The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Although, on the one hand, in the age of the development of the conscious soul, the most abstract element comes to life within the human being, on the other hand, there remains the fact that in the subconscious—in longings, in what the human being desires from life—the most concrete elements strive to emerge into existence.

[ 2 ] On the one hand, people today who are growing into the Age of the Conscious Soul are immersed in their abstract intellectual ideas. On the other hand, however—if I may put it this way—there exists, outside the head, a longing to experience more than what the head is capable of experiencing. After all, human beings initially have only one relationship with nature—one that is formed precisely between their head and nature: everything that people today take in through their scientific understanding of nature is valid for them only insofar as they have acquired it through their head. Today, the human head actually always stands between the human being and nature. It is as if everything that comes to a person from the world were to pile up in the mind, as if the mind were completely clogged—forgive the harsh expression—so that, through its thick layers, it lets nothing through that could become a relationship with the world. Everything gets stuck in the head; one thinks everything through solely with the head. But one cannot live as a mere head; after all, the rest of the organism is attached to the head. The life of this rest of the organism remains dull and unconscious because the human being channels everything toward the head. And that is where everything comes to a standstill. The rest of the human being receives nothing from the world because the head allows nothing to reach it. The mind has gradually become insatiable. It wants everything from the outside world, and the person must then live with their heart—with the rest of their organism—as if they had never entered this world at all, as if they had nothing to do with this environment.

[ 3 ] But this remaining organism develops desire, will, and the capacity for longing, and these then feel isolated. Because, for example, the eyes capture all colors but allow only a faint remnant of them to be experienced in the head, the colors cannot travel downward; they cannot enter the blood or the nervous system located outside the head. Human beings are now aware of the world only within their heads. Yet they possess an all the more intense capacity for desire to connect with the world in some way through the rest of their organism as well. In the growing human being, there lives a desire not only to engage with the world through the mind, but also through the rest of the organism—to learn to think, to learn to experience the world not only with the mind, but with the whole person.

[ 4 ] This ability to experience the world with one’s whole being is, in fact, something we possess today only at an age that we must leave behind early on. For everything I have just said refers to the adult. A child before losing its baby teeth still has the ability to perceive the world with its whole being. For example, one would be very much mistaken to believe that a child experiences things as abstractly as an adult does when, as an infant, it is fed milk. When an adult drinks milk today, they taste it on their tongue—perhaps also in the area surrounding the tongue—but they lose the taste sensation once the milk has passed through their throat. One might well ask why the stomach should be any less capable of tasting than the palate. It is not that the stomach can taste any less; it can taste just as well—it is simply that the mind is an insatiable entity that, in adults, monopolizes all “tastes.” The child, however, tastes with its entire organism; it tastes with its stomach as well. The infant is entirely a sensory organ. There is nothing within it that is not a sensory organ. The infant tastes through and through. People only forget this later, and this tasting with the entire organism is already impaired when one learns to speak, for that is when the head, which must participate in learning to speak, becomes active and develops the first stage of its insatiability. In exchange for devoting itself to learning to speak, it also withholds from itself the pleasure of tasting. So even with regard to this “tasting the world,” one loses this total relationship to the world very early on. Now, this “tasting the world” is not particularly important in and of itself; but in other respects, a total human relationship to the world really does matter an extraordinary amount.

[ 5 ] You see, one can, for example, come to know an important philosopher, such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in various ways. Each way is valid; I do not wish to single out any one of those I am about to list. But even though it is something extraordinarily beautiful and one gains a great deal from delving into Fichte’s philosophy—which, admittedly, not very many people do anymore because they find it too difficult— people could have gained even more from it had they once followed that Fichte with total human sensitivity and seen how he always stepped with the entire sole of his foot, especially with his heel. In this way of walking of Johann Gottlieb Fichte—this peculiar way of planting his heel on the ground—lies an immense power. For people who could witness every step, Fichte’s manner of walking would have been a more intense philosophy than anything he could have told people from the lectern. It sounds grotesque, but perhaps you will sense what I mean by this.

[ 6 ] Such things have been completely lost on people today. If you were a child not just twenty but fifty years ago, you can still remember how such a philosophy was very much alive among people in the countryside. That’s how people used to get to know one another, and many a dialect expression, in its immense vividness, reveals how what people today see only in their minds was once perceived in the whole person. For example, people would say of a certain “lady” in the countryside—let me put it this way—“She’s blowing her nose.” Yes, among us “intellectuals,” “schneuzen” means blowing one’s nose—perhaps in a manner not quite proper for the house. That’s not what it meant back then. Back then, the whole person “schneuzen.” The way they walked, the way they carried themselves, the way they placed one foot in front of the other—their entire demeanor—that was “schneuzen.” A “schneuzen” that encompassed the whole person, which people found akin to that not-quite-proper way of blowing one’s nose.

[ 7 ] As I said, that has been lost. People have reduced themselves to their heads, and they have come to believe that the head is the most valuable part of a human being. But this has not made them the happiest, because the rest of human nature continues to assert its claims in the subconscious. But the experience of the world through something other than the head is, in fact, completely lost to people today with the onset of early childhood and the change of teeth. If you have an eye for it, you will be able to recognize the gait of a father or mother in their son or daughter even after two or three decades. The child has assimilated so completely into the adults around them that what they sensed there has become part of their own nature. But this assimilation is no longer considered culture in our society. Culture, for us, has become what the mind observes and what can be worked out with the help of the mind. Sometimes people even dispense with the mind altogether; then they write everything down and file it away in archives. There it goes from the mind into the hair, and there they cannot preserve it, because by the age of thirty they no longer have any hair.

[ 8 ] But I am certainly not saying all this just for fun, nor to criticize anything, for this is part of humanity’s necessary development. People had to become this way in order to find, through inner effort and inner activity, what they can no longer find naturally—in other words, to attain the possibility of experiencing freedom.

[ 9 ] Therefore, once children have gone through the change of teeth, we must transition to a different way of experiencing the environment than this “experiencing with the whole person” that is still present in children, and elementary school education in the future must be based on young people acquiring—through the detour via the artistic, as I characterized it yesterday—the ability to perceive the entire soul of another person through their outer being. If one seeks to educate a person with abstract scientific content, that person will experience nothing of your soul. They experience something of your soul only when you approach them artistically, for in the arts, everyone must be an individual; in the arts, everyone is different. The scientific ideal, after all, is precisely that everyone is the same as everyone else. It would be a lovely idea—as people say these days—if everyone taught a different science. But that cannot be, because science is reduced to that which is the same for all people. In the arts, however, every person is an individual. Through the arts, therefore, an individual relationship between the child and the active, engaged adult can also develop, and that is necessary. Although this does not provide, as in the early years of childhood, a total physical perception of the other person, it does provide a total perception of the soul of the one who stands before you as a guide.

[ 10 ] Education must have a soul, but as a scientist, one cannot have a soul. One can only have a soul through one’s artistic nature. One can have a soul if one shapes science artistically through the manner of presentation, but not through the content of science as it is understood today. Science is not an individual matter. Therefore, it does not establish a relationship between leader and follower among children of compulsory school age. The entire educational process must be imbued with art and human individuality, and more than any contrived program, it is precisely the individuality of the teacher and educator that matters. It is this individuality that must be at work in the school.

[ 11 ] What actually develops between the leader and the follower when we consider the period between the loss of baby teeth and sexual maturity—what binds the two together? The only thing that binds the two together is what a person brings with them into earthly life from the supersensible spiritual worlds, from their pre-earthly existence. My dear friends, the intellect never acknowledges what a person brings with them from their pre-earthly existence. The intellect is predisposed to grasp only what is on earth, and on earth there is, after all, the physical human being. The intellect understands nothing of that which in another human being originates from their pre-earthly existence. In that particular human nuance, however, which the artistic impulse of the human soul imparts, there weaves and flows what the human being has brought down from their pre-earthly existence; and the child, especially between the change of teeth and puberty, is particularly predisposed to feel in their heart what they perceive in the teacher as originating from this pre-earthly existence. Just as the small child is predisposed to perceive the outer human form as it has taken shape within earthly life, so the child from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year seeks, through living among people, something that, without being capable of being grasped in concepts, lives within the guiding human being; something that is present in such a way that, if one were to try to grasp it in concepts, it would resist those defined concepts. Concepts have contours, that is, external boundaries. But what constitutes human individuality in the manner just described has no external boundaries; it has only intensity and quality, and is experienced as quality and intensity. One experiences it most acutely at the specified age, and one experiences it in no other atmosphere than the artistic one.

[ 12 ] But we do, after all, live in the age of the conscious soul. The primary wealth we acquire for our souls in this age consists of intellectual concepts—in fact, of abstractions. Even the farmer today is already a creature of abstractions. How could it be otherwise, since he devotes himself to the most abstract reading of all—the village newspaper and the like. Our wealth consists precisely in abstractions. Therefore, we must move beyond this way of thinking through the development I hinted at yesterday, by completely purifying our thinking and transforming it into will, shaping it into will. We must bring ourselves to strengthen our individuality ever more, and we can achieve this only by working our way toward this pure thinking. I say this not out of vain folly, but because that is how it appears to me. Anyone who works their way toward such pure thinking, as I indicated in my Philosophy of Freedom, will find that it is not at all a matter of possessing a set of concepts that constitute a philosophical system, but rather of grasping human individuality and its pre-earthly existence.

[ 13 ] One doesn’t have to become a clairvoyant right away. One would only be considered one if one could perceive pre-earthly existence. But one can confirm the truth of what has been said by attaining that strength of will which is acquired through the pure flow of thought. That is where individuality emerges. One does not feel at all at ease with a philosophical system in which one concept interlocks with another and everything has fixed contours; rather, one feels compelled to be part of something living and ever-changing within it. It is a special kind of spiritual life that one acquires when one truly lives through what is meant by the “Philosophy of Freedom.”

[ 14 ] It is truly the drawing of pre-earthly existence into human life that can be achieved through this, and thus it serves as preparation for the vocation of the teacher, the instructor, and the educator. We cannot become educators through study alone. We cannot train others to be educators, if only because each of us is one. There is an educator within every human being; but this educator lies dormant—he must be awakened—and art is the means to that awakening. When this is developed, it brings the educator, as a human being, closer to those he wishes to guide. On a human level, the person being educated must draw close to the educator; they must share something of the educator’s humanity. It would be dreadful if anyone were to believe that they could be an educator simply by knowing a great deal or—in the sense of knowledge—by “being able to do” a great deal, as one might even say today. This leads to a tremendous absurdity, which you can grasp if you consider the following image.

[ 15 ] You have a school class with perhaps thirty students. Among them, let’s say, there are two geniuses—or even just one; that’s enough. Now, whenever we have to staff a school, we can’t always assign just such a genius as a teacher so that the future genius can learn as much from the teacher as he or she needs to. You might say that this doesn’t matter in elementary school, since a genius will go on to high school anyway, and there he or she will certainly find the geniuses he or she needs as teachers. But you couldn’t maintain that argument, because experience contradicts it. One must therefore admit that it is entirely possible for a teacher to find himself facing children who are destined to become more intelligent than he is himself. The pedagogical task, then, consists not merely in bringing the children up to the level of intelligence that we ourselves possess, but to the level for which they are naturally predisposed.

[ 16 ] As educators, we may well find ourselves in a position where we have to draw upon something that is beyond us, and it is impossible to provide schools with enough teachers unless one takes the view that it does not matter if the teacher is not as intelligent as the student will one day be. He will nevertheless be able to be a good teacher, because what matters is not the transmission of knowledge, but individuality—bringing pre-earthly existence to life. Then the child actually educates himself through us, and that is as it should be; for in reality, it is not we who are educating him. We only interfere with the child’s education when we intervene too directly. We educate by behaving in such a way that, through our behavior, the child can educate itself. We send the child to elementary school so that we can remove the disruptive factors. The teacher’s role is to ensure that the child is removed from the circumstances under which it cannot develop. Therefore, we must be clear about this: we cannot force anything upon a person through instruction and education. But we can behave in such a way that the person, as they grow up, is able to bring forth the innate potential within them. We cannot do this, however, through what we know, but only through what is artistically alive within us. And even if the rare case were to arise that we, as teachers and educators, were not particularly gifted—one isn’t supposed to say that, but despite your youth movement, you are already old enough that I may say it— then a teacher who possesses even just a kind of instinctive artistic sensibility will present fewer obstacles to the child’s spiritual development than a teacher who is unartistic, even if that teacher is a tremendous scholar. After all, it is not difficult to be a tremendous scholar.

[ 17 ] These things must be stated once and for all with the utmost clarity. For if one merely states them clearly, our age will not hear them. Our age is terribly unreceptive to such things. And in the case of those who assure you that they have understood all of this, it often becomes apparent after thirty years that they have understood nothing at all. The point, then, is that the soul’s configuration in a human being constitutes the essence of pedagogical work—of teaching and upbringing—for the stage of a child’s life from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. Later, a person enters a stage of life where, precisely in the age of the conscious soul, even deeper forces must rise up from human nature if people are to have any influence on one another.

[ 18 ] You see, the nature of the feelings one person has toward another is, after all, something incredibly complicated. And if you wanted to define the range of sympathies and antipathies—and the interplay of the sympathies and antipathies—that you feel toward another person, you would never be able to finish defining it. Not even in fifty years would you be able to formulate a definition for what you can experience in five minutes of human interaction. Before puberty, it is primarily the experience of the pre-earthly realm. It shines through every hand gesture, every glance, and the intonation of words. Essentially, it is the timbre that permeates the child through the educator’s gestures, words, and thoughts—and what the child seeks.

[ 19 ] And when we, as adults—so mature that we have reached the age of fifteen or sixteen, or have gone beyond that into the infinite—encounter other people, the matter becomes even more complicated. Then what in a person repels or attracts others is truly shrouded in a darkness that is impenetrable to the abstract world of concepts. But if we investigate, with the help of anthroposophical spiritual science, what it actually is—that which can be experienced in five minutes yet cannot be described even after fifty years—then it is that which extends from a previous life or a series of previous earthly lives into the soul’s present life, and which is exchanged between souls. This indeterminate, indefinable quality that comes over us when we, as adults, face another adult—that is what shines from that person’s past earthly life into our own past earthly lives, and vice versa. It is not only pre-earthly existence that is at work here, but everything that a person has ever experienced, as a matter of destiny, in their successive earthly lives.

[ 20 ] And when we consider these mutual influences, we see that—because today, in the age of the conscious soul, everything we take in from our surroundings accumulates in the head and does not reach the whole human being—our present-day “head” culture stands in opposition to that which alone can have an effect from one human being to another. People pass each other by because they look at one another only with their heads or, shall we say, with their eyes—I do not mean to say that they bash each other’s heads in. People pass each other by because the only thing that can take effect from one human being to another is what carries over from repeated earthly lives, yet today’s culture does nothing to develop a sense for this carrying-over. This must be incorporated into our education and our teaching: that as adults, we have the ability to sense and feel that deeper aspect within a person—what carries over from previous earthly lives. This cannot be achieved unless we learn to include the whole of human life, as it unfolds on Earth, in our education.

[ 21 ] Today, people really only have a sense of the immediate present. That is why, even when it comes to education, the only question asked is what is best for the child. But this question does little to serve life. First, because the question is posed one-sidedly, one will receive only a one-sided answer. Second, one should educate the child for life as a whole, not just for the classroom or for the brief period after school, so that the child does not bring shame upon us. But to do this, one must have an understanding of certain imponderables of life, of the unity of the whole of human life, as it unfolds on earth.

[ 22 ] You know, there are people who, once they have reached a certain age, have such an effect through their very presence that those around them perceive that presence as a blessing. Such people do exist. If one were to investigate how these people came to be a blessing to those around them—not through their actions, but through their very being—one would discover that such people once experienced kindness themselves, looking up to a revered authority figure as children in a natural way and being able to revere them. They went through this at the right stage of life. Because they were once able to revere someone themselves, they become a blessing to those around them many years later. One can express this—I would say—paradigmatically by saying: There are people who can bless. There aren’t many of them, but there are people who, in later life, attain the power to bless. This stems from the fact that they learned to pray in their childhood. Here you have two acts that are causally linked: praying and blessing. No one learns to bless unless they learn it through prayer. This should not be understood in a sentimental way, but rather without any mystical overtones—just as one observes a natural phenomenon, except that this phenomenon is closer to us as human beings.

[ 23 ] A child must, of course, be able to grow in accordance with its nature. If you were to invent a device that would keep it at a certain size—one that would prevent it from growing and force it to remain as it is for the rest of its life—you would be doing something monstrously wrong. A person must be able to grow. At school, however, we teach children concepts that we regard as ideal: they are supposed to remain that way throughout their entire lives. The child is supposed to commit them to memory, and they are supposed to remain the same fifty years from now as they are today. Through our textbooks, the child’s soul is shaped in such a way that it must remain small. The right approach is to educate the child so that all its concepts can grow, so that its concepts and its impulses of will remain alive. It is not very convenient, but the artistic approach to education succeeds in doing this. And the child experiences it differently when we teach them living concepts instead of dead ones, for unconsciously they know: What is taught to me grows with me, just as my arms grow with me.

[ 24 ] It is heartbreaking when a child is raised to define a concept and then be expected to “possess” it within that definition. It is truly as if one were trying to constrain one’s limbs within a machine. The child must be given images capable of growth, which will become something entirely different in ten to twenty years. Only by imparting such images capable of growth can we encourage the child to empathize with what is often hidden in the depths of another human individuality. You can see how complex these connections are: we learn to develop a deeper relationship with people by being allowed to grow spiritually during our youth.

[ 25 ] What does it mean to “experience” another person? You cannot experience another person through lifeless concepts. You can only understand another person when you come face to face with them and it becomes an experience that moves you deeply from within. But this requires inner vitality. Today, people go from breakfasts to dinners to tea parties without knowing much about one another. However, people today still know the most about themselves, relatively speaking. But how do they instinctively frame their experiences? How do they judge the many people they encounter at breakfasts or dinners? At most, they judge as follows: Is he like me, or is he different? — And if one believes he is like oneself, then the other person is a decent fellow. But if he is not like oneself, then he is not a decent fellow, and one pays him no mind. And since most people aren’t like you, you might at most sometimes believe—because it eventually becomes too dull not to find a real guy at all—that you’ve found someone who’s just like you. But in reality, you don’t find another person this way; you only ever find yourself. You see yourself in every other person. For many people, this is actually quite good, because if they were to encounter someone who, while not perfect for them, is nonetheless a real person to a certain degree, and if they were to grasp that person, it would be such a powerful experience that it would completely drown out their own sense of self. With the second person, their sense of self would be drowned out even more, and by the third and fourth, they wouldn’t even be able to get close—they would have already lost themselves. They simply haven’t developed enough inner strength and vitality, enough core, enough individuality, so that, out of fear of losing themselves, they are unwilling to truly experience other people. And so they pass each other by.

[ 26 ] That is why the most important thing is for us to develop a form of education through which people can once again learn to live together. This cannot be achieved through empty phrases. It can only be achieved through an art of education grounded in a true understanding of human nature—precisely the art of education we are discussing here. But on the whole, the intellectualist age has immersed all of life in intellectualism. In fact, as far as our institutions are concerned, in many ways we no longer live among human beings at all, but rather we live within an embodied intellect, entangled within it—not like a spider in its own web, but like countless flies that have become caught in a spider’s web.

[ 27 ] Do we even have any sense, when we come face to face with another person, of what that person might be to us? Do we even judge in such a humane way today? No, for the most part we don’t; instead, we ask whether there might be a small plaque on that person’s door bearing some title—for example, “Gerichtsadvokat,” as it’s called in Vienna, or “Rechtsanwalt” in Germany, or in another case, “Praktischer Arzt.” We know that this person can heal us! For another, it says “Professor of English.” Now we know what to expect from him. If we want to know something about chemistry, we have no choice but to ask whether there’s someone out there who has been awarded a degree in chemistry. Whatever he tells us is chemistry. And so it goes on. We are truly entangled in this web of terms. We do not live among people. What matters to us is what’s written on paper; for many people, that is the only point of reference. How else would they know what kind of person I am if it weren’t written on some piece of paper!

[ 28 ] This may all sound a bit radical, but it does indeed characterize our age. Intellectuality is no longer confined to our minds; rather, it truly surrounds us everywhere. We are guided solely by concepts. We are not guided by human impulses.

[ 29 ] I was still quite young when I met the Austrian poet Hermann Rollett in Baden near Vienna; he has long since passed away. He believed that the right path was one leading toward intellectualism. At the same time, however, he had a deep-seated fear of it, because he sensed that it would take hold only of the human mind. And when I once visited him with Schröer, he spoke in a poetic manner about his deep-seated fear of culture. He said: “If you look at people today: they can’t even use their fingers properly; many can’t write; they get writer’s cramp; their fingers atrophy. When it comes down to it, they can’t even sew on a button—only tailors can do that. And not only will their fingers and limbs become clumsier, but they’ll also grow smaller; they’ll wither away, while their heads will grow ever larger.” — That’s how he described his poetic vision, and then he remarked that the time would come when only spheres of heads would roll across the earth.

[ 30 ] At the time, this struck me as a kind of cultural anxiety on the part of this man. He was a child of his time—that is, a materialist—and that is why he had been so deeply afraid that such minds would one day sweep across the earth. Physical heads, of course, will not do that; but the etheric and astral heads are already doing so today in a most alarming way. A sound education of youth must protect people from this. It must put people back on their feet and guide them so that they once again feel their heartbeat when they reflect on something, rather than merely acquiring knowledge. These are the things we must certainly take into account if we wish to immerse ourselves in what must become the guiding principle for the art of pedagogy, for the art of education, with a view to the future of humanity. I will try to elaborate on any further points to be made on this subject before you tomorrow.