The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] I would like to note at the outset that today’s lecture is not part of the course series, but is intended, in a certain sense, to follow on from what I discussed yesterday evening. Yesterday’s discussion focused on that particular phase of humanity’s historical development—which occurred in the middle and even into the second half of the 19th century—namely, the developmental impulse of materialism. I said that in these reflections our attention should be directed not so much toward materialism in general—which, after all, requires a different perspective—but rather specifically toward theoretical materialism, toward materialism as a worldview. And I have pointed out that while it is indeed necessary to confront this materialism with a thorough critique, on the other hand this materialism was a necessary phase in the development of human history; that we must not simply say that this materialism should be rejected, that it is a human aberration, but rather that this materialism demands to be understood. For these two things are by no means mutually exclusive. And it is precisely in such a line of thought that it is important to expand the scope of those concepts relating to truth and error beyond what is usually done. People usually speak of how one can err in logical thought, or of finding the truth. But one does not speak of the fact that, under certain circumstances, even the gaze directed toward the external world may encounter errors in external reality. And as difficult as it may still be for the modern mind to acknowledge errors in natural phenomena—which is, however, precisely what spiritual science seeks to do— it is nevertheless already natural for people today to acknowledge real errors in what emerges in the course of historical development—what, in a sense, manifests itself in the collective, social life of humanity—errors that do not merely require logical correction, but must be understood in light of the conditions under which they arose.

[ 2 ] In thinking, one must, after all, reject error and nothing else. One must escape from error and, by overcoming it, arrive at the truth. But when it comes to errors rooted in reality, one must always acknowledge that these errors also have a positive side, that in a certain sense they are indeed valuable for human development. And so the theoretical materialism of the 19th century must not be condemned in a one-sided, philistine manner, but must be understood in terms of its significance for the development of humanity as a whole. After all, it consisted—and what remains of it still consists today—in devoting oneself to a conscientious and precise investigation of external material facts, in becoming, in a certain sense, absorbed in this world of facts, and then, based on this investigation of the world of facts—to which one becomes deeply accustomed—finding a view of life which holds that only this world of facts exists as reality, and that everything that is spiritual or psychological is, in essence, merely a product arising from these material processes. — This view of life, too, was necessary in a certain era, and the danger would arise only if it were rigidly clung to and were to influence the further development of humanity at a time when other ideas must already be entering human consciousness.

[ 3 ] Today we want to examine what this impetus for the development of theoretical materialism is actually based on. We will arrive at this if, from a certain point of view, we once again bring to mind the “threefold structure of the human organism.” I have described this “threefold structure of the human organism” on various occasions. I have said: Within the human organism as a whole, we must distinguish what can be called, first of all for the physical human being, the sensory-nervous organization; it is concentrated primarily in the human head, but in a certain sense also extends throughout the entire human organism, permeating the other members of this organism as well. Then, as the second component, we have the human being’s rhythmic organization, the most prominent aspect of which is evident in the rhythm of breathing and in blood circulation. And third, we have the human being’s metabolic organization in the broader sense, which also includes the entire system of the human limbs. The human limb system is the musculoskeletal system, and all human movement is, in essence, merely an expression of the human metabolism. Once we are able to examine more closely what actually takes place in the metabolism when a person is in motion, we will recognize this intimate connection between the human limb system and the metabolic system.

[ 4 ] When we consider these three human systems, we are immediately confronted with the profound difference that exists between them. I already pointed out yesterday how two people with very different worldviews sought to understand the same drawings—which relates not only to the human organism as a whole but also to human imagination. I mentioned how I once happened to attend a lecture given by an extreme materialist. He wanted to describe the life of the soul, but was actually describing the human brain—the individual parts of the brain, their connecting fibers, and so on. In doing so, he produced a diagram; this diagram, which he drew on the blackboard, was for him merely an expression of what occurs materially and physically in the human brain, yet at the same time it was, for him, an expression of psychological experience—specifically, of the experience of imagination. Another philosopher, a Herbartian, spoke of ideas, of associations of ideas—that is, of the effect of one idea on another and so on—and he said he could use the same image. —There is here, I would say, something quite empirical that is extraordinarily interesting. What we have here is that someone for whom the life of the soul is something real for the purposes of observation—at least in his ideas (one must always add this when discussing Herbartianism)—uses the same image to clarify for himself how this life of the soul works, just as the other person, who actually only wants to depict the processes in the brain, describes the life of the soul.

[ 5 ] Well, what actually underlies such a thing? It is based on the fact that the human brain, in its plastic structure, is indeed an extraordinarily faithful reflection of what we know as the life of the imagination. The structure of the human brain truly expresses the life of the imagination in a way that one might almost call adequate. But in order to truly think this idea through to its conclusion, something else is necessary. It is necessary that what we learn in ordinary psychology—for example, in Herbartian psychology—as chains of representation, such as those in judgment, in logical reasoning, and so on, not be left merely as thoughts, but that we at least allow it to take shape in the imagination — even if one cannot rise to clairvoyant imaginations —, that one at least allows it to unfold into an image in the imagination; that is, what constitutes the fabric of logic, what is the fabric that psychology—the study of the soul—provides us regarding the life of the imagination, that one allows it to unfold into an image. If one indeed succeeds—I would say—in transforming logic and psychology into a pictorial and sculptural image, then the human form of the brain emerges; then we have drawn an image whose realization is the human brain.

[ 6 ] What is this actually based on? It is based on the fact that the human brain—indeed, the entire nervous and sensory system—is an imprint of the imaginative. And one can only come to fully understand the marvelous structure of the human brain when one is able to conduct research imaginatively. Then one comes to see the human brain as realized human imagination. Imaginative cognition teaches us to recognize the external brain—the brain we come to know through physiology and anatomy—as realized imagination. This is significant.

[ 7 ] Another fact, however, is no less significant. Let us note, on the one hand: The human brain is real human imagination. After all, we are born—if not with a fully formed brain, then at least with the brain’s tendencies toward growth; it seeks to develop into a realized imaginative world; it seeks to become an imprint of an imaginative world. This, so to speak, is what is “complete” about our brain: that it is an imprint of an imaginative world. Into this imprint of the imaginative world, we build what our experiences of imagination are during the time we pass through between birth and death. During this time, we have experiences of imagination; we imagine, we transform perceptions into ideas, we judge, we draw conclusions, and so on. We build this into our brain. What kind of activity is this?

[ 8 ] As long as we live in immediate perception, as long as we are in interaction with the external world, as long as we open our eyes to colors and live in communion with them, as long as we open our ears to sounds and live in communion with them—for as long as this continues, the external world lives on within us, penetrating our organism through the senses like waves. We embrace this external world within ourselves through our inner life. But at the very moment—which I already pointed out yesterday—when we cease this direct experience of the external world, at the moment when we turn our eyes away from the world of colors, allow our ears to become inattentive to the sounds of the external world, or at the moment when we turn these senses toward something else, that which has concreteness—our interaction with the external world in perception—descends into the depths of our souls and can be brought back to mind as an image. We can say: During our life between birth and death, our interaction with the external world is conceptually divided into two parts: the immediate experience of the external world through perceptions and transformed representations. There, we are, so to speak, completely absorbed in the present; there, our inner activity ceases in the present. But then this present activity continues. It initially eludes our consciousness to a large extent; it descends into the unconscious, but can be brought back up again into the image of memory. How does it exist within us there?

[ 9 ] There is a point where only direct observation—which can be achieved through the imagination—can provide insight. The person who honestly pursues his path in the pursuit of knowledge must absolutely tell himself: the moment the mystery of memory confronts him, he can take no further steps in his research. As that which is experienced in the immediate present sinks into the subconscious, it withdraws from ordinary consciousness; one cannot pursue it any further there. If, however, one works accordingly within the human soul through those spiritual-soul exercises that have often been discussed in these reflections, one comes to a point where one no longer loses sight of the continuations of our immediate experiences of perception and imagination, which then merge into images capable of being recalled. I have, after all, often explained how a first consequence, a first result of the ascent to imaginative perceptions, is that one has before oneself—before the soul—the experiences since birth, as in a mighty tableau of life. Whereas ordinarily the stream of experience flows on in the unconscious, and the individual images that arise in memory emerge from this unconscious or subconscious stream through a semi-dreamlike activity, those who have developed imaginative visualization are offered the possibility of surveying the stream of experiences as if in a single picture. One might say that the time that has elapsed since our birth then takes on the character of space itself. One sees, within the context of the image, that which is otherwise in the subconscious. When one raises to immediate vision in this way that which otherwise slips into the subconscious, one can then observe this continuation of present, immediate experiences of perception and thought all the way to the images that can be recalled; one can trace what is going on within the human being—let us say, with any experience one has in one’s imagination—from the moment when one first lost it to the imagination until the moment when one recalls it again. Something is constantly happening in the human organism, from experience to recollection; this becomes visible to imaginative thinking; it becomes visible in imaginations, but it now reveals itself in a very special way.

[ 10 ] The thoughts that have, so to speak, become lost in the subconscious do not stimulate an activity within that subconscious that is connected to our life impulse or our growth impulse; rather, they stimulate an activity within us that is connected to our death impulse. This is the significant conclusion that emerges from imaginative cognition—a path I could only hint at today—namely, that human beings do not link their memory activity, which leads to the renewal of thoughts, mental experiences, and perceptual experiences, to that which calls us into life, which calls us into physical life, which promotes digestion in our physical life, so that we replace substances that have become unusable with usable ones, and so on. What we send down into the human being as the power of memory is not connected to this ascending system of human life, but rather to what we have carried within us since birth—to which we are born just as we are born to that through which we live and grow; it is connected to what then, condensed into a single moment, appears to the entire organism at the moment of death.

[ 11 ] Death appears to be a great mystery only as long as it is not viewed within the continuous flow of life between birth and death. We do not die only—if I may put it paradoxically—when we die; we die, in essence, at every moment of our physical life. And as that activity develops within our organism which leads to memory as memory-based thinking—and every act of cognition in ordinary physical life is, after all, fundamentally linked to memory—to the extent that this cognition develops, to that extent we are continually dying. It is a gentle dying, emanating from our central nervous system, continually taking place within us. Precisely by carrying out this activity, which continues in memory, we continually begin the act of dying. However, this act of dying is counteracted by the forces of growth within us in the other parts of the human organism, which overcome the forces of death. And so we sustain life. If it depended solely on our central nervous system—the nervous-sensory system—then every moment of life would actually be a moment of death for us. As human beings, we are constantly overcoming death, which, so to speak, flows from our head to the rest of our organism. The rest of our organism counteracts this death. And only when the rest of our organism weakens—whether through old age or some other form of damage—so that this other part of the organism can no longer counteract the death-dealing forces of the human head, only then does death occur for the entire organism.

[ 12 ] Yes, in today’s way of thinking—the way of thinking of today’s civilization—we actually work with concepts that lie side by side like erratic boulders, without properly recognizing the connections between them. Light must shine into this chaos of erratic boulders that make up our world of concepts and ideas. On the one hand, we have human cognition, which is so closely bound to the capacity for memory. We look at this human cognition and do not suspect its connection to the idea we have of death. And because we do not suspect this connection, what might otherwise be unraveled in life remains so mysterious to us. We cannot connect what we experience in everyday life with the great, extraordinary moments of experience. The lack of a spiritual overview of the fragments scattered throughout our world of imagination is what has caused life to become, little by little, so inscrutable—despite the great achievements of the 19th century.

[ 13 ] Let us now turn our attention to the second system, the second member of the human organism; here we have the rhythmic organism. This rhythmic organism is, after all, also present in the human head organism. The interior of the human head breathes in unison with the respiratory system. This is, of course, an external physiological fact. But the breathing of the human head is, so to speak, more inwardly situated; it is hidden from the nervous-sensory system. It is obscured by that which is the primary concern of the head’s organization. Yet the human head certainly also has its own hidden rhythmic activity. This hidden rhythmic activity, however, comes to the fore most prominently in the human chest organization, in the functions of the human organism that have their center in the respiratory organ and the heart. However, when we observe this system as it presents itself to us externally, we cannot perceive within it—in the same way as with the head system—a three-dimensional image of its corresponding psychological counterpart, namely the emotional realm. After all, when we consider our inner experience, our emotional life already appears to us as something that is more or less blurred and intertwined. Our concepts have sharp contours. We also have clear notions of the associations between these concepts. But we do not have such sharp contours for the details of our emotional life. It stirs and unfolds within itself. And one will never find a Herbartian who would wish to characterize what he creates as a representation of emotional life in a drawing similar to the way an anatomist or physiologist depicts the pulmonary system or the cardiovascular system. One finds, in fact, that such a relationship does not exist between what is inwardly psychological and what is outward. Consequently, one cannot bring this connection between the psychological emotional life and the rhythmic system before the soul through the insight of imagination. For this, what I have characterized in my writings as the insight of inspiration is necessary. From this particular form of insight—inspiration—it follows that the human emotional life has a direct connection to the rhythmic system; just as the nervous-sensory system is suited to the life of the imagination, so too is the rhythmic system suited to the human emotional life. But—to speak in relative terms—the rhythmic system is not a waxen imprint of the emotional life in the same way that the brain system is a waxen imprint of the life of the imagination. Therefore, we cannot say that our rhythmic system contains an imaginative image of the emotional life. On the contrary, we must say that what develops within us as the rhythmic system, what lives within us as the rhythmic system, has come into being—quite apart from any human knowledge—through world inspiration. It is inspired within us. The activity that takes place in breathing and in blood circulation is not merely something that lives within us beneath our skin; it is a cosmic event, just as lightning and thunder are cosmic events. Through our rhythmic system, we are also connected to the outside world. The air that is now inside me was outside before; the air that is now inside me will be outside afterward. It is a delusion to believe that a human being lives only within his own skin. He lives as a part of the world that surrounds him. And the form of his rhythmic system, which is closely related to his movements, is inspired from this world.

[ 14 ] Looking back on this now, we can say: In the human head, we have, at the very foundation, first the realization of an imaginative world; then, I would say, beneath what is realized there as an imaginative world, the world of the rhythmic system—that is, an inspired world. All we can say about our rhythmic system is this: within it, an inspired world is realized.

[ 15 ] And what about our metabolic-limb system? Metabolism is closely linked to the limb system, as I indicated earlier. What we observe in human metabolism is directly related to human volitional activity. But this connection is revealed neither to imaginative insight nor to inspired insight. It is revealed only to intuitive insight—what I have called “intuitive insight” in my writings; hence the difficulty in viewing what appears externally and materially in metabolism as the realization of a world intuition. But this metabolism is also present in the rhythmic system. The metabolism of the rhythmic system is concealed within the rhythm of life, just as the rhythm of life is concealed within the nervous-sensory activity in the human head.

[ 16 ] In the human head, we have a realized imaginative world, beneath which lies a realized inspired world related to the rhythm within the head. Beneath that, however, there is also metabolism in the head—that is, the realized intuitive—so that we first come to understand our head when we see within it the convergence of the realized imaginative, the realized inspired, and the realized intuitive. In the human rhythmic system, the imaginative element is absent; there is only the realization of the inspired and the intuitive. And in the metabolic system, inspiration is also absent; there we are dealing only with the realization of a world intuition.

[ 17 ] Thus, within this threefold human organism, we first carry within us the head organization, a reflection of what we strive for in cognition, imagination, inspiration, and intuition. If we wish to understand the human head, we must actually tell ourselves: if we have only external, objective knowledge—which is not even imagination, since it does not rise to the level of intuition—then we must stop short of the human head with this knowledge, which is merely objective and derived from the external sensory world. For the human head only begins to reveal its inner essence to imaginative cognition, and behind what is revealed there lies something deeper that opens up to inspiration, and behind that, in turn, lies that which opens up to intuitive cognition. The rhythmic system is not yet accessible even to the imagination; it reveals itself only in inspired cognition. And what lies hidden beneath it is the intuitive. And we should indeed find metabolism within the human organism utterly incomprehensible. The correct standpoint toward human metabolism can be none other than the following. We can only say: Outwardly, we observe the metabolism of the world; we attempt to penetrate it with the laws of objective cognition, thereby gaining a scientific understanding of external metabolism. At the very moment this external metabolism transforms, metamorphosing into our internal metabolism, it becomes something entirely different, and it becomes something in which that which is revealed only to intuition lives.

[ 18 ] One would therefore have to say: In the world that first presents itself to us through our senses, among the most incomprehensible of the incomprehensible is what the substances inside the human skin do—substances that we come to know externally through physics, chemistry, and so on. — One must tell oneself: To attain the highest level of intellectual understanding, one must rise to a higher plane if one wishes to recognize what actually happens within the human organism to the substances that we can so clearly observe from the outside.

[ 19 ] Thus we see that three elements are initially at work in the structure of our organism. In this structure of the organism, the first element at work is that which reveals itself to intuitive knowledge; it is this that first builds up the organism from the substance of the world. Also active within this organism is that which reveals itself to inspired insight; it integrates the rhythmic system into the metabolic organism. Furthermore, active within this human organism is that which reveals itself to imaginative insight; it integrates the nervous system. Then, when this organism enters the external physical world through birth, that which is, in a sense, already complete within it continues to develop as the human being develops objective knowledge between birth and death. But we have seen that this objective knowledge is bound up with the activity of memory; it does not belong to a process of building up, but rather to a process of breaking down. We have seen how this cognition is a slow dying, beginning at the head, so that we can say: The human organism has been built up through that which could be grasped in intuition, inspiration, and imagination; this lives on in the human organism in a way that is inaccessible to our present-day understanding. But that which it builds into him as our objective knowledge between birth and death—that breaks him down; that destroys him. And it is into this destruction that we actually think, that we imagine, when we develop the life of imagination and thought.

[ 20 ] Once one understands what cognition—which is so intimately connected to the capacity for memory—actually consists of, one cannot possibly be a materialist. For if one were to be a materialist, one would have to imagine that the human being is built up by its growth forces, that the forces are at work which take in substances, transport them to the various organs, and carry out digestion—in the broader sense—within the organism; one would have to conceive of this capacity—which lies in growth, digestion, and so on—as continuing, and somewhere it would then have to culminate in imagination, in thought, which leads to objective cognition. But that is not the case. The human organism is built up by something that is accessible to intuition, inspiration, and imagination. It is fully formed when it has processed these forces within itself. But then the process of regression begins; then decay sets in. And that which initiates this decay is ordinary cognition between birth and death.

[ 21 ] In ordinary cognition, we do not build upon the constructive forces; rather, by destroying the structure, we first create the foundations of a continuous element of death within the human being. And it is into this continuous element of death that we place our cognition. We do not delve into the material by imagining it; no, we destroy the material; we surrender the material to the forces of death. And we think into death; we think into the destruction of life. Thinking—ordinary cognition—is not related to sprouting, budding life; it is related to death. And when we look at this human cognition, we find no analogue in the natural forms up to and including the human brain; we find an analogue only in the body that decays after death. For what the decaying body—I might say—intensively represents, what the decaying body represents on a certain scale, must be taking place continuously within us when we perceive objects in the ordinary sense.

[ 22 ] One must look toward death if one wishes to grasp knowledge. One should not view life in a materialistic way, but rather look toward that which is the negation, the overcoming of life. Then one arrives at an understanding of thought. Then, however, that which we call death takes on a completely different meaning; it already takes on a different meaning within life itself.

[ 23 ] One can already gauge such things from outward appearances. I told you yesterday: The culmination of the materialistic worldview occurred in the middle of the 19th century or in the last third of the 19th century. It viewed death as something that must be rejected at all costs, and in a certain sense it took a certain air of superiority in this focus on death, which brings life to a close—the life that one actually wanted to contemplate on its own, yet which one also wanted to regard as concluded with death. — People often look back with a certain disdain on the “childlike folk consciousness.” But take a word from this “childlike” folk consciousness. Take the word “verwesen” for what happens after death: “ver-wesen”—the prefix “ver” always signifies a movement toward what the word expresses; “verbrüdern” means to move in the direction of becoming brothers; “versammeln” means to move in the direction of gathering. In popular usage, “verwesen” does not mean to dissolve or to cease, but rather to move into the essence. Such word formations, connected to a spiritual grasp of the world during an instinctive act of recognition, became very rare. In the 19th century, people became materialistic; they no longer lived in what was the spiritual permeation of the word. And one could cite many such examples that would show that materialism had already played out to its culmination simply in human language.

[ 24 ] Thus we can understand how, after human beings had developed—as I said yesterday—to a culmination through forces that manifest in inspiration, intuition, and imagination, they then reached a supreme culmination in the 19th century, and how a period of decadence followed once again. We can grasp that, in a sense, human beings distanced themselves from the power to comprehend themselves inwardly by developing most strongly the powers most akin to death as powers of cognition—the powers of abstraction. And it is here that, starting from today’s perspective, one can proceed to what, in the entire development of humanity, is the actual essential impulse of what might be called the materialistic impulse of knowledge within human history.