Intellectuality and Will – The Necessity of New Cognitive Powers

GA 179 — 22 December 1917, Dornach

It seems appropriate to look back at this point in our meditation on the various things that have passed through our souls in the course of these discussions. We will not repeat them, but rather use them to orient ourselves, to shed light on things from a certain point of view. For the reflections we have been making during this time, and which in a certain way have followed on from what we have brought before our soul through previous years, they should, above all, in addition to the positive messages they contain, be suitable for filling our soul with thoughts that are needed by the human soul in this time, a time that must be recognized as one of the most serious in the development of world history. Despite the many things we have been through in recent years, we are truly facing serious issues. And no one should fail to recognize the seriousness of the times, for in doing so they would be distracting their souls from the many things that are eminently necessary, that are urgently needed by the human soul if it is to experience the present time in a reasonably dignified manner.

We have tried to characterize the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century with the means that arise when one considers the important, incisive events with which the development of human beings in this 19th and 20th century is connected. You will have recognized that, above all, if we want to understand what the most significant characteristic of this most recent time is, we have to look at the fact that our time is almost suffering from an overabundance of intellectuality. Not that this should be taken to mean that humanity in our present time, compared to earlier ages, is particularly clever. What is meant is that the various powers of the human soul in our time all tend towards intellectuality. And since we live in the materialistic age, intellectuality is used exclusively to interweave the material existence with the human soul, and conversely to interweave the human soul with the material existence.

Our intellectuality is not high in the present age because it is directed almost exclusively towards the compilation and summarization, if I may express myself pedantically, towards the systematization of material things and material phenomena. But in a certain sense, this intellectuality is dominant within the human soul.

What is the necessary strength of soul that must be added to intellectuality in the next age, at the beginning of which we stand? Today everything is imbued with intellectuality, even if it is intellectuality that relates exclusively to the physical plane. Science is imbued with intellectuality, art is imbued with intellectuality, human social thinking is imbued with intellectuality. What must be added is something that, when truly understood, cannot be intellectual at all. And what cannot be intellectual at all, when it is truly understood, when it is taken up into human consciousness, is the human will, the human will so permeated with love, as I have tried to characterize the human will in connection with the impulse of love in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. The human will expresses itself either in the subconscious realities of the drives, the desires, whether they be selfish individual desires, social desires, or political aspirations, all this remains unconscious or subconscious. But if the will is really elevated to the sphere of consciousness, then what is otherwise overslept by the will impulses, or at most dreamt, as the last considerations have shown, is elevated to the sphere of consciousness, then this view of the will can no longer be materialistic. We find in our time for every truly spiritually discerning person a proof that what will is, is not grasped in our time. And this symptom is that in such a way as it is the case, the question can be raised at all by those minds who consider themselves the most important in our time: whether there is any human freedom at all or not.

This question, whether there is any human freedom at all or not, proves, when it is raised, an unspiritual way of thinking. From the spiritual point of view, one must approach the question of freedom in a completely different way. One must approach it in such a way that one knows: the one who can doubt the fact of human freedom does not understand the human will. Wherever doubt arises about human freedom, this presence of doubt is proof that the person in question has no idea of the real reality of human will. For as soon as one recognizes the will, one also recognizes the self-evident correlate of the will, one recognizes the impulse of human freedom.

However, in our time, freedom and necessity are discussed in such a way that what I explained to you last time in the trivial comparison with the pumpkin and the bottle can be clearly recognized in the discussion. I said that if you make a bottle out of a pumpkin, one person can say: This is a pumpkin – and another can say: This is a bottle. This is how people today argue about the freedom and necessity of human action, and what they have to say is usually worth as much as if one person stubbornly claims that it is a pumpkin and the other stubbornly claims that it is a bottle. It is just a pumpkin that has become a bottle!

What is important and essential is that people should again take up the power of the will into their consciousness. Whenever one speaks of the will of the world, one also speaks of that which really rules in the will of the world: of world love. However, there is little need to speak of it, for it rules when the will really exists. And it is much more significant to speak of the individual concrete impulses of the will that are necessary in our time than to indulge in sentimental generalities about love and love and love.

But things must be looked at in such a way that in looking there is real courage for knowledge and also real energy for knowledge. For knowledge of the complete, whole human nature is necessary for our time. And our time must begin to raise the question as a question of human destiny: How must our view of the human being be shaped when we question the fact that the sphere of the so-called living and the sphere of the so-called dead is one, that basically, we only live with our sense perception and our intellect among the living, but that we, in so far as we are feeling and willing beings, live in the same world in which the dead also live. And this realization must be followed by the inner soul impulses that are involved in this question of knowledge, a real will to understand the life of man in a concrete way, including how it proceeds between death and a new birth. Because without an understanding of this disembodied life of man, a real understanding is also not possible for the existence of man within the physical body, namely an understanding of the task of man within the physical body is not possible.

To put it somewhat abstractly: it is necessary for present-day humanity to truly absorb the inner impulses of the zeitgeist, that zeitgeist that has ruled in the narrower sense since 1879, and in the broader sense since the mid-15th century, and to familiarize oneself with the impulses of this zeitgeist. Many people – at least as regards what is actually meant by the words just spoken – most people in the present day have hardly the slightest idea. I have often said in these reflections that what is taught to our youth - to our younger youth and to our older youth - as so-called history is mostly, on the one hand, fable convenante, and on the other hand, often worthless stuff. If real history is to come into being, then it is first necessary to see through what the impulses of the last centuries were and what must change in these impulses in our own age. Today, we have hardly any idea of the tremendous change that has taken place in human thinking and feeling with the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, with the middle of the 15th century. The most nonsensical word in relation to development is considered by many people today to be a guiding principle. This nonsensical word is: nature does not make leaps. Just as nature makes its tremendous leap from the green leaf to the colored petal, so nature makes its leaps everywhere. And it was not a general transition from the fourth post-Atlantic period to the first half of the 15th century, to the fifth post-Atlantic period, starting from the second half of the 15th century, but there was a tremendous turnaround. One can only orient oneself if one can at least to some extent compare what the few centuries of the fifth post-Atlantic period have brought so far with what has gone before, for both things are fundamentally different from each other. From a certain point of view, I would like to draw your spiritual gaze to this matter today.

If one has familiarized oneself with what can be learned from the current content of science, the current content of human education – if one may use the foolish word “education” – and has prepared oneself from this today, then one does not understand writings from the 15th century, even if one is a particularly learned person of today.

Now you must not misunderstand me. Under no circumstances, given all the conditions of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, can I be in favor of rehashing old things. All the talk that is going around the world today about the necessity of warming up all kinds of old books and all kinds of old ideas cannot be applied to the field of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to draw from the immediate spiritual life itself that which has to be revealed for the present time, and because in our time important things are being revealed for the recipient. But one can clarify many things by looking at the way in which a truly learned mind today can relate to the things that have been preserved as wisdom – we do not need to go back any further than the 14th or 15th century. If today a truly learned mind takes up the works of the so-called Basilius Valentinus, the famous adept from the 15th century, for example, he does not know what to make of them. What usually happens today when people like Basilius Valentinus do something – it could also be others, but I am citing him because he is the most famous adept of the 15th century – is that they either talk nonsense, amateurish stuff, stuff they cram themselves full of that cannot be understood, but they believe in it, or they talk nonsense as learned buffoons, talk impotent stuff about what flows to them from Basilius Valentinus.

If you read something like Basilius Valentinus with a connoisseur's eye, with a truly spiritual connoisseur's eye, you soon realize that this Basilius Valentinus contains a wisdom that is indeed useless for people of the present, who have the current interests of the present, but that in this Basilius Valentinus there is all the more wisdom of the kind that occurs when one can connect with the souls that exist between death and a new birth. One can say, whatever appears unnecessary to people at present, this wisdom as it stands in Basilius Valentinus, is all the more necessary for those people who live between death and a new birth. They too do not need to study Basilius Valentinus, because in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science we have something that speaks the language that is common to the so-called living and the so-called dead. What anthroposophically oriented spiritual science provides is enough to also speak to the dead in the way we know. But I mention it as a historical fact that the way in which the dead person absorbs the knowledge of the world has a certain affinity with what is found in writings such as those of Basilius Valentinus. For Basilius Valentinus talks about all kinds of chemical processes, seemingly about what is done with metal and other substances in retorts and crucibles. In reality, he is talking about the knowledge that the dead must acquire if they want to carry out their tasks in that lowest realm of which I have spoken, which is thus the lowest realm for them, in the animal realm. He speaks of what one has to know about those impulses that come from the spiritual world in order to understand the microcosm itself emerging from the macrocosm. This is indeed the cognitive activity of the soul between death and a new birth, but it can only be properly carried out today if it is prepared between birth and death. This was still present as an atavistic inheritance, as an ancient heritage of wisdom, until the 15th century. And Basilius Valentinus speaks of this ancient wisdom heritage, speaks of the secrets of how man is connected with the macrocosm, speaks of real, divine wisdom - in imaginations, as we would say today.

This way of relating to the cosmos in knowledge has disappeared over the last few centuries. It must be acquired again – in a more spiritual way than it existed before the 15th century, it must be acquired again. For it must be practiced both in science and in socio-political life. Salvation for mankind is only possible if such goals are pursued. And it must be recognized that salvation for mankind is only possible under the influence of such goals.

An ancient heritage, which could be called a primal revelation, was handed down through the centuries. In the materialistic fifth post-Atlantic age, it was lost. It must be acquired anew. It can only be acquired if man acquires it, as we have often discussed, by permeating himself, but actively, deliberately permeating himself with the Pauline “Not I, but Christ in me”, when he calls upon those forces that emanate from the Mystery of Golgotha, after having absorbed the mystery forces of Golgotha into his own soul. Christ in me», when he summons those powers that proceed from the Mystery of Golgotha, and, after absorbing the mystery powers of Golgotha into his own soul, uses these powers to explore the universe. And only in this way can we join with the dead who rule among us. Otherwise we will be separated from them for the simple reason that the plan of the world, which we can only grasp with our imagination and our senses, can never bring us into any kind of relationship with the dead.

But as I said, what does the learned mind of the present day make of this ancient wisdom? Perhaps in a similar way to the scholar who spoke the words: “The last and most important operation” by Basilius Valentinus “is the gradual heating of the philosophical mercury and gold in the Thus Theodor Svedberg in Uppsala, who has written a book about these things from the scientific standpoint of the present and who in this respect is only representative of all the learned minds who unfortunately cannot comprehend. It is still the best thing for them to say: Unfortunately, one cannot comprehend. For all of them, Basilius Valentinus has already written the necessary dismissive words himself, in that he writes in his “Twelve Keys to the Universe and Its Understanding”: “If you now understand what I am saying, then you have opened the first lock with the key and pushed back the bolt of the approach. But if you cannot yet fathom the light within, then no glass vision will help you, nor natural eyes be able to help you to find the last thing you lacked at the beginning. Then I will no longer speak of this key, as Lucius Papirius taught me. Thus speaks Basilius Valentinus to all those descendants who, when confronted with ancient wisdom, can only utter the words: Unfortunately, one cannot comprehend. But these people of the present have something else to do than to understand the spiritual! These people of the present must deal with all kinds of other things; and when there is any mention of the spirit, then they must, above all, deal with slandering this mention of the spirit. And an enormous amount of time is spent today on slandering this mention of the spirit. To the Berlin nonsense of Max Dessoir can be added – I have not yet been able to read the writing myself, but I have been told a few things – the Dutch counterpart of the philosopher Bolland, who has indeed earned some merit for the development of philosophy by inspiring the philosophical youth of Holland with his repetition of Hartmannian and Hegelian phrases, but also, as it seems, could not avoid using his philosophical unproductivity in recent times to defame our spiritual science with all kinds of untrue stuff. This must be emphasized again and again, because in order to truly take up spiritual science in our soul, we also need to pay attention to the way in which the present, in its spiritual-scientific impotence, relates to what is necessary for humanity. This present-day science - I am not talking about the external science, which, as you know, I fully recognize, even if I don't follow every naturalist - but what is often called philosophy and the like is, in the present day, not much more than abstract talk, conducted in complete confusion about the concepts of pumpkin and bottle. Unfortunately, it still happens far too often in our society that we repeatedly fall for the nonsense talk of contemporary philosophers in particular and are even occasionally glad when here or there some philosophical button finds this or that, let us say, not to be criticized by what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants. As if it were not, if he does not find it to be criticized, at least his duty and obligation! We need not be pleased at all when, as many of us are, a word of praise falls from this or that side. Even these words of praise are usually not exactly borne by a great understanding. But we must be prepared for the fact that such slanderers of the Dessoirs or Bolland type will arise again and again, and that they will even multiply in the near future. For these people must occupy themselves with something! And since they are far too lazy to concern themselves with what must be brought from the spiritual world for the salvation of mankind in the present age, they must occupy themselves with slandering what is brought. Basilius Valentinus, I said, still offered an ancient, atavistically inherited legacy, a science of the way in which man is created out of the cosmic All, which is above all the science of the soul freed from the body, but which must also be the science that wants to contribute to everything that is not merely external nature. This science can only be furthered if the realization of the will is added to the pure, and indeed materialistically oriented intellectual element of modern times. This will, which, when it is really recognized as will, can only be recognized in its spiritual nature, because it expresses itself only spiritually in the present stage of development of mankind. What the present time so urgently lacks is a courageous bringing forth of the impulses of life from the sphere of the will. Above all, the present time wants to talk, talk! That is good, but only on the basis of true knowledge. The present time does not want the latter – everyone wants to talk, everyone wants to talk, even on the basis of vain assumptions. And we have indeed seen that it is precisely in this disregard for the spiritual element in the world that the misfortune of our age lies. At the present time, one is only sincere about the evolution of humanity when one really wants to engage in the investigation of those impulses of the will that are necessary to push forward the waves of human evolution. Of course, these things should not be taken personally. In this or that place in life, everyone can naturally say: Yes, what should I do? - Certainly, that can never be the demand, that we should understand today what we should do in order to somehow take the first steps tomorrow, to undertake something that will make a world epoch. What we have to undertake, karma will bring to us. But what we have to do is to open our eyes – I mean the eyes of the soul – to really recognize, to really see through the time. What we have to do is not to oversleep this time, but to look into what is happening! What the materialism of the fifth post-Atlantean period has taken away from people, what it necessarily had to take away because people first had to orient themselves purely personally, are comprehensive ideas, as they are the outpourings of the Zeitgeist, and these are comprehensive ideas that we can have in common with the so-called dead. The intellectualistic stuff that has become so great in our time has not only seized human souls, it has therefore also seized the social and historical development of the age itself. Faced with the necessities of history, man has, with a certain right – for these things are not to be criticized, but characterized – man has, with a certain right, handed over to the machine much of what he used to do out of his human initiative, and I also mean out of the organic human initiative. The materialistic age is, of course, at the same time the machine age. And this machine age not only forms with the machines what it needs for ordinary life, but war itself has become the maintenance of a great machine. It could not have happened otherwise, because in the course of the last few centuries, humanity has not only developed a certain class of humanity, but within this class of humanity it has also cultivated views that are above all concerned with only accepting as scientific that can be realized within the outer social order in the making of machines: either in the making of mechanical machines - if I may use this tautology, this pleonasm - or in the making of social machines. For example, until the war, the international financial management of the world was a large-scale machine. Everything was machine-like. Man has given up a great deal to the machine-like. A certain stratum of humanity retained only that which makes trivial necessities of life pleasurable. One could say: toiling in winter, bathing in summer and only as much thinking as is necessary, so that the world machinery toils for one, became the signature of the age. Not as if it could have been avoided. This world machinery had to come about, that is quite natural. To criticize what has happened is a dilettantism in which spiritual science cannot participate. But the matter must be seen through and recognized in the nature that it has, because only then will it be possible to develop the right impulses of will in response to it. Again and again, people have come along who have already expressed the appropriate ideas for this age. But these spokesmen for the appropriate ideas were actually regarded as impossible human personalities, especially in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. Subsequent humanity has gone back to its daily routine without giving a thought to such clear-sighted minds as Bright's and Cobden's, who saw how the social structure of humanity must be on earth under the influence of the machine age. Subsequent humanity should have used some of its intellectual power to find out how appropriate Bright's and Cobden's ideas were for the machine age! But to force the will into the intellect in order to see through reality, that is an effort from which the people of the present shrink. They do not want to imbue their thoughts with will. They want their thoughts to be sentimentally directed towards that which, as they say, makes their hearts glow when they want to uplift themselves. And under the influence of such thought, divested of will, but which feels so warm and comfortable when prattling sentimentalities, one gets accustomed to seizing even the most important questions with a thought that is weak and lacking in will. Above all, one gets accustomed to learning nothing about the development of world history. Is humanity ready to learn at the present time? This, too, is not meant as a criticism but only as a characterization. All that I say is not inspired from the point of view of criticism, but is inspired from the point of view of stimulating the will. It must be made clear how to introduce the impulse of the will into one's thoughts, which can serve for the good of humanity. Unfortunately, people today are not inclined to learn enough. They let things pass by and talk about them, believing that by talking they can also master the element of will. How much has been chattered, insubstantial chatter in the time when the ominous causes of this world catastrophe were preparing! How much has been chattered at the suggestion of the Tsar's peace manifesto frippery! This could happen because it can be said that people had to be taught that these were peace manifesto shenanigans, and that all the chatter that was attached to them was millions and millions of miles away from the possibility of stimulating impulses of will in humanity. But learning should be done. Is learning taking place? No, for the time being learning is not taking place – and it is not a matter of criticizing the lack of learning, but of seeing through this lack of learning so that one may learn. What has taken the place of the chatter about all kinds of world goals in connection with the peace manifesto frippery of the now dismissed tsar? The other nonsense of the peace manifesto frippery of the chatterbox Woodrow Wilson! Exactly the same thing instead of the same thing! That is to be learned, that humanity does not want to learn. And in the realization of this unwillingness to learn, the holy will for the right volition will be kindled in our soul, which must arise from the right insight into that which works and lives in our time. In my public lectures, I have said that, fundamentally, what has developed over the course of the last four hundred years in the historical dream of humanity was enunciated as a world program in the course of the nineteenth century by people like Karl Marx and similar thinkers. The impulses had already passed when it was expressed, but what was basically the basis for the historical development of the last four centuries was expressed with it. What is the situation today? The situation today is that the broader sections of the population have abandoned all thought about social interrelations. They leave it to the professors of political economy, who have indeed talked enough nonsense over the last few centuries, and especially decades. Real social thinking, which has to emerge from the knowledge of the impulses coming from the spiritual world, has been lost in the so-called leading classes. Only one class has recently brought forth world-historical ideas: that class which, in occult conception, are brothers of the shadows as opposed to the brothers of the bourgeois parties of the last centuries. World-historical ideas, even if they are shadowy ideas, have been brought by Social Democracy, gray shadowy ideas of a particularly dangerous kind, since they are completely impregnated with the spirit of the last centuries. But world-historical ideas are what the other strata of humanity have completely lacked. For the other strata of humanity, they would have had to borrow them from the spiritual world; they would have needed to develop their religious, social, and historical ideas not in a general, unctuous way, but to see through social development on a firm foundation of knowledge. No one will understand social evolution in reality who is not willing to place himself in a position to do so from the starting points on which these reflections have been based in recent weeks. The best that the so-called living can receive from the spiritual world today, the best that the dead reveal to us from their life between death and a new birth, speaks for this. The new understanding of the mystery of Golgotha, which we must approach through the deepening of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, speaks for this. Everything that we should allow to pass through our souls as serious Christmas thoughts in these serious times speaks for this. For it was for the salvation of mankind that the Being whose birth is celebrated at Christmas entered into the evolution of the earth, not merely for the comfortable talking to of the soul, but so that this human soul might be imbued with – if I may use the paradoxical word – the will to will, the will to want. If this will to want permeates human souls, then this will mean the impulse for a longing for truly new ideas, because the old ones have been used up. Sometimes we can no longer even use the words. We live in catastrophic times. To call what is happening war is almost anachronistic, arising only from the old habit of still calling a bottle a pumpkin. But just as little as what is happening should be called war, just as little should the comfortable hope speak of peace in the old way, in a careless manner! Mighty portents are announced in our time, and it is incumbent upon humanity to try to understand these portents. In the events themselves, events are changing. 1914 marked the beginning of a world event that could perhaps be called a war between the Entente and the European Central Powers. But something essentially different prevails under what is so-called, and completely different enemies face each other! And in our days a serious symptom of what smolders beneath what we still call, rather inappropriately, a war between the Entente and the Central Powers, is looming for us, a symptom which consists in the sad clash of the populations of northern and southern Russia, a significant symptom, even if it may fade away for the time being, a significant symptom of what is smoldering beneath the surface of events. People do not like the fact that things are being called by their right name today, because they do not want the volition, because they prefer to ignore the seriousness of the times as long as possible, as long as the stomach does not growl too loudly. What is at stake is whether we really develop the will to see the deeper foundations of events, whether we finally develop the will to cast off all superficiality and look things in the face with the eyes of the soul. In the next lectures, we will have to supplement what we have now let pass through our soul in a kind of overview with a variety of additional points that are connected with the deeper impulses to which we have devoted ourselves in these reflections. But I believe that in this time, if we do not want to weave a veil before our eyes, we most honor the mysterious threefold necessity that passes through world-becoming and is the brother of human freedom and the freedom of the other creatures. Here on this earth we must grasp freedom. In this respect, too, the modern man's gaze learns a great deal when he turns to the dead; for the dead man knows that in the life between death and a new birth, freedom comes to him through what he brings with him from the life between birth and death. To be embedded in the intelligences of the higher hierarchies is something that becomes for us a natural necessity when we pass through the portal of death. When we live on the other side, we are embedded in the intelligences of the higher hierarchies and follow their impulses, just as a natural phenomenon here on earth necessarily follows natural impulses. Then we are still free after we have passed through the gate of death, if we carry over into the spiritual world with us in our soul that which we can acquire here as knowledge of spiritual becoming and spiritual essence. This is something that is now also most intimately connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. And because this is so, I believe that even Christmas meditations at this time must not be sentimental, but must appeal to the will-wish. For take the Gospels: how much there is in the Gospels of the appeal to the will to will! The Gospels are not sentimental writings; the Gospels are writings that speak to the very humblest of human nature, but they are also writings that seek to awaken in man the strength of will that he can muster. Christmas candles should not only burn so that we indulge in voluptuous contemplation in a certain way, but they should also burn so that they are symbols for kindling the light of will that serves the salvation of the world. Humanity has a lot of catching up to do; and it must catch up! For by developing the strength that lies in this catching up, it will develop the right healing powers to emerge from the present catastrophic time. It was not man's task merely to enter these times; the task of getting out of them is much more important. This task stands as a sacred sign, I believe, written in letters of fire behind all the Christmas candles that have been burning before our souls for four years now in a different way than in many earlier years! Tomorrow we will meet at four o'clock at the Basel branch for a Christmas party. On Monday at four-thirty we will gather here for the first performance of the “Paradeis-Spiel,” and I will then give a Christmas reflection for those of our friends who are not at home for some reason, but who are here right now, devoting themselves to work and the like, and who might prefer to spend their Christmas here on this day.