SOCIAL
UNDERSTANDING THROUGH SPIRITUAL SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE.
GA
191, Lecture 2, Dornach, October 4. 1919.
In the
middle one of these three lectures there are a number of anthroposophical
truths in particular that I would like to develop for you. We shall then
see what a great impact on a person's everyday life these particular truths
have, and that is what we will talk about tomorrow. Today I just want to
draw you attention to some deeper aspects of the being of man.
People
very often do not ask the question as to which of man's forces are used to
acquire knowledge of supersensible worlds. They try to answer this question
merely by saying that there is a possibility of acquiring supersensible
knowledge by means of certain forces in man. But what the actual
connections are between these forces and man's being, they do not usually
ask. That is why so little importance is attached to making knowledge of
supersensible worlds really fruitful in ordinary life. It can be said that
supersensible knowledge is becoming more and more essential to man, just in
our time. In that case it is vital to understand what its connection is
with ordinary everyday life.
As you
know, the first of the capacities that leads man into supersensible realms
is the force of Imagination, the second capacity is the force of
Inspiration and the third capacity the force of Intuition. The question now
is whether these capacities need concern us at all except in their
connection with knowledge of supersensible worlds or whether these
capacities have any part to play in the rest of man's life?
— You will see that the latter is the case. As my little book
“Education of the Child in the Light of AnthroposophyÝ
tells you, we can see human life running its
course in three stages: from birth to the change of teeth, from the change
of teeth to puberty, and from puberty till about the twenty-first year. If
you do not regard man purely superficially you will be struck by the fact
that the nature of man's development is entirely different in the three
different seven-year stages. The pushing through of our permanent teeth, as
I have often mentioned, is connected with the development of forces that
are not merely confined, let us say, to our jaws or their neighbouring
organs, but fill our whole physical body. There is work in progress within
our physical body between birth and the seventh year, and this work comes
to an end with the pushing through of our permanent teeth.
It is
obvious that the forces doing this work of developing the physical body are
supersensible, isn't it? The perceptible body is only the material in which
they work. These supersensible forces, active in the whole of man's
organisation during the first seven years of his life, become, as it were,
suspended when their purpose has been achieved and the permanent teeth have
appeared. At the age of seven these forces go to sleep. They are hidden
within the being of man; they go to sleep within him. And they can be drawn
forth from your being when you do the sort of exercises I describe in
“Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”
as leading to Intuition. For the forces that are applied in the acquisition of
intuitive knowledge are the same forces that you grow with at the time of
life when this growth culminates in the change of teeth. These sleeping
forces that are active within the human body until the seventh year are the
forces you use in supersensible knowledge to reach Intuition.
Now
the forces that are active from the seventh year to the fourteenth year and
go to sleep at puberty in the depths of the body, are drawn forth and form
the power of Inspiration. And the forces that in bygone times used to be
the source of youthful ideals between the fourteenth and the twenty-first
year — it would be too much of an assertion to say that
this still happens today — the forces that create organs
in the physical body for these ideals of youth, are the same forces you can
draw forth from their state of slumber and use for the acquisition of
Imagination.
From
this you will see that the forces of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition
are not just any old forces got from we do not know where, but are the same
forces as those we grow with from our birth to the age of twenty-one. So
the forces that live in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are very
healthy forces. They are the forces a human being uses for his healthy
growth and that go to sleep within his body when the corresponding phases
of growth are completed.
I have
just shown you the connections between the forces of supersensible
knowledge and man's everyday existence. Something similar, though, can be
said about the forces of man's normal nature, man's nature as it appears in
ordinary life. Only there it is not so obvious. A very important force in
ordinary life — and we have discussed it many times
— is the force of memory. The power of memory is active
within us when, as we say, we remember something we have experienced. But,
as you all know, there is something peculiar about the power of memory. We
have got it and yet we haven't got it. Many a person struggles at some
moment of his life to try and remember something that he cannot remember.
This wanting to remember but not being able to remember entirely, arises
through the fact that the force we use in our souls to remember with is the
same force that transforms the food we eat into the kind of substances our
body can make use of. If you eat a piece of bread and this bread is
transformed inside your body into the sort of substance that serves life,
this is apparently a physical process. This physical process, however, is
governed by supersensible forces. These supersensible forces are the same
forces you use when you remember. So the same kind of forces are being used
on the one hand for memory and on the other hand for the assimilation of
foodstuffs in the human body. And you actually always have to oscillate a
bit between your soul and your body if you want to dwell in memory. If your
body is carrying out the process of digesting too well, you may find you
will not be able to draw enough forces away from it to remember certain
things. There is an inner struggle going on the whole time in the
unconscious between a soul process and a bodily process every time you want
to remember something. Looking at memory is the best way to understand how
absurd it is basically, from a higher point of view, for some people to be
idealists and other people materialists. The assimilation of foodstuffs in
the human body is doubtless a material process. The forces controlling it
are the same as the forces at work in a process of ideas, namely the force
of memory. You only see the world aright if you see it as being neither
materialistic nor idealistic, but are capable of following up the ideal
aspect of what is presented in a material way and following up the material
aspect of what is presented as idea. The spiritual quality of a world
conception is hot being able to say ‘Over there is base materialism, which
is for the “dregs” of humanity, and over here is idealism, which is for the
elect’ —
and the speaker usually includes himself among these —
but the essential quality of a really spiritual world conception lies in
its capacity to take what it has grasped in the spirit and bring it down
into material existence so that material existence can be understood and
not despised. That is the fallacy of many religious denominations, that
they despise material existence instead of understanding it and looking for
the spirit within it.
The
crux of the matter is really to go into these things, and not, as is still
largely the case, to deal in empty phrases where mysticism is concerned.
After having as it were shown you how these things can really be gone into,
I would now like to bring something of very great importance. When people
speak of material existence and supersensible existence they usually speak
of them as though material existence were spread out in the world and as
though supersensible, non-perceptible existence were somewhere behind or
above this. If you imagine you simply have physical-perceptible existence
on the one hand and supersensible existence on the other, you will never
understand man. There is no way of really grasping man if you look at
things from the point of view of the perceptible world versus the
supersensible world. In reality it is like this: The world of the senses
and the world in which we work and live socially are spread out around us.
Let us represent diagrammatically by means of this line this world that is
spread out around us (see horizontal line of drawing). You will only have a
complete picture of what is actually there in the world if you imagine that
there are forces above this line, supersensible forces (red side). We
neither perceive these supersensible forces by means of our ordinary senses
nor by means of our intellect bound to our ordinary senses. We perceive
only what is in the realm of this line.
But
there are forcesunder
this
line as well. If we actually want to include the whole of the imperceptible
or spiritual realm we must speak of subsensible as well as supersensible
forces. So we must imagine that there are also subsensible forces here
(orange side).
Thus
we have the sense world, supersensible forces and subsensible forces. Where
does man himself, as an ordinary person, belong? The part of him you see
standing in front of you belongs entirely to this line. But supersensible
forces from one side and subsensible forces from the other side work into
the part of man that belongs to the line. Man is the result of
supersensible and subsensible forces. Now which of man's forces are
supersensible and which are subsensible? All the forces connected with
understanding are supersensible, that is, everything we make use of for
understanding. And these are the same forces that also form our head. So we
can say that the supersensible forces are the forces of
understanding.
Now
subsensible forces also work into man. What kind of forces are these? These
are will forces. All the will forces, everything in man that is of the
nature of will, is subsensible.
An
obvious question is where do these subsensible forces, these will forces,
come from? They are the same forces as the forces of the planets, that is,
from our point of view, the forces of the earth. Yes indeed, the forces of
the earth are perpetually working into man. And it is our forces of will
that are connected with these forces of the planets, these forces of the
earth. The forces of understanding come to us from the world's periphery,
and pour into us as it were from outside, from the outside of the planet.
The forces of will enter into us from the planet itself. This is how the
forces of our own planet earth live within us. The moment we enter birth
the forces of planet earth are active within us.
The
question now arises as to how this activity is distributed. There is a
considerable difference in this respect in the first, second and third
stage of life, that is, up till the seventh year, the fourteenth year and
the twenty-first year. The will working in us up till the seventh year
works entirely from out of the planet's interior. It is very interesting to
see spiritual-scientifically that in everything working in the child up
till the age of seven it is the forces of the earth's depths that are
active. If you want to see an actual manifestation of the forces of the
earth's interior, then make a study of everything going on in the child up
till the age of seven, for these are the forces from within the earth. To
delve down into the earth to find the forces of the earth's interior would
be absolutely wrong. You would only find earth substances. The forces that
are active in the earth come to manifestation in the work they do in the
human being up till his seventh year. And from the seventh to the
fourteenth year it is the forces of the encircling air that work in man,
forces that still belong to the earth, to the earth's atmosphere. These are
predominantly at work in everything developing in the human being between
seven and fourteen. Then comes the most important stage of all, from
fourteen to twenty-one. At this stage the subsensible passes over into the
supersensible. Here a kind of balance is created between the subsensible
and supersensible. Now the forces of the earth's whole solar system work at
organising the human being.
So we
have the earth's interior in the first period of life; encircling air in
the second period of life, that is, what the earth itself is embedded in.
The forces streaming down from cosmic spaces in so far as these cosmic
spaces are filled with our own actual planetary system, up till the
twenty-first year. Not until the age of twenty-one does man tear himself
away, as it were, from the influences brought about in him from outside by
the planets and the planetary system belonging to these.
Please
notice that in everything I have referred to as having an influence on man,
bodily influences are of course included. They are bodily processes that
the forces from the planet's interior bring about up till the seventh year.
They are bodily processes that are formed by the circulating air in
connection with the breathing and so on between the seventh and the
fourteenth year. There is no doubt that they are bodily processes, in fact
actual transformations of bodily organs are brought about; everything being
connected with man's growing and becoming larger. Thus man grows beyond all
this work being done on him by the earth; all this ceases at
twenty-one.
What
happens then, however? What happens after twenty-one? Up till twenty-one we
draw on what comes from the earth and its planetary system in the way we
have described. We build up our constitution with the earth's help. Then,
after we have reached the age of twenty-one, we have to draw on ourselves.
We gradually have to release what we have put into our organism from out of
the forces of the planet and the planetary system.
Activities going
on in the blood forces always used to ensure that this happened in the
past. As you will probably know, man has not learnt to release the
planetary forces, himself, after the age of twenty-one. And yet he has been
doing so. He did it as an unconscious process. The capacity was in his
blood. It was built into him to do it. The important change in our present
time — and the present extends over a long period of
several centuries, of course — is that man's blood is
losing the capacity to release what we have put into the organism in this
way, before twenty-one
The
important changes taking place in humanity at the present time are based on
the waning of the forces in the blood. These things cannot be testified by
external anatomy and physiology; to do that they would need to investigate
bodies from the tenth or ninth centuries in order to discover that blood
was different then. And they would not even have had the chemical tests to
do it. But through spiritual science we can know with certainty that man's
blood has grown weaker. And the great turning-point when human blood began
to grow weak lay in the middle of the fifteenth century.
What
are the consequences? The consequences of this are that what we cannot
carry out unconsciously any more by means of our blood, we have to carry
out consciously. We have to educate ourselves to do consciously what was
simply done unconsciously by man's blood in the past. For the strength in
our blood is in the process of fading away. What would happen if a time
were to come when human beings completely lost hold of their youth, and
were unable to draw on their youthful forces, if there were no means of
resorting to doing consciously what was once done unconsciously by the
blood?
You
must not take these things in a purely theoretical way, of course. As
theories, they may be interesting, but to take them as theories is not
enough. Nowadays they have to be put into practice, for they are connected
with the practical matter of the evolution of mankind. They must be put
into practice to the point of making us conscious that man's whole
educational system has to change. We have to help man to develop a strong,
conscious capacity to re-experience later in life, as though with the force
of elemental memory, what he has received in his youth.
Everywhere, people
are still working contrary to this requirement. For instance they are proud
of the visual aids used in primary school education, and they attach great
importance to getting down to the mental level of the child as far as
possible, and not teaching him anything that extends beyond his mental
capacity. They actually rig up calculating machines so that they can teach
the children to do all kinds of sums by counting balls. Nothing must go
beyond the child's mental capacity. These visual aid lessons get
frightfully trivial and trite. It is bound to lead to nothing but
commonplace concepts if they avoid giving the child anything beyond its own
mental capacity. People who do this, thoroughly overlook an important yet
subtle observation of human life.
Supposing a child
is taught in such a way that he takes a particular thing in, not because it
is absolutely on his own mental level, but because his teacher's warmth of
enthusiasm gets passed on to him, and the child takes the thing in because
the teacher in his enthusiasm tells him about it. The child takes it in
just because it lives in the warmth emanating from the teacher. If the
child absorbs something that reaches beyond his understanding, purely
because of the infectious quality of his teacher's enthusiasm, he will not
yet understand what he has taken in, as people say in superficial life. Yet
what he has taken in lives in his soul. At the age of thirty the grown-up
will remember what the child took in, perhaps at the age of ten. He
re-experiences it. He has become mature now, and he can understand what he
is able to release from the depths of his soul; he can understand the thing
he was taught purely through the force of enthusiasm, and which he is now
able to release from his mature mind. You know, these are the most valuable
moments in life, when your mental life does not have to be restricted to
what comes to meet you from outside, but you re-experience what you took in
in your younger days with inadequate understanding, and which you can now
release and absorb with your more mature mind. The more care you take that
the child does not just get the sort of lessons where it matter-of-factly
takes in what it understands — for that will disappear
with the passing years, and neither joy nor enthusiasm will come from it
later — the more you will be doing for the person's
later development; for lessons taken in purely through the teacher's warmth
are life giving when they are re-experienced.
Nowadays this is
of particular importance in teaching- In earlier times it was not so
important, for in those days the releasing was carried out by the blood,
whereas now it has to be brought to consciousness. It certainly makes a
difference if you understand the kind of things that are being put to
practical use by spiritual science. Because if you understand them in the
right way you will find an opportunity somewhere in life of making
practical use of them for the good of humanity. In this case, if you
understand it properly, you will find an opportunity to make use of the
fact that our blood is becoming weak, by attaching all the more importance
to the teacher's capacity for enthusiasm.
But
people are so little aware nowadays of what is at stake. For standardised
education still plays a great part, that is, the kind of education that
works with a whole set of standard rules. Education is learnt, how to teach
a child is learnt, how to arrange the lesson is learnt. Comparing this with
our present day consciousness it would be like learning that man consists
of carbohydrates, protein and so on — these are our
constituents and they undergo such and such changes inside our body, and we
cannot eat before we have understood this; for we do not eat in a
physiological sense until we understand it. — I told you
once, and you may even have experienced this yourselves
—, that you can already come across a thing like this:
— You visit someone who has a scale standing beside his
plate, and he carefully puts a piece of meat on the scales to find out how
much it weighs, for he may only eat a piece of meat of a quite specific
weight. Physiology already determines his appetite. But not everybody does
it this way yet, thank goodness! It is important to understand that
physiology is not part of the eating process but covers other aspects, and
that a person can eat without having studied physiology, the physiology of
the nutritional process. But we do not take it for granted that we also
ought to teach, that is, teach in a living way, without having absorbed
standardised education. This standardised education is exactly the same
thing to a good teacher as the aesthetics of colour is to an artist. He can
have studied aesthetics of colour very well, but he will not be able to
paint because of that. The ability to paint comes from an entirely
different quarter from the study of the aesthetics of colour. The ability
to teach comes from an entirely different quarter from the study of
education. The important thing, today, is not to give would-be teachers a
seminar of some sort of standardised education that prescribes dogmas, but
to give them the sort of thing that makes them become teachers and
educators in the same way as people become artists or botanists. It is that
the educator has to be born in a person and not that education has to be
learnt.
What
has to be understood just because of this very change in man's set-up is
that education has to be a real art. In the time of transition people were
at sixes and sevens as to what to do about education. That is why they
invented so many abstract educational systems. The essential thing today,
however, is to give people a real knowledge of man, especially if they are
teachers. You see, if you possess this real knowledge of man and work out
of it with children, a remarkable thing will happen: Let us suppose you are
a teacher and have your pupils in front of you. If you are a student of
standardised education, the kind that follows the rules, then you will know
exactly how you have to teach, because you will have learnt the rules. You
will teach according to these rules, today, just as you taught according to
these rules yesterday and will teach according to them to-morrow and the
day after to-morrow. But if you are the artist kind of teacher you are not
nearly so well off. For now you cannot teach yesterday, today, tomorrow and
the day after tomorrow according to the same rules, but have to learn from
the child afresh each time, how he has to be taught; it must be man's own
nature every time that determines what you do. And it is ideal if the
teacher can teach the way the child tells him to teach, and can keep on
forgetting actual education and has not got a clue about the rules. For the
moment the child stands in front of him again he will again be electrified
by the growing child and will know what he has to do with him.
You
must pay attention to the way things have to be said, to the way things
have to be spoken about today. You cannot speak about these things today in
such a way that they can be put into so and so many satisfying principles,
but you can only speak about them by pointing to something alive, something
that cannot be reduced to abstract principles but which is alive and
produces ever more life. That is the crux of the matter. That is why
spiritual science is needed in actual life today, because spiritual science
is not merely for the head but is for the whole of man and releases will
impulses. Indeed it ought to enter into many realms of life, so that
impulses of will are eventually brought into every sphere of human
activity.
I have
demonstrated this in one particular realm of life, namely education, and
shown how the education of children under the age of twenty-one can be made
to bear fruit for later life. People do not receive an education only up to
the age of twenty-one, though, for education carries on throughout the
whole of life. But this only happens in a healthy way if people learn from
one another.
This
too was done by the blood in earlier ages of history. When people met in
social life they used to learn things from one another unconsciously, some
people learning more and others less, according to the way their blood
worked. But our blood has grown weak and has lost its power. This activity,
too, has to be replaced by more consciousness. People must achieve the art
of acquiring relatively more for themselves from other people compared with
what they produce from out of themselves. In earlier times it was
sufficient to rely on life. The blood did everything. Now it is essential
for people really to develop a sense for the other person's being. This
will come about as a matter of course if people steer their thoughts in the
direction of spiritual science. Different kinds of thoughts are stimulated
with spiritual science than without it.
You
will not doubt this fact, for the way spiritual science is received by
people who do not want to know anything about their thoughts shows that
spiritual scientific thoughts are different from thoughts without spiritual
science. It is necessary to develop a totally new way of thinking. The kind
of thinking we develop when we accustom ourselves to working with
supersensible thoughts is the kind of thinking that has an effect on our
organism. And when I told you today that memory is the same force that
transforms food into substances man needs for his organism you will no
longer be astonished to find that other forces can be transformed in man,
like for instance the force with which we understand supersensible things
being the same one that helps us to know the human being better than we
would know him if we had no healthy longing for supersensible
knowledge.
You
people study what is in my
“Occult Science,”
and to do that you have to develop certain concepts that most people would
still call 'Utter madness'. A few days ago I got yet another letter from
someone studying
“Occult Science,”
and he says that nearly every chapter is pure nonsense. You can understand people
saying it is pure nonsense. Why, it is quite obvious that they often say it
these days. Yet these people who do not put themselves out to accept the
kind of concepts that lead to Saturn, Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan,
and do not get down to developing ideas about a world that is not limited
to the senses will also not acquire any knowledge of man. They do not see
the human being in the other person but notice at the most that one person
has a more pointed nose than the other, and one has blue eyes whereas the
other has brown. But they notice nothing of man's inner being that
manifests as his soul and organises his body. The same force which enables
us to take an interest, and I am not saying now that it enables us to have
supersensible occult powers, but the same force that enables us to take an
interest in supersensible knowledge also gives us the kind of knowledge of
man that we need today.
You
can set up the most grandiose social programmes and develop the finest
social ideas, but if people shy away from acquiring any knowledge of man
and do not see any real humanity in one another, they will never be able to
bring about social conditions. They cannot produce social conditions unless
they establish the possibility that peoplecan
be
social. But people cannot be social if they do not see the human quality in
one another, but live entirely within themselves. Human beings can only
become social if they really meet one another in life, and something passes
between them. This is the root of the social problem. Most people say of
the social question nowadays, that if certain things were arranged in such
and such a way people would be able to lead a social existence.
— But it is not like that. If things are arranged like
that, social people will be good people in a social sense, and anti-social
people will be anti-social with any sort of arrangement.
The
essential thing is to make the sort of arrangements that allow for human
beings to develop really social impulses. And one of these social impulses
is knowledge. But as long as you go on educating people, for instance, with
an eye to their becoming clerks or army officers or some other kind of
civil servant, you will not educate them to recognise the human quality in
others. For the sort of education that is good for becoming a clerk or an
officer only helps you to see clerks and officers in other people. The kind
of education that makes human beings of people also enables them to
recognise people as human beings. But it is impossible to recognise people
as human beings if you do not develop a sense for supersensible knowledge.
And the realm in which supersensible knowledge is most indispensable is in
the art of education. Therefore the natural scientific, materialistic way
of thinking has done more damage in the field of education than anywhere
else. And here you can experience the most amazing things.
In
every department you find well-meaning people today, who want to reform
everything, even revolutionise them. But if you talk to these people about
these things, something very strange transpires. They will admit quite
honestly to a particular conviction about reforming things. Yet one of them
who happens to be a tailor will ask you how his existence as a tailor is
going to be affected when things change. And another person, who is, let us
say, a railway clerk, asks you how his life as a railway clerk is going to
suffer when things are changed. — These are only given
as examples to show you that people are perfectly in agreement that
everything should be changed as long as nothing changes and everything
remains exactly the same. The vast majority of people today are convinced
that everything must stay exactly the same when it changes. Make no mistake
about the fact that the sort of social improvement people long for today is
of extremely abstract dimensions. People long for a great deal, but nothing
must change where their comfort is concerned.
And
this is particularly true where it is a of people taking an inner step into
an entirely new situation. Nevertheless the essential thing is that people
open themseIves to the possibility of making the transition to thinking in
quite a new way about man changing himself in his innermost
being.
All
sorts of questions arise from these considerations, questions that are
absolutely pertinent to life. What we must realise is that we have
constructed a deeper foundation for these questions, by saying that
although certain forces appear to be of a spiritual-soul nature, they also
come to expression in our bodily nature. For the capacity is terribly
lacking today, to bring down to a material level what we think of on a
spiritual level. Not until we are capable of bringing down on to a material
level what we think of as being spiritual shall we be able to grasp the
actual nerve of the social question.
Thus
it is virtually a matter of aiming towards a way of thinking that really
develops a knowledge of man that is at one and the same time a social
impulse. A way of thinking based on anything else is not adequate. A
mentality based on the life of the state or the life of economics creates
clerks and officers. But the sort of mentality we need creates human
beings. This can only be the sort of thought life that breaks away from the
sphere of economics and the life of the state. That is why our
“Threefold Social Organism”
had to happen. We
had to show in a radical way that any kind of dependency of thought life on
economics or on the life of the state had to stop, and thought life had to
be set up on its own basis. Then thought life will be able to give
economics and the life of the state what economics and the state cannot
give to the life of thought.
That
is the important thing, that is what is vital! Whole human beings will only
arise again when we work out of an independent life of thought.