LECTURE XI Dornach, April 30, 1921
In the course
of these lectures we have seen that the middle of the
nineteenth century is an important time in the development of
Western humanity. Attention was called to the fact that in a
sense the culmination of the materialistic way of thinking
and the materialistic world view occurred during this time.
Yet it also had to be pointed out that this trend that has
emerged in the human being since the fifteenth century was
really something spiritual. Thus, it can be said that the
characteristic of this developmental phase of recent human
evolution was that simultaneously with becoming the most
spiritual, the human being could not take hold of this
spirituality. Instead, human beings filled themselves only
with materialistic thinking, feeling, and even with
materialistic will and activity. Our present age is still
dominated by the aftereffects of what occurred in so many
people without their being aware of it, and then reached its
climax in mankind's development. What was the purpose of this
climax? It occurred because something decisive was meant to
take place in regard to contemporary humanity's attainment of
the consciousness soul stage.
In focusing
on the evolution of humanity from the third post-Atlantean
epoch until approximately the year 747 (see sketch) before
the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that a process runs its
course that can be called the development of the sentient
soul in humanity. Then the age of the rational or mind soul
begins and lasts roughly until the year 1413. It reaches its
high point in that era of which external history has little
to report. It must be taken into consideration, however, if
European development is to be comprehended at all. This
culmination point occurs approximately in the year 333 after
Christ. Since the year 1413, we are faced with the
development of the consciousness soul, a development we are
still involved in and that saw a decisive event around the
year 1850, or better, 1840.
A.D. 333
----------747-----------/-------------1413----------1840
Sentient Soul........Rational Soul....Consciousness Soul
For mankind
as a whole, matters had reached a point around 1840 where,
insofar as the representative personalities of the various
nations are concerned, we can say that they were faced with
an intellect that had already assumed its most shadowy form.
(Following this, we shall have to consider the reaction of
the individual nations.) The intellect had assumed its
shadowlike character. I tried yesterday to characterize this
shadow nature of the intellect. People in the civilized world
had evolved to the extent that, from then on it was possible
on the basis of the general culture and without initiation to
acquire the feeling: We possess intellect. The intellect has
matured, but insofar as its own nature is concerned, it no
longer has a content. We have concepts but these concepts are
empty. We must fill them with something.
This, in a
sense, is the call passing through humanity, though dimly and
inaudibly. But in the deep, underlying, subconscious longings
of human beings lives the call, the wish to receive a
content, substance, for the shadow nature of rational
thinking. Indeed, it is the call for spiritual science.
This call can
also be comprehended concretely. In the middle of the
nineteenth century, the human organization, in the physical
part of which this shadowy intellect is trained, had simply
progressed to the point where it could cultivate this empty
shadowy intellect particularly well. Now, something was
required for this shadowy intellect; it had to be filled with
something. This could only happen if the human being
realized: I have to assimilate something of what is not
offered to me on the earth itself and does not dwell there,
something I cannot learn about in the life between birth and
death. I actually have to absorb something into my intellect
that, although it was extinguished and became obscured when I
descended with the results of my former earth lives out of
spiritual soul worlds into a physical corporeality,
nevertheless rests in the depths of my soul. From there, I
have to bring it up once again, I have to call to mind
something that rests within me simply by virtue of the fact
that I am a human being of the nineteenth century.
Earlier, it
would not have been possible for human beings to have
practiced self-awareness in the same manner. This is why they
first had to advance in their human condition to the point
where the physical body increasingly acquired the maturity to
perfect and utilize the shadowy intellect completely. Now, at
least among the most advanced human beings, the physical
bodies had reached the point where one could have said, or
rather, since then it is possible to say: I wish to call to
mind what it is that I am seeking to bring up from the depths
of my soul life in order to pour a content into this shadowy
intellect. This shadowy intellect would have been filled with
something and in this way the consciousness soul age would
have dawned. Therefore, at this point in time, the occasion
arose where the consciousness soul could have unfolded.
Now you will
say: Yes, but the whole era prior to that, beginning with the
year 1413, was the age of the consciousness soul. Yes,
certainly, but at first it has been a preparatory
development. You need only consider what basic conditions
existed for such a preparation particularly in this period as
compared to all earlier times. Into this period falls, for
example, the invention of the printing press; the
dissemination of the written word. Since the fifteenth
century, people by and by have received a great amount of
spiritual content by means of the art of printing and through
writing. But they absorb this content only outwardly; it is
the main feature of this period that an overwhelming sum of
spiritual content has been assimilated superficially. The
nations of the civilized world have absorbed something
outwardly which the great masses of people could receive only
by means of audible speech in earlier times. It was true of
the period of rational development, and in the age of the
sentient soul it was all the more true that, fundamentally
speaking, all dissemination of learning was based on oral
teaching. Something of the psycho-spiritual element still
resounds through speech. Especially in former days, what
could be termed “the genius of language”
definitely still lived in words. This ceased to be when the
content of human learning began to be assimilated in abstract
forms, through writing and printed works. Printed and written
words have the peculiarity of in a sense extinguishing what
the human being brings with him at birth from his
pre-earthly, heavenly existence.
It goes
without saying that this does not mean that you should
forthwith cease to read or write. It does mean that today a
more powerful force is needed in order to raise up what lies
deep within the human being. But it is necessary that this
stronger force be acquired. We have to arrive at
self-awareness despite the fact that we read and write; we
have to develop this stronger faculty, stronger in comparison
to what was needed in earlier times. This is the task in the
age of the development of the consciousness soul.
Before taking
a look at how the influences of the spiritual world have now
started to flow down in a certain way into the physical,
sensory world, let us pose the question today, How did the
nations of modern civilization actually meet this point of
time in 1840?
From earlier
lectures we know that the representative people for the
development of the consciousness soul, hence for what matters
particularly in our age, is the Anglo-Saxon nation. The
Anglo-Saxon people are those who through their whole
organization are predisposed to develop the consciousness
soul to a special degree. The prominent position occupied by
the Anglo-Saxon nation in our time is indeed due to the fact
that this nation is especially suited for the development of
the consciousness soul. But now let us ask ourselves from a
purely external viewpoint, How did this Anglo-Saxon nation
arrive at this point in time that is the most significant one
in modern cultural development?
It can be
said that the Anglo-Saxon nation in particular has survived
for a long time in a condition — naturally with the
corresponding variations and metamorphoses — that could
perhaps be described best by saying, Those inner impulses,
which had already made way for other forms in Greek culture,
were preserved in regard to the inner soul condition of the
Anglo-Saxon people. The strange thing in the eleventh and
tenth centuries
B.C.
is that the nations experienced what is
undergone at different periods, that the various ages move,
as it were, one on top of the other. The problem is that such
matters are extraordinarily difficult to notice because in
the nineteenth century all sorts of things already existed
— reading, writing — and because the living
conditions prevailing in Scotland and England were different
from those in Homeric times.
And yet, if
the soul condition of the people as a nation is taken into
consideration, the fact is that this soul condition of the
Homeric era, which in Greece was outgrown in the tragic age
and changed into Sophoclism, has remained. This age, a kind
of patriarchal conception of life and existence, was
preserved in the Anglo-Saxon world up until the nineteenth
century. In particular, this patriarchal life spread out from
the soul condition in Scotland. This is the reason why the
influence proceeding from the initiation centers in Ireland
did not have an effect on the Anglo-Saxon nation. As was
mentioned on other occasions, that influence predominantly
affected continental Europe. On the British isle itself, the
predominant influence originated from initiation truths that
came down from the north, from Scotland. These initiation
truths then permeated everything else. But there is an
element in the whole conception of the human personality
that, in a sense, has remained from primordial times. This
still has aftereffects; it lingers on even in the way, say,
the relationship between Whigs and Tories develops in the
British Parliament. The fact is that fundamentally we are not
dealing with the difference between liberal and conservative
views. Instead, we have to do with two political persuasions
for which people today really have no longer any perception
at all.
Essentially,
the Whigs are the continuation of what could be called a
segment of mankind imbued with a general love of humanity and
originating in Scotland. According to a fable, which does
have a certain historical background, the Tories were
originally Catholicizing horse thieves from Ireland. This
contrast, which then expressed itself in their particular
political strivings, reflects a certain patriarchal
existence. This patriarchal existence retained certain
primitive forces, which can be observed in the kind of
attitude exhibited by the owners of large properties toward
those people who had settled on these lands as their
vassals.
This
relationship of subservience actually lasted until the
nineteenth century; nobody was elected to Parliament who did
not possess a certain power by virtue of being a landowner.
We only have to consider what this implies. Such matters are
not weighed in the right manner. Just think what it
signifies, for example, that it was not until the year 1820
that English Parliament repealed the law according to which a
person was given the death penalty for having stolen a pocket
watch or having been a poacher. Until then, the law decreed
that such misdeeds were capital offenses. This certainly
demonstrates the way in which particular, ancient, and
elementary conditions had remained. Today, people observe
life in their immediate surroundings and then extend the
fundamental aspects of present-day civilization backwards, so
to speak. In regard to the most important regions of Europe,
they are unaware of how recently these things have developed
from quite primitive conditions.
Thus, it is
possible to say that these patriarchal conditions survived as
the foundation and basis of a society that was subsequently
infused with the most modern impulse, unimaginable in the
social structure without the development of the consciousness
soul. Just consider all the changes in the social structure
of the eighteenth century due to the technological
metamorphosis in the textile industry and the like. Note how
the mechanical, technological element moved into this
patriarchal element. Try to form a clear idea of how, owing
to the transformation of the textile industry, the nascent
modern Proletariat pushes into the social structure that is
based on this patriarchal element, this relationship of
landowner to subjects. Just think of this chaotic
intermingling, think how the cities develop in the ancient
countryside and how the patriarchal attitude takes a daring
plunge, so to say, into modern, socialistic, proletarian
life.
To picture it
graphically, we can actually say that this form of life
develops in the way it existed in Greece approximately until
the year
1000 B.C.
(see drawing). Then it makes a daring jump and we suddenly find
ourselves in the year
A.D. 1820.
Inwardly, the life of the year
1000 B.C.
has been retained, but
outwardly, we are in the eighteenth century, say 1770 (see
arrows). Now everything that then existed in modern life,
indeed, even in our present time, pours in. But it is not
until 1820 that this English life makes the connection, finds
it necessary to do so (see drawing); it is not until then
that these matters even became issues, such as the abolition
of the death penalty for a minor theft. Thus we can say that,
here, something very old has definitely flown together with
the most modern element. Thus, the further development then
continues on to the year 1840.
Now, what had
to occur specifically among the Anglo-American people during
this time period, the first half of the nineteenth century?
We have to recall that only after the year 1820, actually not
until after 1830, it became necessary to pass laws in England
according to which children under twelve years of age were
not allowed to be kept working in factories for more than
eight hours a day, no more than twelve hours a day in the
case of children between thirteen and eighteen years of age.
Please, compare that with today's conditions! Just think what
the broad masses of working people demand today as the
eight-hour day! As yet, in the year 1820, boys were put to
work in mines and factories in England for more than eight
hours; only in that year was the eight-hour day established
for them. The twelve-hour day still prevailed, however, in
regard to children between twelve and eighteen.
These things
must certainly be considered in the attempt to figure out the
nature of the elements colliding with each other at that
time. Basically, it could be said that England eased its way
out of the patriarchal conditions only in the second third of
the nineteenth century and found it necessary to reckon with
what had slowly invaded the old established traditions due to
technology and the machine. It was in this way that this
nation, which is preeminently called upon to develop the
consciousness soul, confronted the year 1840.
Now take
other nations of modern civilization. Take what has remained
of the Latin-Roman element; take what has carried over the
Latin-Roman element from the fourth post-Atlantean cultural
period, what has brought over the ancient culture of the
intellectual soul as a kind of legacy into the epoch of the
consciousness soul. Indeed, what had remained of this life of
the intellectual soul reached its highest point, its
culmination, in the French Revolution at the end of the
eighteenth century. We note that the ideals,
freedom, equality, and brotherhood
appear all at once in the most extreme abstraction. We see
them taken up by skeptics such as Voltaire
[Note 1],
by enthusiasts such as Rousseau;
[Note 2]
we see them emerge generally in the broad masses of the people.
We see how the abstraction, which is fully justified in this
sphere, affects the social structure
It is a
completely different course of events from the one over in
England. In England, the vestiges of the old Germanic
patriarchal life are permeated by what the element of modern
technology and modern materialistic, scientific life could
incorporate into the social structure. In France, we have
tradition everywhere. We could say that the French Revolution
has been enacted in the same manner in which a Brutus or a
Caesar once acted in the most diverse ways in ancient Rome.
Thus, here also, freedom, equality and brotherhood surfaced
in abstract forms. Unlike in England, the old existing
patriarchal element was not destroyed from the outside.
Instead, the Roman juridical tradition, the adherence to the
ancient concept of property and ownership of land,
inheritance laws, and so on, what had been established in the
Roman-juristic tradition was corroded by abstraction, driven
asunder by abstraction.
We need only
consider the tremendous change the French Revolution brought
to all of European life. We only need remind ourselves that
prior to the French Revolution those who, in a sense,
distinguished themselves from the masses of the nation also
had legal privileges. Only certain people could aspire to
particular positions in government. What the French
Revolution demanded based on abstraction and the shadowlike
intellect was to make breaches into that system to undermine
it. But it did bear the stamp of the shadowy intellect, the
abstraction. Therefore, the demands that were being made
fundamentally remained a kind of ideology. For this reason,
we can say that anything that is of the shadowy intellect
immediately turns into its opposite.
Then we
observe Napoleonism; we watch the experimentation in the
public and social realm during the course of the nineteenth
century. The first half of the nineteenth century was
certainly experimentation without a goal in France. What is
the nature of the events through which somebody like
Louis-Philippe, for example, becomes king of France, and so
on — what sort of experimenting is carried out? It is
done in such a way that one can recognize that the shadowy
intellect is incapable of truly intervening in the actual
conditions. Everything basically remains undone and
incomplete; it all remains as legacy of ancient Romanism. We
are justified in saying that even today the relationship to,
say, the Catholic Church, which the French Revolution had
quite clearly defined in abstraction, has not been clarified
in France in external, concrete reality. And how unclear was
it time and again in the course of the nineteenth century!
Abstract reasoning had struggled up to a certain level during
the Revolution; then came experimentation and the inability
to cope with external conditions. In this way, this nation
encountered the year 1840.
We can also
consider other nations. Let us look at Italy, for instance,
which, in a manner of speaking, still retained a bit of the
sentient soul in its passage through the culture of the
intellect. It brought this bit of the sentient soul into
modern times and therefore did not advance as far as the
abstract concepts of freedom, equality, and brotherhood
attained in the French Revolution. It did, however, seek the
transition from a certain ancient group consciousness to
individual consciousness in the human being. Italy faced the
year 1840 in a manner that allows us to say, The individual
human consciousness trying to struggle to the fore in Italy
was in fact constantly held down by what the rest of Europe
now represented. We can observe how the tyranny of Habsburg
weighed terribly on the individual human consciousness that
tried to develop in Italy. We see in the 1820's the strange
Congress of Verona
[Note 3]
that tried to determine how one could rise up against the
whole substance of modern civilization. We note that there
proceeded from Russia and Austria a sort of conspiracy
against what the modern consciousness in humanity was meant
to bring. There is hardly anything as interesting as the
Congress of Verona, which basically wished to answer the
question: How does one go about exterminating everything that
is trying to emerge as modern consciousness in mankind?
Then we see
how the people in the rest of Europe struggled in certain
ways. Particularly in Central Europe, only a small percentage
of the population was able to attain to a certain
consciousness, experiencing in a certain manner that the ego
is now supposed to enter into the consciousness soul. We
notice attempts to achieve this at a certain high mental
level. We can see it in the peculiar high cultural level of
Goethe's age in which a man like Fichte was active;
[Note 4]
we see how the ego tried to push
forward into the consciousness soul. Yet we also realize that
the whole era of Goethe actually was something that lived
only in few individuals. I believe people study far too
little what even the most recent past was like. They simply
think, for example the Goethe lived from 1749 until 1832; he
wrote Faust and a number of other works. That is
what is known of Goethe and that knowledge has existed ever
since.
Until the
year 1862, until thirty years after Goethe's death, with few
exceptions, it was impossible for people to acquire a copy of
Goethe's works. They were restricted; only a handful of
people somehow owned a copy of his writings. Hence,
Goetheanism had become familiar only to a select few. It was
not until the 1860's that a larger number of people could
even find out about the particular element that lived in
Goethe. By that time, the faculty of comprehension for it had
disappeared again. An actual understanding of Goethe never
really came about, and the last third of the nineteenth
century was not suited at all for such comprehension.
I have often
mentioned that in the 1870's Hermann Grimm gave his
“Lectures on Goethe”
at the University of Berlin.
[Note 5]
That was a special
event and the book that exists as Hermann Grimm's
Goethe is a significant publication in the context
of central European literature. Yet, if you now take a look
at this book, what is its substance? Well, all the figures
who had any connection with Goethe are listed in it but they
are like shadow images having only two dimensions. All these
portrayals are shadow figures, even Goethe is a
two-dimensional being in Hermann Grimm's depiction. It is not
Goethe himself. I won't even mention the Goethe whom people
at the afternoon coffee parties of Weimar called “the
fat Privy Councillor with the double chin.” In Hermann
Grimm's Goethe, Goethe has no weight at all. He is
merely a two-dimensional being, a shadow cast on the wall. It
is the same with all the others who appear in the book;
Herder — a shadow painted on a wall. We encounter
something a little more tangible in Hermann Grimm's
description of those persons coming from among the ordinary
people who are close to Goethe, for example, Friederike von
Sesenheim who is portrayed there so beautifully, or Lilli
Schoenemann from Frankfurt — hence those who emerge
from a mental atmosphere other than the one in which Goethe
lived. Those are described with a certain
“substance.” But figures like Jacobi and Lavater
are but shadow images on a wall. The reader does not
penetrate into the actual substance of things; here, we can
observe in an almost tangible way the effects of abstraction.
Such abstraction can certainly be charming, as is definitely
the case with Hermann Grimm's book, but the whole thing is
shadowy. Silhouettes, two-dimensional beings, confront us in
it.
Indeed, it
could not be otherwise. For it is a fact that a German could
not call himself a German in Germany at the time when Hermann
Grimm, for example was young. The way one spoke of Germans
during the first half of the nineteenth century is
misunderstood, particularly at present. How
“creepy” it seems to people in the West, those of
the Entente, when they start reading Fichte's
Addresses to the German Nation
today and find him saying:
“I speak simply to Germans, to Germans as such.”
In the same way, the harmless song “Germany, Germany above
all else”
[1]
is interpreted foolishly, for this song means nothing more than
the desire to be a German, not a Swabian, a Bavarian, an Austrian,
a Franconian, or Thuringian. Just as this song referred only to
Germans as such, so Fichte wished simply to address himself
to Germans, not to Austrians, Bavarians, those from the
province of Baden, Wuerttemberg, Franconia, or Prussia; he
wanted to speak “to Germans.” This is naturally
impossible to understand, for instance, in a country where it
has long since become a matter of course to call oneself a
Frenchman. However, in certain periods in Germany, you were
imprisoned if you called yourself German. You could call
yourself an Austrian, a Swabian, a Bavarian, but it amounted
to high treason to call yourself a German. Those who called
themselves Germans in Bavaria expressed the sentiment that
they did not wish to look up merely to the Bavarian throne
and its reign within Bavaria's clearly defined borders, but
implied that they also wished to look beyond the borders of
Bavaria. But that was high treason! People were not permitted
to call themselves Germans.
It is not
understood at all today that these things that are said about
Germans and Germany, refer to this unification of everything
German. Instead, the absurd nonsense is spread that, for
example, Hoffmann's song refers to the notion that Germany
should rule over all the nations of the world although it
means nothing else but: Not Swabia, not Austria, not Bavaria
above all else in the world, but Germany above all else in
the world, just as the Frenchman says: France above all else
in the world. It was, however, the peculiar nature of Central
Europe that basically a tribal civilization existed there.
Even today, you can see this tribal culture everywhere in
Germany. A Wuerttembergian is different from a Franconian. He
differs from him even in the formulation of concepts and
words, indeed, even in the thought forms disseminated in
literature. There really is a marked difference, if you
compare, say, a Franconian, such as cloddy Michael Conrad
— using modern literature as an example — with
something that has been written at the same time by a
Wuerttembergian, hence in the neighboring province.
Something
like this plays into the whole configuration of thoughts
right into the present time. But everything that persists in
this way and lives in the tribal peculiarities remains
untouched by what is now achieved by the representatives of
the nations. After all, in the realm commonly called Germany
something has been attained such as Goetheanism with all that
belongs to it. But it has been attained by only a few
intellectuals; the great masses of people remain untouched by
it. The majority of the population has more or less
maintained the level of central Europe around the year
A.D. 300 or 400.
Just as the Anglo-Saxon people have stayed on the
level of around the year
1000 B.C.,
people in Central Europe
have remained on the level of the year
A.D. 400.
Please do
not take this in the sense that a terrible arrogance might
arise with the thought that the Anglo-Saxons have remained
behind in the Homeric age, and we were already in the year
A.D. 400.
This is not the way to evaluate these matters. I am
only indicating certain peculiarities.
In turn, the
geographic conditions reveal that this level of general soul
development in Germany lasted much longer than in England.
England's old patriarchal life had to be permeated quickly
with what formed the social structure out of the modern
materialistic, scientific, and technological life first in
the area of the textile industry, and later also in the area
of other technologies. The German realm and Central Europe in
general opposed this development initially, retaining the
ancient peculiarities much longer. I might say, they retained
them until a point in time when the results of modern
technology already prevailed fully all over the world. To a
certain extent, England caught up in the transformation of
the social structure in the first half of the nineteenth
century. Everything that was achieved there definitely
bypassed central Europe.
Now, Central
Europe did absorb something of abstract revolutionary ideas.
They came to expression through various movements and
stirrings in the 1840's in the middle of the nineteenth
century. But this region sat back and waited, as it were,
until technology had infused the whole world. Then, a strange
thing happened. An individual — we could also take
other representatives — who in Germany had acquired his
thinking from Hegelianism, namely, Karl Marx, went over to
England, studied the social structure there and then
formulated his socialist doctrines. At the end of the
nineteenth century, Central Europe was then ready for these
social doctrines, and they were accepted there. Thus, if we
tried to outline in a similar manner what developed in this
region, we would have to say: The development progressed in a
more elementary way even though a great variety of ideas were
absorbed from outside through books and printed matter.
The
conditions of
A.D. 400
in central Europe continued on, then
made a jump and basically found the connection only in the
last third of the nineteenth century, around the year 1875.
Whereas the Anglo-Saxon nation met already the year 1840 with
a transformation of conditions, with the necessity of
receiving the consciousness soul, the German people continued
to dream. They still experienced the year 1840 as though in a
dream. Then they slept through the grace period when a bridge
could have been built between leading personalities and what
arose out of the masses of the people in the form of the
proletariat. The latter then took hold of the socialist
doctrine and thereby, beginning about the year 1875, exerted
forcible, radical pressure in the direction of the
consciousness soul. Yet even this was in fact not noticed; in
any case it was not channeled in any direction, and even
today it is basically still evaluated in the most distorted
way.
In order to
arrive at the anomalies at the bottom of this, we need only
call to mind that Oswald Spengler, who wrote the significant book
The Decline of the West,
also wrote a booklet
concerning socialism of which, I believe, 60,000 copies or
perhaps more have been printed. Roughly, it is Spengler's
view that this European, this Western civilization, is
digging its own grave. According to Spengler, by the year
2200, we will be living on the level of barbarism. We have to
agree with Spengler concerning certain aspects of his
observations; for if the European world maintains the course
of development it is pursuing now, then everything will be
barbarized by the time the third millennium arrives. In this
respect Spengler is absolutely correct. The only thing
Spengler does not see and does not want to see is that the
shadowy intellect can be raised to Imaginations out of man's
inner being and that hence the whole of Western humanity can
be elevated to a new civilization.
This
enlivening of culture through the intentions of
anthroposophical spiritual science is something a person like
Oswald Spengler does not see. Rather, he believes that
socialism — the real socialism, as he thinks, a
socialism that truly brings about social living — has
to come into being prior to this decline. The people of the
Occident, according to him, have the mission of realizing
socialism. But, says Oswald Spengler, the only people called
upon to realize socialism are the Prussians. This is why he
wrote the booklet
Prussianism and Socialism.
Any other form of socialism is wrong, according to Spengler.
Only the form that revealed its first rosy dawn in the
Wilhelminian age, only this form of socialism is to capture
the world. Then the world will experience true, proper
socialism.
Thus speaks a
person today whom I must count among the most brilliant
people of our time. The point is not to judge people by the
content of what they say but by their mental capacities. This
Oswald Spengler, who is master of fifteen different
scientific disciplines, is naturally “more intelligent
than all the writers, doctors, teachers, and ministers”
and so on. We can truly say that with his book about the
decline of the West he has presented something that deserves
consideration, and that, by the way, is making a most
profound impression on the young people in Central Europe.
But next to it stands this other idea that I have referred to
above, and you see precisely how the most brilliant people
can arrive today at the strangest notions. People take hold
of the intellect prevalent today and this intellect is
shadowy. The shadows flit to and fro, one is caught up in one
shadow, then one tries to catch up with another —
nothing is alive. After all, in a silhouette, in a woman's
shadow image cast on the wall, her beauty is not at all
recognizable. So it is also with all other matters when they
are viewed as shadow images. The shadow image of Prussianism
can certainly be confused with socialism. If a woman turns
her back to the wall and her shadow falls on it, even the
ugliest woman might be considered beautiful. Likewise,
Prussianism can be mistaken for socialism if the shadowlike
intellect inwardly pervades the mind of a genius.
This is how
we must look at things today. We must not look at the
contents, we must aim for the capacities; that is what
counts. Thus, it has to be acknowledged that Spengler is a
brilliant human being, even though a great number of his
ideas have to be considered nonsense. We live in an age when
original, elementary judgments and reasons must surface. For
it is out of certain elementary depths that one has to arrive
at a comprehension of the present age and thus at impulses
for the realities of the future.
Naturally,
the European East has completely slept through the results of
the year 1840. Just think of the handful of intellectuals as
opposed to the great masses of the Russian people who,
because of the Orthodox religion, particularly the Orthodox
ritual, are still deeply immersed in Orientalism. Then think
of the somnolent effect of men like Alexander I, Nicholas I,
and all the other “I's” who followed them! What
has come about today was therefore the element that aimed for
this point in which the consciousness soul was to have its
impact on European life.
We shall say
more tomorrow.
Translator's Note:
1.
“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,”
the German national anthem.
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