The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] First of all, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Dr. Unger and all of you for your warm welcome. I feel it is appropriate at this moment to express that this warm greeting is also coming from me to you, and you will believe—from someone whose whole heart is set on ensuring that events such as the one that began yesterday contribute appropriately to the development of the anthroposophical worldview— you will believe—someone whose whole heart is set on this—that this greeting is truly sincere through and through and that it comes from a soul that sincerely wishes for this event to proceed in the very best possible way.

[ 2 ] Anthroposophical spiritual science, as it will once again be represented here at this congress, is based on the recognition that behind the physical, sensory world—and intimately interwoven with it—lies a spiritual, supersensory world, but also on the recognition that human beings are capable, through the development of certain powers of cognition, of gaining insight into this supersensible world that is interwoven with the sensory world. Because anthroposophy acknowledges this, it has often been regarded merely as a kind of revival of the ancient Gnosticism, which was still flourishing in the early Christian centuries and was then overcome—I might even say, eradicated. Anyone who has read even a single one of my books with honest intentions can know that this judgment is entirely incorrect. But anyone who, on the other hand, considers how anthroposophy seeks to develop a supersensible perspective from a similar spirit of inquiry—as was the case in ancient Gnosticism and in other worldviews striving toward the supersensible—will, provided they do not succumb to the misjudgment just expressed, will nonetheless be able to describe this anthroposophy as a kind of Gnosticism. Consequently, however, it understandably finds itself in opposition to a view that developed more and more over the course of the 19th century under the influence of the scientific way of thinking—a view that is, in fact, the very opposite of all Gnostic endeavors toward knowledge. This is what has often been called agnosticism. This agnosticism—one might say in its purest form—arose from the same philosophical foundations from which Darwin, for example, worked in the realm of the natural sciences: from the way of thinking characteristic of the Western world. One can study it in this purest form particularly in thinkers such as Herbert Spencer.

[ 3 ] If one wishes to explain the essence of this agnosticism, it might be best to do so in the following manner. This agnosticism aims to be a kind of philosophy, a kind of worldview, and it seeks to operate entirely on the basis of scientific premises. In doing so, it accepts only those aspects of human methodology of knowledge that the natural sciences themselves employ in their various limited and restricted fields. These natural sciences investigate the individual phenomena of nature within their lawful interrelationships; they certainly interweave the ideas they form about these individual natural phenomena with all manner of hypotheses regarding causality; but it refuses—and in its own field, quite rightly so—to ascend from sensory observation in experiment and observation, and from what emerges for the intellect, which is bound to the senses, from experiment and observation, to any form of knowledge that extends into the supersensible. It summarizes the phenomena—or, more accurately, merely the fields of phenomena—and presents what it can thereby discern regarding the lawful relationships among phenomena.

[ 4 ] This is the foundation of agnosticism. It asserts: One can go on and on in summarizing external phenomena. One then gains, so to speak, a picture of interconnected thought structures that extend like a net over the phenomena and series of phenomena observed by the natural sciences. But in the face of everything that can enter human consciousness as knowledge about nature, one must assume the existence of an unknown realm—the actual, deeper world of causes—that underlies what can be known in this way. One can actually only have knowledge of the external sensory-physical realm and its summaries; but one cannot penetrate to that which holds and sustains the whole, which can no longer be reached by the senses, which must be a supersensible realm. Human beings cannot possess gnosis or gnosticism. Human beings can only have agnosticism; they can only know that limits are set upon their knowledge, and that they cannot penetrate to that which underlies the outer sensory world as its true supersensory cause.

[ 5 ] This agnosticism is then extended to the realm of the psyche as well. It is said: One can certainly fathom how that which appears as ideas in our consciousness is structured, how these ideas mutually support and sustain one another, how feelings are linked to these ideas, how a world of the will, emerging from unknown depths, influences this world of ideas, and how these ideas are stimulated by stimuli arising from sensory perceptions. But one cannot grasp that which now flows forth within the interplay of ideas, the coloring of this interplay by feeling, the pulsing of the same interplay with forces of will—one cannot grasp that which flows forth there and which consciousness sums up in the word “I,” one cannot approach this in such a way that, for example, humanity’s aspirations to knowledge of an immortal, eternal soul can be satisfied by a science of that soul—agnosticism in the realm of the natural sciences, agnosticism in the realm of psychological and spiritual life.

[ 6 ] I do not wish to offer a critical discussion here today of agnosticism, which thoroughly dominates large segments of today’s human world. These lectures are not intended to present a critique of agnosticism; rather, they are intended to present what anthroposophy has to say, in a positive way, about its roots of knowledge and the fruits of its life.

[ 7 ] What I want to say today is a few words about how this agnosticism, when it takes hold of the human soul, affects human life as a whole. For in truth, only someone who does not approach human life—both in its individual and social aspects—with sufficient objectivity can believe that the realization that something like an agnostic viewpoint can stand on its own and form the fundamental tone of a certain more or less scientific or popular philosophy. Anyone who approaches life with an unbiased perspective knows that human life is like the organization of individual human nature. Whatever takes place in any part of the human body—whether it is a matter of illness or health—affects the entire human organism, wherever it occurs within it. And so the impartial observer can also see how what is today known as agnosticism is penetrating our science—which, after all, is an authority for the vast majority of people, at least among the civilized people of the West—how agnosticism is penetrating science, how it is spreading from science into teaching and education, how it takes hold of social and religious life from there, and how millions upon millions of people—who set the tone for the present and the near future—are gripped by it, and who often have no idea at all that, despite perhaps adhering to this or that traditional religious creed, they are, in the depths of their souls, embracing this agnostic view. The impartial observer can see the effects of agnosticism everywhere in life. Today, we encounter its effects in individual human beings and in social life. First and foremost, however, it manifests itself in the realm of imagination. The human being reveals itself—both as an individual and as a social being—through imagination, through feeling, and through will.

[ 8 ] Agnosticism first takes hold of the world of the imagination, and it asserts that, no matter how one may develop this world of the imagination, no matter how one may expand or deepen it, no matter what connections one may explore in one’s imaginative life: one cannot immerse oneself in a being, in a reality, through this imaginative life. Imagination flows in a stream of images that are certainly rooted in some way in a being, in an objective reality; but that which a person carries within as their ideas contains nothing that could lead them down into this realm of true reality. — This view is advocated with the utmost radicalism precisely by the most distinguished minds of our time. But one need only reflect for a moment on how the whole, complete human being, with all his manifestations, must in fact be rooted not in some kind of pictorial existence, not in a world of imagination that has nothing to do with true reality, but how he must be rooted in this true reality itself. Whatever one may think about the relationship between what we imagine and the true reality of the world, no one can admit that what a person feels, what a person wills, and what a person does—that these do not have their roots in this true reality. Even the simplest step into practical life demonstrates this.

[ 9 ] There have been skeptics who did not wish to go quite as far as agnosticism, but who nevertheless regarded the external sensory world, in an absolute sense, as a kind of illusion. Legends have arisen in connection with such skeptics. For example, it was said of a skeptic in antiquity that when he came to a precipice, he did not stop in his tracks because he regarded the existence of the precipice in the external sensory world as merely an illusion. You will immediately see, in the face of such a legend in all its absurdity, that it is impossible to derive ultimate practice from a view that does not allow what a person does—what he himself judges to be his reality—to be rooted in true reality, in an objective cosmic context.

[ 10 ] But if one truly and honestly internalizes the view that everything one can imagine is merely an image that does not penetrate to the roots of what is truly real, then one separates all human imagination from what a human being actually is. Then one goes about in the world having to assume, on the one hand, that human beings are rooted in a true reality, but at the same time that everything they can bring to mind in their consciousness has nothing to do with this reality. Human beings separate that which provides the very essence of their civilized life—their world of imagination and thought—not only from reality but also from themselves; they split themselves internally. And if such a thing is not merely taken as a cliché, as a vain theory, but is lived through from the depths of humanity as an inner truth, then it is impossible to be an inwardly strong person, a person with a secure foundation in life, if one splits oneself in this way and separates one’s best self from what one actually is in reality, in truth. Consequently, when such a worldview is honestly experienced inwardly, one’s ideas become disheartened; they become powerless; they gradually develop, as it were, more and more into something indifferent; and although they were, throughout a large part of human historical development, the actual driving forces of human life, they are supplanted in favor of instincts and drives—in favor of that which now rises from the animal realm into human consciousness, not through conceptual thought.

[ 11 ] Who could fail to see that, fundamentally speaking, modern humanity has, to a great extent, embarked on a path leading to the inner division of the human being and to the devaluation of the life of the imagination! But a life of the imagination that proceeds in this way does not, in turn, permeate the life of feeling. An emotional life that is not permeated by strong ideas—ideas that carry within themselves the awareness that they are rooted in truth—gradually becomes untrue; it gradually feels as though it is rooted in untruth, and then it degenerates in two different directions. It loses its naturalness; it loses its inner honesty and truth, and it degenerates either into a false sentimentality, where one feels compelled to surrender to certain feelings as a human being; but one is not truly immersed in them, because there are no strong ideas behind them. One merely convinces oneself that one is allowed to give in to such feelings. One then projects all sorts of things into these feelings that are not actually experienced. One works oneself up—I would say in a sentimental, clichéd way—to a heightened state of emotion that is inwardly false. That is the degeneration in one direction. Or, on the other hand, emotional life can become untruthful by taking on precisely the character I have already indicated—the character that denies the concept but instead gives voice to what is animalistic. When the concept grows pale, it loses the inner awareness that it is permeated by Being. Then it cannot live itself into feeling; then the human being must sink into that unconscious realm that dwells in his animal nature. Then, in his feelings, he becomes a plaything of his inner well-being or ill-being, of his instincts, drives, and needs, which are not illuminated by the light of consciousness. Because he cannot, as a human being, rise to true humanity, he follows the play of nature within his organic being.

[ 12 ] These are the two deviations into untruthfulness that emotion can take under the influence of agnosticism. These deviations are particularly evident in the artistic works produced by humanity. Art, which must essentially spring from the world of emotion, itself becomes insincere when it is based on an insincere emotional world—a sentimental or animalistic emotional world. We have seen both of these emerge in recent times, in the age of agnosticism. We have seen the rise of saccharine sentimentality, of inner insincerity, which escalates into feelings that do not spring from the true human being with elemental force, but are contrived, manufactured, and therefore untrue. On the other hand, we have seen how those who have seen through the insincerity of this sentimentality and could not help but give voice to what is natural in human beings have been led to the crudest form of naturalism—to the mere imitation of what is already created in the natural world outside.

[ 13 ] Whatever has already been created in nature, nature can still create even better than humans can; and whenever humans—whether as landscape architects or in any other capacity—attempt to imitate nature, they will inevitably fall short of nature—even if they are the greatest of artists—as anyone with an unbiased eye can see. Essentially, anything that imitates nature is superfluous.

[ 14 ] If one does not wish to fall into the trap of using clichés to elevate oneself into the unreal—because one believes one cannot grasp the real—and if one does not wish to degenerate into mannerism, then one must simply stick to the mere imitation of nature. True art rises above mannerism and imitation to become style. But style can develop only when a person is rooted, with their entire inner life, in a true reality that extends beyond the sensory-physical realm—a reality from which something can be created that can come only from human creative power. True art must strive toward style, and true style can be based only on humanity’s experience of the supersensible. Anyone who does not view art as some sort of luxury addition to life, but rather as a necessary condition of any dignified existence—something that makes a person a complete human being and gives human civilization its full meaning—will have to admit: Agnosticism robs humanity of that truth which seeks to live and must live in art.

[ 15 ] Anyone who is willing to see this can also observe it in the course of our recent civilizational and cultural development. One can see how those of an agnostic disposition have gradually rejected everything supernatural in art, acknowledging only that which, as they say, is natural—that which reminds them of something they can perceive externally with their senses and their intellect. But then art merely fulfills a need for sensation that we seek to satisfy when we rest on Sunday after a week’s work; then people indulge in art as if it were a luxury, and art ceases to be a necessity in life. Agnosticism pushes art—as a necessary purpose in life—out of human existence itself, turning it into a Sunday pastime, a luxury of life. This is what it has become for the vast majority of people. Is it anything different when we see today how large groups of people are led through museums? This is a fundamental tone in our recent intellectual life. Anyone who does not view things superficially, but rather the inner connections of life, sees how what I have just characterized here as the corruption of art is connected to the agnostic trend of the age.

[ 16 ] And furthermore: agnosticism exerts its influence not only on the life of the imagination, not only on the life of the emotions, but also on the life of the will. One may philosophize as much as one likes about nature and the world—yet what is duty, what is good, will still speak within a person through a kind of categorical imperative. One can declaim and philosophize about such a categorical imperative within the sphere of agnosticism. But when agnosticism is not merely a theory—when it is a mindset, or even a feeling—then these categorical imperatives simply do not arise. And what matters is not how one thinks about a matter, but what can truly arise within the human soul. No new categorical imperatives arise when the old ones—those passed down through tradition from earlier human epochs—are steadily diminishing. When these traditions are lost, the categorical imperatives gradually cease to exist. Then, in that part of one’s being where the will acts as an impulse for life, one feels an inner emptiness. Thoughts and ideas are rendered powerless by the experience of agnosticism. Emotions are dulled, the will is emptied, and then human beings are at the mercy of either some external authority that provides them with their imperative, or else the animalistic—that which asserts itself as physical needs, that which wells up from the deepest subconscious world without any imagination, indeed without any regulatory force of feeling. Then the human being is either forced to surrender unconditionally to existing authorities, to establish new ones, or to admit that the human race is incapable of anything other than acting on its physical instincts.

[ 17 ] These views, too—albeit perhaps more or less timidly—have been sufficiently represented in our age. What today is increasingly pushing us toward a belief in authority, toward a sense of authority—which cannot be anything other than a response to this belief in authority, to this sense of authority, which we see becoming so terribly rampant—is connected to agnosticism. For something like agnosticism may be a theory in one generation—this generation may perhaps justify it very ingeniously—but in the next generation it becomes a way of life, and when it is a way of life, then precisely those things I have described arise. Thus we see the theoretical agnosticism of our forefathers resurface in the craving for authority among contemporary humanity, or we also see it resurface in the disbelief in anything that, stemming from the human spirit, could regulate human needs or establish a human social life. We see it in the establishment of the view that, when all is said and done, human beings can do nothing other than live by their animal impulses and organize them.

[ 18 ] Now, what initially manifests itself in a person’s imagination, feelings, and will then leads him further along his path toward the actual religious experience. For me, even the most ardent materialist is a religious person, for ultimately, what matters in the essence of religion is not whether one professes this or that faith, but how one feels connected in one’s soul—or, even if one denies the soul, in one’s entire humanity—to the essence of the world.

[ 19 ] Thus it has come to pass that, in this new age, more and more people feel an inner emptiness—even with regard to their religious experience—and therefore seek support. One phenomenon stands out here that may not yet be noticed by very many people—especially those who are not deeply involved in these matters—but which will likely be recognized very clearly in the not-too-distant future: namely, the tendency of intelligent, soulful people in particular to gravitate toward the outwardly structured, rigid old church organizations. The human soul that is inwardly empty cannot find within itself the power that connects it to the divine foundation of the world; it therefore tends to seek external support. The soul that does not feel inwardly connected to God seeks in the external world that which leads it to this God. Numerous people, from whom one might not have expected it, are drawn toward Roman Catholicism. Yet numerous people surrender themselves to a materialistic conception of religion for reasons stemming from the soul that are entirely different from those of those drawn to Catholicism. On the other hand, we see souls who are precisely of a refined, religious disposition, who, in a sense, have deeply felt the inadequacy of the religious traditions of the West. These souls devote themselves to all manner of things brought to them from the Old or even the New Orient. They do not seek what springs from their own present soul; they do not consider that, if a religious life is true, it must always spring forth. They wish to lean on something foreign, on something ancient. It is inner emptiness that we see at work here—the inner emptiness that seeks support from the outside.

[ 20 ] People can only live with everything I have described to a certain extent, and recent developments have indeed shown that it is possible to live with all of this to a certain extent. This has its deep roots in the entire recent development of civilization and culture. As a consequence of scientific thinking, modern technology has emerged—a technology that can actually function only within what is separate from human beings, within that which human beings do not penetrate with their own inner being. This technology represents something around us that demands so much of our labor that we have gradually integrated ourselves into it—as something that surrenders to it, as something that devotes itself to its best interests. One need only recall all manner of work systems that have their origins in Western civilization—how these work systems seek to place human beings within the world of technology itself as a cog in a machine—so that what is dear to them, what arouses their sympathy or antipathy, what prompts them at times to do something faster, and at other times a little slower—is eliminated, so that one can rely on the activity that comes from him just as one can rely on the activity of a machine.

[ 21 ] Humanity could never, in the long run, find any kind of satisfaction in such devotion, in such reliance on something foreign—whether it be something outwardly physical or something spiritual. It is only natural that, under the influence of triumphant technology, something like this has developed, especially among the most civilized people of the modern era. But in a certain sense, it has now reached its culmination; it has reached the point where calls for a reversal can be clearly heard, where one can already distinctly sense the inner division within human beings in their imaginative life, the dulling of their emotional life, the emptying of their volitional and religious life, and the emptying of their social impulses as well.

[ 22 ] We have reached the point where we can experience the fruits of agnosticism, which began as a theory but has now, as a way of life, permeated our social life everywhere. And in life, everything is essentially not only an effect from one side to the other, but also from the other side back to the first. When people today find themselves immersed in a practical, technical existence that seeks to completely eliminate their subjectivity and personality—when they have placed themselves in a situation where their will suffers from inner emptiness and their feelings and sensations from a certain dullness—then we can see how all of this, in turn, has a reciprocal effect on their imaginative life. As a result, people today have arrived at a certain complacency in their imaginative life.

[ 23 ] It is certainly true today that one can say: Whatever ideas or impulses may arise to counter the forces of decline with forces of renewal—the human life of imagination is no longer receptive enough; it develops passive, but not inwardly active, forces, and no longer evolves in such a way that it can grasp something with enthusiasm to see if it will stand the test of life. This inner activity of the imaginative life has given way to a certain complacency. When one hears something unfamiliar—something one has not already thought of oneself—one does not wish to exert one’s inner being to the point where ideas with different contours or different hues come to life within one, as opposed to those that were already there. One does not actually examine, through the inner life available to one, what emerges; rather, one merely asks: Am I accustomed to such ideas arising within me? — If one finds that one is not accustomed to such ideas arising as they are presented to one, then one does not engage with them. I do not even mean to say that one always rejects them vigorously; rather, one does not engage with them at all—one simply lets the ideas pass by.

[ 24 ] This isn’t just the case today, for example, at political rallies. People can say all sorts of things there. Then another speaker takes the stage—the kind who has completely immersed himself in a party mold. You hear him speak in all the ways he’s been accustomed to for thirty years; whatever sounds even slightly like what he’s been accustomed to for thirty years, he parrots; the rest he hasn’t heard at all. He becomes inwardly and unconsciously resentful when he’s supposed to hear anything he isn’t used to. This is, in essence, an effect of agnosticism, in that it has become a “theory of life.”

[ 25 ] This also applies to our educational system. Do we truly have a vivid understanding that education must be shaped in the same way that life itself is? Life is such that the limbs we have as four- or five-year-old children are completely different from those we have as adults. Everything undergoes a metamorphosis; everything is transformed. When we teach a child something, we would prefer to teach it in such a way that it remains fixed—so that the child later remembers it, and what was taught appears in the memory exactly as we taught it. But anyone who thinks in terms of life must conceive of an education that conveys to the child everything it teaches in such a way that it grows with the child—that it is, from the very beginning, something that grows and develops. We must present things to the child in such a way that they undergo metamorphosis and transformation, just like the child’s organic limbs.

[ 26 ] We have, however, seen all of this fade away not only from human perception but also from human practice under the influence of agnosticism. I want to emphasize this once again explicitly: I did not intend today to offer a critique of agnosticism, nor did I intend to counter it with a positive alternative. I merely wanted, in a sense, to present a characterization of our age—albeit from an inner perspective—and to show how, outwardly, in individual human life, in social life, in religious life, and in moral life, certain fruits appear everywhere that must be traced back to the seeds of agnosticism. This is how our age may appear to us if we view it not as we would like to—based on certain prejudices or under the influence of certain agitational ideals—but if we look at this age, in which we ourselves live, in accordance with its reality.

[ 27 ] This, my esteemed audience, is what I wished to preface the lectures that will take place over the next few days and will deal with a view of life that an age—in which the tragedy of agnosticism has come to fruition—must yearn for. This view of life—as you will see—is what anthroposophy seeks to be: a vibrant worldview, a worldview that seeks to penetrate to that which human beings connect with as true reality, a worldview that will show that human beings also possess the means to penetrate to this true reality.