Lecture XVI
Dornach, September 11, 1920
Quite a number
of lectures have now been given by me on the changes that
must necessarily take place in our whole civilization. First
and foremost, what was said in this connection was expressed
in such a way as to appeal to the will of men. We now live in
a cycle of humanity's evolution in which people have to
discover inner activity in order to contribute their share
towards the necessary change. For human soul substance will
have to stream into external life, into the objectivity of
external life, and human beings themselves will have to bring
about what should appear. In the present cycle of human
development it is no longer possible to wait passively for
divine powers, far removed from man, to step in and to do
something for human evolution, without the participation of
man himself.
The essential
thing is to be in a position to understand such things by
observing the individual phenomena of social life and the
life of nature, but today, certain phenomena of social life
shall be our topic. I would like to start with a quite
definite fact. Let us suppose that someone announces himself;
he may, for example, send his business card with the name
“Edmund Miller” printed on it. Yet, on seeing
this card with the name “Edmund Miller,” it would
be foolish to assume that a miller was coming, a man who
grinds corn. For the person announcing himself by this name
may be a contractor, or a professor, or a court advisor, and
so on. It would not be justified in such a case to deduce
anything from the name “Miller.” Initially, it
would perhaps be better to form no thoughts whatever, but
just to wait and see what kind of a person conceals himself
behind the name. Or, through certain other circumstances, we
may already know something about the actual person, the real
living entity concealed behind this name,
“Miller.”
It is clear to
us in this case that it would be quite wrong to infer from
his name anything about the character of the approaching
individual. If a person named “Smith” announces
himself we would not think that he is a smith. This shows
that in regard to those words we consider proper names, we
feel the need to discover, by means of something that is not
inferred from the name, what or whom we are dealing with.
Well, in this
respect, even proper names have undergone a certain history.
A person bearing the name Smith today no longer has anything
to do with a real smith; a person called Miller has nothing
to do with a miller. Yet these names originally arose at a
time when name-giving such as is customary today did not
exist, when people in a village would remark, “The
smith said, — the miller said this or did that,”
— or, “I saw the miller,” — and
referred to the actual smith or miller. One who has lived in
villages knows that people frequently do not refer to each
other by proper names but say instead that they saw the
smith, or the mason, or somebody else. Therefore, the name
itself originally caused people to infer from the words what
lay behind them.
All words, the
whole language, will undergo the same development in
the-course of evolution from the fifth to the sixth
post-Atlantean epoch that proper names have undergone, a
development which in their case we can clearly survey.
Nevertheless, human beings today are still almost completely
caught up in the whole of language; we basically acquire all
our knowledge out of language. In actual fact, the general
attitude towards nearly the whole compass of language is to
infer the things from their words. Now, it is convenient to
do so, but human evolution follows a different course, and in
regard to such things we must have the same attitude that we
adopt in regard to natural phenomena. They contain objective
necessity. Objective necessity also exists where the
causality of nature holds sway in the sphere of life,
something that is experienced by many people with abstract
superficiality. It happens frequently — I have often
pointed this out — that people will say, “I never
intended to do or say this; I meant it quite differently; I
had this or that intention with regard to this matter.”
But regardless of how pronounced the child's intention is not
to get burned, when it reaches into fire, it will burn
itself. Concerning the things of life, intentions that do not
delve into life are not decisive; at most, only those
intentions that do delve into life, or, certainly, facts, and
the relationships of these facts that follow natural laws,
are decisive.
People must
become used to this way of thinking; based an spiritual
science, this is, above all, necessary in the most eminent
sense. And one must also get used to the thought: “As
pleasant as it might be if one could just take words as they
are, it is nevertheless a fact that the objective course and
laws of human evolution point in a different
direction.” They indicate that man's whole conception,
his whole soul life, is becoming emancipated from words.
Words are gradually becoming mere gestures that simply
indicate the being or thing in question, no longer
designating and explaining anything fully. If
spiritual-scientific descriptions are to be taken seriously,
for example, then something must come about for which people
are often annoyed with me, namely, that one can no longer use
words in the manner that words and sentences are customarily
used at present. For if one sets forth spiritual-scientific
facts, one is above all presenting facts of the future;
something is represented that in future time will have to
become the possession of mankind. In a certain sense, one has
to anticipate something that is supposed to occur in the
future. What is to happen in the future must be received into
one's will. Therefore, one is obliged to give
spiritual-scientific descriptions in such a way that even the
words point like gestures to the essential reality lying
behind them. Since our ideal today concerning the
reconstruction of the social order will have to be born out
of spiritual science, as I explained yesterday, it is
necessary that, particularly in matters of social
reconstruction, we speak from the above-mentioned viewpoint.
This is precisely what people did not at all wish to
comprehend, for instance, in my book,
Towards Social Renewal.
[ Note 13 ]
They absolutely wanted matters presented to them in the old style,
matters that cannot be described in the old style since they
are part of the future. And basically, what one is being
faced with here can best be made evident by the fact that
almost all the questions that, up to now, have been connected
by one side or another to the expositions in
Towards Social Renewal
always proceed totally out of the old
manner of thinking. No attempt is made to find one's way into
the transformed new way of thinking.
Thus we may say
that, particularly in the descriptions of social
relationships of the future, it must become evident that we
have to develop an emancipated soul life that no longer
clings merely to words. One who follows my descriptions in
the various fields of spiritual science, including the recent
ones into the field of social life, will find that I am
always at pains to describe a matter from many different
sides. As a rule, I use two sentences instead of one, because
the first sentence indicates the matter from one side, the
other one from the other side. This is then supposed to call
forth a desire in the listener or reader to approach the
matter by transcending the words and sentences, as it were.
This is what must be mentioned in reference to human soul
life as far as the transformation of the meaning of human
language is concerned. This is an important matter. It is
important for the reason that the greatest part of what
occurs today in regard to confusion of one's manner of
thinking and conceptions comes about for no other reason than
the fact that the objective laws and impulses of human
evolution already demand that we free ourselves from
language. Because of their easy-going habits of thinking,
however, human beings do not wish to give up clinging to
language. When such a phenomenon is clearly understood, it
leads to a deeper insight into the whole course of human
development. Indeed, from this transformation of our language
or languages, we can actually build a bridge to profound
spiritual facts. Naturally, this is more the case in one
language than in another. But this is then a matter of the
specific treatment of a language, of the meaning of words in
a language in the individualized differentiated regions of
human civilization, as I have pointed out.
We now live in
the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of human civilization and are
approaching the sixth condition of development. These
evolutionary conditions are not of such a nature that a clear
line could be drawn between one and the other epochs;
instead, one epoch, bearing its own peculiarities, passes
over into the next; and long before it arises, the future one
casts its shadows — one could also say its lights
— into the present. One must take hold of these lights
if one wishes to participate in the evolution of humanity
with one's soul.
Let us try and
connect what might be termed the
“suprahistorical” fact, namely, that we are
supposed to work our way towards the sixth post-Atlantean
epoch, with another fact known to all of us. It is this: With
his spirit-soul entity, the human being descends out of a
spiritual world to earthly incarnation through birth or
conception. On earth, he then experiences the life between
birth and death; then, he passes through the gate of death,
and in so doing bears his soul-spiritual being once again
into that environment of life which is definitely of a
spiritual and soul nature.
Now we must
clearly understand — and the significance of this for
the art of education, for example, has also been outlined
here recently — that we bring down from the spiritual
world, at least in the form of effects, what we have
experienced in this spiritual world. When we move in ordinary
life from one locality to another, we take with us not only
our clothes but also our soul-spiritual belongings. In like
manner, one brings along into this world through conception
and birth the consequences and effects of what has been
undergone in the spiritual world. In the period that mankind
has presently lived through, concerning which we know that it
began around the middle of the fifteenth century A.D., man,
through his spirit-soul entity, brought along forces of the
soul life devoid of images, forces containing no pictures. It
is for this reason that, above all, the intellectual life has
arisen and has flourished. During this period, prior to
descending through conception and birth into physical
existence, the human being was endowed in a sense with
something lacking in capacities, lacking in images. This
explains the slight inclination mankind had for developing
original creations of fantasy since the middle of the
fifteenth century. Human fantasy is, in truth, only a
terrestrial reflection of super-earthly imagination. The
Renaissance does not contradict this, for lust the fact that
one had to resort to a “renaissance,” not a
“naissance,” clearly shows that original forces
of imagination were not present, only a fantasy that required
fructification from earlier periods. In short, the fact is
that the human soul was permeated in a certain sense with
forces that are devoid of images.
Now begins the
age — and in many respects, this is the real reason for
the stormy character of our times — in which the souls
who descend through conception and birth into earthly life
bring along for themselves images from the spiritual world.
When pictures are brought along out of spiritual existence
into physical life, and if salvation is to arise for the
human being and his social life, they must under all
circumstances be united with the astral body, whereas the
element lacking images only unites with the ego. It is
predominantly the unfolding of the ego which has blossomed in
humanity since the fifteenth century.
Now, however,
the time is beginning when man has to feel: Within me there
live pictures from my prenatal existence; during my earthly
life, I have to make them come alive. I cannot accomplish
this merely with my ego; I must work deeper into myself, and
this must reach as far as my astral body.
Now, it is
generally true that humanity resists the images indwelling in
the astral body, images experienced prior to conception. In a
way, human beings repel what is supposed to find its way out
of the depths of their being into the astral body. The dry,
prosaic attitude of the present time is one of its
fundamental characteristics, and there are many broadly based
movements that oppose an education whose concern it would be
that the forces arising from the soul and trying to make
themselves felt in the astral body will actually assert
themselves. There are insipid, dry people who would really
like to exclude any education by means of fairy tales,
legends and anything illuminated by imagination. In our
Waldorf School system, we have made it our priority that the
lessons and instruction of the children entering primary
education will proceed from pictorial descriptions, from the
life-filled presentation of images, from elements taken from
legends and fairy tales. Even what the children are initially
supposed to learn about the nature and processes of the
animal kingdom, the plant and the mineral kingdoms, is not
supposed to be expressed in a dry, matter-of-fact manner; it
is supposed to be clothed in imaginative, legendary, fairy
tale-like elements. For what is seated deep within the
child's soul are the imaginations that have been received in
the spiritual world. They seek to come to the surface. The
teacher or the educator adopts the right attitude towards the
child if he confronts the child with pictures. By placing
images before the child's soul, there flash up from its soul
those images, or, strictly speaking, those forces of
pictorialized representation which have been received before
birth or, let us say, prior to conception.
If these forces
are suppressed, if the dry, prosaic person guides the
education of the child today, he confronts the child from
earliest childhood with something that is actually not at all
related to the child, namely, the letters of the alphabet.
For our present letters have nothing to do anymore with the
letters of earlier pictorial scripts. They are really
something that is alien to the child; a letter should first
be drawn out of a picture, as we try to do it in the Waldorf
School. The child is confronted today with something devoid
of a pictorial element; the young person, on the other hand,
possesses forces in his body — naturally, I am
referring to the soul when I am now speaking of
“body,” for after all, we also speak of the
“astral body” — forces seated in his body
that will burst out elsewhere if they are not brought to the
surface in pictorial representation. What will be the result
of modern mistaken education? These forces do not become
lost; they spread out, gain existential ground, and invade
the thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will after all.
And what kind of people will come into being from that? They
will be rebels, revolutionaries, dissatisfied people; people
who do not know what they want, because they want something
that one cannot know. This is because they want something
that is incompatible with any possible social order;
something that they only picture to themselves, that should
have entered their fantasy but did not; instead, it entered
into their agitated social activities.
Therefore, we
can say that people who, in an occult sense, do not have
honest intentions in regard to their fellowmen, do not have
the courage to admit to themselves: “If the world is in
a state of revolt today, it is really heaven that is
revolting.” It means the heaven that is held back in
the souls of men, which then comes to the fore, not in its
own form, but in its opposite — in strife and bloodshed
instead of imaginations. No wonder that the individuals who
destroy the social fabric actually have the feeling that they
are doing good. For what do they sense in themselves? They
feel heaven within themselves; only it assumes the form of a
caricature in their soul.
This is how
serious the truths are that we must comprehend today! To
acknowledge the truths that matter today should be no child's
play; such acknowledgment should be pervaded by the greatest
earnestness. In general, it is no light task today to
describe such things, for, in the first place, people do not
care for them; secondly, they cling to words. Indeed, one who
states that heaven is revolting in human souls is naturally
taken literally by his words; people do not notice how he is
trying to show that additional facts must be known, whereby
the word “heaven” is related to something more
than they are in the habit of connecting with the term. This
is the same as not thinking of a miller who grinds corn when
a “Mr. Miller” announces himself. The
emancipation from language is definitely required in
individual concrete cases if, in the sense that the laws of
human evolution demand it, we wish truly to make
progress.
Here, we see
how something that comes from the life before birth pushes
into the social life. One who is familiar with these
relationships knows that he has to recognize something that
is actually heavenly in what appears on earth in a
caricature. This is in regard to the social questions, but
there is something else in addition.
During the age
of intellectualism, which has developed predominantly since
the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings have
obtained very little from their life of sleep in the form of
imaginations for their waking life. Even those who have
somewhat more lively dreams tend to interpret them quite
rationally and intellectually. In this direction,
theosophists, for example, are rational and intellectual. I
could not begin to describe in a small volume, only in a big
one, how many people have come to me in the course of time
and wished to have rational explanations for their dreams!
What is important here is that even those imaginations that
express themselves in dreams point to a deeper spiritual
life. I have often said that the outward appearance of the
dream does not matter at all; that has already emancipated
itself from the actual content. The content which we receive
and then interpret in words of a language, from which, in
turn, we actually have to emancipate ourselves as well, is
not the true course of the dream; it really has very little
to do with the true course of the dream. The dream's content
is represented in its dramatic sequence, in the way one image
follows another, the way complications arise and are
resolved; one can experience the same spiritual content in a
number of different ways as a dream. One person comes and
describes how he climbed a mountain; he ascended quite easily
up to a certain point, then, he suddenly stood before an
abyss and could not proceed. Another person relates that he
was walking along a path; everything around him filled him
with joy. Suddenly, when he reached a certain point in the
road, a man with a #8224 came up 'to him and killed him.
Here we have two completely different dream images. Yet the
process concealed behind them may be exactly the same. It can
express itself in one instance in the climb up the mountain
and the feeling of confronting an abyss; in another instance,
it can be expressed in a cheerful walk down a path until one
confronts a person who intends to kill one. The content of
the images is not important; it is the dramatic sequence of
experiencing something that offers resistance. It is the
dynamics behind the images that matters. The course taken by
the forces can envelop itself in any number of images, indeed
in hundreds of pictures!
We can only
understand the spiritual world when we know that what appears
in the physical world in the form of dreams, or what clothes
itself in images from the spiritual world in such a manner
that it resembles the physical world, is only an image. As
long as one has the inclination, however, to interpret the
images in a rationalistic, purely intellectual way, so long
does one also occupy an intellectual standpoint in regard to
the dream life of sleep. What matters here is that we
understand this dream life of sleep as the expression of a
deeper spiritual life. Then only do we comprehend it
imaginatively; then we grasp the pictures as something that
stands in place of the content.
Then we shall
not turn against something that is beginning for the human
being today, namely, making inner soul demands out of sleep
in a manner similar to the demands made by the imaginations
prior to birth or conception. For today we are beginning to
sleep differently from the way sleep was experienced in the
regular life of the intellectual age since the middle of the
fifteenth century. Man brought along into the waking state
little inclination for faculties that wish to experience,
rather than interpret, the images.
We have now
reached the point in human evolution where, out of sleep as
well, we draw imaginations that seek to indwell not only our
ego, where rationality reigns supreme, but also our astral
body. If we work against this, we once more reject something
that is trying to rise into consciousness out of the depths
of the human soul; we also work against the whole course of
mankind's evolution, and what matters here is that we do not
oppose humanity's development but work in harmony with it. We
do this in the first place by permeating our culture once
again with as many elements as possible connected in some way
with the spiritual world. Naturally, in regard to external
life, it is important for us to imbue ourselves with what is
grasped from the spiritual world; hence, that we also imbue
ourselves with a true spiritual insight, to fill ourselves
with something that in this physical world cannot be
comprehended in terms of the physical world. The whole past
epoch of human life was actually opposed to this. Consider a
case that I have already mentioned a number of times.
It is true that
Christianity confronts human beings in such a way that they
can only grasp its essence, especially the nature of the
Mystery of Golgotha, if they come round to a comprehension of
something super-sensible. For one must envisage that Christ, a
being Who formerly had not been connected with earth
evolution, united with the human being, Jesus of Nazareth,
and that super-sensible events took place. One must conceive
of the fact that in regard to the event of Golgotha, even
birth and conception differed from the way they take place in
ordinary human circumstances. In short, the demand is made by
Christology to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a
super-sensible sense.
There is an
interesting passage in a book written by a modern naturalist
[ Note 94 ]
where fulminations
are uttered against the Immaculate Conception, where it is
said that it is an impertinent insult to human reason to
claim that an immaculate conception can occur.
Well, a modern
rationalist, a purely intellectual person, can't help feeling
this way. In a certain sense, what is intended out of the
spiritual life is indeed an impertinent mockery of human
reason. But the point is that we now live in an age where we
must gradually begin to bring into waking life what has been
spiritually experienced between falling asleep and waking in
such a manner that our astral body can be impregnated and
permeated with a pictorial element — not merely our
ego, which is the seat of rationality, of
intellectualism.
It is
interesting that even the theology of the nineteenth century
developed in such a way that it opposed Christology with
rationalism, with pure intellectualism. Increasingly, modern
theology felt called upon altogether to deny Christ as such,
and to describe the humble man from Nazareth, the mere Jesus,
as a human personality somewhat more outstanding than other
human beings. One did not wish to make the effort to
comprehend something super-sensible. What is to confront the
human being supersensibly, what is to awaken him to the
super-sensible realm, this one tried to grasp with concepts
gained here in the sensory world.
A Protestant theologian,
[ Note 95 ]
with whom I once discussed this matter, told me after we had
talked about it for some time, “Yes, we modern
theologians should really not call ourselves Christians any
longer, for we no longer have Christ. If the name
‘Jesuit’ had not been appropriated already, we
should really claim it for ourselves.” This is not
something that I am saying; it is something that a Protestant
theologian of the modern school said to me as a confession of
his own soul.
One who has
insight into the whole character of our time, however, will
understand that we must advance to a comprehension of the
Mystery of Golgotha. Just because it is the central
manifestation of our human evolution, it will tear us away
from the earthly manner of thinking, and will draw us with
might and mean to understand something that is
incomprehensible based an the earthly sense domain. Whoever
wishes in everything to remain caught in the earthly sensory
sphere would say, “The Immaculate Conception is an
impertinent insult against human reason.”
One who
understands the task of present-day man will say: I must
accustom myself to such ideas. In that case, I must
emancipate myself from the customary use of words today. When
somebody by the name of Smith or Miller announces himself, I
must not assume that he is coming with a hammer in hand or
overalls powdered with flour. I must expect something quite
different from what I might deduce from the words. Thus, I
have to become used to emancipating myself from what was
ingrained into the words by the merely physical life of the
senses.
Today, the
Mystery of Golgotha is in fact the first test for us to see
whether we are willing to go along with the comprehension of
something that extends beyond the physical-sensory sphere.
We, therefore, can no longer content ourselves with a merely
traditional, historical description of Christianity, we need
instead a creative understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.
Out of spiritual science, we need inner strength of soul
which, in a new way, approaches the Mystery of Golgotha and
is in a position to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha as a
supersensory fact. Then, having positioned the Mystery of
Golgotha into the central point of human thinking and
feeling, we must make a new beginning especially in regard to
education, and prepare the child in such a way that it does
not suppress, does not have to suppress, the imaginations
that seek to arise from the depths of the soul. We must meet
the imaginations halfway by making pictures of our
conceptions.
This is the
deeper reason why, in the last issue of
Soziale Zukunft
(Social Future),
[ Note 96 ]
which is a magazine dealing
with education, I described education and instruction as an
art in the most eminent sense. In the field of pedagogy,
teachers and educators must actually proceed in the way an
artist does — indeed, they must proceed in a style
surpassing that of an artist. It does not do to impose
abstract principles in an abstract pedagogical sense. What
matters is that one penetrates the being of man, and, through
this comprehension of man's nature, arrives at the point of
reading from the inner human being what one has to do in each
case. An artist who is creating something cannot go by
abstract rules. The purpose of aesthetics is not that of
establishing rules for the artists. An artist cannot even go
by what he has created yesterday when he creates something
today. At every moment he must endeavor to be creative and
original. This is how the teacher must be, in a still higher
sense. One must not say based an a certain attitude of mind:
"Well, if we are looking for teachers like that, we have to
wait another three to four hundred years." The only reason
that we do not have such teachers as yet is because we say
things like this. We can have them the very moment that we
have the strong power of faith in it; but it is the strong,
not the passive, power of faith that is needed here.
Therefore, what is important here is that when we return from
sleep, upon awakening, we truly experience in the astral body
and imprint into the etheric body what the astral body
experiences from the moment of falling asleep until waking
up. It can only take place through pictorializing the whole
cultural life.
This
pictorialization of the whole life of culture, this
pictorialization that is demanded by the laws of humanity's
evolution, will come into being when the whole spiritual life
is left to the decision of those who participate in the
spiritual life; when no instructions, no school regulations
are laid down by a government which by its very nature stands
outside the spiritual life. It is important here that the
state does not hand down pedagogical regulations, school
curriculums, and such like in an abstract manner. What
matters is that one has human beings in an emancipated
spiritual life who act out of their own free personality, and
that one accomplishes with them what one can or wishes to
accomplish with them.
The fact that
the human being is presently beginning to bring along through
conception and birth something that differs from what he
brought with him since the middle of the fifteenth century,
and the fact that he also brings something different with him
out of sleep, both these facts demand that careful attention
be given such matters, and that one really permeates oneself
with the knowledge of such decisive facts. But from where can
this knowledge be gained, if not from spiritual science? The
external culture, today's science, certainly does not deal in
any way with these matters. It ignores them; indeed, its
present methods compel it to do so. I feel obliged to say
that the present situation becomes most poignant when one
observes the frequent and strange discrepancy between the
inner requirements of humanity's evolution and the way in
which people meet them. In recent times, the need has arisen
to reckon with what flows into the human being from the
spiritual world. Those who were intellectual, who did not
reckon with what flows out of the spiritual world, made
hypotheses about atoms, molecules, and the like. It was
thought that bodies possessing volume point back to an
atomistic formation, and so on. Out of the root causes of
mankind's evolution, the need arose to grasp spiritual facts.
And this instinct to grasp the spiritual expressed itself
also in something, for example, like the Theosophical
Society. One of its heroes is a certain Mr. Leadbeater who
wrote an occult chemistry. What did he do in this book? He
did something quite horrible, for he pictures the spiritual
world in an atomistic sense; meaning, the materialistic
manner of thinking is carried into the spiritual world.
I have recently
mentioned this whole grotesque thing. Something very clever
came about in the Theosophical Society. Someone wished to
prove that here is one life; there is the next one (see
drawing below). Now, it is so, isn't it, that something has
to pass from the preceding life to the later one. One sees
the body fall into decay. A proper materialist says that the
body disintegrates and it is all over with man. A
theosophist, however, wants another earth life to come; so,
something must pass from one life to the other! The proper
materialist says that all atoms unite with the earth. The
theosophist also does not think in any other way than
materialistically, but at the same time he tries to think
“theosophically.” He wants something to pass from
the first to the next life. So he says: “Of course, the
atoms become one with the earth; one atom, however, remains
and it passes through the whole period of existence between
death and a new birth. There it appears again. This is the
permanent atom.” One atom! Oh, the
theosophists were especially proud then, when they discovered
this “permanent” atom! They had no inkling that
in this way they were carrying materialism into the spiritual
world conception! Materialism induced them to believe that
something — they never said what it was — of the
many atoms that sink down into the ground is saved; and this
fortunate, saved, permanent atom then reappears in the next
incarnation. Much has been written about this permanent atom.
It is nothing more than an example of the fact that something
was borne into spiritual science that people could not rise
above, namely, materialism. It permeates, by the way, the
whole description of man, in the way it is frequently
presented in the literature of the Theosophical Society. As I
have often pointed out, they present the physical body as
dense, the etheric body as thinner, the astral body as still
thinner. Then come degrees of thinness, where even thinking
and conceptions become quite thin. Yet, one is still dealing
with something substantial, like mist; hence, although Buddhi
and Atma are mists, they are still tangible as mists. One
does not have the will power truly to discard materialism
even in one's conceptual life; to pass from concepts of
matter to concepts of the spirit.
All these
things prove how closely human beings are tied to the old
ways of thinking. Out of such considerations, anybody who
honestly wishes to acknowledge spiritual science should take
up the inner challenge to test himself as to how far he has
freed himself from the old materialistic concepts; or, when
he turns to something spiritual, to what extent he imagines
this spiritual manner in materialistic pictures, not being
aware of the fact that they are just pictures.
It is always a
matter of being conscious of this. For if, say, I were to
draw a picture of one of you on the blackboard, the picture
could mean a lot to me, if the person in question were no
longer present. But if I were then to imagine that the person
in the picture would shake my hand, or would speak to me, in
other words, that he would be the actual person, then I would
be suffering from illusions! Therefore, one may naturally
sensualize the spiritual in pictures, but one must always be
aware of the fact that they are nothing but pictures.
In the case of
words, too, people must realize more and more clearly that
language is on the way to turning the word into a gesture,
and that we should go no further than to allow the word to
indicate something to us that no longer is contained in the
word. All words will have to take the same direction that
proper names have taken.
For
philosophers, I have something even better to say.
Philosophers of recent times have set up any number of
theories. When I say, “The child is small,” they
have a concept of “small;” they have a concept of
“child.” The “is,” however, the
copula of the two — what does it mean? Oh, much has
been written about this copula even in the philosophical
sense, not just from the grammatical or philological
standpoint. Everything that has been written about it suffers
from the fact that this verb, “is,” no longer has
the meaning of which people speak. It has already emancipated
itself from its meaning and the soul content has become a
different one. Thus, people in fact philosophize about
something that no longer lives in the soul in an alive
sense.
This is just an
incidental philosophical remark which perhaps doesn't have
much significance, but it is supposed to draw your attention
to the fact that something that is not noticed by the outer
world is by no means noticed immediately by the philosophers.
Nevertheless, it is often true that the philosophers are the
last to notice the things that really occur in the world, and
many of our philosophical systems lag considerably behind
what exists outside of themselves!
By proceeding
principally from the example of language, however, I have
tried to show you quite concretely how present-day human
development presents itself. What actually takes place in
regard to human development can really only be seen by
looking at super-sensible facts. Anthropology can no longer
discover what actually takes place, only anthroposophy. This
is the reason why anthroposophical cultural thinking must lie
at the foundation of everything that constitutes work for the
progress of mankind.
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