Homunculus
Berlin,
26 March 1914
Often I have indicated how spiritual
science wants to position itself in the spiritual life of the
present. I have also often spoken about what it can be for the
human beings and what it can bring to them, and I will do this
in detail in the last talk. I have also pointed in the course
of these winter talks repeatedly to the fact that one can
understand that on one side numerous human beings of the
present, maybe more than they already know it, strive
instinctively for this spiritual science out of the unconscious
soul forces. On the other side, one can understand that from
the general attitude of our time opposition arises against
spiritual science. The spiritual researcher also understands
the objections, although they are based on prejudice. However,
the whole attitude of our civilisation to a possible spiritual
science depends to no small measure on the fact that one does
not want to realise how spiritual science can basically
understand all other worldviews and can completely acknowledge
the reasons which are brought forward by this or that side
against it. I have drawn your attention to the fact that
spiritual science wants to be the large circle which extends
the human knowledge of all fields of life, and that all other
worldviews are small circles within this large circle, which,
of course believe to be right from their viewpoints. Spiritual
science can mostly affirm the positive aspects of these
worldviews. However, one cannot say this of the other
worldviews that one asserts today, in the same sense. Since
just on the following point of view one will not position
oneself: this or that —
may it be put forward for materialism,
spiritualism or realism — is to be regarded as
one-sided in a certain respect, and only by overcoming this
one-sidedness one can attain knowledge satisfying the human
being. In its fields, that worldview which must appear as
one-sided is often fully entitled, so that it can produce truth
at its place. Spiritual science cannot stop there recognising
these truths as something all-embracing, but it has to go over
to putting them at their right place. That is why we deal in
particular in spiritual-scientific fields with the opposition
of that worldview which believes to stand firmly on the ground
of modern science, and which must — I say expressly
“must” -- regard spiritual science from its point
of view as fantasy and daydreaming.
I choose a form of worldview that believes
to stand strictly on the firm ground of scientific methodology.
I want to characterise this worldview somewhat radically. It
says that one has to consider the physical, chemical and
mineral forces and substances of the human being if one wants
to understand the human being and gets clear about the fact
that, as any other being is composed according to the
principles of nature, also the human being, as the crown of
creation, is composed.
This worldview thinks, if it has succeeded
once in getting to know all natural principles and substances
that work in the human nervous system up to the subtlest
processes of the brain, then it recognises, as far as it is
scientifically possible, how the human thinking, feeling, and
willing arise from the physical laws. It is an entitled ideal
of this worldview to understand the human being wholly
scientifically.
I know that I must cause, indeed,
contradiction from some researchers taking action a little more
seriously who already say today that one has left that more
materialistic worldview which believes there that the human
being is understood completely if he is understood completely
according to the outer physical processes. However, it does not
depend on that that one admits there or there already that one
has not understood the human being if one knows the wholly
natural processes that go forward in his nervous system up to
the brain. However, that is the point that in spite of this
consciousness even in the scientific methods also of the
philosophically thinking contemporaries nothing else exists
than the view, which positions itself on these natural
processes. Since most people who believe to be based on science
reject a view as it is meant here as spiritual
science.
The view of spiritual science has to admit
on basis of its research results that with any thinking, with
any research which can survey the processes of the sensory
world and can pursue them up to the processes in the nervous
system one can find nothing else than the wholly natural human
being. However, this wholly natural human being is only the
cover of that which we got to know as going over from one life
on earth to another which experiences an existence in a purely
spiritual world between death and new birth after every life on
earth. I tried to show this in the last talk. Spiritual science
must realise that this everlasting must remain concealed in the
human nature to any philosophy that wants to turn only to the
forces accessible to this view of nature. One can investigate
this everlasting in the human nature only with forces that one
attains with an inner development, as I have described it more
exactly in my Occult Science. An
Outline and in the book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher
Worlds?. However, even the
philosophers who stress the necessity of spiritual life, yes,
even the philosopher who has become famous in such weird way,
Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926, Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1908) who speaks in his essayistic philosophy of
the “spirit” repeatedly, restricts himself to this
natural human being. He nowhere betrays that he has a sensation
of the fact that spirit and spiritual world can be investigated
only with the mental forces that certain spiritual-scientific
methods bring out of the soul.
Spiritual science is not the adversary of
such scientific views, also not of such philosophical
worldviews, but it has to show their limits, has to show what
they are capable of and what they can show. Concerning this
standpoint of spiritual science to the other worldviews, I have
also emphasised here repeatedly that it feels in harmony with
those spirits of the human development who indeed did not yet
have spiritual science. Nevertheless, because they had a
thorough inkling of truth from their deepest feeling, they
spoke in a clear, understandable way where they expressed this
inkling.
This applies to two personalities of the
nineteenth century, to Goethe and to the less known Robert
Hamerling (1830-1889, Austrian poet)) about whom I would like to speak
today. Both poets have dealt with a problem like from a deep
spiritual-scientific feeling, but poetically, while I want to
stress the spiritual-scientific colouring of this
problem.
I would like to ask: could not the thought
even arise in a head: what originates really if one invents the
human being as a being in such a way that one does not count on
the everlasting forces slumbering in the human soul? Which
picture of the human being originates if one only uses the
natural forces and substances and the physical
principles?
The spiritual scientist can assess such a
picture only from his point of view. If you develop the forces
slumbering in your soul to spiritual beholding, you experience
yourself in the soul so that you experience and recognise that
these abilities are not bound to the senses and not to the
forces of the brain. You experience this way that you are
really with your soul beyond your senses, beyond the brain,
beyond the body, yes, you face everything that is bound to the
body as an outer object. Now you face what you consider,
otherwise, as belonging to your ego, your body, as you face the
table. You face your destiny too, as far as it takes place in
the outer world. You have become a new human being to whom that
what you were before has become objective and outside
you.
If you consider the human being in such a
way, you attain the possibility to assess how much is valid
what one can think up as a picture of the human being with only
natural substances, natural laws and abilities. One realises
that this picture is something very real; but for the human
being it is not real in the sensory world, but it is a part of
the human being, it penetrates and invigorates the human
being.
Those listeners who remember the ambitious
attempt eight days ago have heard that the human soul, after it
has gone through the purely spiritual life between death and a
new birth, enters a new earth-life with forces developed in
this life, that it is attracted by a parental couple and that
it adapts itself to the inherited forces of father and mother.
However, the spiritual researcher realises that the human soul
descends to a new embodiment on earth, must wrap itself during
the penetration into the physical embodiment in forces that are
as it were an essence of the whole physical nature. Before the
everlasting human being hurries to his embodiment, he has to
attract as it were forces and substances from the spiritual
substance by which he hardens the picture that he has developed
purely spiritually like a prototype for the next embodiment and
wants then to embody himself physically within the line of
inheritance. We can say that with the human embodiment an
intermediate link puts itself between the completely spiritual
which prevails between death and a new birth, and that what
stands then in the physical world as a human being before us.
In this physical human, we just have what has come from father
and mother, and that what comes from the former embodiments,
the spiritual-mental. However, in between is, one would like to
say, a purely etheric human being, a still spiritual human
being that is invisible, supersensible, that contains, however,
the forces in himself which are like an essence of the whole
physical world process. It is strange: if the human being
believes to be on the firm ground of natural sciences and
develops a corresponding picture of the human being, he gets to
a picture that is not real in this physical human being who
contains the everlasting soul. It is a mere abstraction that
works, however, in this physical human being, it is that in
which the human being wraps himself up before he descends to
the physical embodiment.
It is a real being what the human being
snatches from the everlasting spiritual life and forces into
the life between birth and death what prevails in us between
birth and death, what is spiritual, but what lifts us from the
physical and what hands over us to the spirit. However, it is
not physically visible but to a higher beholding.
Hence, the strange fact emerges that those
are not completely wrong who believe to think materialistically
correctly, while they form a fantastic picture of the human
being completely according to the principles of nature. This
picture has meaning for the human being between birth and
death, and causes during the life on earth that the soul
forgets its spiritual life as it were. However, it does not
exist as a thing of nature with mere physical substances and
principles, but it penetrates the human nature only. This link
between the outer and the everlasting human being walks through
the physical world.
Goethe considered this thing as something
“supersensible-sensory,” one would like to say, and
he characterised it as Homunculus in the second part of
his Faust. The materialistic worldview develops fantastically
that what Goethe meant with his Homunculus as the picture of
the human being. However, this picture of the human being does
not exist in truth. It impregnates the human being; it divests
him of his everlasting meaning between birth and death and
works in the physical-sensory nature.
This latter is the third that comes to the
other two. While the materialistic thinker believes to put the
most real before us with his picture of the human being; he
puts an abstraction, he puts something supersensible. This
ideal of modern monism, this Homunculus, that what the modern
monism would like to describe as a “human being,”
Goethe used it in the second part of his Faust for a
particular mission. —
I can indicate these things only briefly
not to drag the talk out too much.
Faust has experienced what is known from
the first part of the drama under the guidance
— or by
the seduction —
of Mephistopheles. He has gone through all
phases and tortures of the desire of knowledge, has experienced
serious human guilt, and now in the second part Goethe shows
how Faust is snatched away from the usual imagination. Faust
shall not get the possibility to penetrate farther into the
world, so that he works up his way with the usual consciousness
again from everything that his soul has experienced. A night is
presented to us, it means, Faust's consciousness is removed at
the beginning of the second part. From the spiritual worlds,
forces are put in his sleeping consciousness in which he does
not immediately become aware of that; however, they become
effective, as Goethe suggests, in Faust's soul where the
everlasting forces prevail, so that he can advance. Hence,
spirits speak in his sleep, like Ariel, and others. Therefore,
he feels “life's pulses beating with fresh
vitality” (verse
4679); he is given back to life
and can begin the struggle for existence anew.
I want to refrain from all other things and
state only that one demands from him to conjure up the pictures
of Paris and Helen. Faust himself gets the desire to behold
Helen; and one understands it after Goethe's portrayal that he
himself gets this desire.
What a figure is Mephistopheles? He places
himself beside Faust as the spiritual being that wants to keep
the human being in the outer-sensory world, in the natural
existence. Mephistopheles is absolutely a spiritual being, but
a being that denies the spiritual world towards the human
being. Faust has to demand from Mephistopheles that he enables
him to penetrate into those fields of existence where the
everlasting-mental of Helen exists. Mephistopheles can give him
only the key of this world; since it is the world of the
mothers, the everlasting forces of spiritual existence. Now a
conversation develops in the second part of Faust where the
spiritual-scientific attitude of Faust and the refusal of this
attitude by Mephistopheles face each other. Mephistopheles
regards that world as nothing into which Faust wants to
penetrate. However, Faust replies to him: “in your
Nothingness I hope to find my All” (verse 6256). As to
Mephistopheles the world into which Faust wants to penetrate,
is nothing. —
Faust meets the primal figure, the
everlasting of Helen in the realm of the mothers. He brings up
it. He is immature to face it. I do not want to mention
everything that still happens, but only this one: Faust is not
so purified as in such striving someone who wants to face the
spiritual really has to purify the forces. He approaches Helen
as if she is a sensory appearance and the result is that Helen
paralyzes him. His consciousness is snatched away from him
because of his violent passions. In paralysis, his dream
emerges which leads him into the realm where Helen has
lived.
Now the big question originated for Goethe:
how can one continue the life of Faust poetically? Goethe was
no symbolic poet; he was a realistic poet, even if spiritually
more realistic. The question originated in him: Faust must be
able to face Helen as a human being, as she lived as a human
being. She has to descend to the realm of the human beings, she
has to embody herself, and Faust must be able to face Helen as
a human being: how can one do this in the spiritual-realistic
sense?
When Goethe wrote this scene in the
twenties of the nineteenth century, he remembered former
studies. What he had studied in his youth as spiritual science,
affected him more and more. Hence, the second part of this
drama is riper all the more what caused, however, that some
people regarded this second part as a miserable product of the
old Goethe because they had no use for it. Goethe asked, how
can I use my spiritual-scientific studies to bring Faust where
one has to search the spiritual of Helen? There he remembered
what he had read in the book De
generatione rerum naturalium by
Paracelsus (1493-1541), he remembered the “Homunculus.”
Paracelsus declares in this book how a picture of a completely
natural human being can be produced, so that one can see him
really. — It would lead too far to go into that what Paracelsus
shows, simply because his explanations are not at all
satisfactory for us today. I want to go into the matter more in
the style of modern spiritual science, and not into that what
Paracelsus showed.
Paracelsus talks of the fact that one can
mix different substances and treat them according to the
methods of his time. If one goes into it how the human beings
thought in this respect at his time, it mattered not so much
how the substances were mixed how they decomposed and combined,
but it mattered that the human being stood before the chemical
processes and let them work on his soul. The effect of these
processes caused a clairvoyance to be produced by other means
today. Then one beheld that figure which Paracelsus describes
which is really a paradigm of the human being, a little human
being, but only radiant, without body, not embodied. These are
the essentials in the sense of modern spiritual science that
those processes produced that condition of consciousness while
the Homunculus became visible.
So Goethe said to himself tying on
Paracelsus: this Homunculus is a being which stands between the
supersensible and the sensory, namely in such a way that it can
bring the human beings down from the everlasting into the
physical-sensory world which works in the human being as a
force but is not embodied. Goethe moulded the Homunculus into a
poetic figure. For he presents a spirit of such kind at first
about which one can say in the sense of Faust, such spirits
look greedily for treasures and are happy if they find
earthworms. Goethe presents such a spirit in Wagner, a figure
that is really an ideal of people with modern worldview who
look for treasures and are happy if they find the laws of the
earthworms.
To two sides the picture of
Wagner arose to Goethe. Since there is beside a
Faust book also a Wagner book first;
and then there a strange man lived at Goethe's time: His name
was Johann Jacob Wagner (1775-1845, philosopher). This
man stated that one gets a little human being really, if one
mixes substances and so on in the retort according to certain
methods. From these two Wagner figures, Goethe melted down a
figure, the Wagner of the poem. Thus, the figure of that Wagner
originated who stands before his retort and mixes substances
and waits until the “well-behaved little human
being,” the Homunculus, originates. He would not
originate without further ado. Neither in the retort of Johann
Jacob Wagner nor in that of the Goethean Wagner a human being
would originate, or what some modern scientists imagine as the
human being, unless Mephistopheles slipped in the processes,
unless the spiritual power of Mephistopheles worked in the
background. A purely spiritual being originates in Wagner's
retort that way, it is radiant, it wishes, however, to be
embodied and it does not lack mental faculties, but it lacks
efficiency —
a being that the materialistic worldview
considers as the human being:
He's well supplied with mental
faculties,
but sorely lacks substantial
attribute.
So far he weighs no more than does his
vial
but hopes that he may soon obtain a
body. (Verses
8249-8-9-8252)
Homunculus wants to embody himself, but he
is a being only living in the spiritual. Since those present a
bad abstraction who search the “real.” However,
Wagner can only believe that he has caused the
super-creation in reality. He stands before the retort and
believes:
It works! the moving mass grows
clearer,
the super-creation (conviction) the
more certain; (Verses
6855-6-5-6856)
This passage is so little understood in
the Faust literature even today that people believe that it
concerns a “conviction” (German: Überzeugung). However, Goethe
means it in the sense of Nietzsche's
“superman” (Über-mensch) as
super-creation (Über-zeugung).
Homunculus turns out to be a being that
belongs to the spiritual world. Since he attacks Faust
immediately in a weird way. Faust lives in dreams of ancient
Greece. Homunculus is clairvoyant; he beholds everything that
Faust is dreaming. Why? Because Goethe imagines him in the
spiritual world, not emerging from the physical world. The
human being has it as forces in himself. There Homunculus loses
his abstraction. One will even concede to the monists that this
abstraction would be clairvoyant if they beheld it in the
spiritual world where it is real. Since Homunculus, the human
being, as Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899, philosopher) and
others invented him exists as a spiritual being and is a
clairvoyant being in the spiritual world. However, a person
like Büchner would not suppose this. Hence, Homunculus can
really become the leader in the regions where Helen shall
reincarnate where she shall appear and face Faust. However,
Homunculus must appropriate the forces for that only which are
in the physical nature apart from everything else.
Homunculus as a clairvoyant being becomes
the leader of Faust in the Classical Walpurgis night. There he gets advice from the ancient philosophers,
from Thales and Anaxagoras, from Proteus also, how he could get
to a natural existence. He who wants so much to be embodied,
who “is well supplied with mental faculties,” but
even more, “he sorely lacks substantial attribute.”
Nevertheless, if once the materialists realise how that what we
imagine fantastically could get to natural existence?! Proteus
advises to develop through all realms of nature. Goethe's tip
to that is great where it concerns the passage through the
plant realm, Homunculus says there:
I like the way the air smells fresh and
green!
(German: Es grunelt so,
und mir behagt der Duft!) (Verse 8266)
The verb “gruneln” is derived
from “becoming green” to show the effective fresh
life of the plant realm. However, one thing is said to
Homunculus: that he can get on this way only to the time when
the human being comes into being. He is the mediator between
the bodily and the everlasting. When it concerns the birth he
must submerge head first into the natural forces, must be taken
up in the merely cosmic elements. Hence, one says to
Homunculus, experience all that, and that he has “lots of
time before you must be human” (verse 8326). Then
one tells him:
just don't aspire to the higher
places,
for once you have become a human
being
you've reached the end of
everything. (Verses
8330-8332)
How wonderfully is that in harmony with the
mission of Homunculus with the process of human incarnation;
since if he has become a human being, he completely goes into
the human nature. Hence, one says to him, stay here, do not
aspire to higher places (German:
Orten and not
Orden =
medals (or classes) as in most editions). - Here, one must say “places.” For the
copyist made a mistake there. This part of the
Faust exists only as a duplicate, and because Goethe spoke
with Frankfurt accent, the writer understood Orden
(“medals”) instead of Orten (“places”).
The modern commentators have believed that already the old
Proteus spoke of “medals,” one of the unhappiest
ideas that slipped in the Faust literature.
Goethe portrays the merging of Homunculus
into the elements splendidly where Helen should originate where
she should face Faust, so that her everlasting unites with the
forces that come from the elements, so that she can enter the
earthly existence. The sirens say:
What miraculous fire transfigures our
waves,
that break on each other and shatter and
sparkle?
Lights wave and hover, the brightness comes
nearer,
what moves in the darkness is pure
incandescence,
and all is enveloped in eddies of
fire.
Let Eros now rule, the creator of
all! (Verses
8473-8479)
That is: if the human being enters the
physical existence from the eternally spiritual by love, Eros,
then one can clairvoyantly behold this merging in waves.
“Waves” are meant spiritually. Hence, one
says:
Hail to Ocean and the waves
now embraced by sacred fire!
Hail to Water! Hail to Fire!
Hail this strange and rare
event!
Hail to Air and its soft
breezes!
Hail to Earth's mysterious
depths!
To you four, o Elements,
Here we offer solemn praise!
(Verses 8480-8487)
That is: Homunculus is now taken up in the
elements, and Helen appears in the third act. The reincarnated
Helen appears who does not smash Faust.
Thus, Goethe knew how to use the figure of
Homunculus poetically. Thus, Homunculus is also in Goethe's
eyes that in the human being that leads a completely mechanical
existence in which purely mechanical forces prevail. However,
the human being is the highest member of creation because these
forces dissolve when they enter into him. However, what the
human being is not in reality he can be it in his imagination.
Out of human freedom, he can get an idea of his ideal and that
he can deny his everlasting spiritual which he does not want to
take into consideration, and that he can imagine: I am only a
being that consists of completely natural substances and
forces. Then he can also live in a corresponding
manner.
In a time which produces materialism in
theory which thinks in theory in the described way, it is not
harmless that it has something in its whole attitude that
denies the everlasting spiritual and makes just that the
natural human being what we have got to know as Homunculus. A
certain desire must be there to develop the Homunculus forces
particularly; then one has taste to a worldview that regards
this Homunculus as the human being.
In the sixties of the nineteenth century, a
weird catchword circulated in psychology. One has always
believed of psychology that the human beings would not go so
far into Homunculism in relation to the soul that they wanted
to know nothing about the soul and accept the purely bodily
only. However, there the catchword “psychology without
soul” emerged (by Friedrich Albert Lange in his
History of
Materialism, 1866)
— up to
Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920, psychologist). That
is: one wants to study the mere phenomena of the soul life to
the details. These are just “events,” one says; but
one does not turn to the soul itself.-
Of course, it is in the nature of this
Homunculism to deny the soul; since one must deny the soul if
one considers Homunculus as the true human being, because
Homunculism cannot be reconciled with the soul. A time in which
the catchword “psychology without soul” could
originate must show Homunculism as a hidden desire of human
life. A time, which believes that the human being is only that
what one can recognise with the usual forces engaged in the
nervous system, shows homunculoid characteristics in the
majority of its human beings.
There the thought may arise in a poet: how
would it be if I hold up a mirror to the time and show: you
imagine what would result from you if you believed to originate
only from purely physical forces and principles. He is a poet
who takes the catchword “psychology without soul”
seriously and says to himself, the human beings have not only
said this, but they also lived it. I want to put a human being
who is invented exactly after the picture as they imagine him.
They do not know only that he is in such a way as he works.
However, I want to invent strictly what would originate from
the picture of the modern materialist.
Such thoughts worked in Robert Hamerling
(1830-1889, Austrian poet), and he carried out these thoughts
on his sickbed and sent out the picture of the
Homunculus in the world. One knows this poem little today,
although 5,000 copies were sold during the first five months
after its publication. However, this is also something that is
in the sense of Homunculism, of our time. — Hamerling created
his Homunculus
as I try to show him in few words. I can
show him in such a way. As I got around to regarding that as
correct what I say about Goethe after a more than 30-years
study, I can do it concerning Hamerling too. Since shortly
after Homunculus
by Hamerling had appeared, I wrote a
treatise about it, and Hamerling still wrote to me that I had
understood his idea completely.
Robert Hamerling had taken the idea to put
once before the modern human being what is contained in the
views if one imagines the human being consisting of wholly
physical forces and substances according to natural laws only.
Hence, he let the modern professor be serious to create a human
being according to the physical forces and principles. Indeed,
the scientist who believes to construct a worldview based on
physical laws says that one is not yet able to create a human
being that way today. However, the poet can say, let us
assume that this time has already arrived that that could be
performed what was theory once. Thus, we see the academic
monist standing before the retort, we see him treating the
substances accordingly — and the little human being,
Homunculus, appearing:
“Bravo, little doctor!” he
shouted
Still a second time, while he
Slipped shivering in a little
jerkin,
Which was ready for him;
With gracious look he knocks
On the shoulder of the producer.
“So on the whole and from the
pure
Chemical-physiological point of
view
Considered, is that, my dear,
What you created, a respectable,
Praiseworthy piece of work.
In detail, one could say
Many a thing about it.”
Homunculus continued
And gave some learnt,
Estimable hints.
He spoke much about albumin,
About fibrin, about globulin,
too,
Keratin, mucin, and other
things,
And about their correct mixture,
And taught his creator
And producer thoroughly how he
Could have made it better.
(Literal translation)
Thus he is there in reality
— that is
in the reality of the poet, as he is invented in the heads of
many materialistically minded people. From this materialistic
attitude that is given to the “well-behaved little human
being” that originates also which this little human being
shows as his first tendency. If one looks at the world for the
tendencies of the “youngest” people, one already
understands how Homunculus can come to such like
that:
Gradually he started quibbling
And grumbling in the book,
Which he had in his hands,
The Homunculus. This was
interesting
To the doctor, and he wrote
The remark in his notebook:
The first literary emotion
Of a little human being —
Review
However, it will not go at all. Since
Homunculus grows out of the thoughts of his creator, we say, of
his super-creator, and brings many things with him that lived
in his thoughts because of the whole condition of our time. He
is nervous; he brings nervousness with him. Nevertheless, there
his learnt producer cannot do anything with him. That is why he
casts him back into the retort, makes him the human embryo
again. Homunculus is correctly conceived and born now by a
mother, so that we have a not entirely right Homunculus, but
one who is only without a natural father.
Then he goes through his apprenticeship. He
also becomes a poet, of course. He experiences what many poets
experienced in our time: he looks for publishers. He develops a
pleasant relation not only to his publisher, but also to his
daughter who is promised to him, if his poems find the
necessary distribution. Of course, one has “connections”
in the era of Homunculism. One praises the
book very much; how can Homunculus assume it different! But
behold: when the year was over, the publisher had sold thirteen
copies only. He takes away the daughter from him, and
Homunculus must search his further journey through life.
— He
chooses all possible ways. He comes to a spa resort, and there
he gets to know the customs and traditions of Homunculism, I
would like to say, the customs and traditions of modern spa
life. Then he grasped the plan to found a newspaper,
News for Everything and for All
People.
Councillors, councils of state and other
councils or also the leaders of
powerful, financially strong parties, the leaders of big bank
companies and trading companies urge to it and write their
editorials and reports. — I beg you to
consider — because Homunculus was
published in 1888 —
that with it no satire was intended about
something that appeared much later. — However, Homunculus
is not content with it; he still aims at something higher. He
sells his newspaper to a corporation — this is no
satire — and he devotes himself to his other enterprises. Then
he becomes a millionaire and lives in a very strange way. I
would like to stress that he settles very well in the time of
Homunculism. What Non-Homunculism attains by lifeless forces
if, for example, anything is supported by columns still belongs
to the past times. The big tamed snakes in his garden pavilion
hold its cupola. One had trained squirrels once and had
imprisoned them in cages. Homunculus does not do this; he lets
them work as machines. This is the right Homunculism. Such a
thing would already come out if some thoughts existing already
today were developed further.
However, even if he is a millionaire he
does not arrive at a satisfying life. He did not know a
“soul life” because he had no soul. Thus, his
existence dissatisfies him extremely, and, therefore, he
plunges into the Rhine River. There a being saves him that also
has no soul, the mermaid Lurley. Now Homunculus and Lurley
become a couple. Because all old worlds are not enough for
them, they immigrate
to a quite new region. — One would still have
to describe the interesting Literary Walpurgis night that is celebrated at the wedding feast of this couple.
Some things of it apply to our time, too.
One would have to carry back one's mind
only to Hamerling's time, but one would also have to say the
same here that it should be no satire of modern
conditions:
The host of water poets was
Completely addicted
To harsh world-weariness,
To bitter weariness of life,
To dark melancholy,
And to Prometheic
Liverish pessimism.
The beer and wine poets
Felt much more comfortable in their
skin.
To these the world was just
Right, and they suffered only
From one evil: hydrophobia.
The absinthe poets, in the end,
With the wine and beer poets
Shared hydrophobia,
And with the host of water poets
The vulture bite of the dark,
Melancholy-weary,
Liverish pessimism.
Therefore, they were twice
miserable.
“Art and literature” are
studied rather interesting.
They immigrate into a region not yet
sicklied by the faith in the soul. The soulless man and the
soulless mermaid emigrate into an Eldorado. This is an Eldorado
of some party systems; and something that prevails in a party
system today is portrayed brilliantly. I only want to suggest
that Homunculus also does not manage here with the
establishment of his model state, the Eldorado, even his Lurley
is taken away from him by a party man who walks around with the
slogan: “nobody shall outvote us!” However, Lurley
says, he is a character, and Homunculus has to move on.
Nevertheless, he is an inventive head and wants to think the
things to their ultimate consequences. He says to himself, you
can bring about nothing with the human beings if you want to
put Homunculism into reality; nevertheless, they are not able
to do this. However, why should I not take the ultimate
consequences? Could I not develop the monkeys to human beings?
Modern science already teaches that the human beings have
developed from the monkeys. I gather the best of them and
transform them into human beings rather fast.
— He
founds an enterprise in which he wants to transform the monkeys
into human beings, a quite new realm. Now one tells us about
the monkey school:
The teachers of the monkey
school
Only complained about
restlessness,
Since it was hard to tear
These noble offsprings
From certain habits
Of their race
From climbing up, for example,
Everywhere.
They forgot themselves now and
again
So far, in long lessons
To delouse each other,
Attacked the teacher
In wild hordes to delouse his head.
-
When the monkeys were now
educated,
They competed the human beings
In any field. They were
Very competent at fine arts
Because of their innate imitation
talent.
They were unequalled — of course
—
As stage artists,
And undertook tours
With brilliant success.
Farce, comedy, operetta,
Parody — all that was their
field.
If they made faces, these were:
Showpieces and masterpieces
Of drastic and finest comic,
As one had never seen before.
They had world-famous recitals -
Howling monkeys were the
soloists,
Now and then they beat
Human choirs at prize singing.
Baboons, grinning like fauns,
Developed to fops,
To elegant strollers,
Were also at balls smart
Dancers, and the gallant style,
Which they showed perkily
With the women, was partly
Very much after the taste of the
latter.
Concerning the monkey women,
They equalled the human women
And soon before also
In the skill of flirting.
Who would understand better
To dress up always fashionably
Than a monkey? They understood
To festoon themselves with
jewellery
With tassels, ribbons, and
bows...
And so on. Nevertheless, Hamerling thinks
that one cannot transform an educated monkey to a human being.
Indeed, the monkeys referred to many a “monkey
ancestor,” but they only became similar to the humans
with one “virtue,” that of conviction. They soon
declared that it is actually inferior to be a human being;
because these have not even become “monkeys.” This
led to the fact that the elected monkey rector, the monkey
“Doctor Krallfratz” replaced Homunculus. Thus,
Doctor Krallfratz replaced him. Nevertheless, the monkeys had
less luck with it. Indeed, the human
beings did not cope with the monkeys that had become human
beings; but in wild regions the human beings living still there
in the primordial state coped with them, they simply killed the
monkeys.
Now a chapter comes which one held against
Hamerling very much. —
Hamerling did not want to go among the
anti-Semites; he strictly protested against it where he made
Homunculus the leader of the Jews immigrating to Palestine in
the eighth song. They do no longer stand it here under the
today's conditions.
One should assume that this is something
noticeable in a time that knows the attempts of Zionism.
However, it is important what arises now for Homunculus from
it, the Jews crucify him because they do not endure being
together with him. When he is attached to the cross, only
Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, visits him. He frees him from his
bonds, and they both have to walk on together.
Indeed, Homunculus has thought up to the
ultimate consequence what he believes to have gained from
modern science. However — and this should
appear with people who deal with ideological questions
— he has
not really dealt, actually, with science. He begins now to deal
with scientific problems. Indeed, there he manages to win a big
part of humanity for an idea which appeared first with the
philosopher of the unconscious out of pessimism which is also a
kind of Homunculism in certain sense: from Eduard von
Hartmann's pessimistic philosophy. Not many people still know
today what pessimism has to announce to the human beings: oh,
the world is bad, as bad as possible, and it would be the best
of all to escape this bad world. It is necessary that one
realises that the world originated from the will, and if all
human beings grasped the volition to finish their existence,
world and life would be finished by the united volition of all.
Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869) describes in detail that it were possible to
eliminate humanity from the world by a common
volition.
Homunculus founds a society not only of
human beings but also of animals under this viewpoint. One
holds congresses and speeches, and so on. In the end, a time is
determined at which all human beings should decide
simultaneously: now we want to exist no longer. Besides, even
the earth should perish. All agree; the day, the hour
approaches, but it stops the sun only. What had happened?
Homunculus and Lurley had wished a child; however, they could
not get it in Eldorado. Hence, they accepted two children of
the prehistoric humans living there; they called them Eldo and
Dora. However, both could not cope with Homunculism. When all
human beings gather to carry out their decision, Eldo and Dora
meet again after long separation, they fall in love, and
therefore they come too late. They were absent when the whole
humanity gathered at the agreed time, and all efforts were
pointless. Homunculus himself has built up those who ruin his
decision. Oh, Homunculism will create the “Eldo”
and “Dora” in manifold way from itself who come too
late if Homunculism wants to take the ultimate consequences.
Then the sun of spiritual life, of spiritual science
rises!
Nevertheless, in the end Homunculus must
reach something from his science. He builds, after he has
investigated all forces of nature, a huge telescope with which
he can see into the most distant regions of the universe, all
that is increased hugely with which the modern worldview has
grown up. Except this huge telescope, he constructs a huge
stethoscope and a gigantic smelling pipe; and, one can say, he
still builds everything that one can obtain from the mechanical
forces! From these mechanical forces in the most modern style,
he builds a gigantic airship. I note once again: in 1887,
Robert Hamerling in his Homunculus writes the
history of the dirigible airship! With this dirigible airship,
Homunculus leaves the earth sphere. He can race along with his
airship faster than the light does. But he is not content with
that what he is able to do: he can travel around with his
airship in the cosmic space, can look out with his huge
telescope into the world of the stars, he can listen to the
earth with his huge stethoscope, and he speaks with a gigantic
megaphone down to the human beings. There he comes into a
thundercloud, lightning strikes his airship, it cannot destroy
the rudder, the engine, but it destroys its controllability!
Thus, Homunculus is handed over with his airship to the
elementary forces. He can still take one thing along: when he
approaches the earth once again, he discovers the corpse of
Lurley and carries it with him on his dirigible gigantic
airship. — Hamerling closes his epic with the words:
Whom the holy nature,
The mysterious mother,
Gave life by love,
Gave life in love.
She also refuses death to him,
The happiest death, above all,
is
Dying down in love.
The vast universe has for him
No grave of blissful rest,
No place of everlasting peace.
Who can say where
And how long with Homunculus
And the mermaid that joins him
The ruling fate does chase
The charred gigantic airship
In the whirl of iron laws,
Of substances and forces
On roads without barriers?
Sometimes in starry nights
Sunday's children still see
That wreck as a dark planet
High above in immeasurable
distance,
And shuddering they suspect
The fate of the forever
restless.
Hamerling showed in his way that that what
Homunculism invents cannot belong to the world in which the
human soul lives but only to the completely mechanical forces.
Mechanical forces of nature tear him away. Indeed, the
poet could have this idea that the modern human being who
develops his completely natural human ideal looks, actually,
only at that in himself what is abstraction, what is something
unreal and belongs to the completely natural elements.
Hamerling means that what also Goethe said where his Homunculus
disintegrates in the elements:
Hail to Air and its soft
breezes!
Hail to Earth's mysterious
depths!
To you four, o Elements,
Here we offer solemn praise!
(Verses 8484-8487)
Whereas Goethe's Homunculus contributes his
forces to the incarnation of Helen, the Homunculus of Hamerling
as soulless being, as the representative of that human ideal
that denies the soul has to be taken up in the elements of the
universe.
One can say, Hamerling had the
intention —
I leave it to others to assess whether he
was successful or not —
to hold up a mirror to that modern attitude
which wants to know nothing of the spirit and conjures up a
human ideal divested of spirit before itself. It is another
question whether the reflection is also recognised. However, it
is something that is not real in the physical nature that
rightly those can deny who just put up it. Strange disaster!
Goethe solves the riddle somewhat. He reminds of the other
word:
Simple folk never sense the devil's
presence
not even when his hands are on their
throats. (Verses
2181-2182)
Wagner who produces Homunculus in his
retort also does not notice that the devil is that who produces
him, actually. Since Mephistopheles brings in the spiritual
forces. It is an inspiration of the “father of all
obstacles” of that what is a product of modern science
what materialism wants to put as the modern human
being.
I read about Homunculus a third time. I say
it somewhat bashfully; however, I do not want to shrink back
from a remark that forced on me already once. I read a book of
the learnt economist Werner Sombart
(1863-1941) who describes the modern economic human being.
Read the final chapter about the bourgeois; it is written very
interesting; and at last, the modern economic human being
appears whom the forces seize like with tentacles that prevail
in the modern economic life and who is driven from enterprise
to enterprise. As the last, he has also lost religion, Sombart
says. “Religion has become business.” The modern
human being is in Sombart's humanity. Someone who knows
something of it has to say, does he not exist; do not the
economists describe him?
It arises from everything that one has to
overcome Homunculism by the living understanding of the
spiritual life. As Homunculism cannot see many things, it also
does not see to what its own forces lead him. The poets tried
to show it, and spiritual science completely feels in harmony
with such poets who felt out of their inkling what spiritual
science has to found anew. What spiritual science can be as a
treasure for life to the human being that it can grasp his soul
that it is the only true overcomer of any Homunculism; I show
this in the next talk. Today I just wanted to bring into view
how spirits who looked with open eyes and sense recognised that
what prevails in the conditions of the presence as
Homunculism.
I believe that one understands Hamerling on
the ground of spiritual science; one understands just the last
words:
Who can say where
And how long with Homunculus
And the mermaid that joins him
The ruling fate does chase
The charred gigantic airship
In the whirl of iron laws,
Of substances and forces
On roads without barriers?
Sometimes in starry nights
Sunday's children still see
That wreck as a dark planet
High above in immeasurable
distance,
And shuddering they suspect
The fate of the forever
restless.
Nevertheless, you permit that I use a
well-known and somewhat changed proverb compared with this
quotation: why should we look with the eyes of the Sunday's
child at the wreck in the vast universe? Homunculus is so close
that even Sombart can describe him! Homunculus is very close to
the modern human being, and one can only hope that many
anticipating and sighted souls become Sunday's children in this
respect by spiritual science that recognise the very close
Homunculism, the wreck of a worldview. More and more of such
Sunday's children will be there. And what also
— let me
use this expression —
Homunculism is able to argue against
spiritual science, spiritual science will give humanity what it
cannot lack, what it craves for and what it must hope for: the
soul, and with the soul the spiritual life. Hence, one has not
to be worried about the future of spiritual science.
This will be the topic of the last of these
winter talks.
|