FOUR
ARTICLES BY RUDOLF STEINER
Translated by Norman Macbeth
I
Spengler's “Perspectives of World History”
August 13, 1922
Oswald
Spengler has now issued the second volume of his Decline of
the West. He calls it Perspectives of World History
[The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler;
Volume II: Perspectives of World History. Translated by
Atkinson. (Knopf).]
One feels compelled to compare the beginning and end of these
perspectives.
The
beginning directs our observation toward nature. “Regard
the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in
the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in
upon you — a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of
this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest,
the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir
themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the
little gnat is free — he dances still in the evening
light, he moves whither he will. A plant is nothing on its own
account. It forms a part of the landscape in which an accident
made it take root. The twilight, the chill, the closing of
every flower — these are not cause and effect, not danger
and willed answer to danger. They are a single process of
nature, which is accomplishing itself near, with, and in the
plant. The individual is not free to look out for itself, will
for itself, or choose for itself.”
Throughout the whole book one feels that the
“world-historic perspectives” are colored by this
glance at the sleeping plant-life to which we are
exhorted at the very beginning. Just why should we look
at this? Is this what the man of the present is naturally
driven to when the riddles and disturbances of his epoch rage
in his mind? Is the mood provoked by this gaze at nature
especially suited to penetrating the essence of present-day
culture in such a way that it can be evaluated?
At the
very end of the volume one is placed before the whole tragedy
of the man of the present. “The passion for invention
declares itself as early as the Gothic architecture —
compare this with the deliberate form-poverty of the Doric!
— and is manifest throughout our music. Book-printing
appeared, and the long-range weapon. On the heels of
Columbus and Copernicus come the telescope, the
microscope, the chemical elements, and lastly the immense
technological corpus of the early Baroque. Then followed,
however, simultaneously with Rationalism, the invention
of the steam-engine, which upset everything and
transformed economic life from the foundations up. Till then
nature had rendered services, but now she was tied to the
yoke as a slave, and her work was, as though in contempt,
measured by a standard of horse-power. ... As the horse power
runs to millions and billions, the numbers of the population
increase and increase, on a scale that no other Culture ever
thought possible. This growth is a product of the
machine, which insists on being used and directed, and in
return centuples the forces of each individual. For the sake of
the machine, human life becomes, precious ... The entire
Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth
trembles under it ... And what now develops, in the space
of hardly a century, is a drama of such, greatness that men of
a future Culture, with other souls and other passions, will
hardly be able to resist the conviction that in our times
nature herself was tottering ... And these machines become in
their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic,
mystic, esoteric ... Never save here has a microcosm felt
itself superior to its macrocosm, but here the little
life-units have by sheer force of their intellect made the
unliving dependent upon themselves ... But for that very reason
Faustian man has become the slave of his creation
... The peasant, the hand-worker, even the merchant,
appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with the three
great figures that the machine has bred and trained up in the
course of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer,
and tne factory-worker.”
Why
should man, who seems to be placed in such a relation to
the machine, undertake to evaluate this position with the gaze
directed toward the sleeping life of the plant?
It was
certainly not gazing in this direction that brought man into
the midst of wheels, cranks, motors, and so forth. Much more
was it looking at lifeless nature. Ever since man approached
this with a contemplation which wanted its objects to be
as transparent as those of mathematics, he has moved toward
modern technology. The newer thinking has trained itself to
look at the spiritually transparent. This thinking learns
something about itself when it understands how it conceives the
impact of two elastic balls or the trajectory of a body. In the
same way as it conceives these it would fain grasp all the
phenomena which confront it in a physical or chemical
laboratory. Spiritually transparent phenomena are what it
desires. If someone objects that the impact of two elastic
balls is not spiritually transparent because the force of
elasticity remains dark and impenetrable, we may justifiably
answer that this is not the point, that we need not know the
nature of the ink in which a letter is written when we want to
understand the letter.
In
lifeless nature man sees in complete clarity all that he needs
to construct a machine. For that purpose, he needs ideas which
can dispense with all but what inorganic nature shows in full
transparency.
But in
the soul of man these ideas are mere pictures. Our
consciousness recognizes them as such. They live without force
in our consciousness; they are related to what they portray as
mirror-pictures are related to the objects which stand before
the mirror. One mirror-picture does not strike another, yet
together they may give a coherent picture of a blow. In this
picture-knowledge modern thinking has its greatness and its
deficiency. If it understands itself in its greatness and
deficiency, it is plunged into riddles and
disturbances.
This
picture-knowledge has its transparency. One who feels this will
confess that all knowledge worthy of the name must be thus
transparent. But already in the plant-world this transparency
is no longer present if one seeks only for the same cognition
as in the case of the pictures of lifeless nature. Goethe felt
this. Therefore, he sought a differently formed cognition for
the plant-world. He sought for the picture of the archetypal
plant, out of which the single plant-form may be grasped as the
single physical phenomenon is grasped out of “natural
laws.”
We can
cognize the living as thoroughly as the lifeless only if we
expand our faculties of comprehension. In the cognition of the
lifeless, men saw for the first time what knowledge could
really be. But this cognition reveals only what is foreign to
the real human essence. We cannot advance from the grasp
of the lifeless to the experiencing of the true human essence
if we cling to this method.
In the
machine we have something which is transparent but which is
foreign to us. We have bound up our lives with this foreign
element. The machine stands there cold and alien, a triumph of
“reliable” cognition. Besides it stands man
himself, with only darkness before him if he looks into
himself with this cognition.
Nevertheless, men had to acquire this insight into the
dead-and-transparent if they were to be fully awake. They need
the picture-knowledge of what is alien to their nature in order
to wake up. All previous knowledge was drawn out of the
darkness of man's own nature. It becomes clear for the first
time when the human soul becomes simply a mirror,
reflecting only pictures of things alien to man.
Formerly when a man spoke of knowledge he had in his mind the
impulses and contents of his own nature, which cannot be clear.
His ideas were permeated with life, but they were not clear.
The pictures of the lifeless world are clear. In
such pictures, however, he has not only a revelation of
the lifeless, but inner experiences as well. Pictures can cause
nothing through their own nature. They are impotent. But if a
man experiences his moral impulses in the picture-world as he
has trained himself to experience lifeless nature, then he
raises himself to freedom. For pictures cannot influence
the will as passions and instincts do. The epoch which
developed this mathematical picture-thinking in the lifeless is
the first which can lead man to freedom.
Cold
technology gives human thinking a stamp which leads to freedom.
Among the gears and levers and motors there is only a dead
spirit: but in this realm of death the free human soul
awakes. It must awaken in itself the spirit which
previously dreamed more or less as it ensouled nature.
Thinking rises from its dream through the coldness of the
machine.
Waking
vision, which can be directed toward the machine, again becomes
dreaming if, as in Spengler's contemplation, it is driven back
to the plant. For this contemplation does not, like Goethe's,
go forward to achieve transparency in observing plants;
on the contrary it retreats into the twilight in which life
appears when we look at it as men looked at the lifeless in the
pre-technical period.
The
observation to which we are challenged at the beginning
of Spengler's contemplation allows technics to appear as
something devilish. But this is only because he denies the
clarity which is achieved through technics. Through this denial
man recoils from his own wakefulness. In place of winning from
this clearness the strength to kindle the free human spirit
through the machine, this plant-contemplation calls up a fear
which says: “These wheels, cylinders, and levers no
longer speak. Everything which is decisive withdraws into
the inner realm. Man feels the machine to be devilish, and
rightly so.” But it seems necessary to drive the devil
out of the machine. May one, if one intends to do that, thus
frame the beginning and end of his thinking, and place
“world-perspectives” in between as Spengler does?
We will seek an answer to this question in the continuation of
this article.
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