The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] When speaking today of the youth movement, one can clearly distinguish between the broader youth movement and the narrower youth movement—which might be called the movement of college students—and that segment of youth which is drawn to schools and to education in the broadest sense. I say this not because I wish to emphasize one or the other in particular, but because we can most easily arrive at our intended conclusion if we first examine the main difficulties of inner life, as they have manifested themselves particularly among university and college students.

[ 2 ] In these reflections, we will sometimes begin with specific details of life and then need to quickly rise to a broader perspective. Therefore, allow me to first say a few words about the experiences that university students in particular have gone through in their souls. Essentially, this has been in the making for many decades; it is only in the very last decade that it has reached a climax, making it more clearly perceptible.

[ 3 ] University students are searching for something. It is hardly surprising that they are searching for something, for one goes to college precisely because one is searching for something. They were searching for instructive leaders—one might also say for leading teachers—and the students found no leading teachers. And that was the truly terrible thing, which was expressed in all sorts of different ways—one person phrased it conservatively, another radically; one by saying something very wise, the other by uttering a great folly. It was put this way: “We simply can’t find any teachers anymore.”

[ 4 ] What did one find when one arrived at the university? One found the people who were there, but one did not find in them what one was looking for. They were proud of the fact that they were no longer teachers in the traditional sense, but researchers. Universities and colleges established themselves as research institutions. They were no longer there for the people at all. They were there only for science, and science led an existence among people that it described as objective. It drummed into people in every possible way that it was to be respected as objective science. Sometimes one must express such things somewhat figuratively. Objective science was thus now circulating among people; but objective science was certainly not a human being—rather, something inhuman was circulating among people and calling itself objective science.

[ 5 ] This could be observed time and again in the details. How often do we hear: “That has already been discovered; it already belongs to science.” — Something else is added to science, and these so-called treasures of science are then a collection that has gradually carved out this terrible, objective existence within humanity. But human beings do not fit in with this objective entity strutting about among them, for there is no real relationship between the true, genuine human being and this cold, objective entity, which is stored in the most diverse ways. We have, little by little, acquired libraries and scientific research institutes. But young people, in particular, do not seek out the libraries, nor the scientific research institutes; rather, they seek in the libraries—one can hardly bring oneself to say the word—the people, and there they find: librarians! In scientific research institutes, they seek people who are enthusiastic about wisdom and true knowledge, and they find those whom one simply encounters in laboratories, scientific research institutes, clinics, and so on. The elderly have gradually grown so accustomed to this kind of comfort that they no longer actually want to be there themselves; instead, they want their institutes and their libraries to be there. But human beings cannot bring that about. If they do not want to be there in this way, then they are all the more present; then they exert their influence not through their humanity but through a leaden heaviness.

[ 6 ] One could put it another way: People are drawn to nature. — But, to take a radical example right away: Nature is also present all around the very young child. However, the very young child has no emotional or spiritual connection to nature and can only receive something from it by entering into relationships with people with whom they can experience nature together. In a certain sense, this also applies well into very late adolescence. One must come together with people with whom one can experience nature. But this has not been possible in recent decades for the simple reason that there was no language in which people—from youth to old age—could communicate about nature. When the elderly speak of nature, it is as if they were obscuring nature in the process, as if the names they give to plants no longer fit the plants. Nothing made sense anymore. On the one hand, one was faced with the mystery of the “plant”; then one heard the name from the elders, but it didn’t fit, precisely because the human element had been excluded, because the objective entity known as “science” was roaming the earth. This had come about slowly and gradually. The last few decades, however, have brought about a certain culmination.

[ 7 ] What reached a certain culmination in the nineteenth century is evident in a single phenomenon of great significance. If one had a little imagination and moved in the circles of higher education over the past few centuries, one would constantly encounter this objective entity called “science,” which appeared in the most diverse forms but always sought to be the one and only true objective science. And once one had made this acquaintance, once this objective science had been presented to one time and again, one came to realize that another entity was shyly slipping away to the side, because it no longer felt tolerated. When one was goaded into speaking with it in secret, it would then say: I have a name that is no longer allowed to be spoken in the presence of objective science. My name is Philosophy, Sophia, Wisdom. I simply have the shameful first name of Love, and I possess something that is, by its very name, bound to human inner life, to love. I can no longer show myself; I must walk about in shame. “Objective science” boasts that it no longer has anything of “Philo” within it. It has now lost even the very “Sophia” that served as its symbol. But I still go about like this, for I still carry within me something noble of feeling and humanity. — This is an image that could often come to mind. In such images, what has been vaguely felt by countless young people over the past decades finds its full expression.

[ 8 ] People have always sought to find an expression—just as there is an expression in the imagination, an expression in perception and feeling—for what they are actually seeking. Those who were perhaps the most enthusiastic in recent decades, who felt the most youthful fervor within themselves, indulged in the most vague expressions, because all they really knew was: We are searching for something. But when they wanted to express what they were searching for, it was actually nothing. This “nothing” was indeed, in Faust’s words, “the universe,” but it presented itself as a nothing. One had to cross an abyss. That was the feeling, and that is, in essence, still the feeling today. This feeling can only be understood historically—but not historically in the old sense, rather historically in the new sense.

[ 9 ] Now I want to talk about something completely different, but things will gradually come together for us. Around the beginning of our era, people could still feel quite differently than they do today, because there was still much of the old in those feelings and sensations. People carried a legacy within their souls. This legacy was present not only at the beginning of our era, but well into the Middle Ages. Now, however, souls are brought into the world without this legacy. This is particularly evident in the new century: that souls are entering the world without this heritage. That is one side of the matter. On the other hand: My dear friends, ask those who lived at the beginning of our era whether they spoke much about what we today summarize under the term “upbringing.” The further back one goes into the past, the less one speaks of upbringing. Of course, one can speak of education in various ways. One can also speak of education in the sense that, through education, young people are to gradually develop into what they wish to become in old age. For ultimately, one must grow old in earthly life, no matter how young we may be.

[ 10 ] In earlier times, people were young and grew old in a more natural way than they do today. Today, people actually live in a world where they cannot be young or old in a natural way at all. After all, people today no longer know what it means to be young or old. People know nothing about it anymore, and that is why there is so much talk about education—because people would like to know how to help young people be young, so that they can grow old in a dignified manner. But no one knows how to turn things around so that people can be young and, during their youth, absorb in a proper way what will enable them to grow old with dignity later on.

[ 11 ] All of this was taken for granted centuries ago. Today, people talk a lot about upbringing. They often don’t realize how absurd it is when people talk about upbringing. Why does almost everyone talk about upbringing today? Usually not because they realize how poorly they were raised, but because they believe their poor upbringing is causing them difficulties in life. And so people talk about upbringing because they feel they are uneducated. They admit this to themselves; yet they have never experienced anything genuine in this area. Nevertheless, they presume to pass judgment on it. People clamor for educational programs because they feel no inner security. One could always point out how, in fact, there is a strong will everywhere, but nowhere is there any substance to this will. This is precisely what young people sense—that there is no substance to this will. Why is there no substance? Because, in the entire history of Earth’s development, something truly new has only recently come into being.

[ 12 ] Here, however, I must point out something that I can only hint at in broad strokes. But it will become increasingly clear to you once you take a look at my Occult Science. There you will find that earthly existence is presented as an inheritance from other world-lives. The names themselves are irrelevant. I have called them the Saturn, Sun, and Moon world-lives; but the first earthly existence was, after all, merely a repetition of the earlier world-lives. One might say: There have been three periods of repetition for the Earth—a Saturn period, a Sun period, and a Moon period. Then came the actual Earth period. But this actual Earth period, this Atlantean era, was again merely a repetition—on a higher level—of what had already existed before.

[ 13 ] Then came the post-Atlantean era. Humanity ascended to an even higher level. But once again, it was a repetition of what had already existed. The post-Atlantean era was a repetition of a repetition. Humanity actually lived, right up until the fifteenth century A.D., on nothing but repetitions, nothing but legacies. Right up until the fifteenth century, people were not, spiritually speaking, a blank slate. All sorts of things arose in their souls as if of their own accord. It was only from the fifteenth century onward that souls became blank slates. It is only since the fifteenth century that the earth has been new. Before that, people lived on the earth solely from legacies. People usually do not realize that it is only since the fifteenth century that the earth has been new. In the past, people always drew upon the old. Since the fifteenth century, human beings have stood face to face with nothingness. Their souls are blank slates. And how have people lived since the fifteenth century? At first, what had previously been passed down in other ways was inherited from father to son through tradition, so that from the fifteenth century well into the nineteenth century, tradition still existed. But things have gradually gotten worse and worse with tradition. You can see this in the details.

[ 14 ] Take the concept of justice. To speak of justice the way people do today would never have occurred to someone like Scotus Erigena, for example, because back then people still had something in their souls that guided them and led them to speak from person to person. That no longer exists, because there is nothing left in the soul that leads to humanity, because people have not yet found anything that leads out of nothingness. Back then, at least a father could still tell his son. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, things had come to the point where a father no longer had anything meaningful to say to his son. Then people initially searched frantically for what is called “rational law.” They sought to squeeze out of reason how one arrives at concepts and feelings regarding the law. And then others, such as Savigny, discovered that nothing more could be squeezed out of reason. Thus, they turned to historical law. They sat down and studied what had been in the past, filling themselves with the feelings of those long since dead, because they themselves had nothing left. Rational law was a desperate clinging to what had already been lost. Historical law was an admission that nothing at all could be extracted from the people of the present. Thus, as we entered the twentieth century, the feeling grew ever worse: we stand before nothingness, and we must find something within human beings.

[ 15 ] In ancient Greece, no one would have understood what was meant by “objective science.” People at that time expressed their relationship to the world differently. Referring to spiritual vision, they spoke of Melpomene, of Urania, and of the liberal arts. But these liberal arts, although they were real, tangible entities, were not beings that walked the earth. It was something very concrete that the Greeks still perceived as their relationship to the spiritual world, even at a time when philosophy already existed. It was the Muses whom they truly loved—real entities with whom they had a relationship as if they were real beings. Homer does not begin his Iliad with a mere phrase, as modern scholars believe: “Sing to me, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” Homer felt himself to be a kind of vessel, and the Muse spoke through him, filling him with a higher humanity.

[ 16 ] When Klopstock no longer wished to speak in the style into which he had, for the most part, been born, he at least still said: “Sing, immortal soul, of the redemption of sinful humanity.” But this immortal soul, too, gradually vanished from people’s lives. This happened slowly and gradually. In the early centuries of Christian development, one sees how the concrete Muses gradually became terribly gaunt ladies. Grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music—they had lost all concreteness. Even in Boethius, they have almost no concrete form left. One can no longer really love them. Nevertheless, they are still voluptuous figures compared to the “objective science” that walks among people today. Slowly and gradually, it has come to pass that human beings have lost what in ancient times was their connection to the spiritual world. And they had to lose it, for they had to develop toward complete freedom in order to shape everything that is human from within themselves. This has been the call since the fifteenth century; but it was not truly felt until the end of the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth century. For now not only the legacies but also the traditions were gone. The fathers, so to speak, had nothing left to say to their sons. Now people felt: We are facing nothingness. They felt that the earth had, in essence, become new.

[ 17 ] What I have just said can be expressed in another way. One can ask, in fact, what would have become of the Earth if the Christ Event had not taken place. Suppose the Christ event had not come. Then the Earth would have gradually withered away in the soul-spiritual life of humanity. The Christ event could not wait until today; it had to occur somewhat earlier than the point at which all the old legacies had been exhausted, so that people could at least still perceive the Christ event through those old legacies. Just imagine: If something like the Christ Event—as it occurred at the beginning of our era—had taken place at the end of the nineteenth or in the twentieth century, what a chorus of derisive laughter the people of our time would have raised in response to the claim that any event could have the same significance as the Christ Event! It is unimaginable what people would have felt in the face of such a claim. At the time of the Christ Event, a completely different feeling must have prevailed. The feeling of standing before nothingness could not yet have existed. The Christ Event occurred in the first third of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. And with that same fourth cultural epoch—whose first third is marked by the Christ Event—the Old Age came to an end.

[ 18 ] A new era began in the fifteenth century with the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, in which we now find ourselves. In this period, there are no traditions; they have gradually faded away. Now, when faced with the Christ event and with the deeper, more intimate religious questions, we stand quite clearly before nothingness. For even for theologians, it has gradually become entirely impossible to understand the Christ event. Try today to gain any comprehensible conception of the Christ event from contemporary theology! Those who are considered the greatest theologians today are the ones who argue that Christ is separate from Jesus. It is quite clear that we stand before nothingness.

[ 19 ] What I am describing are merely the symptoms, for these things take place in the deeper layers of human soul life. These deeper layers are conjuring up something in the souls of those who have come of age in recent decades that can be expressed something like this: People feel as if they are disconnected from the flow of world events. Something has indeed occurred in the soul’s development that can be compared to a terrible jolt.

[ 20 ] Imagine if my hand could feel on its own, and it were to be severed from me. What would it feel? It would feel severed, withering away; it would no longer feel like a living thing. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, the soul has felt as if it were severed from, as if it were disconnected from, that general current of world events, and the anxious question confronts humanity: How can I come alive again in my soul?

[ 21 ] If one then tries to speak from the impulses that can bring life back, the people who want to keep plowing ahead in the spirit of the old spiritual life simply don’t understand it at all. How little is actually understood of what is spoken from life itself about something like the founding principles of the Waldorf School! Most people hear something completely different about the Waldorf School than what they should be hearing. They only hear that people are speaking to them in the same way they did decades ago. After all, they can look up the words used today to describe the Waldorf School in books. They find all these words already in the books from the past. And if someone were to use different words—or not even different words, but just different sentence structures—people would say it’s poor language. They have no idea what must happen now, when humanity, which still has a soul within it, is facing nothingness.

[ 22 ] When people talk about Waldorf education, you have to listen with a different mindset than when you hear about education in general—including progressive education. For Waldorf education offers absolutely no answers to the questions people now want answered—questions that are posed and seemingly answered in other educational systems! What are these questions aiming at? Usually at a great deal of reason, and the present age has an immeasurable amount of reason. Reason, intellect, and cleverness are incredibly widespread commodities in the present age. Questions such as: What should one make of the child? How should one instill this or that in the child? — are answered in a terribly rational manner. And it all boils down to this: What do you like about the child, and how can you shape it so that it becomes what you want it to be? But this no longer has any significance for the deeper course of human development! Waldorf education offers no answer at all to such questions.

[ 23 ] If one were to begin by describing, in figurative terms, how Waldorf education speaks, one would have to say that it speaks in a way that is entirely different from how people usually speak about education. Waldorf education is not an educational system at all, but rather an art of awakening what is already present within the human being. Fundamentally, Waldorf education does not seek to educate, but to awaken. For today, the task at hand is one of awakening. First, the teachers must be awakened; then the teachers must in turn awaken the children and young people. It is indeed a matter of awakening, after humanity has been cut off and severed from the continuous flow of world development. Just as a hand falls asleep when it is cut off, so humanity fell asleep spiritually and mentally. You may object that people have come a long way since the fifteenth century and have developed tremendous intelligence. Yes, had the World War not come—which, admittedly, was not experienced by people to the extent that it could have been, but through which they nevertheless realized, at least to some extent, that they had not become all that intelligent after all—who knows how often we would hear: “How wonderfully far we have come!”—That would be unbearable.

[ 24 ] It is true: intellectually, people have come an incredibly long way since the fifteenth century. There is something terrifyingly seductive about the intellect, for it is through the intellect that all people believe themselves to be awake. But the intellect teaches us nothing at all about the world. In reality, it is merely a dream of the world. It is in the intellect that one dreams most intensely, and since objective science works most closely with the intellect—applying it to observation and experiment—it is, in essence, dreaming about the world. But it remains merely a dream. Through the intellect, one no longer stands in any objective connection with the world. The intellect is the automatic continuation of thought after one has long since been cut off from the world. That is why contemporary humanity, when it senses its soul within itself, when it gains a sense of itself in the soul, seeks to reconnect with the world, seeks to return to the world. Whereas up until the fifteenth century one still had positive legacies, one now faces a reversed legacy, a negative legacy. For one makes a peculiar discovery.

[ 25 ] Well into the fifteenth century, human souls were still able to welcome with a certain joy what they inherited from the world’s evolution. The world had not yet fully unfolded by then, and people had not yet become disconnected from it. One could welcome what one received with joy. Even today, after the disconnection, one can reflect on what one receives from the world without any effort on one’s part, but in doing so, one makes a very strange discovery. It is like someone who inherits a fortune and forgets to find out the exact details. Then the accounts are tallied, and one discovers that the liabilities exceed the assets. One has failed to renounce the inheritance! But with it comes a certain amount of debt that must be paid. This is a negative inheritance; such cases do exist. In the same way, humanity also has a negative inheritance in its soul, even in relation to the greatest event that has ever taken place in human history.

[ 26 ] Until the Mystery of Golgotha, people had no need to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, for it did not yet exist. Then it came into being, and in the period that followed, people were still able to grasp it dimly through the remnants of their ancient heritage. Then came the fifteenth century, when such remnants of heritage were no longer available, yet when a father could still pass on to his son an understanding of the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. Today, none of that helps anymore. People are terribly clever; but the people of the seventh and eighth centuries would have been just as clever as to see the contradictions in the four Gospels. After all, the contradictions are terribly easy to spot. Yet it was not until the nineteenth century that people began to examine these contradictions. It is the same in all areas of life. The intellect was overestimated, and an awareness, a sense of the event of Golgotha, has been lost. Religious feeling has been lost in consciousness. Deep within, however, the soul has not lost this sense, and young people want to know: What was the Mystery of Golgotha really like? — The older generation had nothing to say about it. I am not saying that young people know anything or that this is taught at universities. I am saying that they ought to know something about it.

[ 27 ] If one were to put into clear words what is happening chaotically in the depths of the soul, it would be this: Within the soul there is a striving to understand the Mystery of Golgotha anew. A new experience of Christ is being sought. We are inevitably facing a new experience of the Christ event. In its earliest form, it was still experienced through the remnants of the old spiritual heritage, and since these have been exhausted since the fifteenth century, it was perpetuated through tradition. It was not until the last third of the nineteenth century that the spiritual eclipse was complete. No traces of the old heritage remained. Light must once again be sought from within the darkness of the human soul. The spiritual world must be experienced anew.

[ 28 ] This is the significant experience that lies deep within the souls of the present youth movement. It is clear—not in a superficial sense, but in a deeper one—that for the first time in the course of world history, humanity must now experience something that arises entirely from within human beings themselves. As long as one does not know this, one cannot speak of pedagogy. One must be clear that the question must be asked from the deepest root: How does one arrive at the most primordial spiritual experience in the human soul?

[ 29 ] The original spiritual experience in the human soul is now something that stands before humanity as the new century dawns—as the all-encompassing and unspoken mystery of humanity and the world, awaiting humanity’s awakening. The question is: How does a person awaken what lies deepest within them; how can a person awaken themselves? One might say that the most enthusiastic spirits of a maturing humanity are—and I can only express this in a metaphor—like someone who is half-awake in the morning, with all their limbs heavy, unable, in the full sense of the word, to emerge from the state of sleep. This is how human beings feel today: as if they cannot quite emerge from the state of sleep.

[ 30 ] This fact underlies a striving that has found expression in manifold forms over the past decades and that continues to shine into these souls in a heartening way even now. It finds expression in the young humanity’s striving for community. People are searching for something. I said yesterday: Humanity has lost touch with one another; humanity is once again seeking out its fellow human beings. Up until the fifteenth century, people had not lost touch with one another. Of course, we cannot turn back the wheel of world history; it would also be a terrible thing if we were to try. We will certainly not become reactionaries. But we must acknowledge that, up until the fifteenth century, people were still able to find one another. Since the fifteenth century, one could draw from tradition and from what one’s fathers could still impart—vague mental images that made one take notice: the other is a human being. It struck one as mysterious that this figure walking beside one was, after all, also a human being. With the twentieth century, even that has disappeared. There is no longer any tradition to guide us, and yet we still seek out the human being. We truly seek out the human being. Why? Because, deep down, we are seeking something entirely different.

[ 31 ] If things continue the way they did around the turn of the century, then no one will wake up. For the others are also in such a state that they cannot wake anyone else up. After all, people must mean something to one another. Even within the community, they must mean something to one another. This is also what has shone through from the very beginning in everything that lives within Waldorf school pedagogy. It should not be a system of principles, but rather an impulse to awaken. It should be life, not knowledge; not skill, but art—it should be life-filled action, an awakening deed. This is what matters if we are to awaken people, since they have already, through the course of world history, fallen into a slumber filled with intellectualistic dreaming. Even in ordinary dreams, people often become megalomaniacal. But this ordinary dreaming is a mere orphan compared to intellectualistic dreaming.

[ 32 ] When it comes to awakening, it is truly not possible to continue pursuing intellectualism. This objective science, which goes about having cast off all its old garments—for fear that some human element might still be found in any of them—has surrounded itself with the densest veil of mist: the veil of objectivity; and so one actually perceives nothing at all of what goes on within this objectivity of science. We need something human again; we must be awakened.

[ 33 ] Yes, my dear friends, if we are to be awakened, then the Mystery of Golgotha must be experienced once more. But in the Mystery of Golgotha, in addition to the earthly Jesus, a spiritual being also entered the Earth. This was understood in the past, through ancient powers. The twentieth century demands that we grasp it with new powers. Today’s youth, if they truly understand themselves, demand to be awakened in consciousness—not through the old, dormant powers as in the past. And this can only happen through the Spirit; it can only happen if the Spirit’s spark truly strikes within the communities that are being sought. The Spirit must be the alarm clock, the awakener. We can only move forward if we realize the tragic nature of world events in our time: that we are actually facing the nothingness that we, in the course of Earth’s evolution, were inevitably bound to encounter in order to establish human freedom. And in the face of this nothingness, we need to be awakened in the Spirit.

[ 34 ] Nothing but the Spirit alone can open the shutters I spoke of yesterday; without it, they will remain tightly shut. Objective science—which I do not criticize, nor do I fail to recognize its great merits—will, despite all this, leave the shutters tightly shut. For it wishes to deal only with the earthly. But since the fifteenth century, that which awakens humanity has no longer lived in the earthly realm. It must be sought in that which is otherworldly within human beings themselves. This is, in essence, the deepest quest of all, whatever forms it may take today. Those who speak of something new and are sincere and true within themselves should ask themselves: How do we find within ourselves the non-earthly, the supersensible, the spiritual? — There is no need to clothe this once again in intellectualistic forms. It can truly be sought in very concrete forms; indeed, it must be sought in such forms. It certainly cannot be sought in intellectualistic forms. If you ask me why you have come here today, I can only answer: Because the question lives within you: How do we find the Spirit? — If you view what has driven you here in the right light, then simply ask the question: How do we find the Spirit that works within us from the present moment? How do we find this Spirit? — Let us seek to find this Spirit over the next few days, my dear friends.