The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] We will now have to gradually put these things in place, as we hinted at yesterday. As you will have seen from what was discussed yesterday, there will be much to transform and renew, even in the very specifics of teaching.

[ 2 ] Now think back a little to what I just said in the previous lecture. If you consider what I have just said, you can actually view the human being as a being that carries within itself three centers, in which sympathy and antipathy constantly encounter one another. So we can say that antipathy and sympathy already encounter one another in the head. We can simply put it schematically: Let’s assume that at a certain point in the head the nervous system is interrupted for the first time; sensory perceptions penetrate, and the antipathy emanating from the human being meets them. On such an occasion, you see that you must think of each individual system within the whole human being, for sensory activity as such is actually a subtle limb activity, so that sympathy initially prevails in the sensory sphere, and antipathy is sent out from the nervous system. So when you create a mental image of the act of seeing, a kind of sympathy develops within the eye itself—the blood vessels of the eye; antipathy permeates this sympathy—the nervous system of the eye. This is how vision comes about.

[ 3 ] But a second encounter between sympathy and antipathy—one that is now more important to us—takes place in the center of the human being. There, sympathy and antipathy meet again, so that in the human being’s middle system—the chest system—we also have an encounter between sympathy and antipathy. Here, the whole human being is active once more, for while sympathy and antipathy meet within us in the chest, we are conscious of this. But you also know that this encounter is expressed in the fact that, let’s say, after receiving a stimulus, we quickly perform a reflex movement—not thinking much about it—but rather swiftly pushing back anything that threatens us with danger, simply instinctively. Such more subconscious reflex movements are then also reflected in the brain, in the soul, and through this, the whole process takes on a kind of pictorial character once again. We accompany in images what takes place within our chest as an encounter between sympathy and antipathy. As a result, we no longer fully recognize that this is based on an encounter between sympathy and antipathy. But something is happening in the chest that is extraordinarily closely connected to the whole of a person’s life. An encounter between sympathy and antipathy is taking place that is extraordinarily significant in relation to our outer life.

[ 4 ] We develop a certain activity within the whole human being that functions as sympathy—an activity of sympathy. And we allow this activity of sympathy to constantly interplay with a cosmic activity of antipathy within our “chest-human.” The expression of these sympathetic and antipathetic activities, which encounter one another, is human speech. And a clear accompaniment to this encounter between sympathy and antipathy in the chest, mediated by the brain, is the understanding of speech. We follow speech with understanding. In speech, there is essentially an activity taking place in the chest and a parallel activity taking place in the head; the difference is that in the chest this activity is much more real, whereas in the head it is attenuated to a mental image. When you speak, you are in fact constantly engaged in the activity of the chest and, at the same time, accompany it with the mental image of that activity—the activity of the head. You will thus easily see that speaking is fundamentally based on a continuous rhythm of sympathetic and antipathetic effects, just like feeling. Language is also initially rooted in feeling. And the fact that we associate language with content that coincides with thought stems from the fact that we accompany the content of feeling with the content of cognition, with the content of imagination. However, one will only understand language if one first truly conceives of it as rooted in human feeling.

[ 5 ] Language is, in fact, anchored in human feeling in two ways. First, in everything that a person brings to the world through their feelings. What does a person bring to the world through their feelings? Let’s take a distinct feeling, a distinct emotional nuance—for example, wonder or amazement. As long as we remain within the human being—this microcosm—on a soul level, we are dealing with wonder and amazement. When we are able to establish the cosmic connection, the cosmic relationship that can be linked to this emotional nuance of amazement, then amazement becomes the “O.” The sound “O” is, in essence, nothing other than the effect of breathing within us, such that this breathing is gripped internally by wonder and astonishment. You can therefore understand the “O” as the expression of wonder and astonishment.

[ 6 ] In recent times, the external view of the world has always linked language to external phenomena. People have asked themselves: Where do the connections between sounds and their meanings come from? It has not occurred to them that all things in the world make an emotional impression on human beings. In some way, every single thing affects human feeling, even if often very subtly, so that it remains half-unconscious. But we will never have a thing before us that we designate with a word containing the sound “O” unless we are somehow filled with wonder at that thing, even if that wonder is very subtle. When you say “Ofen,” you are using a word that contains “OÖ” because there is something in “Ofen” that expresses a subtle sense of wonder within you. In this way, language is rooted in human emotion. You are emotionally connected to the entire world and assign sounds to the entire world that express this emotional connection in some way.

[ 7 ] People used to take these things very literally. It was believed that language imitated the way an animal barks or growls. Based on this, a theory was developed—the famous linguistic “woof-woof theory”—according to which everything is imitated. The danger with these theories is that they are half-truths. By imitating the dog and saying “woof-woof”—and here lies the nuance expressed in the “au”—I thereby place myself in the dog’s state of mind. The sound is formed not in the sense of this theory, but rather through the indirect process of placing oneself in the dog’s state of mind. — Another theory holds that every object in the world contains a sound within it, just as, for example, a bell contains its own sound. Based on this view, the so-called “Bimbam theory” has emerged. These two theories—the “Wauwau theory” and the “Bimbam theory”—do exist. However, one can only understand humans if one accepts that language is the expression of the emotional world and the emotional relationships we develop toward things.

[ 8 ] Another emotional nuance in our attitude toward things is the one we feel toward emptiness—or toward black, which is, after all, related to emptiness—or toward everything related to black: it is the nuance of fear, the nuance of anxiety. It is expressed by the “U.” Toward the full, the white, the bright, and everything related to the bright or the white—including the sound associated with the bright—we have the emotional nuance of admiration, of reverence: the “A.” If we feel that we must ward off an external impression—that we must, so to speak, turn away from it in order to protect ourselves—if, in other words, we feel a sense of resistance, then this is expressed by the “E.” And if, conversely, we feel the opposite—a sense of pointing toward, of drawing near, of becoming one—then this is expressed by the “I.”

[ 9 ] With this, we have covered—we will go into the details later, including the diphthongs—the most important vowels, though there is one more vowel to consider that is less common in European regions and conveys a stronger meaning than all the others. If you try to produce a vowel by making a sound in which A, O, and U are actually resonating, this implies an initial sense of awe, yet a willingness to immerse yourself in what was initially feared. It is the highest form of reverence that would be expressed through this sound. This sound is, after all, very common, especially in Oriental languages, but it also proves that Orientals are people capable of developing a great deal of reverence, whereas it has been omitted from Western languages because there are people there for whom reverence is simply not in their nature.

[ 10 ] This has given us a picture of what is expressed as an inner stirring of the soul in the vowels. All vowels express inner stirrings of the soul that manifest themselves in sympathy with things. For even if we fear something, this fear is based on some secret sympathy. We would not have this fear at all if we did not have a secret sympathy for that thing. When observing these things, you need only keep one thing in mind. It is relatively easy to observe that the “O” has something to do with wonder, the “U” with fear and anxiety, the “A” with reverence and admiration, the “E” with resistance, the “I” with drawing near, and the “AOU” with awe. But your observation is clouded by the fact that you easily confuse the nuance of feeling one experiences when hearing the sound with the one experienced when pronouncing it. The two are different. With regard to the nuances I have mentioned, you must bear in mind that they apply to the communication of the sound. In other words, this applies when you want to convey something to someone through the sound. If you want to tell someone that you yourself were afraid, you express it through the “U” sound. It is not the same nuance when you yourself are afraid, or when you want to instill fear in another person by producing the “U” sound. Rather, you get the resonance of your own emotion when you want to instill fear—for example, when you say to a child: “U-u-u!” — This is important to keep in mind in the social context of speech. If you take this into account, you can easily arrive at this observation.

[ 11 ] What is felt there is, after all, a purely inner process of the soul. This psychological process, which is actually based entirely on the effect of sympathy, can be met with antipathy from the outside. This happens through the consonants, through the consonant sounds. When we combine a consonant with a vowel, we are always intertwining sympathy and antipathy, and our tongue, our lips, and our palate are actually there to assert themselves as organs of antipathy, to keep things at bay. If we were to speak only in vowels, we would be nothing but devoted to things. We would actually merge with things, would be very unselfish, for we would develop our deepest sympathy with things; we would only emotionally withdraw somewhat from things through the nuances of sympathy—for example, when we feel fear or horror—but even in this withdrawal from things, sympathy would still be present. Just as the vowels refer to the sound of ourselves, so do the consonants refer to things; there, the things resonate along with us.

[ 12 ] Therefore, you will find that vowels must be sought out as nuances of feeling. Consonants—F, B, M, and so on—must be sought out as imitations of external things. So, when I showed you the “F” in the word “fish” yesterday, I was correct insofar as I was imitating the shape of the external fish. Consonants can always be traced back to imitations of external things, whereas vowels, on the other hand, stem from the very elementary expression of human emotional nuances toward things. Therefore, you can understand language as nothing less than an encounter between antipathy and sympathy. Sympathies always lie in the vowels, while antipathies always lie in the consonants.

[ 13 ] But we can also understand the formation of language in another way. We can ask: What, exactly, is this sympathy that manifests itself in the “chest-oriented” person, such that it brings antipathy to a halt, while the “head-oriented” person merely accompanies it? What underlies this is, in reality, something musical that has crossed a certain boundary. Something musical underlies it and goes beyond a certain boundary, leaping over it, so to speak, becoming more than just something musical. That is to say: To the extent that language consists of vowels, it has a musical quality; to the extent that it consists of consonants, it has a plastic, pictorial quality. And in speech there is a true synthesis, a true union of musical and plastic elements within the human being.

[ 14 ] You can therefore see that speech conveys, with a kind of unconscious nuance, not only what individual people are like, but also, and in particular, what human communities are like. In German, we say *Kopf*. In its full context, *Kopf* expresses roundness and form. That is why we do not only call the human head “Kopf,” but we also say *Kohlkopf* (cabbage head). In German, we express form through the word *Kopf*. The Romance languages do not express the form of the head; they say *testa* and thereby express something psychological. It conveys that the head is the witness, the testator, the one who makes a determination. It derives the term for the head from an entirely different foundation. It points to emotional sympathy on the one hand and to the fusion of antipathy with the external on the other. — First, try to clarify for yourself, based on the main vowel, what the difference is: Kopf, o = wonder, amazement! There is an element of wonder and amazement in the soul toward anything round, because the round in itself is connected to everything that evokes wonder and amazement. Take “testa”: the e = to offer resistance. One must assert oneself, offer resistance, when the other asserts something; otherwise, one would merge with them. This emotional nuance is expressed very well when the folk character is pitted against the act of testifying, in the “Kopf.”

[ 15 ] Thus, if you take these things into account, you will be led away from the abstract notion of simply looking at what is in the dictionary: this word for one language, that word for another. But the words of individual languages are drawn from entirely different contexts here and there. It is purely superficial to simply compare them, and lexicographical translation is, fundamentally, the worst kind of translation. When we have the word “Fuß” in German, it is connected to this: we step on something, we make a hollow, a furrow. “Fuß” is connected to “furrow.” We derive the name for the foot from what it does—from making furrows. The Romance languages, with “pes,” derive it from standing firm, having a standpoint. This branch of linguistics—which would be “semantic linguistics”—is extraordinarily helpful to pedagogy, yet we do not yet have it in academia, and we can already answer the question: Why do we not yet have these things in academia, even though they could truly be of practical help?

[ 16 ] We do not yet have them because we are still in the process of developing what we need for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, particularly in the area of education. If you approach language in this way—as pointing to the inner in the vowels and to the outer in the consonants—then you will be able to easily find illustrations for the consonants. Then you will not merely need to apply what I will present in the coming hours as images of consonants, but you will be able to create your own images, and through this you will achieve an inner connection with the children—which is far better than merely absorbing the external image.

[ 17 ] In this way, we have come to recognize language as a relationship between human beings and the cosmos. For human beings, on their own, would remain stuck in admiration and wonder; it is only their relationships to the cosmos that evoke admiration and wonder for that which has a voice.

[ 18 ] Now, human beings are embedded in the cosmos in a certain way, and one can observe this inner presence of human beings within the cosmos even through purely external considerations. I am saying this now because—as you saw in yesterday’s lecture—much depends on our emotional attitude toward the developing human being, on our ability to truly revere in the developing human being a mysterious manifestation of the entire cosmos. An immense amount depends on our ability to develop this feeling as educators and teachers.

[ 19 ] Now, taking a slightly broader perspective, consider the significant fact that a person takes about 18 breaths per minute. How many breaths do they take in 4 minutes? 18 times 4 = 72 breaths. How many breaths do they take in a day? 18 times 60 times 24 = 25,920 breaths a day. But I can also calculate it by taking the number of breaths in 4 minutes, which is 72. Instead of multiplying by 24 times 60, I would then only need to multiply the number of breaths in 4 minutes—that is, 72—by 6 times 60, or 360, and I would also get 25,920 breaths per day: 360 times 72 = 25,920. One could say: over the course of 4 minutes, the breathing process consists of inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling—in a sense, a small daily cycle; and since we have multiplied this number by 360, the other total of 25,920 represents, by contrast, an annual cycle, and the 24-hour day is equivalent to one year for our breathing. Now consider our larger breathing process, which consists of our daily alternation between waking and sleeping. What, after all, do waking and sleeping really mean? Waking and sleeping mean that we are also exhaling and inhaling something. We exhale the “I” and the astral body when we fall asleep, and we inhale them again when we wake up. We do this within 24 hours. If we take this one day and want to scale it to the course of a year, we must multiply it by 360. This means that over the course of a year, we accomplish something similar in this breathing process to what occurs in the small breathing cycle of a single day—where we multiplied by 360 what happens in 4 minutes; if we multiply by 360 the time between waking and falling asleep—which takes place over the course of a day—we get what happens in a year; and if we now multiply one year by our average lifespan, that is, by 72, we get 25,920 again. Now you actually already have a twofold breathing process: our inhaling and exhaling, which happens 72 times in 4 minutes and 25,920 times in a day; our waking up and falling asleep, which happens every day, 360 times a year, and 25,920 times over the course of a lifetime. — Then there is a third kind of breathing when you follow the sun’s orbit. You know that the point where the sun rises in the spring seems to advance a little each year, and in this way the sun completes a full circuit around the entire ecliptic in 25,920 years, in fits and starts; so here, too, we find the number 25,920 in the planetary world year.

[ 20 ] How is our life situated within the world? We live an average of 72 years. If you multiply this number by 360, you get 25,920 again. So you can form a mental image of the Platonic year—the sun’s cycle through the cosmos, which is completed in 25,920 years—as having our human life as its day, so that, given our place in human life, we can regard the process that unfolds throughout the entire cosmos as a year as a single breath; we can understand our human lifespan as a day in the great cosmic year, so that we can once again revere the smallest process as the reflection of the great cosmic process. If one looks at it more closely, then through the Platonic year—that is, what happens within the Platonic year—one gains a reflection of the entire process that unfolds from the ancient Saturn evolution through the solar, lunar, and terrestrial evolutions, and so on, all the way to Vulcan. But all processes that unfold in the manner described are ordered as breathing processes according to the number 25,920. And in what unfolds for us in the time from waking to falling asleep, there is once again expressed what took place during the Lunar evolution, is taking place during the Earth evolution, and will take place during the Jupiter evolution. This expresses what makes us members of the extraterrestrial realm. And what takes place in our smallest breathing process—which unfolds over four minutes—is what makes us earthly human beings. We must therefore say: We are earthly human beings through our breathing process; through our alternation between waking and falling asleep, we are lunar, earthly, and Jovian human beings; and through the fact that our life course is integrated into the cycles of the world year, we are cosmic human beings. For cosmic life, for the entire planetary system, a single breath encompasses one day of our existence, and our 72 years of life are one day for that being whose organs form the planetary system. Overcome the illusion that you are a limited human being; understand what you are as a process, as an event in the cosmos—which is what it truly is—and then you can say: I myself am a breath of the cosmos.

[ 21 ] If you interpret this to mean that the theoretical aspect is of no interest to you, that it is merely a process, and that, in a sense, it was enough for you to have heard it just once—but if, on the other hand, you take away a feeling from it: the feeling of infinite reverence for that which mysteriously expresses itself in every human being—then this feeling will crystallize within you into what must underlie teaching and education. We cannot approach future education by, so to speak, carrying the external life of adults into the educational process. It is a terrifying—utterly terrifying—vision that in the future, on the basis of democratic elections, people will gather in parliaments to make decisions about matters of teaching and education, relying at most on the expert opinions of individuals who have no deeper understanding of the subject than their democratic sensibilities. If this were to come to pass as it now appears to be unfolding in Russia, it would mean that the Earth would lose its purpose, be deprived of its purpose, be removed from the cosmos, and become Ahrimanized.

[ 22 ] Now is the time when human beings must draw what pertains to education from an understanding of the relationship between the human being and the cosmos. We must imbue all our educational efforts with the feeling that the developing human being stands before us, yet is the continuation of what took place in the supersensible realm before the human being was born or even conceived. This feeling should arise from the kind of insight we have just linked to our consideration of vowels and consonants. This feeling must permeate us. And only when this feeling truly permeates us will we be able to teach correctly. For do not believe that this feeling is fruitless! Human beings are organized in such a way that, with properly oriented feeling, they draw guiding forces from these very feelings. If you do not attain this insight—which leads one to view every human being as a cosmic mystery—then you will be able to attain only the feeling that you view every human being as a mechanism; and in the cultivation of this feeling—that the human being is merely a mechanism—would lie the very downfall of earthly culture. The rise of earthly culture, on the other hand, can only be sought in the permeation of our educational impulse with a sense of the cosmic significance of the whole human being. This cosmic sense, however, as you can see, arises for us only when we regard what lies in human feeling as belonging to the time enclosed between birth and death; what lies in human mental image points us, on the one hand, toward the pre-birth realm, and what lies in human will points us, on the other hand, toward the afterlife, toward the embryonic future. When we consider the threefold human being, we first have before us the pre-birth stage, then what lies between birth and death, and thirdly the post-death stage—except that the pre-birth stage projects itself figuratively into our existence, while the post-death stage is already present within us in a germinal form before death.

[ 23 ] It is only through such things that you can gain a mental image of what actually happens in reality when people interact with one another. When one reads older works on pedagogy—for example, Herbart’s pedagogy, which was outstanding for its time—one always has the feeling that people are operating with concepts through which they cannot even approach reality; they remain outside of reality. Just consider how sympathy, when truly developed in the earthly sense, permeates all volition; that is, what lies within us as a seed of the future, as a seed of the afterlife through the will, is permeated by love and sympathy. Consequently—not merely figuratively, but in reality—everything connected with volition must be pursued with very special love in education as well, so that it may be properly restrained or nurtured. We will have to support the sympathy that is already present in the individual by addressing his or her will. What, then, must the actual impulse for the education of the will be? It can be nothing other than our own development of sympathy toward the student. The greater the sympathy we develop toward him or her, the better our methods of education will be.

[ 24 ] And now you will say: Since intellectual education is the opposite of volitional education—because it is permeated by antipathy—we would indeed have to develop antipathies if we were to educate the pupil with regard to his mind, his intellect! That is correct, but you must understand it properly. You must place these antipathies on the right foundation. You must try to truly understand the pupil himself if you want to educate him properly for his future life. The antipathetic element is already present in this understanding, for it belongs to this side. By understanding the student, by trying to penetrate all the nuances of his being, you become the educator, the teacher of his mind, of his cognition. The aversions are already inherent in this; you simply turn the aversion into something positive by educating the student. And you can be absolutely certain: We are not brought together in life without certain conditions being present. What appear to be external events are, in fact, always the outward expression of inner realities, however strange this may seem to an external view of the world. The fact that you are now here to teach and educate the Waldorf children—and everything connected with them—points to the karmic bond between this group of teachers and this particular group of children. And you will become the right teacher for these children precisely because you once developed antipathies toward them in earlier times, and you free yourself from these by now educating these children’s intellects. And we must develop sympathies in the right way by fostering the formation of the will in the right way.

[ 25 ] So let this be clear to you: the best way to gain insight into the dual nature of the human being is to try to do so as we did in our seminar discussion. But you must try to gain insight into all aspects of the human being. Through what we attempted in the seminar, you will become a good educator for the child’s imaginative life. You will become a good educator for the child’s volitional life if you try to surround each individual with sympathy—with genuine sympathy. These things are also part of education: antipathy, which enables us to understand—sympathy, which enables us to love. Because we have a body and, through it, experience a place where sympathy and antipathy meet, this also creeps into the social interactions among people that are expressed in education and teaching. I ask you to think this through and feel it deeply; then we will be able to move forward tomorrow.