The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] My task today will be to discuss the extent to which it is difficult for human beings to maintain the thread of truth in the course of ordinary human thought. I would like to create a mental image of how difficult it is, when one continues a train of thought, to truly take all factors into account in such a way that the manner in which one follows the train of thought does not stray from the truth—how easily, as it were, the thread of truth slips away as one continues a train of thought. Certainly, a line of thought such as the one I intend to pursue today will be among the more difficult ones for us. But it also has, in a certain sense, an inner moral value for us to be clear about the fact that discovering the truth is difficult, and that one can very easily go astray when continuing a train of thought in order to arrive at the truth through strict logical deduction. You will see that what I have to say to you today will make it easier for us to understand certain things that we will have to discuss in the second lecture. I will then have to speak to you about the important concepts of chance, necessity, and providence. And so today I would like to offer an introduction which, although more difficult, will nevertheless provide us with something that is not only important and meaningful in that it allows us to grasp the subject theoretically, but also in that it enables us, in a sense, to gain a sense of the nature of the search for truth.

[ 2 ] I have often mentioned in connection with various topics that there is a philosopher of our time, Fritz Mauthner, who has written a “Critique of Language.” This “Critique of Language” was intended to create something even more accurate for our time than what Kant had already created in his day with his “Critique of Pure Reason.” For Fritz Mauthner believes—one could put it this way—no longer that people seek their insights through concepts, but rather he believes that, fundamentally, it is only language that serves as the thread upon which people spin their insights; that when people think, they do not actually have real concepts, but rather the tradition of words; and that through words they have, so to speak, pointers to this or that. Mauthner believes that people have a certain inner experience with words, come to take words at face value, sort of shuffle their words together, put them together, and gain knowledge through this shuffling of words. This is a complete misunderstanding of the entire process of cognition, but something that was bound to emerge at some point in an age that, like ours, is working its way toward the most extreme consequences of materialism.

[ 3 ] As for how Fritz Mauthner arrived at such a view, I would actually like to give you just a sense of it today, which I intend to evoke by reading to you a passage from Fritz Mauthner’s *Dictionary of Philosophy*, which he wrote later than his *Critique of Language*, specifically a passage from the essay on the word “chance”; since we are, after all, about to discuss “chance, necessity, and providence.” In the passage I am about to read to you, you can see how the age of materialism has gradually, I might say, learned to speak about certain things. In reading this passage to you first, I do not wish to instill in you any particular theoretical stance one way or the other, but rather I want you to ask your own feelings, your own sensibilities, how one might experience what a contemporary materialist philosopher says in such a context. I want you to get a sense of the way he speaks. He says in the article “Chance”: “And it would truly mean becoming a child who unwraps from his ball of wonders the surprises that a benevolent manufacturer has wrapped inside.” He means that if one views everything as a matter of chance, it would mean becoming a child who, as if from a ball of wonders, unwraps the surprises that a benevolent manufacturer has wrapped inside! “If, following Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer, one were still to invoke God…,” he says. If one were to explain the world in such a way as to invoke God in the process, one would today resemble the child who, from a ball of wonders, gradually unravels what a benevolent manufacturer has woven into it. It unwraps; one beautiful thing after another comes out. So, says Mauthner, this is how one appears to be who invokes the good Lord by making him the foundation of the world in order to explain the phenomena of the world with wisdom. And he speaks in the following manner: “If, following Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer, one were to invoke the Lord—‘Schopenhauer’s old Jew’”—that is, he calls the Lord ‘Schopenhauer’s old Jew’ because even the term ‘God of the Christians’ seems incorrect to him—“to untangle this confusion of chance and purpose.”

[ 4 ] You can see the kind of language the materialist gradually resorts to when he takes himself seriously. It is certainly true that very many people do not take materialism—which must always be atheism as well—much more seriously than the man who said: “As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist!” — But those who take atheism seriously must, at the same time, already be mocking everything that invokes providence or the like. For there is hardly any other option when one stands on the ground of materialism.

[ 5 ] Now I would like to present Fritz Mauthner to you for the following reason: although he is bound to deeply wound our sensibilities and feelings, he is, in today’s materialistic sense, an honest, sincere seeker of truth, because everything he does is sincere. So I do not wish to attack just anyone who philosophizes as a matter of office or the like, but rather someone who has at least made philosophizing his inner vocation from a completely different external profession, and who has also acquired a certain erudition. For what is so sorely lacking today when worldviews are constructed is precisely the seriousness that would consist in truly delving into the achievements that the various sciences have brought about up to the present. This Fritz Mauthner has truly become a learned gentleman, so that I am able, by taking him as my starting point and by explaining to you the difficulties of the search for truth, to base my argument on the train of thought of a very learned and very intelligent person. So, I do not wish to call upon just anyone, but rather a very learned and very intelligent person.

[ 6 ] I must now, by showing you—using a very specific case involving Fritz Mauthner—just how difficult the search for truth is, so to speak, start from a simple concept. As you all know, what is known as probability theory has been around for a long time. It is quite easy to understand the principle behind probability theory. Suppose, for example, that you have a die. I certainly do not want to encourage anyone to gamble, but suppose you have a die. You know that a die is arranged so that one side has one dot, the next side has two dots, and so on up to six dots, since the die has six sides. Now, if you take such a die and roll it, it can initially show any face. So six outcomes are possible. One can now ask the question: What is the probability that a specific face—let’s say the six—will come up? One can indeed ask this question: What is the probability that exactly a six will come up when I turn a dice cup upside down and throw the die? — Now the mathematician calculates it this way and says: Six outcomes are possible. The probability that a six will appear on a rolled die is one-sixth. — You see how much smaller the probability is than a certainty. For any event to be certain, there would have to be six possible outcomes, six outcomes that could actually occur; the numerator and denominator would have to be equal. The certainty would be equal to one (6/6 = 1). So, for a single die thrown, the probability is six times smaller than the certainty. — One might now ask further: But if I have two dice in the cup, how great is the probability that, when I throw the two dice, two sixes will be rolled? This probability can also be calculated. It is 1 divided by 36 (by 6 × 6). The probability is therefore 1/36, because there are 36 possible outcomes. You arrive at these 36 cases by thinking as follows: With one die, you can roll a 1, combined with a 1 on the other die, or with a 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6—that already gives you six possibilities. Now the second face of the die can be rolled with a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, and so on; then you get 36 possible rolls. The probability of getting a specific one is 1/36. If you wanted to calculate the probability of rolling three sixes with three dice, you would get this probability: 1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/216. So that is already a very small probability. The probability becomes smaller and smaller the more possible outcomes there are; the more possible outcomes there are, the less likely it is that a specific one will occur.

[ 7 ] So you see that it is possible, in a certain way, to express mathematically in the form of a formula how likely it is that a particular event will occur. This can now be applied to all sorts of things. However, I need not explain anything more to you than this principle here; you see that one can express in mathematical formulas what one feels. One can always feel that it is, to a certain degree, unlikely that a six will be rolled, but the probability is 1/6, and with two dice it is 1/38, and so on. So, in a sense, one can express such feelings, such sensations, mathematically.

[ 8 ] Now there is a certain line of reasoning that relates to divine providence. Materialists, for example, say something like this: Let us consider the line of reasoning of those who believe in God and in providence. What is the line of thought of those who believe in providence? With regard to the providence of the world, it is sometimes as follows. Those who believe in providence say: Let us take, for example, Goethe’s *Faust* or Homer’s poems—it does not matter which. Goethe’s *Faust*—what is it, after all? — If one thinks in the manner of materialists, who compose the world of atoms or molecules, one would actually have to conceive of the entire “Faust” as composed of letters—or, if one did not wish to go further, of individual letters. Now such people, who believe in providence and yet believe in atoms and molecules, put it something like this: Let’s take the entire “Faust,” which consists of letters. Now imagine that you had all the letters that make up the entire “Faust” inside a typesetting case. And through some kind of machinery—not through any kind of wisdom—these letters were thrown about. Now the believer in providence asks: If these letters were thrown about and there were a machine that placed these letters side by side exactly as they fell, how great is the probability that Goethe’s “Faust” would emerge?—That is what they ask. This probability is truly vanishingly small, they say. One cannot assume that, if the letters were thrown down at random, by some chance—see, there we have “His Majesty Chance,” as Voltaire says—Goethe’s “Faust” would emerge in this way. So since that is not the case with Goethe’s *Faust*, but the world is, after all, put together in a far, far more magnificent way, one cannot think that this world was simply thrown together without wisdom. Therefore, there must be a Providence.

[ 9 ] This would be the line of thought of someone who lives with the prevailing materialism of our time, yet who, precisely because of the impossibility that the world could have thrown itself together out of some arbitrary chaos of space, concludes that providence must be necessary.

[ 10 ] Fritz Mauthner is a thorough gentleman, and he has even gone so far as not merely to present this line of thought in such a simple manner, but to actually calculate just how improbable it is that, for example, Goethe’s *Faust* could have come into being in this way through a simple scattering of the letters that appear in it. So he has actually done the calculation, and I would like to demonstrate that to you. He has indeed proceeded with a certain thoroughness here. Fritz Mauthner says: “The existence of God is to be proven by the fact that the beauty and order of the world, without an intentional Creator, would be just as highly improbable through pure chance as the creation of the ‘Faust’ poem, for example, by an enormous typesetting case being overturned and the letters and other punctuation marks arranging themselves by chance in the order of Goethe’s ‘Faust.’ The improbability of such a creation of ‘Faust’ is truly immense. Greater than the mental image can conceive. Even if one sets aside the far-fetched assumption that the letters could also arrange themselves into lines in space, and considers the probability of an infinitely more favorable extra coincidence. Something like this: a German typewriter or typesetting machine falls into the hands of a Chinese person who has no idea about the German language or German letters, but who undauntedly taps away at the keys for weeks or months, and otherwise operates the machine correctly”—that he, through this mere random typing, would produce Goethe’s “Faust”! Mauthner continues: “I have now taken the liberty of calculating, approximately, the probability of the coincidence that, through this blind typing, Goethe’s *Faust* would emerge. A few decimal places in the mantissa of the logarithm don’t matter. I have also generously increased the probability by still recognizing a “Faust” with 100 typographical errors as “Faust,” thus assuming an extremely large number of favorable cases instead of a single one theoretically required. About 300,000 letters are needed for “Faust.” The probability of hitting exactly the right letter by chance with every keystroke is not entirely small—almost 1/100—because there are about 100 different characters in total.” So you can choose a hundred characters. If you type blindly, the probability of selecting one correctly is 1/100, according to the principle I demonstrated to you earlier with the die. Accordingly, the probability that this Chinese man, who has no idea of the “Faust” language, will type one correctly is 1/100. “But since, according to elementary rules, the probability of randomly producing the entire ‘Faust’ with 300,000 letters is equal to the product of 300,000 partial probabilities, the probability of the random creation of ‘Faust’ is calculated as 1:100,300,000.”

[ 11 ] You see, the probability that “Faust” will emerge in this way is not 1/6 or 1/36 and so on, but rather it is equal to the fraction that results when I divide 1 by 100 times 100 times 100 and so on, and do this 300,000 times; that is a fraction with a denominator that, as you can imagine, is enormous; that is to say, this probability is incredibly tiny. Mauthner goes on to say: “This amounts to a fraction whose numerator is 1 and whose denominator is an integer with 600,000 digits. Even the imagination of the Indians”—which Mauthner considers very great—“even the mathematical genius of Archimedes could not grasp this denominator. Its number is nameless. So the Greeks and Romans were right when they declared the random creation of a well-ordered whole to be extremely improbable. The limit of impossibility has been reached.” But only for the human mental image—he believes. One cannot imagine that “Faust” could have come into being in this way. “And the Greeks and Romans could just as easily have applied the conclusion that the ingenious creation of ‘Faust’ by a creator is highly probable or virtually certain to the existence of a creator of the world, if only this transfer or metaphor, if only the whole question were not so unspeakably silly. Nothing is further from my mind than the belief in the accidental origin of even the marvelous structure of a mosquito in the sense of materialism. The origin of a mosquito through material chance is just as improbable as that of “Faust.” Darwinism has really not changed much regarding the incomprehensible. But the mental labor of the dear Lord, who would have had to arrange not three hundred thousand elements or letters (with repetitions), but the elements of the world an infinite number of times (with repetitions), is—for the human imagination, which truly has no other—perhaps even more improbable than the accidental creation of “Faust.” I do not wish to extend my calculations to the degree of improbability of a world government and a providence.”

[ 12 ] You see, one can make an immensely scholarly observation—you will surely have found the observation scholarly enough—which leads to the logical conclusion: What must God have in mind if he were to compose the world from all the elements of the world; for even to produce “Faust,” for example, by chance from a typesetting case or a typewriter would lead to such an improbability that it borders on the impossible. Thus, says Mauthner, both the concept of chance and the concept of divine providence are impossible, for one certainly cannot assume that the world would fall out of a large typesetting case in a well-ordered manner by chance, when the probability is already so small in the case of “Faust”; but one can assume a God just as little, for what kind of wisdom would there have to be in God if he were now to assemble the world from all the elements of the world!

[ 13 ] One cannot, therefore, assume the existence of either a god or “His Majesty, Chance.” That is why Mauthner maintains that all of this is invalid, that it is all merely linguistic concepts with which people engage, just as they do with languages and translations. He calls this “Critique of Language”!

[ 14 ] So we have—and let us bear this in mind—a truly astute line of reasoning, arrived at with great effort, which now leads to the following alternative: Either one would have to assume that the world came into being by chance—a probability that is, of course, infinitesimally small—or one would have to consider that a “Dear God” once had all this wisdom in mind in order to wisely form the world out of chaos; this is even less plausible.

[ 15 ] Let us now, as those of us in Spiritual Science who strive not merely to recognize this or that, but also to think correctly—that is, to take into account in every instance the factors that can lead to a correct train of thought—grapple with this line of reasoning in a manner befitting the seriousness of Spiritual Science. Let us take up the sentence once more: The probability that Goethe’s *Faust* might arise by chance from a typesetting case is so small that it is expressed as 1 divided by a number of 600,000 digits. The probability that the world came into being through such a primordial accident would, of course, be immeasurably smaller. But the entire “Faust” did come into being! Did it come into being in such a way that Goethe—let us now say “dear Goethe” instead of “the dear Lord”—had in his mind the laws that, according to the principles of typesetting, arranged the 300,000 letters from the type case so that they now formed “Faust” in orderly rows, like soldiers? Did he think about the laws of how one must reach in there to find the right letters? — No! When we think of the creation of Goethe’s “Faust,” it has nothing at all to do with that jumbling! The one who brings Goethe’s “Faust” into being is doing something entirely different! He would not even have time to think that “Faust” could be jumbled together from 300,000 letters! Goethe did not need to know the slightest thing about how “Faust” could be jumbled together from 300,000 letters, and yet he created it! So, on the one hand, we could and must imagine the chaos in which, for my sake, things are wildly jumbled together, and on the other hand, that God would have all the various laws in his head if he were to jumble the world together the way Goethe would have jumbled “Faust” together had he stood before the typesetting case! But God did not do that any more than Goethe did not just throw “Faust” together. What we must imagine in the soul of God has absolutely nothing to do with the whole line of thought about jumbling things together, just as the creation of Goethe’s *Faust* has nothing to do with this whole incredibly scholarly way of jumbling things together. That is to say: This whole line of thought leads to an absolute impossibility! It is witty, it is correct, it is conscientious—it is all of these things—but it leads to an impossibility! This is because here a conscientious person takes up a train of thought, spins it further, but in the course of that train of thought loses sight of the real factors that would have led him to a true, correct conclusion.

[ 16 ] The matter is much more important than one might initially think, for it shows us that it is sometimes extraordinarily difficult—even when working in the most scientific manner—not to lose the ability to think correctly in the course of a train of thought. And we must take this to heart, in our sensibilities and in our feelings. We really have much, much to learn from a matter such as this. Two things are necessary for us when we bring such a matter before our souls. The first is that, through such a striking example, we must educate ourselves to the knowledge that the search for truth is difficult, and that human beings truly have a very, very great need to develop a sense that not every train of thought, however correct it may seem to us at first glance, is in fact already a true train of thought. The more we can internalize the feeling that we can be mistaken—that we can be mistaken even with the greatest conscientiousness—the more we will move away from the principle, so widespread today, of clinging rigidly to one’s own opinion, of, I might say, stubbornly holding fast to one thing or another that we have regarded as correct. Today, one encounters nothing more frequently than the case of people who say: “I consider this and that to be right!”—and the decisive feeling one often has toward such people is this: how happy and how simple-minded this person is at the same time! Happy, because they have no idea what it means to believe in something one has thought up; and how simple-minded, because they have no idea how far removed from true reality such a thing can be. On the other hand, however, it must be clear to us that this realization must not depress us. It will make us quite humble; but it will not drive us to melancholy, or to despair over human life, simply because the pursuit of truth is so difficult. For we know that this life of the human soul is an infinite one, and that this life of the human soul must be a search; that it might therefore even correspond to a good, wise design that the search for truth is difficult. And we shall see that life is based on this. Death would immediately be upon our soul if the search for truth were easy, if it were truly as many people believe—that one could find the truth easily; if it were as some people believe who come along and say: I have now realized that one must organize life in such and such a way, then the whole world can be made happy! If it were the case that, given the complexity of the whole world, one could find the truth as easily as most people believe, then that would be the death of the soul; for the life of the soul rests precisely on the fact that one cannot find the truth in such totality, but that one must seek the truth slowly and that one must remain most humble in the slow, piecemeal pursuit of the true. The more comprehensive the truths we seek are supposed to be, the more likely error becomes. Therefore, naturally, one of the most learned gentlemen here has fallen into—I would say—a childish error, which I have indeed shown you, in that the problem of the world was to be interpreted as a matter of mere chance and providence.

[ 17 ] But the depression, the dismay at how difficult it is to find the truth, cannot overcome us if we consider that life consists in our having to seek the truth. The search itself is what matters. One might say: If the death of the soul were to occur because the truth were not to be sought, then it would surely have to occur now; for now, in terms of the lack of a genuine sense of seeking the truth, we are truly at a high point in human development. Never have there been more “program people,” more people who believe they have solved the entire mystery of the world with a few words, than in our time. So there is already, right now, a way of looking at things of which it can be said that it signifies spiritual death. It would signify spiritual death if what all these “program people” find were true. But it is precisely wrong; fortunately, it is wrong!

[ 18 ] A man like Fritz Mauthner—and there are many today who think along the same lines—thinks in a much more typical way than one might suppose. From the perspective of today’s way of thinking, the volumes of the *Philosophical Dictionary* are exemplary. They truly present the matter as most people think today, those who do not wish to depart from contemporary thinking, in the direction that Spiritual Science seeks to depart from it. People like Fritz Mauthner say: On the one hand, we arrive at the impossible idea that the world arose by chance—for this has such a low probability, as I have indicated to you. But the other concept, the concept of an all-wise God, is just as impossible; for it is impossible for our human minds to grasp that there is a God, a loving God, who now forms in his mind everything he needs to assemble the individual letters of the world out of chaos. In the past, says Fritz Mauthner, people used to operate with concepts like “chance” and “providence.” But we, he says, have now moved beyond these things, for we know today that concepts such as “chance” and “providence” have no significance in the world at all, no objective meaning, but are merely concepts of the human mind, having meaning only for human beings. It is precisely in this that the criticism lies: that such concepts are no longer applied to the world. These people always say: Look, in the past people were so childish; on the one hand they spoke of “divine providence,” on the other of the concept of “chance.” We must regard both the concept of chance and the concept of divine providence as existing solely within human thought, as not applicable to the world at all! — On what ground do these critics stand? They say: If we survey the entire philosophical development, this whole philosophical approach that many philosophers have pursued—and Mauthner has really sat down and studied the philosophers of the world; he knows them all, as far as one can know them in a single lifetime—then we see how they have striven to find concepts. But these are all merely human concepts that are not applicable to reality! The concept of divine providence has no corresponding reality. And so the article “Chance” concludes by saying something like: In the past, divine providence, world order, world harmony, and world beauty were regarded as concepts that were understood something like this: There is something random in the world —; but the world exhibits an order, the world also exhibits beauty. And Mauthner concludes the article “Chance”: “But we know that the concept of chance is a human construct. The concept of beauty and the concept of order are also human constructs. The concept of God is a human construct. The concept of cause is a human construct.” That is to say: We all know that these important concepts are human constructs, having no objective meaning. “For us, it is the height of literal-minded humanity to even pose the question, let alone attempt to answer it with a childish parable: whether chance or God is the cause of the world’s order and the world’s beauty.”

[ 19 ] What, then, did Fritz Mauthner do to arrive at the conclusion that the concept of God is a human construct, the concept of chance is a human construct, and the concept of order is a human construct—so that order does not exist in the external world, but rather humans merely imagine that order exists, that beauty exists, and so on? What did he do, this Fritz Mauthner and the other philosophical thinkers who arrived at this realization? They really—you don’t have to believe me—demonstrated with all manner of philosophical acumen how human reason works to arrive at these concepts, and how these concepts are truly the work of human beings; they proved that! So, what he says there is proven: “But we know…,” and so on. That is proven! But when one sees how it is proven, then one says: Yes, you are truly right, my dear Fritz Mauthner. But we know that the concept of chance is a human construct; the concept of beauty is also a human construct, the concept of God is also a human construct, the concept of chance, the concept of the May beetle! For that is precisely how things stand, as soon as we put them in the right light! If you were to now examine all that great acumen— it really is tremendous acumen—it would take you many years to go through it all if you wanted to study everything—that has been expended to prove that the concept of God is a human construct, that the concept of cause, the concept of chance, and the concept of beauty are human constructs, then there are lines of thought therein that are entirely applicable to the assertion: the concept of the May beetle is a human construct. — Certainly, the concept of the May beetle is a human construct, but does this decide anything about the fact that the May beetle also flies outside, that it is also real? The concept of the May beetle is a human construct—herein lies the childishness! One can go about one’s work with tremendous acumen and believe one has found something tremendously correct, yet one has lost the thread on which the things that lead to the correct are hung. All the evidence that has been presented to show that these concepts are human constructs does not, in fact, determine whether the concept corresponds to an objectivity, any more than the concept of the May beetle, as a human construct, determines that the May beetle is objective—that is, that it flies outside.

[ 20 ] You see, the modern scientific way of thinking provides tremendous certainty. And one could say that this is expressed in the following statement: “But we know that the concept of chance is a human construct. The concept of beauty and the concept of order are also human constructs. The concept of God is also a human construct. The concept of cause is a human construct. For us, it is the height of literal-minded humanity to even ask whether chance or God is the cause of the world’s order and beauty.”

[ 21 ] Oh yes—one must say—you think that because you can prove the concept of the May beetle is a human construct, it is childish, a superstition about words, to apply that concept now to something flying outside? It is the same thing, exactly the same! Only you don’t realize that it’s exactly the same thing.

[ 22 ] What, then, is the purpose of all these things? The purpose of all these things is to draw attention to how difficult it can be to arrive at the truth when one seeks it by following a thread of logical concepts strung together; to draw attention to all that can happen when one seeks the truth with even the greatest acumen, and how one must be thoroughly imbued with the feeling that the search for truth is difficult—difficult on a grand scale, difficult on a small scale. And the more what I have tried to suggest today takes root as a feeling within you, the better it will be.

[ 23 ] Based on these premises, we will soon—on Hegel’s birthday, August 27—discuss the concepts of “chance, providence, and necessity” from our Spiritual Science perspective.