The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventeenth Lecture

[ 1 ] In order to understand our modern spiritual life and its potential for future development, I have presented some thoughts here in my recent reflections, and in the course of these reflections I said that it seems necessary to consider the course of events that has unfolded throughout human evolution and that has ultimately led to the state of the soul in which this modern spiritual life now finds itself.

[ 2 ] Let us once again consider some of the characteristics that define this modern intellectual life. From a wide variety of perspectives, we have come to the conviction that the fundamental tone of this intellectual life is intellectualism—the intellectual, rational approach to the world and to human beings themselves. This is not contradicted by the fact that, in recent times, the essence of the current worldview has been sought in the observation and interpretation of external phenomena perceptible to the senses. This, in particular, will become clear to us in the coming days. Intellectualism as such first emerged in the course of human development—one might say, during the period spanning three hundred years prior to the Mystery of Golgotha—and it then gradually developed to a height beyond which it has not actually progressed any further in the three centuries following the Mystery of Golgotha. Over the course of roughly six centuries, one might say, humanity has been educated in this intellectualism. And it has developed out of a spiritual worldview—that very spiritual worldview which is now ebbing away in this age, in these six centuries. As I have already pointed out, one can scarcely study the ebb of this worldview through external documents, since the later spread of Christianity made it a point, with few exceptions, to destroy the Gnostic texts. These Gnostic documents represent that phase in the development of human worldviews which, on the one hand, drew upon older traditions—upon the ancient wisdom that existed in Asia, Africa, and Southern Europe—and upon what was still accessible in these later times, given the limited capacities of people who no longer ventured far into supersensible vision. That older wisdom, which still has its final echoes in the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers and which still shines through somewhat in Plato’s writings—this worldview did not operate on the basis of intellectualism. It derived its content essentially—albeit in an instinctive manner—through supersensible perception. This supersensible perception simultaneously imparts what one might call an inner logical system. One does not need intellectual processing when one carries the content of supersensible perception within oneself, for it possesses the logical structure inherent in its very nature.

[ 3 ] But it was precisely this ability to access this supersensible content that humanity gradually lost. And the final phase was what has been preserved in Gnosticism. But Gnosticism is already permeated by intellectualism. So one can say that, in a certain sense, intellectualism is born out of Gnosticism in the course of human development. It is born out of supersensible, spiritual content. The spiritual content dries up, and the intellectual remains.

[ 4 ] The figure who primarily set the tone—one who now operates entirely within the realm of intellectualism, and in whom one can already clearly see (whereas this is not yet evident in Plato) how the older spirituality has come to an end and how human beings are attempting to arrive at a worldview through intellectual inner work—that figure is Aristotle. Aristotle is, in a sense, the first person in the very course of human development to work in a truly intellectualistic manner. Throughout his work, one still encounters such passages that show how vividly alive the memory of ancient insights—gained through supersensory means—still was. Aristotle is aware of these insights. He cites them when speaking of his predecessors; but he is no longer able to connect what he cites there with a genuine, inwardly experienced content. One can already see to a high degree in his work that what was previously an intense experience has become mere words. In contrast, he works in an eminently intellectualistic sense.

[ 5 ] Due to the unique nature of Greek culture, Aristotle is not a Gnostic. But in Gnosticism—which was still widespread at that time and continued into the post-Christian centuries—there is an intellectual grasp of ancient spiritual content that is no longer experienced. In a sense, what the Gnostics present is a shadow image of the ancient spiritual wisdom. And fundamentally, one can see how, little by little, humanity as a whole lost the very ability to ascribe any meaning to what was once given in a supersensory way. This point—that one can no longer ascribe any meaning to the ancient spiritual—was fully realized in the 4th century A.D. And it is precisely in a thinker such as Augustine that it becomes clear in the most eminent sense how he struggles from the very depths of the human soul to arrive at a worldview, yet how he cannot possibly arrive at such a worldview through any form of spirituality, and how he therefore ultimately ends up accepting what is presented to him dogmatically by the Catholic Church.

[ 6 ] This Western spiritual life—which we will discuss first—gained its substance particularly in the centuries following the first four after the Mystery of Golgotha; It acquired its content through what was handed down from the Christian tradition—what gradually took shape in dogmas, that is, in intellectualistic forms of thought—but which was related to a content that had once been experienced in supersensible vision, yet now existed only as a memory. But it was no longer possible to fathom the connection between human beings and this supersensible content—that is, to somehow bring the meaning of this supersensible content to human beings. And so, in the centuries that followed, right up into the 15th century, the education of humanity essentially took the form of intellectualism.

[ 7 ] Anyone who traces the intellectual life from the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. into the 15th century—with all that was experienced during that time, beginning with the early Church Fathers and continuing through Scotus Erigena, all the way to Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus—and all that was experienced during that time—will likely be less interested in the content being conveyed than in the profoundly meaningful education that was undergone, leading to that intellectualistic disposition of the soul. With regard to intellectuality—to the processing of concepts—the Christian philosophers certainly took it to the highest level. And while one can say, on the one hand, that the birth of intellectualism was completed in the 4th century A.D., one can also say that this intellectualism, as a technique—as a technique of thought—was developed well into the 15th century. —The fact that the element of intellectualism could be grasped by human beings at all took place in the 4th century. But intellectualism first had to be worked through internally. And it is truly admirable what was accomplished in this direction right up into the era of high scholasticism.

[ 8 ] In this regard, modern thinkers could indeed learn a great deal if they were to once again hone their conceptual skills by drawing on the conceptual techniques developed by the scholastics of the Catholic Church. When one considers the disorganized thinking that is commonplace in today’s science, when one thinks of how certain concepts—without which one cannot arrive at a worldview at all—for example, the concept of subsistence as opposed to existence— have virtually lost their inner substance, that concepts such as “hypothesis” have taken on a character that is entirely vague, whereas for the Scholastics it represented a strictly defined conceptual construct—and if one were to cite many other examples along these lines, one would see just how a mastery of conceptual technique is actually entirely absent from everyday intellectual life today, and how much could be learned if people were to reacquaint themselves with the techniques of thought—that is, the techniques of intellectualism—that were developed up through the 15th century. The reason why thinkers trained in this field are so far ahead of even modern philosophers is precisely that these thinkers have internalized the scholastic element.

[ 9 ] It is, I might say, downright refreshing to turn away from the disheveled thinking found in recent scholarly literature to a book such as Willmann’s History of Idealism—a work with which, of course, one cannot agree today, and whose content one finds completely repugnant; but it reveals a mode of thinking in which one can feel extraordinarily at ease precisely as such, in contrast to what has just been characterized. This History of Idealism by Otto Willmann should also be read by those who hold entirely different viewpoints. For the way in which the problems have been addressed since Plato—with a complete mastery of scholastic thought—can, at the very least, have an extraordinarily disciplining effect on a modern person.

[ 10 ] It was thus essentially from the 4th century through the 15th century that this mode of thinking was developed. Now, this mode of thinking initially took the form of a very specific approach by human cognitive faculties to the content of the world. One could say that thinkers such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas clearly articulated the relationship between this mode of thinking and the content of the world—to the extent that it had been developed at that time—in a manner that was entirely sound for their era.

[ 11 ] How does this account present itself to us? These thinkers initially had what I have just characterized in this way—derived from ancient traditions and handed down through the ages—but, no longer understanding its meaning, they preserved it as dogma. At first, they had to protect this as the content of a supernatural—or, as was largely synonymous at the time, a supersensory—revelation. The Church preserved this revelation through its magisterium. Whatever there was to be said about the supersensory worlds was believed to be contained within the Church’s dogma. And what was contained in this dogma was to be accepted as revelation, beyond the reach of human reason—that is, human intellectuality.

[ 12 ] On the one hand, therefore, it was entirely natural for the Middle Ages to apply highly developed intellectual methods; on the other hand, it was clear that this intellectual approach was not to have any bearing whatsoever on the content of dogmatics. People sought the highest truths they needed in this dogmatics. These truths had to be drawn from supernatural theology, and it essentially contained everything that actually pertains to the higher destinies of the human soul. In contrast, these views were permeated by the belief that nature could be understood and explained with the help of developed intellectuality; that one could even, through reason—that is, through intellectuality—come to comprehend, with a certain degree of abstraction, the beginning and end of the world; that one could also comprehend the existence of God, and so on. These things were certainly counted among those that could still be attained through intellectualistic methods, albeit in a certain abstract form. Thus, human knowledge was essentially divided into two realms: the realm of the supernatural, which could only be accessed by humanity through revelation and which has been preserved in Christian dogma; and the other realm, which encompassed knowledge of nature—to the extent that it was available at the time—but which was to be attained in its entirety through intellectualist methods.

[ 13 ] One must thoroughly grasp this duality of the cognitive process in the Middle Ages if one is to understand the development of the modern mind; for beginning in the 15th century, the fields that would eventually form the content of the modern scientific worldview emerged—slowly at first, then at an ever-increasing pace. The intellect had developed its own methods by the 15th century, but during this period it had been substantially enriched by substantive knowledge of nature. What knowledge of nature existed up to that time was based on ancient tradition and was scarcely understood. The intellect had, so to speak, not yet tested itself against any immediate, elementary content.

[ 14 ] This did not happen until the work of Copernicus, Galileo, and others became part of the development of modern knowledge. That was the time when the intellect no longer merely refined its methods, but began to engage with the external world. One can see, in particular, how a mind like Galileo’s, equipped with a refined technique of thought, first approaches the external, sensory content of the world. This is precisely what, over the course of the following centuries up to the 19th century, became the primary preoccupation of humanity in its quest for knowledge: the intellect’s engagement with the natural sciences.

[ 15 ] But what endured in this conflict between the intellect and the natural sciences? One must not rely on preconceived notions, but rather on psychological and historical facts. One must be fully aware that humanity does not merely carry theories from one age into the next, but that throughout the development of Christian philosophy, the urge to apply the intellectual element solely to the sensory world—and to keep the supersensible realm untouched by it—had become firmly established in an extraordinarily powerful way. It would have been considered a sin for one striving for knowledge to attempt to apply intellectuality to the supersensible realm.

[ 16 ] This creates a certain habit. Such habits live on. People are not fully aware of them, but they act under the influence of these habits. And from this habit—that is, a habit produced by the influence of Christian dogma—arose the impulse in the centuries preceding the 19th century to limit intellectual inquiry solely to external sensory observation. Just as universities were generally continuations of the schools established by the Church, so too was the scholarship pursued at these universities—with regard to the natural sciences—entirely a continuation of what the Church had recognized as correct in the field of natural science. The striving to incorporate only external sensory empiricism into knowledge is entirely an echo of a spiritual habit arising from Christian dogmatics.

[ 17 ] Parallel to this turning of the intellect toward the external sensory world, there was an ever-increasing fading of that which, emanating from the soul, was directed toward the content of supersensory dogmatics. Once again, people had the opportunity to explore for themselves; even if it meant gaining only sensory content for the intellect, it was still a matter of acquiring knowledge.

[ 18 ] Under the influence—I would say—of the ever-increasing body of knowledge derived from the sensory world, dogmatic content began to fade. It was no longer even possible to grasp that connection between the human soul and this supersensible content, which, as late as the 4th century A.D., still existed as a memory of something that had once been experienced by humanity in ancient times. That which related to the supersensible worlds gradually faded away entirely, and what we experience in the spiritual developments of the last three or four centuries is, after all, merely an artificial perpetuation of the supersensible content. The content borrowed from the sensory world and processed by the intellect is becoming ever more abundant. The human soul is permeated by this; the reference to supersensible content is fading more and more. This, too, is entirely a result of Christian-dogmatic development.

[ 19 ] Then came the 19th century, a time when the fundamental connection between the human soul and the supersensible realm had completely faded, and when it became increasingly necessary—one might say—to artificially convince oneself that the belief in a supersensible world still had some significance. And so, particularly in the 19th century—though the groundwork had already been laid—the doctrine of the two paths of knowledge emerged: the path of knowledge and the path of faith. A faith-based understanding, built entirely on mere subjective conviction, was still meant to underpin what had been preserved from the old dogmatics. At the same time, people were increasingly—I would say—overwhelmed by the insights offered by the sensory world. This, in essence, was the state of development of the European intellectual world around the middle of the 19th century: a rich flow of knowledge about the sensory world, coupled with a problematic stance toward the supersensible world. While research into the sensory world provided a firm foundation everywhere—while one could point everywhere to the facts that arose from external observation and that could be synthesized into a kind of worldview, which admittedly contained only sensory content but which nevertheless became increasingly complete with regard to this sensory content—there was a kind of desperate striving to to establish a framework of belief regarding the supersensible. And particularly noteworthy in this regard is the development of theology in the 19th century, namely Christology, in which one sees how, little by little, virtually all supernatural content of the concept of Christ is lost, and ultimately nothing remains but the Jesus of Nazareth present in the sensory world—that is, what could be regarded in ordinary sensory and intellectual life as a member of human evolution. And efforts arose that sought to uphold Christianity in the face of modern Enlightenment and scientific thought by subjecting it to critical scrutiny, dissolving it through this process, sifting through the content of the Gospels, and thereby, in a certain sense, at least defining a justification for the faith’s reference to a supernatural world.

[ 20 ] It is indeed remarkable to see the form this development took precisely in the middle of the 19th century. Precisely those who are engaged in modern spiritual science must not overlook this stage in the development of human knowledge. Those who have spoken extensively in recent times about the spirit and spiritual life tend to dismiss, in an amateurish manner, what emerged in the mid-19th century as materialism in the course of human development. Certainly, to remain stuck at this stage of materialism is superficial; but an even greater superficiality is to adopt an amateurish attitude toward this materialism. After all, it is relatively easy to acquire a few concepts of the spirit and spiritual life and then to speak out against what arose in the materialism of the 19th century; but one must view the matter from a different perspective.

[ 21 ] It is true that, for example, a thinker such as Heinrich Czolbe—who is perhaps one of the most outstanding among materialist thinkers—defined this sensualism in 1855 in his book Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus. A Draft, defined this sensualism precisely by stating: “This sensualism signifies a quest for knowledge that excludes the supersensible from the outset.” — So that in Czolbe’s system of sensualism, one has before one something that seeks to explain the world and also human beings based solely on what is given in sensory observation. This very system of sensualism is, one might say, superficial on the one hand and extraordinarily astute on the other. It truly attempts to place everything—from perception all the way up to politics—under the banner of sensualism, to present everything as if it could be explained solely from what the senses can observe and what the intellect can deduce from these sensory observations. This book was published in 1855, that is, at a time when there was not yet any explicit Darwinism, since Darwin’s first epoch-making work was not published until 1859.

[ 22 ] The year 1859 was, as I have often noted, an exceptionally pivotal one in the recent development of human thought. It was around this time that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published. During this period, spectral analysis emerged in the course of human development, giving rise to the view that the universe consists of the same material substances as earthly existence. We also see the attempt to grasp, through external, sensory empiricism, that which had previously always been treated in a spiritual-intellectual manner: the realm of aesthetics. Gustav Theodor Fechner’s Introduction to Aesthetics was published in 1876. And finally, we see the attempt to apply this way of thinking—which underlies all of the above—to social life. Karl Marx’s first major economic work was also published in 1859. This fourth manifestation of modern materialist intellectual life coincides, down to the year, with the same period. But as I said, it was preceded by something like Czolbe’s system of sensualism.

[ 23 ] When attempts have been made to interpret all that has been extensively explored since that time in terms of the facts of external sensory life through materialistic worldviews, one may say: This materialistic worldview was not created, for example, by Darwinism or by spectral analysis; rather, what Darwin so carefully compiled, what could be discerned to a certain extent through spectral analysis, and what could be investigated about things themselves—things that people had previously sought to investigate only by entirely different means, as was done in Fechner’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, has been immersed in the already existing worldview of sensualism. And materialism—it was, in essence, already there; but it emerged from the continuation of that habit of thought which is actually a child of scholastic thinking. One cannot understand this modern intellectual development—nor can one understand materialism—unless one is clear that it is nothing other than a continuation of medieval thought, merely omitting the view that one must ascend from thinking to what is supersensory—not through human reason and human observation, but through revelation as set forth in dogmatics.

[ 24 ] This second aspect was simply omitted. But the fundamental conviction regarding one aspect of cognition—that pertaining to the sensory world—was retained. And in the course of the 19th century, what had developed there then transformed in such a way that it appeared, for example, in Du Bois-Reymond’s famous “Ignorabimus” from the early 1870s. The scholastic said: Human knowledge, imbued with the intellect, relates only to the external sensory world. Everything that human beings are to know about the supersensible must be given to them through revelation, which is preserved in dogmatics. — This revelation, preserved in dogmatics, fades; but the other fundamental conviction is retained. Du Bois-Reymond articulates it sharply, albeit in a modern guise. And he then applies what was expressed in Scholasticism as I have just described in such a way that he says: One can only know the sensible, should only know the sensible, for there is no knowledge of the supersensible.

[ 25 ] Essentially, there is no difference between the field of knowledge in Scholasticism and that which has emerged—albeit in a modern guise—among contemporary natural scientists—and DuBois-Reymond was certainly one of the most modern. It is truly of the utmost importance to seriously examine this emergence of the modern view of nature from Scholasticism, because people always believe that this modern natural science developed in opposition to Scholasticism. In reality, just as the modern universities cannot, in their structure, deny their origins in the Christian educational institutions of the Middle Ages, nor can the structure of modern scientific thought deny its origins in Scholasticism, from which it has merely shed, as I said earlier, a highly commendable elaboration of concepts and methods of thought.

[ 26 ] This method of thinking has also been lost; consequently, certain issues that arise—and which are unsatisfactory to the true thinker—are elegantly glossed over in modern scientific reasoning. But that which lives as spirit, as meaning, in this modern understanding of nature is the child of scholasticism.

[ 27 ] Now, the habit of limiting oneself to the sensory realm was certainly there. But this habit has certainly brought about good as well, for it gave rise to a tendency to engage in-depth with the facts of the sensory world. One need only consider that, for modern spiritual science—for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science—the sensory world is a reflection of the supersensory world; that what one encounters in the sensory world truly contains images of the supersensory—and then one will be able to fully appreciate the significance of delving into the sensory-material world. While one must repeatedly emphasize that that other form of materialism—which has emerged as spiritualism and seeks to perceive the spirit in a material way—is fruitless, because the spirit, of course, can never become sensually perceptible and therefore the entire methodology is nothing but humbug, one must be clear that what has been observed with the ordinary, normal human senses and synthesized through the intellect—which has been developed in the course of human evolution—from sensory observation is indeed a reflection of the supersensible world, and that therefore a study of this reflection, in a certain sense, leads far more effectively into the supersensible world than, for example, spiritualism. I have often expressed this in the past by saying: People sit around a table and summon spirits, completely ignoring the fact that so many spirits are already sitting around the table! They should be aware of their own spirit: that is certainly what they should be seeking. But because they forget this spirit of their own—because they are unwilling to grasp it—they seek the spirit in an outwardly material way through all sorts of spiritualist experiments that mimic laboratory tests. — This materialism, which thus operates within the imagery of the supersensible without being aware that it is dealing with imagery of the supersensible, has, in terms of its research methodology, nevertheless accomplished great things—great and mighty things.

[ 28 ] Certainly, the actual sensualists or materialists never sought—and this is already quite evident in Czolbe—to relate the sensually given to anything supernatural in any way; but there was an aspiration to recognize the sensory as such—in its structure and in its laws. If one compares the summaries of sensory facts that existed in the first half of the 19th century, one must say that they are still piecemeal compared to the work carried out from around the 1840s onward. And when Darwinism then emerged as a major perspective—Darwinism, which, at least in the person of Darwin himself, led to the systematization of a wealth of facts from certain perspectives—it became apparent that this had, for the first time, established a principle of inquiry, a method of inquiry.

[ 29 ] There were cautious naturalists in the 19th century, such as the naturalist Gegenbaur. Gegenbaur never fully became a Darwinist, at least not in the sense of Haeckel. But what Gegenbaur—who, after all, also continued Goethe’s work regarding the transformation of vertebral and skull bones—particularly emphasized is that, whatever the truth may be regarding the absolute truth of Darwinism, he developed a method through which one was able to arrange the phenomena in sequence and compare them with one another in such a way that one actually noticed what one would not have noticed without this method—that is, without Darwinism.

[ 30 ] Gegenbaur argued, for example: Even if everything related to Darwinian theory were to disappear one day, this Darwinian theory has given rise to a certain approach to research, such that facts have been discovered that would not have been found without this approach. It was, however, a certain practical application of the “as-if principle.” Yet this practical application of the as-if principle is not as foolish as the philosophical establishment of the as-if principle, as it later came to be understood.

[ 31 ] And so it came to pass that, in the second half of the 19th century, a rather peculiar structure of intellectual life actually emerged. Philosophy, after all, had in recent times—and these recent times do not go back very far—essentially always emerged from theology. Anyone who no longer sees the theological element in Hume and Kant simply cannot grasp such things. Philosophy has indeed emerged from theology; in a certain sense, it has processed in intellectual terms that which shimmered, as it were, halfway into the supersensible. And because what philosophy dealt with was still something that shimmered toward the supersensible, the natural sciences waged war against it more and more intensely from the middle of the 19th century onward. After all, the inclination toward this supernatural content of human knowledge had long since faded. Natural science had substance. One had to place trust in it. In it, one found something substantial. And in contrast to what was welling up ever more abundantly in natural science—and which indeed developed into philosophical problems sometimes viewed with skepticism—philosophical development actually stood powerless. And it is indeed interesting that the most compelling philosophy of the second half of the 19th century had to point to the unconscious, and no longer to the conscious. Thus, Eduard von Hartmann’s philosophy was cast out of the realm of the intellect because it still sought to exist as philosophy at all. And so we have this curious spectacle—the more the 19th century draws to a close, the more we witness this curious spectacle—in which philosophy became increasingly devoid of content, sinking ever deeper into the endeavor of justifying its very existence. For the most astute philosophers, such as Otto Liebmann, are primarily concerned with justifying the existence of philosophy to some extent.

[ 32 ] But there is by no means such a tenuous connection between a philosopher like Otto Liebmann, who still seeks to justify the existence of philosophy, and a philosopher who wrote the book: “The Whole of Philosophy and Its End,” Richard Wahle, who, in a thoroughly astute manner, set out to prove that philosophy could not possibly exist—and who, consequently, was even awarded a professorship in philosophy at an Austrian university for a discipline that, according to his proof, cannot possibly exist!

[ 33 ] In the 1890s, we then witnessed a remarkable stage in the development of this outcome of modern intellectual progress. On the one hand, we have the endeavor in the natural sciences to advance toward a comprehensive worldview, rejecting everything revelatory and supersensory; and on the other hand, a powerless philosophy.

[ 34 ] This became, one might say, particularly significant in the 1890s, but it is by no means anything other than a necessary consequence of the preceding development. We will continue to trace this development tomorrow. I would just like you to bear this in mind in particular: that modern materialism must be viewed from the perspective that what initially manifests itself in material existence is a reflection of the supersensible. Human beings themselves, as they appear between birth and death, are a reflection of what they have experienced supersensibly between their last death and this birth. And anyone who seeks the soul in the material world is simply looking in the wrong place.

[ 35 ] This is the fundamental question that must be raised regarding 19th-century materialism if one wishes to understand it historically: To what extent was it justified? — For it is not by opposing it that one understands its historical development, but by grasping what it indeed lacked—and what, in a certain sense, it was bound to lack—because the period immediately preceding it had sought the spiritual and psychological in the wrong place. People believed they could find the spiritual and psychological by seeking it—in the ordinary sense—within the sensory realm, through various considerations or the like. That is not possible. One can find it only by going beyond the sensory realm. Sensualism and materialism neither wanted nor were able to go beyond the sensory realm. They remained with the image and took the image for reality. That is their true nature. We will speak more about this nature tomorrow.