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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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Man as a Being of Sense and Perception
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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Man as a Being of Sense and Perception
Memory and Love in Connection with Childhood Development
Schmidt Number: S-4550
On-line since: 27th June, 2002
THIS cleft in human nature of which I have been speaking also finds
expression in everyday communal life. You find it in the relationship
of two human capacities which even the most casual examination shows
as belonging by their very nature to the life of both soul and body.
You have on the one hand the faculty of memory, an important
factor in soul-life, but bound up with the bodily life; and on the
other hand a capacity less noticeable, because men give themselves to
it more or less naively and uncritically I mean the capacity
for love. Let me say from the outset that, whether we are
speaking about the being of man himself or of his relationship to the
world, we must start from the reality and not from any preconceived
idea. I have often made use of a somewhat trite illustration of what
it means to proceed from ideas instead of from reality. Someone sees a
razor and says, That is a knife, a knife is used for cutting up
food! So he takes the razor for cutting up food, because it is a
knife. Scientific conceptions about birth and death as they relate to
man and animal are somewhat like this, though people are not generally
aware of it, believing the subject to be a very learned one. Sometimes
these ideas are even made to cover the plants. The scientists form an
idea of what birth is, or what death is, just as one forms an idea of
what a knife is, and then go on from that idea, which of course
expresses a certain series of facts, to examine human death, animal
death and even plant death, all in the same way, without taking into
account that what is usually comprised in the idea of death might be
something quite different in man from what it is in animals. We must
take our start from the reality of the animal and the
reality of man, not from some idea we have formed of the
phenomenon of death.
We form our ideas about memory in somewhat the same way. It is
particularly so when the concept of memory is applied indifferently to
both man and animal, with the object of finding similarities between
them. Our attention has been drawn, for example, to something that
happened in the case of the famous Professor Otto Liebmann. An
elephant, on his way to the pond to drink, is in some way offended by
a passer-by, who does something to him. The elephant passes on; but
when he comes back again, and finds the man still there, he spouts
water over him from his trunk because, so says the theoriser,
he has obviously remarked, has stored up in his memory, the injury
received.
The outer appearance of the thing is of course, seen from such a
theoretical standpoint, very misleading, but not more so than the
attempt to cut one's meat at table with a razor. The point is that one
must always start from reality and not from ideas acquired from one
series of phenomena and then transferred arbitrarily to another
series. Usually people completely fail to see how widespread to-day is
the error in scientific method I have just described.
The human faculty of memory must be understood entirely out of human
nature itself. To do this one needs an opportunity of watching how the
memory develops in the course of the development of the individual.
Anyone who can make such a study will be able to note that memory
expresses itself quite differently in the very little child from the
way it expresses itself from the ages of six, seven or eight onwards.
In later years memory assumes much more of a soul-character, whereas
in the earliest years of a child's life one can clearly see to what a
large extent it is bound up with organic conditions, and how it then
extricates itself from those conditions. And if you look at the
connection between the child's memories and his formation of concepts
you will see that his formation of concepts is very dependent upon
what he experiences in his environment through sense-perception,
through all the twelve varieties of sense-perception that I have
distinguished.
It is most fascinating, and at the same time extraordinarily
important, to see how the concepts that the child forms depend
entirely upon the experiences he undergoes; above all upon the
behaviour of those around him. For in the years with which we are here
concerned the child is an imitator, an imitator even as regards the
concepts he forms. On the other hand, it will easily be seen that the
faculty of memory arises more out of the child's inward development,
more out of his whole bodily constitution very little indeed
out of the constitution of the senses and therefore of the human head.
One can detect an inner connection with the way the child is
constituted, whether the formation of his blood, the nourishment of
his blood, is more or less normal, or whether it is abnormal. It will
be readily remarked that children with a tendency to anĉmia have
difficulties in remembering; while on the other hand such children
form concepts and ideas more easily.
I can only hint at these things, for in the last resort everyone, if
he has been given the right lines to go upon, must seek his own
confirmation of them in life itself. He will then find that it is from
the head-organisation that is, from the nerve-senses
organisation and thus from experiences arising out of
perception, that the child forms concepts; but that the faculty of
memory, interwoven as it were with the formation of concepts, develops
out of the rest of the organism. And if one pursues this study
further, particularly if one tries to discover what lies behind the
very individual manner of memory-formation, how it differs in children
who tend to a short, squat figure and in those who tend to shoot up,
one will find a connection clearly indicated between the phenomena of
growth as a whole and formation of the power of memory.
Now I have said on earlier occasions that the formation of the head
represents a metamorphosis of the human being's organic structure,
apart from the head organisation, in an earlier earth-life. Thus what
we carry about in a particular earth-life as our head is the
transformed body (apart from the head) of the previous earth-life, but
especially the transformed metabolic-limb system; or what to-day is
metabolic-limb man is transformed during the life between death and
rebirth into the head-formation of the next earthly life. One must of
course not think of it in a materialistic way; it has nothing to do
with the matter that fills out the body, but with the relationships of
forms and forces.
Thus, when we see that the child's faculty of forming concepts, his
faculty of thought, depends upon his head-formation, we can also say
that his capacity for thought is connected with his earlier life on
earth.
On the other hand, what develops in us as the faculty of memory
depends primarily on how we are able to maintain in a well-organised
condition the metabolic-limb system of this present earth-life. The
two things go together: one of them a man brings with him from his
previous earth-life, and the other, the faculty of memory, he acquires
through organising and maintaining a new organism.
From this you will understand that ordinary memory, which we have
primarily for use between birth and death and which we cultivate in
connection with this earth-life, does not suffice to enable us to look
back into the life before birth, to look back into our pre-natal life.
Hence it is necessary this is something I constantly emphasise
when I am expounding the methodology of the subject for us to
acquire the ability to go behind this memory, to learn to understand
clearly that it is something that is of service to us between birth
and death, but that we have to develop a higher faculty which traces
in a backward direction, entirely in the manner of memory, what has
taken shape in us as the power of thought. Anyone who constructs an
abstract theory of knowledge substitutes a word for a deed. For
example, he says, Mathematical concepts are a
priori, because they do not have to be acquired through
experience, because their certainty does not have to be confirmed by
experience; they lie behind experience, a priori. That is a
phrase. And to-day this phrase is to be heard over and over again in
the mouths of Kantians. This a priori really means that we have
experienced these ideas in our previous earth-life; but they are none
the less experiences acquired by humanity in the course of its
evolution. The simple fact is that humanity is in such a stage of its
evolution that most men, civilised men at any rate, bring mathematical
concepts with them, and these have only to be awakened.
There is of course an important pedagogic difference between the
process of awakening mathematical concepts and that of imparting such
thoughts and ideas as have to be acquired through external experience,
and in which the faculty of memory plays an essential role. One can
also, especially if one has acquired a certain power of insight into
the peculiarities of human evolution, distinguish clearly between two
types of growing children those who bring much from their
previous earth lives and to whom it is therefore easy to communicate
ideas, and others who have less facility in the formation of ideas but
are good at noticing the qualities of external things, and therefore
easily absorb what they can take in through their own observation. But
in this the faculty of memory is at work, for one cannot easily learn
about external things in the way in which things have to be taught in
school. Of course a child can form a concept, but he cannot learn in
such a way as to reproduce what he has learnt unless a clear faculty
of memory is there. Here, in short, one can perceive quite exactly the
flowing together of two streams in human evolution.
Now what is it exactly that lies behind this! Just think on the
one hand you have the human being shaping his concept-forming faculty
through his head-organisation. Why does he do that? You have only to
look at the human head-organisation with understanding to say why.
You see, the head-organisation makes its appearance comparatively
early in embryonal life, before the essentials of the rest of the
organisation are added. Embryology furnishes definite proof of what
Anthroposophy has to say about human evolution. But you need not go so
far, you need only look at the adult man. Look at his
head-organisation. To begin with, it is so fashioned as to be the most
perfect part of the human organisation taken as a whole. Well, perhaps
this idea is open to dispute; but there is another idea that cannot be
gainsaid, if only one looks at it in the right way; that is the idea
that we are related to our head in experience quite differently from
the way we are related to the rest of our organism. We are aware of
the rest of our organism in quite a different way from the way we are
aware of our head. The truth is that our head effaces itself in our
own soul-life. We have far more organic consciousness of the whole of
the rest of our organism than we have of our head. Our head is really
the part of us that is obliterated within our organisation.
Moreover this head stands apart from the relationships of the rest of
our organism with the world, first of all through the way the brain is
organised. I have often called attention to the fact that the brain is
so heavy that it would crush everything that lay beneath it were it
not swimming in the cerebral fluid, thereby losing the whole of the
weight that a body would have that was made of brain fluid and was the
same size as the brain; thus the brain loses weight in the ratio of
from 1,300 or 1,400 grammes to 20 grammes. But this means that while
the human being, in so far as he stands on the earth, has his natural
weight, the brain is lifted out of this relationship with gravity in
which the human being is involved. But even if you do not stress this
inward phenomenon, but confine yourself to what is external, you might
well say that in the whole way in which you bear your head, in the way
you carry it through the world, it is like a lord or lady sitting in a
carriage. The carriage has to move on, but when it does so, the lord
or lady sitting in it is carried along without having to make any
exertion. Our head is related to the rest of our organism somewhat in
this way. Many other things help to bring this about. Our head is, so
to speak, lifted out of all our other connections with the world. That
is precisely because in our head we have in physical transformation
what our soul, together with the rest of our organism, experienced in
an earlier earth-life.
If you study the four principal members of the human organisation in
the head physical body, ether body, astral body and ego
it is really only the ego that has a certain independence. The other
three members have created images of themselves in the physical
formation of the head. Of this, too, I once gave a convincing proof:
On this occasion I should like to lead up to it by telling a story,
rather than in a theoretical way.
I once told you that many years ago, when circumstances had brought
about the foundation of the Giordano Bruno Society, I was present at a
lecture on the brain given by a thoroughgoing materialist. As a
materialist, of course, he made a sketch of the structure of the
brain, and proved that fundamentally this structure was the expression
of the life of the soul. One can quite well do that.
Now the president of the society was the headmaster of a
grammar-school, not a materialist, but a hide-bound Herbartian. For
him there was nothing but the philosophy of Herbart. He said that, as
a Herbartian, he could be quite satisfied with the presentation; only
he did not take what the lecturer had drawn, from his standpoint of
strict materialism, to be the matter of the brain. Thus when
the other man had sketched the parts of the brain, the connecting
tissues and so on, the Herbartian was quite willing to accept the
sketch; it was quite acceptable to the Herbartian, who was no
materialist, for, said he, where the other man had written parts of
the brain, he needed only to write idea-complexes, and instead
of brain fibres he only had to write association fibres. Then
he was describing something of a soul-nature
idea-complexes where the other was describing parts of the
brain. And where the other drew brain-fibres, he put
association-fibres, those formations that John Stuart Mill had so
fantastically imagined as going from idea to idea, entirely without
will, automatically, all kinds of formations woven by the soul between
the idea-complexes! One can find good examples of that in Herbart
also.
Thus both men could find a point of contact in the sketch. Why? Simply
because the human brain really is in this respect an extraordinarily
good imprint of the soul-spiritual. The soul-spiritual makes a very
good imprint of itself on the brain. It certainly has had time during
the period between death and new birth to call into existence this
configuration, which then so wonderfully expresses its soul-life in
the observable plastic formations of the brain.
Let us now pass on to the psychological exposition given by Theodore
Ziehen. We find that he also describes the parts of the brain and so
on in a materialistic way, and it all seems very plausible. It is also
extremely conscientious. One can in fact do that; if one looks at
man's intellectual life, the life of ideas, one can find a very exact
reproduction of it in the brain. But with such a psychology one
does not get as far as feeling, still less as far as
will. If you look at such a psychology as Ziehen's, you will
find that feeling is nothing more than a feeling-stress of the idea,
and that will is entirely lacking. The fact is that feeling and will
are not related in the same way to what has already been
formed, already been given shape. Feeling is connected with the
human rhythmic system; it is still in full movement, it has its
configuration in movement. And will, which is connected above all with
the plastic coming-into-existence and fading-away which take place in
metabolism, cannot portray itself in reflected images, as is possible
with ideas. In short, in the life of ideas, in the faculty of
ideation, we have something of soul-life that can express itself
plastically, pictorially, in the head. But there we are in the realm
of the astral body; for when we form ideas, the entire activity of
ideation belongs to the astral body. Thus the astral body creates its
image in the human head. It is only the ego that still remains
somewhat mobile. The etheric body has its exact imprint in the head,
and the physical body most definitely so of all. On the other hand, in
the rhythmic system there is no imprint of the astral body as such,
but only of the etheric and physical bodies. And in the metabolic
system only the physical body has its mirror-image.
To summarise, you can think of the matter in this way. In the head you
have physical body, etheric body and astral body, in such a way that
they are portrayed in the physical; that in fact their impression can
be detected in the physical forms. It is not possible to understand
the human head in any other way than by seeing it in these three
forms. The ego is still free in relation to the head.
If we pass on to the rest of the human organisation, to the
breathing-system, for instance, we find the physical and etheric
bodies have their imprints within it; but the astral body and the ego
have no such imprints; they are to a certain extent free. And in the
metabolic-limb system we have the physical body as such, and the ego,
astral body and etheric body are free. We have not only to recognise
the presence of one of these members, but to distinguish whether it is
in the free or the bound condition. Of course it is not
that an astral body and an etheric body have no basis in the head;
they permeate the head too. But they are not free within it, they are
imprinted in the head-organisation. On the other hand, the astral
body, for example, is quite free throughout the rhythmic system,
particularly in the breathing. It acts freely. It does not merely
permeate the system, but it is actively present within it.
Now let us put two things together. The one is that we can affirm a
connection between the faculty of memory and the organisation outside
the head; the other is that we have to look outside the head also for
the feeling and willing organisations. You see we are now coupling
together the feeling world of the soul and the world of
memory. And if you take note of your own experience in relation to
these two things, you will discover that there is a very close
connection between them.
The way in which we can remember depends essentially on the way we can
participate in things, on how far we can enter into them with that
part of our organisation which lies outside the head. If we are very
much head-men, we shall understand a great deal, but remember little
in such a way that we grow together with it. There is a significant
connection between the capacity for feeling and the faculty of memory.
But at the same time we see that the human organisation apart from the
head, in the early stages of its development, becomes more like the
head. If you take the embryonal life, then, to begin with, the human
being is practically all head; the rest is added. When the child is
born just think how imperfect is the rest of the organisation
in comparison with the head! But it is attached to the head. Between
birth and death the rest of the organisation becomes more and more
like the head-organisation, and shows this notably in the emergence of
the second teeth. The first teeth, the so-called milk teeth, are
derived more from the head-organisation. It will be easy to
demonstrate this anatomically and physiologically when suitable
methods are applied. To spiritual scientific investigation it is
unquestionable. In the second teeth the entire man plays his part. The
teeth which are derived more from the head-organisation are cast out.
The rest of the man assists in the formation of the second teeth.
In fact, in the first and second teeth we have a kind of image
translated into the physical an image of the formation of
concepts and memory respectively. The milk teeth are formed out of the
human organism rather in the way concepts are formed, except that
concepts of course are translated into the sphere of the mental life,
whereas the second teeth are derived out of the human organism more in
the way the faculty of memory is derived. One only has to be capable
of recognising these very subtle differences in human nature.
When you grasp such a thing as this, then you will of course see that
one can really understand the structure of matter particularly
when it comes to organic life only if one understands it in its
spiritual formation. The thorough-going materialist looks at the
material man, studies the material man. And anyone who starts from the
reality and not from his materialistic prejudices, will at once see in
the child that this human head is formed out of the super-sensible,
through a metamorphosis of his previous earthly life, and then he sees
that the rest is added out of the world into which the child is now
transplanted; the rest is added, but that too is formed out of the
spiritual, out of the super-sensible of this world.
It is important to pay attention to such a view. For the point is that
we should not speak abstractly of the material world and of the
spiritual world, but we should acquire an insight into the way the
material world originates in the spiritual world; an insight, so to
speak, into the way the spiritual world is imaged in the material
world. Only we must not thereby remain in the abstract, but must enter
into the concrete. We must be able to acquire an insight into the
difference between the head and the rest of the organism. Then in the
very forms of the head we shall see a somewhat different derivation
from the spiritual world, compared with what we see in the rest of the
organism. For the rest of the organism is added to us entirely in the
present earth-life, whilst the head organisation, down to its very
shape, we bring with us out of our previous earth-life. Whoever
reflects upon this will see the folly of such an objection to
Anthroposophy as has again recently been made, in a debate which took
place in Munich, by Eucken so highly respected by many people
despite his journalistic philistinism. By putting forward the foolish
idea that what one can perceive is material, Eucken raised the
objection that Anthroposophy is materialistic. Naturally, if one
invents such a definition, one can prove what one will; but anyone who
does so is certainly ill-acquainted with the accepted method of proof.
It is a question of grasping how the material, in its emergence from
the spiritual, can be regarded as bearing witness to the spiritual
world.
Again and to-day I can only go as far as this if you
grasp the connection between the birth of memory and the forces of
growth, you will thereby recognise an interplay between what we
call material and what in later life, from seven to eight years of age
onwards, develops as the soul-spiritual life. It really is a fact that
what shows itself later in more abstract intellectual form as the
faculty of memory is active, to begin with, in growth.
It is really the same force. The same method of observation must be
applied to this as is applied, let us say, when we speak of latent
heat and free heat. Heat which is free, which is released from its
latent condition, behaves externally in the physical world like the
force which, after having been the source of the phenomena of growth
in the earliest years of childhood, then manifests itself in the inner
life as the force of memory. What lies behind the phenomena of growth
in earliest childhood is the same thing as what later makes its
appearance in its own proper form as the faculty of memory.
I developed this more fully in the course of lectures given here in
the Goetheanum last autumn. [* Grenzen der Naturerkenntnis,
27th Sept. to 2nd Oct., 1920 (Translated as "The Boudaries of Natural Science.)] You
will see how one can discover along these lines an intimate connection
between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical, and how therefore
we have in the faculty of memory something which on the one hand
appears to us as of a soul-spiritual nature, and on the other hand,
when it appears in other cosmic connections, manifests as the force of
growth.
We find just the opposite when we consider the human capacity for
love, which shows itself on the one hand to be entirely bound
up with the bodily nature, and which on the other hand we can grasp,
exactly like the faculty of memory, as the most soul-like function. So
that in fact this I will explain more fully in later lectures
in memory and love you have capacities in which
you can experience the interplay between the spiritual and the bodily,
and which you can also associate with the whole relationship between
man and the world.
In the case of memory we have already done this, for we have related
ideation with previous earth-lives, and the faculty of memory with the
present earth-life. In later lectures we shall see that we can
experience the same thing as regards the capacity for love. One can
show how it is developed in the present earth-life, but passes over
through the life between death and rebirth into the next earthly life.
Why are we making a point of this? Because to-day man needs to be able
to make the transition from the soul-spiritual to the bodily-physical.
In the soul-spiritual we experience morality; within the
physical-bodily we experience natural necessity. As things are seen
to-day, if one is honest in each sphere one has to admit that there is
no bridge between them. And I said yesterday that because there is no
such bridge, people make a distinction between what they call real
knowledge, based upon natural causality, and the content of pure
faith, which is said to be concerned with the world of morality
because natural causality on the one hand, and the life of the
soul-spirit on the other, exist side by side without any connection.
But the whole point is that in order to recover a fully human
consciousness, we need to build a bridge between these two.
Above all we must remember that the moral world cannot exist without
postulating freedom; the natural world cannot exist without necessity.
Indeed, there could be no science if there were not this necessity. If
one phenomenon were not of necessity caused by another in natural
continuity, everything would be arbitrary, and there could be no
science. An effect could arise from a cause that one could not
predict! We get science when we try to see how one thing
proceeds from another, that one thing proceeds from another.
But if this natural causality is universal, then moral freedom is
impossible; there can be no such thing. Nevertheless the consciousness
of this moral freedom within the realm of soul and spirit, as a fact
of direct experience, is present in every man.
The contradiction between what the human being experiences in the
moral constitution of his soul and the causality of nature is not a
logical one, but a contradiction in life. This contradiction is always
with us as we go through the world; it is part of our life. The fact
is that, if we honestly admit what we are faced with, we shall have to
say that there must be natural causality, there must be natural
necessity, and we as men are ourselves in the midst of it. But our
inner soul-spiritual life contradicts it. We are conscious that we can
make resolutions, that we can pursue moral ideals which are not given
to us by natural necessity. This is a contradiction which is a
contradiction of life, and anyone who cannot admit that there are such
contradictions simply fails to grasp life in its universality. But in
saying this we are saying something very abstract. It is really only
our way of expressing what we encounter in life. We go through life
feeling ourselves all the time actually at variance with external
nature. It seems as if we are powerless, as if we must feel ourselves
at variance with ourselves. To-day we can feel the presence of these
contradictions in many men in a truly tragic way.
For example, I knew a man who was quite full of the fact that there is
necessity in the world in which man himself is involved.
Theoretically, of course, one can admit such a necessity and at the
same time not trouble much about it with one's entire manhood. Then
one goes through the world as a superficial person and one will not be
inwardly filled with tragedy. Be that as it may, I knew a man who
said, Everywhere there is necessity and we men are placed within
it. There is no doubt about it, science forces us to a recognition of
this necessity. But at the same time necessity allows bubbles to arise
in us which delude us with hopes of a free soul-life. We have to see
through that delusion, we have to look upon it as hot air. This too is
a necessity.
That is man's frightful illusion. That is the foundation of pessimism
in human nature. The man who has little idea of how deeply such a
thing can work into the human soul will not be able to enter into the
feeling that this contradiction in life, which is absolutely real, can
undermine the whole soul, and can lead to the view that life in its
inmost nature is a misfortune. Confronted by the conflict between
scientific certainty and the certitude of faith, it is only
thoughtlessness and lack of sensitivity that prevent men from coming
to such inner tragedy in their lives. For this tragic attitude towards
life is really the one that goes with the plight of soul to which
mankind can come to-day.
But whence comes the impotence which results in such a tragic attitude
to life! It comes from the fact that civilised humanity has for
centuries allowed itself to become entangled in certain abstractions,
in intellectualism. The most this intellectualism can say is that
natural necessity deludes us by strange methods with a feeling of
freedom, but that there is no freedom. It exists only in our ideas. We
are powerless in the face of necessity.
Then comes the important question is that truest? And now you
see that the lectures I have been giving for weeks actually all lead
up to the question: Are we really powerless? Are we really so
impotent in the face of this contradiction? Remember how I said that
we have in our lives not only an ascending development, but a
declining one; that our intellectual life is not bound up with the
forces of growth, but with the forces of death, the forces of decay;
that in order to develop intelligence we need to die. You will
remember how I showed here several weeks ago the significance of the
fact that certain elements with specific affinities and valencies
carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur combine to
form protein. They do so not by ordinary chemical combination, but on
the, contrary by becoming utterly chaotic. You will then see that all
these studies are leading up to this to make it clear to you
that what I have told you is not just a theoretical contradiction, but
an actual process in human nature. We are not here merely in order,
through living, to sense this contradiction, but our inner life is a
continual process of destruction of what develops as causality in
outer nature. We men really dissolve natural causality within
ourselves. What outside is physical process, chemical process, is
developed within us in a reverse direction, towards the other side. Of
course we shall see this clearly only if we take into consideration
the upper and the lower man, if we grasp by means of the upper man
what emerges from metabolism by way of contra-mechanisation,
contra-physicalisation, contra-chemicalisation. If we try to grasp the
contra-materialisation in the human being, then we do not have merely
a logical, theoretical contradiction in ourselves, but we have the
real process we have the process of human development, of human
becoming, as the thing in us that itself counteracts natural
causality, and human life as consisting in a battle against it. And
the expression of this struggle, which goes on all the while to
dissolve the physical synthesis, the chemical synthesis, to analyse it
again the expression of this analytic life in us is summed up
in the awareness: I am free. What I have just put before
you in a few words the study of the human process of becoming
as a process of combat against natural causality, as a reversal of
natural causality we shall make the subject of forthcoming
lectures.
Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
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