The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Psychosophy III

Eleusis

To Hölderlin

Peace dwells around me, within me. The busy people
whose tireless worries never sleep. They give me freedom
and leisure. Thank you, O my
Liberator, O Night!—With a white veil of mist
The moon traces the uncertain boundaries
Of the distant hills. A bright streak
Of the lake glimmers kindly across.
Memory banishes the day’s tedious clamor,
As if years lay between it and now.
Your image, my beloved, appears before me,
And the joy of days gone by. Yet soon it gives way
To the sweeter hopes of our reunion.
Already I picture the scene of the long-awaited, fiery
Embrace; then the scene of questions, of secret,
Mutual scrutiny,
What in my friend’s demeanor, expression, and disposition
Has changed since that time;—the joy of certainty,
To find the loyalty of our old bond, even firmer, more mature,
Of the bond that no oath sealed:
To live by free truth alone,
At peace with the code
Which governs thought and feeling, never, never to yield!
Now the mind negotiates with the sluggish reality,
Which once carried me lightly over mountains and rivers to you.
But a sigh soon announces their discord, and with it
The sweet dream of fantasy flees.

My eye rises to the vault of the eternal sky,
To you, O shining star of the night!
And all desires, all hopes
Forgetfulness flows down from your eternity.
My mind loses itself in the vision,
What I called “I” fades away.
I surrender myself to the Immeasurable.
I am in it, I am everything, I am only it.
The recurring thought finds it alien,
It shudders at the Infinite, and, in wonder,
It cannot grasp the depth of this vision.
Imagination brings the eternal closer to the senses,
Uniting it with form. — Welcome, you,
Sublime spirits, lofty shadows,
From whose brows perfection radiates!
Do not be alarmed. I feel that it is also my home,
The radiance, the solemnity that surrounds you.

Ha! If now the gates of your sanctuary were to burst open,
O Ceres, who once reigned in Eleusis!
Intoxicated with inspiration, I would now feel
The thrills of your presence,
Understand your revelations,
I would interpret the lofty meaning of the images, hear
The hymns at the gods’ feasts,
The lofty sayings of their council.

But your halls have fallen silent, O Goddess!
The circle of gods has fled to Olympus
Away from the desecrated altars,
Fleeing from the desecrated tomb of humanity
The genius of innocence that conjured them here.
The wisdom of your priests is silent.
Not a single note of the sacred consecrations
Has reached us, and in vain does
The seeker’s curiosity now seeks more than love
For wisdom. They possess the seekers and despise you.
To master them, they dig for words,
In which your lofty spirit would be imprinted.”
In vain! They catch only a little dust and ash,
In which your life will never, ever return to them.
Yet even amidst decay and the soulless, there are those
Who are eternally dead, the contented ones! — In vain, there remained
No sign of your feasts, no trace of an image.
To the son of consecration, the abundance of lofty teachings,
The depth of the ineffable feeling was far too sacred,
That he should deign to honor them with dry symbols.
Even the thought defies the soul’s grasp,
Which, beyond time and space, immersed in a sense of infinity
Loses itself and now awakens once more to consciousness.
Whoever might wish to speak of this to others,
Even if he spoke with the tongues of angels, would feel the poverty of words.
He shudders at having conceived the sacred as so small,
At having made it so small through them, that speech seems like a sin to him,
And that, trembling, he seals his lips.
What the consecrated one thus forbade himself, a wise
Law forbade the poorer spirits from revealing,
What they saw, heard, and felt on that holy night,
nor did the noise of their folly
disturb the better ones in their devotion, nor did their hollow verbiage
make him angry at the Holy One Himself, lest this
be trampled into the mud, so that one might
memory would not even be entrusted with it, lest it
become a plaything and a commodity for the sophist,
whom he sold for a pittance,
for the cloak of the eloquent hypocrite, or even
for the rod of the joyful boy, and thus become so empty
in the end that it would find its roots
From foreign tongues would it have its root.
Your sons, Goddess, carried it sparingly,
Not your honor in the streets and markets; they kept it
In the inner sanctuary of the breast.
Therefore you did not live on their lips.
Their lives honored you. In their deeds you still live.

This very night, too, O holy Deity, I heard You.
The lives of Your children often reveal You to me as well,
I often sense You as the soul of their deeds!
You are the lofty spirit, the faithful belief,
That does not waver in a single Deity, even if all else perishes.

[ 1 ] We will once again begin this lecture by reciting a poem, which is intended to illustrate some of the points I will be discussing today and tomorrow. This time, it will, so to speak, be a poem by a non-poet, which, in contrast to the other intellectual pursuits of the person in question, appears to be a casual byproduct of those pursuits. We are thus dealing with a revelation of the soul that, in a sense, did not arise from the innermost impulse of that soul. And it is precisely this fact that will enable us, within the course of these lectures, to observe certain aspects of the “subject” particularly well. The poem is by the German philosopher Hegel and deals with his relationship to certain initiatory mysteries of humanity.

[ 2 ] If we consider the assertion made in the last two lectures—that when we survey the life of the soul, it essentially reveals to us, right up to its limits, its two elements: judgment and the experiences of love and hate associated with desire— it might seem as if this assertion were to overlook precisely the most essential aspect of the life of the soul—that through which the soul truly experiences its innermost self: emotion, the act of feeling. Thus, one might be tempted to say that in these lectures, the life of the soul has been characterized precisely by what, in a sense, is not peculiar to it, and that no consideration has been given, at least initially, to what ebbs and flows, rises and falls in the life of the soul as feeling and gives it its respective character.

[ 3 ] We shall now see that we will indeed be able to understand the dramatic nature of soul life—which we attempted to highlight yesterday—if we approach the feeling by starting from the two characterized elements of soul life. To do so, we must first return to the simple facts of soul life. And the simplest facts of inner life have, after all, been mentioned many times before. They are the sensory experiences gained through the gates of our senses, which penetrate into our inner life and then continue to exist within it. Compare this fact—that, so to speak, the life of the soul sends out its waves as far as the gates of the senses and, from these gates of the senses, draws back into itself the experiences of sensory perception, which then continue to live independently within the life of the soul— compare this fact with the other, namely that everything that can be summed up in the experiences of love and hate—which arise from desires—wells up as if from the inner life of the soul itself. As if from a center of the inner life, desires first arise—at least as far as mere observation of the soul is concerned—and it is these desires that, even upon superficial observation, lead to the experiences of love and hate within the soul. But we would be mistaken if we were to seek these desires, for example, within the soul itself. For [careful] observation of the soul, these desires are not to be sought within the soul itself. They could not be found there. If, on the other hand, you engage in a comprehensive observation of the soul, you will find, when you observe your inner life, how desires arise in relation to the external world, and how love and hatred—the expressions of desire—then well up within the soul itself. Thus we can say that by far the greatest extent of psychological experiences—insofar as they involve perceptions—is gained at the boundaries of the soul’s life through the gates of the senses. That which, on the other hand, plays out in the soul as desire—as love and hatred—arises from the center of the soul.

[ 4 ] We will be able to communicate most effectively if we represent what we recognize as a fact in a kind of visual image. We will be able to characterize this inner life of the soul—which we are to consider first in its inner nature—well if we regard it as the interior of a circle, which is meant to represent the content of our multifaceted inner life. Let us now imagine the sense organs truly as gates, for that is how we must regard them. You can also glean this from the lectures on anthroposophy. For now, it suffices to regard them as gates—as openings toward the outer world. If we were now to depict the inner life of the soul graphically, we could do no better than to have the flood of desires—which find their expression in the phenomena of love and hate—well up from the center of this inner life and flow in all directions into it. In this way, we would, as it were, have completely filled our soul with desires and would find the flood of desires surging all the way to the gates of the senses.

[ 5 ] What, then, happens when a sensory experience occurs—for example, that of sound through the organ of hearing or that of color through the organ of sight? Let us initially set aside the external world in terms of its content and say: Let us take, on the one hand, the moment in which sensory perception occurs—this interaction between the soul and the external world. Let us vividly place ourselves in this moment, where the soul, experiencing it inwardly, has the direct experience of color or sound from the external world through the gateway of the sense organ. Now imagine turning away from the sensory experience, and imagine that the soul continues to live on in time, taking with it and retaining as a memory-image what it has, as it were, captured from the sensory experience. The soul now carries this forward.

[ 6 ] We have said that we must distinguish between what the soul carries forward as a memory image of sensory perception and sensory perception itself; for if one does not make this distinction properly, the result is not truth, but Schopenhauerianism. Therefore, we must distinguish between the experience that persists in the soul as a memory image and the experience that arises in the act of sensory perception. What happened at the moment when the soul, through the gateway of sensory perception, was exposed to the external world?

[ 7 ] As experience immediately reveals, our soul truly lives inwardly in the surging sea of desires, the phenomena of love and hate, to the extent that I characterized it yesterday and the day before. And as the soul allows its own waves to crash up to the gates of the senses, desire knocks at the very gate of the senses, and this desire actually comes into contact with the outside world at the very moment of sensory experience. It is this desire that, as it were, receives a seal impression from the other side. Take a seal bearing the name Müller and press it into sealing wax; the name Müller will remain imprinted in the sealing wax. What remains in the seal impression? An imprint caused by the seal. You cannot say that what has been imprinted there does not correspond to what the external world has brought about! That, again, would not be unbiased observation, but Kantianism. Insofar as you wish to look only at the external material aspect, it is already Kantianism. But if you look at what matters—in this case, the name “Müller”—and not at the brass, then you must say: In what has opposed the sensory experience, an imprint has been pressed in from the outside, forming a mark. That is what is taken along. Just as you do not take the seal with you, you also do not take the color or the sound with you, but you do take with you what has arisen in the soul as an imprint. What one might call desire—or the phenomena of love and hate—comes to meet the sensory experiences.

[ 8 ] Can one really call it that? Is there really, even in the mere sensory experience, anything that can be perceived as a phenomenon of love or hate? Is there anything in the immediate sensory experience that truly must push its way outward as a kind of desire? If there were nothing—nothing similar to or of the same nature as desire—pushing its way into the sensory experience, you would not carry it over into the broader life of the soul; then no memory image would form. But there is a fact that proves desire extends outward, whether you are perceiving sounds, colors, smells, or the like, and that fact is the fact of attention. A sensory experience that we merely stare at naturally makes an impression on us according to the laws governing the relationship between the external world and the sensory organ; but the impression you merely stare at does not carry over into your inner life. You must meet it from within with the power of attention. And the greater the attention, the more easily the soul carries these sensory experiences forward as memories in the course of its life. Thus, the soul is connected to the external world in such a way that, as it were, this soul allows what it is inwardly to extend substantially to the very outer limits of its being, and this is still evident at the very outer limits of its being in the very fact of attention.

[ 9 ] The other aspect of the soul’s life—judgment—is suspended precisely during direct sensory experience. In that moment, only the soul’s desire, its self-surrender, and its exposure to external impressions come to the fore. A sensory impression is characterized precisely by the fact that attention is directed in such a way that the act of judgment as such is suspended. When the soul exposes itself to the color red or to any “tone,” only desire is alive in this act of exposure, and the other activity of the soul—judgment—is suspended and suppressed in this case. However, one must be clear that a very precise boundary must be drawn here if one wishes to observe accurately rather than fantastically. For example, if you have seen the color red and say, “Red is”—you have already made a judgment; only when you stop at the color impression are you dealing with a mere correspondence between the soul and the external world. What then arises from the interaction of the element of desire with the external world?

[ 10 ] Since we wish to explain this precisely, we have distinguished between sensory perception and sensory sensation, defining sensory perception as the experience undergone when exposed to external impressions—that which is experienced during the impression itself—while sensory sensation is that which remains, that which the soul carries with it. Therefore, we can say: In what we carry with us, we have a modification of desire. Attention shows us that desire is present, and what remains turns out to be a sensory sensation. What lives on in our soul is therefore modified desire in the form of sensation. We do, in fact, carry the essence of our own soul along with our sensory perceptions and sensations. The sensory sensation arises from what surges and swells through our entire soul, from the power of desire within us.

[ 11 ] As we have seen, sensory perception arises at the boundary between the life of the soul and the external world, at the gateway of the senses. But let us suppose for a moment that the power of desire within us did not extend to the boundary of the life of the soul, but remained within it. When we speak of a sensory experience, we would say that the force of desire penetrates to the surface of the soul. But let us now imagine that a desire were to arise, yet it would not reach the boundary of the soul’s life; rather, it would, as it were, be blunted within the soul’s being, remain within it, and not extend as far as the gateway of a sense. What would have happened in this case? We have seen that when desire advances and is compelled to withdraw, a sensation—a sensory perception—arises. Sensory perception arises only when the withdrawal is caused by a counterforce from the outside—that is, by the activity of the senses. Inner sensation arises when the desire is not pushed back into itself by direct contact with the external world, but is repelled within the soul—somewhat short of the boundary. This is where inner sensation arises, and this is the feeling. Feelings are therefore, for the observation of the soul, modified desire. Feelings are, as it were, such desires that remain stationary, rebounding within themselves, which do not burn their way to the boundary of the soul’s life, but rather live within the soul’s life. Thus we can say: Even in feelings, we essentially find contained within the substance of the soul that which we call desire. If this is the case, feelings as such are not in any way something new in the life of the soul when we consider its elements; rather, feelings are then substantial, real processes of desire taking place within the life of the soul itself.

[ 12 ] Let us first take stock of what we have now established, and then characterize, from a certain perspective, the two elements of the life of the soul: judgment and the experiences of love and hate that arise from desires. For we can say: Everything that takes place in the soul as a judgmental activity—and this is what matters—comes to an end at a certain moment; but what unfolds as desire also comes to an end at a certain moment. — The soul’s activity of judgment ends where a decision has been reached, where we have, so to speak, concluded the judgment in a conception that we then carry forward with us as true. And if we ask about the end of desire, we find satisfaction. So that, in fact, every desire in our soul strives, so to speak, for satisfaction, and every activity of judgment strives for a decision. So when we look, as it were, into our inner life, we find, on the one hand, the act of judgment. As long as it has not yet been concluded, it drives the inner life toward a decision. And on the other hand, we find desires. As long as they have not found satisfaction, they press toward satisfaction within the living inner life. Thus we can now say: Because our inner life consists of the elements of judgment and desire, the most important facts of inner life—which we must continually find in every soul, since every soul constantly contains these elements—are the soul’s flow toward decisions and toward satisfaction. If, then, we were to observe a soul life in its flowing stream, we would find it, so to speak, filled with the striving toward decisions and the striving toward gratification. This is, in fact, the case.

[ 13 ] If you now consider certain aspects of human emotional life, you will easily be able to identify the origins of a great variety of emotions when you realize that this must bring about certain changes in the inner life as the quest for satisfaction and the pursuit of decisions continue unabated. If you consider, within the realm of emotions, phenomena that fall, for example, under the categories of impatience, hope, longing, doubt, and perhaps even despair, you will have points of reference for associating something real and spiritually tangible with these words when you tell yourself: All of this—impatience, hope, longing, doubt, despair—are different ways in which the flowing stream within the soul expresses itself in the striving for decisions by the powers of judgment or for the satisfaction of the powers of desire. Try to grasp this concretely in the feeling of impatience. There you will be able to feel vividly how the striving for satisfaction lives within impatience. There you can grasp how something lives within the feeling of impatience that can be called a desire flowing continuously in the stream of the soul. And this can only find resolution when it flows into satisfaction. The powers of judgment are scarcely deployed in this process. Or take the feeling of hope. In hope, you will easily be able to recognize the continuous flow of desire—but that desire is, on the other hand, interwoven with the other element of soul life: what we have called the movement of the powers of judgment toward decision. Anyone who analyzes the feeling of hope will easily see these two elements flowing within it: the desire that is permeated by the striving of the powers of judgment toward a decision. And because it is precisely in this feeling that these two elements maintain such a balance for the life of the soul—holding each other in perfect equilibrium like two equal weights on the two pans of a scale—that is why the feeling of hope possesses a sense of completeness. There is exactly as much desire for satisfaction as there is prospect of a favorable decision.

[ 14 ] Suppose a different feeling were to arise from the presence of a desire that urges for fulfillment; this desire, however, would be interwoven in the soul with a process of judgment that, by its own strength and power, could not bring about a decision. The act of judgment would be incapable of bringing about a decision. Yet the desire is linked to such an act of judgment that cannot bring about a decision. Therein lies the feeling of doubt.

[ 15 ] Thus, within the broad realm of emotions, we might find that judgment and desire interact in a remarkable way. And if someone has not yet found these two elements in an emotion, they must continue searching. They can be quite certain that they have not yet searched far enough.

[ 16 ] If we take the significance of the activity of judgment for the life of the soul as the one element, we must say: The activity of judgment culminates in a concept, and the concept has meaning in life only if it is a true one. Truth has its foundation in itself. The soul, on its own, cannot decide what is true. Everyone must sense this when comparing the life of the soul in its unique way with that which is ultimately to be attained by it in truth. One need only consider the following: What we call “judgment” in the life of the soul is something that, in other words, can also be called “reflection,” and reflection ultimately leads to what we form as a judgment from the concept. But it is not through our deliberation that the decision—the judgment—becomes correct; rather, it becomes correct for entirely different, objective reasons that are removed from the arbitrariness of the life of the soul, so that the judgment toward which the soul strives in its decision comes into being outside the realm of the soul.

[ 17 ] If we ask about the other element that wells up, as it were, from unknown depths, from the center of the soul, and spreads in all directions throughout the life of the soul—if we ask about the origin of desire—we do not find it, at first, within the life of the soul, but rather outside of it, so that desires and decisions reach into our life of the soul from the outside. But within the life of the soul, what takes place is the very end of these desires: satisfaction. And within the life of the soul, in contrast to the truth that has its foundation outside, the struggle for truth—the struggle leading to a decision—takes place. Thus, in our judgments, we are, so to speak, fighters; and within the life of the soul, in relation to our desires, we are enjoyers. And it is important to distinguish that, in the case of judgment, only the beginning belongs to the inner life; the decision leads us beyond the inner life. With desire, it is the opposite; there, it is not the beginning but the end—satisfaction—that enters the inner life.

[ 18 ] Let us examine more closely what enters into the inner life of the soul other than satisfaction, and let us consider it in light of what we said earlier: that sensation is, in essence, a burning of desire to the very limits of the inner life of the soul, and that feeling is something that remains in the middle, where desire, as it were, dulls itself within itself. So what will be present at the point where the inner life experiences satisfaction—the end of desire—within itself? There, feeling will be present. Therefore, we can say: When, within the inner life of the soul, desire reaches its end “in satisfaction,” then feeling arises.

[ 19 ] But that is only one kind of feeling, in which desire finds its fulfillment within the inner life of the soul. Another kind of feeling arises in yet another way, namely through the fact that, in the depths of the soul’s life, there are indeed connections between the soul’s inner life—so to speak, its inner world—and the external world. This is expressed in the fact that our desires are directed toward external objects. But they do not, for that reason, always reach all the way to the external objects—as is the case with sensory perceptions. When we perceive a color, the desire extends all the way to the external world. But a feeling can also develop from this desire within the inner life of the soul, a feeling that nonetheless has a connection to an external object. Desire can develop toward any object, even if it remains within the soul. It still has a connection to the object, as if through a distant effect, similar to how a magnetic needle aligns itself with a pole without reaching it. From this we see: Desires can be contained within the inner life of the soul, even if they are related to the external world; so that the external world also has a relationship with the life of the soul that does not reach the very limits of that inner life. Then those feelings can arise in which the desire toward the object remains intact and persists toward the object, even if the object is not in a position to satisfy the desire. Let us suppose that a soul approaches an object, a desire is aroused toward the object, but the object is not in a position to satisfy this desire: then the desire remains active in the soul and does not experience satisfaction.

[ 20 ] Consider this phenomenon very closely and compare it to a desire that has come to an end within the life of the soul. There is a considerable difference between these two desires, one of which has come to an end in the soul, while the other has not. A desire that has ended in satisfaction—one that is carried forward by the life of the soul to the point of being, as it were, neutralized—has such an effect within the life of the soul that everything connected with the life of the soul receives a healing influence. But through the desire that remains unsatisfied and is now carried forward in the soul—because the object could not satisfy it—the soul, after the object is gone, retains a living connection—to nothing, so to speak. And the consequence is that the soul lives in an unsatisfied desire as in an inner reality not grounded in reality. This fact alone suffices to ensure that the life of the soul exerts an unfavorable influence—a pathogenic influence—on that with which it is connected, namely, the life of the spirit and the body, through these unsatisfied desires. Feelings associated with satisfied desires can therefore be clearly distinguished, through direct observation of the soul, from those that arise, so to speak, from unfulfilled desires. When these phenomena manifest themselves in a crude manner, they are, of course, easy to distinguish. But when they manifest themselves in a more subtle way, people usually do not realize that they are dealing with what they are, in fact, dealing with.

[ 21 ] Suppose a person is standing in front of an object. He walks away from it. What matters here is not a desire that has reached the object, but a desire that has reached the inner life of the soul. So he can walk away and say afterward that the object satisfied him, or he can say that the object did not satisfy him. Even if they express it differently—for example, by saying they liked it or did not like it—it amounts to the same thing. In the first case, however hidden it may be, there is a desire that has found satisfaction; in the case of dissatisfaction, there is a desire that has remained intact as a desire.

[ 22 ] At first, there is only one kind of feeling—and this is deeply revealing of the inner life—which manifests itself in a slightly different way within the inner life. You will easily see that feelings—that is, either desires that have been fulfilled or those that have not—can be based not only on external objects but also on internal experiences of the soul. Thus, the feeling that we must describe as an unsatisfied desire can be rooted in a sensation that perhaps brings to mind something from the past that we have long since left behind. So within ourselves we find the sources of our feelings, of satisfied or unsatisfied desires. Let us distinguish within ourselves between the arousal of desires by external objects and the arousal of desires by ourselves, by our own inner life. There are, for example, other, very prominent inner experiences that can show us how we have desires left over from our inner life that have not reached their final goal.

[ 23 ] Imagine you are reflecting on something. Your judgment is too weak; you reach no conclusion in your reflection and must stop without making a decision. There you stand, facing your inner life and your own desires, feeling a sense of dissatisfaction. You experience pain in connection with this feeling of dissatisfaction. There is only one kind of feeling in which we neither reach a decision through judgment nor do our desires end in satisfaction, and yet no sense of pain arises. These are feelings in which we are neither directly confronted with an external object through our desires nor directly with our inner experiences. In the ordinary sensory experiences of everyday life, we confront the object directly with our desires, but we do not judge in the process. As soon as judgment begins, we have already moved beyond the sensory experience. Let us suppose we carry both judgment and desire to the very limit of our inner life, where the sensory impression from the external world surges directly toward us; we would thus develop a desire that, as it is aroused by the object, we carry all the way to the boundary—but now right up to the very edge of the impression itself—with the power of judgment, with the capacity for judgment. Then a peculiar feeling will arise that is, so to speak, composed in a very strange way. We can best understand this in the following manner.

[ 24 ] We allow [as indicated by the diagonal lines] our desire to extend only as far as the boundary of our inner life, for example, as far as the eye. We exert our inner life in relation to our desires, allowing it to flow—insofar as it is a capacity for desire—to the very gates of sensory experience, A. But we also exert our power of judgment and allow it, likewise, to flow toward the external impression [as indicated by the vertical lines]. Then we would have a symbol for the feeling just described, which is composed in a wholly unique way.

[ 25 ] We will truly appreciate the difference between these two currents, which extend all the way to external impressions, when we consider what has already been said. When we develop our power of judgment, the focus of the soul’s activity lies not within the soul, but outside of it. For it is not the soul that decides what is true. Truth overwhelms desire. Desire must capitulate before truth. And if, through our power of judgment, we are to decide within our soul what is to be true in the most eminent sense, then we must take into our soul something that is foreign to the soul. We can therefore say: The lines extending from bottom to top, which are meant to represent the powers of judgment, emanate from us and encompass something external. But our soul life, as the life of desires, cannot go any further than the boundary. There it is either hurled back into itself, or it withdraws into itself beforehand, remaining confined to itself. Our desire feels overwhelmed when judgment in the soul concludes with the decision of truth. But in our example, we are assuming precisely that, up to the point of the impression, both desire and judgment flow, and that the two streams coincide completely with regard to the impression. And there we then see: It is not our desire that flows out and brings us back, so to speak, something foreign in the truth, but rather our desire goes forth and brings us back the judgment that has gone as far as the boundary of the life of the soul. There, desire surges to the very limits of the soul, turns back, as it were, and returns with the judgment into itself. But what kind of judgments can we bring back there? Only aesthetic judgments that are somehow connected with art and beauty. This can only occur in the contemplation of art, where, so to speak, our own inner life extends precisely to the limits of its effectiveness, turns back there directly at the object of the external world, and returns to itself with the judgment. You may find this strange at first, but observing your own soul might confirm it to you.

[ 26 ] Suppose you are standing in front of the Sistine Madonna or the Venus de Milo, or in front of any work of art that is truly a work of art in the truest sense. Can you say that, in this case, the object arouses your desire? Yes, it does; but not by itself. If the object were to arouse desire by itself—which is, of course, possible—then whether desire is aroused at all would not depend on a certain development of the soul. It is entirely conceivable that you might stand before the Venus de Milo and feel no inner stirrings whatsoever toward the work of art. Certainly, this can also be the case with other objects. But when this happens with other objects, it gives rise to the usual indifference toward those other objects. This indifference also arises in those who do not direct a corresponding inner activity of the soul toward the Venus de Milo. Those, however, who direct a corresponding inner life of the soul toward the work of art allow the stream of desire to flow to its limit, and then something returns to them. Nothing returns to the others. But it is not a desire that returns. It is not even a desire that draws one back toward the object; rather, what returns is the desire that expresses itself in a judgment: “This is beautiful.” — Thus, the forces of desire and the forces of judgment engage with one another within the soul. And a person can find satisfaction in the external world only if that world serves merely as the stimulus for his or her own inner soul activity. A person can experience in the Venus de Milo only as much as he already possesses within his own soul, and just as much will return to him as he allows to flow outward from the immediate impression. Therefore, the enjoyment of beauty requires the immediate presence of the work of art, because the substance of the soul must indeed strive to the very limits of the soul’s life. And every memory of the work of art essentially yields something other than an aesthetic judgment. The aesthetic judgment arises under the immediate impression of the work of art, where the waves of the soul’s life reach the very limits—willingly reaching those limits—and return as aesthetic judgments.

[ 27 ] Thus, in truth, we have something before which—as it were, something external to the life of the soul—desire capitulates; and thus, in beauty, we have something where desire immediately coincides with judgment, where the decision itself is brought about by desire, which voluntarily draws to a close at the boundaries of the life of the soul and returns as judgment. That is why the inner experience of the soul in beauty spreads such infinitely warm satisfaction within the soul. And, fundamentally speaking, the highest balance of the soul’s powers is present when desire surges to the very limits of the soul’s life and does not return to itself as mere desire, but as a judgment—which is now to the soul like an object of the external world. Therefore, there is hardly anything else where a condition for a healthy soul life can be developed as strongly as in devotion to beauty. When we strive for the intellectual fruits of the soul, we are, in essence, working within the soul with material before which the faculty of desire must continually capitulate. This faculty of desire will certainly have to capitulate before the majesty of truth; but this is not possible without impairing the health of the soul and all that is connected to the life of the soul. A sort of unceasing striving in the realm of thought, in which desires must continually capitulate, is something that, in a certain sense, will ultimately wither a person both physically and spiritually. In contrast, with those judgments that simultaneously bring back an equal measure of satisfied desires into our inner life, the desires themselves are most fully balanced by the judgment. |

[ 28 ] Now, don’t misunderstand me. None of this is meant to suggest that it would be good for a person to constantly revel in the beauty of things and claim that the truth is unhealthy. That would provide an easy excuse for a half-hearted pursuit of truth, if someone were to argue: “You said that thinking is unhealthy, and reveling in beauty is healthy; therefore, I will do the latter!” — That is not something that should happen; rather, the following should result for the soul. Because truth is a duty with regard to the progress of human culture as well as to the life of the individual, human beings are compelled, in the pursuit of truth, to curb their life of desire. Because the decision regarding truth does not lie with us, truth compels us to curb the life of desire within ourselves. And we must do this calmly within the pursuit of truth. Therefore, the pursuit of truth is, in essence, what most effectively brings our sense of self back into proper perspective. When we experience for ourselves how our pursuit of truth continually finds its limits in our own judgment and we view the situation objectively, then we can be fully content. The pursuit of truth makes us ever more humble. But if a person were to act this way constantly—if they were to continue living solely in such a way that they became ever more humble—they would ultimately arrive at their own dissolution; they would lack something necessary for the fulfillment of the life of the soul: the sense of, the feeling for, their own inner self. A person must not lose their sense of self by merely surrendering to that before which the inner turmoil of their life of desire must capitulate. And this is where the work of aesthetic judgment comes into play. The nature of aesthetic judgment is such that a person brings back what he brings to the boundary of the soul. This is a life in which a person is permitted to do what he truly ought to do. What one truly ought to do is this: to allow the decision to be brought about in a completely selfless, unselfish manner. There is no other way to pursue the truth. But what about beauty? There, it is somewhat different. There, too, we surrender ourselves completely, allowing—almost as in sensory perception—the inner surging of the soul to flow to its very limits. But what then comes back to us? What cannot at all be given to us from the outside, what cannot at all be decided from the outside: we ourselves return to ourselves. We have surrendered ourselves and are returned to ourselves. This is the distinctive feature of the aesthetic judgment: that it contains within itself the element of selflessness, just as truth does, and at the same time the assertion of the human sense of self—that which we called the “inner master” yesterday and the day before. Like a free gift, we are returned to ourselves in the aesthetic judgment.

[ 29 ] As you can see, especially in these lectures, I must offer you something that is least likely to lead to definitions and so on. I have, after all, often spoken out against defining things. And so I will not say, “This is a feeling” and so on; rather, I will try to characterize it by simply delineating the scope of the life of the soul, by simply immersing ourselves in the scope of the life of the soul.

[ 30 ] In last year’s lectures on anthroposophy, we saw that, on the lower side, the physical realm adjoins the life of the soul, and at the boundary between the physical and the soul-life, we sought to grasp the human being and to deduce what is connected with the outer physical form. If you recall this, you will gain a foundation for much of what will be said in these lectures, and for what these psychosophical lectures ultimately aim to achieve. After all, they are ultimately intended to offer rules for living and wisdom for life. To that end, we first had to lay a broad foundation in the earlier lectures.

[ 31 ] Today’s descriptions may have given us a hint that what we desire surges within our inner spiritual life. Now, yesterday we said that certain experiences—including those of an emotional nature, such as judgments—depend, in a certain sense, on the independent life that our ideas lead within us. We concluded yesterday by saying: The ideas we have acquired in the past come alive; they are like bubbles in our inner life, in that they lead a life of their own, a life of their own desires. — Much depends on the kind of life they lead at a certain moment of our existence. What we were able to characterize yesterday as boredom or as other soul events that are harmful or beneficial to the human being determines whether a person is happy or unhappy at a certain moment. Thus, our present emotional state depends on how the ideas we have acquired in the past behave as independent entities.

[ 32 ] This raises the question: How should we conduct ourselves when we consider our inner life, particularly in light of the fact that we are, in a certain sense, powerless when it comes to certain ideas that we are supposed to allow into our present inner life? Other ideas enter our inner life more easily. And you know how much depends on whether we are powerful or powerless in this regard, whether it is easy or difficult to bring these ideas to mind, and whether we are able to recall them from memory with ease or difficulty. When we recall a particular thing, we must ask: Which ideas come to mind more easily, and which ones with greater difficulty? —For this can be extraordinarily important in life. Can we do something from the outset when taking in ideas, so that we imbue them with something that makes them return to us more easily? Yes, we can endow them with something. And simply reflecting on this fact would be infinitely useful for many people, for many people would make their outer lives and their inner lives immensely easier if they were to consider what makes a mental image easier to recall—what can promote the process of being recalled more easily. If you cultivate self-observation of the soul in all its aspects, it can show you that you must imbue the mental image with something if it is to come more easily to mind. We have identified desire and judgment as elements of the life of the soul. Since the life of the soul consists of these two elements, we will also be able to find only within these two elements what we must imbue a mental image with if it is to be remembered more easily. What can we imbue an idea with from our desire? We can imbue the idea with nothing but desire itself. How do we do that? By transferring as much of our own desire as possible onto the idea at the very moment we take it in. It is beneficial for our inner life when we impart a part of our desire to the idea. We can do this only by taking in the idea in question with love, by permeating it with love. The more lovingly we take in an idea—and this can be expressed in another way: the more interest we direct toward an idea, the more we lose ourselves and our selfishness while taking it in—the better it will remain in our memory. For those who cannot lose themselves in an idea, it will not easily remain in their memory. As these lectures continue, we will also gain further insights into how we can surround an idea with an atmosphere of love.

[ 33 ] The other thing we can impart to a concept is the power of judgment we possess in our soul. In other words: Any concept will be more easily recalled if it has been taken in through the soul’s power of judgment than if it has simply been committed to memory. So, when you encounter an idea that you take into your soul, if you judge it and take it in by embracing it and enveloping it with your judgment, you are giving it something that promotes its recall. In this way, you imbue it with something like an atmosphere. And it depends on the person themselves—how they prepare their ideas—whether they resurface more easily or with greater difficulty. We will see that the way we surround an idea with love or judgment is something extraordinarily important for our inner life.

[ 34 ] That is one question for tomorrow. The other point is that our inner life is in a continuous relationship with the “I” center. And if we follow the path we have outlined today—albeit with some difficulty—we will find a way tomorrow to bring together these two directions: the direction of memory and the direction of the “I” experience.

[ 35 ] It might surprise some that all human emotions are, in essence, supposed to be desires. And it might surprise, in particular, those who know that the higher life of the soul—the life of the soul toward which one strives through esoteric development—is precisely connected with overcoming desire in a certain way. However, when one says “overcoming desire,” this is not a precise expression in the context of the science of the soul; for desire does not arise within the soul itself, but surges in from unknown depths. What is it that surges into the soul? What does it signify? For now, we can understand it in abstract terms—tomorrow we will grasp it concretely—as that which, on a higher plane, corresponds to desire and arises from the very essence of the human being as the will. And when we combat desire for the sake of higher development, we are not combating the will that underlies a desire, but only the individual modifications, the individual objects of desire. In this way we purify the will, and then the will acts within us in a pure form. And such a will, which has become free from objects, which is objectless, represents, in a certain sense, the highest within us. You must not think here of the “will to exist”—that would not be an objectless will—but rather you must think of a will with a content of desire that is directed toward no object. Will is pure and free only when it is not initially modified into a specific desire—that is, when it leads away from a specific desire.

[ 36 ] Thus, we can see the life of the will extending even into our emotional life. If that is the case, then one should be able to conclude that will and emotion are related in some way. One can, of course, offer all sorts of fanciful definitions of will and emotion; for example, someone might say: “Will must be directed toward an object; it must translate into action.”—But such definitions do nothing to capture reality, and we shall see that they are usually entirely unfounded, and that the person who offers such definitions would do well to surrender to the genius of language, which is wiser than the individual human soul. For example, language has a brilliant word for that inner experience in which the will immediately becomes feeling. Imagine that the will were to proceed to a certain limit, then become dulled within itself, and that a person were to observe from within this dulling of the will’s striving—as it were, to let the will recede within oneself and then observe it: That would happen if a person were to face another being, and the inner surge of the will were to reach a certain point and then be held back. This is most certainly a profound feeling of the will’s lack of fulfillment. Here, language invents a brilliant word for this will, which most certainly does not become action, for it withdraws into itself. Here, it invents the word “reluctance,” and it is quite clear to everyone that this is not will; so that when this will recognizes itself, it is, for the feeling, the will that withdraws into itself. And language has the word “reluctance” for this self-contemplation of the will, thereby expressing a feeling. From this we can see how nonsensical it would be to define the will as the starting point for action. And within the will, the modified will—desire—then surges; and depending on how it manifests itself in one way or another, the various forms of the soul become apparent.