The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday I tried to describe the intellectual climate at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, and I tried to describe it as I myself experienced it firsthand—an experience that led me to write my Philosophy of Freedom.

[ 2 ] This Philosophy of Freedom was based on the impulse to appeal to moral intuitions within human beings as that which, in the course of world development, must lead to the foundation of the moral life of the future. Through my “Philosophy of Freedom,” I wanted to show that, in the development of humanity, the time has come when morality can be carried forward in no other way than by appealing, with regard to moral impulses, to that which human beings can draw forth—entirely individually—from the innermost depths of their being as moral impulses. I have pointed out to you that the publication of this Philosophy of Freedom coincided with a time when it was widely claimed that people had finally recognized that moral intuitions were an impossibility and that all discussion of them must be silenced. I therefore felt it necessary to provide a justification for moral intuition—which, precisely in those circles that believed they stood on the solid ground of modern science through philosophical thinking, was said to need to be silenced. There was therefore a sharp contrast between what the era, in the minds of many of its most respected thinkers, considered to be correct, and what I, based on the foundations of human development, had to consider correct.

[ 3 ] But what is the actual basis for this difference? To discover this, let us now delve into the depths of the human soul, as it has taken shape in the Western world in our time. In the past, people spoke of moral intuitions, saying that human beings, as individual beings, can draw the impulses for action from the “depths of their being,” independent of external life. But as early as the first third of the fifteenth century—and increasingly so in the centuries that followed—everything that had been said in this way about moral intuitions became less and less true from a purely human standpoint. For although people said that morality could not be grounded in the observation of external facts, they no longer perceived anything truly illuminating when they looked into their own inner selves. Thus, while they claimed that moral intuitions existed, they actually knew nothing more about them. For centuries, all such assertions had been of a nature in which the mode of thinking characteristic of humanity before the fifteenth century continued automatically, and people continued to assert facts that had once been valid but had now ceased to be so.

[ 4 ] The traditions I have spoken to you about in recent days—and which persisted for centuries—played their part in making it possible for such assertions to be made. Before the fifteenth century, people did not merely speak of these things in vague terms —this vague way of speaking was in itself untruthful—but when people spoke of intuitions, including moral intuitions, they spoke of them as something that arose within the human being, and of which they had just as clear a conception as they did of something real and actual, just as they had a conception of something real when they opened their eyes in the morning after sleep and looked at nature. Outwardly, he saw nature, saw the plants, the clouds. When he looked within himself, he perceived the spiritual rising up within him, which encompassed the moral—just as he had once regarded it as a given. The further back we go in human development, the more we find that the real emergence of an inner existence within human experience is something self-evident. We can also study these facts—which, as I have just described to you, emerge from spiritual science—historically through certain external symptoms. For example, at a time when talk of an inner reality increasingly veers into falsehoods, the “proof of God” emerges.

[ 5 ] If, in the early centuries of Christian intellectual development, people had spoken of proofs of God’s existence, as Anselm of Canterbury did, they would not have known what was meant by that. In even earlier times, they would have known even less. To speak of proofs of God in the second or third century B.C. would have been like if one of the people sitting here in the front row were to stand up and I were to say, “Mr. So-and-so is standing there!” and someone here were to demand, “No, that must first be proven!” What human beings perceived as divine was, for them, a direct presence standing before their souls. They possessed the capacity to perceive that which they called the divine. In that historical era, this divine was more or less primitive and imperfect by today’s standards. In that primitive age, people had not progressed beyond the point that was known to them at the time. But they would not have wanted to hear anything about proofs, for that would have seemed absurd to them. People only began to seek proof of the divine at a time when they had lost it inwardly, when it was no longer present for their inner spiritual perception. If one considers the actual world impartially, the emergence of proofs of God must be regarded as a symptom of the fact that the direct perception of the divine had been lost. But the moral impulses of that time were linked to this divine aspect. What were moral impulses back then can no longer be regarded as such today. But that was the case in those times. Therefore, when—in the first third of the fifteenth century—the capacity for contemplation of the divine-spiritual in the old sense had dried up, the direct contemplation of the moral also dried up, and all that remained of the moral was the traditional dogmatism, which people then interpreted in such a way that they called it “conscience.” But by this they always meant something highly indeterminate.

[ 6 ] And when, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was declared that all talk of moral intuitions must be silenced, this was merely the final consequence of historical development. Until then, people still had a vague sense that such intuitions had once existed. But now they began to examine themselves. After all, their intellect had at least given them the ability to examine themselves, and they now found that, using the method they were accustomed to for scientific thinking, they could not arrive at moral intuitions at all.

[ 7 ] Now we must take a look at the old moral intuitions. In this regard, our history has become very flimsy. We have an external history. In the nineteenth century, we also endeavored to establish a cultural history. However, modern times have not been able to produce a history that also takes into account the inner life of human beings, and so we do not know how the inner life developed from the earliest times up to the first third of the fifteenth century. But if one goes back in time and looks at what was referred to as moral intuition back then, one finds that it was not something that had been worked out internally by the human soul. That is why, for example, the Old Testament quite rightly did not regard what appears there as moral intuition as something developed by the human soul, but rather as divine commandments that had flowed into it from outside. And the further back one goes, the more one finds that human beings perceived what they saw in the moral realm as an inner gift from a divine being existing outside themselves. Thus, moral intuitions were regarded at that time as divine commandments—not in a figurative or symbolic sense, but in the most literal sense.

[ 8 ] There is therefore a great deal of truth in the fact that certain religious philosophies today point to a primordial revelation that preceded the historical eras of Earth. External science cannot get much further in this regard than to a kind of—I would say—spiritual paleontology. Just as one finds fossilized forms in the earth that point to earlier life, so too can one find forms in the, as it were, fossilized moral ideas that point back to the once-living, God-given moral ideas. One can therefore arrive at the concept of a primordial revelation and say: This primordial revelation dried up. Human beings lost the ability to be conscious of this primordial revelation. And the culmination of this loss occurred in the first third of the fifteenth century. People no longer perceived anything when they looked inward. They preserved only the tradition of what they had once seen. The external denominations gradually took control of this tradition and shaped the content—which had become external and merely traditional—into dogmas that were simply to be believed, whereas people had previously experienced them in a living way, though as something transcending humanity.

[ 9 ] This was the highly significant situation at the end of the nineteenth century: in certain circles, people had come to realize that the old, God-given intuitions were no longer present, and that if one were to try to prove the ideas of the ancients using one’s intellect, one could only say: There are no moral intuitions! Science has silenced moral intuitions, and people, if they merely adopt a receptive attitude, are no longer capable of receiving moral intuitions. Had one been consistent, one would have had to become a sort of Spengler even back then and say: There are no moral intuitions; consequently, humanity can do nothing but slowly wither away in the future. — At most, one could have asked one’s grandfather: “Have you heard that there once were moral intuitions and influences?” — and he would then have replied: “One would have to search through the cupboards and libraries; then one could still acquire knowledge of moral intuitions second- or third-hand, but no longer through direct experience.” — Then one would have had to say to oneself: So there is nothing left to do but wither away in regard to moral intuitions, to become senile, to have no more youth. — That would have been consistent! But one did not dare to do so, for consistency was not exactly a outstanding characteristic of the dawning age of intellectualism.

[ 10 ] People didn’t dare to say just anything at all. If one offered any kind of judgment, one did so only half-heartedly, much like Du Bois-Reymond in his speech on the limits of scientific knowledge, where he says that one cannot bring supernaturalism into the natural sciences, because supernaturalism is faith and not knowledge; science comes to an end with supernaturalism. The subject was not explored any further. If anyone said anything more on the matter, people would start to complain and claim that it was no longer science. Consistency was no longer a hallmark of the outgoing century.

[ 11 ] On the one hand, there was the alternative of drying up. The spiritual gradually merges into the psychological, the psychological into the physical, and after decades, the soul would be able to unearth only antiquated impulses regarding morality, which would ultimately lead not only to thirty-year-olds but even twenty-year-olds walking around with bald heads and fifteen-year-olds with gray hair. That is speaking somewhat figuratively; but that would indeed be Spenglerism as a practical impulse for life. That was one alternative.

[ 12 ] The other was that one became immediately aware: With the loss of the old intuitions, we are faced with nothingness. — So what to do? Seek the universe within this nothingness! Seek something from this nothingness that is not simply given to us, but that we must work to attain. And this could no longer be achieved with the passive powers that were available, but only with the strongest powers of cognition available to human beings in this age: the powers of cognition of pure thinking. For in pure thinking, thought passes directly into the will. You can observe and think without exerting your will very much. Experimentation and thinking do not merge into the will; but pure thinking—that is, unfolding elemental, primordial activity—requires energy. Here, the flash of the will must strike directly into thinking itself. Yet this flash of the will must also emerge from the entirely unique human individuality. And one had to have the courage to appeal to this pure thinking, which also becomes pure will. This, however, becomes a new ability: the ability to draw moral impulses from immediate human individuality—impulses that must now be cultivated and are no longer given as they were in the past. One had to appeal to intuitions that must be cultivated! And this age, after all, knows what a person cultivates within as nothing other than imagination. Thus, in this age, which has in any case silenced this inner work, future moral impulses had to be born out of moral imagination; that is to say, human beings had to be directed away from merely poetic, artistic imagination toward a productive moral imagination.

[ 13 ] All ancient intuitions were always given only to groups. There is a mysterious connection between primordial revelation and groups of people. The ancient intuitions were always given to groups of people within their context. The new intuitions, which must now be developed, must be worked out within the realm of each individual human soul; that is to say, each individual human being must himself be made into a source of morality. This must be drawn out of the nothingness one finds oneself confronted with, through the intuitions themselves.

[ 14 ] That was all one had left, unless one was already, as an honest person, inclined to embrace a kind of Spenglerism at that time—and these “Spengler” works are certainly not exactly vibrant works! But the task at hand was to find, out of the nothingness with which people seemed to be confronted, a reality full of life once again; therefore, naturally, one could initially appeal only to a beginning. For what had to be appealed to is a creative force within the human being—in a sense, the creation of an inner human being within the outer human being. In the past, the outer human being received moral impulses from outside. Now, human beings had to create an inner human being themselves. With this inner human being, they simultaneously gained a new moral intuition—or rather, they are gaining it. Thus, something like a “Philosophy of Freedom” had to be born out of the times, yet as something that, at the same time, had to stand in opposition to the times in the strictest sense.

[ 15 ] Let us now consider the state of the soul of modern man from yet another perspective. You see, as—I might say—a prelude to the rise of intellectualism in Western civilization, the awareness of the pre-earthly human being, of humanity’s pre-earthly existence, was swept away long ago. This was taken away from Western civilization in very early times, so that Western people were unaware that as I emerge from the embryonic state of earthly development, another being unites with me—one that descends from spiritual and soul heights and permeates this physical earthly being.

[ 16 ] Now, with regard to this penetration, the following becomes quite clear to the observer. I have already referred you to an image to illustrate what I have to say here. When we look at a corpse, I said, we know that it cannot have acquired its form through the ordinary forces of nature, but must be the remnant of a living human being. It would be folly to conceive of the form of the human body as something living in and of itself. One must go back to what the living human being was. Yet, when viewed impartially, intellectualistic thinking also presents itself to us as something “dead.” Of course, people will say: Prove it to us! It proves itself precisely through direct perception, and such proofs—which are actually only available for secondary matters—can indeed be found. But to demonstrate this, I would have to present several chapters of philosophy, which lies beyond the scope of the present task. Yet for the impartial observer, intellectualistic thinking—from which our entire modern civilization flows—appears, in relation to living thinking, just as a corpse relates to a living human being. Just as the corpse originates from the living human being, so too does the thinking I possess today originate from a living thinking that I had in an earlier time. And with sound reasoning, I must tell myself: This dead thinking must descend from a living one that existed before birth. The physical organism is the grave of living thinking, the vessel of dead thinking.

[ 17 ] But the peculiar thing is that during the first two stages of human life—up to the sixth, seventh, and eighth years, until the end of the change of teeth, and then on to the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth years, that is, until sexual maturity—one has, so to speak, a form of thinking that is not yet entirely dead. Thinking is in the process of dying. It has only ever truly lived in pre-earthly existence. During the first two epochs of life, it comes to an end. For human beings, it becomes completely dead starting in the first third of the fifteenth century, precisely with the onset of sexual maturity. It is then the corpse of what is actually living thinking. This was not always the case in human development. If one goes back beyond the fifteenth century, it becomes apparent that thinking still possessed something alive, that the kind of thinking still existed that people today cannot stand, because they experience it as if an anthill were crawling around in their brains. They cannot stand it when something is alive within them. They want to be able to keep their heads quite still and comfortable, and they want the thinking inside them to proceed calmly as well, so that one need only give it a little help with logical laws. But pure thinking is like having an anthill in one’s head, and that, they say, is not healthy. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, people could still tolerate living thought. — I am not saying this to offer criticism. It would also be inappropriate—just as inappropriate as criticizing a cow for no longer being a calf. It would have been a great calamity for humanity if things had not turned out this way. There had to be people who could not tolerate this anthill in their heads. For what was dead had to be brought back to life in some other way.

[ 18 ] The fact is that, since the middle of the fifteenth century, people have, upon reaching sexual maturity, experienced an essentially dead form of thinking within themselves. They were filled with the corpse of thought. If you take this thought very seriously, then you will understand that it was only from that time onward that a true inorganic natural science could emerge, because it was only then that human beings began to be able to comprehend purely inorganic laws. Only now could the dead be understood in the way that has been sought since Galileo and Copernicus. The living had to die inwardly first. When people were still inwardly alive in their thinking, they could not comprehend the inanimate externally, for the living mode of cognition imparted itself to the external world. Natural science became ever purer, and this continued until, by the end of the nineteenth century, it was almost nothing but mathematics. That was the ideal toward which it strove: it was to become phoronomy, a kind of pure mechanics.

[ 19 ] Thus, in more recent times, the dead have increasingly become the very object of knowledge. That was now the entire pursuit. Of course, this lasted several centuries; but the development follows this line. Genius figures such as de Lamettrie, for example, stated—almost prophetically—that human beings are essentially machines. However, a person who seeks only to comprehend the inanimate makes use only of the mechanical, the inanimate aspect within themselves. This makes the development of the natural sciences easy for modern people. Thinking ceases with sexual maturity. In earlier times, people possessed God-given intuitions, because thinking still retained its capacity for growth far beyond sexual maturity. After reaching sexual maturity, people today lose this living thinking, and so in later life they learn nothing new, but merely parrot what they had already acquired in their early youth.

[ 20 ] Now, this was actually quite fitting for the elders who held the reins of culture: to encompass a dead world with dead thinking. It is an excellent way to establish science. But one can never use it to teach and educate the young. And why? Because young people, until they reach sexual maturity, retain the vitality of thought, even if only unconsciously. And so, despite all reflection on the principles of education as they have been formulated in recent times, it is becoming increasingly clear that when rigid, objective science—which encompasses the dead—becomes the educator and approaches the living, youthful, these young people feel it as if a stake were being driven into their flesh. A stake—death—has been driven into their hearts, and they are expected to tear the living out of their hearts. It had to emerge from within human development to reveal what many people still overlook today, yet which is truly and profoundly present: a chasm between old age and youth. And this gulf stems simply from the fact that young people cannot allow the dead stake—which the head devises out of mere intellectualism—to be driven into their living hearts. Young people yearn for a vitality that can only be developed from the spirit through human individuality. And we are taking the first step toward developing this through moral intuitions.

[ 21 ] Once you’ve started down that path—as I attempted to illustrate in my Philosophy of Freedom with regard to this purely spiritual realm—for these moral intuitions, distilled from human individuality, are indeed purely spiritual—and once you’ve dared to speak out while others claimed you’d be silenced: lo and behold, the powers that claimed one would be silenced for speaking of moral intuitions are themselves silenced! Thus I appealed to the living, purely spiritual. Science is dead. It cannot bring the mouth to life. But one cannot rely on it anyway. One must appeal to an inner vitality, and only then can one truly begin to seek. The divine lies precisely in this appeal to the original moral and spiritual intuitions. But once one has grasped the spiritual, one can also develop the powers to grasp the spiritual in the broader realms of worldly existence, proceeding from that point. And that is the direct path from moral intuitions to other spiritual contents.

[ 22 ] In my work How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, I have attempted to show that knowledge of the supersensible worlds is gradually built up through imaginative, inspired, and intuitive experience. When one observes the external natural world, one first arrives at imagination, then at inspiration, and finally at intuition. In the moral world, it is different. When one arrives at imagery—at imaginations in general—one has simultaneously developed, through these imaginations, the capacity to have moral intuitions. Already at the first stage, one attains what is achieved there only at the third stage. In the moral world, intuition follows immediately upon external perception. In the case of nature, however, two other stages intervene. Thus, if one has spoken of intuitions in the moral realm not in a clichéd manner but in honest truth, one has no choice but to recognize them as something purely spiritual. But then one must continue working in order to find the other spiritual aspect as well. For qualitatively, one has grasped in moral intuition the very same thing that one then fills with content for natural development—for my part, with esoteric science.

[ 23 ] But it is precisely in such an approach that we find what we need, my dear friends. On the one hand, we need a full acknowledgment that external science can necessarily encompass only the material, and therefore, when considering the material, must remain not only materialistic but also phenomenalistic. But we must work to ensure that what natural science turns into dead thought is brought back to life. And so, I would say, a Bible verse comes alive on a somewhat higher level. I do not wish to pepper my discussions with Bible verses in a sentimental way, but rather to use just one such verse to clarify certain points. Why do we no longer have any real philosophies today? Because thinking, as I have characterized it, has in fact died. Therefore, philosophies—if they rely solely on this dead thinking—are dead from the outset. They do not live. And even if someone truly seeks something living in philosophy, like Bergson, nothing comes of it, because although he struggles to grasp the living, he cannot lay hold of it. To grasp the living means: first to arrive at seeing. What we need in order to arrive at something living is what we can, after the age of fifteen, bring to bear on what was at work within us before the age of fifteen. This is not disturbed by our intellect. We must learn to carry what is at work within us as spontaneous, living wisdom into our deadened thinking. It must be imbued with the forces of growth and reality. That is why I would like to refer to this Bible verse—and not out of sentimentality: “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

[ 24 ] After all, it is always the Kingdom of God that one seeks. But unless one becomes like a child before puberty, one cannot enter the Kingdom of God. One must infuse one’s dead thinking with childlike and youthful qualities. This brings it to life, and through this, intuition returns. One might say that we learn to speak from the primal wisdom of childhood. A linguistics such as that described, for example, by Fritz Mauthner does not merely silence moral intuitions; it actually silences all speech about the world. One should stop talking about the world, because Mauthner demonstrates that all speech about the world consists solely of words, and words cannot express reality.

[ 25 ] This way of thinking has only emerged since the first third of the nineteenth century. But people don’t stop to consider what it would be like if our words and concepts didn’t merely signify something, but were something in themselves. For then they would not be transparent; then, like clouded lenses before our eyes, they would obscure the sensible world; they would block our entire view of the world. Something beautiful would have come of humankind if it had concepts and words that meant something in and of themselves! Then it would be trapped within them. Concepts and words must be transparent so that we can reach things through them. It is simply necessary—if one so desires—that all talk about realities be silenced, that we learn a new language.

[ 26 ] In this way, we must return to childhood by learning a new language. The language we learn in our early childhood gradually becomes completely lifeless as dead, intellectualistic concepts creep in. We must revive it. We must find a breakthrough into our thinking, just as we had a breakthrough from the unconscious when we learned to speak. We must seek a living science. We must realize, of course, that the thinking which reached its peak in the last third of the nineteenth century silences us when it comes to moral intuitions. We must learn to open our mouths by allowing the spirit to move our lips. Then we will become children again—that is, we will carry childhood into our later years. And that is what we must do. If any youth movement is to possess truth and not merely be empty rhetoric, it must necessarily be a longing for the human mouth to be opened by the spirit, a longing for human language to be enlivened by the spirit that springs from human individuality. One sees how, first of all, the individual moral intuitions must be drawn out of human individuality, and one will see how, as the ultimate consequence of this, what emerges is what constitutes a true spiritual science—that which transforms all anthropology into anthroposophy.