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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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Goetheanism as an Impulse for Transformation ... Human Science and Social Science
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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Goetheanism as an Impulse for Transformation ... Human Science and Social Science
A Turning-Point in Modern History
A Turning-Point in Modern History
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
Lectures Section
A lecture, hitherto untranslated given at Dornach on January 24, 1919.
Published in The Golden Blade, 1977.
A lecture by
Rudolf Steiner
Dornach, January 24, 1919
Unknown translator
Bn 188.4, GA 188, CW 188
A lecture, hitherto untranslated given at Dornach on January 24, 1919.
Published in The Golden Blade, 1977.
It is the seventh of twelve lectures in the volume
Goetheanism as an Impulse for Transformation ...
Human Science and Social Science.
In the collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's works, the volume
containing the German texts is entitled,
Der Goetheanismus, Ein Umwandlungsimpuls und
Auferstehungsgedanke. Menschenwissenschaft
und Sozialwissenschaft
(Vol. 188 in the Bibliographic Survey, 1961). The translator is
unknown.
From Bn 188.4, GA 188, CW 188.
Copyright © 1977
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A TURNING-POINT IN MODERN HISTORY
A lecture, previously untranslated,
given at Dornach on 24 January, 1919 *
* From a shorthand report unrevised by the lecturer.
Published in agreement with the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung,
Dornach, and the Rudolf Steiner Press.
IT seems that it would be useful to consider matters concerned with
the social life of the present in the light of our recent studies of
Goethe. The nineteenth century represents a very significant
turning-point in the history of mankind, particularly in relation to
the social life of our own time. The middle of the century brought a
much greater change in ways of thinking than is generally appreciated.
When considering this change one could certainly start from
personalities who were not German, for example Shaftesbury and
Hemsterhuis. But these examples from England or Holland would not lead
us so deeply into our theme as the study of Goethe can do. At the
present time, when so much far more than people realise
is tending towards the destruction of all that springs from middle
Europe, it may be of use to link up with these things, which should
live on in humanity in a way quite different from the way imagined by
most Germans today.
If one looks at the present situation honestly and without prejudice,
one cannot help feeling oppressed if one remembers a saying by Herman
Grimm the saying of an outstanding man who lived not very long
ago. For this one need not be a German, but one needs to have some
feeling for the culture of middle Europe. Herman Grimm once said that
there are four personalities to whom a German can look if he wishes to
find, in a certain sense, the direction for his life. These four are
Luther, Frederick the Great, Goethe and Bismarck. Grimm says that if a
German cannot look in the direction given by these four personalities,
he feels unsupported and alone among the nations of the world.
In the nineties many people had no doubt at all that this remark was
correct (though I was not one of them), but today it can give us a
feeling of oppression. For one must admit: Luther does not live on
effectively in the German tradition; Goethe has never been a living
influence, as we have often had to emphasise, and Frederick the Great
and Bismarck belong to conditions which no longer exist. Thus
according to Herman Grimm's remark the time would have come
already in which a German would have to feel unsupported and alone
among the nations of the world. People do not feel deeply enough to
realise fully in their soul what this signifies: less than three
decades ago something could be taken as a matter of course by an
enlightened spirit and today it is quite impossible. If
present-day men were not so superficial, many things would be felt
much more deeply. It can sometimes be heartbreaking how little the
events of the world are felt.
Looking back before the nineteenth century to the end of the
eighteenth century, we can observe a significant impulse. It was the
impulse working in Schiller when he wrote his Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of Man; this was the time, too, when Goethe
was stirred by his dealings with Schiller. They led Goethe to express
the impulse which lay behind Schiller's Aesthetic Letters
in his own tale,
The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.
You can read about the connection between Schiller's Aesthetic
Letters and Goethe's fairy-tale in my recent small book on
Goethe.
When Schiller wrote these Letters, his intention was not
merely to write a literary essay, but to perform a political deed. At
the beginning of the Letters he refers to the French
Revolution and tries in his own way to say what may be thought about
the will behind it, and behind the whole revolution at the end of the
eighteenth century. He had no particular expectation as to what would
be achieved through a great political change, of which the French
revolutionaries hoped so much. He hoped much more for a thorough
self-education of man, which he regarded as a necessity of his time.
Let us consider once more the basic conception of these Letters.
Schiller seeks to answer, in his own way, the question:
how does man achieve real freedom in his social life? Schiller would
never have expected that men would be led to freedom simply by giving
the right form to the social institutions in which they lived. He asks
rather that by work upon himself, by self-education, man should reach
this condition of freedom within the social order. Schiller believed
that man has first to become inwardly free before he can achieve
freedom in the external world. And he says: Man has his existence
between two powerful influences. On one side he faces the influence
coming from physical nature; this Schiller calls the influence of
natural necessity. It includes everything produced by the sense-nature
of man in the way he desires and so on. And he says: If a man obeys
this influence, he cannot be free.
Opposed to the influence of the senses there is another the
influence of rational necessity. Man can commit himself to follow
rational necessity, as the other pole of his existence. But then he
cannot be a truly free man, either. If he follows in a logical way
this rational necessity, it is still something that compels him. And
if this rational necessity is consolidated into the laws of an
external State, or something of that kind, in obeying such laws he is
still compelled. So man is placed between reason and sensuality. His
sensuality is a necessity for him, not a freedom. His reason is also a
necessity, though a spiritual one; under it, he is not free.
For Schiller, man can be free only if he does not follow in a
one-sided way either the influence of the senses or that of reason,
but succeeds in bringing the influence of reason into closer accord
with his humanity; when, that is, he does not simply submit like a
slave to logical or legal necessity, but makes the content of the law,
the content of rational necessity, truly his own.
Here Schiller, in comparison with Kant, whom unfortunately he
otherwise followed in many ways, is a much freer spirit. For Kant
regarded absolute obedience to what he calls duty that is,
rational necessity as the highest human virtue. Duty,
thou great and sublime name , Kant says, on the only occasion
when he becomes poetical, having nothing that flatters or
attracts us... Schiller says: I serve my friends
willingly, and unfortunately I like to do it. And so it often worries
me to find that I am not virtuous. That is his satirical comment
on Kant, who would regard serving one's friends as a duty. Schiller
means that while an unfree man may serve his friends as a duty, in
obedience to the categorical imperative, a free man
carries his humanity so far that he does it because he likes to do it,
out of love, as an inner matter of course.
Thus Schiller seeks to draw down rational necessity into his human
realm, so that a man does not have to submit to it, but is able to
practise it as a law of his own nature. The necessity of the senses he
seeks to raise up and spiritualise, so that the human being is not
simply driven by his sensuality, but can ennoble it, so that he may
give it expression, having raised it to its highest level. Schiller
believes that when sensuality and reason meet at the centre of his
being, man becomes free.
It seems as if present-day man is not properly able to share what
Schiller felt when he described this middle condition as the real
ideal for human beings. If a mutual permeation of rational necessity
and the necessity of the senses were constantly achieved, Schiller
held, this ideal condition would be expressed in the creation and
appreciation of art.
It is very characteristic of the time of Schiller and Goethe to seek
in art a guide for the rest of human activity. The spirit of Goethe
rejects everything Philistine and seeks for an ideal condition which
is to be achieved in the likeness of genuine art. For the artist
creates in a visible medium. Even if he creates in words, he is
working in a sense-perceptible medium. And he would produce something
terribly abstract if he gave himself up to rational necessity. He must
learn what he is to create from the material itself, and from the
activity of shaping it. He must spiritualise the sense-perceptible by
giving matter form. Through the formal pattern (Gestalt) that
he gives it, matter is enabled to have an effect, not just as matter,
hut in the same way that the spiritual has an effect. Thus the artist
fuses spiritual and perceptible into one creation. When all that men
do in the external world becomes such that obedience to duty and to
the law comes about through an inclination akin to that of the artist,
and when all that comes from the senses is permeated by spirit, then
for individual human beings, and also for the State and the social
structure, freedom is achieved, as Schiller understands it.
So Schiller asks: how must the various powers of the soul
rationality, sensuality, aesthetic activity work together in
man, if he is to stand as a free being in the social structure? A
particular way for the forces of the soul to work together is what
Schiller thought should be aimed at. And he believed that when human
beings in whom rational necessity permeates sensual necessity, and
sensual necessity is spiritualised by rational necessity when
these human beings form a social order, it will turn out to be a good
one, by necessity.
Goethe often talked with Schiller, and corresponded with him, while
Schiller was writing his Aesthetic Letters. Goethe was a
quite different man from Schiller. Schiller had tremendous inner
passion as a poet, but he was also a keen thinker. Goethe was not in
the same way a keen abstract thinker and he had less poetic passion,
but he was equipped with something that Schiller lacked: with fully
human, harmonious instincts. Schiller was a man of reflection and
reason; Goethe was a man of instinct, but spiritualised instinct. The
difference between them became a problem for Schiller. If you read his
beautiful essay on Naive and Sentimental Poetry, you
will always feel that Schiller might just as well have written, if he
had wanted to become more personal: On Goethe and Myself. For Goethe
is the naive poet, Schiller the sentimental poet. He is simply
describing Goethe and himself.
For Goethe, the man of instinct, all this was not so simple. Any kind
of abstract philosophical talk, including talk about rational
necessity, sensual necessity and the aesthetic approach for
these are abstractions if one contrasts them with one another
was repugnant to Goethe in his innermost being. He was willing to
engage in it, because he was open to everything human and because he
said to himself: A lot of people go in for philosophising, and that is
something one must accept. He never rejected anything entirely. This
is most evident when he has to talk about Kant. Here he found himself
in a peculiar position. Kant was regarded by Schiller and many others
as the greatest man of his century. Goethe could not understand this.
But he was not intolerant, or wrapped up in his own opinion. Goethe
said to himself: If so many people find so much in Kant, one must let
them; indeed, one must make an effort to examine something which to
oneself seems not very significant and perhaps one will find a
hidden significance in it after all. I have had in my hands Goethe's
copy of Kant's Critique of Judgement; he underlined important
passages. But the underlinings became fewer well before the middle,
and later disappear altogether. You can see that he never reached the
end.
In conversation about Kant, Goethe would not let himself become really
involved in the subject. He found it disagreeable to talk about the
world and its mysteries in terms of philosophical abstractions. And it
was clear to him that to understand the human being in his development
from necessity to freedom was not as simple as Schiller had believed.
There is something very great in these Aesthetic Letters,
and Goethe recognised that. But it seemed to him too simple to ascribe
all the complications of the soul of man to these three categories:
rational necessity, aesthetic impulse, sensual necessity. For him
there was so much more in the human soul. And things could not simply
be placed side by side in this way.
Hence Goethe was stirred to write his
Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,
in which not only three but about twenty powers of the soul are
described, not in concepts, but in pictorial forms, open to various
interpretations. They are headed by the Golden King, who represents
(not symbolises) wisdom, the Silver King who represents beautiful
appearance, the Bronze King, who represents power, and Love who crowns
them all. Everything else, too, indicates soul-forces; you can read
this in my article.
Thus Goethe was impelled to conceive this path for the human being
from necessity to freedom in his own way. He was the spiritualised man
of instinct. Schiller was the man of understanding, but not in quite
the usual sense: in him understanding was led over into perception.
Now if we consider honestly the course of history, we can say: this
way of looking at things, developed by Schiller in an abstract
philosophical way, by Goethe in an imaginative and artistic way, is
not only in its form, but also in its content, very remote from
present-day men. An intimate older friend of mine, Karl Julius
Schröer, who was once responsible for examining candidate teachers for
technical schools, wanted to examine these people on Schiller's
Aesthetic Letters: they were going to have to teach
children between the ages of ten and eighteen. They staged a regular
agitation! They would have found it quite natural to be questioned
about Plato and to have to interpret Platonic Dialogues. But they had
no inclination to know anything about Schiller's Letters on
Aesthetic Education, which represent a certain culmination of
modern spiritual life.
The middle of the nineteenth century was a much more incisive point in
man's spiritual history than people can realise today. The period
before it is represented in Schiller and Goethe; it is followed by
something quite different, which can understand the preceding period
very little. What we now call the social question, in the widest sense
a sense that humanity has not yet grasped, but should grasp and
must grasp later on was born only in the second half of the
nineteenth century. And we can understand this fact only if we ask:
why, in such significant and representative considerations as those
attempted by Schiller in his Aesthetic Letters and
represented pictorially by Goethe in his
Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,
do we find no trace of the peculiar way of thinking we are impelled to
develop today about the structure of society although Goethe in
his Tale is evidently hinting at political forms?
If we approach the Aesthetic Letters and the
Tale with inner understanding, we can feel the presence in
them of a powerful spirituality which humanity has since lost. Anyone
reading the Aesthetic Letters should feel: in the very way
of writing an element of soul and spirit is at work which is not
present in even the most outstanding figures today; and it would be
stupid to think that anyone could now write something like Goethe's
fairy tale. Since the middle of the nineteenth century this
spirituality has not been here. It does not speak directly to
present-day men and can really speak only through the medium of
Spiritual Science, which extends our range of vision and can also
enter into earlier conditions in man's history. It would really be
best if people would acknowledge that without spiritual knowledge they
cannot understand Schiller and Goethe. Every scene in Faust
can prove this to you.
If we try to discover what main influence was then at work, we find
that in those days the very last remnant, the last echo of the old
spirituality, was present in men, before it finally faded away in the
middle of the nineteenth century and humanity was thrown back on its
own resources. It lived on in such a way that a man like Schiller, who
thought in abstractions, possessed spirituality in his abstract
thinking, and a man who had spiritualised instincts, such as Goethe
had, had it living in these instincts. In some way it still lived. Now
it has to be found on the paths of spiritual knowledge; now man has
to find his way through to spirituality in freedom. That is the
essential thing. And without an understanding of this turning-point in
the middle of the nineteenth century, one cannot really grasp what is
so important today. Take, for example, Schiller's way of approaching
the structure of society. Looking at the French Revolution, he writes
his Aesthetic Letters, but when he asks, How
should the social order develop?, he looks at man himself. He
is not dealing with the social question in a present-day sense.
Today, when the social question is under review, it is usual to leave
out the individual human being, with his inner conflicts, his
endeavours to achieve self-education. Only the social structure in
general is considered. What Schiller expected to come about through
self-education is expected to come through alterations in outer
conditions. Schiller says: If men become what they can become at the
midpoint of their being, they will create a right social structure as
a matter of course. Today it is said: If we bring about a right social
structure, human beings will develop as they should.
In a short time the whole way of feeling about this has turned round.
Schiller or Goethe could not have believed that through self-education
men could bring about a right social structure if they had not been
able to feel in man himself the universally human qualities that
social life requires. In every human being they saw an image of human
society. But this was no longer effective. In those days beautiful,
spiritual descriptions of the best self-education could be written
it was all an echo or in a sense a picture of the old atavistic
life, but the power to achieve real results was not in it. And today's
way of thinking about the best social conditions is equally powerless.
It places man in an invented, thought-out social structure, but he is
not effectively present there. We must look at human society in
general, we must look out at the world and find ourselves there, find
the human being.
This is something that only real Spiritual Science can do, in the most
far-reaching sense. Take what is objected to most of all in my
Occult Science:
the course of evolution through Saturn,
Sun, Moon, and Earth; everywhere man is there. Nowhere do you
have the mere abstract universe; everywhere man is in some way
included; he is not separated from the universe. This is the beginning
of what our time instinctively intends, out of impulses that remain
quite dark. The time before the middle of the nineteenth century
looked at man, and believed it could find the world in man. The time
after the middle of the nineteenth century looks only at the world.
But that is sterile; it leads to theories which are entirely empty of
man. And so Spiritual Science is really serving those dark but
justified instincts. What men wish for, without knowing what they
want, is fulfilled through Spiritual Science: to look at the external
world and to find there the human being. This is still rejected, even
regarded with horror; but it will have to be cultivated, if any real
recovery in this connection is to come about in the future.
At the same time there must be a development also in the study of man.
A real understanding of the social organism will be achieved only when
one can see man within it. Man is a threefold being. In every age
except for our own he has been active in a threefold
way. Today he concentrates everything upon a single power in himself,
because he has to stand entirely on the single point of his own self
in this age of consciousness, and people feel that everything proceeds
from this single point. Each man thinks to himself: If I am asked a
question, or if life puts a task before me, I myself form a judgment,
out of myself. But it is not the entire human being who judges in this
way. The human organism has a man in the middle, with
something above it and something below it; and it is the man in
the middle who has the capacity to form a judgment and to act
on it at any moment. Above is Revelation: what is received through
religion or some other form of spiritual revelation and viewed as
something higher, something super-sensible. Below, underneath the
faculty of judgment, is Experience, the totality of what one has
passed through.
Present-day man takes little account of either pole. Revelation
an old superstition that must be overcome! To experience, also, he
pays little attention, or he would be more aware of the difference
between youthful not-knowing and the knowing that comes through
experience. He often gathers little from experience because he does
not believe in it. Most people today, when they have grey hair and
wrinkles, are not much wiser than they were at twenty. In life a man
may get cleverer and cleverer, and yet be just as stupid as before.
But experience does accumulate and it is the other pole from
revelation. In between stands immediate judgment.
Today, as I have often said, one reads critical judgments written by
very young people who have not yet looked round in the world. Old
people may write lengthy books and the youngest journalists may review
them. That is no way of making progress. Progress can be made when
what is achieved in later life is taken as a guide, when age is held
to be more capable of judgment through the experience that has been
acquired.
Thus man is a threefold being in practical life. If you read my book,
Riddles of the Soul, you will find that revelation corresponds
to the head of man, the man of nerves and senses; immediate judgment
corresponds to the breast man; experience corresponds to the man of
the extremities. I could also say: the man of the life of nerves and
senses, the man of the rhythmical life, and the man of metabolism. No
consideration is given today to this threefold nature of man, and so
there is no recognition of what corresponds to it in cosmic terms.
This cannot be discerned because of the general unwillingness to rise
from the sense-perceptible to the super-sensible.
Today, when a man eats that is, unites external nourishment
with his organism he thinks: There inside is the organism,
which cooks the stuff and takes from it what it needs, and lets the
rest pass away unused, and so it goes on. On the other hand, I look
out into the world through my senses. I take up the perceptible and
transform it by my understanding; I take it into my soul, as I take
nourishment into my body, What is out there, what eyes see and ears
hear, I then carry within me as a mental picture; what is out there as
wheat, fish, meat or whatever, I carry inside me, after having
digested it.
Yes, but this leaves out the fact that the substances used in
nourishment have their inner aspect. The experience of food through
our external senses is not related to our deeper being. With what your
tongue tastes and your stomach digests, in the way that can be
confirmed by ordinary scientific research, you can maintain your daily
metabolism; but you cannot take care of the other metabolism, which
leads for example to the change of teeth about the age of seven.
The essential thing in this other metabolism lies in the deeper forces
at work in it, which are not observed today by any chemical study.
What we take as food has a deep spiritual aspect, and this is very
active in man, but only while he sleeps. In your foods live the
spirits of the highest Hierarchies, the Seraphim, Cherubim and
Thrones. Hence in your food you have something cosmically formative,
and therein lie the forces which provide imperceptibly for the change
of teeth, for adolescence, and for the later transformations of the
human being. Only the daily metabolism is brought about by the things
known to external science. The metabolism which goes through life as a
whole is cared for by the highest Hierarchies. And behind the
sense-perceptible world are the beings of the Third Hierarchy: Angels,
Archangels, and Archai. Hence we can say: sense-perception, Third
Hierarchy: foodstuffs, First Hierarchy: and in between is the Second
Hierarchy, which lives in the breathing, in all the rhythmic
activities of the human organism.
The Bible describes this quite truly. The spirits called the Elohim,
together with Jahve, are led into men through the breath. The ancient
wisdom was quite correctly aware of these things, in an atavistic way.
Thus you are led through a real study of man into a true cosmology.
Spiritual Science re-inaugurates this way of looking at things. It
looks for man again in the external world, and brings the entire
universe into man. This can be done only if one knows that man is
really a trinity, a threefold being. Today both revelation and
experience are suppressed; man does not do them justice. He does not
do justice to his sense-perceptions, or to the foods he eats, for he
regards them merely as material objects. But that is an Ahrimanic
distortion, which ignores the deeper life that underlies all created
things, of which foodstuffs are an example.
Spiritual Science does not lead to a contempt for matter, but to a
spiritualisation of it. If anyone were to look at food with contempt,
he would have to learn that Spiritual Science says, in a way that
would seem grotesque to him: the highest Hierarchies, Seraphim,
Cherubim and Thrones, they are alive in nutriments.
In our time threefold man is put together in an unclear, chaotic way,
and made into a single entity. In social terms, a precisely
corresponding picture arises when everything is brought under the
single entity of State legalism. In fact, society should be seen as a
trinity, composed of three members. First, economic activity, the
natural foundation of life. Second, legal regulation, which
corresponds to the middle element in man, his rhythmic nature. Third,
spiritual life. Now we can see a trend towards making these three
realms into one. Economic life, it is said, must be brought gradually
under the control of the State. The State should become the only
capitalist. Spiritual life came long ago under the dominion of the
State. On the one hand we have man, who does not understand himself,
and on the other the State, which is not understood, because man no
longer finds himself within the social structure.
These three elements economic life, legal regulation, spiritual
life are as radically different as head, breast and limbs. To
burden the State with economic life is as if you wanted to eat with
your lungs and heart, instead of with the stomach. Man is healthy only
through the separation and co-operation of his three systems. The
social organism, too, can be healthy only when the three elements work
independently side by side, and are not thrown together in a single
entity.
All legal regulation, which corresponds to the breathing, rhythmic
system in man, represents a quite impersonal element, expressed in the
saying: All men are equal before the law. Nothing personal comes into
this; hence it is necessary that all human beings should be concerned
with this middle realm and that everyone should be represented there.
People are inclined to stop at this point, leaving a certain sterility
on either side. We have to breathe; but we are not human beings unless
nourishment is added to the breathing process from one side and sense
impressions from the other. We must have a State, which rules through
law, impersonal law. But economic life, which is half-personal,
wherever men participate in it, and spiritual life, which is entirely
personal, must work into the State from either side, or the social
organism will be just as impossible as if man wanted to consist only
of breathing.
This must become a new, fundamental doctrine: that the social
structure has three members. You cannot live as human beings without
eating; you have to receive your food from outside. You cannot
maintain the State without bringing it the necessary nourishment
from what human beings produce spiritually. This spiritual
productivity is for the State what physical food is for individual
men. Nor can you have a State unless you give it a certain natural
basis on the other side in economic life. Economic life is for the
State exactly like the element brought to the breathing process in
human beings through sense-perceptions.
You can see that real knowledge of man and real knowledge of the
social structure depend upon one another; you cannot reach one without
the other. This must become the elementary basis for social insight in
the future. The sin committed in relation to man by leaving out
Revelation and Experience is committed by Socialist thinkers today
when they leave out of account the half-personal element in which
fraternity must rule and on the other side ignore spiritual life,
where freedom must rule; while the impersonal element of the law must
be ruled by equality.
The great mistake of current Socialism is its belief that a healthy
social structure can be brought about by State regulation, and
particularly by socialising the means of production. We must appeal to
all the powers of the social organism if we are to create a healthy
social structure. Side by side with Equality, which is the one aim
today, and is absolutely right for everything which has the character
of law, Fraternity and Freedom must be able to work. But they cannot
work without a threefold social order. It would be just as senseless
to ask the heart and lungs to think and eat, as it is to ask an
omnipotent State to direct economic life and to maintain spiritual
life. The spiritual life must be independent, and co-operate only in
the same way as the stomach co-operates with the head and with the
heart. Things in life do work together, but they work together in the
right way only if they can develop individually, not when they are
thrown together abstractly.
The facts of the present time really prove that this insight must be
achieved. It is very much worth observing how people at the present
time do not see the connection between materialism on the one hand and
abstract thinking on the other, particularly in relation to the social
question. One great reason for the rise of materialism is that the
State has gradually taken possession of all the academic institutions
which were originally free corporations. If you go back to the times
when such things were founded, from an atavistic feeling originating
in clairvoyance, you will see how the necessity of co-operation
between these three elements was still felt. Only since the sixteenth
century has everything flowed into one, with the rise of materialism.
In earlier times, if a man wanted to be an outstanding jurist, he went
to a university distinguished for the law, perhaps to Padua; if he
wanted to be an outstanding physician, he went to Montpellier or to
Naples; if he wanted to be an outstanding theologian, he went to
Paris. These institutions did not belong to a particular State, but to
humanity, and represented an independent member of the social
organism.
Again, every school that is immediately under the power of the State
is an impossible institution, and in the end unhealthy. Every
undertaking concerned with production is unhealthy when managed by the
State. You cannot pour anything into the lungs, not even water when
you are thirsty. If this happens, you see how unhealthy it is.
Today people pour all kinds of economic and even spiritual
undertakings into the realm which should be responsible only for the
legal regulation of existing affairs. The radical parties go as far as
wishing to separate the Church from the State, because they hope that
people will be really interested only in what the State does. Then, in
this clever, roundabout way, the Church could be expected to fade away
entirely. But if you suggest to these people that schools need to be
independent in order to restore productivity to spiritual life, they
will contradict this very vehemently.
Every arrangement which makes for an intervention from the legal side
into the spiritual life must lead to sterility. And in the same way it
is false if the legal organisation intervenes in the initiatives
necessary for economic life. The police, security, everything which
belongs to social rights not private rights and not penal law,
which belong to the spiritual life all these belong to the
system of legal regulations. Everything economic forms an independent
system and must be organised cooperatively, in a way that is
half-personal. All spiritual life must be a matter for human
individuality; in no other way can it flourish.
Schiller describes the middle condition that lies for man between the
demands of rational necessity and the demands of this sense-life, and
he relates this ideal to the creation and appreciation of art. In his
Aesthetic Letters he says boldly that man is fully man
only when he is playing, and he plays only when he is man in the
fullest sense of the word. Schiller regards playing as the ideal
condition, but of course you have to think of playing as Schiller
does: that the necessity of reason is transformed into inclination,
and inclination is raised to a spiritual level like that of reason. He
calls the earnestness of life a game, in his sense of the word, for
then one acts like a child who is playing, not obeying any duty but
following one's impulses, and yet following them freely, because the
necessities of life do not yet intervene in childhood.
A summit of human achievement is indicated in Schiller's
Aesthetic Letters: man is fully man only when he is
playing, and he plays only when he is man in the fullest sense of the
word. On the other hand, when we have to begin with the concrete
reality of the entire cosmos in order to find man in it, it is
necessary that we should say to ourselves: man will achieve real
progress for humanity only when he can take the smallest things in
everyday life, even the most everyday game, and understands how to
raise them into the great seriousness of cosmic existence. Therefore
it has to be said: a turning-point in the history of mankind has come
in this present time, where earnestness is knocking most solemnly at
our doors.
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Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
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