IV
The
Science of the Supersensible and the Moral-Social Ideas
Basel, 24 November 1917
A
basic quality of anthroposophy is the pursuit for ideas, for
mental pictures, for concepts of the world that are rooted in
reality in a much deeper sense than the concepts, mental
pictures and ideas of the scientific worldview are. Indeed,
this could seem very weird at first, because many people
believe that these scientific mental pictures are rooted very
deeply in reality.
However, even if one disregards what I have brought forward in
the three talks I held here this year and only looks at that
which reasonable naturalists have brought forward concerning
what natural sciences have to say about the being of the events
of nature, one will get the insight that also such natural
scientists are clear to themselves that with the usual
scientific ideas one cannot penetrate into the being of
reality. How much just natural scientists have spoken about the
limits of the scientific knowledge! I have brought forward the
typical fact in the first talk that one of the most significant
disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), published a
basic book during these years where he shows that one cannot
come close anyhow to the being of the life phenomena just with
the scientific concepts, which celebrated the greatest triumphs
in the second half of the nineteenth century.
As
long as it concerns penetrating only into the being of nature,
these limitations of the scientific images do not at all
appear. Nevertheless, they appear if the human being wants to
apply the soul forces that he uses to scientific cognition also
to the moral-social life. What is maybe a mere error or a mere
one-sidedness in natural sciences — if it is taken as a
basis of the moral-social life — becomes injurious,
causes minor or major disasters. One of the biggest disasters
is that, in which we live during these years.
As
peculiar as it will appear to somebody: someone who is able to
grasp the things in their deeper coherence gets clear about
that what happens now as such tragic events is associated with
the inadequate moral-social ideas which prepared themselves
since centuries and which showed to advantage in particular in
the nineteenth century. The mere science, the mere knowledge,
the mere theory corrects in painless way if inadequate concepts
are inserted in it. Reality corrects at pains and disasters if
actions are inserted in it, which arise from inadequate
knowledge and penetrating reality.
Now
we will get to apparently remote mental pictures if we want to
apply the anthroposophic spiritual science to the moral-social
life, remote only because they still appear very strange to the
present habitual ways of thinking because of the prejudices
with which one is coming up to meet them. I must take the
starting point from calling attention to the fact that the
consideration of the human being has become relatively
one-sided just under the influence of the modern world view, so
that, actually, also far-sighted naturalists attempt to
penetrate not only into the pure physical side of the human
being but into his whole nature.
Since only if his whole nature is considered, it can become
reality in the social-moral life, can any influencing control
work salutarily on the social-moral life.
It
could now seem weird if anybody says, for the whole
consideration of the human life it is necessary that one not
only considers how the human being is active in the wake day
life but that one has also to regard the other side of life,
the dream life, to take the whole human being into account.
Reasonable naturalists even attempt today to come close to this
dream life, while they want to consider the subconscious.
However, already in case of the consideration of dreams it
becomes obvious that such attempts work with inadequate
cognitive means because they want to refrain from
anthroposophy.
What spiritual science can show with its means leads us to the
cognition that this sleep-dream life flows into the whole life
of the human being much more intensely than one believes in the
one-sided scientific consideration. I have to foreground a
sentence which seems paradoxical even today to most people
which will been corroborated, however, more and more if one
goes over from abstractions to realistic concepts.
I
could give a comparative psychology of the sleep of plants, of
animals, of the human beings, it would turn out that it is more
difficult to spiritual science than to the one-sided scientific
consideration because it cannot take simple concepts as
starting point and cannot encompass the whole world with them.
As death of the plants, animals, and human beings is something
else to the spiritual researcher, the sleep, the dream life of
animals and that of human beings is different to spiritual
science.
Spiritual science finds out for itself with its means that we
can have our ego-consciousness only because we experience the
sleep and the wake consciousness alternating in such a way as
we experience the sleep as human beings. It is a trivial view
that the human being must sleep because he is tired. However,
already the consideration of a pensioner who visits a talk or a
concert and who is most certainly not tired, but falls asleep
after the first five minutes, proves adequately by experience
that the theory of tiredness is most certainly not true. Only
that will understand sleep who understands it as an internal
rhythm as it must penetrate life and as we got to know such a
life rhythm yesterday as one of the members which correspond as
bodily tools to the soul being.
The
human being has to spend his life as it were, — as well
as the single tone can never be music but only in the
interaction with other tones the impression of a melody or
harmony can originate — in such a way that life condition
interacts with life condition and an interaction takes place in
time. Rhythmical events must form the basis of the soul life.
Rhythmical events are also that which in the alternating
conditions of sleeping, dreaming, and waking takes place
fact.
One
normally believes to understand this sleeping and dreaming
condition if one considers it in such a way as it presents
itself to the usual observation. However, just if one considers
it in such a way, one will never get a real view of the nature
of dream or sleep. Only if one can envisage the everlasting
essence of the human being, one will also be able to recognise
that — if the human being withdraws from the wake day
life if he falls asleep and dreams — that then in him
that is even more active which belongs to his everlasting
being, than while awake. Save that the human being, as he is in
the present world period, has developed little of this
everlasting. If this everlasting does not have the basis of the
bodily life as in the wake day life, if this everlasting is on
its own as in sleep, that appears in this everlasting which
points, indeed, to conditions that are different from those
which proceed between birth and death, but points to them in
such a way that the immediate perception, the immediate
consideration cannot prove its nature at all.
Hence, spiritual science shows that the nature of dream, for
example, is misunderstood in manifold way. One misunderstands
it; one interprets dreams in the old way superstitiously if one
considers the contents of a dream and is of the opinion that
the dream may be prophetic. However, one also misunderstands
the nature of the dream if one as an enlightened person smiles
only at those who regarded something as prophetic in a
dream.
Spiritual science shows that it is true that something
prophetic is in the dream. In the dream that being works in us
which is associated with our future in such a way that it still
encloses that in us what we carry through the gate of death.
The forces of our everlasting soul work prophetically in the
dreams. The pictures of the dreams are memories of the past.
One may say, the nature of the dream is falsified because the
human being is not able to work really with that what works in
the dream as his being. He dresses what he cannot realise in
the pictures, which his body, certain sensory reminiscences,
certain memories give him from the past life.
All
that falsifies the dream and is a mask of the dream. As well as
it is superstitious to think of the pictures, which appear in
the dream, a healthy kernel is contained in the superstition
that the dream has something prophetic. However, this prophetic
cannot appear in the usual observation of the dream. The dream
is just something exceptionally significant, considered
spiritual-scientifically.
However, the important is something else; it is that one is of
the trivial opinion that the human being lives and dreams at a
certain time and at another time he is awake, fully awake.
Spiritual science shows that this is a wrong opinion. The state
of dreaming, of sleeping does not stop if we awake; these
states continue into our wake day life; the wake day life
drowns them only. This wake day life, the imagining, is as it
were a bright light that outshines what remains subconscious.
However, while we feel our wake day consciousness flowing in
our soul, a continual dream life and sleep life penetrating the
whole awake life flows subconsciously in us. We dream if we add
feelings, affects, or passions to the clear mental pictures. I
have pointed out in the first talk that that which spiritual
science searches as coherent, was always found by single
outstanding persons like with flashes and I have pointed to the
great aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer
(1807-1887). When he wrote his article about Volkelt's book
The Dream Fantasies, he pointed out that nobody who does
not understand the emotions, passions, and affects understands
the nature of dream. However, one called Vischer a spiritist
because of this assertion. Thus, we keep on dreaming in the
usual life. Save that the pictures of the dream if we have
awoken do no longer appear but that what proceeds now as
feelings, affects and passions appears with the same degree of
reality in us as the dream does.
In
the feelings, affects, and passions lives also what lives in
the imagining. Nevertheless, it lives in it in such a way as
the mental pictures live in the dream. However, if we develop a
feeling, a passion, we do not become aware of the pictures that
form the basis as they form the basis of the dreams, but we
become dreamily aware of the feeling, of the passion.
Similarly, the sleep in the wake consciousness forms the basis
of the will. Why were there discussions repeatedly in the
course of the spiritual human development about the nature of
the will, about the free will? Why have the philosophers never
agreed how actually the will lives in the human being, whether
as a free or as a not free one? Because the usual wake day
consciousness oversleeps that which happens in the will.
Although our mental pictures are clear during the wake day
consciousness, we oversleep the real process of willing. In
this will, something deepest of the human being lives, but one
is not immediately aware of it.
Spiritual science now shows that it sees with the beholding
consciousness into the supersensible world. With the levels of
Imaginative and Inspired knowledge, it penetrates into that
world which exists for the usual consciousness only in the
chaotic dream world. To the human being with the usual
consciousness that only emerges as distorted dreams from the
world of the everlasting which works beneath the outer
sense-perceptible. With the Imaginative knowledge, with the
Inspired knowledge spiritual science fetches the true figure of
that which lives and weaves in these undergrounds. With the
Intuitive knowledge it fetches what one oversleeps otherwise,
what the darkness of the consciousness covers completely.
However, you learn from it that in the human life not only that
prevails what one can overview with the usual wake
consciousness, but that in the human life — because dream
and sleep also penetrate the wake day life — that
prevails what is real, what for the usual wake consciousness is
not accessible what one can only grasp with the beholding
consciousness as concepts, as mental pictures. Hence, let us
look at the social human life as it should be enclosed with the
social, moral, political concepts and we discover that
something lives in the human life that is only dreamt that is
even overslept.
This is the secret of the social life and of the historical
life; this is the secret of the moral-social existence. With
the concepts, which come up from the habitual ways of
scientific thinking and which belong completely only to the
usual wake consciousness, one cannot grasp history, with these
mental pictures one cannot grasp the moral-social life.
Yesterday I have pointed to the fact that spiritual science
should bring back something to the human being that he has
lost. For centuries, for millennia there were instinctive
impulses the awareness of which spiritual science has to
generate. It is interesting to envisage the intervention of
modern natural sciences from this viewpoint of the human
development. If one asks for these modern natural sciences and
their significance only in such a way as one often does today,
one gets to a completely wrong concept. One always assumes that
these natural sciences have originated in such a way because
just the concepts that they give correspond to reality. Someone
who has insight in the matters knows that the following view is
true: anybody who stands firmly on scientific ground must be a
sceptic at the same time because he knows that these scientific
concepts correspond to truth only superficially. These
scientific concepts did not appear in the human evolution
because the human being was silly and childish for millennia,
as many people believe, but they have originated for a quite
different reason.
If
one looks back in time where one recognised nature and spirit
more instinctively, the human being had concepts on one side
that he applied to nature in such a way that he spoke of events
of nature, of the being of nature, as if these were also
something mental; and if he spoke of his soul, materialist
mental pictures interacted.
Even in our words “spirit” and “soul”
are still materialist mental pictures if we know these concepts
historically to a T. The human being has still grown together
with nature so that he did not distinguish his mental exactly
from nature. The recent historical development means that the
human being has gone adrift from the natural existence. Just,
therefore, he has formed such concepts of nature as they show
the contents of the modern scientific thinking that do no
longer contain anything mental. To attain such a developmental
level, the human being has developed these scientific concepts
for his sake. Not because this is the only saving truth to
which one got finally, but because the human being could get to
a certain level of freedom, of self-determination only because
he has got free from nature and has formed concepts which
should enclose nature and which can give the soul nothing.
If
the human being has such concepts of nature, one has to draw
his attention all the more to own forces of his inside to which
we have pointed yesterday. Then his self-consciousness can only
awake in right way. We live in a transitional condition.
Natural sciences will generate a spiritualistic conception of
the soul life.
The
scientific materialism has the big merit, because it divests
nature of any mental to lead the human being to a high level of
self-reflection.
If
one looks at the development of modern natural sciences in such
a way, they seem to be created for an “education of the
human race” in the sense of Lessing. Then the scientific
concepts have been developed so that the human being has no
longer to ensoul nature mystically, as in former times, but
that he gets free from any mental in the view of nature, but
that he has to fetch that from the depths of his being which
spiritualises this mental. Then one may regard the entitled
materialism of natural sciences as something great.
One
only defames anthroposophy if one says that it is anyhow in
conflict with natural sciences. On the contrary, it points to
the big, significant role that the scientific development has
in the educational process of the human race. However, what
appears as scientific mental pictures is just not adapted to
grasp the moral-social life, it is not adapted to form
concepts, mental pictures, or ideas from which actions can
arise in the moral-social life. That which the human being
overviews as nature, he overviews it in the wake
consciousness.
Not
such impulses form the basis of the moral-social life, of the
historical experience as the wake day consciousness has them
for seizing nature, but such ideal impulses form the basis of
it as they appear, otherwise, only in the dreams.
Thus, spiritual science gets to the weird result that the
historical life, the social life of humanity cannot be
encompassed by a soul being which has built up itself with
natural sciences and wants to write history after the pattern
of natural sciences, wants to consider sociology after the
pattern of natural sciences. Which inadequate concepts has one
attempted to understand the social life with the cognitive
means of natural sciences!
One
needs only to remember the English philosopher Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903) who wanted to enclose anything actual in which the
human being lives, also the sociological configuration of
humanity. He wanted to apply the concepts of embryology to the
social life, to the configuration of the moral-social life: The
embryo develops in such a way that one has to distinguish in
its early state the ectoderm from which the nervous system
evolves, the endoderm from which other subordinate organs
evolve, and the mesoderm. From these three parts, the human
embryo develops gradually. In the moral-social development,
Spencer also distinguishes three impulses. He says, as in the
natural development ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm exist,
three parts exist in the social becoming of the human being. He
wants to show: as the embryo has the ectoderm, the human being
develops what is militarily and politically strong from the
social ectoderm; that what works and practises agriculture from
the endoderm; and the commercial class from the social
mesoderm. There one has a parallelism between the ranks of the
social-moral life and the layers of the embryo. It forms the
basis of this view that because from the ectoderm the nervous
system develops also from that what corresponds to the ectoderm
in the social-moral life the most valuable must develop in the
state. Hence, Spencer's worldview depends on considering the
actually valuable class as the military one. In it the
political higher life should develop. As the nervous life
originates from the ectoderm, the political, the leading class
should originate from the military. I do not keep
characterising this strange view of the philosopher Herbert
Spencer, I only want to point to it. I could still bring in
many examples how one has tried to apply scientific mental
pictures to the social life and to understand it with them.
However, the peculiar is that the old instinctive cognition
that enclosed mind and body, matter and spirit at the same time
was a not fully conscious cognition that bit by bit changed via
the scientific purely external cognition of the dead into the
higher levels of cognition to which spiritual science points
today: to the Imaginative cognition of the beholding
consciousness, to the Inspired cognition, to the Intuitive
cognition. Scientific knowledge is only an intermediate stage
between the instinctive cognition and the higher cognition that
I have characterised in my books The Riddle of Man and
The Riddles of the Soul. The beholding consciousness
just disintegrates into the Imaginative consciousness that is
the lowest level, the Inspired consciousness, a higher level,
and the Intuitive consciousness, the highest level. It is
typical only that for the consideration of the outer world the
instinctive old cognition had to change into the scientific
mental pictures. After this transition the other ways of
spiritual knowledge will come. The social-moral life cannot
have this transition. One has attempted it; but it cannot have
it.
While skipping the scientific way of thinking the instinctive
cognition of social-political ideas has directly to change into
the conscious cognition of the same world, which is dreamt in
the history and the social life of humanity. That which
humanity dreams in history and in the social life can be only
consciously recognised with the Imaginative, Inspired, and
Intuitive consciousness. In this area is no transition from the
instinctive consciousness via the scientific one to the
Imaginative consciousness. It must become catastrophic if one
wants to do this transition if one wants to insert such
concepts that are formed after the pattern of scientific
concepts into the social order. This happened in particular in
the nineteenth century up to now. Scientific mental pictures
work catastrophically if they transition into actions.
The
transition from the old instinctive experience that used myths
to the Imaginative cognition must be direct.
Thus somebody may ask mockingly: hence, one is not allowed to
believe that one can master the social, moral life with the
scientifically oriented concepts, but one can penetrate this
social-moral life only salutarily if one realises that one has
to deepen the concepts spiritual-scientifically?
Somebody may mock; he may close his eyes to the big signs of
our disastrous time. However, it is in such a way. As well as
already some people begin to take notice of spiritual science,
which has a say if it concerns the configuration of reality,
there will be more and more people who realise that one has to
turn to spiritual science if one needs lively concepts for the
moral-social existence. That is why, spiritual science has not
appeared in our time from arbitrary agitation in favour of
single people but because of deeper historical necessities.
We
do not need to point to less significant personalities if we
want to envisage that which we consider here. History as the
science of the moral-social life is not yet very old. One
believes that it is an old science. In reality it is, as well
as it is practised today, hardly hundred years old. Everybody
can convince himself of it. When history appeared, Schiller
(Friedrich S., 1759-1805, German poet and writer) wanted to be
one of the first teachers of history. Perhaps it may be good
just to bring in a great personality as an example of that what
is so often said that one can learn from history for the
moral-social life of the human beings. How often does one hear
from people, where every judgement is demanded about this and
that what one has to feel under the influence of the tragic
events: history teaches this, history teaches that.
Well, let us consider these teachings of history with one of
the greatest: when Schiller started his professorship in Jena
in 1789, he characterised a teaching of history that had arisen
to him in the following way. Schiller said in his famous
inaugural speech, it was the prelude of his historical
lectures: “The community of European states seems to have
changed into a big family. Their members may be hostile to each
other, but do no longer tear each other to pieces, I
hope.”
This is the lesson that even such a great man like Schiller
drew from history! One has to consider that he spoke the words
that should be prophetic in 1789!
How
have the European peoples tortured themselves shortly after,
and what does happen today again in this Europe! What a prophet
was this historian, this genius Schiller?
Why
is this that way? One could bring in many examples of the fact
that a conception of history of such kind, as it is usual even
today, gives nothing for life. Plainly and simply because one
works in such a conception of history with mental pictures
which are taken from the outer reality, the object of natural
sciences. These concepts are not suitable to enclose history
and the moral-social effectiveness what the human beings, as
well as they are in life, only dream.
History is only dreamt. If we want to have concepts that can
really intervene in history, in the moral-social life, they
have to be scientifically clear, but the essentials should be
that they grasp that clearly which appears from the usual
consciousness only in the dreams of history and of the
moral-social life.
I
know that it is a paradoxical truth even today that people do
not experience the historical development so that this
experience works in concepts of the wake day life.
Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge that truth. Then one will
recognise of which kind the concepts, the mental pictures, the
ideas and ideals must be which can master this life.
The
art historian Herman Grimm (1828-1901) said more often to me in
conversations, if one wants to have a historical consideration
that really encloses the historical, then one cannot work with
such concepts as the naturalist applies them, then one has to
understand history with the creative imagination of the people.
He said this because he still had no concepts of Imaginative
cognition. — One has to take his starting point from that
what remains in the subconscious as it were; one has to bring
up this only into consciousness, but into a consciousness that
is different from the usual one. A notion of that what is true
in this area formed the basis of Grimm's intuition.
That is why someone is very much wrong who believes to be able
to encompass history or the social-political life with the
concepts that developed with the scientific thinking. Since
someone who figures the things out knows, for example, that the
most sure means to ruin a community in relatively short time is
a parliament, in which you put nothing but theorists,
professors who think scientifically. Let it legislate, and then
you will cause the decline of the community with such
parliament. Since they will put nothing but concepts, nothing
but ideas into reality that can have no reality in the
historical, in the social-moral life, but must destroy this
social-moral life.
Hence, the remark of Herman Grimm is very fine when he said, it
is strange that the excellent historian Gibbon (Edward G.,
1737-1794, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)
describing the first Christian centuries did not describe the
advancing, growing Christian life but that he could only
describe the decline of the old life with his concepts. —
One cannot encompass the growing life with mental pictures of
the wake day life but with mental pictures only which originate
from the dreaming consciousness.
In
recent time, these things have become particularly important
because just in the nineteenth century the scientific approach
tried to start its campaign of conquest also in the historical,
in the social-ethical life. Only few people braced themselves
against it. In particular, socialism, which wanted to be
scientific, supported the emergence of this thinking most
consciously.
Socialism tried to put the social-moral ideas completely into
the waters of scientific consideration. Just in the recent time
this extreme way appeared to consider the social-moral life
only from the viewpoint of material interests, class conflicts,
impulses of surplus value et cetera as it happened with
Marxism.
Spiritual science does not take the view that one has to deal
with either — or everywhere, but that concepts show
one-sidedness as a rule. I have often enough used the
comparison: if the spiritual researcher advances to concepts,
so that he regards them as images of the real from different
sides like four photographs of a tree from four sides, one can
describe the world from a pantheistic, theistic, monotheistic,
or polytheistic viewpoint.
One
realises the true meaning of these things only if one looks at
them as one-sided images of reality that can never enter into
abstractions, but only into the living oneness with itself.
Hence, you must not understand what I want to say now in such a
way, as if I wanted to condemn everything lock, stock and
barrel that has come up under the influence of the socialist
thinking. I would not dream of that. Since this view has
brought much valuable things, and it has fought its way through
hard enough.
Those who are the significant official bearers of the cultural
life who have to keep watch that right concepts and images
originate have simply rejected for decades what has come from
this side until not only the scanty concepts of the older
academic socialism, but the much more voluminous concepts of
modern socialism have become socially acceptable.
Such things are beyond the spiritual-scientific consideration
that does not advocate anything which wants only to face up
objectively to the facts. However, one has to say that this
approach of the recent socialism, in particular the materialist
historical view, is scientifically oriented. What are they in
truth?
To
the spiritual researcher is that which, for example, Karl Marx
(1818-1883) has shown with urgent logic an expression of that
what humanity has dreamt in social-moral impulses during four
centuries up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx
described the impulses of the last three to four centuries.
However, these impulses did not live in the wake day images,
but humanity dreamt in its impulses, in its social, moral
ideas. When actually the dream was already over when actually
already a social-moral order had appeared as it was in the
sense of the dreams of the last four centuries, Karl Marx wrote
his books about what had already become a corpse from which one
should awake. That what Karl Marx wanted to put as a program,
lived in the time that was before, actually, even before he was
there with his thoughts. However, reality demands that now
— skipping the scientific way of thinking — the
social-moral ideas are filled with the higher supersensible
consciousness.
Once one could grasp this instinctively. Even that about which
Karl Marx wrote was still dreamt instinctively. The new time
can no longer venture to dream only to experience the
social-moral ideas only instinctively; it must be able to
immerse them into the Imaginative cognition.
One
can say of any time if one wants to be trivial that it is a
“transition period.” However, it concerns what
transitions. In our time, the old instinctive cognition
transitions into the conscious cognition.
In
the area of the view of nature, our time has entered into the
intermediate stage of natural sciences.
In
the social it has to find the immediate transition from the
instinctive social-political feeling of the old time as it
existed, for example, in the Roman Law, it has to find the
transition to the creative also where the moral-social ideas
intervene immediately: in the area of education. With pure
knowledge concepts, one can be neither a pedagogue nor a
politician, nor anybody who participates in the creation of the
social life at this or that place. A time will come where one
will smile at the economics, at the sociopolitical theories as
one smiles today if any theorist who is called an aesthetician
writes how a right opera or symphony must be, a theorist who
cannot compose who can only consider a symphony or an opera
aesthetic-academically who cannot create out of Imagination.
One would laugh if he put that as classic example.
As
weird as it sounds even today: one will consider this way what
appears as economics from mere concepts of the wake day
consciousness, which turned out to be so inadequate. One will
smile at it as an error that was comprehensible in the
scientific age. However, one will overcome it if the
consideration of the social-moral life is associated livingly
with the supersensible reality that brings the supersensible
into the legal life, into the spiritual life, which is
penetrated by social love.
One
can even give in detail that someone who wants to participate
in the state-social design of a community can obtain a picture
of a scientific consideration only which has something artistic
which itself is artistic-creative. Not aestheticians, but
composers have to create operas and symphonies. Not
scientifically thinking theorists can find social concepts, but
those who are penetrated with concepts that are out of this
living that emerges, otherwise, only in the dream impulses, in
the feelings, in the affects, and passions, and in the will
itself.
The
social design of any community can only arise from the
Imaginative knowledge. That life which penetrates the social
communities, that dream life, which flows from the human being
in the love of a human being to his fellow man, where love
becomes duty, can experience its outer configuration only in
the community under the influence of Inspired concepts of the
beholding consciousness.
The
legal life is still the echo of old legal concepts even today
and remains so dark to the scientific view about which one
messes while one looks for all possible and impossible
scientific psychological concepts of the recent time,. It will
be able to become creative again if it is penetrated with
Intuitive knowledge.
Really, it does not concern a few anthroposophic dreamers but
human beings who should become able to put themselves
powerfully into life. It does not concern the foundation of
single colonies of a few people who want to have a good time or
to be vegetarians somewhere in a mountain area and lark about
there, but this is why it concerns understanding the signs of
time knowing what is really historically inevitable in the
developmental course of humanity. Anthroposophy is not the
hobby of single groups; anthroposophy is something that the
spirit of our time demands.
Many educational rules will give way to the knowledge that one
can find spiritual-scientifically from nature, from the being
of the human being. The future pedagogues will have no
preconceived rules. However, an understanding changing into
immediate, recognising love with the growing human being will
penetrate the pedagogue. He will learn things quite different
from theoretical education; he will learn to stand in the full
life. Hence, he will also cope with any individual being. One
will understand how freedom and necessity penetrate each other
in life.
One
understands that the moral-social life, considered
scientifically, would be in such a way, as if I had three
objects here. I light up the first object; then I light up the
second object, the first one gets dark; now I let the second
object getting dark and light up the third one. I pursue this.
While I pursue this and say, the first object was lighted up,
that is the cause of the light of the second one; the second
one is the cause of the light of the third one. Such an
illusion, as if the first body which is lighted up from the
outside worked as a cause of the illumination of the second one
and the second as a cause of the illumination of the third.
Such an illusion forms the basis of that historical approach
which looks at the consecutive facts always as effects of the
preceding facts. Thus, there is no causal coherence in the
consecutive historical events as in nature. However, there is
the fact that a common light illuminates the consecutive facts.
One has to penetrate into this light with higher, supersensible
knowledge.
What is good in natural sciences: to seize the things in
detail, does not apply to spiritual. However, it does also not
apply to the social-political life. To spiritual science, a
description of the social-political life in detail would be as
if a chess player just wanted to consider which moves he wants
to do. He cannot carry out them, because this depends on the
moves of the opponent. Nevertheless, one can still be a good
chess player if he masters the rules of chess. One can stand
his ground as a chess player. The same holds true if one wants
to master life. Only in the realms of nature are defined laws.
If one faces life, one has to have a skill that copes with this
life. Then one must be always ready that anything of the wealth
of life faces you as the opponent of chess faces the
player.
Any
child is like an opponent of chess to the teacher. Education
will accept forms by which it makes the human being capable of
life, able to penetrate into the nature of any single human
being.
However, such a life in the social-political can arise only
from a real cognition of that what is contained in the human
lives and human beings what is dreamt there as history what is
dreamt as social-political impulses. How much does one miss in
this direction even today!
In
spiritual science one has started studying since many years
what is the nature of the Western European peoples, of the
Central European peoples, of the East European peoples, which
impulses really exist, how the different soul expressions are
distributed geographically and historically, which impulses
really exist. Only by the knowledge of the available impulses
that Imagination, that Inspiration can originate which can
enjoy life in the moral-social ideas, as they become prominent
in the social life, in the legal life. I would like to point to
a very promising start just here in Switzerland. Your
fellow-countryman Roman Boos (1889-1952) has published a book
about The Over-all Work Contract under Swiss Law, a book
that grasps the nature of certain institutions and concepts
available in the legal life for the first time.
However, one has done various attempts in the recent time to
recognise from the mental-social being how the laws, how the
impulses gradually take place. Thus, an American has written a
very interesting book in which he wants to show that the
peoples split up into two groups: One group are the ambitious,
the progressive peoples, the others are the descending peoples.
The American, Brooks Adams (Peter Chardon B. A., 1848-1927)
describes the soul life of the ascending peoples in the
following way: it arises from a basic soul quality, from the
imaginative-warlike; so that the peoples who have future are
gifted with Imaginative fantasy life and with warlike impulses.
That is not my opinion but that of the American Brooks Adams.
Those peoples who become decadent are the peoples with industry
and science.
This is one-sided, of course. However, even these one-sided
considerations show that one has already done the attempt to
master life with really moral-social ideas. However, one cannot
survey life with the concepts that are formed only after the
pattern of natural sciences. One can survey it only if one
penetrates into the supersensible depths of life. One can do
this only with the beholding consciousness.
I
could only give scanty indications. In single talks, I can only
give suggestions, which is why one can easily disprove
spiritual science. However, today spiritual science is not so
happy to have countless chairs at disposal as the other
sciences have. This will also come. Spiritual science can only
give suggestions also concerning the social-moral ideas.
If
one surveys everything at last that I have brought forward
sketchily today, I would let culminate it, while I show that
the community must develop under the influence of vivid
moral-social ideas also in such a way that the human being can
develop as a whole in this community. However, to his whole
being belongs what I have explained yesterday: the independent,
everlasting being about which I have said yesterday that in it
the idea of freedom lives.
The
highest social-moral idea is the idea of freedom. No community
will realise it in itself, which does not take its starting
point from supersensible ideas. Since the supersensible can
only prosper where the creation of the community originates
from supersensible impulses, sensations, concepts, mental
pictures. The mental pictures of the usual day consciousness do
not work in that life in which the social-moral ideas work. If
the human being wants to work in this life, he must work into
this moral-social life with another member of his being.
One
may say that the great persons of the past already realised
with single light flashes what it concerned. As I have pointed
to Goethe in another way at the end of the last talk I would
like to point again to him today at the end. He did not yet
have spiritual science. However, if he looked at the historical
life and wanted to figure out what this social-moral life is,
which embodies itself in history, he found strange words
saying, the best we can have from history is the enthusiasm
that it excites.
How
wonderful is such remark! I said that Friedrich Theodor Vischer
stated that one could not understand the emotional life if one
did not understand the dream. — Goethe looks at the
history of humanity, at the historical dream. He knows
instinctively, intuitively that humanity is dreaming, while it
lives history that the historical impulses do not enjoy life in
the mental pictures but in that which enjoys life in the dream
sphere of the historical experience. That is why, the best we
have from history is not that “fable convenue”
which you read in the history books and which we regard usually
as history which gives, however, nothing but the corpse of that
which develops as the stream of humanity in the
social-political development.
Goethe knows: not that which you read in the history books is
that which the human being has as best from history, but that
which can be associated with this dream of history, as a
creative quality: enthusiasm. With it, he pronounced a big
truth from one side apprehensively, which must work reforming
if humanity wants to overcome the catastrophic events of the
present.
However, this truth can be complemented on the other side,
while one points out that one cannot intervene with
sophisticated concepts after the pattern of scientific mental
pictures anyhow fruitfully in the social-moral life, but with
concepts which are connected with life much more intimately, as
the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science intends
them.
One
needs something stronger than the not creative ideas in
history: one needs enthusiasm. Everything that should cause
that the social-moral life can develop must arise from
enthusiasm. However, from a right enthusiasm which originates
if one can recognise by the connection of the single human
being with the supersensible human by Imagination, by
Inspiration, and by Intuition.
As
Goethe could say on one side that the best we have from history
is the enthusiasm that it excites, the spiritual researcher
would like to add that anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into
the supersensible; it tries to recognise the everlasting, the
immortal, and the elements of freedom in the human life.
However, the best it wants to give humanity will be that it
gives enthusiasm that can develop the moral-social life.
In
this direction, I wanted to give some indications and
suggestions with this last talk to show that spiritual science
does not want to be only a theory, but a force that co-operates
from the innermost impulses of life with the energetic human
life that we need in this catastrophic time.
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