Steiner The Human Being as Spiritual Being Evolving through the Course of History

Human Evolution and the Soul and Spirit of the Universe, Part II
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-85584-708-8
Verlag: Rudolf Steiner Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 206, 226 Seiten

Reihe: The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner

'If we lived only in worlds of spirit, as we do between death and a new birth, we would never be able to acquire freedom there. It is something we can only achieve by our efforts within the physical world...' - Rudolf Steiner Rudolf Steiner's lucid account of our current phase of evolution focuses on the threefold human being and the significance of incarnation on Earth. In a nuanced presentation, he supports the modern scientific outlook but highlights the urgent need to broaden it, emphasizing the importance of balance in thinking, feeling and will. Withdrawing into abstract intellectualism while letting feeling and will run amok, leads to unconscious egotism and, ultimately, the War of All Against All. In place of nebulous mysticism or narrow materialism, Steiner calls on us to bring our thoughts, feelings and actions under conscious self-control so that - for our benefit and society as a whole - we can live our lives with clarity, far-sightedness and purpose. Intrinsic to this reassessment of ourselves and our place in the universe is a recognition of death as a gateway to continuing existence. Only by acknowledging our journey into the afterlife and our return to earth (reincarnation) will we take charge of a truly human evolution. This previously-unpublished course of lectures - released in tandem with the twin course in CW 205 - features an introduction by Matthew Barton, notes and an index. Eleven lectures, Dornach; July-Aug. 1921, GA 206

Autoren/Hrsg.

Steiner, Rudolf

Weitere Mitwirkende

Barton, M.

Leseproben

LECTURE 2

DORNACH, 23 JULY 1921

YESTERDAY I tried to distinguish between those sensory experiences which belong to our ‘upper nature’, if I may call it that, which constitute our life of soul as such, and those sensory experiences that belong more to our ‘lower nature’, the content of which relates to our conscious apprehension as outward experiences do, the only difference being that they occur within us. We saw that the first kind comprise the sense of I, the sense of thoughts, the sense of words, the senses of hearing, warmth and sight; and we saw how we engage also in a second of two regions, in which human beings, by virtue of possessing the sense of taste, smell and the others, largely have these inner experiences in a way that resembles awareness of outer experiences. As you can see, when we’re discussing such a theme it becomes very difficult to resort to the rough-andready expressions that we can apply to the external world but which immediately fall short when we consider the nature of the human being as such and the inner reality and configuration of the cosmos.

At any rate, if we recognize this distinction between the upper and lower aspect of our being, both of which represent world occurrence, then we can also recognize how our experience is divided in two: how one pole of our experience contrasts with the other pole and how these two are radically different. Unless we conscientiously reflect on this division within our human nature we will fail to properly clarify the most important problem of life in the modern world and in the near future, which is this: What is the relationship between the world of morality, within which, after all, we live with our higher nature, within which we heed our human and world responsibility, and the other world, that of natural necessity, to which we are also harnessed?

In recent centuries, as we know, since the mid-fifteenth century, human progress has especially involved the development of ideas related to natural necessity. During these centuries, people have paid less attention to the other sphere of human experience, that of the moral world order. Today it is apparent to everyone who can read the signs of the times a little, who seeks to discover the great tasks of the era, that a deep gulf has opened between what is called ‘moral imperatives’ and ‘natural necessities’.

In particular, this opening gulf is seen, by a very great many who regard themselves as standing fully in modern culture, in terms of the distinction they make between the realm comprising knowledge and investigation and that other realm of experience which, as they think, should be confined to faith or belief alone. As you know, many think that only what can be formulated in strict ‘natural laws’ should be regarded as scientific, and that everything related to morality, which they assign to a different kind of certainty altogether, should be taken only as a sort of ‘article of faith’. There are detailed theories about the distinction thought necessary between ‘scientific certainty’ and these certainties of belief.

All these distinctions, all these theories, are based largely on the fact that people have very little historical awareness nowadays, and that they pay very little heed to the circumstances under which our present contents of soul have arisen. I have often cited a classic example of this: the view of modern philosophers that the distinction between the human body and soul is based on some kind of original observation or suchlike, whereas in fact what humankind thinks about these two spheres merely goes back to a synod decree, that of 869, the eighth general synod. This dogmatized the doctrine that the human being should not be seen as consisting of body, soul and spirit but of body and soul only, the soul being ascribed a few spiritual qualities.

In subsequent centuries, this dogma was increasingly consolidated, and was the basic tenor of medieval philosophical thought. As modern philosophy developed out of medieval philosophy, people thought their judgements were founded on experience, but in fact they were based only on the habitual outlook they had acquired in accordance with the centuries-old custom of seeing the human being in terms only of body and soul.

This is a classic example of modern humanity’s belief that it judges and views things without preconceptions whereas in fact the judgement it arrives at is nothing more than the outcome of a historical process. And we do not easily arrive at a really accurate judgement about such things unless we survey ever greater and greater periods of history.

Anyone, for instance, who knows only the modern mode of scientific thought will quite naturally regard this as standard and authoritative since they cannot imagine any other mode of cognition. But if we see this modern scientific mode of judgement, which has come into force since roughly the middle of the fifteenth century, alongside another that held sway in the early medieval period and can be traced back to the fourth century AD, we will see things as the better new Scholastics of today do when they opine about our relationship to the intellectual world. But this judgement will be limited to the human being’s relationship to intellectuality and will not extend beyond it to our relationship with spirituality. Without a greater historical horizon, extending back further to a time before Aristotle, who died in 322 BC, we cannot discover how people thought then and how we ourselves must enter into a quite different context of thought from the one that prevails today. It is impossible to understand Plato, or even Heraclitus or Thales, with a modern outlook and frame of mind. One even fails to understand Aristotle. And if you are aware of modern debates about Aristotelian philosophy, you will know that countless obscurities have arisen in all the exegesis of Aristotelian concepts and ideas, simply because people have failed to recognize that, in returning to Plato, say, who was Aristotle’s teacher, one needs a quite different frame of reference. In advancing from Plato to Aristotle, you will see how you can judge Aristotelian logic differently than if you only look back to Aristotle with the means a modern outlook and culture offers.

Even when he established his edifice of logic, which is already abstract and intellectualized enough, Aristotle basically still had a knowledge, albeit largely an external one and not based on his own perception—which will have been very limited—that people had formerly been able to see into the world of spirit, even if only instinctively. For him, the logical tenets he propounded were, if we can call it this, the last expression from above, from the world of spirit. Thus what Aristotle established as logical rules or the basic concepts of logic were in a sense the shadows cast from the world of spirit above, which, for Plato, for instance, had still been a given, a world of experience, a reality: a world that was real to human awareness.

One thing is usually overlooked: the great, the enormous differences between different eras of humanity’s history. If, say, you think of the period between the death of Aristotle in 322 BC up to the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, very little external documentation remains since the Church set about eradicating all outward records testifying to the state of soul of people in these three centuries before and three centuries after Christ.

If we consider that many people nowadays speak about the ‘gnosis’, and if we ask how they know of it, we see that they do so only from the writings of its opponents. All gnostic writings were eradicated apart from a very few and extremely uncharacteristic gnostic texts, leaving only quotations from gnostic writings that were included in anti-gnostic texts, those intended to refute Gnosticism. What is left of the gnosis today is more or less like what we would have of anthroposophy if we were to learn of it from writings by Father Kully.* And yet people speak of the Gnostics out of this externalized knowledge.

And yet this gnosis was a major element in the whole reality of the life of culture and spirit in the period I have referred to. Of course we can’t return to this gnostic outlook today, but it was something extraordinarily important for the development of Europe during those times.

How could we actually characterize this gnosis? The way people were able to speak of it in the fourth century AD would have been impossible, say, half a millennium previously. Half a millennium before that time, people still had ancient, instinctive powers of vision, perceptions of the supersensible world, and they had to speak of these perceptions by describing them. Underlying such descriptions they possessed, in a sense, the reality of the world of spirit, which was present to their awareness. And this awareness came to an end.

A salient aspect of Aristotle is that for him this world had become nothing more than tradition. He may, as I said, have known something about it still, but it had largely become a matter of tradition for him. Yet the ideas and concepts of those times still took their colouring from these worlds of spirit, something that really only faded and was lost in the third and fourth centuries AD.

Augustine no longer possessed anything of the gnosis—it had disappeared by then. Gnosis had largely become, let us say, the abstract residue of spiritual perceptions from the past, a merely abstract residue, mere concepts. What lived in them were abstractions. Their abstract nature is already apparent in the work of Philo. We can also discern these abstractions in the...