolished the spirit. It had guided the development of dogmatism in
such a way that the organization of man was permitted to comprise
body and soul only. Curiously enough, this catholic development has
persisted into our present science. If we seek to ascertain from
history why scientists admit only body and soul we find but one
reason. In the course of time the spirit has been forgotten; the
habits of thought prevalent in certain circles have lost the ability
to accept the spirit along with the soul of man.
These lectures must draw attention to the links
connecting us with what exists as psychology because, by studying
what has just been said, we will be able to understand that there
exists no authentic doctrine of the spirit — unless in Hegel's
philosophy, and even that cannot properly bear the connotation,
because it is really a doctrine of the soul.
The strange disappearance of the concept “spirit”
from our present-day habits of thought becomes intelligible by
considering the work of the most important investigator of the soul.
Precisely in the work of this man, whose views come closest to the
teachings of pure, scientific theosophy on the subject of the soul,
we can see why present thought habits prevent us from arriving at the
idea of the spirit. I refer to Franz Brentano, the distinguished
psychologist whose standpoint approaches that of theosophy. He wrote
a curious book, that is, he set out to write a curious book, a
psychology. The first volume of this appeared in 1874, entitled
Psychology from the Standpoint of Empiricism. The second
volume was promised for the autumn of the same year, and the others
were to follow in rapid succession, but this first volume remained
the last; no further ones appeared. Now a new edition of a part of
this first volume has been published under the title A
Classification of the Faculties of the Human Soul, appearing
simultaneously in Italian and German, and an appendix has been added.
In view of the promise contained in the first volume of
this book, we, especially as anthroposophists, must deeply deplore
the fact that its continuation never materialized. There is a
definite reason for this, however, which is readily discerned by the
spiritual scientist. It is clear to anthroposophical thinking that
the thought habits of modern science prevented a continuation of that
first volume. Brentano prided himself on proceeding from a purely
methodic standpoint, on investigating the soul quite in accordance
with modern scientific methods. Out of the spirit of present-day
methods of investigating the soul a doctrine of the soul was to be
evolved. When we find, among many other matters, a discussion of the
problem of immortality, the fact that no sequel was forthcoming must
indeed be painfully felt from the anthroposophic standpoint. I
consider the book and its fate extraordinarily symptomatic of our
present time. Brentano promised to deal with the immortality of the
soul, and when we realize that, although he could not prove the fact
of the immortality of the soul, he could at least prove that a man is
justified in cherishing the hope of immortality, we are faced anew
with the pity of his failure to get on. Only the first book was
achieved, and it contains no more than a sort of demonstration of
methodic psychology and a statement of the author's analysis of the
human soul. Later we shall come back to the reasons why this book
could not have had a sequel.
In order to show the links with modern science I must
allude, in this introductory lecture, to the classification of
psychical activity as set forth in the new edition of Brentano's
work. In contrast to the current classification — thinking,
feeling, and willing — Brentano offers another, the three
members, visualization, reasoning and the phenomena of love and hate,
or emotion. You will notice that in a certain way this classification
suggests what was said in the lectures on Psychosophy, though the
latter drew from another source entirely. It is not necessary to
mention the meaning of visualization again, nor, in view of what we
have to say here in an introductory way about Brentano's psychology,
need we go into it in detail, because the concept “visualization”
is one that we have established as the becoming conscious within the
soul of the content of our thought. Any thought content lacking all
emotion and brought about by a conclusion concerning something
objective would be a visualization.
Now, reasoning is distinct from visualization. Reasoning
is called a concatenation of concepts, for example, the rose is red.
But Brentano says this definition does not cover reasoning; that on
the contrary, when uttering the sentence, “the rose is red,”
either you have really said nothing in particular, or else you have
said something else in an obscure way, “the red rose is”
— that is, there exists, among other things, the actual
presence of a red rose. This interpretation contains much that is
correct, as even a superficial examination of your own soul life will
show. Whether I call to mind “rose” and “red,”
or whether I connect the concepts, makes no material difference but
there is an essential difference when I do the same thing in
connection with cognition: a rose is. In that case I have done
something that is not exhausted in visualization but that determines
something in relation to reality. The moment I say, “The red
rose is,” I have determined something. “The rose is red”
tells nothing more than that in some man's soul the concepts “rose”
and “red” have met. Nothing has been said about anything
except the content of thought. But “the red rose is”
determines something. According to Brentano, this is reasoning. You
do not transcend visualization until you have expressed what
constitutes a conclusion. It is not possible here to go into the
extraordinarily ingenious evidence offered by Brentano.
Next, Brentano distinguishes the emotions, or phenomena
of love and hate. Here again we have something more than mere
conclusions. To say, “the red rose is,” is not the same
as a feeling I may have in connection with a rose. Those are
phenomena of the soul that can be grouped under the head of emotions.
They are not objects; something is told about the experiences of the
subject. On the other hand, Brentano does not discuss the phenomena
of will because he does not see enough difference to warrant him in
assuming stirrings of the will as distinct from other emotions. What
you desire (will) [TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: In addition
to “willing,” wollen can also mean “desiring”
or “wanting,” even “wishing” at times. Such
interesting double meanings can be explained but not translated, so
it remains for the reader to keep the explanations in mind whenever
the terms recur.] you desire (will) with love,
and the willing is represented in connection with the phenomenon of
hate by not-willing (not-desiring). You cannot undertake to separate
the phenomena of will from the mere phenomena of love and hate and
from those of visualization.
It is extremely interesting to note that so keen a
thinker, in setting out to describe the soul life, should have
classified it in this way. This classification has its origin in the
fact that here, for once, is a man who took seriously the customary
habit of ignoring the spirit. Others in a certain way mixed into the
soul life what properly pertains to the phenomenon of the spirit,
resulting in the creation of an ambiguous being, a sort of
soul-spirit, or spirit-soul. All sorts of activities could be imputed
to this spirit-soul. Brentano, however, made a serious attempt to
answer the problem of what comprises the soul when considered wholly
by itself. He took seriously this inclination to differentiate soul
and spirit clearly. He was sufficiently astute to decide what
features of the current concept of the soul would be unaccounted for
if one disregarded the spirit. Had Brentano continued the work, it
would have been interesting to note the dilemma he would have
encountered. Either he would have seen that somewhere he must come to
a dead end because somewhere the soul must enter into a relationship
with the spirit, or he would have had to admit the necessity for
advancing from the soul to the spirit.
Let us consider, as an illustration, the two extreme
members of Brentano's classification: visualization, and the
phenomena of love and hate. To begin with, visualization, in his
doctrine, is what goes on in the soul. It determines nothing because,
if something is to be determined, reasoning must enter in. That would
imply that in visualization we could not emerge from the soul; that
we could do so only in reasoning, not in visualization. On the other
hand, it is interesting to note that in Brentano's system the
phenomena of will coincide with the emotions. No psychologist such as
Brentano can discover anything in the soul but phenomena of love and
hate. That is true as long as we limit our observation to the soul:
when we like something, we want (will) it. But in passing from the
soul to reality in its entirety, we see that the relation of the soul
to the outer world is not exhausted with the soul's emotional
experiences. It is a different matter when the soul emerges from
itself and passes over to willing. Advancing from mere emotions to
willing is a step we must take out of the soul, not one that is
consummated within the soul. However strongly emotions may grip us,
they in no way affect the outer world. Within the soul we find only
emotions.
That is the way visualization looks in such systems of
psychology as Brentano's, like something confined within the soul,
something unable to enter reality; emotions are pictured as something
not rooted in will but exhausting themselves in the psychic premises
of will. We shall see that the spirit enters in exactly where
Brentano's characterization leaves off, and that visualization would
indeed be exhausted at that point were it not for the bridge leading
from the soul to the spirit. On the other hand, we shall find that
wherever the actual transition is made from the emotions to the will,
the spirit enters in. You see, then, that a blind alley was
encountered during the last decades at exactly the point where
spiritual-scientific research must step in if any progress is to be
made. That was inevitable.
Passing on to something else, we find exactly what
threads lead from modern scientific psychology to spiritual science.
The same man whose work we have been discussing, Franz Brentano,
occupied himself throughout a long scholarly life with Aristotle. It
is a strange coincidence that just recently a book by Brentano on
Aristotle has appeared, a presentation by this psychologist of his
research in Aristotle, Aristotle and his Philosophy. Now,
Brentano's standpoint is not Aristotle's, but in a certain respect he
is close to him, and he has admirably presented Aristotle's doctrine
of the spirit. A third book by Brentano appeared at the same time,
Aristotle's Doctrine of the Origin of the Human Spirit.
It will be worthwhile to devote a little time to that
work as well, because Brentano is not only the most interesting
psychologist of our time but a man who knows his Aristotle, and in
particular, Aristotle's doctrine of the spirit. Aristotle has given
us a doctrine of the spirit that contains nothing whatever of what
could be termed Christian concepts. It summarizes, however, all that
was achieved in its field by Western culture in the last centuries
preceding the birth of Christianity — achieved in such a way
that in the fourth century B.C.
it was possible for Aristotle to think scientifically about the
relation of the spirit to the soul.
We can clearly read between the lines that with regard
to the main issues Brentano does take the same stand as Aristotle.
Therefore, by studying Brentano's relation to the Aristotelian
doctrine of the spirit, we can infer to what extent the present-day
non-spiritual-scientific doctrine of the spirit is justified in
transcending that of Aristotle. It is extraordinarily interesting
today to compare the Aristotelian and the spiritual-scientific
doctrines of the spirit, in so far as they are strictly scientific.
I will sketch the former for you. Aristotle speaks
unequivocally of the spirit in its relation to the soul and the body
of man. He speaks of the spirit as of something superadded to the
body and the soul out of spiritual worlds. Thus far Brentano does not
depart in any way from Aristotle's standpoint because, like the
latter, he is constrained to speak of the spirit as of something
superadded to the human body and soul. Therefore, when a human being
enters physical existence through birth, we are not dealing, in the
Aristotelian sense, with something that is exhausted with the line of
descent, but with hereditary traits. The soul element appears as
something that weaves through the body and holds it together, but it
is not thus exhausted in what man inherits from his ancestors in the
way of body and soul, for spirit is added to it. When the human being
appears upon the physical plane, the body and soul elements combine
with the spiritual. According to Aristotle, the spirit as such is
wholly absent when the human being enters physical existence.
Instead, the spirit is an original creation of the Divinity, directly
added out of the spiritual world to what is born of the father and
mother. Thus Brentano's most recent book contains the clear
definition, “When a human being enters existence he is created
by father, mother, and the God. What pertains to soul and body is
born of the father and mother, and some time after conception the
spiritual element is added by the God.”
In view of this premise, that the spirit is given to man
through actual creation (creatio), it is interesting to follow
Aristotle's views on immortality. According to Aristotle, spirit-man
had previously not existed at all; the God creates him. Neither for
Aristotle nor for Brentano does this imply that the spirit ceases to
be when soul and body pass through the portal of death. On the
contrary, this spirit that has been created remains in existence
after death, and although it had been specially created for this
individual human being, it passes over into the spiritual world. It
is further interesting to note that Aristotle, and really Brentano as
well, follows the course of a human life through the portal of death
and then has that which was created by God for the individual live on
in a purely spiritual world. In Aristotle there is no thought of a
return to a physical embodiment, so we are not dealing here with
reincarnation.
Consider that what Aristotle sets up as the prerequisite
of the birth of a man in one incarnation — an original creation
of spirit — must occur at every incarnation because
reincarnation would not be a new creation. This alone suffices to
show that the doctrine of reincarnation would conflict with his
doctrine of creation. Now, it is a curious point, and one that must
be considered in studying Brentano's conclusions about Aristotle,
that Aristotle arrives at no view of the life of the spirit after
death, other than that the spirit finds itself in a rather
theoretical situation because all activity that Aristotle is able to
discuss presupposes the physical world and physical corporeality. The
spirit, even the eternal God-Spirit, really plays only the part of an
onlooker, so that in Aristotle's philosophy nothing of the
specifically spiritual tie comes into consideration, other than the
contemplation of life from birth to death. According to Aristotle,
the soul must look to this one life of today and base all future
progress on it, so what remains is the spirit looking back after
death upon this one life. In one case the spirit may thus see its
insufficiencies and its virtues; in another, an excellent life; in a
third, possibly a life of lies and crime. Upon this it bases its
further development in the spiritual world.
That is the way in which the spirit, in the Aristotelian
sense, would carry on after death. We must ask ourselves, however,
what unprejudiced thinking will have to say about such a doctrine of
the spirit. Aristotle makes it clear that his life on earth is not a
mere existence in the vale of tears, but that it is of great
significance and importance. True, a good deal of what Aristotle
imagines as the future progress of the soul remains vague, but one
point is quite definite: that this one earth life has profound
meaning later on. Had the God created the spirit-man without having
him incarnate, he might have created the spirit in such a way as to
enable it to continue its development. But within Aristotle's meaning
that would not have been a complete development. Unmistakably,
Aristotle considers a physical incarnation important, one of the aims
of the Divinity being to introduce man into a physical body. It is
inherent in Aristotle's view that it is not the Divinity's intention
merely to create the spirit as such, but rather, to create it in such
a way that further progress demands the garb of a physical earth
body. Born with the spirit-man at the moment of his creation is the
aim to attain to an earthly body. A divinely created human spirit
that would not demand incarnation in a human body is unthinkable.
Now imagine a spirit looking back upon physical
existence and let us say it finds the physical life of man imperfect.
What must arise in this disembodied human spirit, according to
Aristotle? Naturally, the longing for another physical incarnation.
The spirit must feel this longing, otherwise it would have completely
missed its purpose for, since the spirit needs incarnation in order
to perfect itself, it must feel the longing for it. Therefore, it is
quite impossible to speak, in Aristotle's sense, of a single
effectual incarnation unless it were a perfect one; that is, a
complete step in the development of the spirit.
Now consider this strange arrangement made by the God,
as Aristotle sees it. We have the creation of the human spirit that
belongs in the physical body and leaves it at death. Yet, if we think
consistently along Aristotle's line of reasoning, in passing over, it
carries with it the longing for a physical body without being able to
obtain one. Since Aristotle does not assume reincarnation, it follows
that the soul would have to live on with a longing for a new
incarnation. Aristotle's doctrine calls for reincarnation but does
not admit it. Nor can it be admitted, as we shall see, from another
angle of Aristotle's doctrine.
We are dealing here with the shrewdest doctrine of the
spirit, apart from that of spiritual science. It is a doctrine that
continues to loom into modern thought, as in Brentano, in which
unprejudiced thinking teaches us that the spirit, created by God and
delivered into the earthly world, is equipped with a longing for
incarnation. Thus we see how the Aristotelian doctrine, gleaming
across the millennia and based upon a scientific foundation, is still
capable of exerting a deep influence. We also see the need to
transcend Aristotle if we would provide scientific substantiation for
reincarnation. In dealing with the doctrine of the spirit we are at a
turning point. Only spiritual science, by offering scientific
evidence of reincarnation, can transcend Aristotle, but this
scientific authentication has never before been achieved. That is
why, basically, we are at the turning point regarding the doctrine of
the spirit. Through spiritual-scientific research we can advance
beyond Aristotle in a genuine and fundamental way and offer
scientific demonstration of reincarnation.
Brentano arrived at an inherently incomplete doctrine of
the soul, Aristotle at an inherently contradictory doctrine of the
spirit. It is important to observe that so shrewd a man as Brentano
could not get beyond Aristotle in dealing with the spirit, and that
his doctrine of the soul came to a halt because he left the spirit
out of account. We shall find the common root of these two cases in
the fact that, even from the standpoint of modern science, it is
impossible to arrive at an unequivocal view of life if
spiritual-scientific research be rejected. Spiritual science alone
leads to a satisfying, uncontradictory philosophy.
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