The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday I wanted to explain to you how we must approach the education—or rather, the guidance—of young people by structuring that education in an artistic manner. I pointed out that, in earlier eras, educators, in a certain sense, drew upon the artistic. This was the case in so-called higher education, where what has today taken on an entirely abstract, scientific form—namely, grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric—was regarded and practiced as arts, so that the young person first came to recognize in his or her guide something that made him or her say: “This person can do something I cannot.” — And through this alone was the proper relationship between the younger and older generations established, for this relationship can never develop through intellectuality alone. As soon as one no longer possesses the ideas revealed within through the soul of feeling and the soul of understanding, but instead stands on the ground of the intellect with the soul of consciousness, there is no longer any possibility of distinguishing between people in any way. For human nature is such that, when it comes to defining something conceptually with the conscious soul—or indeed, whenever a person arrives at concepts at all—everyone believes they can discuss these concepts with anyone else. This is the case with the intellect, where a person’s maturity and experience are not taken into account at all. A person’s maturity and experience only come into play when it comes to skill. The skills of an older person are also recognized quite naturally by the young.

[ 2 ] In order to understand these things from their very foundations, we must once again take a step back and consider, from a different perspective, how human development has actually unfolded with regard to human interaction. External history, which relies on documents, can, after all, only go back a few millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, and it cannot even evaluate what it investigates there in the proper way, because even the spiritual achievements of ancient Greece can no longer be grasped using today’s concepts. One must apply entirely different concepts even to the ancient Greek period. Nietzsche, among others, sensed this. This is why his unfinished short treatise Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks is so compelling; in it, he examines Greek philosophy in the context of the general development of Greek culture up to Socrates. In Socrates, he finds the first glimmer of pure intellectualism, whereas everything philosophical in the so-called tragic age of Greek development arose from comprehensive human foundations for which, when expressed conceptually, the conceptual is merely a language for expressing lived experience. Philosophy, after all, was something entirely different in the earliest times than what it later became. But I will merely point this out for now.

[ 3 ] What I actually want to talk about here is that, through spiritual imagination and especially inspiration, one can look back much further—even into the details of human development—and, above all, look into the souls of human beings. And there we see that if we go back very far—say, to the seventh or eighth millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha—there was even a completely natural reverence among the young for the very elderly. Why was this reverence so natural? Because in those earliest times, what today exists only during the early years of youth was still present throughout the entire course of human development.

[ 4 ] If one does not view the human being in such a crude manner as is often done today, one will find that the entire spiritual development of the human being changes around the time of tooth replacement, around the sixth, seventh, or eighth year. The human soul changes, and it changes again with the onset of puberty. I have discussed this in detail in my little book The Education of the Child from the Perspective of Spiritual Science. People may still notice, at a pinch, that a person’s soul development changes around the age of seven and again around the ages of fourteen and fifteen. What they no longer notice at all, however, is that further transitions in soul development take place in the early twenties, the late twenties, the mid-thirties, and so on.

[ 5 ] Anyone capable of observing the inner life more closely knows full well that such transitions occur in human beings, that human life as a whole unfolds in a rhythmic manner. Just try to visualize this, for example, in the case of Goethe. Goethe himself records how he was torn away from certain childlike religious notions—from the entire complex of ideas he had held up to that point—by the Lisbon earthquake, which occurred around the time he was losing his baby teeth, and how, even as a child, he became confused by it all. He describes how he began to ponder the question of whether there could be any divine goodness at work in the world when countless people are swept away by the earth’s terrible fiery forces. Goethe was, especially during such transitional moments in his life, very receptive to allowing external events to affect his soul, so that he became aware of his inner transformation. And around this time, Goethe notes in his own writings how he had become a sort of “peculiar pantheist,” how he could no longer believe in the ideas passed down to him by the older members of his household and by his parents. He describes how he took one of his father’s music stands, placed minerals on it, and set a small incense candle on top, which he lit with a magnifying glass as the first rays of the morning sun shone in. Later in life, he expressed this by saying that he had wanted to offer a sacrifice to the great God of Nature by kindling this sacrificial fire, which he had ignited from Nature itself.

[ 6 ] Take this first period of Goethe’s life, then the next, and so on, piecing together his entire life from time periods for which this childhood era serves as a rough guide: You will find that, in such periods of Goethe’s life, something always happens that fundamentally transforms his soul. It is extraordinarily interesting to see how even the event in which Schiller inspired Goethe to continue Faust found such fertile ground in Goethe only because he was at a pivotal juncture in his life at the end of the eighteenth century. It is interesting that Goethe rewrote his Faust at the beginning of a new phase of his life. In Goethe’s youth, Faust begins with Faust opening the Book of Nostradamus, which describes “how celestial forces ascend and descend and pass the golden buckets to one another.” But then the page is turned, and it is said: “You, Spirit of the Earth, are closer to me.” Goethe rejects the grand tableau of the macrocosm and allows only the Earth Spirit to approach his Faust. When, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he was prompted by Schiller to rewrite Faust, he created the “Prologue in Heaven.”

[ 7 ] Anyone who can observe their own life in this intimate way will also find such changes within themselves. Today, however, we notice them only if we actively train ourselves to look closely at our own lives.

[ 8 ] In the sixth, seventh, and eighth millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, these turning points were so strongly felt by human beings that they were experienced as emotional sensations, much like the loss of baby teeth or the onset of puberty today. Specifically, it was the case that up until about the middle of life—around the age of thirty-five or thirty-six—these changes were felt in such a way that life up to that point was regarded as ascending. But then it began to decline. One felt, so to speak, the withering away of life. But as one sensed that metabolic waste products were accumulating in the organism with a certain sluggishness—as one sensed that the physical organism was becoming ever heavier and more lifeless—one simultaneously became aware, right up into old age, of how the soul-spiritual aspect was flourishing. One felt how, as the body withered, the soul was liberated. And in ancient times, people would not have spoken with such fervor of certain individuals as “patriarchs”—the word itself, after all, came into use only later—if they had not observed outwardly in these people: Though he is growing old physically, he owes to his physical aging a radiance of the spirit. He is no longer dependent on the body. The body withers away; the soul becomes free.

[ 9 ] In more recent times, an extraordinary incident occurred at the University of Berlin. There were two philosophers there: one was named Zeller—the famous “Greek” Zeller—and the other was Michelet. Zeller was seventy years old and wanted to retire. Michelet was ninety and lectured with tremendous vitality. Eduard von Hartmann told me that Michelet is said to have remarked, “I don’t understand why the young man doesn’t want to lecture anymore.”

[ 10 ] Rarely do people today retain such vitality. But back then it was like that, especially among those who devoted themselves to a truly spiritual life. What did young people tell themselves when they looked at the patriarchs? They said to themselves: It’s wonderful to grow old! Through one’s own development, one comes to experience things that one could not have known before. — And people thought this in a completely natural way. Just as a little boy who has a toy horse wishes to grow up so he can get a real horse, so people back then wished to grow old because they felt that something would then be revealed to them from within.

[ 11 ] Then came the following millennia. Although people still experienced this into old age, it did not last as long as it had in the primordial Indian era, according to the terminology I use in my Outline of Esoteric Science. During the heyday of Greek civilization, people still vividly experienced the turning point in life in their mid-thirties. At that time, people could still articulate the difference between the physical and the spiritual by saying to themselves: When one is thirty years old, the physical begins to decline, but the spiritual then blossoms all the more. — This was experienced spiritually and emotionally in the immediate human presence. This is the foundation of the primordial sensibility of Greek civilization, not the fantasy of which modern science speaks. If one wishes to understand what the vitality of Greek culture is based on, one must know that the Greeks could still reach the ages of thirty, thirty-five, and thirty-six with full consciousness, whereas an older humanity could still grow much older with full consciousness. This is the course of human development. Then, by nature, humanity had to experience aging more and more unconsciously; and now the need arises to live through this process consciously once again, for it must be lived through consciously once more.

[ 12 ] Anyone who observes themselves can recognize this seven-year cycle. The duration is not precisely defined, but is approximate. Anyone who looks back on the time of their forty-ninth, forty-second, or thirty-fifth year can know quite well: something happened to you back then that taught you to experience or feel something you simply could not have achieved on your own before—just as you could not have bitten with your second set of teeth before you had them. — The ability to experience human life as something concrete has been lost in the course of human development. And if one does not train oneself inwardly today to observe this within oneself, these phases become completely blurred starting at the age of thirty. At the beginning of one’s twenties—and even at the end of one’s twenties, though to a lesser extent—there is still something to be noticed in terms of an inner transformation. But the human constitution has now become such that a person is actually carried along by their natural development only until the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven, and this limit will be pushed lower and lower. In earlier times, people were unfree in their constitution because they were predestined, by their very nature, to go through this process. Freedom has become possible only through the abolition of this natural determinism. To the extent that it ceases, freedom becomes possible. Human beings must, through their own inner effort, come to find the spiritual, whereas in the past, as one grew older, year by year, it naturally sprang forth.

[ 13 ] So today we find ourselves in a situation where, for all the reasons I have discussed over the past few days, older people no longer emphasize what they have simply come to be by virtue of their age. They remained stuck in that intellectualism which, by the ages of eighteen or nineteen, is already so far developed that one can know things intellectually from that point on. But with regard to intellectualism, one can at most achieve greater practice, but not qualitative progress. Once one has even tasted this sin—the desire to prove or disprove everything intellectually—one no longer experiences any progress in this proving or disproving. That is why, when someone draws on decades of experience to present an argument and attempts to prove it intellectually, an eighteen-year-old can intellectually refute them. For what one can do intellectually at the age of sixty, one can already do at the age of nineteen. Intellectualism is simply a stage that is reached once during the era of the conscious soul, but it no longer undergoes progress in the sense of deepening, only in the sense of practice. The young person may well say: “I’m not as smart as you yet; you can still outwit me”—but he will not believe that the other person is capable of more in the realm of intellectualism than he is.

[ 14 ] One must speak out about these things in no uncertain terms so that they become clear. I do not wish to criticize, but merely to describe what constitutes a natural development of humanity. We must be clear about the nature of the present age: If people today do not strive for development out of inner activity and keep that development alive, they will become rusty with the mere intellectualism of the 1920s. Then they will sustain themselves only artificially through external stimuli. If this were not the case, do you think people would flock to the movies so much? This longing for the movies—indeed, this longing to view everything in an external way—stems from the fact that people have become inwardly inactive and idle, that they do not want any inner activity at all. Lectures on spiritual science, as referred to here, can only be listened to in such a way that those in attendance are constantly participating. But that is not what people like today. Today, people mainly go to lectures or events when the program says “with slides,” so they can sit there and leave their thinking as undisturbed as possible. Everything just washes over them. They can remain completely passive.

[ 15 ] But after all, our entire educational system is geared toward this, and one could call anyone who, for pedagogical reasons, rebels against the triviality of today’s visual-based instruction “backward.” But this is necessary; for human beings are not merely visual-perception machines, machines that merely want to observe. Human beings can only live through inner activity. To present something from the spiritual sciences means inviting people to participate with their souls. People today do not want that. All spiritual science must invite such inner activity; that is to say, it must lead all contemplation to the point where one no longer has any points of reference in external, sensory perception, and the interplay of inner forces must be allowed to move freely. Only when thinking can move freely within this interplay of inner forces can one arrive at imagination—not before. The foundation for all anthroposophical spiritual science is therefore inner activity—the call to inner activity, the appeal to that within the human being which can still be active when all the senses are silent and only the activity of thought remains active.

[ 16 ] But this is something extraordinarily significant. Just imagine for a moment that you could do that. I don’t want to flatter you by saying, for example, “You can do it.” — But first, let’s assume for the sake of argument that you could think in such a way that your thoughts were merely an inner flow of thought. When I speak of “pure thinking” in my Philosophy of Freedom, that term was already out of place given the cultural conditions of the time; for Eduard von Hartmann once said to me: “That doesn’t exist at all; one can only think on the basis of external perception!” I could only reply to him: “One must try it; one will then learn it and ultimately be able to do it.” — So suppose you could have thoughts in a pure flow of thought. Then the moment begins for you when you have led thinking to a point where it no longer needs to be called thinking at all. In the blink of an eye—let’s say in the blink of thought—it has become something else. For this thinking, rightly called “pure thinking,” has become pure will; it is will through and through. If you have progressed so far in your inner life that you have freed thinking from external perception, then it has simultaneously become pure will. You are, if I may say so, soaring with your inner life in the pure course of thought. This pure course of thought is a course of will. But with this, pure thinking—indeed, even the effort to practice it—begins to be not merely a mental exercise but an exercise of the will, and one that penetrates to the very center of the human being. For you will make the remarkable observation: Only now can you speak of thinking, as it is experienced in ordinary life, as a mental activity. After all, you had no right at all to speak of thinking as a mental activity before, for you knew this only superficially from physiology, anatomy, and so on. But now you sense inwardly that you are no longer thinking so high up, but that you are beginning to think with your chest. You are, in fact, interweaving your thinking with the breathing process. In doing so, you are stimulating what the yoga exercises have sought to achieve artificially. You notice that as thinking becomes more and more an act of the will, it first breaks free from the human chest and then from the entire human body. It is as if you were drawing this thinking out from the very last cell fiber of your big toe. And when you study something like this with inner attention—something that entered the world with all its imperfections (I do not mean to defend my Philosophy of Freedom)—when you allow such a thing to take effect within you and feel what this pure thinking is, then you feel that a new inner human being has been born within you, one who can bring about the unfolding of the will out of the spirit.

[ 17 ] How else would a person know that he has a will? After all, they don’t “have” one! For they are at the mercy of instincts linked to their organic development. They often imagine that they do this or that out of some psychological impulse. In reality, however, they do it because their stomach is in good or bad shape. But now you know that you have permeated the physical organism with that which also fills it with consciousness. You don’t need to become a clairvoyant to realize this. You merely need to let the Philosophy of Freedom take effect within you with inner engagement. For this Philosophy of Freedom cannot be read the way other books are read. It must be read in such a way that one has the feeling it is a living organism: one section develops out of the next, and one is thus drawn into something alive. When something like this is expected of them, people immediately get a kind of goosebumps: “Something is entering me that I don’t want; this is making me unfree!”

[ 18 ] This is no different from claiming that a person becomes unfree if he has to make the effort to express himself in a particular language within two or three years. To prevent him from falling into this arbitrary association of ideas, one should shield him from language, for it is through language that he becomes unfree! They must be able to speak Chinese or French one moment and German the next. — No one says this, because it is too absurd, and because life itself would refute such nonsense. On the other hand, there are people who hear or see something about eurythmy and then claim that it is based on the random association of ideas among individual people. One should surely expect philosophers to have enough insight to say to themselves: With this eurythmy, one must first investigate whether it is not precisely the case that the expression of these gestures actually lays the foundation for a higher freedom—that it is merely an unfolding of language on a higher level.

[ 19 ] It is therefore no surprise—since nothing that goes beyond the intellectual can be viewed impartially today—that people get goosebumps when they are told that a book must be read quite differently from other books; it must be read in such a way that one experiences something in the process. And what must be experienced? The awakening of the will from within the spiritual realm! In this regard, my book was intended to be an educational tool. It was not intended merely to convey content, but to speak in a very specific way so that it could function as an educational tool. That is why you will find in my Philosophy of Freedom a discussion of the art of concepts—that is, a description of what takes place in the human soul when one does not limit one’s concepts to external impressions alone, but is able to live within the free flow of thought.

[ 20 ] But this, my dear friends, is an activity that, while aiming at insights in a much deeper sense than the external understanding of nature, is at the same time artistic—it is entirely identical with artistic activity. The moment pure thinking is experienced as will, the human being is in an artistic state of mind. And it is precisely this artistic state of mind that today’s educator needs in order to guide young people from the time their baby teeth fall out until they reach sexual maturity—or even beyond. This is the state of mind one has when, from within one’s inner soul, one has come to a second human being who cannot be perceived in the same way as the outer physical body—which can be studied physiologically or anatomically—but who must be experienced; hence, he can rightly be called the “life body” or “etheric body,” provided these terms are not simply taken back into the old usage. This life body cannot be observed externally. It must be experienced inwardly; to recognize it, a kind of artistic activity must be unfolded. Hence, there is that mood in The Philosophy of Freedom—which most people do not even notice—that touches upon the artistic element throughout. Most people do not notice this because they seek the artistic in the trivial and the natural, and not in free activity. But it is only through this free activity that one can experience pedagogy as an art, and the teacher can become a pedagogical artist by attuning himself to this mood. Then, in our age of the conscious soul, the entire educational process will truly be geared toward creating an artistic atmosphere between those being guided and those who guide. And within this artistic atmosphere, that relationship between the guided and the guide can develop—a leaning, an inclining—because one knows: This person can do something that he can show one artistically, and what he can do—one senses this—is what one would also like to be able to do. — One does not then rebel, because one feels that one would destroy oneself if one did so.

[ 21 ] The way writing is taught today, it often happens that even as a child—after all, there’s always a smarter child than the teacher—one gets the feeling: Why should I torture myself with writing when I have absolutely no connection to it! — The North American Indians felt much the same way when they saw European writing: they perceived the black symbols as sorcery, and that is often how a child feels as well. But let us awaken in the child an awareness of what it means to look at black, red, green, yellow, and white! Let us awaken in the child a sense of what it means when a dot is encircled by a circle. Let us evoke that immense sense of the differences that exist when one draws two green circles, each containing three red ones; then two red circles, each containing three green ones; two yellow circles, each containing three blue ones; and finally two blue circles, each containing three yellow ones. Let the children sense, through the colors, what the colors say to people above all else; for a whole world lies within the colors. But let them also sense what the colors have to say to one another. One helps them sense what green says to red, what blue says to yellow, what blue says to green, and what red says to blue—these are, after all, the most wonderful relationships that colors have with one another. One does not show a child symbols or allegories, but rather approaches it artistically. Then one will see how the child gradually brings figurative elements onto the surface out of this artistic sensibility, from which the letters then develop in the same way that writing once developed from pictographic writing. How foreign is a B or a G or any other such symbol—which has developed into its present form out of an inner necessity—to a child today! What does a “G,” “K,” or “U” mean to a seven-year-old child today? The child has not the slightest connection to them. After all, it was only over the course of millennia that humanity established this connection. The child must develop a connection to them in an aesthetic way. Everything is being eradicated from the child because the written characters are inhuman. The child, however, wants to remain human.

[ 22 ] This touches on the innermost aspects of the art of education—something that must be said today if one is to understand youth in relation to old age. The gap between old age and youth must be bridged not with empty phrases, but through an art of education that does not shy away from drawing on genuine insights from the humanities. That is why I said a few days ago: What is the basis of this art? It is based on an experience of the real spiritual. And what is the basis of what our age has gradually developed to the point where it believes it must, as a matter of course, impart to youth? Not the spirit, but the spiritless! There, it is regarded as a sin to bring the spirit into what is called knowledge and science.

[ 23 ] This science, after all, doesn’t let people off scot-free, even in early childhood. It can hardly be any other way; for when one is trained in botanical systematics—and there are books that exist solely within the framework of botanical systematics—the teacher believes he is committing a sin if he speaks to children in any way other than what is prescribed by scientific botany. But what is written in a botany textbook is out of the question for a child under the age of ten; one can only begin to grasp it after the age of eighteen or nineteen.

[ 24 ] Now, what I have said is not intended to create yet another intellectual theory of education, but rather to foster an artistic atmosphere between older and younger people. Only when this happens will what must happen occur, so that today’s young people can grow into the world in a healthy way. What today’s people are growing into can be described in very concrete terms. Between the ages of nine and ten, an indefinable feeling lives in the soul of every human being who is not a psychopath. There need not be a clear—or even a vague—concept of it, but it begins to live within the person from the age of nine or ten. Up to that point, what is called the astral body has been solely responsible for the person’s soul life. From then on, the nature of the “I” force stirs within the person. This stirring of the “I” force within the person does not take the form of articulated concepts; rather, a question takes root in the mind of the growing person through a feeling, deep in the unconscious soul. It takes one form in one person and another in another. Put into words, it might sound something like this: Until now, the astral body has believed in other people; now I need something that someone tells me, so that I can believe in that person or in several people around me. Those who rebel most against such a thing as children are the ones who need it the most. Between the ages of nine and ten, one begins to depend on being able to strengthen one’s sense of self through faith in an older person. One must be able to believe in this person without having that belief drummed into one; one must be able to believe in them through the artistic atmosphere that has been created. And woe betide if an older person does nothing to properly answer this question—which for some children can persist until they are sixteen or seventeen, and for others even until they are eighteen or nineteen—so that the child can say to himself: I am grateful that I was able to learn from the older person what can only be learned from him. What he can tell me, only he can tell me, for when I come to understand it at my own age, it will already be different.

[ 25 ] In this way, something can be created through education that, when applied correctly, can become of the utmost importance for the Age of the Conscious Soul—and which already wove a bond between young and old in the most ancient Patriarchal Age. Back then, every young person would say to themselves: The old man with snow on his head has experiences that one can only have once one has grown as old as he is. Before that, one does not have the faculties for it. That is why he must share his experiences with me. That is why I am bound to his insights, because only he can tell me these things. Certainly, I will grow to be just as old as he is. But I will not know this until thirty-five to forty years later. By then, time will have moved on, and I will have learned something different.

[ 26 ] In the depths of the world’s spiritual life lies, as it were, a chain that stretches from the past into the future, and which generations must take up, carry forward, forge, and develop. This chain was broken during the age of intellectualism. This was felt to the greatest extent by young people at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Do you feel that you sensed something like this, even if you were unable to express it at the time? Do you feel that, by feeling this way, you are perceiving it correctly? And when you feel this, you will experience the true significance of today’s youth movement, which has—and must have—a Janus-like nature, because it is directed toward the experience of the spiritual—an experience of the spiritual that pursues thought so far that it becomes will, the innermost human impulse.

[ 27 ] We have now explored the will in its most abstract form, as an idea. In the coming days, we will explore it further in the deeper realms of the human being.