The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Twenty-third Lecture

[ 1 ] It is easier to understand the perspectives one must develop within anthroposophical spiritual science in order to gain insight into humanity and the world if one delves deeply into the historical evolution of human perspectives. Anyone who hears today that, in order to truly know something about the nature of the human being, a completely different way of perceiving must arise within the human being itself—one that differs from the ordinary way—will at first be surprised and, in that initial moment, will actually reject any such different insight out of that very surprise. Human beings have, so to speak, the feeling that at least one thing must remain unchanging: namely, the way in which one behaves mentally in one’s perception of things. We can see this particularly clearly in the views of certain history teachers and contemporary historians. These historians state without hesitation that human beings must, in essence, have been the same in their inner disposition throughout history as they are today; for if they had not been so in their inner disposition, these people argue, there could not really be any history. For if one is to study history, one must start from today’s state of mind. If, as a student of history, one were to look back on people whose inner lives were entirely different, one could not understand them. One would not understand how they spoke or what they did, and one would therefore be unable to extend historical thinking back to the time of such people with a different state of mind. Thus, these people argue, for there to be any conception of history, people must essentially have always been, in their state of mind, just as they are now.

[ 2 ] But now it will be easy to understand that such a view is, in fact, a view designed for human convenience. For if people have changed their state of mind in the course of historical development, then we must also make our concepts flexible and strive to understand other, earlier epochs of history differently from the way we are accustomed to understanding the things of the world today.

[ 3 ] There is a very significant example of a person who was compelled to undergo such a transformation of his entire spiritual constitution due to a certain inner spiritual impossibility of readily identifying with the spiritual constitution of his contemporaries. And this significant example—I am really only citing this today as an example—is Goethe.

[ 4 ] As a young man, Goethe had to come to terms with the way people of his time viewed the world and the affairs of those around him. One could say that he never really felt entirely at home in this state of mind. There is something tempestuous about the young Goethe. But this tempestuousness is of a special kind. One need only look at his early poems to see that, on the one hand, Goethe harbors a kind of inner opposition to what his contemporaries actually thought about the world and life.

[ 5 ] But at the same time, there is something else within him. There is something within him like an appeal to that which lives in nature—which speaks more, which speaks of something more enduring, than the opinions of the people around him, who are forming precisely such opinions, can ever convey to him. Goethe appeals to the revelations of nature as opposed to the revelations of human beings. And this, in fact, conveys the mood of Goethe’s soul throughout his entire life—even as he was growing up as a child, while he was studying in Leipzig and Strasbourg, then making his way in Frankfurt, and also during the early days of his stay in Weimar.

[ 6 ] One need only consider him as a child, surrounded by the religious beliefs of his fellow human beings. But he himself recounts, I have often highlighted this beautiful scene from Goethe’s life, in which, as a seven-year-old boy, he sets up an altar by taking a music stand, placing minerals from his father’s rock collection on it, setting a small incense stick on top, focusing the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass, and lighting the incense stick with the magnifying glass in order to — as he later says, though of course he wouldn’t have spoken that way as a seven-year-old boy — to offer a sacrifice to the great God of Nature.

[ 7 ] We see that he is growing beyond what the environment of his time can offer him, and he is turning toward nature, in which he initially seeks refuge. It is precisely this state of mind that is alive within him—just look at Goethe’s early works. Then he is seized by a great longing, the longing for Italy. And, strangely enough, we see how Goethe’s entire state of mind changes. In fact, Goethe can only be truly understood by those who grasp this tremendous shift in his inner vision—a shift that takes place within him as he sets foot in Italy. One need only take a statement such as the one found in his letters to his friends in Weimar, written while contemplating the works of art he sees there—works that conjure Greek art before his soul. There he says: “I suspect that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, followed the same laws that nature itself follows, and which I am now tracing.” — Goethe is at last content with his surroundings, and he is content because these surroundings—he means the world of art—have been infused with perspectives that are closer to nature than those he had observed around him in his youth. And we see how, in the course of his Italian journey, the idea of metamorphosis arises from this state of mind, how Goethe begins precisely there to view the transformation of the leaf into the petal in such a way that the idea of metamorphosis—the idea of transformation—becomes apparent to him throughout all of nature.

[ 8 ] It is only now that Goethe truly feels at home in the world with his soul. And when one considers everything that Goethe has produced since that time as a poet and as a scholar—when one looks at it—one cannot help but say to oneself: Goethe now lives once again in ideas and concepts that are not readily comprehensible to his contemporaries, and certainly not readily comprehensible to modern people. Anyone who approaches Goethe with what they have absorbed from the entire modern educational system—from elementary school all the way up to the highest institutions of learning—and with the habits of thought and feeling that have become ingrained there, does not truly understand Goethe. One must first, in a certain sense, transform oneself inwardly if one wishes to grasp, through one’s own understanding, what Goethe actually means when he rewrites Iphigenia—which he initially composed in the spirit of the Germanic North—in Italy, adapting it to the meter of the Greek people. Only after this inner transformation of the soul can one truly grasp Goethe’s entire relationship to his Faust.

[ 9 ] After his trip to Italy, Goethe essentially came to inwardly despise what he had written for his Faust up until that point. He could never again, after his Italian journey, have written verses like the one that appears where Faust turns away from the ascending and descending celestial forces passing golden buckets to one another—where Faust turns away from the macrocosm and says, “You, Spirit of the Earth, are closer to me.” That is the youthful Goethe. Goethe would not have written that after 1790. After 1790, when Goethe took up his Faust again in the late 1790s, this Spirit of the Earth was no longer closer to him; in the prologue, set in heaven, he describes the macrocosm. There he turns precisely toward that from which Faust had turned away for the youthful Goethe. There, however, he describes in appropriate language how heavenly forces ascend and descend and pass the golden buckets to one another. There, Goethe did not say inwardly, so to speak, “You, Spirit of the Earth, are closer to me,” but rather he says: I only understand humanity when I do not merely look to the Spirit of the Earth, but when I rise above the earthly into the heavenly. — And in this way we could gain insight into many things. We could, for example, also look at this wonderfully written treatise from 1790, “An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants,” and would have to admit that Goethe could never have written this language—which speaks to the things themselves, namely to the growth and development of plants—before his trip to Italy. And this points us significantly toward a connection between Goethe’s soul and the entire development of humanity. Goethe felt alienated from the thinking of his time at the very moment when he was compelled to internally assimilate the true education—the scientific education—of his era. He strove for a different way of thinking, for a different way of relating to the world, and found this other way—which he believed to be the way of the Greeks, the Greeks’ attitude toward nature, the world, and humanity—brought to life within himself.

[ 10 ] The modern physicist rejects Goethe because he lives in the very world that was foreign to Goethe in his youth. And this rejection is, after all, more honest than a forced agreement. What people have come to embrace in their view of the world since the mid-15th century was something in which Goethe could not quite find himself—could never quite find himself. In his youth, he opposed it, and after his trip to Italy, he accepted it because, drawing on his affinity for Greek culture, he had gained something else for himself.

[ 11 ] What, then, had been present in the worldview and outlook on life since the mid-15th century? What exactly is Galileanism? When one studies it, Galileanism is an attempt to make sense of the world through measurement, number, and weight—through the contemplation and observation of external things. It never occurred to Goethe to construct a worldview based on measurement, number, and weight.

[ 12 ] But this is only one side of the matter. There is a certain correlation to what arises in a person when he views the world in terms of measure, number, and weight, and that is the abstract concept—that is, mere intellectualism. We can see this clearly: to the same extent that measure, number, and weight have been applied to the observation of external nature since the first third or the middle of the 15th century, to that same extent intellectualism has developed internally in human life—a disposition of the soul, a tendency toward abstract thinking, toward the kind of thinking that makes preferential use of the intellect. Just as we develop concepts today with our great fondness for mathematics, geometry, and mechanics, so, as human beings, we have essentially been doing this only since the 15th century. In this world—on one side, measurement, number, and weight; on the other, intellectualism—Goethe did not feel at home.

[ 13 ] The world to which he turned knew, in essence, very little about measure, number, and weight. Anyone who studies Pythagoreanism will easily be led to believe that everything in the world is viewed there as we view it—in terms of measure, number, and weight. But it is precisely the characteristic difference—in how Pythagoreanism uses measure, number, and weight figuratively, and how they are used universally, as it were, in a wholly human way, with what lives in measure, number, and weight not yet felt as separate from humanity—that can already point to the fact that Pythagoreanism did not work with measure, number, and weight as it has been done later, since the mid-15th century—as Galileanism works with measure, number, and weight. And anyone who, for example, delves into the mind of a 9th-century thinker—I characterized him here recently in a series of lectures—anyone who delves into Johannes Scotus Erigena, anyone who reads deeply into Scotus, will find: just as we are accustomed today to constructing a worldview based on chemical and physical principles and to hypothetically constructing the beginning and end of the world from what we have learned through measuring, counting, and weighing, so it is not with Scotus Erigena. In Scotus Erigena’s thought, human beings do not separate the external world from themselves to such an extent, nor do they separate themselves from the external world. He lives more in harmony with the external world and does not yet strive for objectivity in the way we strive for it today. And so one can see how what unfolded in Greek culture over all the centuries since the Pythagorean era—and one can see this particularly in a mind such as Scotus Erigena’s—then played out its full course in later centuries. In that era, the human soul essentially lived within entirely different concepts. It was toward these concepts that Goethe strove once more from the various depths of his inner life.

[ 14 ] However, we can only gain a clear understanding of what is actually at stake here if we consider another historical fact that is rarely taken into account today. I have already presented this historical fact from one perspective in my book The Riddles of Philosophy; today I would like to present it from another perspective.

[ 15 ] We modern people must make a clear distinction between the concept and the word. It would only lead to disaster for human prudence if we did not make a clear distinction between what lives internally in the abstract mind and what lives in the word. The abstract mind is, after all, universal, generally human. The word lives in the individual vernacular languages. We can already distinguish between what lives in the concept, in the idea, and in the word.

[ 16 ] If one wishes to correctly understand what the Greeks have handed down to us from a purely historical perspective, one cannot succeed by attributing to the Greeks the very same distinction that we develop when distinguishing between concept and word. The Greeks did not distinguish between concept, idea, and word with the same degree of rigor. When they spoke, what lived in the idea came to life for them on the wings of the word. They believed they were imbuing the word with the concept. When they thought, they did not think in an abstract, intellectualistic way as we do. Something like the sound of the word—though inaudible—passed through their souls. It resounded inaudibly within them. The word lived, not the abstract concept. In an era when it would have been considered unnatural to nurture a certain segment of youth spiritually in the way we nurture our youth today, things could indeed be different. It is, after all, extraordinarily characteristic of our culture and civilization—though we usually do not notice it—that a large portion of our youth, from the age of ten to eighteen, spends their time immersing themselves in Latin, Greek, and dead languages. Imagine if a Greek, in his youth, were to have been educated in such a way that—for my sake—he would have immersed himself in this manner in Egyptian and Chaldean. Unthinkable, isn’t it? Completely unthinkable! The Greek did not merely live in his language through his thinking; rather, language was his thinking. Thinking was embodied in the language itself. One might call this a limitation of the Greek nature, but it is simply a fact. And a true understanding of what Greek culture has bequeathed to us can only be that which brings to mind this close bond between the concept, the idea, and the word—and which shows us how the word lived in the soul of the Greek like an inner, inaudible sound.

[ 17 ] Yes, with such a state of mind, one cannot observe the external world in the Galilean sense, as we view it in terms of measure, number, and weight. Measure, number, and weight, so to speak, fall away. I would like to say that it is significant—albeit only as an external symptom—that what we today present to every child as physics was actually perceived as a miracle in the Greek world. Many of the experiments we conduct today—which we explain in terms of measure, number, and weight—were perceived as magic. You can read about this in any history of physics. The Greeks did not approach what we today call inorganic nature in the same way we do. They did not have the possibility of approaching it in this way from their spiritual disposition, and this is because they did not advance to abstract concepts in the way we do in the age of Galileo.

[ 18 ] If one lives in the world of words as the Greeks did, then one cannot calculate the results of experiments the way we do today, but one observes the transformations in nature. One observes not what takes place in the mineral world, but rather what occurs primarily in the plant world. Just as there is a kind of affinity between the abstract concept and the perception of the mineral world, so too is there an affinity between the Greek approach to the word and the perception of growth, life, and transformation in living beings. When we reflect today, based on our mineral concepts, on the beginning and end of the Earth and form hypotheses, these hypotheses are a reflection of what we have measured, counted, and weighed. And we develop a Kant-Laplacean theory, or we form the concept of the Earth’s heat death, of entropy and its maximum. These are all abstractions that we distill from what we have measured, counted, and weighed. Consider, by contrast, the cosmogonies of the Greeks. In these cosmogonies, they sense that their ideas are nourished by the way vegetation emerges in spring, how it dies off in autumn, how it develops, and how it disappears. Just as we construct a world system from our material concepts and material observations, so too did the Greeks construct a world system from their observations of what is revealed in vegetation. For them, the living was the very source from which their myths and their cosmogonies sprang.

[ 19 ] The arrogant modern person, raised on science, will say: Well, yes, that was just childish; we have happily outgrown it. We have come so wonderfully far! — And he will regard what can be gained through measuring, counting, and weighing as an absolute. Those who are not so narrow-minded will say to themselves: From the Greek worldview—which formed a picture of the world out of the living—our way of thinking has developed, bringing us intellectualism, which is, after all, also a means of educating humanity. But from this worldview of ours, which thrives on measuring, weighing, and counting, another must in turn develop.

[ 20 ] It is curious that once Schiller had overcome his earlier aversion to Goethe and drawn closer to him, he wrote him a letter that was very characteristic of him. I have often quoted this letter. He wrote to him: “Had you been born a Greek—or even just an Italian—the world you are actually seeking would have surrounded you from your earliest youth.”—I am not quoting verbatim, but to the effect. Schiller sensed how Goethe’s soul was drawn toward Greek culture. Well, one can study in Goethe how a mind was transformed by immersing itself in Greek culture. What interests us today far more is this entirely different way of relating to the world of Greek culture than was the case from the 15th century onward. Thus one might say: In our time, which lives in the intellect and experiences the world most through the intellect, insofar as this world can be measured, counted, and weighed, was preceded by another era that lived less in the intellect than in that living soul life which still held the word within, which heard the sound inwardly as a soundless sound, which—just as we today grasp a concept—lived the sound inwardly, lived the sound inwardly. And through this liveliness of the soul’s content, that era recognized the living in the external world above all else.

[ 21 ] But one can go back even further; in that case, however, one must turn to spiritual science for help, since one can no longer rely on conventional history to trace the past. One can certainly remain within a history understood in spiritual-psychological terms if one wishes to understand the radical difference between the Greek constitution of the soul and our own; but if one wishes to go further back—say, beyond the 8th century B.C.—and to visualize what the constitution of the human soul was like at that time, then external history can tell us nothing more. After all, we have only sparse external documents from that time, and the documents we do have are not properly appreciated. In fact, we do have certain external documents as well, and viewed correctly, even the Iliad and the Odyssey are such documents, but they are not usually regarded from this perspective. If one goes back even further, one comes to realize the significance of a perspective held by various people—one that Herder, in particular, expressed with great force, as if in a profound intuition, though he by no means developed it scientifically. It is the view that the era in which civilized humanity lived through language was preceded by another in which it lived through imagery. But how does one live through imagery, for example, with language and with the inner life of the soul that is revealed in language? One lives in images when one is no longer so concerned with the content of the sound—with that which, so to speak, colors the sound—but rather when one is concerned with the rhythm of the sound, with what I would like to call the form of the sound, with what we today actually perceive as an independent element distinct from language itself: the poetic quality of language. Today, the poet must first shape language artistically if art—if poetry—is to emerge. But we look back to a time when it was fundamentally natural for human nature to shape language poetically, when, so to speak, language and theoretical development were not yet as separate as they later became, when people still saw value in following a short syllable with a long one, two short syllables with a long one, when they saw value in saying a series of short syllables in succession. In this shaping of language, something of the world’s mysteries was revealed to them—something that does not reveal itself when we take only the form and content of the sound.

[ 22 ] Some people today sense how language originated from such a state, and we should consider how such people, amid the abundance of what our scientific approach now confusingly presents to humanity, have intuitively grasped something like what I am now attempting to illustrate from the perspective of the humanities. Benedetto Croce has pointed out, in an exceptionally charming way, this once-poetic, artistic element of language that developed in human beings in prehistoric times—or at least in a time approximating prehistory—before language took on its prosaic character. So that, in a sense, we have three epochs before our minds: the epoch that begins around the 15th century, which I would like to call “Galileanism,” which lives inwardly and intellectually, while outwardly viewing the world in terms of measure, number, and weight. And an earlier epoch, for which Goethe longed, toward which he inwardly and spiritually oriented his entire post-Italian life—an epoch in which human beings lived in the undivided oneness of word and concept, in which they developed not an intellectualism but an animated inner life, and where, outwardly, they observed that which is alive, that which transforms, that which lives in metamorphosis. And now let us look back at a third epoch, when the human soul lived in something beyond language, in something that shaped sounds pictorially. But that which still lives behind the sound with the soul, as through an animated instinct, perceives something else in the external world as well. As I said, historical evidence does not point to this at all; the historian can only intuit it. Anthroposophical spiritual science can fully penetrate it. It is the imaginative element of language—the instinctively imaginative—that precedes the experience of the word. And through this imaginative experience, something even higher in external nature is actually experienced than can be experienced through the word or the concept.

[ 23 ] We know, of course, that even today—when it is in a state of complete decadence—Eastern civilization, in its decadent manifestations, still points us to earlier conditions, conditions that were still full of life; for example, when one studies the Vedas or Vedanta philosophy, which in turn point to even older, prehistoric times. Something has remained that, I would say, pervades this entire Eastern state of mind like an ethereal force—something quite distant from the Western state of mind, something that, when we put it into words, is no longer the same. Something has remained that can be expressed only very sparsely with our word “compassion,” no matter how deeply Schopenhauer may have felt it. This compassion, this love for all beings, as it still exists today in the East, points to earlier times when it was even more intensely present, when it expressed in the soul a living-into of the soul into that which feels. It is entirely justified to say: Oriental compassion expresses a bygone primordial phenomenon of the life of the soul, which manifests itself in the inner sharing of the experience of that which feels, that which lives inwardly, that which does not merely live through transformation like a plant, that which does not merely come into being and pass away, but which experiences this coming into being and passing away in its inner feeling.

[ 24 ] This sharing in the objectively living sensation of the other is actually only possible when one rises beyond concept and beyond sound or the content of words to that which lives in imaginative language. One lives in tune with the outer life of the plant when the word is as alive to one as it was to the Greeks. One lives in tune with the other’s sensation; one lives in tune with what lies not only in the living but also in the sentient, when one possesses an inner receptivity not only to language but to artistic linguistic expression.

[ 25 ] That is why it is so significant when mythic poetry alludes to this primordial phenomenon of soul life—when, for example, we are told of Siegfried that there was a moment for him when he understood the voice of the birds, which do not reach the level of human speech, but only that of forming combinations of sounds. But what ripples to the surface like a spring of inner life in the song of the birds, in the voice of the birds—that lives in all living things. Yet it is precisely this aspect of all living things that we cannot experience when we merely listen to words, which confine the living being to its inner chamber of the soul. For when we listen to words, we hear what the other person’s mind is experiencing. But when we grasp inwardly what lives—syllable by syllable, word by word, sentence by sentence—in the imaginative shaping of language, then we grasp not merely what is in the mind, but specifically what lives in the other person’s heart. When we listen to what a person speaks to us in words, we hear how capable they are; but when we can listen to the sound of their words, to their rhythm, to their phrasing, then we hear the whole person. And just as we hear the whole person, so do we—when we rise to grasp the conceptless, wordless formation of sound, which itself is not heard but is experienced inwardly—come to grasp that which feeling objectively experiences inwardly. And as we once again find our way into a completely different state of mind—where speech was merely incidental, but where the soul lived in rhythm, in tempo, in the melodious theme, where this was a living presence in the soul’s experience—we return to an epoch that lies beyond the Greek era and before antiquity; we return to that epoch when human beings rose from grasping mere metamorphosis in the living world to grasping what lives in the animal realm and in the world of sensation—to the direct contemplation of what lives in the world of sensation.

[ 26 ] When we consider civilized humanity—that is, the segment of humanity that was regarded as such at that time, just as civilized peoples are regarded today—and when we look at this segment of humanity from the 8th century B.C. back to approximately the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C., we find, at the very core of these peoples’ souls, a disposition—one rooted in the soul’s imagery—a tendency to perceive everything as a sentient being.

[ 27 ] Our limited science talks about how people used to personify things in earlier times. It attributes an immense intellectual capacity to the soul of what actually existed, and then compares it to something like: Well, a child, when it bumps into a corner, also hits the corner because it personifies the table as a living being.” — No one who believes that the child personifies the table—imagining it, for example, as something living that it is hitting—has ever looked into a child’s soul. The child does not see the table any differently than we do; it simply has not yet separated what the table is from the living. And those ancient peoples did not personify, but actually experienced—through their experience of the structure of language—not only the living, but also the sentient.

[ 28 ] Only when we understand in this way how human souls have developed, — let us simply set this before us for now — from the third pre-Christian millennium to our own time, from the era of pre-linguistic development through linguistic development into the intellectualistic era, from the time of experiencing objective sensation through the experience of objective growth and becoming to the perception of what exists in measure, weight, and number—only then, when we bring this to mind, will we be able to more easily say that today, when consciousness encompasses everything, it is necessary, in order to penetrate the essence of things, to consciously immerse ourselves in a new way of viewing the things around us. Anyone who believes that the human state of mind has never changed—but has always remained the same throughout the periods under consideration—thinks that this state of mind is something absolute, and that a person loses themselves entirely when they transform this state of mind into another. But anyone who sees how it is inherent in the natural course of human development that the state of the soul undergoes transformations will find it easier to rise to an understanding of the necessity that we must first transform our own state of mind, in order to penetrate, in a manner appropriate to our present age, into the essence of things, into the essence of the human being, and into the essence of the relationship between the human being and the world.