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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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The Riddle of Humanity
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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The Riddle of Humanity
Schmidt Number: S-3237
On-line since: 29th July, 2002
It gives me great pleasure to be here with you once more. And to see
the fine progress our building has made during the time we could not
meet is a pleasure no less great. In the name of our striving to serve
the needs of our time, a hearty thanks is truly due to all our friends
who have been devoting themselves to the necessary tasks of this
building. Some of these things take months to accomplish, so allow me
to say, by way of a greeting, that every step our work progresses has
great significance for our spiritual movement. In these difficult
times, when the fate of spiritual movements can be said to depend upon
an uncertain future, we need above all to maintain a lively awareness
of the eternal significance of precisely the kind of work that takes
place here. It is important that such work has actually been taken up,
that some human hearts and souls have actually been touched by the
spiritual implications of the work, and that some human eyes have
actually beheld it. For this creates a womb that will always be able
to carry the future, and what we are doing thus enters into the
developing stream of human aspiration. We may hope that what our dear
friends accomplish here in their souls will also be able to bear the
most manifold fruits out there in the world. And these fruits will
most certainly be beautiful for, from its inception, this work has
been done in the spirit of progress and with a desire to build the
future a desire to lead our times forward.
It gave me deep joy, for example, when I walked past the house that
has been newly erected in the vicinity of the west portal
(see Note 1)
for the first time. It is significant that this house also stands within our
precincts. For it is significant that it has been possible to build
such a house. It stands there as a living protest against all merely
traditional style in building and against an architecture that no
longer has anything to contribute to our path of development. So this
little house stands there as a preliminary announcement of something
new. And the fact that in our circles the need to build something new
was understood, is much more significant than one might at first
think. For this house to stand here is of very great significance!
Whatever objections may still be raised against this style of building
and this kind of architecture, it is nevertheless the style and the
architecture of the future. And if one tries to acquaint oneself with
the artistic longings of the present, one finds everywhere the same:
there is an obscure striving, but none of those who strive know where
they want to go. By and by it will be seen that those who strive in
darkness are striving for the goals that already are being sought
here. It will be seen that one needs to become acquainted with these
forms that are born out of the womb of spiritual science. However
shocking some aspects of our buildings may now seem, it will not be
long before they cease to be shocking and appear as the obvious result
of the experience and the feelings of the present and of the immediate
future. And at present, when there is so much to cause us sorrow, we
have this to raise our spirits: that we are permitted, in the midst of
these times of uncertain destiny, to establish what mankind needs for
its future.
And now, today and tomorrow I would like to talk to you about some
things that are evidence of what is rooted in the depths of the human
soul, rooted in such a way that a person finds much of it
incomprehensible when it emerges from the depths. Moreover, it makes
self-knowledge difficult, for it is rooted in the soul in such a way
that the inner destiny of a person is connected with what thus emerges
from the depths of the soul. The nearer one comes to self-knowledge,
the more these life-obscuring clouds arise. It is about human nature,
therefore, that we want to speak about some indefinite and
often indefinable aspects of human nature.
I will begin with an example; our times provide us with many examples
like it. You are aware that for a long time people have called our
times the age of decadence, and have even been pleased to
feel themselves to be true children of such times. One felt something
about our times that made it proper and even stylish to be a
decadent. Many adhered to a kind of gospel which
proclaimed: In order not to be a philistine you must have a certain
degree of nervousness. Anyone who was not nervous was a thick-headed
philistine or was some other kind of person who was bound to
fail to achieve the heights of his age. More than a few people really
did feel like this during the last few decades. To be distinguished
one had to be, at the very least, nervous. Only as a decadent could
one really belong to the new spiritual nobility.
Today we will first consider one type of decadent as an example. Later
he will provide us with a basis for some more general conclusions
about certain world-views. So, as I said, he will only be an example
of one type and should only be viewed as such. There are numerous
contemporary examples which we could equally well consider.
Today I want to discuss a relatively young man who developed along
these lines. He wrote two books that attracted much attention. The
first was called Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter).
The second book was only published by friends after his death. It bore
the title, Concerning the Last Things (über die letzten Dinge)
(see Note 3).
I am speaking about Otto Weininger,
(see Note 2)
a man whom many saw as a
true genius of his time. When he wrote the fat book, Sex and
Character, it attracted a great deal of attention, and the various
judgments passed on the book differed greatly. There were people who
viewed it as a kind of gospel proclaimed by the archetypal spirit of
the times. They claimed that this book, Sex and Character,
touched if somewhat one-sidedly and perhaps not entirely
explicitly on the deepest truths of the contemporary era. There
were also others those, for example, who by profession were
doctors to the insane who maintained that the only serious
libraries in which the two books, Sex and Character and
Concerning the Last Things, belonged were the libraries of
asylums for the insane. They did not mean in the patients' library,
either, but rather in the doctors' library so that the doctors
could study the two books as typical examples of contemporary lunacy.
As you see, a greater divergence of opinion could not be imagined. On
the one hand there was an almost prayerful reverence for a great work
of genius; on the other, this work was viewed as a product of lunacy.
And some of what is to be found in the book, Sex and Character,
is indeed curious. But it could only have surprised those who had not
concerned themselves intensively with certain thoughts that had been
coming to the surface during the last few decades.
To begin with, Weininger said (not in precisely these words, for with
so fat a book it is necessary to abbreviate): Up to now the views of
mankind have been the views of philistines and pedants. The
philistines and pedants have always believed that there are two kinds
of human being in the world-men and women. But only a true philistine
could believe that there are just men and women in the world. To
really understand the world, one must rise above the philistine view
that there are just men and women in the world, for Weininger believes
it is not true that there are only the two sexual identities,
masculine and feminine. With great correctness and diplomacy he calls
the masculine and feminine characters respectively M and W. But,
according to Weininger, there is no one in the world who is
exclusively M or W. And it would be unfortunate if there were someone
who would have to be designated as entirely M or entirely W. For, asks
Weininger, what is a proper woman? A proper woman is not even a
something, but is the negation of a something is nothingness.
Now there are some individuals walking about who are not properly here
in this world. They are only here as a kind of maya. But those we
designate as W would not be here at all not if they are
exclusively W. The truth of the matter is that every human individual
consists of M + W. Every human being has both masculine and feminine
characteristics. If there is a preponderance of M, the person gives
the impression of being a man; if there is a preponderance of W, the
impression of being a woman. And because a woman does not have so very
much M in her, she is both a Something and a Nothing. The fundamental
character of a person depends on how much M they possess and how much
W, and on the way these are combined.
This is how Weininger observes humanity. He says that everything
depends on our giving up the old prejudice that there are men and
women. He believes that very much indeed depends on our finally seeing
that every human individual is a Something in so far as there are M
characteristics present in him, and a Nothing in so far as there are W
characteristics, feminine characteristics, present. Thus every human
being fundamentally consists of a combination of the Something and the
Nothing.
Now, this is the point of view on which the whole fat book is based.
Everything from the life of the individual to the course of history is
observed, with mathematical rigour, from this point of view.
Naturally, Weininger finds, for example, that the basic character of
an individual depends very heavily on the quantity, the quantum, of W,
contained in that individual on how much of the Nothing they
contain. A different type of person arises depending on whether more
or less W is mixed into their character.
You must excuse me for confronting you with some of Weininger's train
of thought. You might be of the opinion that it is not quite proper to
talk openly about such things. But if we want to know what is going
on, we cannot stick our heads in the sand like ostriches. So I am
simply describing this one type of person. At present there are
actually many people who think like this, only many of them do not
know it. Therefore you must excuse me, for I am not expressing my own
judgements; they are Weininger's.
Let us assume that much W were mixed into the character of a
particular individual, a maximum quantity, so that the person appeared
to us in the maya form of a woman. If less were mixed in, then the
person would be of a different type and would only have the outward
appearance of being exclusively feminine. If there is much W in the
mixture, we have the type of the mother; if less, then we have the
type of the hetaera. Thus, two basic types of individual have been
distinguished: the mother and the courtesan. The mother is the most
retrograde type of human being. She floats on the lowest plane of
human existence and can only be a friend of men who are philistines,
for, possessing the highest degree of W, she comes closest to the
Nothing and has nothing to contribute to cultural progress. If there
is less W mixed in, we have the type of woman who can be the friend of
a genial man: the type of woman, whom Weininger calls the hetaera, who
can participate in the cultural progress of humanity and who lives on
a higher plane of being.
The other kind of human being is also divided into two kinds
those who have much M and those who have less M. These are the men,
although we can only call them men if we lapse into the old,
traditional way of speaking. Those who have much M have the great
honour of being able to burden themselves with much guilt and are
capable of doing great evil. Those with less M tend to exist on a
lesser plane of existence and are less capable of doing evil and
creating guilt in the world. And what is the greatest guilt that those
with much M in their nature can load upon themselves? What, indeed, is
the greatest possible guilt there is within the limits of our
physical, historical existence? Now, you must remember what I have
told you that according to Weininger's theory, W is really the
Nothing. But how can this Nothing exist in the world? Why is the
Nothing in the world at all? What is this Nothing when one examines it
more closely? It is nothing but the guilt of the men. Thus W has no
existence at all in its own right. It exists only through the guilt of
M. If men had not laden themselves with guilt by creating woman out of
their longing, woman would not even exist. That is the Fall Of Man.
Yes, according to Weininger's theory, those of you who have the outer
appearance of women are to believe that fundamentally, in some
unknown, occult way, you have been summoned into existence by the
guilt of men! And one must concede that there is genius in the way the
book's argument is presented precisely the kind of genius that
has been used frequently in recent decades. In viewing Weininger's
literary accomplishments one critic even said that the presence of
such spirits as Weininger proves that one still can take sonic joy in
present-day life, in spite of all its philistinism and pedantry!
The book is not intended frivolously, nor is it merely an item of
belles-lettres. The man who wrote it received his doctorate
from a university for the first part of it not the whole book,
but the first two or three sections of it. Thus, the first part of it
was accepted by a university as a doctoral dissertation. Later he
changed it somewhat. If one wants to write a doctoral dissertation,
naturally one has to translate what has been written in a genial vein
into something a little more pedantic. He was able to do this, of
course. And so the book was received in all seriousness and it
furnished a basis for subsequent theories. The book caused a great
sensation and, not only that, it has had great influence.
Let us look a little more closely at this man. From the very
beginning, Weininger was the kind of child one calls
gifted. Even in his early years he was full of the kind of
clever ideas which make so many parents happy. He was a serious child
who was interested in intellectual matters. Once he had entered
school, it is impossible to discover one instance in which his
teachers made a mistake which is as is to be expected, is it
not? But for him, the teachers could not do things satisfactorily.
Weininger was always wanting to do something different from what his
teachers expected of him, especially once he had entered grammar
school. While the teachers were talking about things that bored him,
he read all kinds of things for himself. Of course others do that,
too: one ignores the teacher who is going on about things that are, in
any case, in the books, and can be read up at home in less
time-meanwhile, under the desk ...!
When he had compositions to write, the teachers who corrected them
were sometimes astonished, sometimes repelled, by what they read. Nor
did he care to please the schoolmasters. When he entered university he
showed himself to be a gifted person, with many ideas about what was
presented to him there. He came under the most diverse literary
influences. The various cultural streams of the end of the nineties of
the last century had a marked influence on him. And the society around
him naturally had a great influence on him, too. He lived in the
Vienna of the end of the nineteenth century, a member of circles of
which it was said correctly that there were many
geniuses among them, but decadent geniuses. At the turn of the last
century Weininger was a member of circles whose most gifted members
were said to have dismissed Raphael as an idiot by the time they were
twenty. Of course, at the age of twenty it is to be assumed that one
is a genius. One reforms the whole world daily. This applies to
Weininger, too, but as a genial, gifted man with ideas. For, to draw
what I have been telling you to a conclusion, he does have ideas.
However mistaken one may hold them to be, they are ideas. Moreover,
they are new ideas.
Weininger was influenced by certain racial theories that are deeply
rooted in our times. He was Jewish, and early on he acquainted himself
with the development of humanity and with how it moves towards the
Mystery of Golgotha. He was much concerned with the Christ. And he
constructed a very unique theory for himself. On the one hand, he saw
Christ as a Jew. But, precisely because Christ was a Jew, it was
possible for him to overcome Judaism in the most thoroughgoing way.
Weininger believed that the result was a total reversal in the
development of mankind, and this observation made a deep impression on
him. Whereas previously he had raised a kind of pessimistic defence of
his Judaism, he now took heart in the thought of converting, of
imitating Christ, by changing and becoming a Christian. At this stage
there entered into his thinking the idea of a kind of modern Christ,
but a Christ who had freed humanity from evil and from original sin.
What Weininger does not say at this point, although one sees that it
is the idea that rules his soul, is that the feminine is the thing
from which Christ, out of his deeper knowledge, is to free modern
humanity. Our redemption lies in being totally freed from W. Only then
can mankind develop further. Not only must we be redeemed from sin, we
must also be redeemed from W. Then W will no longer exist and the sin
of man will also cease to exist, because the sin of man is what W is.
Weininger saw this as the fulfilment of Christianity which he, as a
Jew, could introduce: the redemption from F. He saw this as his
mission.
Such were the thoughts that occupied him at the age of twenty or
twenty-one. In a relatively short time he was able to write this
gigantic book, a book in which a very great deal of contemporary
learning and science is dealt with, and which is saturated with the
kind of ideas I have been sketching for you. Then came a period when
he was preoccupied with thoughts about how his kind of genius could
not be understood in the present day. He believed that it was a
foregone conclusion that he would not be understood by any people in
whom the F plays a significant role those with the outer
appearance of women and others who possess a large amount of W, even
though they do not outwardly appear to be women. All of these people
he must do without. That, of course, is far, far more than the half of
humanity. Women will never understand me, Weininger told
his father. So they must all be put to one side.
Then, when his book appeared, he developed a kind of wanderlust. He
wanted to travel, so he took a journey to Italy. At this point in his
life, extraordinary things begin to emerge. On a journey to Sicily he
wrote down the ideas which then were published in the book,
Concerning the Last Things, which was published posthumously by
his friend Rappaport.
This second book contains extraordinary ideas, ideas much more radical
than those to be found in Sex and Character. But there is
something curious about these ideas: they are reminiscent of what we
call imaginative knowledge. There are ideas, aphoristically expressed,
covering just about the whole range of human life. Mind you, what is
said there about illness alone would be enough to convince any doctor
that Weininger was completely insane. Yet all the ideas collected in
Concerning the Last Things actually contain imaginative
knowledge. They are paradoxically expressed, but they contain
imaginative knowledge. They are constructed in the manner of
imaginative knowledge. Consider one of them: Weininger points out that
both evil and neurasthenia are present in mankind. He believes,
furthermore, that if we observe neurasthenia, we will discover it
growing everywhere in the external world, for the whole world of the
plants is an embodiment of neurasthenia! It is comparable to
neurasthenia. If that which rightly lives in the plant world gains the
upper hand in a person, that person becomes neurasthenic; for a human
being is also in a certain sense a plant, and he is neurasthenic to
the extent that his plant nature gains the upper hand. Paradoxical!
But by no means a mad idea just one that has been paradoxically
expressed! Or one could say, rather, that something that must be kept
within the limits of imaginative knowledge has been dragged into the
sphere of intellectual knowledge and has thereby been turned into a
caricature.
He says similar things about the way evil lives in man. Just look
about you, he says. Evil is to be found living wherever there are
dogs. The dog is the symbol of evil. Just as a person is neurasthenic
in so far as he resembles a plant, he becomes evil in so far as he
resembles a dog. All the rest of nature, you see, is condensed in the
human being.
Everything that is spread out before us in nature is contained in man
it can all be found in man. In this fashion, deeply felt
aperys emerge from Weininger's soul. For example, he is
standing on a mountain. It is spewing forth fire. What he compares
that to I will not even mention. But then he sees the setting sun and
says, more or less, At this place and on this soil, such a
setting sun is only endurable if the crater is at one's feet;
otherwise it would be disturbing.
So you see in what an extraordinary fashion this soul experiences the
world: another soul would experience the beauty and grandeur, of a
sunset, but a sunset is only endurable to him if there is something
with which to contrast it. And there is much in which this soul
differs from the souls of other men. It is interesting how he
describes what happens when one meets a person and looks them in the
eyes how one being gazes out of one eye, another being out of
the other. He observes the thing exactly. He possesses imaginative
vision, but presents it in a confused manner.
Then he returns home, having recently felt much distress at the
world's lack of understanding and asking himself how long it will be
before the world will be able to understand the kind of things he
writes. Weininger's father is still thoroughly convinced that his son
is just a genial young man, even though he has had to move house
because he cannot live with his family. Although he naturally does not
agree with all his son's ideas, he does not notice anything abnormal
about him. After all, what state would we be in if all the parents in
the world thought that their children were insane just because they
disagreed with their ideas!
Then Weininger took a room in the house in which Beethoven died. After
living there for some days, he shot himself, exactly in accordance
with a programme he had formulated. Beforehand, he had announced to a
company of his younger friends that he was going to shoot himself
because this corresponded so well to his personality. He was
twenty-three years old. He shot himself in the house in which
Beethoven died.
So you see that we are dealing with an extraordinary individual. And
yet his personality is typical. This is an especially pronounced
example, with certain ideas developed in a unique way, but there are
many people about who possess similar natures. Contemporary humanity
includes many individuals with natures similar to Weininger's. It is
quite understandable that a doctor who treats the insane should see
nothing but crazy nonsense in either Sex and Character or in
Concerning the Last Things. A psychiatrist would compare
Weininger's biography with the ideas he developed and would find
numerous, obvious symptoms of abnormality. But some such signs are to
be found in almost anyone. It more or less depends on the subjective
viewpoint, but the psychiatrist does not know this. As I said,
however, it is easy to point to a pre-existing abnormality in someone
who set himself against his teachers as Weininger did and who read
books under the desk while his teacher lectured about something
entirely different. And it is a dubious trait to see oneself as a
prophet, and dubious to rent a room in the house in which Beethoven
died in order to shoot oneself there! Weininger exhibited many such
traits, and one must acknowledge that it is quite appropriate to make
him the subject of psychiatric studies, even though one could write in
this same vein about many people. Nevertheless, it would be
appropriate. But what most stands out as genuinely serious and
significant in the distorted and caricature-like ideas of Sex and
Character and Concerning the Last Things is the particular
direction and fundamental character they express. One can concede that
the whole of it is crazy nonsense, and yet it is interesting because
of the manner in which the ideas are shaped.
If one were to express his fundamental insights in terms of a more
strict, spiritualised, healthy science, one would have to put it thus:
We can see how everything that fills the external world, the
macrocosm, corresponds to something in the human being, the microcosm,
for man carries within himself everything that is out there. Thus I am
saying that Weininger is following the pattern of imaginative
knowledge when he produces the idea, albeit in a distorted,
caricature-like form, that the plant is the embodiment of
neurasthenia, and that the dog is the embodiment of evil. It is as
though someone had twisted genuine imaginative knowledge into a
caricature, but it nevertheless follows the pattern of imaginative
knowledge. And yet this man Weininger is wholly unsuited for life; he
is a man who can be totally ignored as far as life goes! For,
fundamentally speaking, no one can learn anything from these two
books. It is characteristic of the literati of our time that they are
much more interested in such tests of endurance than in confronting
imaginative knowledge which has been expressed as it should be
expressed. That holds no interest for them. It becomes interesting,
however, when it comes expressed in insane ideas.
We are really talking about imaginative knowledge, therefore, but in a
distorted form. What, then, is actually going on here? One needs to
get to the bottom of things to understand why an individual of
Weininger's calibre should still be unfit for life. Why did Weininger
develop into such an extraordinary person? Now, suppose that one could
have observed Weininger at times when he was sleeping normally.
(Although I am convinced that what I am about to say must have been
so, it is hypothetical, for I did not personally observe Weininger's
case.) If he had been observed when he was sleeping a healthy sleep
something that must have been a rare occurrence one
would have seen that truly grandiose intuitions and imaginations of
the spiritual world were present in his ego and his astral body. So,
if we could have observed his ego and astral body when they were
separated from his physical and etheric bodies, we would have
perceived a grandiose, genial soul, a soul filled with wonderful
intuitions and inspirations that were absolutely accurate. This soul,
rightly understood, would actually have become one of the great
teachers of our times. But it was only permitted to work as a teacher
while separated from the sleeping physical and etheric bodies. Only in
the state of sleep were the students permitted to behold what the I
and the astral body of their teacher had to say to them. But Weininger
himself was not far enough advanced to be aware of this. He was not
awake enough to perceive it; he had not undergone what in these days
would be called initiation. In other words, he himself was not aware
of what happened in his I and astral body while he was separated from
his physical and etheric bodies. In our times, what would Weininger
have had to become in order for him to have been able to work for the
spiritual benefit of his fellow men? Through initiation he would have
had to acquire the ability to behold the great gifts he possessed
while outside his own physical and etheric bodies, for these can only
manifest themselves outside the physical and etheric bodies. Then he
would have been able to submerge again in his physical and etheric
bodies in order to use the spiritual faculties and powers they contain
for looking at the things he had experienced while outside his
physical and etheric bodies. Then he would not have believed that he
needed to present these truths by deriving them from the physical
body, in the way one would demonstrate a mathematical truth.
But instead of this, something else happened. What happened instead is
the following. Imagine that this is Weininger's physical body, and
that these are his etheric and astral bodies. (They were drawn on the
blackboard.) If one were to observe this astral body and its I, one
would see the most beautiful and significant things ... But now this
astral body and I submerge in the physical body and are inside it.
Instead of the person being able to separate himself from the astral
in order to behold the astral realm, this astrality is pressed into
the physical body. There it acquires the vitality which otherwise
would only be possessed by the astrality of a normal man. That is to
say, the giant imaginations which are contained in the astral body,
and which should remain there, are pressed into the physical body. The
brain does not function in the way it has been formed to function, the
way appropriate to our present cycle of development. What should
simply remain in the astral body as imaginations is pressed into the
brain as though it were a lump of soft wax. Think of the brain as
being like butter, or wax. A properly formed human brain allows the
astral body to submerge in it like in air, filling it but leaving it
unaltered. But this brain has not retained the form proper to a human
brain; instead, things that should remain in the astral body have been
pressed into it. This now expresses itself in the brain, leading that
to come to expression in the physical man which would receive its
rightful expression only in the spiritual man.
Why does this happen? What leads the astral body to thrust itself into
the physical body in a manner for which it is not intended? What
enables this to happen?
Well, my dear friends, there is a good reason why this happened, for
those intuitions and imaginations that were being expressed, in our
day, through Weininger, are ideas that really belong to the future?
Please do not let what I am saying upset you; do not think that all
the ideas about masculinity and femininity that we have been following
are really ideas of the future. Those are not ideas of the future, but
the caricature-like results of ideas that already have been pressed
into the brain. But there is more to them than just this business
about M + W. If they are separated-out and observed from within, they
become something grandiose, something that people of today cannot yet
understand. In the future something will be poured out over humanity;
people will no longer be so aware of one another in terms of gender,
but will meet more as human beings. Once one isolates this idea and
clarifies it as regards the way it has been pressed into the physical
body, it really does contain something of the future. All ideas,
however, must be said to contain something of the future, for although
the ideas you develop as you live in the twentieth century belong to
the twentieth century, the ideas you need for your next incarnation
are already there beneath the surface. They are there in your astral
body and I, and you will need to take them with you as fruits of this
incarnation. Everyone already carries a little bit of the future, but
normally it does not come to expression in this life. The ideas for
the next incarnation are already there, at work in the brain, just as
the seed is within the plant. What happened to Weininger, however,
should not happen. The independent astral body and I should not have
influenced his physical and etheric bodies as they did. That is
something that should only have occurred during the time between death
and a new birth, when the body for his next incarnation was being
formed. Then it would have been right for the ideas to press into the
body the body that was to come.
So you can see what is involved: the present and the subsequent
incarnation are out of tune with one another. They are creating
disturbances in one another instead of remaining properly distinct.
The future incarnation is erupting into the present incarnation. What
would be significant and right for the next incarnation is forcing its
way into the body of the present incarnation, where it causes
disturbances and where it appears in caricature.
I have often told you that we live in a time of transition, and that
there will come a time when the people living today will again
incarnate. When that time comes, these people will have a different
relation to their previous incarnations. Unlike today, when everyone
is aware only of his present incarnation, they will have to look back
to their previous incarnation. This change is being prepared, and
sometimes aberrations occur. Aberrations of this process can be
observed in precisely such individuals as Weininger. The aberrations
can be followed all the way to their ultimate consequences. Why, then,
do we die? In order to be able to live the next incarnation! Of the
many things that make death magnificent and I am speaking now
about a life that has run its full course one is the way in
which we are able to carry the fruits of this incarnation with us
through the gates of death and then use them to shape the next
incarnation. Death is as much a part of life as birth and growth. A
plant is killed by the seed it carries within itself; the seed is what
leads it to wilt. First the leaves come, then the flower and fruit,
then it wilts and this is more or less how we are killed by our
next incarnation. If our next incarnation is somehow off its tracks or
turned around, then some of the things it needs to accomplish can
happen in a distorted fashion instead of happening in the way they
should. The next incarnation is the rightful bringer of death in the
present incarnation. If the next incarnation erupts into the life of
this incarnation, as Weininger's did, it brings a caricature of death,
suicide. The next incarnation should rest, quietly embedded in this
one. But if it is not attuned to it, the next incarnation can erupt
into the present one, bringing about the caricature of death, suicide.
So you can follow the results of a dissonance between this
individuality's physical and etheric bodies on the one hand, his
astral body and I on the other, all the way to these consequences.
I would like to point out how this particular example illustrates what
is living in many people of today. The important thing is to notice it
when it occurs in the present, and to understand it. The literati, who
do not understand him, see Weininger as the genius of the age; the
psychiatrists see him as insane. But for those who want to respond to
events with a loving understanding, he is an example of the
transitional nature of our times, an interesting example. It is
important to take hold of life by way of such interesting examples.
This is how spiritual science becomes practical, for we live in times
in which life will become more and more difficult, in which men will
become more and more involved with themselves, times when
self-knowledge is becoming more and more difficult. The upward thrust
of what is living and stirring within us will grow and will make us
seem to be afflicted with confusion and depression. The knowledge of
spiritual science must help us win through to an understanding of
mankind.
Tomorrow we will speak further about this and begin the approach to a
greater theme.
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Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
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