XII
FROM what has been said
during the last few days it will be clear that nowadays one human
being meets another in a different way from what was the case in the
past, and this is of quite recent date — in fact, it entered
human evolution with the century.
In
poetical language no longer suitable for today, former ages foretold
what in this century has come for the whole of humanity. Former ages
spoke of how, at the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called
Dark Age would have run its course, how in a new age there must come
quite new conditions in human evolution, conditions difficult to
attain because at first man is not accustomed to them. And in spite
of the fact that we have now entered an epoch of light, much will
seem more chaotic than what was brought by the long, gloomy Age of
Darkness.
We
must not merely translate into our language what was formerly
presented in a picture derived from ancient clairvoyant vision: if
so, we should be understanding only the old again. We must learn to
perceive it anew with the spiritual means of today. We must permeate
ourselves deeply with the consciousness that in this epoch for the
first time human ego meets human ego in an intercourse of soul that
is free of all veils.
Were
we to go back to the first epoch after the great Atlantean
earth-catastrophe, to the seventh or eighth millennium before Christ,
we should find that fully grown men actually confronted one another
as today only the child confronts grownups, with comprehension of the
complete human being as I characterized it yesterday, a comprehension
where soul and spirit are not found separated from the body but where
the physical body is perceived as being of the nature of soul and
spirit. In the epoch I have called the ancient Indian, which followed
immediately upon the Atlantean catastrophe, the human being did not
consider soul and spirit in the abstract way that we do today, with a
certain justification.
It
is precisely expressions used in this most ancient epoch which seem
to us entirely spiritual which are misunderstood today. We
misunderstand them if we believe that in the first post-Atlantean
epoch of culture men overlooked all they saw in the outer world and
were only willing to concentrate on what existed outside the world of
the senses. This was by no means the case. They had a much fuller
perception of, let us say, a human movement, or of the play of
expression on a countenance, or of the way young people grow in five
years, or of the plastic development of new leaves and blossoms in a
plant, or in an animal of the way the whole of its forces pour into
the hoof and other parts of its leg. Men did direct their gaze into
the world we call that of the senses, but in the material processes
they saw the Spiritual. For them what in the material world presented
itself to their senses was at the same time spiritual. Naturally,
such perception was only possible because over and above what we see
in the sense-world, they actually perceived the Spiritual. They saw
not only the meadow carpeted with flowers but over the flowers they
saw in a vibrating, active existence the cosmic forces which draw
forth the plants from the earth. In a certain way they saw — it
seems grotesque to modern man but I am telling you facts — how
the human being bears on his head a kind of etheric, astral cap. In
this etheric, astral cap they experienced the forces underlying the
growth of the hair. People today are prone to believe that the hair
grows out of the head simply by being pushed from inside, whereas the
truth is that outer Nature draws it forth. In olden times men saw the
reality of things which later as an artistic copy shed their light
into civilization. Just think of the helmet of Pallas Athene for
instance which quite obviously belongs to the head. Those who do not
rightly experience this helmet think of it as placed upon her head.
It is not placed upon the head. It is bestowed by a concentration of
raying cosmic forces that are working around the head of Pallas
Athene and densifying, so that in olden times it would have seemed
impossible to the Greek to form the head of Pallas Athene without
this covering. They would have felt as we do today about a scalped
head. I am not saying that this was the case among Greeks of later
times.
In
ancient times men were able to experience the sense-world as having
soul and spirit, because they experienced something of an etheric and
soul-spiritual nature. But these men did not ascribe any great
importance to the soul and spirit. People readily believe that in the
oldest Mysteries the pupils were principally taught that the sense
world is semblance and the spiritual world the only reality, but this
is not true. The strivings of the Mysteries were directed to making
the material world comprehensible to the human soul by the roundabout
way of comprehending what is of the nature of soul and spirit.
Already
in the epoch of the first post-Atlantean culture, the Mysteries were
striving to understand man as a being of soul and spirit, and
particularly inwardly — not theoretically — to feel, to
interpret any manifestation of the physical man in terms of the
spirit. For example, it would have been impossible for them to have
given a mechanistic explanation of walking, because they knew that
when man walks he has an experience with every step, an experience
which today lies deep beneath the threshold of consciousness. Why do
we walk? We walk because when we stretch our leg forward and put down
our foot, we come into a different relation to the earth and to the
heavens, and in the perception of this change — that we place
one foot into a different degree of warmth from that in which the
other foot has remained — in the perception of this
interchanging relation to the cosmos there lies something that is not
only mechanical but distinctly super-dynamic.
This
was the perception in more ancient times; the gaze of the human being
even then was directed to man's external form, to his external
movements. And it would never have occurred to the men of that time
to imagine that what they saw as dumb show in Nature — the
growth and configuration of plants, the growth and configuration of
animals — was to be interpreted in the way that we
scientifically do today. In the human heart and mind there was
something altogether different; a man, belonging to the old Indian
civilization to which I referred yesterday, felt it as entirely
natural that during a certain period of the year the earth breathes
in the being of the heavens, and during another period of the year
she does not breathe in but works within herself by shutting out the
heavens. It was natural for it to be different in ancient India
because climatic conditions were different. But were we in
imagination to extend our own climatic conditions we should have to
say: During the summer the earth sleeps, gives herself up to the
heavenly forces, receives the power of the sun in such a way that
this power of the sun pours into the earth's unconsciousness.
Summer is the sleep of the earth. Winter is her waking. During the
winter the earth thinks through her own forces what during the summer
in her sleeping and dreaming she has thought in relation with the
heavens. During the winter the earth works over in her own being what
during the summer has come to her through the in-working of the
forces and powers of the cosmos.
Nowadays
little is known of these things — in practical knowledge, I
mean — as when the peasant out in the country puts potatoes
into the ground during the winter. But nobody thinks about the fate
of these potatoes because men have lost the faculty of getting right
into the being of Nature. It would never have occurred to human
beings who felt in this way to look out into Nature at animals,
plants and minerals shining and sparkling in their color, to imagine
that in this there is one single reality, a dance of atoms —
that would have seemed utterly unreal. “But man needs this
dance of atoms for his calculations about Nature.” Yes, that is
just it, people believe they need the dance of atoms to be able to
make calculations about Nature. Calculations in those days meant
being able to live in numbers and magnitudes and not having to attach
these numbers and magnitudes to what is only densified materiality. I
do not want to raise objections against the service densified
materiality renders today, yet one must mention how different the
configuration of souls was in that more ancient age.
Then
another age came in my book Occult Science. I have called it the old
Persian; everything was built upon the principle of authority. People
preserved during the whole of their life what is today experienced in
a dull, repressed form between the seventh and fourteenth years. They
took it with them into later life. It was more intimate but at the
same time more intense. In a certain sense human beings looked
through the external movement, through man's external
physiognomy, or through a flower. They looked at something that was
less outwardly objective. What they saw gradually became only a
revelation of what exists as true reality. For the first
post-Atlantean epoch of civilization the whole external world was
simply reality, spiritual reality. The human being was spirit. He had
a head, two arms and a body, and that was spirit. There was nothing
to deter the ancient Indian from addressing the being he saw standing
on two legs, with arms and a head, as spirit. In the next epoch men
already saw more deeply into things. It was more in the nature of a
surface behind which something more etheric was perceived, a human
being more in a form of light. Man had the faculty of perceiving this
form of light because atavistic clairvoyance was still present.
And
then came the epoch of the third post-Atlantean culture. One felt the
need for penetrating still further into the inner being of man or of
Nature. The outer had become clearly perceptible and man is beginning
to look through the outer perceptible to the spirit and soul within.
The Egyptians, who belong to this epoch of the third post-Atlantean
culture, mummified the human body. In the epoch of the old Indian
culture, mummification would have made no sense; it would have been a
fettering of the spirit. A distinction had arisen between body and
spirit by the time mummification was practised. Formerly men would
have felt they were imprisoning the human spirit, no distinction
having been made yet between body and spirit, if the body had been
embalmed as mummy.
Then
among the Greeks — and actually into our own time — there
was already a clearly established separation between the body and the
spirit and soul. Today we can do no other than keep these two apart,
the bodily and the soul-spiritual. Thus in earlier epochs man really
saw the ego through sheaths.
Imagine
the ancient Indian. He did not look at man's ego. His language
was such that it really only expressed outwardly visible gestures and
outwardly visible surfaces. The whole character of Sanscrit, if
studied according to its spirit and not only according to its
content, is of the nature of gesture, of surface; it expresses itself
above all in movement and contour. The ego was therefore seen through
the sheath of the physical body, in the next epoch through the sheath
of the etheric, in the third epoch through the sheath of the astral
man, man's ego still remaining indefinite, until in our epoch
having cast off its veil it enters into human intercourse.
No
one can adequately describe the impulse that has entered modern
evolution, unless he draws attention to the relationship of ego to
ego, free from the sheaths, which is emerging in a totally new way,
though slowly, today. I shall not speak in the usual sense of our age
being an age of transition. For I should like to know which age is
not! Every age is an age of transition from the preceding one to the
one that follows. And as long as one simply says — Our age is
an age of transition — well, it remains just a hollow phrase.
There is something to grasp only when one describes what makes a
transition. In Our age we are going over from experiencing the other
man through sheaths, to direct experience of the other man's
ego.
And
this is the difficulty in our life of soul; we have to live into this
quite new relation between man and man. Do not think that we must
learn all the teachings about the ego. It is not a question of
learning theories about the ego. No matter whether you are a peasant
on the land or someone working with his hands, or a scholar, it holds
good for all of you that at the present time, in so much as we have
to do with civilized men, their egos meet without sheaths. But that
gives its special coloring to the whole of our cultural development.
Try
to develop a feeling for how in the Middle Ages there was still much
that was elementary in the way in which one human being experienced
another. Let us imagine ourselves in a medieval town.
Let
us say, a locksmith meets a town councilor in the street. Now what
was experienced was not just that the man knew the other to be a town
councilor; it was not exhausted by the locksmith knowing — we
have elected that man. It is true there existed a link which gave the
men a certain stamp. One belonged to the tailors' guild, one to
the locksmiths' guild. But this was experienced in a more
individual way. And when one as locksmith met a town councilor, he
knew from other sources than from the directory: That is a town
councilor. For the man walked differently, his look was different, he
carried his head differently. People knew that he was a town
councilor from things other than documents, the newspaper or things
of the sort. One man experienced the other, but experienced him
through his sheaths.
But
in the sense of modern evolution we must increasingly experience
human beings without sheaths. This has gradually arisen. But in a
certain sense men are afraid of it. If we had a cultural psychology
then it would describe, in connection with recent centuries, men's
fear of being obliged to consort with human beings whose egos are
unsheathed. It is a kind of terror. In the form of a picture, one
might say that those people who in the last century really
experienced their own times have frightened eyes. These frightened
eyes, which you would not have been able to find either among the
Greeks or the Romans, make their appearance in the middle of the
sixteenth century, especially in the sixteenth century. Then we
follow up these frightened eyes in literature. For instance, one can
form a clear mental picture on reading the writings of Bacon of
Verulam. We can glean from his writings with what kind of eyes he
looked out at the world. Still more so with the eyes of Shakespeare.
They can be pictured quite clearly. One need only supplement the
words by the descriptions which circulated of Shakespeare's
appearance. And so we must picture the people of recent centuries who
lived most deeply in their own times as having frightened eyes, an
unconsciously frightened look. At least once in their lives they had
this frightened look. Goethe had it. Lessing had it. Herder had it.
Jean Paul never got rid of it to the day of his death. We must have
an organ for perceiving these subtleties if we want to develop any
understanding of historical evolution.
Men
who want to find their way livingly into the twentieth century should
realize that those who represented the nineteenth century can no
longer represent the twentieth.
It
goes without saying that books about Goethe written in the nineteenth
century by the philistine Lewes, or the pedant, Richard M. Meyer, can
give no real conception of Goethe. The only literary work of the last
third of the nineteenth century which can give some idea of Goethe is
at best the Goethe of Herman Grimm. But that is a nightmare to those
suffering from the great cultural disease of modern times,
philistinism. For in this vast volume on Goethe you find the
sentence: “Faust is a work that has fallen from heaven.”
Just imagine what the commentators who pull everything to pieces have
said; and imagine someone comes along and says that this should not
be pulled to pieces. This may not seem important, yet we must notice
such things in speaking about cultural phenomena. Read the first
chapter of Grimm's Raphael and you will have the feeling: this
must be an abomination to every orthodox professor, nevertheless
something of it can be taken over into the twentieth century, for the
very reason that for the orthodox professor nothing in it is right.
Thus
man was seen within sheaths. Now we must learn to see him as an
ego-being without sheaths. This alarms people because they are no
longer capable of perceiving what I have described as the sheaths in
which, for insurance, one could have seen our town councilor. It is
no longer possible, at any rate not in Middle Europe, to give people
outer representations of the sheaths. For outer representations, the
sheaths still had a connection with the spiritual content existing in
medieval councilors. Today — I must confess — it would be
difficult for me to distinguish by their outer sheaths between a
councilor and a privy councilor. In the case of a soldier, in the
days when militarism was supreme one could still do it. But one had
studiously to learn to do it, to make it a special study. It was no
longer connected with basic human experience.
So
there existed a kind of terror, and people made themselves
indifferent to it by means of what I described yesterday as the web
of intellectualism that spreads itself around us, and within which
all are caught. In the centers of culture which have retained
something of the East, the inner is still brought into a relation
with the outer, the basic with the intellectualistic. Those of you
who come from Vienna will sense that in the last century this was
still very much so. For in Vienna, for instance, a man who wore
spectacles was known as “doctor.” People did not bother
about the diploma; they were concerned about the exterior. And anyone
who could afford to take a cab was an aristocrat. It was the
exterior. There was still a feeling of wanting to live within what
can he described in words.
The
great transition to this newer age consists in man meeting man free
of his sheaths — according to his inner disposition, to what
the soul demands; but the capacities for this untrammeled encounter
have not yet been acquired; above all we have not yet acquired the
possibility for a relation between ego and ego. But this must be
prepared for by education. That is why the question of education is
of such burning importance.
And
now let me tell you quite frankly when the great step forward in
educational method can first be made towards the individual ego-men
of the new age. But I beg you not to use what I am going to say to
impress other people who are of an opposite opinion, for if you do so
the only result will be a volley of abuse against Anthroposophy. We
shall work rightly in education only when we have learned to feel a
certain bashfulness about speaking about it at all, when we feel
abashed at the idea of talking about education. This is astonishing
but it is true. The way in which education is being talked about will
be regarded as shameless in future. Today everyone talks about it and
about what he considers right. But education does not allow itself to
be tied down in formal concepts, nor is it anything we come to by
theorizing. One grows into education by getting older and meeting
younger human beings. And only when one has grown older and has met
younger people, and through meeting younger people and having once
been young oneself we penetrate to the ego — only then can
education be taken quite naturally.
Many
suggestions about education today seemed to me no different from the
content — horrible dictum — of the book of the once
famous Knigge, who also gave directions as to how grownup people
should be approached. It is the same with books on good breeding.
Therefore what I have said and written about education, and what is
attempted practically in the Waldorf School, aims only at saying as
much as possible about the characteristics of the human being, in
order to learn to know him, not to give directions: “You are
meant to do this in such-and-such a way.” Knowledge of man —
that is what must be striven for, and the rest left to God, if I may
use this religious phrase. True knowledge of man makes the human
being a teacher. For we should really get the feeling that we are
ashamed to talk about education. But under the cultural conditions of
today we have to do many things that ought to make us ashamed. The
time will come when we shall no longer need to talk about education.
Today these ways of thinking are lacking, but only for a little more
than a hundred years.
Now
read Fichte or Schiller thoughtfully. You will find in their writings
what to modern people appears quite horrible. They have spoken, for
example, about the State and about organizations to make the State
into what it should be. And they have spoken about the aim of the
State, saying: Morality must be such that the State becomes
superfluous, that human beings are capable out of themselves of
becoming free men, capable through their morality of making the State
superfluous.
Fichte
said that the State should be an institution which gives over the
reins and gradually becomes entirely superfluous. It would hardly be
possible to demand this of our contemporaries nor would they take it
seriously. Today it would make a similar impression as the following
incident on a troupe of actors. — A play had been performed for
the fiftieth time by a traveling company when the director said: “Now
that we have performed this for the fiftieth time, the prompter's
box can be dispensed with.” But the actors were quite terrified
at the idea. Finally one of them pulled himself together and said:
“But, sir, then one will see the prompter!” This is about
what would happen with our men of the present day. They do not see
that the prompter, too, can be dispensed with. Thus it is today. The
State will have found its best constitution when it makes itself
superfluous, but the government officials and the Chancellors and the
Privy Councilors — what would they all say to such a thing?
Now
in practical everyday life we must be right within this great
revolution going on in the depths of modern souls if we are to reach
an outlook where there is as little talk about education as there was
in older cultural epochs. Education was not talked about in earlier
days. The science of education first arose when man could no longer
educate out of the primal forces of his being. But this is more
important than is supposed. The boy or girl, seeing the teacher come
into the classroom, must not have the feeling: “He is teaching
according to theoretical principles because he does not grasp the
subconscious.” They want a human relation with the teacher. And
that is always destroyed when educational principles are introduced.
Therefore if we are to get back to a natural condition of authority
between young and old it is of infinite importance, and an absolute
necessity, that education shall not be talked about so much, that
there should be no need to talk or think about it as much as is done
today. For there are still many spheres in which education is
conducted according to quite sound principles, although they are
beginning to be broken through.
You
see, theoretically it is all quite clear, and theoretically people
know how to handle the matter, just as it is handled by the academic
opinion of the present-day. But in practice it is quite good if there
should happen to anyone what happened to me. A friend had scales by
his plate and weighed the different foods so as to take the right
quantity of each into his organism. From the physiological point of
view this was correct — quite definitely so. But picture this
transposed into the realm of education. Unfortunately it does happen,
though in a primitive way and only in certain connections. But it is
more wholesome when this happens intuitively, if parents, instead of
buying some special physiological work on nourishment, judge how to
feed their children through the feeling of how they themselves were
once fed. And so in Pedagogy one must overcome everything which lays
down rules as to how much food should be taken into the stomach, and
of striving in the sphere of education for real insight into the
nature and being of man. This insight into the nature of man will
have a certain result for the whole of human life.
You
see, whoever comes to an understanding of the human being in the way
I have been describing during these days, and thereby imbues his
knowledge with artistic perception, will remain young. For there is
some truth in this — once we have grown up we have actually
become impoverished. Yet it is of the greatest importance that we
should have forces of growth within us. What we have in us as a child
is of the utmost importance. But to this we are led back in inner
experience through true knowledge of man. We really become childlike
when we acquire the right knowledge of man and thereby qualify
ourselves to meet those who are young and those who are still
children in the right way.
There
must be a striving that says, not in an egoistical sense as often
happens today: “Except ye become as little children ye cannot
enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” We must seek for this even in
practical life. Unless we were imbued with an active human force
which worked in us during childhood, we could never be educators.
Pedagogics is not enough if it makes the teacher or educator merely
clever. I do not say that it should make him empty of thought. But in
this way one does not become empty of thought. Pedagogics that makes
the teacher merely clever is not of the right kind; the right kind of
pedagogics makes the teacher inwardly alive and fills him with
lifeblood of the soul which pours itself actively into his physical
life-blood. And if there is anything by which we can recognize a true
teacher or educator, it is that his pedagogical art has not made him
a pedant.
Now,
my dear friends, that you can find a pedant working in some place is
perhaps only a myth or a legend. If teachers are pedants, if these
myths and legends are founded on truth, then we may be sure that
pedagogy has taken a wrong road. To avoid giving offense I must
assume these legends and myths to be hypothetical and say: If pedants
and philistines were to be found in the teaching profession it would
be a sign that our Education is going under. Education is on the
ascent only when, in its experience and whole way of working,
pedantry and philistinism are driven right out of men. The true
teacher can be no philistine, can be no pedant.
In
addition to this, so that you may be able to check what I have been
saying, I ask you to consider from what vocation in life the word
pedant is derived. Then, perhaps, you will be able to contribute to
the recognition of the reality of what has been indicated; I do not
want to enlarge upon it because already much that I have said is
being taken amiss. It is only on the assumption mentioned that we can
have a right Pedagogy, otherwise it would have to become a Pedagogy
in accordance with what I have been giving you in these lectures.
Thus in the lecture tomorrow I will attempt to bring these talks to
some conclusion.
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