The Relationship Between Human Science and Social Science

GA 188 — 25 January 1919, Dornach

What I found particularly important yesterday was to show, on the one hand, using Schiller's “Letters on Aesthetic Education” and, on the other, Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, how, before the middle of the 19th century, the way in which outstanding minds in particular imagined and felt about the world was different from the way they did after the middle of the 19th century. It is precisely in such examples that one can really see what a considerable, significant turning point occurred in the middle of the 19th century. We have spoken of this turning point in the development of humanity from various points of view, and have pointed out that in the middle of the 19th century there is, so to speak, a crisis of materialism, a crisis in that materialistic thinking gains the upper hand in all human perception and feeling, world view, outlook on life, and so on.

Now, anyone who wants to look at these things closely, who has the courage and the interest to look at these things closely, will notice the turnaround that has actually taken place in all sorts of ways.

Take the scene with the Kabirs out of today's performance, try to read in this “Faust” scene everything that refers to the Kabirs, try to follow every single line with real interest, and you will see how Goethe, through his spiritualized instincts, was still very much within the realm of intuitive knowledge. Through such performances and mystery plays, as the Greeks had in imitation of the Kabirs, for example, the highest is expressed for man in relation to the pursuit of knowledge and the like. Goethe rightly associated these Kabirs with the path that should lead from homunculus to homo. He rightly associated these Kabirs with the mystery of human becoming.

Three Kabiras are brought forward. We speak first of three human limbs. Before we go into the true inner being of man, we speak of three human limbs: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body. Speaking of these human limbs immediately arouses the criticism of those people who today think they are particularly clever, who today think they are particularly scientific. Such people object, for example: Why divide, segment the unified human being? After all, man is a unity; it is schematic to separate man into such limbs. Yes, but it is not so simple. Of course, if it were only a schematic division of the human being, it would be unnecessary to attach any particular value to these limbs. But these individual limbs, which one seems to abstract so much from the whole human being, are all connected with completely different spheres of the universe. The fact that man has a physical body, as he has today, and the way in which this physical body has developed from its Saturnian disposition to the present day, means that man belongs to space, to the sphere of space. And through his etheric body, man belongs to the sphere of time. Thus, by belonging to the two totally different spheres, by, one could say, having crystallized out of the world of time and space, the human being consists of a physical body and an etheric body. This is not an arbitrary scheme, which is mentioned as a classification, as a structure of the human being. It is actually based on the whole connection of the human being with the universe. And through his astral body, the human being already belongs to the extra-spatial and extra-temporal.

This trinity, so to speak the human shell trinity, is presented in the three Kabirs. The fourth “did not want to come”. And it is he who thinks for them all! If we ascend from the three sheaths to the human ego, we have in this human ego, first of all, that which rises above space and time, even above the timeless, spaceless quality of the astral. But this human ego only came into consciousness in the period of time that followed the Samothracean worship of Kabir. The Greeks had, of course, derived their belief in the immortal from the ancient Samothracean teaching; but it was only within the Graeco-Latin period that the consciousness of the ego was to be born. Therefore the fourth did not want to come, representing as it does that which exists as a relationship between the ego and the cosmos. And how far removed that was from the Kabir mystery, which initially points to what was there in the becoming of man. The three highest, the fifth, sixth and seventh, are still to be “inquired of in Olympus”: spirit-self, spirit-life, spirit-man. These come, as we know, in the sixth and seventh periods. And the eighth has not yet been thought of at all!

We actually see the mystery of humanity in its ancient form, as it was veiled in the mysteries of Samothrace, from which the Greeks took the best for their knowledge of the soul, for their wisdom of the soul, and even the best for their poetry, insofar as it related to the human being. That is the important thing to recognize: as soon as one turns one's gaze back to these ancient times, which Goethe tried to revive, one looks into a knowledge of the connection between man and the universe. Man felt himself related to all the secrets of existence. Man knew that he is not merely enclosed within the limits of his skin, he belongs to the whole wide universe. And that which is enclosed in his skin is only the image of his particular being.

One could say that a reflection, a final echo of this view of the connection between man and the universe can still be found in such writings as Schiller's “Letters on Aesthetic Education”, and can be found as, I would say, the permeating spiritual air of life in such a work of poetry as Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. In his pictorial way of presenting things, Goethe has actually tried to show what it is that places a person in the community of human beings. There are twenty soul forces that Goethe lets appear in the form of the fairy tale figures. But by letting these twenty soul forces appear, Goethe shows how these soul forces lead from one person to another in social life. In this fairy tale, Goethe has created imaginations of the course of social development through humanity. These imaginations, as Goethe created them, as he juxtaposed the king of wisdom, the king of appearance, the king of violence, and as he allowed the king to disintegrate within himself, who chaotically combines all three - wisdom, appearance and violence - this way in which he presents it shows in his way what must be grasped very intensely and consciously from different points of view today.

But we cannot stop with Goethean fairy tales today. Those who want to stop at Goethean fairy tales and their presentation today are really just playing. You know that the same theme, the same impulses that Goethe presented in fairy tales, are presented in my first mystery, “The Portal of Initiation”. But they are presented with the awareness that something occurred in the mid-19th century that makes it necessary to present such things today from completely different, more urgent impulses. Yesterday I pointed out how the transition must be from looking at the earlier age to the age at whose end we are standing. But what we have to regain, what was present in ancient times like the last echo of atavistic clairvoyance about these things, is the consciousness of the connection between man and the whole universe, the consciousness of that secret which you will find expressed in my second mystery at the beginning, where it is shown through Capesius how all the activity of the gods ultimately amounts to representing man. Why is an awareness of this cosmic significance of the human being, of the fact that the human being is part of the whole cosmos, so very important for our time? Precisely because we are on the verge of having to grasp the most everyday, the immediate outer life spiritually. And this outer social life cannot be grasped if one cannot base it on a real insight into the nature of the human being. The moment one begins to place the human being himself in the social structure in his entirety, as some teachers of economics do today and as it even lives in the trivial consciousness of most people, one must fail with regard to the social question, because the human being with his essence stands out from what the social question actually represents.

I told you yesterday that there are three aspects to human nature. What they are called is another matter. Today we call them the nervous and sensory human being, the human being of rhythm, and the human being of metabolism. We have to distinguish three things in relation to a truly organically ordered social structure: the spiritual, the purely regulatory state, the economic-economic. The human being is in touch with this social life, the human being stands in it. But he stands, as it were, already in his threefoldness, as the threefoldness of the social organism. Please note: It is always necessary to point out that one is not constructing, not seeking analogies, not interpreting such things in abstract terms, but is actually doing spiritual research. Thus, anyone who compares the winter of the earth with night or with sleep, and the summer with waking, will come to nothing, whereas for the earth, summer represents sleeping and winter waking. Nothing is achieved by those who think of the development of humanity in analogy to the development of the Binzel man. While the individual human being progresses from childhood to old age, humanity progresses from old age back to childhood. Real research shows something quite different from what people fantasize. Don't spin any analogies, but look at things as they are! If we consider the threefold human being, we first have the human spirit in the sense-nervous sphere. Then we have the middle part in the rhythmic sphere, and the lower part in the metabolism. You can read more about this in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul). But I have drawn attention to the fact that the metabolism actually bears the imprint of the highest, the spiritual. Metabolism therefore corresponds to intuition when we see the spiritual, the rhythmic corresponds to inspiration, and the nerve-sense life corresponds to imagination. The human being is a threefold being. But the right social organism, which present humanity is striving for in the fifth post-Atlantic period, is also threefold. Only, when we observe this threefoldness, we must not disregard what follows.

Where, in fact, in the human being, is that which the human organism is aiming at — not in the whole human being, but in the human organism? Yes, the world has a very complicated view of this, and the real view, the true view, seems complicated to people. Today's genuine physiologist thinks, as I said yesterday: People eat, stuff the food into themselves; then the organism selects from this food what it needs and expels the rest. It transforms this into itself, and so it goes, day after day. Now, I told you yesterday that this metabolism only refers to the daily metabolism, and that the other metabolism, which leads the human being from the first teeth to the permanent teeth, then again through puberty and so on, does not depend directly on this metabolism at all. This metabolism, which extends over the long periods between birth and death, is not connected with the simultaneous stuffing and transformation of food and so on, but is based on other laws and other substance processing. I already pointed this out yesterday. But what does this daily food that we take in mean at all? Here we come to a chapter where we must again come into the most violent conflict with ordinary science today.

Please, I do not want to cause you to not eat now, please do not draw any complicated, nonsensical conclusions from the things that are said for the sake of knowledge and insight, lest someone draws all kinds of follies from them as consequences! But why do we actually eat? Do we eat so that what is outside of us is inside of us? No, we eat so that the various substances that enter us carry out particular expressions of power, and our organism defends itself against these expressions of power. You can imagine figuratively: When you absorb food, these foods cause small explosions in you; you need these explosions because you have to destroy them again, paralyze them again, and destroy them, and it is in this destruction that your inner strength actually develops. Man needs impetus, stimulation, and essentially what food is to us is stimulation. For that which we are as human beings, we actually receive in a mysterious way from somewhere else.

You remember, I have said before: the head is actually hollow. This allows it to absorb from the universe that which is productive in the human being. And this production is, as it were, only coaxed out of the head. In this way, the head in turn comes into its own. In many respects, the head is actually the least important part; it is the last remnant from the previous incarnation. It is that which, for example, could not think without rhythmic activity. One always believes that the head thinks. It does not really think, but only reflects thoughts. But it is coming into its own again in that it is actually the productive element. And man depends on the fact that, in addition to the rhythm within him, metabolism also prevails, which is the constant stimulator, in order to develop this productivity. Metabolism is therefore the constant stimulator through which man comes into contact with the outside world.

And what about the social organism? There it is actually the other way around. What is inside the human being, what the human being carries inside him, what needs stimulation from the outside through the metabolism, is the basis for the social organism, just as food is for us. What we eat is to us what people bring forth from their nervous and sensory lives to the social organism. So the state, or rather the social organism, is an organic being that, if I may use the expression, eats what people think up, what people invent, what comes from human spirituality.

Take away the fundamental power, the fundamental property of human spirituality, namely freedom, individual freedom, and it is just as if you wanted to let people grow up without giving them food. Free, individual human beings who place themselves in a socially coercive structure and sterilize their free spirituality will cause the social structure to wither away just as a person will wither away if you do not give him food. What human minds bring into the world is the nourishment for the social organism.

So that one can say: what is productive in the sphere of the nerves and senses is the nourishment for the social organism. — What the rhythmic system is in the human being corresponds, in the social organism, to everything that should actually be entrusted to the state, as I said yesterday: everything that relates to regulation, to external legality, and thus to the legality of the state. And what is productive in the state? That which emerges from the natural foundation in the broader sense, the economic life. This is, in a sense, the head of the state. The economic life, the natural foundation, everything that is produced, that is, in a sense, the head. It is the opposite of the individual human being. So we can just as well say: just as the human being is productive through his nerves and senses, so the social organism is productive through its natural foundation. And just as the human being receives his metabolism from nature, so the social organism receives its nourishment from the human head.

You can only understand the social organism in relation to the human being if you turn the human being upside down. Here in the human head is actually the human being's land. The human being grows from top to bottom, the state organism grows from bottom to top. If it is necessary to compare it to a human being, then the state organism has its head at the bottom and stands on its head with its legs at the top. It draws its nourishment from the individual human beings. This is how we must inwardly understand the social organism. It does not matter if we use analogies; but the view of the true reality, of the genuine reality, that is what matters.

Isn't it true that in the course of the 19th century, precisely when this important turning point in the middle of the 19th century asserted itself, we recorded the actual tendency towards materialism, the turning away from the spiritual. It was the high tide of materialism. What actually happened with regard to the human conception of the world? Yes, with regard to the human conception of the world, what happened was that people lost the spirit of the supersensible. They lost what was to be achieved through the production of their empty heads; what was to enter into the empty head, that is what people have lost. They want to rely only on chance and experimentation with regard to all inventions and discoveries. However proud and arrogant we are of the achievements of the second half of the 19th century, study the history of ideas and you will see how even the greatest of these achievements are not based on the direct initiative of the mind, but on constellations that have arisen in the course of experimentation. Man has lost God, man has lost the spirit, by no longer striving towards the spirit with the mind.

What would be the counter-image in the social organism? There one would lose the natural foundations, there one would argue about everything without taking the natural foundations into consideration. This is indeed the character of social debate in the second half of the 19th century and to this day, today most fiercely. For today people talk about social institutions, about socialization of human economy and the like: in this way they omit in this debate the actual natural foundation, the way in which production should take place, in the same way as materialists omit what the mind should do in the human being. Just as materialistic thinking loses sight of the spiritual dimension of the world, so the corresponding social organism loses sight of the material dimension of the economy and of the social context. And in the social process there is a great danger that corresponds to the loss of spirit in the materialistic world view: in the loss of a production that is as satisfying as possible for humanity, of the most possible insight into the productive process.

Now, one cannot come to an understanding of the social structure if one does not train oneself in the threefold nature of the human being and thereby learn how to shape the relationship between the science of the human being and the social science. Otherwise everything will be judged wrongly. Our learned economists, through whom so much misery has come into the world, because the others also think in this way, because they only accept the experiments, our learned economists know in fact nothing about this relationship of the human being to the social structure. For this can only be gained through spiritual science. Our economic scholars and teachers of economics are seriously arguing about whether a piglet or a human being is of greater economic value. That is not true, though a great deal can be said for both from the point of view of the arguments that people have. Some claim that a piglet is more valuable in the economy than a human being, because a piglet represents something that can be eaten, something suitable for consumption, which has an economic value. You can't eat a human being; they even eat away at things themselves, and for some people they represent no economic value. But some think differently, they say: Well, but the person produces economic value, and that will be there! So indirectly he helps so-and-so many piglets to come into existence and so on. Well, as I said, there are arguments about such things! It is in fact a question that is discussed among teachers of economics, whether a piglet or a human being represents the greater economic value.

Now, that is just a grotesque example. But for those with deeper insight, what is alive in our catastrophic present actually depends on such grotesque things. For one can indeed say: the knowledge that is sufficient to make magnificent progress in science, the knowledge that provides great scientific results, that wonderfully enables us to compare the embryo of a piglet with the embryo of a dog, with the embryo of a human being, with the embryo of a bat and so and to form from this schematically the kind of thinking that is sufficient to produce all kinds of physiological, biological, mineralogical, geological knowledge in the sense of today, this thinking, this way of connecting thoughts, is not sufficient to distinguish economically what is more important, a pig or a human being. And until one realizes that one can be a great naturalist without being able to distinguish economically between a pig and a human being, there will be no salvation in relation to the knowledge of the social question. People must uncompromisingly admit that what constitutes the greatness of thought in the field of natural science today does not allow the economic value of a piglet to be distinguished from the so-called economic value of a human being. We will continue this discussion tomorrow.