The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] One hundred and fifty years ago today, Hegel was born in Stuttgart, and as we commemorate this fact on this day, we cannot help but be overcome by a sense of the immense change and transformation that the times have undergone since the birth of this mind, which is so extraordinarily characteristic of modern civilization as a whole. Hegel, after all, embodies, so to speak, the essence of the intellectual life of that region of Central Europe which has changed so fundamentally as a result of his work—a region from which he is now beginning to vanish, ideologically speaking, having played a certain role there.

[ 2 ] Hegel was born in Stuttgart, in the Swabian region; he spent the formative years of his life—the years in which his unique intellectual character developed—in Central Germany, and in the final phase of his life became an influential figure in Northern Germany, particularly in the field of education, but also in various other intellectual matters in Northern Germany. Born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart, Hegel—who gradually emerged from a certain ponderous intellectual disposition—entered the University of Tübingen at the age of eighteen, where he studied theology and became acquainted, above all, with the much more agile, intellectually lively, and youthful Schelling, as well as with I might say, Hölderlin, who brought the most melancholic sentiments of ancient Greece into the modern era; he spent his student years in Tübingen in close camaraderie with these two—Hölderlin and Schelling—and then, following Schelling’s lead, turned his attention to Central Germany, Thuringia, to the University of Jena, where he initially—just like Schelling, drawn by the personality of Johann Gottlieb Fichte—made his first attempts at developing his own philosophical ideas. He taught at the university until 1806. In that year, he completed his first major, independent work, *The Phenomenology of Spirit*, as they say, while Napoleon’s cannons thundered around Jena. This work contains an attempt to relive in thought everything that human consciousness can experience—from its dullest impressions of the world up to that clarity where a person experiences the world of ideas with such intensity that this world of ideas itself appears to him as the substance of the spirit. One might say that this *Phenomenology of Spirit* is something like a journey of the spirit around the world.

[ 3 ] The difficult conditions in Germany at the time cost Hegel his position at the University of Jena. He remained in central Germany, however, and initially edited a political newspaper in Bamberg for about a year; he then served as a high school principal in Nuremberg until he became a university professor in Heidelberg for a few years. During his time in Nuremberg, he developed his most significant work, the *Science of Logic*. In Heidelberg, he wrote his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.” He was then appointed to the University of Berlin—founded in the spirit of Fichte and Humboldt—where he played an influential role that extended not only to the entire educational system, which could be administered from Berlin, but also to other intellectual matters.

[ 4 ] Hegel was a peculiar figure even outwardly when he lectured. He had his written manuscript pages in front of him, but they always seemed to be in disarray, so that he was constantly flipping through them, searching. He was somewhat awkward in his presentation and had difficulty articulating his ideas. The thought within him was at work, emerging from the deepest recesses of his soul; yet as he lectured, it took an extraordinarily difficult form to find expression, coming out in a stammering, disjointed manner. Nevertheless, his lecture—which reached the audience in this manner, constantly interrupted—is said to have made an extraordinarily powerful impression on those who had an appreciation for engaging with such a personality. But Hegel also possessed other remarkable personal qualities. He truly immersed himself in the entire structure of his surroundings; he experienced the very fabric of that environment. And so one can observe how he actually grew out of the Swabian milieu, how he, in a sense, embodied the Swabian spirit with all its distinctive characteristics, until—after graduating from university, he spent some time as a private tutor in Switzerland and in Frankfurt am Main — until he arrived in Switzerland and Frankfurt am Main, where he adapted relatively quickly to his new surroundings.

[ 5 ] And then he came to Jena, where Fichte’s fiery spirit was at work, where, above all, there was something like a distillation of the entire Central European intellectual spirit—a time that people today can hardly even imagine. The fact was that when Fichte, in his own way, engaged in discussions in the lecture hall—discussions that were certainly on a high intellectual level but nevertheless remained at an abstract level—these discussions continued in debates spilling out into the streets and public squares of Jena; so that, in fact, such a lecture by Fichte was not merely a discussion of certain problems, but an event—an event also in the sense that individuals from all places not too far from Jena at that time, who were in need of a worldview, gathered in Jena. And anyone who reads the correspondence—which is indeed abundant—in which individuals who heard Fichte in Jena express their views will repeatedly come across passages that speak of Fichte’s immense intellectual influence. Indeed, it must be said that even many years after Fichte’s death—even decades later—individuals who heard him in Jena still express themselves in such a way that they speak of the profound influence on their souls that they experienced through Fichte in Jena.

[ 6 ] Inspired by the tremendous intellectual energy flowing into the world at that time were the fiery philosopher Schelling and the more ponderous Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, who nevertheless joined forces with Schelling to further develop Fichte’s philosophy. Schelling and Hegel published the *Critical Journal of Philosophy* in Jena at the beginning of the previous century; its articles certainly moved at the highest levels of abstract philosophical thought, but in such a way that one can see: these statements, distilled into subtle abstractions, deal—as if gushing directly from the human heart—with those matters of human and worldly life that are, after all, the pinnacles of all striving for a worldview. Hegel then worked his way toward a certain degree of independence and, by 1806, had written his *Phenomenology of Spirit*, which is, in fact, a phenomenology of consciousness.

[ 7 ] As I said, Hegel was always part of that whole milieu. Deep within him, the enigmas of his surroundings were at work. And just as the Swabian spirit was—with its depth found, well, I don’t want to be rude, in certain select Swabians—just as the Swabian spirit was in his youth, when it truly came to revelation within him, so it was this entire philosophical spirit—which concentrated and synthesized the newer intellectual aspirations—that seized him in Jena at the beginning of the 19th century, and from which he wrote and worked: from this philosophical spirit, which, however, always drew sustenance from a broad overview that he ceaselessly maintained of the general state of the world.

[ 8 ] It was from this that Hegel’s *Logic* also emerged—not an ordinary logic, but something entirely different. It was written in the second decade of the 19th century. One might say: The most peculiar form of humanity’s striving at its highest level is revealed precisely in this Hegelian *Logic*.

[ 9 ] For Hegel, logic is something like a summary of what the Greeks understood by “logos”—the world reason—albeit in a somewhat different way than Hegel did. Hegel had come to truly grasp this during that inner, profound experience he underwent while working on his *Phenomenology of Spirit*: When a person rises to the intense experience of the Idea—that is, the Ideas of the world—then this experience of the Idea is no longer merely a mental experience; rather, it is an experience of the divine element of the world in its truth, in its purity, in its luminous clarity. Something that had been pulsing in the minds and souls of Central Europe for centuries came to inner, spiritual existence in a special way in Hegel at that time. One need only recall the profound mysticism of Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler—we have come to know it from another perspective in recent days, yet it remains profound, and the experience itself remains the same, even when one is aware of the deeper occult underpinnings of which I spoke here a few days ago— one need only think of this mystical experience as it then became an inner revelation in figures such as Valentin Weigel, even in Paracelsus, and in Jakob Böhme; and one need only take what spirits like Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler experienced more out of an intense feeling than abstractly—what Jakob Böhme expounded in images through inner experience— one need only transform that into the bright, luminous clarity of world-ideas and thus replace the mysticism of feeling and imagery with the mysticism of ideas—then one has the experience that was Hegel’s when he wrote the *Logic*: a merging of the soul into pure ideas, but with the conviction that these ideas are the substance of the world; a life in what Nietzsche later called the cold, icy realm of ideas—but for Hegel, an experience of ideas with the awareness that this experience of ideas is a dialogue with the World Spirit itself.

[ 10 ] What Hegel experienced—not in vague definitions of a unity of the world, not in such vague concepts as those expounded by the pantheists, but in concrete ideas that could be traced from simple being all the way up to the fully realized idea of the organism and the spirit—what can be experienced in the full breadth of the developed world of ideas—Hegel summarized this in his *Logic*; so that in his *Logic* there is presented an organism of the ideas possible to man, which, however, at the very moment they are experienced by man, reveal the certainty that they are the very same thing that the World Spirit brings into reality. Hence Hegel also calls the content of his *Logic* “divinity before the creation of the world.” But the realm into which the person who studies Hegel’s “Logic” is transported is icy; this realm is icy, for Hegel moves entirely within what the ordinary person calls the utmost abstraction. He begins by positing Being as the simplest idea, then passes into Nothingness, proceeds dialectically from Being through Nothingness to Becoming, to Existence, and so on—to Being-for-Itself, to Essence, to Substantiality, to Causality, and so on; and one does not receive what the ordinary person wants when he seeks to be filled inwardly, in his soul, with the divine warmth of the world; one receives a sum of, as is commonly said in everyday life, abstract ideas.

[ 11 ] What is this “logic”? This “logic,” when one delves into it, becomes an experience in itself; it even becomes an experience that can shed much light on many of the mysteries of humanity and the world in general. One might say: What one experiences in Hegel’s “Logic” can, in essence, only be properly characterized through the science of the spirit. It is only through the science of the spirit that one finds the words with which to characterize this experience. It is a very strange feeling. Rosenkranz, Hegel’s student, who was completely devoted to his master, has given us a biography of Hegel that is not only charming but also written with great insight. In this biography of Hegel, he utters words that, I would say, are significant in a certain respect for the course of history. He says, around the mid-1840s: “We are, in fact, the gravediggers of the great philosophers.” And he then goes on to describe how the great philosophers emerged from European civilization at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, and how they had, in a sense, already died during that era. One feels a sense of melancholy when reading this particular passage in Rosenkranz’s biography of Hegel, for it expresses a profound truth. As the 19th century advanced further and further, it became the gravedigger not only of the philosophers, but of philosophy itself—indeed, of the great questions of worldview in general. That which now confronts us with such giant strides—the decline of European civilization—first manifested itself on the philosophical heights. The presumptuous philosophical systems of the second half of the 19th century are, after all, essentially a decline.

[ 12 ] But from the standpoint of spiritual science, one cannot speak as Rosenkranz did; from the standpoint of spiritual science, I would say, even that which is outwardly and physically dead must come to life. For that which is eternal in the human being continues to work eternally—on the one hand in the supersensible worlds, but on the other hand also in the earthly world itself; and while it is the task of the forces of decay to act as gravediggers, it is the task of spiritual science to extract the eternally living soul from the dead and to present it to the world in its continued existence. That is why I do not wish to speak today of the dead Hegel, but of the living Hegel.

[ 13 ] But indeed, living beings of Hegel’s kind become, in a certain sense, at the same time sharp critics of that which in our time—partly out of the slumber of the soul, partly out of malice—forms an alliance with the forces of decline. And so, from the standpoint of the science of the spirit, I must say: Yes, it is true that Hegel’s logical dialectic unfolds in a cold, icy realm of initially abstract concepts. One actually lives entirely in concepts by living through Hegel’s “logic,” which the thoughtless person does not love, and of which the thoughtless person says: “That doesn’t interest me.” — But precisely this world of Hegel’s concepts, precisely this sum of apparent abstractions, precisely these icy-cold concepts—what are they, after all? One can investigate, through what the philosophy of mind currently offers, what these concepts are. They certainly cannot, without a doubt, be the eternal world reason itself, for this eternal world reason could never have brought into being the entire multifaceted—and above all, not the entire warm—world out of this sum of mere abstractions. Like thin veils of concepts—Hegel himself calls his ideas “logic”—shadows—that is how these logical concepts, these logical ideas, appear.

[ 14 ] So what Hegel initially experienced in his belief regarding this logic—that, of course, cannot be it; it is a sum of ideas that begins with Being, passes through Nothingness to Becoming and so on, through a series of such concepts, and ends with the idea that carries its purpose within itself—that is, with what ordinary consciousness still calls an abstraction. So certainly, one could not have created the world out of such ideas, and that which is living spirit—which must indeed be grasped in supersensory cognition as living spirit—is not this logic either. It is, I would say, born of a subjective feeling when Hegel says that the content of this logic consists of God’s thoughts prior to the creation of the world. One could never in any way grasp the rich fullness of the world from these thoughts. And yet, the experience—if one is only willing to engage with it at all—is a powerful, a tremendous one. What, then, is actually contained in this logic?

[ 15 ] If you look at our structure here—it is intended to have, as its central group at the eastern end, a kind of Christ figure in the middle, towered over by Lucifer, and below that, thrust into the earth, as it were, by the representative of humanity who maintains complete spiritual balance within himself: Ahriman. This group is intended to represent the fullness of humanity. For in reality, the human being is that which must seek a balance between what strives to rise above the human being and what pulls the human being down toward the earth—between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. Physiologically and physically speaking, the Luciferic within us is the force that leads the human being to fever and pleurisy—that which brings the human being into conditions of heat that dissolve him, that cause him to disintegrate in the world—and the Ahrimanic, which ossifies and calcifies him. From a soul perspective, human beings must seek a balance between rapturous mysticism, between theory, between all that aspires upward toward the immaterial yet light-permeated, and that which pulls them downward toward pedantry, philistinism, materialism, and intellectualism. Spiritually speaking, human beings must maintain a balance between that which constantly lulls them to sleep—that which always leads them to surrender to the universe: the Luciferic—and that which constantly awakens them, that which pierces them with a force that does not let them sleep: the Ahrimanic. One cannot understand the human being unless one can place it at the midpoint between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. But what the human soul experiences at this midpoint is complex, and the human soul actually experiences this complexity only over the course of time, in the course of its development; and one must understand the individual stages of this development. One might say: Anyone who understands Hegel as he elaborates his *Logic* can see how humanity, during the time Hegel was working on his *Logic*—in the second decade of the 19th century—began to harden, began to become materialistic, to grow dense, to become entangled in matter. It is as if knowledge and cognition were sinking into matter during this period. And one is struck by the image of humanity sinking into the material world, with Hegel standing as if in the center, striving with all his might to wrest from Ahriman that which is good in him: abstract logic, which we need for our inner liberation, without which we cannot attain pure thought—wresting it from the forces of heaviness, wresting it from the earthly forces, and setting it before us in all its cold abstractness, so that it may not dwell within that element which is the Ahrimanic in human beings, but rather so that it may rise up into human thought. Yes, this Hegelian logic has been wrested from the Ahrimanic forces and given to humanity; it is what humanity needs, without which it cannot move forward, but which first had to be wrested from Ahriman.

[ 16 ] Thus, Hegel’s logic truly remains something eternal; it must continue to exert its influence. It must be sought out again and again. One cannot do without it. If one tries to do without it, one either falls into the softness of veiling, or one sinks into that very state into which one immediately sank when one first approached Hegel and could not grasp him. For there, I might say, while on the one hand the image of Hegel appears—rising above the Ahrimanic, truly saving for human thought that which Ahriman seeks to preserve as pure logic for humanity— there also appears, on the other side, the figure of Karl Marx, who likewise took his cue from Hegel, who takes up Hegelian thought, but is seized by Ahriman’s claws and dragged into the deepest depths of the material swamp, arriving at historical materialism through Hegel’s method. There, one involuntarily sees side by side the spirit striving upward, which snatches logic from Ahriman, and next to it the one who, because one must sustain oneself through all the inner human soul forces using this logic, sinks into the Ahrimanic.

[ 17 ] Thus Hegel already stands there as a spirit that can only be grasped if one seeks to grasp him using the concepts that, in turn, can only be provided by the philosophy of mind. This is what Hegel became as a result of the influences exerted upon him by Fichte’s fiery words in Jena, the essence of which he then developed in his own way during his time in Bamberg, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg.

[ 18 ] And then he was transferred to northern Germany. He always remained rooted in his surroundings. His inner being responded to his surroundings in a deeply human and personal way. Thus he became the influential spirit of the University of Berlin. And now the world witnessed the work he produced—a work he had to create from the very heart of modern civilization if he was truly a spirit who fully belonged to that center. In recent weeks, we have characterized the East, the Center, and the West; we have seen how economic thought flourished particularly in the West, how spiritual thought flourished in the East, and how legal and political thought rose to particular prominence in the Center. Fichte wrote a work on natural law. The most enlightened minds were engaged with legal ideas. Hegel presented to the world, precisely at the time he was moving to northern Germany, his *Outline of the Philosophy of Right, or Natural Law and Political Science in Outline*. Much of what one might call slander against Hegel has, in fact, stemmed precisely from this book, which contains the remarkable sentence: “Everything rational is real, and everything real is rational.” — But whoever can appreciate that it was indeed Hegel who wrested human reason from the Ahrimanic forces will also appreciate that he had every right to seek this reason everywhere in the world and to assert it. And so he became—because he moved solely within the Ahrimanic realm, which cannot lead upward to that which lies before birth, to that “which works after death”—an interpreter of spirituality, but only of the spirituality of the earthly-physical realm: he became a philosopher of nature and history. But he set forth that which lives in the external world in the relationship between human beings, which then systematically develops into organized human life; he summarized this in his concept of the objective spirit. He saw in the practice of law, of custom, in the fulfillment of contracts and so on, the spirit at work within social organization itself. He was thoroughly immersed in these matters, not only in a spatial sense but also in a temporal one. It was, after all, still the spirit of the times when, particularly in the region where Hegel lived, the state was not yet worshipped as it would be later. That is why it is also incorrect to view what appears in Hegel as the concept of the state in the same light in which the state had to be viewed later. Hegel, for example, still recognized free corporations and a corporate way of life within his conception of the state. All that which later emerged in Prussia as anti-human did not yet exist at that time, when Hegel, in a certain sense—I would say—deified the idea of the state, particularly in Prussia; but this arose from his striving to see reason in the world—the reason he had wrested from Ahriman in his Logic.

[ 19 ] And now one really must say: This is, after all, the tragedy that then unfolded in such a shattering way throughout history. What lives on in Central Europe is something that must not be viewed in the same way that the West views it—especially since the hypocrisy of recent years— it is something that is characterized precisely by the fact that it still gives even a mind like Oswald Spengler’s the impression that it must be the source of the only salvation—the only social salvation—for times of decline; not to reverse the decline—Spengler does not believe in such a reversal—but merely to make the decline bearable, a decline that will continue until complete barbarism sets in at the beginning of the next millennium.

[ 20 ] One might say: In the 1820s, Hegel stands as the spirit presiding over the entire Prussian educational system, embodying that kind of rationality I have just described to you—which, I might say, is born of the ice of Ahriman, but which also possesses an inner rigidity of mental organization that has nothing mathematical about it, yet possesses an immense power and a certain subtlety of mind.

[ 21 ] And now one really must admit: That which existed in Central Europe—which, after all, can also be characterized by the fact that, as late as the 9th century, blood sacrifices were still part of its uncivilized culture—gave rise to qualities that have a certain value when guided by a spirituality such as Hegel’s. But such spirituality is rare; it did not repeat itself. Hegel’s students were all, fundamentally speaking, small minds, and the one who was, in a certain sense, a great mind—Karl Marx—immediately fell prey to the Ahrimanic forces; and what then spread was precisely that which brought about the plunge into the Ahrimanic depths. From what fell there, Hegel rescued something that must be eternal, and he could rescue it only by extracting it precisely from that very element. This could only be accomplished by such an extract—a spiritual extract of the Central European essence—as Hegel was: a Swabian by birth, a Swabian in terms of the land of his youth, a Central German, a Franconian, and a Thuringian in terms of his mature years, and—in the final epoch of his life—so deeply Prussian that he perceived Prussia as the center of the world and called Berlin the center of the center. But there is a certain power—truly not a physical power, but another kind of power, a spiritual power—in this Hegelianism, and there is something in it that must be absorbed by every spiritual worldview. For any spiritual science that could not be permeated by the bony system of ideas—which Hegel wrested from Ahriman, the ossifying Ahriman—would become stunted. We need this system. In a certain sense, we must grow inwardly strong through it. We need this cool, level-headedness if we do not wish to degenerate into nebulous, warm mysticism in our spiritual striving. One also needs the strength that lived in Hegel; one needs his strength to profess reason if one does not wish to sink into that very abyss into which Karl Marx immediately sank when he sought to assimilate Hegel’s spirituality on his own terms.

[ 22 ] It is necessary—it would be necessary—that at this moment, which is perhaps one of the most important, even more so than 1914, as many people as possible recall precisely what is significant in Hegel. For souls could, in a certain way, awaken precisely through Hegel. And awakening is necessary. People do not believe—or do not want to believe—what dangers actually prevail in the civilization of Europe and its American offshoot; they do not want to believe what forces of decline are at work. In fact, people today only reckon with the forces of decline in public life. They do not want to sense the forces of ascent. Let us highlight a few characteristic examples that may have struck us particularly in recent days: What, for example, is the underlying mindset that is now taking hold in the civilized world regarding spiritual life—that very spiritual life that has just been handed down? (It is not our spiritual life; we want to bring a new spirit into the civilization of humanity.) But what is the underlying mindset that is now spreading more and more as a prevailing attitude toward spiritual life? — You can glean this from an article that the rector of the University of Halle wrote very recently in the *Hallische Nachrichten* under the headline “The Dismantling of Universities?” He writes: “It now seems so certain that a proposal has in fact been made by a government agency to dismantle some of the German universities. Other educational tasks are considered more important, and it is believed that greater funds must be made available for them. And since these funds are lacking, the plan is to allow some universities to close in order to establish a kind of civil service school where individuals who have not attended university can be educated to the extent that they can administer the offices entrusted to them.”

[ 23 ] The indoctrination of civil servants—that’s where it begins! In Russia, it’s in full swing. And people in the West don’t believe it. They will have to learn the hard way that they, too, will be forced to believe it—unless there is an awakening of the soul—if even the finest minds continue to turn a deaf ear to everything that speaks of the spirit, and entertain the world with the old clichés of liberalism, conservatism, pacifism, and all manner of things—for their own amusement, but certainly not for the good of this world.

[ 24 ] And morality is rapidly declining, especially among our intellectuals. Here is a small example of that.

[ 25 ] I should note that when Ernst Haeckel stepped down from his professorship at Jena, he personally appointed his student Plate—who had come to Berlin—as his successor. He installed him, so to speak, because Haeckel’s influence at the University of Jena was significant when he retired; he appointed Plate to all the offices he had held—the professorship, the administration of the Zoological Institute, and also that of the Phyletic Museum, which had been established for Haeckel himself by the Haeckel Foundation that had been created; this Phyletic Museum was founded on Haeckel’s sixtieth birthday. All of this was what Haeckel was stepping back from and for which he appointed his student Plate. Now I would like to read you a news item from the last few days:

[ 26 ] “A year ago, eight days after Ernst Haeckel’s death, an obituary by Dr. Adolf Heilborn in the *Berliner Tageblatt* first reported on the ordeal Haeckel had endured due to Professor Ludwig Plate’s conduct during the last ten years of his life. On April 1, 1909, Haeckel had relinquished the chair of zoology in Jena—which he had held for forty-eight years—as well as the directorship of the Zoological Institute and the Phyletic Museum to his Berlin student Ludwig Plate, for which Plate expressed his heartfelt thanks to the . One of Plate’s first official acts after his move was to demand that Haeckel vacate his office at the Zoological Institute immediately; when Haeckel protested, Plate explained: “Since April 1, I have been the sole director of the Phyletic Museum, and you must unconditionally comply with all my orders.” Heilborn, as Haeckel’s student and friend, recounted this opening exchange and the subsequent development of the conflict here in simple terms—with the result that Professor Ludwig Plate filed a defamation suit against him in the Jena District Court. Now, in a short work titled *“The Lear Tragedy of Ernst Haeckel”* (Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg/Berlin 1920), based on Haeckel’s unpublished letters and notes as well as official records. Heilborn was able to employ the turn of phrase that a witty lawyer once used in court: “I move that my opponent be convicted on the grounds that my opponent himself has presented.” Nothing incriminates Plate more sharply than his own statements. From Haeckel—who had donated over one million marks in endowments to the university, along with his vast library and the collections he had acquired over 55 years, all free of charge—he demanded the return of a number of allegedly missing books, and on another occasion, a larger number of cardboard boxes. And then he passes this judgment: “This grave injustice inflicted upon me can no longer be undone, but I will forgive him in recognition of his great services to science and because he is my former teacher,” and: “No one will blame me for having severed all personal contact with Haeckel after all these experiences.” So much for Plate—Haeckel. I am reminded of a lecture once given by Ottokar Lorenz, one of the better historians of earlier times. I did not agree with its content, but I did like a turn of phrase right at the beginning. Ottokar Lorenz was speaking at a Schiller anniversary event on “Schiller as a Historian.” As I said, I did not agree with the content of what he said, but he remarked: “Yes, actually, from the standpoint of modern scholarship, there is nothing more to be said about Schiller as a historian. But if I do say something after all, it is on behalf of the High Senate and my colleagues”—and there they all were, the High Senate and my colleagues. And so I would like to say—here comes what appears to be a very special, well, let’s say, statement by the High Senate and my colleagues. It reads: “In the academic world of Jena, Plate stood entirely alone”—I would like to know whether he stood alone when he entered the lecture hall. — “The anatomist Schwalbe once wrote: ‘It is unbelievable how… Plate behaved. I am surprised that the students in Jena did not react. It would be a truly good deed if they could drive Plate out…’”

[ 27 ] This is what the professors—the “fellow professors”—write, expressing their deep regret that the students did not drive Plate out. The fellow professors who write this—in private letters, of course—have presumably avoided being unfriendly toward Mr. Plate whenever he came to the lecture hall.

[ 28 ] “Heinrich Heine once said that Lessing’s opponents were spared from vanishing without a trace—like an insect trapped in amber—simply because they were associated with him. It would be rude to apply this comparison to living people, however well it may fit into a scientific context. We shall therefore content ourselves with Heilborn’s remark that nothing will remain of Plate’s name and work except the vague memory of the ordeal he inflicted on Haeckel.”

[ 29 ] One could cite many similar examples of scholarly morality, of the morality of our contemporary intelligentsia; for what this reveals is that today we are not dealing merely with the struggle of one worldview or another against another worldview; we are dealing today with the struggle of truth against falsehood, and it is falsehood that directs its weapons against the truth. And more important than any dispute over other concepts today is the struggle of truth against the hypocrisy that is taking hold of people more and more.

[ 30 ] Perhaps I went a bit too far when I said recently during a lecture: “The people of Europe are asleep.” They will learn the hard way—I said this in a different context—they will have to learn the hard way what Bolshevism, as the outermost extension of the Western European worldview, is as it spreads across all of Asia; it is something that Asia, these people of Asia, are embracing with the same fervor with which they once embraced their sacred Brahman. — For that is precisely what will happen, and modern civilization will have to come to terms with it. And one feels the deepest sorrow when one sees the sleeping souls in Europe who are so utterly unable to truly bring this gravity—which is at stake today—to the forefront of their minds. A few days after I had said this, I came across the following news item: “A few days ago, I had the opportunity to see a 10,000-ruble note in the possession of a representative of the Soviet Republic. What astonished me was not the denomination of the note; rather, what struck me about that 10,000-ruble bill was a swastika, finely and clearly embossed in the center of the paper.” That symbol, which the ancient Indians and Egyptians once gazed upon when speaking of their sacred Brahman—they see it today on the 10,000-ruble note! Those who shape high politics know how to influence the human soul. One knows what the triumphant march of the swastika—which a large number of people in Central Europe already bear, albeit for different underlying reasons—means; one knows what this signifies, but one refuses to heed those who seek to interpret the mysteries of today’s historical developments through its most significant symptoms.

[ 31 ] However, this interpretation can only be derived from what can be brought to light through the humanities. One must turn one’s gaze to what is present. One must turn one’s gaze to the tendency toward devastation directed against the old spiritual life—a tendency that seeks to transform even the remnants of this old spiritual life into schools and bureaucracies for civil servants, a tendency that has sunk to such moral depths as I have described to you in connection with Mr. Plate, who is a direct student of Haeckel, the favorite student of Haeckel, who was so good at heart. Haeckel did not do this; it is the work of the Ahrimanic-materialistic culture. In this age—in which, however, one knows, when one sets to work consciously, how one must act—in this age, one should reflect on spirits such as Hegel, who was born in Stuttgart one hundred and fifty years ago, and who, in an inner, spiritual struggle wrested from the Ahrimanic forces those concepts and ideas that are needed to possess sufficient inner spiritual steadfastness to climb the ladder into the spiritual world—but who also offers much more in the way of inner spiritual discipline. Truly, Hegel should be valued by spiritual science for the way his work lives on today, and because of what endures from him today, let us remember him on his 150th birthday.

[ 32 ] He died of cholera on November 14, 1831, in Berlin—the same day Leibniz, the great European philosopher, died. What he left behind was, at first, either misunderstood in the outer world, dumbed down by his students, or dragged directly into the Ahrimanic realm, as in Marxism. Through spiritual science, we must find the ground where that which was born in Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel as an eternal truth one hundred and fifty years ago in Stuttgart—that which embodies the finest spiritual essences of Europe and has been at work in Central Europe for sixty years—must not be buried. It must not be buried; it must be brought to life through spiritual science, just as we truly need it now in the midst of this intellectual, moral, and economic decline.