Goethe and the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century

GA 171 — 21 October 1916, Dornach

Thirteenth Lecture

We have tried to visualize the main ideas that are struggling for expression, or one might say for existence, in our fifth post-Atlantean period, struggling for existence in such a way that they develop one-sidedly under the characterized twofold impulses. Under the influence of the one impulse, more or less everything that can be connected to the fact of birth, the fact of the relationship between living beings, and in general the beings and forces within our earthly existence, is formed and shaped. Influenced by the other impulse, we see the facts that follow death, what is called suffering, pain, evil. And how one-sidedly the series of facts in human thinking develop, which follow on from what has been characterized, we have tried to illuminate from various sides. Now it must be clear that the two most important ideals for this fifth post-Atlantic period are: firstly, the ideal of presenting purely what is present in the sense world and tracing it back to the original phenomena, as Goethe did, as we have already discussed, who tried to trace the phenomena back to what he called the archetypal phenomena. On the other hand, the fifth post-Atlantic period must strive to achieve free imagination arising in the human soul. In the synthesizing of imaginations, which the human being receives from the spiritual world, of which only a few can be present now, because the fifth post-Atlantic period, as we know, only began in the 15th century. With these free imaginations, the human being should comprehend what presents itself in the outer world of the senses. As you can see from various of my statements, some of which have been given in lectures and some of which can be found in my books, it was Goethe who made a great beginning with such a view of the world. That is why Goethe can also be the genuine, appropriate basis for a world view that is truly required by the fifth post-Atlantic epoch.

It is a peculiar feature of world evolution that it must, as it were, take place in waves, that certain impulses arise, have a strong effect, then subside and can only arise again later, and so on. This is felt particularly strongly by those who understand the Goethean worldview in its nerve. Of course, spiritual science itself cannot yet be found in the Goethean world view, but it will be able to arise more and more under the influence of the understanding of the Goethean world view. For it is truly the case that everything that could still be given without the actual form of spiritual science as a world view is given in the Goethean world view. And this Goethean world view has cast its light first into circles that are narrow for the world at large, but wide for spiritual life, and much in spiritual life has already been influenced by the Goethean world view, even if what has been influenced has basically also been swept away, just as the Goethean world view itself has been swept away. For there is no need to deceive ourselves: even if Goethe is mentioned by many today, even if many believe they know his works, that which actually lives and breathes in his world view is still something that belongs to the most unknown in the development of mankind and which, when it enters more and more into human evolution, will substantially transform not only scientific and social thinking, but also the rest of human thinking, but also the impulses of human action. In our time, there are still few favorable forces and impulses working outside of the anthroposophical movement for an understanding of Goethe's world view. For as justified and as magnificent as the so-called democratic principle is for the development of humanity, when it is understood in the right sense, it has a corrupting effect in our time, when it is often grasped and applied in the wrong way. In our time there is an intense dislike, antipathy, yes more than that, in many souls an intense hatred and antagonism towards a world view of the kind that has its sources in Goethean thinking and Goethean sentiment. For this world-view requires much that our time, in particular, is least willing to accept. In our time, everyone wants to have, as it were, their own world-view, to build up their own world-view, to be a loner in their world-view, without having laid the foundations for it. And the next feeling that everyone has is something like that the individual world-views stand side by side with equal rights. What Goethe so uniquely characterizes in Faust's striving, is something that every journalistic drip and everyone who parrots these drips speaks of today; but today, there can be no question of knowing the innermost nerve of this Faustian striving. And we will still have much to discuss when we consider what has only been sketched out here, and what is unfavorable to a harmonious balance of the impulses mentioned in modern times, and then also discuss how this harmonious balance of the one-sided impulses that we have come to know should be brought about.

Today, I would like to add a few more random thoughts to help you understand how it could come about that Goethe's world view, which was already at such a high level, petered out in the 19th century and all sorts of other world views came to the fore. This nineteenth century increasingly came to find the world surrounding man uninteresting. One often pays little attention to this, but it is nevertheless the case. This is because in the nineteenth century, in the spiritual development of mankind, there arose a crisis that caused the contemplation of the spiritual life in things to dry up more and more. People only saw the external sensory qualities, sensory properties, and modes of activity of things, and these became less and less interesting. What lives and breathes through the sensory world spiritually was no longer seen. The sensory world as such became less and less interesting. Hence the dream of seeking something hidden within this world of sense itself, which after all was the only thing that corresponded to the spirit of the time. The spiritual hiddenness in the world of sense was not perceived. So people sought the hidden in the world of the senses itself, and that led to the fact that one sought to deepen the view spatially in another direction, though in a highly fruitful way, through microscopic and telescopic research, through that which can be seen purely sensually in the smallest and largest. Faith in the spiritual and hidden vanished. So people wanted to be allowed to believe at least that the riddles of the world would be solved by exploring what was immediately hidden from the senses, and in this field they did indeed go an enormous way. One need only think of the great and powerful progress that microscopic research has made in relation to living things in the 19th century. The science of cells has emerged from this. It was realized that the living organism of plants and animals and humans consists of the smallest parts, cells, and the perfection of microscopic research made it possible to study the life of these smallest cell creatures, about which one could previously only make more or less guesses. In this way, one wanted to explain the sensory from another sensory. And this mode of explanation became especially important for a series of facts that emerged in the fifth post-Atlantic period, for the facts that are connected with birth, with the becoming of living beings. One saw a living being, up to and including the human being, emerge from a cell; one saw it develop by observing the progressive life and multiplication of cells, and one finally arrived at an understanding of how the simple round cell that multiplies gradually in the course of its life before birth, also in humans, and finally becomes the human form, how it comes into existence through birth, is transformed.

As I said, people began to develop ideas about how the simple cell becomes that which then enters into existence through birth as a human being, and these ideas led to what can be called the problem of birth, the riddle of birth in humans, being closely linked to the processes in animal life. It was seen that the animal world in its simplest forms presents itself in such beings, which themselves are only like a single cell, that there are therefore animal beings in the world which, so to speak, take on the form throughout their entire life that humans only take on in the very earliest period in the mother's body. Other animals present themselves in forms that are similar to a later developmental form of man. In a certain period of development before birth, that is, in embryonic development, the human form presents itself in such a way that it looks, or at least resembles, a little fish, and between the cell form and the form of a little fish lie the other forms, which in turn live outside as independent beings. In a sense, then, through his embryonic development, the human being gradually recapitulates the forms that are outside. As we know, this led to the formulation of the biogenetic law, made famous by Aaeckel, which states that during his development before birth, the human being recapitulates the animal forms in abbreviated form, as it were. This, however, led to the belief that man, as he enters earthly existence, must have descended from animal forms. It was thought that in ancient times only cell-forms existed, and that somewhat more complicated beings developed from these cell-forms through these or those processes, which were thought of as being more or less accidental or purely scientifically necessary – which is ultimately the same. So that in the next stage of the development of the world, we have the simple cell creatures and somewhat more complicated ones, but the somewhat more complicated ones first go through the stage of simple cell development; then came the more complicated ones, which in turn had gone through cell forms, that is, what had emerged earlier, and then their form. And so, it was thought, the whole animal world had developed, finally man, who, during his embryonic development, briefly recapitulates all animal forms.

In this way, an idea arose about the connection between what one can call human birth and the gradual emergence, as one thought, of organic life forms. This linked man directly to the various animal forms, and since man is easily dazzled by what he sees directly, in the course of the 19th century one forgot to take into account anything other than what thus appeared to be a similarity between human embryonic development and the formations of the other organic forms. The thoughts and ideas by which the connection that had been recognized or believed to have been recognized through the advanced means of research was recognized were only as narrow as they were, and could only take on the materialistic form that they did because, in the course of the 19th century, Goethean thinking and imagination had really dried up completely. One need only recall how Goethe, in the course of his life, came to what he calls his theory of metamorphosis.

Before arriving at his theory of metamorphosis, Goethe was probably concerned with the knowledge of the spiritual world that was available to him in his time, and he became familiar with various ways, various means, through which man can try to approach the spiritual world. Only after Goethe's mind had been greatly deepened by his experiences with these means and ways did he begin to formulate scientific ideas. And there we see, first of all, how Goethe, after coming to Weimar and gradually having the resources of the University of Jena at his disposal, does everything to enrich his scientific knowledge and insights, but at the same time does everything to gain coherent ideas about the various forms of organisms. And then again we see how Goethe sets out on his Italian Journey, how he, while on the Italian Journey, takes in everything he encounters in plant and animal forms, in order to study the inner relationship of the plant and animal forms in the rich diversity that now presents itself to him. And in Sicily, finally, he thought he had found what he then called his 'primordial plant'. What did Goethe have in mind when he thought of the primal plant? This primal plant is not a physical structure. Goethe himself calls the primal plant a physical-supernatural form. It is something that can only be seen in the spiritual, but it is seen in this spiritual in such a way that when you see a particular plant, you know: this particular plant is a special manifestation of the primal plant. Every plant is a particular form of the original plant, but the original plant is not a plant that can be perceived by the senses. The original plant is a being that lives in all plants, both sensually and supernaturally. Goethe's idea was to not just follow the various sensory forms, but to seek the one original plant in all plants. In doing so, he had, one might say, essentially deepened, very, very much deepened, what had always existed as a doctrine of metamorphoses, and it was obvious to him that he should now also apply the idea of this doctrine of metamorphoses to a broader extent to the organic, to the living.

It is interesting to see how he now describes how he wanted to conceive of the human form itself in such a way that its individual limbs represent transformation products, so to speak, that the human being is the complication of an idea. He recounts how, in 1790, he found a sheep's skull in the Jewish cemetery in Venice that had decomposed particularly well, so that he could see from the individual skull bones how these skull bones are formed in such a way that one can recognize in them transformed vertebral bones. He had noticed that the spinal column consists of individual bones, which I will only draw schematically, but that the skull then consists of such remodeled vertebral bones. Of course, when they are remodeled, they take on completely different forms, but then the skull bones are only remodeled vertebral bones. The vertebral bones lie one above the other in a ring shape. By thinking of them as rubber and pulling the rubber apart in a variety of ways, one can imagine that the forms of the skull bones arise from the vertebral bones (see drawing a). For Goethe, it was something extraordinarily important to be able to say: in the vertebral bone that envelops the spinal cord, something is given like a basic element of human development, which only needs to be transformed in order to shape itself into more complicated elements of this human development. Thus, on the one hand, Goethe had recognized in the plant leaf: When a plant grows, it develops leaf after leaf; but then, at a certain point, the development of the leaf comes to an end. Through the transformation of the leaf, first the petals arise (see drawing b), but then also the stamens, which are organs of a completely different design, which are also nothing other than leaves, but transformed leaves. For Goethe, the whole plant is contained in the leaf.

There is much that is invisible and supersensible in a leaf; the whole plant is in a leaf. In the same way, however, the whole skull skeleton is already in the spinal column. The spinal column and the skull together form a whole, and the complicated skull bones are just as much transformed vertebral bones as the petals, just as the stamens and pistils are transformed green leaves of the plant. Thus Goethe has the idea that that which underlies the leaf in a supersensible way is transformed in the most diverse ways and then becomes the whole plant; that that which lies in the spine is transformed in a complex way and becomes the head. Goethe came to this conclusion in his views.

Spiritual science did not yet exist at that time, and it is particularly interesting to see how Goethe is a spirit who always remains at the level of consciousness to which he can penetrate through his rich observation, and does not does not grasp any speculative thoughts, does not hypothesize, for example, in order to penetrate beyond this point, to which he can penetrate through his rich experiences, in an unjustified way, in a fantastic way.

Now, although it is a long way, but it is a way that can now be taken, more than a hundred years after Goethe formulated these ideas. In relation to the human being, Goethe more or less stopped: the human being has a spinal column, one vertebra lies on top of the other, then the vertebra transforms into the skull bone. Goethe stopped there. Today, there is no longer any need to stop at what he stopped at. For from there to an idea that allows a wide, wide view, there really is a path, and a path must even be created through spiritual science. When one looks at the human being as a whole, with the same spirit with which Goethe, after — as they say, by a “coincidence” — a sheep's skull happily came across him in the Jewish Cemetery in Venice, when one looks with the same spirit with which one examined the individual bones of this sheep's skull and recognized through this spirit that they were transformed vertebrae, one sees the human being as a whole, then one notices something today. I have already hinted at this, but I must mention it again in this context and illuminate it from a different point of view. Today we recognize that the human being is essentially a twofold creature: he consists of his head and the rest of his organism. Just as the petal develops from the stem leaf of the plant, as the petal is a transformation of the stem leaf of the plant, so the human head is also a transformation of the whole rest of the organism. I have said that in order for this transformation to come about completely, the human being must develop from one incarnation to the next. What we carry today, as I said, in our other organism, that becomes our head in the next incarnation.

You see, this view is only a fully developed impulse that arises when one inwardly follows what began in Goethe's world view. If one really stands on the ground of this doctrine of metamorphosis, one attempts to describe the organism in its individual members; but these members are conceived in their connection in such a way that the connection is only possible if one sees through to something that lives there as a spiritual essence. For, of course, if a leaf were what the senses see, it would never be able to become a petal or a stamen; if a vertebra were what the senses see, it would never be able to become a be able to become a limb of the head skeleton; if the human body were to be what it presents to the external senses, then, however much it might transform its powers, it would never be able to become a human head. But now, even with regard to external observation, this Goethean world view is clearer in the demands of the fifth post-Atlantic period than the natural science of the 19th century, which prided itself so much on its external observation and experimentation. Goethe is truly better at looking, and those who try to rely on him are better at looking at what happens in nature and what is present in nature than the biological science of the 19th century in particular.

As two members, I said, man presents himself to us: as the head and as the rest of his organism. This fact, that the head is, so to speak, a transformed rest of the organism, must first be understood if one wants to build further. Only then will one be able to ask: Yes, what then is on the one hand this human head, and what on the other hand is the rest of the human organism? To answer this question, one must take quite different things as important than the usual modern natural science takes.

You see, when you imagine an animal, the essential thing about the animal is that its spinal cord - I have also mentioned this several times - is parallel to the earth's surface, and that the animal stands on the earth's surface with its front and hind legs (a) and carries its head horizontally in the extension of the spinal cord, essentially as an extension of this spinal cord. What is known as the human spinal cord is now aligned vertically, exactly perpendicular to the direction of the animal's spinal cord (b).

But we do not want to consider this spinal cord for the time being, because it does not belong to the head; it belongs to the rest of the organism. We want to consider another spinal cord first. Yes, but what kind of another spinal cord? We want to consider the human brain. You will say: Is that a spinal cord? Yes, that is a spinal cord! It is nothing more than a transformed spinal cord, so to speak, an expanded spinal cord. Imagine a horizontal spinal cord, as found in animals, expanded, transformed, metamorphosed, and you get the human brain (c).

The true fact is this: during the development of the moon, what is now the brain looked like the spinal cord of an animal today. And only during the transition from the lunar to the terrestrial development did this spinal cord, which man had on the moon, become more complicated, becoming the present human brain; but it retained its horizontal position. For essentially its axis is perpendicular to the spinal cord belonging to the body, and this spinal cord belonging to the body was only acquired by man during his time on earth. That is still at the stage at which the spinal cord that became brain was on the moon during the lunar evolution (d).

What appears simpler in humans today, their spinal cord, was acquired later in the course of evolution than what appears more complicated today, their brain. Only the brain that humans have today used to be a spinal cord. So we see that humans have a spinal cord that has been transformed into a brain, and only later in the course of evolution was an original spinal cord added to it.

Thus, when we look at the human head, it does not appear to us to be very different from that of an animal; for the direction of the head is like the direction of the backbone of the animal, which is also the direction of the head of the animal, horizontal, parallel to the earth (f).

And many other characteristics could be indicated that would show that the human head, when viewed as it is in the whole development, is a transformed 'animality', and that the rest of the human organization has been added to this transformed animality. This idea is not at all similar to the one that natural science development in the 19th century came to. For the scientific development in the 19th century, because it places the main emphasis on the external-sensual, will find precisely the human head most different from the animal. Here (see drawing) the human head does not appear to us to be so different from the rest of the animal, only ennobled: the brain is a fluffed-up spinal cord, which the animal also has.

You will now have the question on your lips: Yes, do you perhaps believe that the rest of the human organism is now even nobler than the head organism in terms of external form, that the rest of the human organism might even resemble the animal less than the head? And you yourself may find it paradoxical today, but you will already find your way into the idea that this must be said. And basically, doesn't our head, after all, look most like animal forms, of all our limbs taken as a whole? At least for a large part of our lives, we are hairy on the head, men more so than women. The rest of the organism is by no means as hairy. This already strongly suggests its relationship to the animal organism. I will leave it at this suggestion for the time being, but we will elaborate on this over time. But it will lead us more and more to the realization that something quite different takes place in nature than what is very often believed. Man looks down from man to the lower animals and sees, for example, a turtle or a shell or a snail, and he believes in the sense of today's natural science that the snail, the shell, in fact the lowly creatures, first developed gradually, and the human head was added to the lowly organisms of the lowly animal world. This is nonsense, complete nonsense! If you look at a shellfish or a turtle today, you see a human head at a subordinate level, and the rest of our organism has been added to it. After what are lower animal forms – I will schematize them – have gradually been transformed into the human head, the rest of the organism has been added to it.

So we have an evolution that goes from lower animal forms further and further, and what is animal nature has formed the human head and the rest of the organism is attached to this human head as the later. In our head alone we carry within us what connects us to the other animals, not in our other organism. Therefore, the human head has the same direction in its main axis as an animal: parallel to the earth's surface. The rest of the organism is built upright, perpendicular to the earth's surface.

It is very unfortunate that this false idea, which is characterized by this, has been incorporated into the scientific development of the 19th century. For this reason, it is thought that man as such, as he is, emerges with his whole organism as a somewhat more developed form from earlier animal forms. The truth is that what could have become of earlier animal forms can only be the head, but that what is completely new within the evolution of the earth has been added to this head.

Now, therefore, we are dealing with two things at once. The first is this: that in our head we actually have a transformed form for the other animal forms. And yet, from that which has only just been added to the head and which we have as the rest of the organism in an incarnation, we develop the form of the head through corresponding forces in the next incarnation. This might seem like an apparent contradiction. We shall see, by looking at these things more closely, that it is not a contradiction.

I wanted to show you, by recalling the fact that man actually carries the animal within himself, that with his earthly organism he supports the animal that has become his head, just how wrong today's external ideas can be. But I would also like to show you something else in a positive way. If the human head is only a transformed animal, how did the human head become what it is today? How can the head, as it is today, develop through being prepared by an earthly organism in a previous incarnation, to become the human head? Well, the animal walks on the earth with its two pairs of legs, that is, with four legs. Anyone who believes that this animal only walks over the earth and that nothing else happens but that this animal walks over the earth is greatly mistaken. Forces are constantly rising from the earth into the animal, going up through the spine, and then, as it were, always influencing the brain, going back down into the earth again (a). The animal belongs to the earth. And the way it stands on it, how the forces that are active in the earth go through its legs into its spine and back again, that is part of the animal's whole life.

The relationship that the animal has to the whole earth is what the human being, the human head, has to the rest of the human organism. The fact that the human being has an organism that stands vertically out of the earth makes this rest of the organism the same for the human head as the earth, the whole earth, is for the animal. Thus, in our head-attached organism, we have the secrets of the whole earth within us. And it can easily be shown, though today it can only be hinted at, that when we study the head and the brain within it, the rudiments, the appendages, are there for front and back limbs , by means of which man, with his head, stands on himself like the animal on the earth, as we do, only transformed into internal, other organs, have hind limbs and forelimbs. And the whole formation of the head is such that it is in fact related to the rest of the human organism as the animal is to the earth (b).

This is so significant that one can see what kind of significance such an idea, which of course only arises from the views fertilized by spiritual science, has. For with this idea one must now go back to what the 19th century, with its crude means, observed only insufficiently; with this idea one must now go back and follow embryonic development. Then something quite different will emerge from what 19th-century science was able to find. But then, in turn, ideas will arise that can be fruitful for human life, even beyond mere inanimate technology. But without these ideas, humanity will not get out of the deadlock it has now entered. For the real progress of humanity is based on the development of ideas, not of general ideas, which are cultivated today in associations with great ideals, not in these ideas, which anyone can grasp by spending three hours in a coffee house, but in the ideas that are borrowed from reality through research and are then applied to life. It is easy enough to come up with fine ideas that can be used to found associations, but they do not prevent culture from reaching dead ends like the one it is in now. Only concrete ideas can prevent this.

We must truly feel this, then we will first understand the great tasks of spiritual science, and we will correctly assess the reality around us. This reality is bent on preventing spiritual science from emerging, especially in its most important form. The spirit that caused the Goethean world view to dry up in the 19th century is still present to a sufficient extent, and this spirit finds expression in a certain mania for persecution: a mania for persecuting everything that strives for ideas saturated with reality. To this spirit of the age, these ideas, saturated with reality, often seem fantastic, because it is not suited to assimilate them. And what will increasingly come to be faced by spiritual science and its strongest adversary is this: a worldview that seeks real spiritual paths and seeks to research realities without prejudice will be rejected precisely because one wants to reject this research into realities. It is too uncomfortable to get to know what is necessary to arrive at a truly comprehensive worldview. Therefore, this comprehensive worldview will be vilified and will not let the world see how comprehensive it is, but will pretend to the world that it is based on just as superficial, narrow-minded, limited concepts and research results as other worldviews are at present. And more and more will be felt a certain recognition of the dishonesty of the pursuit, namely, that pursuit which insists on narrow-mindedness and a rejection of precisely that which, with the consciousness that only leads satisfactorily forward, really wants to research the realities and thereby also come to a certain comprehensive point of view. Arrogance and presumption are qualities that have not yet reached their peak. What will yet come about under the influence of that arrogance, which will be fostered not by natural science but by the world view that is often drawn from natural science, is something that people of the present still have no conception of. And what tyranny will arise when more and more external powers allow themselves to be privileged by materialism in the field of medicine, in the field of other so-called science, what will arise from this, the present man is still far too comfortable to even feel. He much prefers to accept bit by bit how, day by day, the spiritual is allowed to be privileged more and more by the external powers. And there are still few people who feel what a dreadful future humanity is heading for if they do not learn to feel what is at stake in this very area, what a decline can be observed in this very area compared to the points of view that have already been reached.

I just wanted to hint at this feeling, which is necessary for people of the present day. For this feeling is countered by an enormous sleepiness, especially among the idealistically minded people of the present. In the face of what one should feel to be one's task, it seems to be the worst sin when those who, precisely imbued with idealistic attitudes, find their way into a newer world view, then withdraw from the rest of the world's work and life and found all kinds of colonies and the like, while the most urgent thing is that the newer world view, the spiritual-scientific world view, be fully integrated into life and not sleepily stumble towards the enormous abyss that opens up from what one can thus hint at, as I have hinted at again today.

I wanted to present something episodic today. Because to explain the very important things that I still have to say, I need three consecutive lectures.