The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] Today it will be necessary to examine various matters that can truly be understood only by setting aside certain prejudices—prejudices that have been deeply ingrained in humanity through a long process of education extending right up to the present. The task will be to grasp, in a sense, through a kind of spiritual ascent, some of what must be said today—things that will find further confirmation tomorrow—in order to gain insight into spiritual matters. You must bear in mind that when the demand is made that statements in the Spiritual Science be proven in the same way as in empirical natural science or in contemporary jurisprudence—and indeed in contemporary social science, which is essentially useless for public life—such proof actually does not get us very far. For this kind of proof—the true spiritual researcher must already carry it within himself. He must have trained himself precisely in the rigorous methods of modern natural science, including mathematical natural science. He must know how to prove things in that context, and he must, in turn, have incorporated this method of proof into the entire course of his inner life and developed it there into a higher level of knowledge. Consequently, it is usually the case that when the demand for conventional proof is made of the spiritual researcher, he is, in essence, generally very familiar with what is being asked of him, and has long since anticipated the objections that might be raised against him. In fact, he is a spiritual researcher in the true sense of the word—as spiritual research was characterized here yesterday—only if he has truly undergone rigorous training in contemporary scientific inquiry and if he is, at least in spirit, quite familiar with the results of current natural science. I must state this first, along with something else. For if one remains confined to the form of proof that has become ingrained in scientific practice today—namely, through the art of experimentation—one will never arrive at a form of knowledge that is socially applicable. In experimentation—even if one succumbs to the illusion that it is otherwise—one proceeds by following a certain direction and, in a sense, allowing the phenomena to confirm what lives in the ideas that one may have formulated as natural laws, or perhaps even mathematically.

[ 2 ] But if one is compelled to incorporate one’s knowledge—the content of one’s knowledge—into social judgment; in other words, if the ideas—the ideas formulated as laws—that one has acquired, say, through contemporary anthropology or biology or through Darwinism, are to have validity and permanence, no matter how advanced they may be—if one then wishes to incorporate these ideas into social knowledge, into a social understanding that can become practical—then the insights gained through the art of experimentation are of no use, simply because one cannot wait in the laboratory to see what becomes of our ideas when we transfer them into social life. It could easily happen that, as a result of such social experimentation, thousands upon thousands of people might die or starve, or otherwise fall into social misery. And a large part of our social misery is caused precisely by the fact that our ideas—having emerged from a purely experimental perspective—have gradually become too limited, too narrow to function in reality as they must if we truly wish to translate anything of social significance from thought and knowledge into practice. Now I have pointed out to you how the spiritual researcher, in order to attain such knowledge that simultaneously sheds light backward on nature, yet points forward toward social life—how the spiritual researcher must position himself in relation to the two boundaries that arise in our cognition: the one boundary found in the material realm, and the other found in the realm of consciousness. And I have shown you that, when it comes to the material realm—instead of passively letting our cognition roll on, so as to extrapolate all manner of mechanistic, atomistic, and molecularist worldviews into the metaphysical—we must instead pause at this boundary and develop something that does not yet exist in ordinary human life as a capacity for knowledge: we must develop inspiration there. On the other hand, I have shown you that if one wishes to grasp consciousness, one must not attempt to penetrate this consciousness with the concepts and ideas that have been sparked in one by the external natural world—as, for example, the Anglo-American associationist psychologists do. One must be clear that this consciousness is of such a nature that we simply cannot penetrate into it using these ideas that have been sparked by the external world. We must first step out of these ideas and enter the world of imaginative cognition. Thus, in seeking to know ourselves, we must fill the concepts and ideas with content so that they become images. And until the view of humanity that is now taking hold of the entire civilization—a view that has, in particular, Western origins—until this view gives way to imaginative cognition, we cannot make progress in properly positioning ourselves at this second boundary of ordinary human cognition.

[ 3 ] But one can say at the same time that humanity today has certainly reached a point in its development—having emerged from other, now historic forms—where such progress requires, on the one hand, inspiration, and on the other, imagination. And anyone who is able to study what is actually happening with humanity in the present—what is only beginning to show itself in its initial symptoms—knows how, I might say, forces rise up from the depths of human development that are definitely tending toward the introduction of inspiration and imagination into this human development in the proper way.

[ 4 ] Inspiration cannot be attained except by wrestling with a certain mental image, in the manner I have described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? and as I will describe—at least in outline—in my next lecture. But then, when one has progressed far enough through a certain inner self-cultivation, through systematic training in a specific type of mental image, through training in the life of the world of imagination, ideas, and concepts—when one has gone far enough in this—then one learns to recognize inwardly what it means to live in inspiration. For to begin with, it is the case that when one takes what is otherwise mathematized in our lives during the first seven years—up to the time of the change of teeth—and practices it not unconsciously, as happens in ordinary life and also in ordinary science, but rather practices it with full consciousness, when one immerses oneself, I might say, into a living mathematics, into a living mechanics—in other words, when one takes what otherwise works within us—the sense of balance, the sense of movement, sense of life—into full consciousness; when, so to speak, one tears from within oneself that which otherwise lives within us as a sense of balance, a sense of movement, a sense of life; when one tears it out in such a way that one lives within it through mathematical images—but through expanded mathematical images—then it is as if one were falling asleep, but one does not drift off into unconsciousness or into the nebulous world of dreams; rather, it is as if one were drifting into a new state of consciousness, which I would like to describe to you today—we will discuss all of this here tomorrow—for now, only to describe it. One grows into a state of consciousness in which one initially senses something like a soundless weaving—yes, I can’t call it anything else—a soundless weaving within a world music. One literally becomes—just as one becomes one’s body through one’s “I” in childhood—one becomes this weaving within a soundless world music. This weaving within a soundless world music gives rise to the other sensation of existence—one that must be rigorously demonstrated—that one is now outside one’s body with one’s soul-spiritual being. One begins to realize that one is also outside one’s body with one’s soul-spiritual being during sleep. But the experience of sleep is not permeated by that which, during such a conscious stepping out of the body through one’s own independence, vibrates through one; and at first one experiences something like an inner restlessness—this inner restlessness, which has a musical character in itself, when one fully and consciously immerses oneself in it. This, I might say, gradually brightens as what one experiences there—this musical quality—becomes something like a wordless revelation of words from the spiritual universe. Certainly, these things seem grotesque and paradoxical today to those hearing them for the first time. But much of what appeared in the course of world evolution, when it first emerged, seemed precisely paradoxical and grotesque. It is indeed true that one cannot make progress in human evolution if one wishes to pass by these phenomena unconsciously or semi-consciously. At first, it is merely an experience—I would say, a musical yet soundless experience. But then something emerges from this soundless experience, so that we are able to derive inner meaning from what we are experiencing there, just as we receive outer meaning when we listen to a person speaking to us through sensory words. The spiritual world simply begins to speak, and one need only gain experience of these things.

[ 5 ] And the next stage one progresses through is this: one not only weaves and lives within a soundless musical realm and does not merely perceive the speech of the supersensible spiritual realm, but one learns to give form to that which announces itself from the supersensible spiritual realm, into something substantial—so that, as it were, individual supersensible beings emerge from the general language of the spirit that one first learns, just as we, when listening to a person at a lower level, gradually crystallize or organize—if I may use this trivial expression—into something substantial what is revealed from their soul and their spiritual nature. We thus immerse ourselves in the observation and understanding of a real spiritual world. This spiritual world now takes the place of the empty, stripped-down, metaphysical world of atoms and molecules; it presents itself to us as that which truly lies behind the phenomena of the physical-sensory world. We no longer stand at the boundary toward the material world in the same way we do when we simply allow our conceptual musings—which, as it turns out, have been illuminated and ignited by our interaction with the physical-sensory external world—to roll on out of inertia; rather, we now stand at this boundary in such a way that the spiritual content of the world dawns upon us there. That is one aspect of it.

[ 6 ] And, my esteemed audience, humanity today is striving to step out of itself, out of its physicality; and one can say that in individual human beings, this tendency of present-day humanity at its current stage of development stands out quite clearly, extracting from physicality that which the spiritual researcher extracts with full consciousness—extracting it in precisely the same way he behaves when, in the observation of external nature, he applies the concepts he has grasped inwardly in an orderly and systematic manner. As some of you may know, a peculiar illness has been described for some time now. This illness—referred to among psychiatrists and psychologists as pathological brooding and doubt—might perhaps be better termed pathological skepticism. This illness presents itself in the strangest forms and is already clearly evident in numerous cases, and it is indeed necessary that the study of this illness be pursued in light of our actual cultural conditions of recent times. This illness—you can learn a great deal about it in the psychiatric literature — by the fact that, from a certain age onward—which is generally associated with sexual maturity or the preparation for sexual maturity—people begin to be unable to take a proper stance toward the external world they experience, and are assailed by an endless number of questions regarding their experiences in that external world. There are individuals who, when first afflicted by these disorders—even though they are otherwise entirely rational, even though they are able to fulfill their obligations to a high degree, and even though they fully understand their condition—find that as soon as they are even slightly removed from what binds them to the external world, they are compelled to ask the most curious questions. These questions simply intrude into their lives. These questions cannot be dismissed. They occur particularly strongly in those who experience modern science with a healthy—even predominantly healthy—constitution—but with a constitution that possesses an open heart, an open mind, and a certain understanding precisely of the way modern science thinks—so that they then have no idea how these questions arise subconsciously from this modern science. Such phenomena occur particularly among women, who have less robust constitutions than men, and who then absorb modern science not from strictly disciplined literary works but rather from lay or amateur works when they immerse themselves in the findings of modern thought. And especially when such an encounter with modern thought coincides to a greater degree with the preparation for puberty or the waning of puberty, such states occur to a high degree in such individuals. They consist in the fact that the person in question must ask: “Yes, where does the sun come from?” And no matter how clever the answers given to them, one question always gives rise to another. Where does the human heart come from? Why does the human heart beat? Didn’t I forget to confess two or three sins? What happened when I received Holy Communion? Didn’t a few crumbs of the Host perhaps fall to the ground? Didn’t I once try to slip a letter into my pocket here or there and then drop it? And I could list a whole long litany of such questions for you, and you would see from them that all of this is very well suited to keeping people in a state of constant unease.

[ 7 ] If the spiritual researcher is able to grasp this matter, I would say he is well-versed in it. It is simply a stepping out of that state in which the spiritual researcher consciously finds himself when he arrives at the musical, soundless experience of the word—the experience of essence through inspiration. But people afflicted with a tendency to doubt and to brood enter this realm unconsciously. They lack the cultural experience necessary to truly comprehend the state into which they are entering. The spiritual researcher knows that a person lives all night long, from falling asleep to waking up, immersed in such questions—that a vast number of questions arise within them from the realm of sleep—and he knows this state because he, too, can consciously experience it in the manner described. Those who approach these matters solely from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness and strive to understand them may devise all sorts of rationalistic explanations, but they will not arrive at the truth because they cannot grasp the matter through inspiration. For example, he sees how there are people who go to the theater in the evening; when they leave the theater, they cannot help but be overwhelmed by an endless number of questions: What is this actress’s relationship to the outside world? What did that actor do in a previous year? What is the relationship between the individual actors? How was this or that set created? Which painter painted this or that set? And so on and so forth—for days on end, such people remain under the influence of this inner flood of questions. These are pathological states that one begins to understand only when one realizes that these people enter the very realm that the spiritual researcher experiences through inspiration—by behaving differently than these people in their pathological state. These people enter the same realm as the spiritual researcher, but they do not take their “I” with them; in a sense, they lose their “I” upon entering this world. And this “I” is the organizing principle. This “I” is what is capable of bringing the same kind of order into this world as we are capable of bringing order into the world of our sensory-physical environment. The spiritual researcher knows that human beings live in this very same region from the moment they fall asleep until they wake up, that every person who has just left a play is truly assailed by all these questions at night while sleeping; but through a certain regularity in normal existence, sleep simply spreads over this “demon of questions,” and the person is done with this “demon of questions” when they wake up again.

[ 8 ] The point is that, in genuine spiritual research, we must bring into this realm the full power of discernment, the full composure, and the full strength of the human “I.” Then we will not live there in a state of excessive skepticism; rather, we will live there just as level-headed and just as securely as we live securely in the physical-sensory world. And, fundamentally, all the exercises I describe in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? are, to a large extent, also aimed at enabling the individual to enter this region in a fully conscious manner—preserving their “I”—and with strict discipline. The instructions for spiritual research are largely concerned with ensuring that the spiritual researcher does not lose their inner stability or the inner discipline of the “I” along this path.

[ 9 ] And the most brilliant example of a person who entered this field in modern times without being fully prepared—the most brilliant example—is the one that Dr. Husemann has already described here in a different context. That brilliant example is Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche is, after all, a peculiar personality. In a certain sense, he is not a scholar at all. He is no ordinary scientist. But with an immensely brilliant gift—emerging from the sexual maturity of youth and growing into scientific research—he absorbed, with an immensely brilliant gift, all that contemporary scholarship has to offer. The fact that, despite absorbing all of this, he did not become a scholar in the conventional sense is simply demonstrated by how a model scholar of our time—truly a model scholar of our time—confronted him immediately after his first youthful publication, namely Wilamowitz. Nietzsche had published his work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, in which this readiness to enter into initiation, to enter into the musical and inspirational realm, is already hinted at; the title itself conveys this longing to grow into what I have characterized, but it was not there. There was no conscious Spiritual Science even in Nietzsche’s time, but by titling his work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, he indicated that he wanted to understand a phenomenon such as Wagner’s tragedy from within this spirit of music. And he grew more and more into it. So, as I said, Wilamowitz immediately appeared on the scene, who then wrote his pamphlet against this work, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he, from a scientific standpoint, completely dismissed what the uneducated but knowledge-seeking Nietzsche had written. This was entirely justified from the perspective of modern science. And, when it comes down to it, one cannot understand how a man as distinguished as Erwin Rohde could have believed that a compromise could be reached between this modern Wilamowitzian philology and that which lived within Nietzsche as a still obscure striving, as a longing for initiation and inspiration. What Nietzsche had so deeply internalized, what he had so thoroughly developed within himself, eventually found its way into other strands of contemporary scholarly life. It found its way into positivism, particularly as it originated with the Frenchman Comte and the German Dühring. I myself, while organizing Nietzsche’s library in the 1890s, saw all of Nietzsche’s—I would say—meticulously made marginal notes in Dühring’s works, from which he had studied and absorbed positivism; I myself held all these works in my hands. I lived, so to speak, in the manner in which Nietzsche absorbed positivism, and was able to form a mental image of how he then entered the realm of extra-corporeal life and how, there, he lived through positivism once again without a proper penetration of that realm by the “I,” so that works such as Human, All-Too-Human and the like, which depict a constant oscillation between the inability to move within a world of inspiration and the desire, nonetheless, to hold fast within that world of inspiration. I would like to say that the aphoristic character of Nietzsche’s style in these works reveals how Nietzsche strives to introduce the “I,” yet how this effort is always cut short, and how he therefore fails to achieve a systematic or artistic presentation, but only the aphorism. It is precisely in this constant breaking off of intellectual life within the aphorism that the inner, spiritual essence of this remarkable mind is revealed. And then he rises to that which has indeed posed the greatest riddles for modern research, for modern external science; he rises to that which lives in Darwinism, which lives in the theory of evolution, which seeks to show how the most complex organisms have gradually formed from the simplest, most primitive organisms. He immerses himself in this world—the very world into which I have attempted, in a modest way—as you can clearly trace in my debates with Haeckel—to bring inner stability and inner flexibility in my book The Riddles of Philosophy*. Nietzsche immerses himself. From his soul, I would say, the idea of “over-evolution” struggles to emerge. As he traces evolution all the way to humanity, this evolutionary idea explodes, leading to his concept of the “Superman.” As he traces this movement of evolving beings, he loses—because he cannot obtain the content through inspiration—that very content and must live within the contentless idea of eternal recurrence.

[ 10 ] It was solely Nietzsche’s inner, sound nature that prevented him from succumbing to what pathologists call “doubt-mongering.” It was precisely what lay within Nietzsche—a profound vitality unfolding at the very root of his illness, which he himself sensed and which asserted itself—that prevented him from succumbing to complete skepticism and instead led him to conceive of that which then became the very content of his most inspiring works. No wonder that this journey into the spiritual world, this striving to move from the musical to the inner word, to the inner essence—as it culminated in the unmusical nature of the recurrence of the same, as it culminated in the contentless, and to be perceived only lyrically, no wonder that this had to end in the very condition that, for example, the attending physician once described as an atypical case of paralysis.

[ 11 ] Yes, the one who did not know Nietzsche’s inner life, who was unable to assess it from the standpoint of a researcher of the mind, who, like a mere psychiatrist, stood before Nietzsche’s world of ideas, concepts, and images without any inner connection to it—that person expressed, in the face of this concrete case, something that is merely the abstract in contrast to the concrete. In 1872, Du Bois-Reymond declared “Ignorabimus” in the face of all of nature. When confronted with cases that are unusual, the psychiatrist says: paralysis, atypical paralysis. Faced with cases that occur in such a way that they are completely torn out of our current human development, the psychiatrist stands there and says “Ignorabimus” in the concrete case, or “Ignoramus.” It is merely the translation of what is then clothed in words: an atypical case of paralysis.

[ 12 ] This ultimately tore Nietzsche’s body apart. It gave rise to what the phenomenon of Nietzsche represents within our contemporary intellectual culture. This is another form in which, among highly cultured individuals, the psychologically significant tendencies of doubt, brooding, and hyperskepticism manifest themselves. And the phenomenon of Nietzsche—allow me to insert a personal remark here—stood before my eyes, sending a shiver down my spine, at the moment when, a few years after Nietzsche’s illness, I entered his small room in Naumburg, where he lay on the sofa, staring blankly after his meal, recognizing no one around him, where he, like a complete fool, but still with a light in his eyes that shone with his former genius, looked at you.

[ 13 ] If one were to look at this Nietzsche—with all that one could experience of Nietzsche’s worldview, of Nietzsche’s inner mental image and imagery—and if one were then, unlike the mere external psychiatrist, to approach this Nietzsche, this ruin, this wreck in terms of physical life, with this image in one’s own soul, then, then one would know: This human being wanted to look into the world that comes into being through inspiration. Nothing from this world penetrated to him. And that which wanted to enter this world, that which yearned for inspiration, ultimately extinguished itself; yet, as a formless soul-spiritual entity, it continued to fill the organism for years to come.

[ 14 ] One could learn the full tragedy of our modern culture—its striving toward the spiritual world, its inclination toward that which can arise from inspiration—from such a sight. For me—and I’m not afraid to mention this personal detail here—that was one of those moments that can also be interpreted in the spirit of Goethe. Goethe says: “Nature holds no secret within itself that it does not reveal somewhere.” — No, the whole world holds no secret within itself that it does not reveal somewhere. The current development of humanity carries within it the secret that, from within this humanity itself, a striving simply asserts itself—a tendency, an impulse that rumbles through the social upheavals sweeping through our civilization, an impulse that seeks to peer into the spiritual world of inspiration. And Nietzsche, as a human being, was the one point where nature revealed its manifest secret, where it could be revealed what is today a striving across all of humanity, what we must strive for, if not all those who strive toward education, who strive toward modern science—and this is what all of civilized humanity will gradually do, for knowledge must become widespread—if people are not to lose their sense of self and civilization is not to degenerate into barbarism.

[ 15 ] This is the one great cultural concern, the one great concern for civilization, that weighs upon anyone who follows the current course of human history and aims to arrive at a social way of thinking. On the other hand, similar phenomena are making themselves felt on the level of consciousness. And on this side of consciousness as well, we will have to study these phenomena, at least briefly; we will see how, out of the entire chaos of contemporary human life, other phenomena emerge that confront us pathologically in the same way—phenomena that have been described since Westphal, Falret, and others, and which have not been described by chance only in recent decades. On the other hand, toward the boundary of consciousness, we are confronted just as much by the phenomena of claustrophobia, astraphobia, and agoraphobia as we are by skepticism on the material side. And just as—we will have to discuss this later—pathological skepticism must be healed through the cultivation of inspiration in a cultural-historical sense, which is one of the great socio-ethical tasks of the present, so too is the looming onset of those phenomena that I will discuss tomorrow—claustrophobia, astrafobia, agoraphobia—is the other disruptive force, and one that we will be able to overcome through imagination, which we must integrate into modern civilization for the social well-being of humanity.