Lecture IX
Dornach, August 27, 1920
A hundred-fifty
years ago today Hegel was born in Stuttgart, and when we
recall this fact today, we should be spontaneously filled
with a feeling for the tremendous change and transformation
the times have undergone since the birth of this individual
whose spirit was so extraordinarily characteristic of the
whole of modern civilization. In a sense, Hegel does embody
the essence of the Central European cultural life, which,
subsequent to his influence, has changed so considerably.
Having played a certain role in Central Europe, this cultural
life is just about beginning to disappear from this
region.
Hegel was born
in Stuttgart, in Swabia; he spent his maturing years of
development of his particular spiritual character in middle
Germany. In the last period of his life, he was a personality
of great consequence in northern Germany, where he was
particularly influential in public education, but also in a
number of other cultural concerns of that region. Born on
August 27, 1770, having developed slowly because of a certain
sluggish mentality, Hegel attended the University of
Tuebingen where he studied theology. Above all else, he made
the acquaintance of the much more mentally mobile and quick,
young Schelling.
[ Note 70 ]
He also became acquainted with Hoelderlin,
[ Note 71 ]
who, one might say,
transposed the melancholic sentiments of ancient Greece into
modern times. In close relationship with these two, Hegel
spent his years of study in Tuebingen. Then, like Schelling,
he turned to middle Germany, to the University of Jena in
Thuringia, where, again like Schelling, attracted to the
personality of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, he made his first
attempts at working out his own ideas of a world view. He
taught at the University until 1806. In that year, while
Napoleon's cannons thundered around Jena, he concluded his
first sizable independent work, his
Phenomenology of the Spirit.
This work contains the attempt to re-experience
in thoughts all that human consciousness can experience —
from the dimmest impressions of the world to that mental
clarity in which the human being experiences the world of
ideas with such intensity that this ideal world itself appears
to him as the very substance of spirit. One could say that this
Phenomenology of the Spirit
is something like a world tour of the spirit.
The difficult
conditions in Germany at that time brought an end to Hegel's
position at the University of Jena. Yet he continued to
remain in middle Germany, and for the next year or so edited
a political newspaper in Bamberg. Then he was principal of a
secondary school in Nuremberg, until he took a position as
professor at the University of Heidelberg for a few years.
During his years in Nuremberg, Hegel completed his most
important work,
Science of Logic.
In Heidelberg, he wrote his
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.
Then he was called to the University of
Berlin, which had been founded on the spirit of Fichte and
Humboldt. There, his activity expanded in influence and
authority to cover the entire educational system then being
administered from Berlin, as well as other matters of
cultural importance.
Hegel was a
strange personality even in outward appearance when he
lectured. Before him were the written pages of his
manuscript, which, so it seems, were always in disarray so
that he was constantly turning and searching among his pages.
He was somewhat awkward in his presentation and laborious in
his delivery. While he was lecturing, the thought within him
worked out of deep substrata of the soul, forming itself only
with great difficulty into a word, which then issued forth as
if in a stuttering, disjointed manner. Yet, his lecture,
which reached its audience in this way as if constantly
interrupting itself, is supposed to have made an
extraordinarily grand impression on those who were capable of
appreciating such a personality. In other ways, too, Hegel
had remarkable personal qualities. He truly entered into and
familiarized himself with the whole structure of the
environment in which he happened to find himself. Thus, one
can observe how he actually outgrew the Swabian milieu. One
can see that he retained within himself the Swabian spirit
with all its special characteristic features until he went to
Switzerland and Frankfurt/Main — he spent some time as
a private tutor in both Switzerland and Frankfurt after
graduating from the university — where he again merged
relatively quickly with the life of his new surroundings.
Then he moved
to Jena, where Fichte's fiery spirit operated, where, above
all else, there existed something like a concentrated
summation of the entire cultural essence of Central Europe
— a time of which people today can scarcely form a
picture. It was indeed so that when Fichte presented his
expositions in the university auditorium, which, in his
characteristic manner, were on a high spiritual, yet
nevertheless abstract level, these discourses were continued
and carried on in debates right out into the streets and
squares of Jena. In very truth, a lecture by Fichte was not
merely a discussion pertaining to questions of one or another
kind, but an event. It was an event also in this respect,
that at that time, from all around Jena, individuals in need
of a world outlook came to hear Fichte speak. One who reads
the correspondence, of which there is a great deal, in which
people tell of hearing Fichte in Jena, will again and again
come across passages testifying to Fichte's tremendous
spiritual influence. Indeed, long after Fichte had died,
decades later, people who had heard him in Jena still spoke
of the great influence he had upon their soul life. The
philosophical fire-spirit, Schelling, was stimulated by what
flowed as the power of spirit into the world; the more
ponderous Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was motivated as
well, and joined forces with Schelling to develop Fichte's
philosophy further. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, Schelling and Hegel published the
Critical Journal of Philosophy
in Jena. Its articles certainly
stood on the highest levels of abstract philosophical
thinking, but in such a manner that one sees how these
utterances, couched in thin abstractions, concern themselves
— as though welling up straight from the human
heart — with those affairs of human life and the world
that have always been the high points of all striving for a
world concept. Following this, Hegel worked his way to a
certain independence, and in 1806 wrote his
Phenomenology of the Spirit,
which, however, is actually a
phenomenology of consciousness.
As I said,
Hegel always stood completely within his milieu. The riddles
of his surroundings worked deep within him. Just as the
Swabian spirit with its depth, as found in a few select
Swabians, was so strongly revealed in Hegel's youth, so was
this whole spirit of philosophy, comprising in concentrated
form the whole new cultural striving, that took hold of him
in Jena at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was
out of this philosophical spirit that he wrote and taught, a
spirit which was always nourished, and increasingly
maintained, however, by an overview of the general world
condition.
Out of this
spirit, too, arose Hegel's
Logic
— no ordinary
logic, but something entirely different. It was written in
the second decade of the nineteenth century. One is moved to
say that the most singular of all kinds of human striving on
the highest level manifests itself in this Hegelian
logic.
To Hegel, logic
was something akin to a summation of what Hellenism, in a
manner somewhat different from Hegel's, understood as logos
or universal reason. During the profound inner experience
that Hegel underwent while working out his
Phenomenology of the Spirit,
he began to feel strongly that if man
works himself up to the intensive experience of the
“idea,” hence the ideas of the world, then this
experiencing of the “idea” is no longer a mere
thought experience but one of the divine cosmic element in
all its truth, purity, and light-filled clarity. Something
that had pulsed for centuries in the minds and souls of
Central Europe came into inner soul existence at that time in
Hegel. One need only recall the deep mysticism of Meister
Eckhart, of Johannes Tauler. Recently, we have become
acquainted with this mysticism from another side; yet it
nevertheless remains profound — for the experience
remains the same, after all, even if one is familiar with the
deeper occult foundations of which I spoke here a few days ago.
[ Note 72 ]
One need only think of this mystical experience that became an
inner revelation, as in Valentin Weigel, even in Paracelsus or
in Jacob Boehme. One need only transform for oneself into the
bright, light-filled clarity of universal ideas what minds
such as Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler experienced more
out of intense feeling than something abstract, what Jacob
Boehme set out in images through inner experience, hence
replacing the mysticism of feeling and imagery with the
mysticism of ideas; then one has the experience that was
Hegel's when he wrote his
Logic.
It was the soul's
surrender to pure ideas, but in the conviction that these
ideas are the very substance of the universe. It was a
dwelling in something that Nietzsche later called the cold,
icy realm of ideas. To Hegel, on the other hand, this was
accompanied by the awareness that such an experience of the
ideas was a dialogue with the cosmic spirit itself.
What Hegel
experienced, not in a vaguely defined unity of the world, not
in such vague concepts as those produced by the Pantheists,
but in concrete ideas that were followed through from simple
“existence” all the way to the fully saturated
“idea of the organism” and the “spirit,”
what can be experienced to the full extent of the developed
world of ideas, this Hegel summed up in his
Logic.
Thus, it is the intent in his
Logic
to present a structure of those ideas
attainable for the human being, ideas which, as man
experiences them, simultaneously demonstrate the certainty
that they are of the same element by which the universal
spirit allows reality to come into being. This is why Hegel
called the contents of his
Logic
the divinity prior
to the creation of the world. Yet, icy is the region in which
a person finds himself who studies Hegel's
Logic;
this is because Hegel moves entirely in what the ordinary
person calls the uttermost abstraction. He begins by
presenting “being” as the simplest idea; then he
passes over to “nothingness”; proceeds
dialectically from “being” through
“nothingness” to “becoming,” to
“existence,” and on to “causality.”
One does not gain from this what the ordinary person wants
when he wishes to be filled inwardly in his soul with divine
cosmic warmth. Instead, one receives what in ordinary life
would be called a sum of abstract ideas.
What is this
Logic?
When it is really contemplated, this Logic
becomes an experience; it even turns into an experience that
can give a person much information about many a secret of
humanity and the world in general. One is induced to say that
what is experienced through Hegel's
Logic
can really only be characterized by means of spiritual science.
It is only through spiritual science that one finds words to
characterize this experience. This is a remarkable discovery.
Hegel's pupil, Rosenkranz,
[ Note 73 ]
who was devoted to his master, has presented us with
a biography of Hegel, written not only in a kindly but also a
spirited manner. In it, he uses words that are, I might say,
in a certain respect significant for the events of that time.
It was around the mid-forties of the nineteenth century that
he said, “We are actually the grave diggers of the
great philosophers.” Rosenkranz then lists the great
philosophers who rose from European civilization during the
period near the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth
century, and how they actually died within that same period.
One experiences a melancholy feeling when reading this
passage in Rosenkranz's biography of Hegel, for something
very true has been expressed. As this nineteenth century
advanced step by step, it became the grave digger not only of
the philosophers but of philosophy itself, indeed, of the
profound questions dealing with world concepts. The decay of
European civilization, now approaching us with giant strides,
first announced itself in the lofty regions of philosophy.
The presumptuous philosophical systems of the second half of
the nineteenth century are at bottom expressions of
decline.
On the basis of
spiritual science, on the other hand, one cannot speak as did
Rosenkranz; based on spiritual science, I would say that even
what is outwardly, physically dead must also come to life.
For what is eternal in the human being works on eternally, on
one side in super-sensible worlds, but on the other side also
in the earthly realm itself; and if it falls to the impulses
of decline to have grave diggers, it is up to spiritual
science to seek out what is eternally alive soul essence in
what is dead and to place it before the world in its ever
continuing life. Therefore, I would like to speak today not
of the dead but of the living Hegel.
To be sure,
however, living personalities of Hegel's kind also become, in
a certain sense, sharp critics of what — partly from
indolence of soul, partly from sheer bad will —
presently forms an alliance with the powers of decadence.
Therefore, from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, I must
say: Yes, it is true that Hegel's logical dialectic runs its
course in the cold, icy realm of what at first seem to be
abstract concepts. To experience Hegel's
Logic
actually means finding oneself dwelling in a multitude of
concepts, which a thoughtless person does not care for, about
which the thoughtless man would say, “That does not
interest me.” But this conceptual world of Hegel's,
this sum of apparent abstractions, these icy, cold concepts,
what exactly are they? One can investigate what these
concepts are, particularly through what spiritual science
offers us. There is no doubt that they cannot be eternal
universal reason itself, for universal reason could never
have created from this sum of pure abstractions the entire
multiform and, above all, warmth-pervaded world of ours.
These logical concepts, these logical ideas, seem like
transparent conceptual veils; indeed, Hegel himself calls his
logical ideas shadow images.
Therefore, what
Hegel initially experienced in this logic is, of course,
something that it cannot be. It is a sum of ideas that begin
with “being,” pass from “nothingness”
to “becoming,” and so on through many such
concepts, ending with the “idea bearing its own purpose
within itself ” — therefore, concluding with what
ordinary consciousness would also still call an abstraction.
It is certain then that the world could not have been created
out of such ideas; nor is this logic to be viewed as the
living spirit, that is, what must be grasped in supersensory
perception as living spirit. Indeed, I would say, it is out
of an admittedly subjective feeling that Hegel declares that
the contents of this logic are the thoughts of God prior to
the world's creation. Out of these thoughts, one could never
in any way comprehend the rich abundance of the created
world. And yet, if one allows oneself to go into these
thoughts, the experience is a strong and powerful one. What
exactly is it then that is contained in this logic?
Look at our
building here.
[ Note 74 ]
It is intended to have as the central group in the middle of
the eastern end a kind of Christ figure, with Lucifer rising
above it, and below Ahriman, as though being thrust into the
earth by the Representative of Humanity, who inwardly
preserves complete balance of soul. The intention is to
represent the full human condition in this group. In reality,
man is, after all, that being who must seek the balance
between what tries to rise above the human being and what
draws him down into the ground — the balance between
the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic nature. Physiologically,
physically speaking, the Luciferic force is that element in
us which brings about fever, pleurisy, which brings man into
conditions of warmth that tend to dissolve him, cause him to
be dissipated in the world; the Ahrimanic force brings about
ossification, calcification. Speaking of the soul level, man
is the entity who must seek the equilibrium, on the one hand,
between rapturous mysticism — between theory, between
all that strives to the insubstantial but nevertheless
light-irradiated realm — and what pulls him down, on
the other hand, to the pedantic, philistine, materialistic
and intellectualistic sphere. Spiritually speaking, man must
hold the balance between the Luciferic force always wishing
to lull him to sleep, always tempting him to yield himself up
to the universal all, and the Ahrimanic force that shocks him
awake again and again, striking through him with a violence
that does not let him sleep. One does not comprehend the
nature of the human being if one cannot place it in the
middle between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic force.
Yet, the
experience of the human soul at this middle point is a
complicated one; the soul can only fully experience this
complexity in its development in the course of time, and one
must understand each of the successive stages of this
development. One can say that whoever understands Hegel and
the way he elaborated his
Logic
can see how, at that
time, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, mankind
began to calcify, to become materialistic, to densify
inwardly, to become entangled in matter. In the realm of
knowledge and perception, this age gives the impression of
sinking down into matter. As in a picture, humanity appears
to be sinking into the material element, with Hegel standing
in the center, working himself out of it with all his might
and snatching away from Ahriman what he has that is good,
namely, the abstract logic that we need for our inner
liberation, without which we will not achieve pure thinking.
Hegel wrests this logic from the powers of gravity, from the
terrestrial powers, presenting it in all its cold
abstractness, so that it may not live in the Ahrimanic
element dwelling in man, but can rise into human thinking.
Yes, this Hegelian logic is wrested from the Ahrimanic
powers, torn free from them and bestowed on humanity. This is
what mankind needs and without which it cannot progress
— which, however, had first to be rescued from
Ahriman.
Thus, Hegelian
logic actually remains something eternal; thus it must
continue to be effective. It must ever and again be sought
for. We cannot do without it. If we try to manage without it,
we either fall back into the nebulous softness of
“Schleiermacherei,”
[ Translator's Note A ]
or we founder in what people immediately became enmeshed in
when they have approached Hegel without being able to grasp
him. For there appears on the one side the image of Hegel,
who Lifts himself out of Ahriman's realm, who rescues from
Ahriman what, as pure logic, has to be saved for mankind,
actually has to be saved for human thinking. On the other
side, there arises the image of Karl Marx, who also orients
himself on Hegel, taking up Hegel's thinking, but is gripped
by Ahriman's claws and dragged into the lowest depths of the
material bog — who by Hegel's method arrives at
historical materialism. Here, we cannot help but see, side by
side, the upward striving spirit, snatching the logic away
from Ahriman, because, with this logic, one must truly keep
oneself upright by means of all one's inner human soul
forces, and the one who, with this logic, sinks into the
Ahrimanic morass.
Hegel actually
appears as a spirit that can be understood only if one tries
to comprehend him with the concepts which only spiritual
science can supply. This is what Hegel became through the
influence brought to bear on him by Fichte's fiery words in
Jena, the essence of which he then formulated in his way,
during his subsequent sojourns in Bamberg, Nuremberg and
Heidelberg.
Subsequently,
he was transferred to northern Germany. He always experienced
fully what his surroundings contained. In a humanly personal
manner, his inner life awakened to what was around him. Thus
he became the influential genius of the University of Berlin.
Now the world experienced through him that work which he had
to create out of the very middle of the modern civilized
world if he was truly a spirit fully belonging to this
middle. In the last few weeks, we have, after all, been
characterizing the East, the Middle, and the West. We have
found that it is the economic thinking that flourishes
particularly in the West; in the East, spiritual thinking
flourished; in the Middle, the legal, political element has
chiefly raised itself to a special flowering. Fichte has
written a work dealing with natural law. The most enlightened
minds occupied themselves with ideas concerning human rights.
It was just at the time of his move to northern Germany that
Hegel gave the world his
Basic Principles of the Philosophy of Rights or Natural Rights
and Science of the State in Outline.
Everything that could be termed a
defamation of Hegel was due chiefly to this book, which
contains the remarkable sentence: “Everything
reasonable is real, and everything real is reasonable.”
[ Note 75 ]
Whoever can
appreciate that it was Hegel who wrested human reason from
the clutches of the Ahrimanic powers will also recognize his
right to search it out, and to make it effectual throughout
the world. Thus, because his field of action was the
Ahrimanic which cannot lead a person upward to what lies
before birth or into what is active after death, Hegel became
an interpreter of spirituality, but only of the physical,
earthly one; he turned into a philosopher of natural science
and history. Yet he depicted what dwells in the external
world in the relation of man to man and which then develops
systematically as organized human life. This he summed up in
his concept of “objective spirit.” In the
expression of rights, in morality, in the implementation of
treaties and so forth, he beheld the spirit active in the
social organization itself. Regarding these matters, he stood
completely within not only the spatial, but also the temporal
milieu. It was not yet the trend of that time, particularly
in the area where Hegel lived, to worship the state as much
as was the case later on. Therefore, it is incorrect to view
the concept of the state appearing in Hegel's writing in the
same light as must be done in regard to later times. Within
his structure of the state, for example, Hegel still
acknowledged free corporations, a corporate life. All the
antihuman elements that made their appearance later in the
Prussian realm were not yet in evidence when Hegel, one might
say, deified the idea of the state in Prussia of all places;
but this grew out of his attempt to see at work in the world
that reason which he had wrested from Ahriman through his
logic.
Thus, we cannot
help but say that this is basically the tragedy that has
since been enacted historically in such a shocking way. The
element living in Middle Europe is indeed something we must
not regard in the same way as do Western eyes, particularly
since the mendacities of recent years. It is something best
characterized by the fact that, even now, it gives the
impression to a mind such as Oswald Spengler's that the only
social salvation for the impending age of decline must come
through Central Europe, not in order to counteract the
decline — Spengler does not believe in such
counteraction — but merely to make the decline that
will take place tolerable, until, in the beginning of the
next millennium, total barbarism supposedly will come into
being.
One can say
that in the twenties of the nineteenth century Hegel appears
as the ruling spirit governing the whole realm of Prussian
education; he stands there with the kind of reasonableness I
have just characterized for you. It is a reasonableness that
is born, as it were, out of the ice of Ahriman, but it also
possesses in its spirit structure something of an inner
firmness, having nothing mathematical about it, yet
containing a tremendous force, an element of fine
spirituality.
Now, one has to
understand that what was present as the special element of
Central Europe has to be characterized also from
this aspect: that right into the ninth century its
lack of culture still included the practice of blood
sacrifice. This showed characteristics that have a certain
value when taken up by such a spirit as Hegel's. Such a
spirituality, however, is rare, it does not repeat itself.
Hegel's students were basically all small minds, and the one
who, in a certain respect, was a great mind, Karl Marx,
quickly succumbed to the Ahrimanic powers. The element which
then gained ground was the very one that precipitated the
plunge into the Ahrimanic abyss.
Hegel salvaged
something from what plunged into this abyss — something
that must be eternal, something he could only salvage because
it was saved from just this element. It was necessary that
this be done by a person whose soul essence was of the very
being of Middle Europe. This was the case with Hegel. He was
Swabian by birth and by virtue of the region of his youth:
middle German, Franconian and Thuringian in respect to his
maturation; and he was so pronouncedly Prussian in the final
period of his life that he experienced Prussia as the center
of the world, with Berlin as the very center of this world
center.
There is a
certain inherent force in Hegelianism, truly not a physical
force but a different one, namely a spiritual force;
Hegelianism contains something that must be taken up by every
spiritual world view. For any spiritual science would have to
become rachitic if it could not be permeated by the skeletal
system of ideas which Hegel wrested from the ossifying grip
of Ahriman. We need this system to become inwardly strong in
a certain manner. We have need of this sober thoughtfulness
if, in our spiritual endeavors, we wish to avoid the
degeneracy of nebulous, cozy mysticism. We also need the
force that lived in Hegel; we require the force of his creed
of reason, if we do not wish to sink into what Karl Marx
directly succumbed to when he tried independently to work
himself into Hegel's mentality.
It would really
be necessary at this point in time — which is perhaps
one of the most important moments, more important even than
1914 — that as many people as possible recall this
significant element in Hegel. For a true recognition,
especially of Hegel, could bring about a certain awakening of
soul. And an awakening is needed! No one believes, no one
wishes to believe, what dangers are actually at work in
European civilization and its American appendage; one does
not wish to believe what forces of decline prevail. In public
life today, only the forces of decline are taken into
account. No one wishes to perceive, to feel the uplifting
forces. Let us focus on single characteristic things that
just recently may have caught our attention. What thoughts
are harbored, for instance, in the attitude becoming
prevalent now in the civilized world in regard to the
traditional spiritual life? I am not referring to
our spiritual life, for we intend to bring a new
spirit into humanity's civilization. What are the thoughts in
the attitude of mind now growing and spreading in relation to
the life of the spirit? You can find such thoughts in a
recent article
[ Note 76 ]
written by the rector of the University of Halle for the
Hallischen Nachrichten
under the title,
“Gradual Abolition of the Universities.” He states:
At least this
much appears certain, namely, that a government agency has
actually put forward the suggestion to close down a part of
the German universities. Other educational tasks are held
to be more important, and it is believed that greater
financial resources have to be freed for them. Since these
resources are unavailable, it is thought that a number of
universities should be abolished in order to found a type
of civil service school where persons who have not attended
a university would be educated so that they could
administer the official posts allotted to them.
So, civil
service training begins! In Russia it is going at full speed.
And the Western world pays no attention! They will have to
pay bitter attention to it, however, if an awakening of souls
does not take place, if even the best minds continually turn
a deaf ear to all that refers to the spirit; and, for their
own amusement, certainly not for the good of this world, they
continue to entertain the world with the timeworn slogans of
liberalism, conservatism, pacificism, and so on.
And
particularly morality among our intellectuals is fast going
downhill. Here is a small indication of it. But first, I must
mention that when Ernst Haeckel retired from his professorship
at Jena, he himself chose as his successor his pupil Plate,
[ Note 77 ]
who had recently arrived from Berlin. He installed him, so to
speak, for Haeckel's voice really carried weight at the
University of Jena at the time of his retirement. He
installed Plate in all the responsible posts he had held: His
professorship, his administration of the Zoological Institute
and the Phyletic Museum, established for Haeckel himself on
the occasion of his sixtieth birthday
[ Note 78 ]
by the Haeckel Foundation
that had come into existence. It was from all this that
Haeckel withdrew, installing in his place his pupil Plate.
Now I would like to read you a news item
[ Note 79 ]
of a few days ago:
One year ago,
eight days after Haeckel's death, an obituary notice in the
Berliner Tageblatt
by Dr. Adolf Heilborn made the
first mention of the martyrdom inflicted on Haeckel during
the last ten years of his life, as a result of the conduct
of Professor Ludwig Plate. On April 1, 1909, Haeckel had
relinquished the chair of zoology at Jena, which he had
occupied for forty-eight years, and the directorship of the
Zoological Institute and Phyletic Museum to his former
pupil Ludwig Plate, for which the latter expressed his
heartiest thanks to “his highly honored
Excellency.” Upon settling down in his new positions,
one of Plate's first official acts was to demand that
Haeckel clear out his workroom in the Zoological Institute
without delay. When Haeckel protested,
[ Note 80 ]
Plate's explanation was:
“Since April 1, I have been sole director of the
Phyletic Museum, and you are to comply without question to
all my directions.” This prelude and the further
developments of the conflict were related in simple words
by Heilborn who was Haeckel's pupil and friend, with the
result that Professor Ludwig Plate brought an action of
libel against him at the District Court in Jena. Following
this, Dr. Heilborn made public all the relevant facts in a
small brochure,
The Lear-Tragedy of Ernst Haeckel
(Hoffman & Campe, Hamburg/Berlin 1920), based on
Haeckel's unpublished letters and notes, and on official
documents. Heilborn could make use of a turn of phrase that
a witty advocate once used before the court: “I move
for the condemnation of my respected Opponent on the same
grounds which he himself has brought forward.”
Nothing weighed more against Plate than his own remarks.
From Haeckel, who had made endowments to the University of
over a million marks, who had donated his large library and
collections representing fifty-five years of work to it,
Plate demanded the return of a-number of allegedly missing
books, and at another time the return of a considerable
number of cardboard boxes. Furthermore, Plate stated the
following: “This grave injustice which has been done
to me can never be erased; however, in recognition of his
great services to science and because he is my former
teacher, I shall forgive him.” — and “No
one will hold it against me that after all these
experiences I have broken off all personal contact with
Haeckel.”
So much for
Plate versus Haeckel. I am reminded of a lecture once given
by Ottokar Lorenz,
[ Note 81 ]
one of the better historians of earlier times. I did not
agree with its content, but one expression appealed to me
that he used right at the beginning. At a Schiller jubilee,
Ottokar Lorenz had to lecture on “Schiller as a
Historian.” As I said, I did not agree with the
content, but he said:
Indeed, from
the standpoint of present-day science, there is actually
nothing more to be said about Schiller as a historian. If I
nevertheless do say something more, it will be on behalf of
the High Senate and my honored colleagues.
The High Senate and the colleagues were
all sitting there. Now follows what we could call a special
declaration by the High Senate and the colleagues. For he
says:
“ In
the academic world of Jena, Plate stood quite
alone.”
—I question whether he stood by
himself when he came into the lecture hall!?
The anatomist
Schwalbe once wrote: “It is unbelievable ... how
Plate behaved. I am amazed that the students in Jena did
not react. It would be a really good deed if they could
make it too hot for him in Jena.”
Thus write the
professors, the "honored colleagues," who thoroughly deplore
that the students did not manage to torment Plate enough to
make him leave Jena. These honored colleagues who write like
this — in private letters, of course have, however,
carefully avoided being unfriendly to Professor Plate when he
enters the lecture hall.
Heinrich
Heine once said that Lessing's opponents, due to their
association with him, were preserved, like an insect in
amber, from vanishing without a trace. Now it would be
discourteous to apply this comparison to living persons,
however well it would fit in a scientific context. We will
therefore content ourselves with Heilborn's remark to the
effect that nothing will remain of Plate's name and work
except the sinister remembrance of the martyrdom that he
inflicted on Haeckel.
One could cite
a great many similar examples of academic morality, of the
morality of the present-day intelligentsia. What comes to
light thereby is that today we have to do not merely with the
struggle of this or that world-view versus another; we are
dealing today with the struggle of truth against the lie, and
in this conflict it is the lie that directs its weapons
against the truth. Today, truth's struggle against falsehood,
which is extending its grip further and further on mankind,
is more important than any dispute over other concepts.
It was perhaps
thought to be exaggerated when, in a recent lecture, I said
that the people of Europe are asleep. They will have to
experience bitterly — I mentioned this in a different
context — how the most extreme effect of the Western
world concept is spreading in Bolshevism across all of Asia,
and will be taken up by the people of Asia with the same
fervor with which they received their sacred Brahman at one
time. This will indeed happen, and modern civilization will
have to face up to it. And one feels the deepest pain on
seeing the sleeping souls in Europe, who fall so completely
to evoke in their minds that real earnestness which is what
matters today.
A few days
after I had expressed this here, I came across the following
news item:
Some days
ago, I had the opportunity to take a look at a 10,000 ruble
note in possession of a representative of the Soviet
Republic. What astonished me was not so much its high
denomination; rather, what struck me was that in the center
the bank note bore a finely and clearly drawn swastika.
This symbol,
which a Hindu or an ancient Egyptian once looked upon when he
spoke of his sacred Brahman, is seen today on a 10,000 ruble
note! In the strongholds of politics, people know how to
influence human souls. One knows what the victorious advance
of the swastika signifies, the sign which a great number of
people in Central Europe are already wearing today —
again based on other underlying reasons — one knows
what it means. Yet one is unwilling to listen to something
that seeks to interpret the secrets of today's historical
developments out of the most important symptoms.
This
interpretation, however, can proceed only out of what can
come to light through spiritual science. One must take a good
look at what is presently going on. One must focus on the
tendency to devastation in regard to the established cultural
life, the tendency that is seeking to transform even the
vestiges of this old cultural life into schools for civil
servants and bureaucratic machinery, and that has morally
sunk down to a low point such as I described to you in regard
to Herr Plate, who is Haeckel's closest pupil, the favorite
pupil of that inwardly decent, good man, Haeckel! Haeckel did
not do things like that; the Ahrimanic, materialistic culture
does.
In this age
— in which one knows how to proceed if one goes about
it consciously — one should recall great minds such as
Hegel, born 150 years ago in Stuttgart, who in an inner
struggle of soul and spirit wrested from the Ahrimanic powers
those concepts and ideas which are needed to acquire
sufficient inner spiritual steadfastness for ascending the
ladder into the spiritual world; but who also offers much
else of inner spiritual discipline. Truly, through the way in
which his ideas can be alive now, Hegel should be treasured
on the part of spiritual science; and because of what can
live of him today, let us commemorate him today, on this, his
150th birthday.
He died of
cholera on November 14, 1831, in Berlin, on the anniversary
of the death of Leibnitz, the great European philosopher.
What he has left behind, has, to begin with, either been
misunderstood in the outer world, or been misrepresented by
his students, or else has been dragged down directly into the
Ahrimanic sphere, as in Marxism. With the help of spiritual
science, the soil must be found in which the eternally
enduring force that was born 150 years ago in Stuttgart in
Georg Friedrich Hegel — a force containing the best
extract of European spiritual life, which exerted its
influence throughout sixty years in Middle Europe — can
grow. It must not be buried; it must be awakened to life in
spiritual science, a life such as we now truly need in this
intellectual, moral and economic decline.
Translator's Notes:
A.
“Schleiermacherei” — an apt play on
words around the name of Hegel's contemporary, F.D.E.
Schleiermacher (lit. = veil maker). Steiner described his
world view as ardently devotional and sincere, but
introspective. See
Riddles of Philosophy,
pp. 165–168.
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