Lecture II
Dornach, October 8, 1920
Today I wish to make a link with what I said yesterday at the
conclusion of the lecture. I pointed then to a personality who was
driven by his philosophical instincts, as it were, from knowledge of
the soul-spiritual into an intimation of the connection of this
soul-spiritual with the physical-bodily existence of the human being.
This was
Schelling.
I said that out of these instincts Schelling not
only occupied himself with theoretical medicine but also with all
kinds of therapeutic treatments. I do not know whether this resulted
in greater or lesser satisfaction for the patient than is the case
with many well-trained physicians, for this question of how much
improvement in a person's condition can be attributed to therapeutic
measures is, in most cases, a very problematic one if it is not looked
at inwardly.
This instinct arose in Schelling out of the entire disposition of his
soul, and from this he acquired a principle. It would certainly be
good if this became a kind of inner principle for every physician,
became an inner principle so that the physician would coordinate his
entire practical conception of the nature of the healthy and sick
human being out of this principle. I quoted Schelling's own words,
which show a kind of daring. He simply said, To know nature means to
create nature. Generally what is first noticed when a genius comes
forth with such an expression is its quite obvious absurdity, for no
one seriously believes himself capable, as an earthly human being in
the physical body, of creating anything out of nature simply by
knowing nature. Obviously in technology there is continuous creation,
but there it is not a matter of really creating something in the way
that Schelling meant; rather, by putting things together, by a
composition of the forces of nature, nature in turn is given the
opportunity to create in a particular way and through a particular
arrangement, and so on. With this sentence, therefore, we have
fundamentally to do with an absurdity that a man of genius laid at the
foundation of all his thinking.
Yesterday I indicated another sentence that could be contrasted with,
To know nature means to create nature, and this sentence would be,
To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit. This last sentence
was probably not expressed by Schelling in such a fundamental way. In
modern times, however, a person who once again approaches a spiritual
science, developing his own spiritual investigation, sees that both
these sentences basically point back to an ancient knowledge from
inspiration. Schelling, who certainly was by no means an initiate but
simply a man of genius, could arrive at the first sentence out of his
instinct. When a person pursues the kind of spiritual investigation
that was not being done in Schelling's time, this sentence immediately
recalls a resounding from ancient wisdom. Then one is carried over to
the other sentence, which resounds in a similar way from ancient
wisdom. Neither sentence can be comprehended with the customary modern
intellectual knowledge that we apply in our sciences. Considered
either in relation to each other or by themselves, these phrases are
absurd. They both point, however, to something of the greatest
importance in the human organization, something as important for the
healthy condition as for the diseased condition.
When we consider outer nature in relation to the finished processes of
nature, we can say nothing more than that To know nature means at
most to recreate nature in thoughts. Therefore what we call our
thoughts bring us no further than recreating nature since they lack
the inner formative force; this is what we develop in our thinking, in
the soul life permeated by thoughts, by mental images. It has been
pointed out previously, however, that this soul life permeated by
mental images is basically nothing but what emancipates itself from
the physical-etheric organism at the time of the change of teeth, what
the human being therefore has within the physical-etheric organism
until the change of teeth.
What is active in the human physical-etheric during the childhood
years, what truly engages in a creative activity, thus remains in a
weakened form, toned down in the soul life as a world of pictures or a
world of thoughts or mental images, in short, as a world force in
thoughts and mental images, a force in its creative substantiality. It
simply sits in our organism; what we know from age seven on simply
sits within our organism in an organizing way. It creates there, but
not at all, in the same as we are able to see it creating in outer
nature; we see it creating within our own organism. Thus if a child
were already a sage and were able to express himself not about outer
nature but rather about what goes on within him, if the child were
able to look within to his inner nature and penetrate nature there, he
would say, To know this nature means to create this nature. The
child would simply saturate himself with the creating forces, would become
one with these creating forces. And in his medical instinct, in his
physiological instinct, Schelling merely stated something that for the
entire later life is absurd; he drew forth something from the age of
childhood and extended it by saying, as it were: all this knowing in
old age is nothing but a faint web of images; if one were able to know
as a child, one would have to say that to know actually means to
create, means to develop creative activity. We are able to see this
creative activity, however, only in our own inner being.
What is it, therefore, that actually confronts us as creative activity
in our own inner being, which is expressed in a genius such as
Schelling as I have indicated? It is true, isn't it, that the nature
of genius is generally based on the fact that the person retains a
certain childlike quality in later life. Those people who age no
matter what happens and who take up aging in a normal way, as it were,
take it up appropriately never become geniuses. It is people who carry
into later life something of a positive, creative-childlike element who
bear the quality of genius. It is this childlike element, this
positive creative element, this knowing-creative element that if I
want to express myself in a simple way does not have time to know
things outwardly because it turns the forces of knowledge inward and
begins: to create. This is the heritage that we bring with us in
entering physical existence through birth. We bring with us the forces
of organization, and we can perceive them, as it were, through
spiritual science. And a person like Schelling sensed them
instinctively.
Anyone who acquires such perception knows that these soul-spiritual
forces that permeate the organism in an organizing way in the first
period of childhood do not completely cease being active with the
change of teeth. They have undergone only one stage. They become
suppressed, as it were, to a lesser degree of activity so that later
we definitely still retain in us the organizing forces. We have
conquered in ourselves, however, the memory-forming element that
entered consciousness with the change of teeth, detaching itself
thereby from the organization. We have taken memory from its latent
state into its liberated state; we have received as a soul-perceptive
force our growth force, our force of movement, our force of balance,
which were active in a correspondingly heightened degree in the first
period of childhood. You can see from this, however, that in normal
human development, this organizing force, this growth force, must be
transformed to a degree into something soul-spiritual, let us say,
into the force of memory, into the thought-forming force.
Let us assume, now, that too much of this organizing force active in
the first period of childhood were held back due to some process;
picture a development in which insufficient forces of organization
were transformed into the memory-forming force. These forces then
remain stuck below in the organism; they are not carried properly into
sleep each time a person falls asleep but rather continue to course
through the organism between falling asleep and awakening.
If an individual engaged in medical, physiological-phenomenological
research in the direction I can only suggest in this short course of
lectures, he would be led to the insight that it is possible for
forces in the human organism[,] that should actually enter the
soul-spiritual at the proper turning-point in life instead[,] to remain
below in the physical organization. Then what I spoke to you about
yesterday occurs. If the normal degree of organization-forces is
transformed with the change of teeth, then in later life we have the
proper degree of forces in the organism to organize this organism in
accord with its normal shape and normal structure. If we have not done
this, however, if we have transformed too little, then the organizing
forces that remain below appear somewhere and we encounter new
formations, carcinomatous formations, about which I spoke yesterday.
In this way just as Troxler suggested in the first half of the
nineteenth century we can study the process of becoming ill or of
illness that occurs in the moments of transition in later life.
We can then compare this with childhood illnesses, for obviously
childhood illnesses cannot have the same origin, because they appear
in an early stage of life when absolutely nothing has yet been
transformed. If one has learned the origin of illnesses in later life,
however, one has also acquired a capacity to observe what underlies
the origin of illnesses in childhood. One finds the same thing, in a
certain way, only from another side. One finds that there is too much
of the soul-spiritual force of organization in the human organism when
childhood illnesses arise. To an individual who has acquired the
capacity to perceive along these lines, such things appear especially
significant when considering the phenomena of scarlet fever or measles
in childhood. With these he can see in the child's organism how the
soul-spiritual, which otherwise functions in a normal way, begins to
stir; he sees how it is more active than it should be. The whole
course of these illnesses becomes comprehensible the moment one really
sees this restless stirring of the soul-spiritual in the organism as
the basis of illness.
Now, I beg you to consider my next sentence very precisely, for I
never go a step further than is justified by the deliberations
preceding it, even if much may be suggested only sketchily; everywhere
I merely indicate how far one can go, so I am not drawing a conclusion
here. I am simply saying that now one is not far from recognizing
something that is extraordinarily important to recognize for a true
knowledge. First we must arrive at the point of recognizing that in an
illness of the human organism during later life, one that goes in the
direction of new formations, there is too much of the organizing force
that results in an island of organization, so to speak. When we have
reached this point we are not far from saying that, if the later
period of life points in this way back to earliest childhood, this
indicates ultimately that what reveals itself in childhood points back
to the time before birth or, let us say, before conception; it points
back to the soul-spiritual existence of the human being before he was
clothed with a physical body. A person suffering from childhood
illnesses is simply someone who brought along too much of the
soul-spiritual from his prehuman, pre-earthly life; this excess then
lives itself out in the childhood illnesses.
In the future there will be no choice but to allow oneself to be
driven beyond the fruitless, materialistic approaches in which
physiological and therapeutic matters remain stuck today, to be driven
on to a soul-spiritual approach. It will soon be seen that what arises
in spiritual science does not occur because the spiritual investigator
is too little grounded in physical research, because he is, as it
were, a dilettante in physical research (though I must add
parenthetically that many who call themselves spiritual investigators
are, in fact, dilettantes, but this is not how it should be). It is
not necessary for the spiritual investigator to be grounded too little
in physical research in order to become a spiritual investigator;
rather he must be even more immersed in physical research than the
ordinary natural scientist. If he sees through phenomena more
intensively, he will be driven by the phenomena themselves into the
soul-spiritual, especially when it comes to illness.
The sentence, To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit, is
actually an absurdity similar to the first sentence, yet this sentence
also points to something that must be recognized, that must be
penetrated. Just as the sentence, To know nature means to create
nature, points us to the first age of childhood, and actually to life
before birth if we extend it in the right way so the sentence,
To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit, leads us to the end
of a person's life, to what kills the human being. You need only hold
to this sentence in a paradoxical way To know the spirit means to
destroy the spirit and you will find how one must not follow it
but how it nevertheless exists in life as something continually being
approached asymptotically.
For an individual who doesn't simply grasp knowledge aggressively but
develops self-perception in the right way, to know the spirit means to
see continual processes of breakdown, continual processes of
destruction in the human organism. When we look into the creative age
of childhood in the same way, we can see continuous upbuilding
processes, but upbuilding processes that have the peculiarity of
actually dimming consciousness. Therefore we are dreaming, we are
half-asleep in childhood; our consciousness is not fully awake. Our
own earthly spirituality, namely the conscious spirituality of pressing
back the growth activity, is what actually organizes us inwardly. The
moment this force enters consciousness, it ceases to permeate us with
organizing forces to the same degree as before.
In looking into the age of childhood one witnesses the work of
upbuilding forces, though forces that weaken consciousness; in the
same way one witnesses the breakdown processes when surrendering
oneself to perceiving the developed thinking processes, but these
breakdown processes are particularly suited to making our
consciousness clear and luminous.
Modern physiological science pays little attention to this, although
this is perfectly obvious in physiology's revelations, as obvious as
can be. If you direct your attention to the real revelations of modern
physiology, you will see that everything known about the physiology of
the brain makes it quite clear that with soul-spiritual processes
occurring consciously we do not have to do with any kind of growth
forces or forces that take up nourishment; rather we have to do with
processes of elimination in the nervous system, with breakdown
processes, with a continuous slow dying.
It is death that is active in us when we surrender ourselves to what
is spiritually active in our consciousness. And just as we look
through the unconscious creating forces to the beginnings of life, so
we look through the conscious conceptual forces that reveal themselves
as destructive forces; they reveal themselves as what begins to take
hold of us more and more as we grow into earthly life, to break us
down, and finally to lead us to confront earthly death; we see through
these forces to the other end of life, to death. Birth and death
or, let us say, conception, birth, and death can only be understood
by taking the spiritual into consideration.
And what wants to be expressed in the sentence, To know the spirit
means to destroy the spirit, is this: if a person wishes only to gaze
into the spirit, to take it up more or less naively, to take it up in
the same way that outer nature is taken up, then that individual would
have to dam up what is active in this thinking, conceptual, sensing
and feeling activity; the breakdown would have to be prevented. This
means that in such a moment a person would have to diminish, to
weaken, the power over the spirit, the inner consciousness, to the
point of unconsciousness, to a working of the spiritual in
unconsciousness. He would have to come to the point of forming
something spiritual out of himself, of pressing something spiritual
out of himself, as it were. To do this, however, he could not remain
conscious, because the organization cannot be carried into this
breakdown process, into this spiritual process.
Thus we can say that on the one hand we have the processes of
organization that consist of the fact that we have the form-skeleton
of the human organism, as it were (see drawing a), into which the
organizing force (drawing b, red) enters as something spiritual. (Of
course this is now considered abstractly.) On the other hand, as I
have described in the second case, we have the form-skeleton of the
human organism, but we do not wish to allow it to be permeated by the
organizing force, by the force that weakens our consciousness to a
certain extent: instead we wish to drive out the organizing force,
which we now want to know as spirit (see drawing c). We cannot go
along with our ego, however, because this is bound to the organism.
We have the other side as well, the side in which man clearly begins
to develop the spiritual, that is, to develop will activity in the
spiritual. This permeation with will activity remains unconscious,
sleeping, as it were, dreaming; based in this permeation with will
activity is a soul-spiritual element that we actually bring forth from
our organization without consciousness. Here we have the other side,
the manic side, the frenzied side, in which the human being goes mad;
we have the varying forms of the so-called mental illnesses. Whereas
with physical illnesses we have a soul-spiritual element that does not
belong in the physical organism (drawing b), with the so-called mental
illnesses we have something in the psychological realm that drives out
of the physical-etheric something that should remain within it
(drawing c). Something is driven out of the organism.
Today we will see what we arrived at yesterday illuminated from the
other side. This viewpoint can lead us still further. We will see
tomorrow the fruitful therapeutic consequences that can be arrived at
particularly from this viewpoint, consequences that can then be
confirmed absolutely in life, proving themselves in the most outward
practice of medicine, in practical therapeutic measures.
If we are looking for the cause of physical illness, we must
ultimately seek it in the spirit going astray in the organism. This
should certainly not be pursued abstractly. Anyone who does not
understand the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical
organism should really stay quiet about these matters. Only with
knowledge of the soul-spiritual element can one come to know the
specific aspects of this: where in one organ or another there is too
strong a force of organization, a hypertrophied force of organization,
as it were; these details can be arrived at only if one knows the
soul-spiritual concretely. The soul-spiritual element is made concrete
in the same way as the physical-bodily element in the liver, stomach,
and so on, and one must know this soul-spiritual element (of which
psychology has no intimation) with its constituents, its members, just
as well as we know the physical-sensible. And if the relationships
between the two are known, then one can often indicate even out of
the soul-spiritual findings encountered with the human being where
there is some kind of excessive organization in a particular organ. In
every case that is not the result of an external injury, such an
origin can be indicated.
On the other hand, if we are considering the so-called mental
illnesses, we remain purely in abstractions if we believe that
anything can be gained from a half-baked phenomenology, if we believe
that simply by describing soul-spiritual abnormalities one can arrive
at anything (though to describe them is, of course, most useful). With
such descriptions one can naturally create a sensation among laymen,
because it is always interesting to learn how a person who has gone
mad deviates from life's normal standard. Anything unusual is
interesting, and in our time it is still rare to deviate in this way
from normal life. But to remain stuck in simple description should not
be the important thing. It is particularly important not to press on
from that point to the dilettantish judgment that in such cases the
soul and spirit are ill and that the soul and spirit
can be cured somehow by soul-spiritual measures, as is commonly
dreamed up by those who remain stuck in abstractions.
Indeed not. Particularly with the so-called mental illnesses it is
absolutely clear that in every case one can indicate where the
diminished organization of some organ resides. An individual who truly
wishes to know the nature of melancholia or hypochondria driven to the
point of mental illness must not wade around in the soul element; he
should rather attempt to determine, from the condition of the
abdominal organs of the person in question, how the diminished
organization is influencing the person's abdominal organization. He
should attempt to determine how a force of organization that works
less strongly than normal allows something to precipitate out, so to
speak just as in chemistry one precipitates something out of a
solution so that a sediment occurs how a diminished force of
organization in the physical-bodily element, which would otherwise be
permeated by the force of organization, precipitates something out and
how this precipitate is then present in the organism as something
physical-bodily, how it is deposited in what takes place in the liver,
gall, stomach, heart, and lungs. These processes are not so accessible
to investigation as one would like nowadays, when people prefer to
stick to the crude aspects for histology also remains at the crude
level. Psychology is necessary to such an investigation, but in every
case it is necessary to lead the study of so-called mental illnesses
back to the bodily condition.
Of course such illnesses may seem less interesting as a result, but
this is nevertheless the case. It naturally seems more interesting if
a hypochondriac can say that his soul life is active in such-and-such
a way in the soul-spiritual cosmos than to say that there is a
diminished force of organization in his liver. It is more interesting
to look for the causes of hysteria, let us say, in the soul-spiritual;
it is more interesting than if one simply points to the metabolic
processes of the sexual organs when speaking of hysterical phenomena
or if one speaks of irregularities in the metabolism that spread
throughout the organism. Little will be learned about these things,
however, if the investigation is not pursued in this way.
Spiritual science is not always simply seeking the spirit. This can be
left quietly to the spiritualists and other interesting people
interesting because they are rare, though unfortunately they are not
rare enough! Spiritual science does not incessantly speak about
spirit, spirit, spirit; rather it attempts really to lay hold of the
spirit, and it tries to pursue its effects and succeeds by means of
this in reaching the correct place for a comprehension of the
material. It is certainly not so arrogant as to try to explain mental
illnesses abstractly by mental means; instead it leads, particularly
in the case of mental illness, to a material grasp of mental illness.
One may thus say that it points in a clarifying way to some
interesting phenomena. One need not look back very far perhaps
still with Griesinger and others, or in the pre-Griesinger era in
psychiatry to discover that not so long ago psychiatrists also at
least incorporated the bodily condition in their diagnoses. But what
has become more and more common today? It has become commonplace for
psychiatrists to flood us with descriptions of illness in their
literature that merely describe the soul-spiritual abnormalities, so
that here materialism has actually led us into an abstract
soul-spiritual domain. This is its tragedy. Here materialism itself
has led away from materialism. This is what is so remarkable about
materialism, that in certain regards it leads to a misunderstanding,
to a lack of comprehension of the material world itself. One who
pursues the spirit as a real fact, however, also pursues it where it
works its way into the material and where it then withdraws so that
the material is deposited, as in the so-called mental illnesses.
I had to present these things as a foundation in order to offer
guidelines in relation to the therapeutic aspect tomorrow. What we
discover when the physiological therapeutic domain is fructified with
spiritual science also has a social aspect. Life is remarkable in that
everywhere we are driven into the social element if we are not seeking
the scientific in an abstract withdrawal, in an academic existence
estranged from life, but rather in the life-filled comprehension of
human existence, of human community, if we are seeking with a truly
living science. As an example, we have an extraordinarily interesting
social phenomenon in recent evolution: through the split of humanity
upward into a bourgeois aristocracy and downward into the proletariat,
we can see how the one-sided aristocratic nature is taken hold of by a
false seeking after the spirit, by materialism in the spiritual realm,
while the proletarian nature is taken hold of by a certain
spiritualism in the material realm.
What does that mean spiritualism in the material realm? It means
remaining stuck when seeking the origins of existence. The proletariat
has thus developed scientific materialism as a view of life at the
same time as the aristocratic element has developed the teachings of
the spirit materialistically. While the proletariat has become
materialistic, the aristocracy has become spiritualistic. If you find
spiritualists among the proletariat, they did not grow out of their
own proletarian soil; rather it is a mimicry, it is simply imitative,
merely something that penetrated the proletariat by an infection I
will speak about infection tomorrow with the aristocratic-bourgeois
element.
And if you see among the aristocracy the development of materialism,
coming to behold spirits materially as one looks at flames, so that
materialism is carried into the most spiritual, wanting to see the
spiritual materially, then we see this growing out of the original,
decadent one-sidedness that emerged from the universally human, from
the totality inclining to the aristocratic, to the bourgeois element,
infected by the aristocratic element.
If what applies to the spirit is compelled to remain in matter,
because it has not been drawn out by an appropriate education or the
like, if in its spiritual seeking the proletariat is compelled to
remain in matter, then materialism develops as a view of life.
Materialism was developed by the proletariat as a view of life in the
materialistic understanding of history, for example. Materialism was
developed by more aristocratic people as spiritualism, for
spiritualism is materialism, masked materialism, which does not even
remain honest enough to acknowledge it; instead it lies and maintains
that those who profess things materialistically are actually
spiritual. After this divergence, we will continue tomorrow with our
studies.
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