| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Sixth Lecture
07 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Sixth Lecture
07 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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I would like to introduce some of the material that I will be presenting here over the next few days today by taking up the life and teaching of a personality whom I have already mentioned here and there in the lectures and whom I have also dealt with in more detail in the third chapter of my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Soul Mysteries). I will have much to say about this personality, Franz Brentano, as one of the representative spirits of the second half of the 19th century, for reasons that will become clear as we move forward in our considerations. Some of these indications can also be found in the journal 'Das Goetheanum'. I am linking up with Brentano's teaching and life today for a specific reason, namely the publication of the first volume from Franz Brentano's estate, which covers one of the most important chapters of the world view, namely the teaching of Jesus as illuminated by Franz Brentano himself. Franz Brentano, a philosopher, died in Zurich in 1917 at the age of seventy-nine. With his death, a philosophical life came to an end that undoubtedly ranks among the most interesting in history and, above all, in the second half of the 19th century. Not only did a philosophical teacher live in Franz Brentano, but also a philosophical personality lived in him, a personality in whom philosophical striving emerged from the full extent and depth of the personality. The philosopher Brentano is a member of the family to which Clemens Brentano, the German romantic, belonged. Clemens Brentano was the uncle of the philosopher Franz Brentano. And Clemens Brentano is a member of the family that was friends with Goethe through Sophie La Roche and Maximiliane Brentano, and that two, at the beginning of the 19th century, often interrelated intellectual currents . These were Catholicism on the one hand – we are dealing with a devout Catholic family in the Brentano family – and the romantic spirit on the other. Clemens Brentano truly created some of the most beautiful German romantic poetry, and, emerging from the romantic atmosphere of German intellectual life, he was an extraordinarily important storyteller. One would like to say that, through the German Romantics' telling of tales, the German fairy tales were transformed in such a way that a light from the spiritual world really shone on those to whom fairy tales were told from just such a source. And our philosopher Franz Brentano heard tales told by Clemens Brentano, his uncle, when he was still a very young child. For us, two aspects are important here. One is that Franz Brentano emerged from this spiritual atmosphere. He was born in 1838. In 1842 Clemens Brentano died. And on the other hand, we have to consider that Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholic romanticism, grew into the strictest scientific view that prevailed in the second half of the 19th century in the spiritual life of modern civilization. Franz Brentano grew up in such a way that even as a child a pious spirit entered his soul. The religious element is something that comes naturally to him from his soul. And Catholicism does not enter his soul as something external, but as something that constitutes the essence and weave of this soul. With complete inwardness, the boy Franz Brentano embraces Catholic piety and grows into it. He has awakened within himself, brought up by romanticism, a powerful intellectualism. While in the romanticists of the Clemens Brentano school, the spiritual lived in the form of fantasy, while a genius like Clemens Brentano paid little attention to the rules of logic and strove to gain the spiritual world in flight, but in flight of the imagination , to gain the spiritual world and to live in it, this high regard for the intellectual life, which was also developed in Franz Brentano, was transformed into a special talent for the elaboration of strict concepts. This was helped by the fact that, coming from Catholicism, it was, so to speak, natural for Franz Brentano to make philosophical-theological studies his own. And his fine spirituality had led him early on to penetrate the web of thought of Aristotle and then also into the strict conceptual training of medieval scholasticism. In this medieval scholasticism, as I have already explained in more detail here, Aristotelianism also lived on. And one would like to say: While Franz Brentano retained the disposition to take intellectual flights of fancy, he could not develop unconcerned with the logical powers of the human soul, in the manner of Clemens Brentano, for example, but he developed precisely the strictest logic and only arrived at his conceptualization through the strictest logic. But however great the development of Franz Brentano's abilities in logical training, in theological-philosophical matters, his genuine Catholic piety was even greater in his early youth. There is something truly remarkable about the modern scholastic training that Franz Brentano, in particular, was able to undergo out of his Catholicism. We must always repeat: the really strict logic, not that superficial logic which is contained in today's everyday education and also dominates science, but what really strict logic is, which is connected with the whole human being, not only with the human head, that already emerges from scholasticism. Scholasticism is the art of logical conceptualization to the highest degree. But in the Middle Ages and in Catholicism to this day, scholasticism was used only to support Catholic doctrine of revelation, in the sense that I once explained by discussing 'Thomism. With a mind like Franz Brentano's, a very specific spirituality developed precisely out of Catholic piety and out of the rigorous training of scholasticism. He developed the ability to simply take the existence of a spiritual world for granted. By immersing himself in Catholicism and scholastic theology, he was, after all, living in the spiritual realm, and he could not help but live in the spiritual realm. And he grasped this spirituality by developing it in strict logic. He was truly a true Catholic. He was a Catholic in the strictest sense, and although he cultivated the strictest logic within himself, he would never have allowed himself to criticize Catholic revealed doctrine, up to a certain point in his life. I beg you to imagine just once a human being in all his human depth, in whom the strictest logic lives, which in so many modern minds has practiced the most disparaging criticism of Catholic revealed doctrine. This gave rise to strong doubts in him, but he pushed them all down into the subconscious, never allowing them to surface into consciousness; for the moment they did arise in consciousness, he pushed them down. He said to himself: Catholic revealed doctrine is a closed system and shows very clearly that it has come to earth from the spiritual worlds themselves, albeit by the most varied detours, and also through people. It shows its own truth, and one must always assume, when doubts arise, that one can err as an individual human being in the face of such an all-encompassing system of such venerable greatness as Catholicism. Since it belongs to the teachings of Catholicism that only the councils could ever speak about the truth of the dogmas, Franz Brentano, in his state of mind, could never allow himself to really assert a doubt against the doctrine of revelation if any doubt arose from the unconscious. He pushed everything aside, he simply said to himself: It is impossible to really accept such a doubt. But the doubts, in his feelings, in his sensations, in his unconscious, were terribly stirring in his soul. He did not do as the rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did, and give himself up to these doubts, but always pushed such doubts aside as something forbidden. Then an event occurred that caused a mighty upheaval in his soul. Brentano was born in 1838. He was ordained a Catholic priest in his sixties, and it was as a Catholic priest, but with the state of mind I have just described to you, that he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Würzburg. And so he was affected by the movement for the dogma of infallibility, which was developed towards the end of the 1860s. This dogma was to be declared in 1870. As an excellent theologian and pious Catholic, Franz Brentano – who was still a relatively young man at the time – was commissioned by the famous Bishop Kezteler to say what could be said from the point of view of Catholic theology about the dogma of infallibility. I will first describe the sequence of external events. Ketteler was one of the German bishops who rebelled most vigorously against the establishment of the dogma of infallibility. He had a memorandum prepared by Franz Brentano, which was to be presented by Ketteler at the bishops' assembly in Fulda, in order to decide on behalf of the German bishops that they would not endorse the dogma of infallibility. Ketteler also presented the full content of Brentano's memorandum, which was directed against the dogma of infallibility, at the bishops' assembly in Fulda. That is the outward appearance, to which only the fact needs to be added that the German bishops then fell down, that when they were gathered in Rome and the dogma of infallibility was to be declared, they finally submitted and agreed to the dogma of infallibility. So Franz Brentano criticized this dogma in the negative sense as a non-Catholic doctrine for Bishop Ketteler. And then the infallibility dogma was declared. In what position was Franz Brentano as an excellent theologian and as a devout Catholic? He would never have allowed himself to criticize a dogma that he had already grown into. But when Bishop Ketteler called on him to criticize the dogma of infallibility, it had not yet become a dogma, was only about to become one. So he allowed himself to attack this nascent dogma with his intellect. It was also entirely in line with the thinking of Bishop Ketteler, who was initially also against the dogma of infallibility. So Franz Brentano would never have challenged an existing dogma out of his mood at the end of the sixties. But infallibility was not yet a dogma, and so he criticized it with tremendous acumen. For what Ketteler had put forward at the bishops' meeting in Fulda was precisely Brentano's memorandum. But now infallibility became a legitimate Catholic dogma. You see, not a mere intellectual consideration, but the fact that he had grown together with one of the most important events of modern Catholicism was a decisive turning point for Franz Brentano. What might not have happened at all through a mere intellectual step: his break with the Church occurred for him in connection with these events. He was the most important critic of the dogma of infallibility and at the time had to ask himself: Was the orthodox Christian Franz Brentano, who had criticized the dogma of infallibility from the depths of Catholic consciousness before 1870, still a Catholic when after 1870 the dogma of infallibility had now become a legitimate dogma? You see, there are facts here that play a stronger role in people's lives than an intellectual decision, which in most cases is worthless, can do. And so a man as upright and as alive in his conscience as Franz Brentano could do nothing but leave the Church. You have only to take the whole context to see how deeply Franz Brentano had actually grown together with a certain side of the intellectual life of the second half of the 19th century. Thus Franz Brentano stood as a philosopher, in a sense cast out of his Catholic career. He had a completely different education from the other philosophers of the 19th century; for the education he had is not otherwise evident in the philosophers outside the Church. But now he was included in the series of philosophers outside the Church. In this context, the 19th-century scientific way of thinking had made the strongest possible impression on him. This scientific way of thinking had indeed set the tone for the whole of scientific life since the middle of the 19th century. And when Franz Brentano habilitated in Würzburg, he did so with the thesis: “In philosophy, no other methodological principles can prevail than in true science.” Natural science made such a deep impression on him in its method that he could not help but say: philosophy must make use of the same methods as natural science if it wants to be a real science. It is really not easy to untangle the mental tangle in which Franz Brentano was entangled in the 1860s. Let us just look at the situation objectively. On the one hand, we have a person who was perhaps one of the greatest experts on Thomism and Aristotelianism of his time, an extremely sharp thinker and conceptualizer, but all this based on Catholic doctrine. On the other hand, we have a man who is extremely impressed by the scientific method. How is that possible? Yes, it is quite possible, for the following reason. Take the meaning of medieval scholasticism. Medieval scholasticism is a science that works according to scholastic concepts for the spiritual, but a science that commands itself to know only something about the external sense world, and then some insights that result from conclusions from the sense world, while everything supernatural is left to revelation, to which intellectual knowledge should not dare. Thus, in medieval scholasticism, we have a strict division: the realm of sensory knowledge with some conclusions, such as the existence of God or other similar conclusions; these belong to human knowledge. On the other hand, the actual mysteries, the contents of the supersensible world, can only be gained through revelation, that is, through what the Church has preserved from the revelations of the supersensible worlds that have come to people at various times in a manner that the Church considers legitimate.  But that was already the preparation for the modern scientific view. This modern natural science also only wants to draw sensory knowledge and at most some conclusions from sensory knowledge. This modern natural science does not even know that it is the continuation of scholasticism, only that certain radical minds have done it somewhat differently than the scholastics. Let us visualize this schematically. The scholastic says to himself: With the intellect and with ordinary science, I gain knowledge of the ordinary sensory world and some conclusions that arise from it (yellow); then there is a boundary beyond which lies the supersensible world, into which one cannot penetrate (red). It is no different with modern natural science! It says: With human knowledge, one penetrates into the sensual world and can draw some conclusions that follow from this knowledge. The scholastics said: Above that lies the supersensible world, which one must recognize through revelation. Radical spirits of the modern world said: One can only recognize the sensual world, we leave out the supersensible world, which does not even exist, or at least one cannot recognize it. In this they became agnostics. What was current in scholasticism with regard to the knowledge of the sensual world and some of the conclusions drawn from it was merely continued in the modern scientific attitude, so that a mind that had so earnestly absorbed scholastic training throughout its youth needed to see nothing in the modern scientific method but the continuation of scholastic views. But for him, because he was also a devout Catholic, the spiritual world was again a matter of course. So Franz Brentano was actually only more consistent than hundreds and hundreds of others, both on the Catholic and on the non-Catholic side. So Brentano turned to the scientific method. But this scientific method must either become aware of its limitations or else declare agnosticism or the non-existence of the supersensible world. If, nevertheless, one perceives the supersensible world as a matter of course, but can no longer hold to the truth of Revelation – because one can no longer hold to the truth of the Church – as was the case with Franz Brentano, then one is in a special situation. A superficial mind can easily get by in such a situation. He either denies the existence of the supersensible world or he does not care about it. Franz Brentano could not do that. But precisely because of his strict scholastic training, he was able to express the thesis that true philosophy must use no other methods than those of true natural science. Now you all know that anyone who, despite saying yes to the scientific method, still wants to arrive at a spiritual world through knowledge must ascend from the ordinary scientific method to what I call exact clairvoyance or exact seeing, which is developed according to the methods I have described in my books. But Franz Brentano recoiled from the development of this kind of seeing, from the development of any kind of method that went beyond the natural sciences and yet was supposed to be cognitive. He was influenced by the attitude he had as a Catholic towards revelation. Science was not allowed to enter into revelation. He could understand a natural-scientific method that was limited only to the sense world; but precisely when one takes this seriously, one must develop supersensible abilities. He recoiled from this. In this frame of mind, Franz Brentano became a philosopher, no longer a theologian, but a simple philosopher. We may say that such a personality, in whom one finds all the storms and struggles that took place in the intellectual life of the time very distinctly marked, and in whom one must say in the end: he did not become the victor in his own soul - such a personality is naturally often much more significant and much more interesting than others who easily, in lightly-draped concepts, can cope with everything possible. In this frame of mind, Franz Brentano was now called to Vienna, to that Austria of which I spoke to you here the other day. I have characterized its peculiar spirituality, and if you recall what I said about Austria at the time, you will understand that a philosopher of this kind could make a great impression in Vienna. And that is precisely what Brentano did. He was extraordinarily interesting as a personality, even in his outward appearance. He had a very intellectual head and sparkling eyes, which probably had something similar to the eyes of the romanticist Clemens Brentano. Franz Brentano was actually strikingly interesting in his personality, in that when you saw him walking, for example when he mounted the podium, he always had something about him, as if he had not quite slipped into his physical body. Almost every movement, whether walking or moving the arms, the facial expressions, the formation of the words themselves, all this had something unnatural about it. One always had the feeling that something was dangling with the physical body, as if one were dangling with clothes. And yet the whole thing made an extraordinarily sympathetic and spiritualized impression. One could not help feeling that it was quite natural for this personality, with her always serious tone of voice, with her constant striving to shape concepts in the strictest way, but who in turn gave the impression of having lived in her thinking not in her head , but lived a little above her head, it was basically quite natural for her to feel in her physical body as if she were in a suit that was not quite right for her, that was too big or too small, we can say, too big. And some things that one would have found flirtatious in the movements of another person were interesting in Franz Brentano. Franz Brentano endeavored to apply scientific method everywhere. When he treated intellectual problems, he treated them with an attitude inspired by scientific method. But I would like to say: the theologian was still there in the tone of voice. There was a great difference, for example, between hearing the scientific method used by any old naturalist and by this philosopher who had grown out of theology. For those who had some idea of Franz Brentano, it was quite natural that when he came to Vienna in 1874, he initially became, in a sense, the darling of Viennese society, that is, of the society that particularly loved such famous personalities as Franz Brentano was at the time. The women in particular – for the men of this society were less concerned with education, especially in the 1870s – had a particular taste for Franz Brentano, because one could always hear something witty from him. He was superior to you, and yet again he was not completely superior to you; but then you were also superior to him. When he came, he took off his greatcoat awkwardly. It was so easy to help him, and you could feel so superior to certain sides of his nature when you could help him, when you could support him, for example, so that he wouldn't fall over the doorstep and the like, or when he didn't found the spoon right away, or when he, who liked to do so, cut the meat so long on one side and then on the other, until it was no longer individual pieces, but something that in some areas of Germany is called a mess. So you could feel superior and yet at the same time see something like the revelation of a spiritual world through him. A poet, Adolf Wilbrandt, who was sometimes extraordinarily witty but never very receptive to the depths of the human being, tried to ridicule this in a somewhat disdainful way in his “Guest from the Evening Star”. This novella was seen everywhere in Vienna as a mockery of Franz Brentano, but it is really only in the sense that I have just characterized it. Now, at the time when Franz Brentano, in the state of mind I have described, was giving his lectures in Vienna, he enjoyed an enormous popularity for the time. One must bear in mind that philosophy was not a very respected subject at the time. But Franz Brentano had already attracted a large audience in Würzburg as an associate professor, and in the same lecture hall where students had written “sulfur booth” on the door after the first lecture by his predecessor – they did not go there again later. In this same auditorium maximum, Franz Brentano read about philosophy, and the lecture hall soon filled up. And so the lecture halls in Vienna where he gave lectures were always full. One of his first literary works was his “Psychology”. He had set out to write a psychology using a scientific method. It was intended to be four or five volumes. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874. He had promised the second volume for the fall, and so it was to continue. He had set about investigating, using a scientific method in the strictest sense of the word – just as one investigates whether a metal heats up or cools down, or whether heat is conducted from one metal to another – how one idea follows another, how one idea and another correspond, in short, all the smaller relationships of the soul life. He did not go further. But he had already said in the first volume: Science must also be used for the study of the soul, for psychology. But if this scientific basis were to be bought at the price of modern psychology having nothing to say about the fate of the better part of the human being when the body is given up to the elements of the earth, then something quite valuable would indeed be given up for the sake of this scientific basis. For Brentano — who, of course, lived in the spiritual, but who, of course, could not prove it using the scientific method — this spiritual was by no means something that he did not want to see as an object of knowledge. He definitely wanted to penetrate into the spiritual world with knowledge, but he also wanted to remain with natural science. And so this first volume remained the only one of Brentano's “Psychology” to be published. He was too true and scientifically conscientious a man to have continued in the sense of mere formalism. Of course he could easily have done that, and he could still have produced psychologies of that kind, like those of the others. But if Brentano had continued a psychology, it would have had to be true on every page, like the first volume, true, of course, within the limits within which man can penetrate to truths. But Franz Brentano wanted to remain in the realm of natural science. This did not lead to a continuation into the soul. He could not deny the soul, as those psychologists have done who have written “souls without souls.” He could only fall silent. And so he wrote no second volume to his first, much less the following volumes. The Brentano students resented my stating this fact in the third chapter of my book “On Soul Puzzles” because they themselves are inclined to explain the matter much more superficially. But even if one were to decide to say: well, perhaps the Brentano students know better that this was not the reason, from Brentano's estate or from the fact that they were close to him, the first volume from the Brentano estate, which has been excellently edited and introduced by the Brentano student Alfred Kastil, does in fact show the same frame of mind in Franz Brentano that prevented him from adding a second volume to the first of his psychology. In this first volume of Brentano's estate, the first chapter is entitled “The Moral Teaching of Jesus according to the Gospels,” which was written long after he left the church. In the strictest sense, he did not want to accept anything that was not compatible with a strictly scientific attitude. The second chapter is: “The teaching of Jesus about God and the world and about his own person and mission according to the Gospels.” The third chapter is particularly detailed and is a critique of Pascal's thoughts on the defense of the Christian faith. Then, after a short interlude about Nietzsche as an imitator of Jesus, there is an appendix: The Truth of the Faith in a Brief Presentation of its Essential Content. It is tremendously moving to have this little book about the teachings of Jesus by Franz Brentano in front of you, after Jesus and his teachings have been written and spoken about from all possible points of view in the 19th century, from orthodox, semi-orthodox, free-thinking , from completely atheistic points of view, and much has been written and spoken about Jesus and his teachings, taking everything for help, for example, from David Friedrich Strauß, what is there in the way of mythology and so on. It is moving to see how the excellent philosopher Franz Brentano, who had left the Church, characterizes in his own way Jesus' moral teaching and its lasting significance, then Jesus' teaching about God, the world and Jesus' own mission, then the whole significance of the Church's dogmatics and church administration, the significance of the Church as it is presented apologetically by Pascal. It is touching to see how Franz Brentano, in turn, appears in a forceful way as Pascal's astute opponent and now speaks out about Catholicism as such. It is touching because here we have the Brentano of his youth before us, with all his piety, with all his great ability to immerse himself in the spiritual, and yet also the man of the strictest scientific mind , an attitude that grows out of scientific methodology, a man who, for example, could not be impressed by so-called modernism because Brentano is a deep spirit and modernism, even Catholic modernism, is something shallow. So, despite having fallen away from the Church, he did not, for example, express any kind of approval of modernism. In the 19th century, spirits who believed they stood on the ground of natural science, such as David Friedrich Strauß, had in the strictest sense of the word asked the question: Are we still Christians? Do we still believe in a God? — These two questions were asked and answered in the negative by David Friedrich Strauß, and by countless others as well. They simply did not have the same profound training as Brentano. Their cognitive life was therefore also less tragic. They had less to struggle for than the scientific method, for it was easier for them, because of their superficiality, to abandon themselves to it than it was for Franz Brentano, for whom it was difficult to abandon himself from his depth. Nevertheless, he considered this scientific method to be absolutely necessary in our time. I am relating this to you because I believe that by taking the pure facts of his inner and outer life, the example of this personality can give us a clearer insight into the workings and essence of civilization in the second half of the 19th century than if I were to describe it in the abstract. Franz Brentano's psychological makeup is such that, if one regards him primarily as a psychologist, one must say: Everything in this man's abilities tends actually toward the development of supersensible knowledge, so that the soul can be observed. If Brentano had wanted to write even the second volume of his Psychology, he would have had to arrive at imaginative knowledge, and then at inspired knowledge, and so on. He did not want that. Because he did not want to do this, he conscientiously refrained from writing the second and third volumes. Nevertheless, in a sense he became a victim of the scientific method, an honest and conscientious victim. And just as only supersensible knowledge, in the sense in which I have described it, for example, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, can penetrate to the real nature of the soul, so only such supersensible knowledge of what natural science offers can penetrate to what is present as the all-pervading and weaving spiritual world. Purely scientific astronomy knows of heavenly bodies floating out there in space. At most, it analyzes the nature of the light of these heavenly bodies using spectral analysis. But for it these are all spheres floating in space. All this is spiritless. And the content of zoology, biology, botany and mineralogy is spiritless. By the very nature of its method, natural science must extract the spiritless and leave the spirit unconsidered. Spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense must in turn lead to the spirit. supersensible knowledge, not only in psychology but also in the world in general, leads to spirituality. Just as Brentano was unable to approach the nature of the soul with his strictly scientific attitude in his “Psychology”, he was just as unable to truly approach the Mystery of Golgotha when he had abandoned Catholic dogmatics. How can one approach the Mystery of Golgotha? Only if you can grasp that the world is interwoven with a supersensible spiritual. In this supersensible spiritual there is an entity, as I have often described to you, the Christ, who lived as Christ-entity in the body of Jesus of Nazareth when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Without spiritual science, one comes to no other understanding than that of the personality of Jesus. Only anthroposophical spiritual science can reveal how the divine Christ lived in Jesus. Franz Brentano did not want that. But he still retained enough from his Catholic consciousness that Jesus has a central significance in the whole evolution of the earth. That was clear to him. Just as it was clear to him that the soul is immortal, but that he could not find this immortality in a cognitive way, so it was clear to him that Jesus forms the center of earthly development. But he could not find the transition from Jesus to Christ. And so we see that he is emotionally and willfully seized in an enormously strong way by the significance of Jesus' personality and Jesus' teaching. Take sentences like this: “Not overcome” - as David Friedrich Strauß thinks - “if one interprets it harmoniously and pays attention to its essential features, the teaching of Jesus in history, but in its perfection in life, has still not been achieved. Because of human weakness, it will still take hard struggles to achieve full victory, but because of its inner strength, it will be impossible for it to ever perish. Conscience will always bear witness to the truth and sacred beauty it contains. Indeed, it has done so since pre-Christian times among pagans and Jews and in the Asian Orient as well as in the European Occident, so that Jesus' moral teaching does not so much signify a mighty advance by proclaiming entirely new commandments, but by the fact that Jesus illustrated them in such a way by the incomparable example he gave in his life and death that the possibility of such sublime virtue was fully grasped and thus inspired imitation with a higher courage. This example will shine forever and no prophecy is more certain than when one says in this sense: Jesus and no end.” Thus the philosopher and former Catholic, the excellent theologian Franz Brentano, who could not arrive at Jesus as the Christ only because of his scientific mentality! Compare these beautiful words about Jesus as the center of earthly development with much of what has been written by theologians who remained in the Church, and form an opinion about them. But also form an opinion about what it means when a person with the state of mind that I have characterized says the following about Jesus' world view: “So Jesus' world view was not only geocentric,” that is, not only but also Christocentric, and in such a way that not only the whole history of the earth, but also that of pure spirits, both good and evil, is ordered around the person of the one man Jesus, and in every respect finds its understanding only through the purposeful relation to him. The world is a monarchy, not only in view of the one all-powerful God, but also in view of that creature which, before all others, is his image." Thus Franz Brentano approaches the personality of Jesus. But still, he comes from this personality of Jesus, of whom he says that his world-view is not merely geocentric but Christocentric, and that not only men on earth but also higher spirits, both good and evil, are guided by it. He comes from the personality of Jesus, not to the essence of Christ. And so there is a terrible contradiction in him. For he does ask himself: What is this man Jesus, around whom the whole of human history revolves? But there is no idea in Franz Brentano that would lead to such a reality that the Christ in Jesus could really be grasped. For only he who grasps the Christ in Jesus can think of making him the center in such a way. Here too, although he at least brought it to a literary conclusion for religious reasons, but then did not publish it himself, and it was only published by his students, here too Franz Brentano did not reach the end of his quest, although he was, so to speak, standing directly at the gate, which he only had to open to arrive at the immortality of the soul and also at an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. That is why it is such an extremely interesting document, this little book by Franz Brentano, 'The Teaching of Jesus and Its Permanent Significance', because Franz Brentano certainly had an idea of this permanent significance. Once again, after he has presented the teaching of Jesus and its permanent significance as the second chapter, he asks again: Are we still Christians? The answer will depend, he says, on the sense in which the question is put. And then, however, after blaming modern education for the fact that a real Christ-idea cannot arise, he says once more: “Perhaps someone will call the hopes I have expressed here vain, because the mighty influence that Jesus' teaching and example has exercised on humanity is essentially connected with the fact that one has ascribed to him a divine nature and thus professed a belief in which, according to my own admission, even the most advanced no longer hold today.” There he comes, I might say, into the unclear. "But they overlook the fact that the possibility of such influence did not begin with the belief in the divinity of Jesus, but rather that looking at his example, as it is presented in the Gospel narratives, was one of the strongest motives that led to the belief in the divine superiority of his person. No other... could be placed at his side, and the more these centuries grow into millennia, the more will be given to distinguish him and to shine as a light in our own lives. They feel once more how close Franz Brentano came to the gate of the supersensible world, and how he was held back by the most powerful guide of modern civilization, by the methodology and spirit of the natural sciences. And so, after this publication from Brentano's estate, one can say what one also had to say about his writings printed during his lifetime: Franz Brentano stands there like a ghost from the second half of the 19th century, who with every phase of his mental life driven to the apprehension of the supersensible world, but who allowed this apprehension of the supersensible world to be forbidden to him by natural science, just as he allowed the criticism of dogma to be forbidden to him by the dogma itself. Thus it is that Franz Brentano, precisely through what he was unable to achieve, stands before us as a luminous personality, as one of the most significant personalities of the second half of the nineteenth century, and teaches us, perhaps like few others, to recognize how the intellectual heritage of the nineteenth century, which entered the twentieth century, actually relates to the development of humanity in terms of its effects. |
| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Seventh Lecture
08 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Seventh Lecture
08 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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I have spoken of Franz Brentano at some length because the fact is immediately apparent that the first work of this important philosopher, published by his students from his estate, was a work about the life of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus. That provided the external point of contact. But I wanted something more profound with the presentation of this philosopher's life. I wanted to show, through a person who was not just a thinker, not just a scientist, but who was truly a seeker of truth as a whole human being, how a personality of this kind had to position itself in the spiritual life of the second half of the 19th century. Franz Brentano was born in 1838, so he was a student at the very time when the scientific mentality was emerging within modern civilization. He was a student who, as you have seen, was a devout Catholic who, as a devout Catholic, held firmly to the spiritual world, but only in the way that was possible from Catholic religious practice and Catholic “theology.” This man, who had thus grown into a certain self-evident grasp of the spiritual world, of the immortality of the soul, of the existence of God and so on, did so as a scientist, and indeed as the most conscientious scientist imaginable, in the era when scientific thinking meant everything. So that, more than with any other personality, when one is familiar with Franz Brentano, one has the feeling that here is a person of deep spirituality who, however, in the face of the scientific attitude of the 19th century, did not rise to it, could not penetrate it to a real grasp of spiritual life. I do not actually know of any personality in modern times in whom the necessity for the anthroposophical world view emerges so characteristically. In the case of Franz Brentano, one would like to say: he actually only needed to take one or two steps further and he was with anthroposophy. He did not come to it because he wanted to keep to what was scientifically common practice. Franz Brentano, precisely because of what I described yesterday as the characteristic of his personality, even in his outward appearance, through the dignity of his demeanor, through the seriousness that was present in everything he uttered, already gives the impression that he could have become a kind of leading personality in the second half of the 19th century. You may now rightly ask: But how is it that this personality has remained quite unknown in the broadest circles? Franz Brentano actually became known only to a narrow circle of students. All these students are people who received the most profound inspiration from him. This can still be seen in the work of those who are in turn the students of those students, for it is they who are actually still around today. Franz Brentano made a significant impression on a narrow circle. And most of the students in this circle are certainly so minded towards him that they perceive him as one of the most stimulating and significant people for centuries. But the fact that Brentano has remained unknown in the widest circles is characteristic of the entire development of civilization in the 19th century. One could, of course, cite many personalities who, in one direction or another, are also representatives of intellectual life in the 19th century. But you could not find a personality as significant and as characteristic as Franz Brentano, no matter how hard you looked. Therefore, I would like to say: Franz Brentano shows that although natural science, in the form it took in the 19th century, can acquire great authority, it cannot exercise spiritual leadership within the whole of culture despite this great authority. For that, natural science must first be developed into spiritual science; then it has everything in it that can truly, together with spiritual science, assume a certain leadership in the spiritual life of humanity. To understand this, we must today take a broader view. If we look back to the earliest times of humanity, we know that a kind of dream-like clairvoyance was present everywhere as a general human faculty. To this dream-like clairvoyance, the initiates, the initiates of the mysteries, added higher supersensible knowledge, but also knowledge about the sensory world. If we were to go back to the very early days of human development, we would find no difference in the way the physical and the supersensible are treated. All spiritual life has proceeded from the mystery schools, which were basically churches and art institutions at the same time. But in the deepest sense, this spiritual life influenced all human life in the old days, including state and economic life. Those who were active in state life sought the advice of the mystery priests, but so did those who wanted to provide impetus in economic life. There was actually no separation between the religious and scientific elements in those ancient times. The leaders of religious life were the leaders of intellectual life in general and were also the people who set the tone in the sciences. But more and more, the development of humanity has taken shape in such a way that those currents of human life that originally formed a unity have separated. Religion has become separate from science, from art. This happened only slowly and gradually. If we look back to Greece, we find that there was no natural science in our sense, and alongside it, for example, philosophy; rather, Greek philosophy also discussed natural science, and there was no separate natural science. But as philosophy in Greece emerged as something independent, the religious element had already separated from this philosophy. Although the mysteries were still the source of the deepest truths, in Greece, especially in later Greece, what the mysteries gave was already being criticized from the standpoint of philosophical reason. But religious revelation continued, and when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared, it was essentially religious revelation that set out to understand this mystery. Whatever understanding of theology still existed within European civilization during the first few centuries is no longer properly understood by people today; they refer to it disparagingly as 'gnosis' and the like. But there was a great deal of spiritual understanding in this gnosis, and there was a clear awareness that One must understand spiritual matters in the same way as one understands today, for example, gravity or the phenomena of light or anything else in the physical sense. They did not have the awareness that there is a science separate from religious life. Even on Christian soil, the first church fathers, the first great teachers of Christianity, were absolutely convinced that they were treating knowledge as something unified. Of course, the Greek separation of religious life was already there, but they included both the contemplation of the religious and the rational contemplation of the merely physical in the treatment of all spiritual matters. It was only in the Middle Ages that this changed. In the Middle Ages, scholasticism arose, which now made a strict separation - as I already pointed out yesterday - between human science and what is actual knowledge of the spiritual. This could not be attained through the application of independent human powers of knowledge; it could only be attained through revelation, through the acceptance of revelations. And more and more it had come to be that one said: Man cannot penetrate the highest truths through his own powers of knowledge; he must accept them as they are delivered by the church as revelation. Human science can only spread over what the senses give and draw some conclusions from what the senses give as truths, as I said yesterday. Thus, a strict distinction was made between a science that spread over the sensory world and that which was the content of revelation. Now, for the development of modern humanity, the last three to five centuries have become extraordinarily significant in many respects. If you had told a person from those older times, when religion and science were one, that religion was not based on human knowledge, he would have considered it nonsense; for all religions originally came from human knowledge. Only it was said: If man confines himself to his consciousness, as it is given to him for everyday life, then he does not attain to the highest truths; this consciousness must first be raised to a higher level. From the old point of view, it was said just as one is forced to say today, for example, according to what I have presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline”: that man must ascend through special treatment of his soul abilities in order to gain higher knowledge. This was also said in ancient times. People were aware that with ordinary consciousness one can only recognize what is spread around man; but one can further develop this consciousness and thus arrive at supersensible truths. Thus in those ancient times one would not have spoken of a revelation reaching man somewhere without his own activity. That would have been felt to be nonsense. And so all the dogmas contained in the various church teachings originally come from such initiation truths. Today, people easily say: dogmas such as the Trinity or the Incarnation must have been revealed, they cannot be approached through human cognitive abilities. But originally they did arise out of human cognitive abilities. And in the Middle Ages, people had progressed to a greater use of their intellect. This is characteristic, for example, of scholasticism, in that the intellect was used in a grand sense, but only applied to the sensual world, and that at this stage of human development one no longer felt capable of developing higher powers of cognition, at least not in the circles in which the old dogmas had been handed down as doctrines of revelation. Then they refused to pave the way for man to the supersensible world through higher powers of knowledge. So they took over what had been achieved in ancient times through real human knowledge, through tradition, through historical tradition, and said that one should not examine it with human science. People gradually came to accept this attitude towards knowledge. They gradually got used to calling belief that which was once knowledge, but which they no longer dared to attain; and they only called knowledge that which is actually gained through human cognitive abilities for the sensual world. This doctrine had become more and more pronounced, especially within Catholicism. But as I already told you yesterday: basically, all modern scientific attitudes are also nothing more than a child of this scholasticism. People just stopped at saying that the human intellect could only gain knowledge about nature, and did not care about the supersensible knowledge. They said that man could not gain this through his abilities. But then it was left to faith to accept the old knowledge as handed-down dogmas or not. After the 18th century had already proclaimed mere sensual knowledge and what can be gained from it through rational conclusions, the tendency emerged in the 19th century in particular to only accept as science what can be gained in this way by applying human abilities to the sensual world. And in this respect, the 19th century has achieved an enormous amount, and great things are still being achieved in the field of scientific research through the application of scientific methods. I would like to say that the last public attempt to ascend into the spiritual world was made at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century by the movement known as German idealism. This German idealism was preceded by a philosopher like Cart, who now also wanted to express the separation between knowledge and belief philosophically. Then came those energetic thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Flegel, and these stand there, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, like last mighty pillars, because they wanted to go further with the human capacity for knowledge than mere sensory knowledge and what can be deduced from it. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are very different from one another. Fichte started from the human ego, developed an enormous power precisely in grasping the human ego, and sought to conquer the world cognitively from the human ego. Schelling developed a kind of imaginative construction of a world view. This impetus in the imaginative construction of thoughts even brought him close to an understanding of the mysteries. Hegel believed in the thought itself, and he believed that in the thought that man can grasp, the eternal lives directly. It is a beautiful thought when Hegel said that he wanted to recognize the spirit and conquer it from the point of view of thought. But only those who grasp Hegel's general striving, this striving towards the spirit, can really taste him. For when one reads Hegel — most people soon stop reading, after all — he is, despite his belief in the spirituality of thought, a terribly abstract thinker when he expounds his ideas. And it is true that, although the impulse that lived in Hegel in terms of the spirit was an immensely strong one, Hegel gave mankind nothing but an inventory of abstract concepts. Why was that so? It is indeed a tremendous tragedy that these robust, powerful thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, did not actually penetrate to spirituality. This is because, in the general civilization of that time, humanity was not yet mature enough to really open the gates to the spiritual world. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel only got as far as thought. But what is the thought that lives in man in ordinary consciousness? Do you remember what I said some time ago? When we follow a person's life from birth to death, we have the person before us as a living being; soul and spirit warm and illuminate what stands before us as a physical being. When the person has died for the physical world, then we have the corpse in the physical world. We bury or cremate this corpse. Just think what a tremendous difference there is for an unprejudiced human observer of life between a fully living human being and a corpse. If you can only grasp this difference with your heart, then you will be able to understand what the spiritual scientist has to say about another phase of life, when man is considered between death and a new birth, as he is as a soul-spiritual being in a spiritual world, how he develops there, how he, while growing old here on earth, becomes younger and younger in the spiritual world until the moment when he finds his way down to a physical embodiment. What lives in man can be grasped just as much with the higher spiritual powers as one can grasp what lives in a physical human being. And then one can ask oneself: What remains of it when the human being has been born, what presented itself to our view in the spiritual world above, before the soul-spiritual descended? What remains in the human being, perceptibly, are his thoughts. But these thoughts, which the human being then carries within himself here on earth through the physical body, are the corpse of the thoughts that belong to the human being when he lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual and soul world. The abstract thoughts we have here are quite a corpse compared to the living being that is in man between death and a new birth, just as the corpse is in the physical compared to the living person before he has died for the physical world. Those who do not want to take the step of enlivening abstract thoughts allow nothing more to live in them than the corpse of what was in them before they descended to earth. And only this corpse of thoughts lived in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, however magnificent these thoughts are. One would like to say: In ancient times, when religion, science and art were still one, something of the life that belongs to man in the spiritual world still lived on in earthly thoughts. Even in Plaio, one can perceive in the sweep of his ideas how something supermundane lived on in him. This is becoming less and less. People keep the knowledge of the supermundane as revelation. But otherwise the human being would not have been able to become free, he would not have been able to develop freedom. The human being comes more and more to have nothing but the corpse of his prenatal inner life in his thinking. And just as one sometimes finds in certain people, when they have died, an enormous freshness in the corpse for a few days, so it was with the corpse-thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: they were fresh, but they were nevertheless just those corpses of the supersensible, of which a real spiritual science must speak. But I ask you now: Do you believe that we could ever encounter a human corpse in the world if there were no living people? Anyone who encounters a human corpse knows that this corpse was once alive. And so someone who really looks at our thinking, our abstract, our dead, our corpse thinking, will come to the conclusion that this too once lived, namely before man descended into a physical body. But this realization had also been lost to man, and so people were experiencing dead thinking, and they revered everything that came to them from living thinking as a revelation, if they still placed any value on it at all. This was particularly confirmed by the great advances in natural science that came in the period I have already mentioned, when Franz Brentano was young. To the many peculiarities of Franz Brentano, I must add two more today. Yesterday I wanted to characterize the personality more, today I want to point out the development over time. Therefore, today's consideration must be somewhat more general. In addition to all the qualities that I mentioned yesterday about this Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholicism but then became a general philosopher, he had an immense antipathy towards Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. He did not rail against them as Schopenhauer did, because he had a better education; but he did use harsh words, only more delicately expressed, not in the same truly abominable tone as Schopenhauer's. But one must realize that a man who grows out of Catholicism into a new outlook cannot, after all, have any other attitude toward Fichte, Schelling and Hegel than Franz Brentano had. When one has outgrown scholasticism, one wants to apply to the sense world what for Hegel, for example, is the highest human power of cognition, thinking, and in the sense world, thinking is only an auxiliary means. Just think: with this thinking-corpse one approaches the sense world, one grasps inanimate nature first. You cannot grasp living nature with this thinking anyway. This thinking corpse is just right for inanimate nature. But Hegel wanted to embrace the whole world with all its secrets with this thinking corpse. Therefore, you will not find any teaching about immortality or God in Hegel, but what you do find will seem quite strange to you. Hegel divides his system into three parts: logic, natural philosophy, and the doctrine of the spirit = art, religion, science Logic is an inventory of all the concepts that man can develop, but only of those concepts that are abstract. This logic begins with being, goes to nothingness, to becoming. I know that if I were to give you the whole list, you would go crazy because you would not find anything in all these things that you are actually looking for. And yet Hegel says: That which emerges again in man when he develops being, nothingness, becoming, existence and so on as abstract concepts, that is God before the creation of the world. Take Hegel's logic, it is full of abstract concepts from beginning to end, because the last concept is that of purpose. You can't do much with that either. There is nothing at all about any kind of soul immortality, about a God in the sense that you recognize it as justified, but rather an inventory of nothing but abstract concepts. But now imagine these abstract concepts as existing before there is nature, before there were people, and so on. This is God before the creation of the world, says Hegel. Logic is God before the creation of the world. And this logic then created nature and came to self-awareness in nature. So first there is logic, which, according to Hegel, is the god before the creation of the world. Then it passes into its otherness and comes to itself, to its self-awareness; it becomes the human spirit. And the whole system then concludes with art, religion and science as the highest. These are the three highest expressions of the spirit. So in religion, art and science, God continues to live within the earth. Hegel registers nothing other than what is experienced on earth in everyday life. He actually only proclaims the spirit that has died, not the living spirit. This must be rejected by those people who seek science in the modern sense, based on a scientific education. It must be rejected because, when one penetrates into nature with dead concepts, the matter does not go so that one remains with the abstractions. Even if you are so poorly educated in botany that you transform all the beautiful flowers into the number of stamens, into the description of the seed, the ovary and so on, even if you have such abstract concepts in your head, and then go out with a botany drum and bring back nothing but abstract concepts, at least the withered flowers are still there, and they are still more concrete than the most abstract concepts. And when you, as a chemist, stand in the laboratory, no matter how much you fantasize about all kinds of atomic processes and the like, you cannot help but also describe what happens in the retort when you have a certain substance inside and below it the lamp that causes this substance to evaporate, melt and so on. You still have to describe something that is a thing. And finally, when physicists in optics also draw for you how light rays refract and describe everything that light rays still do according to the physicists, you will still be reminded of colors again and again when that beautiful drawing is made that shows how light rays pass through a prism, are deflected in different ways. And even if all color has long since evaporated in the physical explanation of color, you will still be reminded of the colors. But if you want to grasp the spiritual with a completely abstract system of concepts and with completely abstract logic, then you have no choice but to use abstract logic. A person like Franz Brentano could not accept this as a real description of the spirit, nor could the other scholastics, because at least they still have tradition as revelation. Therefore, as a student in the mid-19th century, Brentano was faced with a truly irrepressible thirst for truth and knowledge, with an inner scientific conscientiousness that was unparalleled in his time, so that he could not receive anything from those who were still the last great philosophers of modern civilization. He could only accept the strict method of natural science. In his heart he carried what Catholicism with its theology had given him. But he could not bring all this together into a new spiritual understanding. But what is particularly appealing is how infinitely truthful this human being was. Because – and this brings me to the other thing I mentioned – when we look at the human being as he is born into the physical world, as he makes his first fumbling movements as a child, as we first fumbling movements as a child, we see in an unskillful way the unfolding of what was tremendously wise before it descended into the physical world. If we understand spiritual science correctly, we say to ourselves: We see how the childlike head organism is born. In it we have an image of the cosmos. Only at the base of the skull do the earthly forces, as it were, brace themselves. If the base of the skull were rounded, as the top of the head is rounded, the head would truly be a reflection of the cosmos. This is something that human beings bring with them. We can certainly regard the head, when we consider it as a physical body, as a reflection of the cosmos. This is truly the case.  I was criticized for mentioning an important fact in public, but without mentioning such facts, one cannot actually get to the world's interrelations: I have publicly stated that there is a certain arrangement of furrows in the human brain, certain centers are and so on. Even in these smallest details, this human brain is a reflection of the starry sky at the time when the person is born. In the head we see an image of the cosmos, which we also see externally with our senses, even though most people do not perceive its spiritual aspect. In the chest organism, in what mainly underlies the rhythmic system, we see how the roundness of the cosmos has already been somewhat overcome by adapting to the earth. But if you follow the chest organism with its peculiar formation of the spine with the ribs and sees how this thoracic organism is connected to the cosmos through breathing, then, even if only in a very altered form, something like an image of the cosmos can still be seen in the thoracic, in the rhythmic organism. But no longer in the metabolic-limb organism. There you cannot possibly see anything that is modeled on the cosmos. Now, the formation of the head is connected with thinking, the thoracic organism, the rhythmic organism with feeling, and the metabolic-limb organism with will.  Why is it precisely the metabolism-limb organism, which is actually the most earthly part of the human being, that is the seat of the will? This is how it is connected: in the human head we have a very faithful image of the cosmos. The soul-spiritual has flowed into the head, into the formative forces. One could say that the human being learned from the cosmic forces before descending to earth and formed his head accordingly. He still forms the thoracic organism a little, but no longer the limb organism at all. The will is in the latter. So that when one looks at the human external organism, thinking must be assigned to the head, feeling to the middle man and willing to the metabolic-limb organism. But in what is really the lowest, the metabolism and the limbs, the spiritual also maintains itself best, so that in our thinking we have only a corpse of what we were before we descended. In our feelings we have a little more, but feeling, as you know, remains in a dream-like state, and the will, one no longer even notices with the ordinary consciousness. The will remains entirely in the unconscious, but in it there is still most of the life of what we were before we descended to earth. When we are developed as a child, most of our immortal soul is in our will. Now, most people do not have many scruples; they say: Man has the three soul powers within him, thinking, feeling and willing. You know, these three soul activities are listed as if they were present for ordinary consciousness, whereas in anthroposophy we first have to point out that actually only thinking is fully awake. Feeling is already like dreams in people, and people know nothing at all about willing. I must emphasize again and again: Even if we only want to raise an arm, the thought, “I am raising my arm,” flows into the organism and becomes will, so that the arm is actually raised. Man knows nothing of this, he sleeps through it in the waking state, just as he otherwise sleeps through things from falling asleep to waking up. So instead of saying: we have in us the waking thinking, the dreaming feeling, the sleeping willing, they say: we have thinking, feeling and willing, which are supposed to be on a par with one another. Now imagine a person who has an infinite sense of truth and who works with modern science, that is, who only uses thinking. The modern natural scientist, whether he is using a microscope, looking at the cosmos through a telescope, or doing astrophysics with a spectral analyzer, always turns only to conscious thinking. Therefore, it became an axiom for Franz Brentano that all unconsciousness had to be rejected. He wanted to stick only to ordinary conscious thinking, and for this he did not want to develop higher cognitive abilities. What could we actually expect from such a person when he speaks of the soul, when he wants to speak as a psychologist? One might expect that he would not speak of the will at all in psychology if he sticks only to the conscious. One might expect that he would cross out the will entirely, be quite uncertain about feeling, and really treat only thinking correctly. Other, more superficial minds have not come to this. Franz Brentano's psychology does not divide the soul faculties into thinking, feeling and willing, but into imagining, judging and into the phenomena of love and hate, that is, into the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy, that is, of feeling. You will not find any will in him at all. The right active will is absent from Brentano's psychology because he was a thoroughly honest seeker of truth, and he really had to admit: I just can't find the will. On the other hand, there is something tremendously moving in seeing how infinitely sincere and honest this personality actually is. Will is absent from Brentano's psychology, for he separates judgment and imagination so that he now has three parts to the life of the soul; but judgment and imagination coincide in terms of the capacity of the soul, so that he actually has only two. Now consider the consequence of what appears in Brentano. What does he have in reality i. in man? By becoming a modern natural scientist and not giving anything a value that does not present itself to conscious thinking according to the natural scientific method, he excludes volition from the human soul. And what does he thereby eliminate? Precisely that which we bring with us as living beings from our state before we descend into a physical body. Brentano was confronted with a science that eliminated precisely the eternal in the soul for him. The other psychologists did not feel this. He felt it, and therefore there arose for him the tremendous abyss between what was once a doctrine of revelation that spoke to him of the eternal in the human soul, and what he could find alone according to his scientific method, which even cut away the volition and thus the eternal from the human soul. Thus Brentano is a personality who is characteristic of everything that the 19th century was unable to give to humanity. The gates to the spiritual world had to be opened. And that is the reason why I have spoken to you about Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in 1917, because in him I see the most characteristic of all those philosophers of the 19th century who already had a serious striving for truth But they were held fast by the fetters of the natural-scientific spirit, which did not want to rise to a spiritual comprehension of the world, and in this way show everywhere that the time has come when this spiritual conception is needed. What, after all, is the difference between what spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense really wants and the tragic striving of a man like Franz Brentano? That Franz Brentano, with tremendous acumen, has brought in the concepts that can be obtained from ordinary consciousness, and said: That is where you have to stop. But the knowledge is not complete; one strives in vain for real knowledge. But he was never satisfied with that; he always wanted to get out. He just could not get out of his natural science. And that remained so until his death. One might say that spiritual science had to begin where Brentano left off, had to take the step from ordinary consciousness into higher consciousness. That is why he is so extraordinarily interesting, indeed the most interesting philosopher of the second half of the 19th century, because in him the striving for truth was truly something personal. It must be said: if you want to study one symptom of what a person had to experience in the development of science and in the spiritual development of modern times, you can consider this nephew of Clemens Brentano, the philosopher Franz Brentano. He is characteristic of everything that a person has to seek and cannot find with the usual scientific method. He is characteristic of this because one must go beyond what he strove for with such an honest sense of truth. The more closely one looks at him, right down into the structures of his psychology, the more this becomes apparent. He is precisely one of those minds that show: humanity needs a spiritual life again that can intervene in everything. It cannot come from natural science. But this natural science is the fate of modern times in general, as it has become the fate of Brentano. For like the true modern Faust of the nineteenth century, Brentano sits first in Würzburg, then in Vienna, then in Florence, then in Zurich, wrestling with the greatest problems of humanity. He does not admit to himself that “we cannot know”, but he would have to if he were fully aware of his own method. He would actually have to say to himself: natural science is what prevents me from undertaking the path into the spiritual world. But this natural science speaks a strong, authoritative language. And so it is also in public life today. Science itself cannot offer people what they need for their soul. The greatest achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries could not give people a kind of guiding spirit. And this scientific attitude is a strong obstacle due to its powerful authority, because wherever anthroposophy appears, science initially opposes it, and although science itself cannot give people anything, when it comes to anthroposophy, the question is: does science agree with it? — For even those who know little about science have the overriding feeling today that science is right, and if science says that anthroposophy is nonsense, then it must be right. As I said, people do not need to know much about science, because after all, what do the monistic speakers know about science? As a rule, they have in mind the general things that applied three decades ago! But they act as if they were speaking from the full spirit of contemporary science. That is why many people see it as an authority. One can also see from Brentano's inner destiny the outer destiny, not the inner destiny of the anthroposophical world view, but its outer destiny. |
| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Eighth Lecture
09 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Eighth Lecture
09 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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This time I wanted to use a personal example to make it clear how what we now call anthroposophy had to grow out of the whole of spiritual life. After all, the objection is justified when it says: When such things are discussed, we are actually dealing with a narrower circle. One is considering individual scientific, philosophical or otherwise striving people who have not become known to the greater mass of humanity, and one actually then places oneself outside of what lives in the great masses of people. But you only need to look a little more impartially and you will not be able to see things in this way. One must only bear in mind that everything that lives as the content of the soul, and as the impulse for all the actions and omissions of the great masses of people, comes from the influence of certain leading personalities who may not have received any knowledge of what personalities of the kind we have been considering experience in their quiet study, as one says. But one must bear in mind that in such personalities, time itself pulsates with their thinking and feeling, so that a larger number of people, and especially those who acquire a higher education, absorb what such personalities experience and then carry it back to the places where the leading personalities of humanity, who influence the masses, also educate themselves. So that, just by observing the experiences of people living in their quiet study, one can see what constitutes the impulses that will then live in the great masses of people at some time. We just do not usually recognize the channels through which these spiritual impulses pour into the great masses of people. And so, in the end, what lives in truth, in reality, in the culture of our time, can only be seen as we have seen it again in these days, and it is justified to say that out of the deepest spiritual experience of the nineteenth century, something like anthroposophy was bound to arise, because the spirit of the age, being what it was, actually crushed human souls, as we have just seen from the outstanding example of Franz Brentano. And in order to generalize a little more about what I am actually trying to achieve with these observations, I would like to extend the observation to a somewhat wider circle. We find Franz Brentano, still a devout Catholic, as a teacher of philosophy in Würzburg. After what I said yesterday and the day before, we can roughly imagine the philosophical problems that Franz Brentano, still thoroughly Catholic and with a keen intellect, presented from his lectern in Würzburg. He tried to explain everything with his keen intellect, but in the background, what he had received from Catholic theology always lived with him. Many an extraordinarily significant thought emerged from there. For example, the realization of the newer scientific theory of evolution was already alive in Franz Brentano, which is based on the fact that the human brain is not entirely dissimilar to the brain of the higher apes. This purely naturalistic theory of evolution drew the conclusion from this that there is a relationship between humans and higher mammals. Franz Brentano also accepted this assertion positively, just as he did not negate scientific knowledge in general, but accepted it positively. He said: Well, of course, natural science can show that the human brain is not very different from that of anthropoids. But if you look at the mental life of anthropoids and that of humans, you find an enormous difference. Above all, we find the difference that even the highest ape species cannot develop abstract concepts. Man can develop abstract concepts. So if, as Franz Brentano thought, the human brain is so similar to the ape brain, then it must be said that the thoughts that man develops for himself cannot come from the brain, because otherwise they would also have to come from the ape brain. We must therefore conclude that man has something that represents a special soul substance from which thoughts arise that anthropoids cannot grasp. Thus it was precisely from the assimilation of scientific knowledge that Franz Brentano concluded the independence of the soul substance. This was still the case in the years from 1866 to 1870, when he was a teacher of philosophy in Würzburg, because in the background of what he developed philosophically was still what had remained for him as an overall view of the world from Catholic theology. However, when Franz Brentano later outgrew Catholic theology more and more and grew more and more into what was peculiar to him from the beginning, but which was initially still illuminated by Catholic theology, when he grew more and more into a merely scientific understanding of the phenomena of the soul, he lost the substance of the soul and could no longer say anything about it. His ability to perceive simply weakened when he wanted to rise from the mere socialization and separation of ideas to the problem of the inner soul life itself. Now I have already told you that this scientific way of thinking, however much individual followers may resist it, is nevertheless nothing more than a straightforward continuation of scholastic thinking. Scholastic thinking has led to the statement: Revelation is about the supersensible world; the sensible world, with a few conclusions drawn from sense observation, can alone be the object of human knowledge. — And what was cultivated among the scholastics, that is, on the one hand, they took what was attainable only by human sense knowledge as a science, and on the other hand, what was available as knowledge of the supersensible world through revelation, that also developed in the further throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to such an extent that natural phenomena were observed according to the principles actually stated by the school, and the doctrine of revelation for science was simply dropped. Thus, in the sense that I have just expressed, modern natural science can be called a true child of medieval scholasticism, and therefore it should not surprise us when we see how people who continue to adhere to revelation, as Franz Brentano did in his youth and as Catholic scholars still do today, readily admit the validity of natural science, which is limited to the sense world alone, and hold fast only to the view that one must not strive after a knowledge that extends to the supersensible; for this supersensible must remain the object of the belief in revelation. Thus it is easy to imagine that natural scientists and Catholic theologians work together at an institution without any dispute arising over the area in which the Catholic theologian wishes to work and that which he concedes to the natural scientist. I would like to give an example of this. Let us look at how Franz Brentano taught logic, metaphysics, ethics, and the history of philosophy in Würzburg from 1867 to 1870. Now, to make the matter quite clear to you, I would like to stay in the same place, in Würzburg, and visualize Brentano's lecture hall, around the year 1869, where he taught the subjects I I have just characterized, where he spoke of how, in addition to the similarity of the brain to that of higher apes, there must be a soul substance that ordinary thought in man brings forth. Let us now take another chapter that he also presented at that time: On the Existence of God, on the Proofs of the Existence of God. There he presented in a sharp-witted way everything that the mind of man can bring forward for the existence of God, and of course he pointed out in the end that one can only approach this existence of God with human knowledge, that the truth about the existence of God must be given through revelation. Now let us vividly recall how Franz Brentano, with an ecclesiastical-Catholic sense, presented his metaphysics, his philosophy, to a large audience, taking full account of natural science, and how he approached the highest problems of man in this way, and let us go from Franz Brentano's lecture hall at the University of Würzburg to the lecture hall of the physiologist Adolf Fick. For at the same time that Brentano was lecturing on metaphysics and philosophy, Adolf Fick was lecturing on physiology in Würzburg. Now I would like to show you what a listener in Adolf Fick's lecture hall of physiology could hear, a listener who might have just been listening to philosophy at Franz Brentano's, out of such a mind as I have just characterized for you. The following idea was presented: I am only quoting, because what I am telling you now is contained almost word for word in the lectures that Adolf Fick later gave at the University of Würzburg. He said something that could be summarized in the following sentences: We consider, for example, warmth, which we first perceive through our sensation. When we touch a body, it seems warm or cold to us; we have sensations of warmth. But what corresponds to these sensations of warmth in the external world is a movement of the smallest parts of the bodies, that is, a movement that is carried out in the atoms and molecules or also by the atoms and molecules in space. If, for example, we look at a gas, then this gas must be enclosed in a space that is closed on all sides; but the atoms and molecules of the individual gas are present in it. However, they are not in a state of rest, but are floating back and forth, bumping into each other and into the walls. So everything in it is in motion and turmoil (see drawing). And if we touch with the surface of our skin what is only a movement inside, we have the sensation of warmth.  This view was common in the natural sciences at the time; it was the view that emerged in particular from the work of Julius Robert Mayer, Helmholtz, Clausius and other natural scientists of the time. Jose, the English brewer who was also a naturalist, had discovered that water can be heated by a movement, for example, of a paddle wheel moving in the water. One could then measure how much work the paddle wheel does and how much heat is generated, and this gave one the opportunity to say: Heat is generated by movement, by mechanical work. This must therefore be nothing more than a transfer of the visible movements performed by the paddle wheel as it turns in the water; this is transformed into invisible movements, which, however, are then felt as heat. So heat was definitely understood as a kind of movement. But now, in those days, it had been discovered that not only heat can be converted into motion, but that other forces of nature can also be converted into motion. And so a physiologist like Adolf Fick was able to announce at the time that all natural forces, magnetism, electricity, chemical forces, can be transformed into one another, that one can be converted into the other, that basically the only difference is that we perceive the different forms of movement with our senses in a different way. So if we disregard what we have within us in the way of sensations of warmth, light and so on, and look at what is outside in space, there is only movement everywhere. This physiologist then continued this observation by saying: Even when we look at the human body, the highest organism – and here Adolf Fick came into his actual domain, physiology – we cannot assume a special life force that sets the parts, the molecules of the human organism, in particular motion, but that which moves outside when we perceive heat, any kind of tension or electricity or magnetism, that is also active in the human body. He then explained how carbon burns to form carbonic acid, how hydrogen burns to form water, and how the oxygen that is absorbed causes the oxygen in the human body to be consumed by combustion. He then discussed how to determine how a certain amount of oxygen is absorbed and how a person releases heat. In those days, experiments had already been carried out with the calorimeter to determine how much heat is released by this or that animal, and they had also been carried out on humans, and it had been found that the results were inaccurate. But it was said that mistakes had been made in the experiments, and approximate figures had been found from which it emerged that what corresponded to the absorption of a certain amount of oxygen was then released as heat. It was assumed that some of what is processed internally is converted into muscle movement, that what is produced as heat in the human body through the combustion of carbon to form carbonic acid or hydrogen to form water, is represented by such movements in the human body. Man inhales oxygen. Hydrogen burns to water, carbon burns to carbonic acid. What makes man warm inside, but what he then radiates, is only the movement of his smallest parts. Only after the transformation of the forces do parts transform into what underlies muscle performance when a person not only radiates warmth but also does work with his muscles or even just moves his limbs. So that one can say: Man as a whole is a kind of complicated physical-chemical device that radiates warmth and does work through the inhaled oxygen. Adolf Fick continued in a manner that he said: But if people continually breathe oxygen and consume the oxygen by using it as a combustion agent, it should have been noticeable long ago in the history of the Earth that the oxygen would have become less. But that is not the case. But this can also be explained because oxygen is always being produced. The plants are irradiated by the sun, and as the plants absorb the sunlight, they release oxygen. This in turn releases the oxygen. Man can breathe it in again. What humans and animals consume in oxygen is always produced again by the plant world. Furthermore, Adolf Fick said in his lectures: At least the sun should get colder, since it radiates light and heat continuously. He then explained how one could calculate how much colder the sun should be. Julius Robert Mayer had already calculated this and had also shown that the sun should have cooled down long ago, that it could no longer radiate heat at all, given the amount it radiates. Therefore, Julius Robert Mayer assumed, and Fick presented it in his lectures, that comet masses, of which, according to Kepler's saying, there should be many more in space than fish in the ocean, would continually crash into the sun. When something impacts a body, new heat is generated. Through this continuous approach, the solar heat and thus also the sunlight are constantly being recreated. It was only, as Adolf Fick assured, an embarrassment because one would have to assume that such masses are always present. So one would have to assume that the masses that fly into the sun are thrown out again so that they can fly in again later. But he also found a way out of this by showing that according to the so-called second law of mechanical heat theory, it is not necessary for the heat of the sun to be always present, because it is a law of development, which, however, can be proven in the strictest sense – at that time Clausius had already published the second law of mechanical heat theory – that through the transformation of forces, forces are continually transformed into heat, but heat cannot be transformed back into forces, so that heat is always left over, so that ultimately everything that happens in the world must transform into states of heat that balance each other out. Then there will be nothing left of what happens in the world but the so-called heat death. And everything must end in this so-called heat death. Thus Adolf Fick presented how the earth, with everything that happens on it, including man, develops into this heat death, and how all events in this heat death will one day come to an end. A strictly physical worldview! We can imagine how Adolf Fick, the physiologist, presented this doctrine as a physical world view, while over in his lecture hall Brentano presented what I have just described to you. But now I would also like to tell you two conclusions from these two lectures. Let us assume that Brentano, in his lecture hall, once closed his lecture as follows: When we consider the scientific view of the development of the world, we must start from an initial stage that can be scientifically understood. We arrive at a final state, which today even science describes as the heat death. But all this is permeated and inspired by divine spiritual happenings. We are led to the beginning, where a creative act of God calls into being that which can then be observed scientifically. We come to the heat death, from which only a creative act of God can continue the evolution. — This is what Franz Brentano might have said as the conclusion of one of his lectures, and that is what he said. Let us assume that the two lectures took place one after the other, not simultaneously, and that a student, after hearing Franz Brentano, went over to Adolf Fick to listen to the final lecture on physiology. What would he have heard there? Well, I am just quoting, I am just saying what Adolf Fick himself said in those years, around 1869, at the same university where Brentano taught. He said, after he had preceded such considerations, as I have just explained to you now, in a whole series of lectures: We come to the point that once upon a time everything that happens around us and in us, in the heat of death, that is, in the end of the world. But if we can assume such an end of the world according to all the rules of natural science that we have now, if nothing is forgotten, if we must assume such an end of the world according to strict natural science, then it is inconceivable that this world did not also have a beginning; for one cannot imagine that a world that has existed from eternity with natural scientific events would not have long since reached the heat death. Since this heat death must therefore develop only after some time, this world must also have had a beginning, that is, Adolf Fick concluded, it must have originated from a creative act of God. So you could go to a lecture by Franz Brentano in the Catholic theological philosophy department and hear the conclusion that I have just characterized, and then go to the physiologist – not one of the type of “fat Vogt” and the like, who just did not think things through, but to a physiologist who thought things through – and he said the same thing, only based on the principles of natural science. This is an extremely interesting fact. It means that if one did not go further than pointing to a creative act of God from the point of view of natural science, one was entirely in line with what was being presented in the neighboring lecture hall from the perspective of Catholic theology. What could a student do who had heard this view from Adolf Fick, who had heard, for example, how the world is physically constituted, but that it can even be proved that it emerged from a creative act of God? Adolf Fick would have simply told him: If you want to know something about this act of God, go to the other lecture hall where Catholic theology is being presented! A student would have felt that way in any case. And now put yourself in the shoes of Franz Brentano. At the time, he was able to make such a final conclusion directly with his scientific mindset because what seemed certain to him about the supersensible world came from Catholic theology. Ten years later, it was no longer so. Ten years later, as I have described to you, he could no longer find the supersensible world fully based on the doctrine of revelation in the sense of Catholicism. That means in other words: if the listener went over from natural science to where he was supposed to hear the supplement that natural science itself demands, then the person who could no longer hold on to the old traditions of revelation could no longer tell him anything. And that was basically how it was when Franz Brentano lectured in Vienna. He had recently left the Church. He came to Vienna in 1874; in 1873 he had actually only completely left, although he had already inwardly disintegrated with the Church after the dogma of infallibility. But he was so attached to the Catholic Church that for many years he thought about the matter thoroughly. Now we can no longer imagine that, as in the 1960s, a student could have gone from the lecture hall, let's say instead of Adolf Fick in Würzburg, from Brücke in Vienna or some other physiologist, because they all said the same thing, of course, he couldn't have gone to Franz Brentano and found the complement there. For with Franz Brentano he certainly heard extraordinary and interesting things about ethical and psychological problems, but nowhere did Brentano find the possibility of passing through direct knowledge to the supersensible. We see from this example in particular how the possibility of coming to the supersensible from the old spiritual culture disappears if one does not want to return to the old belief in revelation. This is the most important spiritual cultural fact of our time. For it is out of the moods that could be awakened by something like this that the souls of the leader-natures have grown. And it is through what these leader-natures have achieved that we have ended up in the cultural chaos of our time. Now I would like to show you the problem from a different perspective. Among those who were still studying at the time when Franz Brentano was performing his brilliant deeds at the university, was Richard Wahle. In 1894, Richard Wahle wrote his book, which is actually much more important than is usually the case in philosophical circles: “The Whole of Philosophy and its End, its Legacies to Theology, Physiology, Aesthetics and State Pedagogy.” Anyone who looks at the development of intellectual life with an open mind must point to this book in particular as being an extremely significant phenomenon. I would like to briefly characterize the way in which Richard Wahle viewed the world. This view was born entirely out of what Richard Wahle undoubtedly received as powerful stimuli from Franz Brentano, and out of what else was available in terms of intellectual culture at the time. Richard Wahle says: What do we actually experience of the world? Well, what we experience of the world is that “events” occur before us. I am standing there; the walls, the light, the lamps, the people appear before my eyes. I have to make these occurrences my personal experiences through my perceptions. There are occurrences everywhere that are given to me through perceptions. I carry nothing else within me but the perceptions of the occurrences. The world is a sum of occurrences that represent themselves to me through my perceptions. But let us look impartially at what we actually have. Do we ever have a table in front of us? We have an occurrence that is represented to us by the idea of the table. Do we have a person in front of us? We have an occurrence that is represented to us by the idea of the person. We have nothing but the representatives of occurrences. It is extraordinarily ingenious at the moment when one was so influenced by Franz Brentano that one perceived how he, as I told you yesterday, eliminated the will and only allowed the life of representation and, at most, the life of feeling to count. This life of representation only gives subjective representatives of occurrences. And what are these occurrences like? They are powerless, thoroughly powerless! For, let me give you a drastic example: the event of one person slapping another — it is an event or a sum of events — I don't know what is behind it! Richard Wahle says quite correctly in his way: We only have the events, represented by the subjective ideas. We cannot get to the primal factors. He fully admits that primal factors are hidden behind what we have as human beings, but we cannot get to them. Therefore, we come to nothing but agnosticism. We have to admit to ourselves that when one person slaps the other, my idea of the moving hand is powerless, that it is by no means sitting on the other person's cheek. I only have the idea. Wahle resolves everything that is accessible to man into subjective representations of events. Even what we perceive within ourselves are events that only emerge from within, instead of being given by events from outside. Again, we know nothing of the primal factors that are within ourselves. We don't even have a conception of which primal factors underlie the occurrence when my own hand rises from my thought, which is powerless and cannot itself give the other person a slap in the face. We don't know what factors underlie it, we don't know what underlies us. But we cannot possibly admit that the thought, which is given to us alone, gives the other a slap in the face, because thought is completely powerless, and if we take the greatest heroes in history, they are only given through subjective thoughts. Imagine, for example, Bismarck: he is only given as a subjective representative of events. The contents of his soul life, even of that of the greatest heroes, did not do the deeds. The deeds were done by the primal factors. But man does not penetrate to the primal factors. In Brentano you see the striving out of a view that still strives towards reality, but towards a reality that is only given through the faith of revelation, towards the pure intellectualism of the life of representation, where he falters, so that he cannot even continue his “psychology” beyond the first volume. And you see how Richard Wahle, who comes from the same time direction, feels compelled to stick to the content of the intellect when faced with weak ideas. Everything becomes weak. Man only develops intellectual concepts and finally realizes that they are weak. It was a significant experience for me when, after my first lecture in Vienna, Richard Wahle told me: I also have my ideas about the primal factors, but basically we are only a kind of gravedigger compared to the ancient philosophers. — Richard Wahle is a particularly harrowing example, for he was condemned to make the ultimate confession in the most spirited way: that man, from the newer culture, can gain nothing in his soul but something that is weak and anemic. I then quietly touched on the names of the teachers back when Wahle was still a student in Vienna, namely Zimmermann and Franz Brentano. He said, “Yes, at least they still dared to make claims, we can't even do that anymore.” And look at what was published as a book in 1894: “The Whole of Philosophy and its End, its Legacies to 'Theology, Physiology, Aesthetics and State Pedagogy.” Theology! Should what is theological tradition be taken up again? Should man completely renounce the attempt to penetrate to the supersensible himself? Should we simply go back to what Franz Brentano had to leave in such a significant way? How, then, should the process take place whereby that which philosophy once offered is to pass in part to theology as a legacy? How should what philosophy has offered pass to physiology as a legacy? Just think — physiology, in the sense of Adolf Fick, leads us to an act of creation by God at the beginning of evolution. This legacy would therefore not be able to provide anything satisfying. According to the demands of science in the present day, aesthetics would certainly not be accepted as something that is capable of somehow leading into the fields of truth. And state education? Well, it is quite understandable that someone who cannot establish a connection between themselves and the spiritual world appeals to those ideas that are created by people within human societies, that he wants to channel what should lead to action into state education education in the broadest sense; that everything that leads the human being, be he child or adult, to action, should be determined by state laws, that certain directions should be given to him by state laws. We see agnosticism in its most spirited, most energetic, most conscientious bloom in this book “The Whole of Philosophy and its End”. And how could it have been otherwise? I want to express in a single image what I would now like to say. Philosophy, love of wisdom; one can only love something that one knows as a living thing. As long as one knew Sophia as something living, one could speak of Philosophia. Now that Sophia is supposed to be only an aggregate of everything possible that can be found in the universe in terms of the inanimate, the Philo also had to fade away. Basically, this revolutionary Richard Wahle did the most consistent thing one could do in the field of philosophy. He simply stated what has become of philosophy under the influence of mere intellect. One can no longer love that. It must fall apart into indifferent things. It must have reached “its end.” After Sophia has died, there can be no more love for the dead Sophia, at most in memory. But then one could only write a story about the now deceased philosophy. One could dedicate a good memoir to it. Of course, the history of philosophy could still be written. One could still galvanize old systems. That has basically become the most common thing among the new philosophers. There have been New-Kantianers, New-Fichteans, Haeckelianers; everything that can remind one of the love for a dead lover has arisen. And if we consider the powerless and insipid subjective representations of the events, which are, however, the intellectualistic representations, then we will understand the whole course. But then we will also understand that in fact the old philosophical thinking has come to an end, must have come to an end. That is why, in my book “Riddles of Philosophy”, after having presented the whole course of philosophy from the ancient Greek philosophers to the second half of the 19th century, I tried to show how what philosophy was must pass over into anthroposophy. The last chapter is therefore a sketchy presentation of anthroposophy. The fact that one must proceed in this way, that in today's historiography of philosophy one must have anthroposophy as the last chapter, is not the result of subjective considerations, but of the objective course of historical development itself. And when we consider the most characteristic personalities of modern times, they force us to look at it this way. For, after humanity has really come to the anemic and powerless concepts that no longer contain any reality, after humanity has forgotten that these concepts are the corpses of what once was, before we descended from spiritual worlds into earthly life, it is necessary that we revive these concepts and ideas through meditation and concentration, by means of what you will find presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” And we are faced with the task of not stopping, as Franz Brentano did with the concepts of natural science, for example, but of taking them up and giving them life through the inner spiritual work that consists of meditation and concentration. And then the scientific conceptions of the most recent times will lead most surely up into the supersensible world. Then they will lead to the evolution of that method which is the method of anthroposophy; then the method of anthroposophy will develop out of natural science. This, in turn, can then imbue the anemic and powerless representatives of the events with essence, with life, because this essence, this life, must arise from the intellect itself for a humanity that has once advanced to the intellect. And I would like to say: Franz Brentano also seems to me to be particularly characteristic when it comes to the more intimate aspects of the problem. When he was still a fairly young man, he wrote a letter to an acquaintance about meditation, because he was attached to the meditation that had been taught to him from his Catholicism, but which he never led to the independent development of an inner spiritual life. Franz Brentano wrote something like this about the meditation he had come to know: “I advise you not to give up meditation. He who leads only an active and not a contemplative, meditative life, lives only a quarter of life; three quarters of life must be lived by devoting oneself to meditative contemplation. Everything that can bring one close to God can only come from meditative contemplation. — Then he concludes with the characteristic sentence: “I would rather die than give up meditation.” But it was a meditation that had been trained from ancient spiritual life. And we feel the tragedy of a personality who loves meditation so much and yet, because he is fettered by science, cannot develop into a free meditation that leads him to a renewed grasp of the spiritual and supersensible life. Perhaps it can be seen from this passage in the letter how Franz Brentano was led by an inner necessity to the gates of anthroposophy, but how he could not unlock them because he rejected everything that he believed should be rejected by the scientific attitude and way of thinking. It is a simple fact that science has certain limits. If science does not merely say, “There is nothing more to be achieved,” but, in the words of Adolf Fick, Franz Brentano's colleague at the university, must say, “There is a creative act of God, a creative deed,” then one can also say, “Just as it is legitimate to make one's observations in the whole realm of the physical, it must also be possible to make these observations here.” The physical does not just set limits, but it points out that there is something that must also be considered positively. It is truly not a subjective arbitrariness when one points out these things today, when one points out the necessity of anthroposophy for general human culture, but rather: anyone who looks at the history of spiritual life without prejudice can see the necessity of anthroposophy precisely from it. Suppose anthroposophy were recognized as a science. In that case, the Adolf Ficks would simply teach: This is as far as physical research goes; I cannot say anything about what comes after this, but there is a continuation, which is anthroposophical research. However, what will happen physically at the end of world evolution, something like the heat death, will only be seen in the right light when the whole evolution is considered as in my “Occult Wissenschaft im Umriß (Occult Science), where even the existence of Saturn is traced backwards to the beginning, where you also have the existence of nature at the beginning, consisting only of warmth, and then again the existence of Vulcan, also consisting of warmth. But the creative activity of the spirit is not only observed at the beginning and the end; throughout the entire process of evolution, the physical is always considered in connection with the spiritual forces and spiritual deeds of those spiritual entities that do not undergo physical embodiment. So of course it will not be the case that the anthroposophical and the physical stand side by side, but rather that the two will permeate each other. When, for example, we consider individual physical facts, we will have to hear a great deal about the spiritual forces that are at work in the physical world. Then we shall no longer speak merely of occurrences and unknown factors, but we shall speak of how, in what appears as occurrences, we can find the unknown primal factors not only at the beginning and end of the development, but throughout the entire development. I would like to make this clear to you with the help of an image. Suppose you have a mirror and you see what I have just described. We can stick with the sensualization, even though it is somewhat drastic. You see in the mirror what I have described, namely one person slapping the other across the face. There you have the whole process in the mirror image. You certainly have images, and you will not be able to say that this image is so powerful that it slaps the other image. But that is more or less how the philosopher of modern times must think about his ideas. They are powerless like the mirror images. One mirror image cannot slap the other. But the philosopher, Richard Wahle, for example, goes further in a very spirited way. He says: We cannot get to the original factors, even if I have two people in front of me, so to speak, one of whom is slapping the other one. I only have the idea of this, and the idea of person A cannot give person B a slap in the face. And I cannot get to the original factors, to what actually gives the slap in the face. This image helps to make it quite clear: the reflection of A cannot give the reflection of B a slap in the face. But look clearly at the reflections, and you will see all kinds of movements. You will not, however, think that this image here has been particularly hurt by the slap in the face; nor will you be able to feel any real sympathy for this image because it has received a slap in the face. But just keep looking! Look at the face of this picture afterwards, after it has received the slap, and you will find something in this face that would be inexplicable if it were merely a picture without strength or vitality. In other words, philosophy had come to a point in Richard Wahle where it could only speak of events, but could not read into them, because all the old atavistic clairvoyance, which alone made reading possible, had been lost. You read into the image of the person who gets slapped, into the forms that the face takes, that it points to primal factors. If you open a book, you read in it, if you know how to read, without being able to say: Yes, I don't see the primal factors. — Because what you read does lead you to a certain understanding of the primal factors. We must learn to read again in what the phenomena are. We can readily admit that in the intellectual age only the representations of the events are there; but if we are able to approach these subjective representations with inner strength, then we will understand how to read them again. Then we will not become Kantians, but we will become anthroposophists who say to themselves: Of course, we cannot gain anything about the original factors from the representations that are immediately available to us. But if we know how to read the world, then we will gradually work our way through the events to an understanding of the pre-factors. But this can only happen if we bring inner strength into our soul life again. And this can only be achieved through the paths indicated in meditation and concentration and so on. We may say, then, that modern philosophy has expressed and squeezed out of itself everything that gives life to the intellect. It was the fault of human beings that they could not find the way into the supersensible worlds, and we must learn from the time in which these human beings lived to strive for such an inner development that this way into the supersensible worlds can be found again. This is what I wanted to discuss with you today, through a somewhat detailed historical examination of the second half of the 19th century. Through this examination, I wanted to prepare some things that I will then expand on in the next lectures. |
| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Ninth Lecture
14 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Ninth Lecture
14 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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The purpose of last week's lectures was to provide a certain historical perspective, showing how especially deeper-disposed personalities had to struggle with the currents of the 19th century, and in particular, how the contemporary scientific way of thinking prevented deeper natures from finding their way into the spiritual world. When we make observations directed at the personal, as we have done in relation to Franz Brentano, we can see much more intimately, in the inner soul struggles of human beings, in what has taken place in the spirit, what the great struggles and currents of the time are, than when we characterize only in the abstract. In the last issue of our journal 'Das Goetheanum', I pointed out how Franz Brentano, who, starting from Catholicism and immersing himself in the scientific mentality, got stuck, so to speak, in the physical-earthly, no longer found his way back into the spiritual, as he faced another personality who actually - albeit with some modification - suffered the same fate. That is Nietzsche's personality. Just as one can show in the case of Brentano how the natural-scientific world view took hold of him and never let go of his devout Catholicism, and how one can show how this characterizes the entire course of his philosophical development, one can show something similar in the case of Nietzsche. It can be shown that Nietzsche, starting not from Catholicism but from a different spirit, was also held back by natural science within the physical-sensual, just as he could not, like Brentano, rise into the spiritual, but then his fate took a similar but still different path. Brentano immersed himself in the spirit of natural science as early as the 1860s, and we have seen how the dogma of infallibility, as a wave of fate bearing down on him from outside, so to speak, then completely alienated him from his church. Nietzsche, who is a few years younger, went through a similar process of development in the 1870s. He did not start out from Catholicism. He actually started from an antique-like artistic world view, from what the modern human being develops as a world view when he absorbs more of the Greek way of looking at the world in his youth. And it can be said that Nietzsche was as passionate about the Greek way of looking at the world and about an artistic world view in general as Brentano was about Catholicism. He believed that in Richard Wagner and his art he found a renewal of Greekness. And just as Brentano had participated in all Catholic practice and had completely absorbed himself in everything that Catholic worship can evoke within a person, so Nietzsche immersed himself in Wagner's art, in which he believed he saw a resurrection of what the Greek way of looking at the world was. This is how he wrote his first writings, and this is how he experienced the irruption of the scientific way of thinking into his soul in the 1870s. Before that, he was filled with the view that great human ideals are given to man in an independent spiritual sphere, that man can place these great ideals, the moral, the religious ideals, before his soul, that he finds in them the possibility of rising above the physical-human. And Nietzsche finds words of extraordinary enthusiasm and high flight to describe man's assimilation of ideals. Then the scientific view comes over him. And he feels he must increasingly imbue himself with the thought that the physical in man, in its broadest sense, also produces the ideals as results. It is unsettling for him to have to abandon the old belief that ideals are something independent, something rooted in an independent spiritual world, that ideals actually emerge as the results of what bodily-physical processes are. Nietzsche, so to speak, submerges with all that lives in his ideas as ideals into the physiology of human nature. What had previously seemed divine and spiritual to him now seems merely human, even all too human. He used to see how man has devoted himself to idealistic worlds, how he has elevated himself above base nature by devoting himself to them. Now he believed he recognized that man's lower nature develops only one kind of drive, becoming more and more powerful, and that the holding up of ideals is nothing more than a means of intensifying the inner power in man. In short, Nietzsche strove to explain all ideals as a kind of illusion of physiological processes in the broadest sense. He did not, however, conceive of these physiological processes in man in as philistine a way as today's natural science; but he wanted to regard ideals as a result of physiological, physical processes in the broadest sense. And so, for him, ideals became something that clouds the minds of people who do not see through them, while those who see through them are enlightened about the fact that ideals, like ordinary urges, arise from the physiological foundations of the human being and are only intended to bring the physical nature of the human being more and more powerfully to bear in the broadest sense. Of course, this is a somewhat radical and retouched description, but it essentially reflects what had such a devastating effect on Nietzsche, especially when he believed that he had come to the conclusion that conscience, too, can only be explained from a physiological basis. It is only that the natures of the two personalities are different: Brentano is a subtle mind, attuned to imagination, to cognition; he uses the natural-scientific method to create, as it were, an instrument with which he then wants to dissect human mental life in a subtle way, just as natural science dissects physical life. But this instrument becomes blunt at the moment when he wants to approach the real spiritual world. Nietzsche, when he comes to the conclusion that, according to the opinion of natural science, the physiological is the basis of everything, or at least according to its consequences, forms an instrument for himself that is not a fine analytical knife, like Brentano's, but a hammer, robust enough to get everything that is spiritual out of the physical, even physiologically. With this instrument, which is now robust enough to transform the moral and the ideal into the physiological, he grinds the intellectual to dust. He titled one of his writings: “Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.” Brentano shrinks from the spiritual, as it were. Nietzsche crushes the spiritual. Basically, anyone who looks at the inner cultural history of the most recent times must find a profound similarity between these two personalities, despite all their differences. And yet, in the very latest writing of which I spoke to you recently, Brentano has a short chapter on Nietzsche in which he shows that he has nothing but mere rejection for Nietzsche. He calls him a belletristic, dazzling mayfly. He compares him to Jesus and finds that Nietzsche is a caricature of Jesus. One cannot help but say: It is strange that a man of such extraordinary refinement as Franz Brentano did not develop a way of penetrating, even to some extent, into the experiences of another mind that was so similar to his in character and destiny, as I have described. But this is a general phenomenon of our time and only highlights, with excellent examples, what people are like today. They do not live in each other, they live apart. I have often emphasized that they pass each other by without understanding, and that is also a social phenomenon of our time. People pass each other by, even the strongest seekers of truth. Other people do it too, but with such outstanding personalities, what appears as significant symptoms is actually a general phenomenon of our time. Why do people pass each other by without understanding? We so urgently need the possibility of mutual understanding! Today we so urgently need the possibility that someone penetrates both Nietzsche and Brentano, or for that matter Haeckel, David Friedrich Strauß and so on, in order to show how these different personalities look at the world from the most diverse points of view. But only the spiritual-scientific view, the one that really ascends to the spirit, can achieve such a view that delves into the individual personal points of view. And that is precisely the reason why people do not understand each other: that they do not ascend to the spirit. We must seek the reason why a personality like Brentano, in the mere natural science, remained stuck, in the mere natural science, why he could not create a bridge to another personality, who basically had a very similar fate to his own. Only a spiritual deepening will be able to penetrate the most diverse points of view. But for this, a penetrating study of the human being, a penetrating knowledge of the human being, is necessary. For what do such personalities, who are seized by the scientific methodology of the 19th century, like Brentano and Nietzsche, ultimately face? One day they are confronted with the fact that, as honest seekers of knowledge and truth, they have, on the one hand, the physical world and the excellent scientific methods for penetrating into it; on the other hand, a spiritual world. Of course, people like Nietzsche and Brentano did not go so far as the superficiality that many today display, who do not even see this spiritual world as the great opposite of the physical world. They see the physical world, they see the spiritual world, but there is no bridge between the two. They see what man wants by virtue of his basic nature; they see the will that is based on instincts and impulses, and they attempt to explain these impulses and instincts from the physiological nature of man, how they accumulate, as it were, into volition. But then they notice that a spiritual world erects ideals above them, which are to be striven for; they notice the 'should' in relation to the 'wanting', and they find no bridge between the 'wanting' and the 'should'. A person like Brentano becomes a psychologist, a scientist of the soul. Physiology is, after all, to a certain extent complete. But he wants to examine the phenomena of the soul. He wants to imitate natural science by investigating the phenomena of the soul. At first he is not at all certain whether he has soul phenomena, because in a sense science denies this. Brentano is actually only certain that there are soul phenomena because he was a devout Catholic for so long, not out of any scientific knowledge. This dichotomy is terrible in the soul of these people: the spiritual world, the physical world, and no bridge between the two. How do you get from one to the other? The moral ideals are there. But it is not possible to understand how what the moral ideals want can take hold of the human muscles, how it can lead people to action. For science merely says how muscles and bones move according to physical laws, but not how the ought is reflected in the movement of muscles and bones. The point is that, however perfect the scientific method may be, this scientific century was basically helpless when it came to the human being. You simply could not examine the human being. It did not occur to anyone that the human being is a threefold being, in the way I have described in the last sections of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (The Riddle of the Soul). It was not possible to arrive at the conclusion that the human being can be divided into a nervous-mental human being, which naturally fills the whole human being but is mainly localized in the head; into a rhythmic human being, which in turn permeates the whole human being but is mainly concentrated and localized in the respiratory and circulatory organs; and finally into the metabolic human being of the limbs, which is the remaining human being. This is such a profound fact that everything that is to lead to an understanding of the human being must be linked to it. Of course, one must not say that the three parts of the human being are the head, chest and limbs. I have already said that the human being is a nerve-sense being everywhere, only this is primarily expressed in the head. But look at this head. It is so formed that we cannot but be filled with ever deeper admiration when we consider the structure, especially the nervous structure, of the human head. Within the world of physical phenomena, there is nowhere to be found any real reason why the human head, especially in its inner parts, should be formed precisely as it is.  This is where the realization I have often spoken of here occurs. The human head is modeled on the cosmos in its outer form, if you disregard the base of the head. It is actually spherical in shape (see drawing). Its form is taken from the cosmos. All the cosmic forces in the mother's body also work together to first create the human head during embryonic development. If we look at this spiritually, we see that the human being's soul and spirit live in a spiritual world before the person descends into physical earthly existence, first connecting with the cosmic forces and only then taking hold of the forces of heredity. The actual spiritual-soul-man first forms out of the ether of the world and only then goes to the physically ponderable matter that is offered to him in his mother's body. So actually this head is formed out of the cosmos, and what has descended from man out of spiritual-soul worlds to earth is imagined from this cosmic formation. Therefore, in the physical world, no one understands the structure of the human head who does not explain it in spiritual terms, saying: the human head is an image, an immediate imprint of the spiritual. These wonderful convolutions of the brain, everything that can be discovered physiologically in the human head, is as if it were crystallized spirit, spirit present in material form. The human head is, as a physical body, an immediate image of the spirit. If someone were to sculpt the spirit as such, they would actually have to study a human head permeated by spirit. Of course, if they are a model artist, they will not capture anything special; but if they are not a model artist, but create from the spiritual, then they will achieve a wonderful image of the innermost nature of the cosmic spiritual forces when they create the human head. What is present in the human head is intuition, inspiration, imagination of cosmic spirituality. It is as if the Godhead itself had wanted to create an image of the spiritual and had placed the human head on it. It is therefore basically comical when people seek images of the spirit, while they have the best, the most magnificent, the most powerful image of the spirit, but precisely the image of the spirit, not the spirit itself, in the human head. The opposite is the case with the human being with limbs. If you contrast the human being with limbs, they are only attached to the earth. They have only one sense as an attachment to the earth. The arms are somewhat lifted out of the earthly. In animals, those limbs that are arms in humans are also still attuned to the heaviness of the earth. But essentially, the nature of the human limbs is thoroughly organized around the forces of the earth. Just as the human head is a reflection of cosmic spirituality, so what we encounter in the human limbs shows us how the spirit is bound to the forces of the earth. Just study the shape of a human leg with a human foot! If you want to understand it in a plastic way, you have to understand the forces of the earth. Just as you have to understand the highest spirituality if you want to grasp the human head, so, in order to understand the form of the limbs, you have to study what binds the human being to the earth, what presses him to the earth, what causes the human being to be able to walk along the earth and to sustain himself in space within the forces of gravity. All this must be studied, the whole way the earth affects a being that relates to it in this way, as man does. Just as one must study the spirit in order to understand the human head, so one must study the physical of the earth with its forces in order to understand the human being in terms of his limbs and metabolism. But this has a very significant consequence. Only when one looks into the human being in this way, when one is able to see the human head as it were, in the crystallized, all-encompassing spiritual world, and when one sees in the lines of gravity and again in the lines of momentum, in which the earth turns, the origins of the formations of the human limbs, when one sees through dynamically, in the effect of the forces, the way in which the human being is formed and built, only then can one form an opinion about it. of the formation of the human limbs, when one sees dynamically, in the effect of the forces, the way in which the human being is formed and built, only then can one form an opinion about how the spiritual and soul life that occurs in the human being itself now works in the human being. And I would like to tell you about this today using two examples.Two things can play a major role in the human soul that are, to a certain extent, opposed to each other. One is what I would call doubt, and the other is what I would call conviction. One could perhaps also find other, even more succinct words. But you will all feel that we have a kind of polar opposite of the soul when we speak of doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other. Imagine what happens when a person is seized by doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other, and this happens on a more intense level. Try to visualize yourself being seized by doubt about something, even if it is only a matter that is occupying you intensely. It does not have to be a great cosmic truth or a great cosmic riddle, just a matter that interests you greatly. You must go to bed with this doubt. Imagine tossing and turning, feeling restless, and unable to find peace of mind. And then try to visualize how something flows into your soul as a soothing conviction, bringing an inner calm, how, as it were, a warmth of soul can fill you completely. In short, if you really look at the matter impartially from within, you will be able to visualize before your soul the opposite natures of doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other.  What is the difference in relation to the essence of the human being? The human head is modeled out of the cosmic ether from what we were in the spiritual world; the human head is a pure replica of the most human, namely the spiritual human being. Doubting ideas come to the head, but they find no place in the head. The head does not absorb them. They have to pass through the head down to the nature of the limbs. In the nature of the limbs, they combine with everything that becomes grainy in the human material being, that becomes so that it permeates this human material being grainily, that thus takes on an atomistic nature. Doubting ideas pass through him as if our head were permeable to them. The blood first absorbs these doubting ideas, then they are carried down into the whole organism, preferably absorbed by the metabolism, and only then handed over to the nervous system, and they live in all that is atomistic in human nature, that is, granular, salty. They connect with it very intimately. The body absorbs the doubting ideas, and they pass through the head. Only when one understands this special kind of human head, and that the matter of the head is not suitable for doubting ideas, because the head is an image of the truth itself, from which we come when we descend from the spiritual into the physical , we understand: just as light passes through a transparent glass, so do doubting ideas pass through our head and take hold of the other part of the nervous system and disturb our metabolism. The head only takes in doubting ideas to the extent that it itself is a matter of metabolism. But it passes them through its special nervous organization and only takes in convincing ideas. The convincing ideas find related structures everywhere when they enter the human head. They find accommodation everywhere in the nervous system. They settle in the human being's head first and go out into the rest of the body not through the blood but through the nervous system, which is in a kind of destructive process, so that they pass directly into the whole of the rest of the human being in their spirituality. But they find accommodation in the head, they fill the head. And in the head, from the spirituality of the head form, also from the inner formation, they receive their suitable form for the whole person and therefore work as if they were intimately related to the person, as if the person himself would live in them inwardly, as if they were the person himself. One would like to say: In the convincing representations, the head of the person forms something that is particularly appropriate for the person. Study the human embryo and you will see that the head forms first, then the rest of the organism; for it is from the head that the forces that form the rest emanate. When you take convincing ideas into your head, it is like this spiritually: they are first taken up spiritually in the head, and the head then sends them to the rest of the human being. Just as the other person is physically reproduced in the embryo according to the human head, so here the spiritual of the convictions and ideas of the other person is radiated, and a person arises from it in a spiritual way from the convincing ideas (left drawing, red). An inner image of a person radiates in that person. And whatever radiates in the form of convincing ideas in a person connects with everything that permeates the person like warmth. Just as the doubting images seize everything granular, everything atomistic, so the convincing images seize the warmth flowing through the body, the first link of the etheric that permeates the whole human being, and do not enter further into the physical.  Try to imagine the presence of doubting and convincing ideas in human nature, and you can grasp the truth of the matter in immediate life every time you feel and experience the beneficial effect of a convincing idea and the torturous effect of doubting ideas. I have often said that the spirit of language is a spirit that works rationally. And if you ascribe the natural embryo to procreation (drawing on the right, white), you are not at all surprised that this formation is attributed to conviction (on the left, red). We must not regard these things as mere coincidences. They are the deeds of the ruling genius of language, which knows more than the individual human being. I know that today's linguistic science regards this as a gimmick. But once one really looks into the workings and weaving of the ruling language genius, one will regard much of today's philology and linguistics as gimmicks. But now consider what it all means. You get a picture of how two soul experiences, doubt and conviction, continue to work in the physical person. They provide an absolutely comprehensible bridge from the soul and spirit to the physical. You see a physical person, and through his physical corpuscles in his body you can see the shimmering and undulating of his soul and spiritual experiences: this person is a skeptic, this one a doubter. You can see how the doubting spirit vibrates on in the soul and in the body through the inner structure of the material. You look at the other person, in whom the warmth flows through the limbs in a calm manner, and you see in this calm flow of warmth the physical expression of devotion to one's convictions. You see the spiritual directly expressed in the physical. Only then do you begin to understand the physical. Today's chemist and physicist says when he analyzes the human being: Inside there is lime, phosphorus, oxygen and nitrogen, carbon. Yes, you will never find anything spiritual in oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and hydrogen. Of course Du Bois-Reymond is quite right when he says: A number of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon atoms can be completely indifferent to how they lie and move. Yes, if you look at the substance in the body only as carbon, oxygen and so on, then it is like that. But if you know how a substance works that is receptive to the spirit in the most diverse ways, that is in the main an immediate image of spiritual essence, that is otherwise incorporated into the earth, so that the earthly holds there, which is driven through the head as doubting ideas, then the possibility of thinking ceases. It is not the same in our brain for a number of carbon, nitrogen atoms, and so on, as they lay and moved, as they lie and move. There we see how it matters to the substance whether the heat current flows into it or whether salt formation is at work in it, so that the body develops a tendency to develop a granular structure. These are two contradictions that express themselves in the material and that originate from the spiritual. It is actually the case that we did not end up with materialism in the 19th century because people did not know the spirit. The spirit in its most filtered form was best known in the materialistic age, because all previous ages did not actually have the spirit in its purest form; they always mixed material into the images of the spirit that they formed; they were images in which material was always mixed. Only the age of natural science has brought pure spiritual conceptions. But what the age of natural science had to neglect is just the knowledge of matter in reality, of spirit in matter. What has brought us materialism is the insufficient knowledge of the material nature of the world, the lack of insight into the spiritual weaving and working in the material. Science has become materialistic through ignorance of the material effects. Because people did not know how the spirit works creatively, they imagined this spirit as more and more abstract and abstract. As a result, the moral ideal finally became something that one could not even ask about, because it did not even have the materiality to fly around in space. It was no longer there at all. If you tried to grasp it, it was rather like trying to breathe in an element that is not there. The people of the 19th century seem like someone trying to breathe under the recipient of an air pump! When they gasp for moral ideals, for example, they are not there; they would like to have them, but they are not there because no one wanted to develop a concept of the workings of the spiritual soul in the physical body. Hence all the curious theories arose about the interaction of the physical and the bodily with the soul and spiritual, which were all fabrications, while real knowledge can only be gained by looking closely at the facts.  When we have become familiar with how doubt and conviction permeate and interweave human nature, then we are able to become acquainted with that which we have come to know in man and in turn to know it in the world. We have in the world the sphere of material creation. We see, for example, how matter must form itself in grains out in the world, how it crystallizes. Once we have become familiar with how doubt takes hold of the granularity in us in the organism, we then learn to see doubt outside of us. We look at the mountain (white) that forms with its granular rock; but at the same time we find that the same thing is happening in the mountain that we are getting to know as doubt within us (red), and we get to know the creative power of doubt. The doubt within us makes us grainy because we are human and not nature. Doubt outside in nature has the right effect. When that which works outside in nature moves in us, it causes the wrong. By stepping on the rocks, you are stepping on the physical manifestation of what the deity sends out as doubt so that the world can become grainy. And again, when you study your convictions with a warm sense of being imbued, then you are in that which is being created. So when you think that basically the warmth is to be sought in the womb of the creative forces of the world, then you find that what is cosmic conviction works out of warm matter. Get to know these things in truth within yourself, then you will also learn to judge the agents out there in the cosmos in the right way. If you see what is crumbling and crumbling away out there, so that we have, so to speak, the first preparation for the atomization of our earthly existence in the universe, as emanations of world doubt, then you will learn to understand much in cosmic existence. And conversely, if you are able to look into the cosmic with conviction, then you will get to know much of the Creative. But these are things by which I only wanted to hint to you how one must first know man in order to have any prospect at all of knowing the cosmic existence. Well, you see, for Brentano in the 1860s and for Nietzsche in the 1870s, the methods of natural science were there; they found carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, some sulfur, and so on in the brain. There was really nothing spiritual to be recognized in it. And if one applied the method that had led to this to the spirit, then of course one could come to nothing but either the spiritual impotence that Brentano came to, or the wearing down of the spiritual that Nietzsche, who was more of a will nature, came to. But both were subject to the same fate, namely that they could not reach the spiritual from the physical, because they could not find the spiritual in the physical, and therefore did not perceive the spiritual as something powerful enough to bring forth the physical. Thus, such minds were faced with a physical nature that actually had no meaning because it contained nothing spiritual, and with a spiritual nature that had no power, no might. That is the fate of the most significant minds that in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century faced matter without meaning, faced the spirit without power. Historians have spoken of ideas in history. This is mind without power. You really cannot put cultural instruments into the hands of ideas, through which culture arises, or through which historical events arise at all; ideas as abstractions are powerless, this is mind without power. In contrast to this is nature, which one studies only in its unspiritual matter: matter without meaning. You will never find the bridge if you invent the absurdity on one side: matter without sense, and on the other side the un-spirit: spirit without power. Only when one finds the strength in the spirit, the strength in the conviction to drive the warmth through the body because the human being is organized in such and such a way, only when one finds the strength in the doubt to push through the head because there is no affinity with the head and to wear down the rest of the human being internally so that it disintegrates into a granular structure , that is, only when one finds in the spirit that which has the power both to dissolve the granular structure through warmth and to form it in the salt formation process, then one finds a matter in which meaning is, because then the powerful spirit works in such a way that what appears in matter is meaningful. And so we have to look for matter with meaning and spirit with power. This is what such minds as Brentano and Nietzsche, in their tragic fate, also point to in their personalities. |
| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Tenth Lecture
15 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| 213. Human Questions and World Answers: Tenth Lecture
15 Jul 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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It is, after all, something that should be taken into account that a meeting was convened some time ago by the opponents of the things presented at the Vienna Anthroposophical Congress, at which a wide variety of speakers spoke out of the materialistic sense of the present and that at the end a particularly materialistically minded physician summarized the various speeches in a slogan that was intended to represent a kind of motto for the opponents of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: the battle against the spirit. — It is simply the case that today there are people who see the battle against the spirit as a real motto. When such a word is uttered, one is reminded again and again of how many people, well-meaning people, there are in the present day who, in the face of what is prevailing in the civilized world, are actually caught in a kind of sleep state, who do not want to hear where things are heading. They consider things of the greatest importance to be insignificant phenomena of the times, the opinion of one person or another, whereas it is in fact the case that today a striving that is present in the real progress of human development is clearly asserting itself. And actually all those who can muster an understanding for such a cause should also be most intensely involved with it in their hearts in order to truly muster it. I have now tried to show, by taking two personalities as examples, how deeper natures in particular were placed in the newer currents of thought. I have contrasted these two personalities, Franz Brentano and Nietzsche, to show how, from the most diverse sides, people who are initially oriented towards the spiritual are, as it were, submerged in the contemporary scientific way of thinking. If we consider personalities who have shared the fate I have outlined, we may perhaps be more deeply moved than if such things are presented only in the form of an abstract description. In the case of Brentano, I wanted to illustrate how a personality who grew up in an education shaped entirely by Catholicism retained for life, on the one hand, what Catholic Christianity had implanted in its soul in terms of an affinity for the spiritual world. In Franz Brentano, who was born in 1838 and thus lived during the time when the scientific way of thinking of the nineteenth century flooded all human research and spiritual striving, we see what lives on from very old currents of world view. If we look at young Brentano, who studied in Catholic seminaries in the 1850s and 1860s, we find that his soul was filled with two things that guided him in a certain way. One is the Catholic doctrine of revelation, to which he stood in a position that theologians of the Catholic Church have held since the Middle Ages. The Catholic revelation about everything spiritual is traditionally received. One finds oneself in a kind of knowledge of the supersensible worlds that has come to man through grace. For Brentano, the other element was connected with this, through which he first wanted to understand what he had received through the Catholic doctrine of revelation. That was Aristotelian philosophy, the philosophy that was still developed in ancient Greece. And until the mid-sixties, perhaps even a little longer, Brentano's soul lived in a way that was entirely in keeping with the spirit of a medieval scholastic: one must accept what man is meant to know of transcendental worlds as revealed by the Church, and one can apply one's thinking to the study of nature and life according to the instructions of the greatest teacher for this research, according to the instructions of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. These two things, Aristotelianism and Catholic revelation, were indeed connected in the spiritual life of the medieval scholastics, who regarded them as compatible. This continued in Franz Brentano. He was only shaken in such a view by what then confronted him as the scientific method, so strongly shaken that when he took up his post as a private lecturer in Würzburg, he established as a main thesis the proposition that in all philosophy it must be done as in natural science. And then he wanted to found a psychology, a doctrine of the soul, in which the life of the soul would be considered in the same way that natural science considers external natural phenomena. It is therefore fair to say that this man underwent a very radical change. He wanted to combine knowledge gained through revelation with knowledge gained through reason, which is limited only to earthly things. He thus demanded that science can only be what is formed according to the pattern of scientific methodology. One should really stop and think about what such a radical change really means. What I would like to draw your attention to first is that, up until this change, medieval scholastic thinking still seems to be present in an extraordinary personality. This continues to have an effect, as it does today in many contemporaries who are honestly Catholic, as it basically exists, albeit in a slightly different form, in many honest confessors of the Protestant faiths. If I quoted Nietzsche, it was because, although Nietzsche did not have a survival of medieval scholasticism in his soul, something else lived on in his soul, namely, what emerged during the Renaissance as a kind of reaction to scholasticism. Nietzsche had a kind of Greek wisdom of art that formed the basis for his entire world view. He had it in the same way that the men of the Renaissance had it. But these men of the Renaissance by no means already had the urge and the inclination not to recognize the spiritual in its reality. They sensed, they still felt the reality of the spiritual. So that something from ancient times also survived in Nietzsche's soul. And he, too, as I told you yesterday, had to immerse himself in the scientific view of the 19th century and completely lost what connected his soul to a spiritual world. The implications of this point to some tremendously significant riddles for the true seeker of truth in the present day. Let us take the two streams of spiritual thought that penetrated the life of the soul, as they lie in medieval scholasticism. Let us visualize what is actually present. I would like to do it in the following way. Within medieval scholasticism, we have a number of, let us say, doctrines about the supersensible world, for example about the Trinity of the original spiritual being, about the incarnation of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. series of doctrines that must be said to relate not to the sensual but to the supersensible world, which in very ancient times were once found by people who were then initiates, initiates. For one must not imagine, of course, that something like the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation was simply invented by someone to deceive people. These doctrines are rather the results of the experiences of former initiates. That they were regarded as a supernatural revelation is only a later conception. Such doctrines were originally found by way of initiation. Later on, however, it was no longer admitted that one could undergo such an initiation and arrive at the conception of the Trinity oneself, for example. Dogma only becomes something when one no longer has the origin of one's knowledge. If someone is an initiate and beholds the Trinity, it is not a dogma for him, but an experience. If someone claims that something cannot be seen, but is revealed and must then be believed, then it is a dogma. Contempt for dogmas as such is, of course, not justified, but only a certain attitude of people towards dogmas is contestable. When you can trace the dogmas, which have a deep spiritual content, back to the form in which an initiate once expressed them, then they cease to be dogmas. But the path that man has to go through to get to the place where you see things is precisely what was no longer done in the Middle Ages. People had old doctrines that were once wisdom of initiation. They had become dogmas. You were supposed to believe them. You were supposed to accept them as revealed knowledge. So that was one current, revealed knowledge. The other current was now rational knowledge, the subject of the medieval scholastic's instruction in the sense of Aristotle's teachings. But they thought about it this way: through this knowledge of reason, nature can be explored to a certain extent. One can also draw logical conclusions from this knowledge of nature, for example, the conclusion that there must be a God. One cannot find the Trinity, but one can find the rational conclusion that there must be a God, that the world has a beginning. That was then knowledge of reason.There were such conclusions, which the medieval scholastic admitted to the knowledge of reason, which touched the supernatural; only the view of the supernatural was not admitted. But reason was admitted, through which one could not understand the real knowledge of revelation, but through which one could approach something like the existence of God or the beginning of the existence of the world. These truths, which could be found through reason, were called preambula fidei, and could then form a basis for penetrating to that which could not be explored by reason, but which was said to be the content of revelation. Now, having juxtaposed these two currents of thought, of knowledge, let us place ourselves in the mind of a person who juxtaposed them in his own soul. During the period in which scholasticism flourished, what lived in a scholastic was by no means the evil that uninformed people tell of today, but at a certain time in medieval development it was simply what was required by the development of humanity. One could not have had any other view at that particular time. Today, of course, things have changed. Today, we have to find different ways to knowledge and to human soul activity than those that were at home in scholasticism. But that is why one should still try to penetrate this scholasticism with understanding. And you can only do that if you now ask yourself: How did the knowledge of revelation stand in the soul of an honest scholastic, alongside the knowledge of reason that was directed towards natural phenomena and towards one-sided conclusions of reason from natural phenomena? How did these two things stand side by side? What did such a scholastic want, and with him all his believers, all who were honestly Catholic, when he put himself in the frame of mind that was in line with revelation, when he said: What the dogmas give must not be looked at, looking at it is not possible; one must accept it as a revelation? The scholastic attempted to evoke a certain mood of soul in relation to the supersensible world. He was completely imbued with the fact that this supersensible world exists and stands in an intimate relationship to that which lives in man as soul. But he did not seek a path of knowledge in man in order to come directly through his own personality to that which stands as the supersensible world in an intimate relationship to man. Imagine this mood. It was the mood towards, I would say, a known unknown, towards an unknown acquaintance, towards someone you should worship and revere, but to whom you should still be shy, so that you do not, so to speak, open your eyes to him. Next to it stood the knowledge of reason. Scholastic reason was an extraordinarily astute one, something that has not been achieved again later. One would wish – I have also said it here several times – that people who do natural science or science in general today would only learn to think as sharply as the scholastics were able to think. It was a rational knowledge that only denied itself the right to go beyond certain limits: knowledge by revelation on the one hand, rational knowledge on the other. But if we now compare the knowledge by revelation and the rational knowledge of the scholastics with similar structures of today, then a great difference becomes apparent. The scholastic said to himself: You dare not intrude with your knowledge into the realm from which you are only supposed to have revelations. You dare not intrude into a vision of the Trinity, into a vision of the Incarnation. But in the revelation that he received through his church, ideas of the Trinity and ideas of the Incarnation were given. They were described. People said to themselves: knowledge does not penetrate to these things, but one can think about them if one reflects on these things in the sense of what has been revealed. You cannot say of the medieval scholastics that they had a mere dark mystical feeling of the supernatural. It was not that. It was a thinking that was already trained in plastic ideas and that grasped the content of Revelation. They thought about the Trinity, they thought about the Incarnation. But they did not think as one thinks when one arrives at a conclusion oneself, but as one thinks thoughts that are revealed to one. You see, that too still corresponds to a certain fact of higher knowledge. There are still people today who have certain atavistic clairvoyant views, as you might call them, who have dream-like imaginations. There are people who, for example, can rise in such atavistic clairvoyant imaginations to the point of visualizing the events of Atlantis. That still exists today. Don't think that there are no thoughts in what such people have as clairvoyant imaginations. Such seers often have much more plastic thoughts than our strange logicians, who learn to think from today's schooling. Sometimes one would like to despair of the logic of those who learn to think from today's schooling, while one need not despair of the logic that simply reveals itself atavistically and clairvoyantly; for this is often very strictly developed. Thus, even today it can be shown that thinking is already present in that which is truly revealed supersensibly for human observation. This was also the case in medieval scholasticism. It is only in recent times that thought has been eradicated from the content of revelation, so that today faith seeks to distil not only knowledge but also thinking out of its content. The medieval scholastics did not do that. They did extract the knowledge, but not the thinking. Therefore, if you take the dogmatics of medieval scholasticism, you will find a very highly developed system of thinking. This lived on in a man like Franz Brentano. That is why he could think. He could grasp thoughts. This can be seen even in the rudiments of his psychology, in which he only got as far as the first volume. There you can still see that he has a certain inner plasticity of thought formation, even though he constantly steps on his own feet in a terrible way and thus does not make any progress. As soon as he has any thought about a psychological construct - and he has such - he immediately forbids himself to think about the things. This prohibition is something extraordinary today. I have told you how an extraordinarily brilliant man, who wrote the important book 'The Whole of Philosophy and its End', told me in Vienna himself recently: 'I have my thoughts about what stands behind mere events as the primal factors.' But scientifically he forbids himself to have these thoughts. One could easily imagine, hypothetically of course, that a scientifically trained person today would suddenly become clairvoyant through a miracle, and that he would fight against this clairvoyance in the worst possible way. One could easily imagine this hypothetically because the authority of knowledge that clings to the external is enormous. So that was one thing that lived in the soul of the medieval scholastic: a specifically formulated content of revelation. On the other hand, there was a rational knowledge that was based on nature, but it was not yet the same as our present-day knowledge of nature. To substantiate this, just open a book of natural history, for example by Albertus Magnus; you will probably find descriptions of natural objects as they are described today – but they are described differently than they are today – but alongside that, you will still find all kinds of elemental and spiritual beings. Spirit still lives in nature, and it is not the case that only the completely dry sensual evidence is described as natural history and natural science. These two things live side by side, a content of revelation, in the face of which one prohibits oneself from knowing, but which one nevertheless thinks, so that the human spirit still attains it in its thoughts, and a content of rational knowledge, which still has spirit, but which also still has something that one must look at if one wants to have it before oneself in its reality.  Knowledge of nature has developed out of medieval scholasticism. One branch of scholasticism, knowledge by reason, has developed further and become the modern view of nature. But what has happened as a result? Imagine the thoughts of a scholasticist regarding knowledge of nature quite vividly. There is still spiritual content in them. What do these spiritual contents protect the medieval scholastic natural scientist from?  Perhaps I can illustrate this schematically. Suppose this here was such a medieval scholastic with his longing for revelational knowledge at the top and his longing for knowledge of nature at the bottom. But in the knowledge of nature, he has the spiritual. I'll let some red pass. He has thinking in the knowledge of revelation. I'll let some yellow pass. Where does this rational knowledge actually want to go? It wants to go out to the objects, to the things around us. The thoughts you have want to snap into place with the objects. You don't want to recognize just any plant, you want to form a concept of the plant, without you counting on it: the concept snaps in there, it wants to snap in. But with the scholastic, the spiritual content, which still permeates his rational knowledge, prevents him from really snapping in down there. It doesn't snap completely, it is, as it were, thrown back a little. What does it not snap into? When today's intellectualistic rational knowledge snaps into external nature, when it snaps fully into it, it actually snaps fully into the Ahrimanic. What then does the spirituality of the medieval scholastic mean in relation to his rational knowledge? That basically, he wants to approach nature with this rational knowledge as if it were something that burns a little. But he feels the burning and shrinks back again and again: nature is sin! He guards himself against Ahriman! But further development has brought this: in the nineteenth century it has thrown out of all spiritual rational knowledge, and with that rational knowledge snapped into the Ahrimanic. And what does rational knowledge, which has snapped into the outer Ahrimanic, say? It says: the world consists of atoms, atomic movement is the basis of all scientific knowledge. It explains warmth and light as atomic movements, it explains everything in the external world as atomic movements, because that satisfies our need for causality. In 1872, Da Bois-Reymond gave his famous lecture in Leipzig on the limits of knowledge of nature. It is the lecture in which the rational knowledge of scholasticism has advanced so far that all spirituality has been thrown out; and with the motto “Ignorabimus” the spirit of man should snap into the Ahrimanic. And Du Bois-Reymond describes very vividly how a human mind that now has an overview of everything that swirls as atoms in the universe no longer sees green and blue, but only perceives atomic movements everywhere. It feels no warmth, but wherever there is warmth, it feels that movement of which I spoke to you here eight days ago. He suppresses everything in his mind that has to do with colors, temperatures, sounds, etc. He fills his head with an understanding of the world that consists only of atoms. Imagine: the whole world as imagined by someone who thinks in terms of atoms. He has it all figured out in his head: the moment Caesar crossed the Rubicon, there was a certain constellation of atoms in our cosmos. Now he only needs to be able to set up the differential equation, and so, by continuing the calculation, he finds the next constellation, and the next, and so on. He can calculate the most distant future. Du Bois-Reymond called this the Laplacean mind because it was also an ideal of Laplace. So there we have, in 1872, a description of an intellect that comprehends the world universally, that comprehends everything as atomic motion, and all you need to do is know the differential equations and then integrate them, and you get the world formula.  But what has actually been achieved as a result? What has been achieved is that one has learned to think as Ahriman can think, what the Ahrimanic ideal of thinking is. One can only recognize the full significance of what is happening in our time when one knows what it actually is. The Ignorabimus speech will go down in the history of the development of the modern spirit, but its true significance will only be recognized when we are in a position to show that here the one branch of the scholastic school of thought has actually snapped into the Ahrimanic. You see, the scholastic, so to speak, kept his knowledge in suspense. It did not quite reach what is out there. He always withdrew with his knowledge before Ahriman. That is why he had such a need to develop truly ingenious concepts; because ingenious concepts still have to be developed through human effort. When it comes to conducting experiments, well, then you only need human endeavor to put the apparatus together and so on, but the kind of astute thinking that scholasticism had is not needed. This meant a very important turning point when one was once snapped into the Ahrimanic. Because what you see outside as the sensual phenomena of the world, as your sensual environment, that is only there as long as the earth is there. It perishes with our planet. What lives on are the thoughts that snap in outside. When something is conceived that is in line with Laplacean thinking, or what Du Bois-Reymond presented as an ideal of natural scientific thinking, it means not only that it is conceived, but that these are real thoughts that snap into place outside. And when everything we see with our senses on earth has perished, these thoughts can live on, if they are not eradicated beforehand. Therefore, there is a real danger that, if such a way of thinking becomes general, our earth will change into a planet corresponding to the materialists' conceptions. Materialism is only a mere doctrine as long as it does not become reality. But the Ahrimanic powers strive to make the thoughts of materialism so strong and widespread that the only thing left of the earth are atoms. If we say today that we have to explain everything in terms of atoms, that is an error. But if all people start to think that everything has to be explained in terms of atoms, if all people put on Laplacian minds, then the earth will really consist of atoms. It is not true from primeval times that the earth consists of atoms and their components, but humanity can bring this about. That is the essential thing. Man is not merely predisposed to have wrong views, but wrong thoughts create wrong realities; when wrong thoughts become general, realities arise. This danger from Ahriman has already manifested itself today. The other danger in the knowledge of revelation was sought to be avoided by the medieval scholastic, who still had the knowledge of revelation clothed in thoughts. It was concrete thoughts that grasped the content of the revelation. The dogmas were gradually thought through so little that people came to drop them altogether in general. One should indeed drop what is not understood. This is fully justified on the one hand, and if people can no longer follow the dogmas to the point of seeing them, it is natural that they drop them. But then what do they come to? Then they arrive at the most abstract of thoughts of dependence on some quite indefinite eternal or infinite. Then thoughts are no longer vividly formed that carry the content of the Revelation within them, but only some kind of dependence on some kind of infinite is felt in dark mysticism. Then the content of the thought disappears. This path has also been taken in recent times. It is the path that leads to the Luciferic. And just as surely as the path of knowledge through reason in modern times has led to the Ahrimanic, just as surely the other path can lead to the Luciferic. And now look again at a mind like Franz Brentano's in the sense I have described. Franz Brentano approaches nature with this attitude: Just don't touch Ahriman! - and to the supersensible world: Just don't touch Lucifer! — So just don't become atomistic, just don't become a mystic. With this attitude he approaches natural science, which is such a powerful authority that he submits to it. He describes the phenomena of the soul in terms of the scientific method. If he had approached the subject from a more superficial point of view, as many of today's psychologists do, he would have written a doctrine of the soul inspired by Ahriman, a kind of psychology, a 'doctrine of the soul without a soul'. He could not do that. Therefore, he abandoned the attempt after the first volume, and did not write the following volumes – there should have been four – because something in him did not allow him to grasp the idea of rushing headlong into the purely Ahrimanic. And take Nietzsche. Nietzsche was likewise seized by natural science. But how did he take up natural science? He did not really care much about the individual methods, but only looked at the natural scientific way of thinking in general. He said to himself: All that is spiritual is based in the physiological, is a “human, all too human” thing. What should actually be divine-spiritual ideals are an expression, a manifestation of the human, of the all-too-human. He rejected the very kind of knowledge that can be found in Brentano: knowledge through reason. He allowed the will to become active in him. And, as I said yesterday, he wore down the ideals, he wore down the spiritual. This is the other phenomenon where a personality, as it were, approaches the Ahrimanic, but strikes against it. Instead of snapping, he strikes. He also wants to develop atomism, but he strikes against a wall. And so we see how such minds develop their particular soul mood in the 19th century because they come so very close to what plays into our knowledge as Ahrimanic powers. That is the fate of such minds in the 19th century: they come so incredibly close to Ahriman. And then they either end up in a situation like Brentano's, where they shyly retreat at the very boundary and do not advance at all with their knowledge, or they start lashing out like Nietzsche. But it is the Ahrimanic power that brought its waves to knowledge in the 19th century, which then had an effect on the 20th century. And one should understand that. And the original spirits who personally experienced this still half-masked encounter with Ahriman in the 19th century had a tragic fate behind them. But the students now received the prepared thoughts. These thoughts live in them. The Ahrimanic power has already formed the thoughts. The first original spirits recoiled; the pupils received the incomplete ahrimanic thoughts. These are now at work in them: 'Fight against the spirit', against the spirit that just does not want to surrender the earth to the ahrimanic powers, hatred of the spirit, fight against the spirit! Today we must see this as a real connection. It lives today as a mood of the times, as a state of mind. We must understand it in order to truly grasp how necessary it is to assert a truly spiritual world view in all the different cultural forms in which such a world view must be lived. |