Spiritual Science and Social Renewal in Modern Civilization

GA 192 — 6 July 1919, Stuttgart

Twelfth Lecture

Eight days ago today, I tried to explain from a certain point of view why European culture is now standing at the edge of an abyss, why it is moving towards its own decline. It is undoubtedly of the greatest importance in the present time to acquire a full consciousness of the forces of decline that are at work in this European culture. It is precisely on this point that we must not allow ourselves to be under any kind of illusion, because it is precisely the pursuit of illusions that has brought us to the present European situation, the pursuit of illusions that have always been an outgrowth of real practice, and yet they are nothing more than illusions, because they are drawn from very narrow experiential contours, from very narrow experiential surfaces, and because they disregard a truly pervasive experience. But it would be a very false kind of view to think that a critique of these facts is enough. There can be no question that a mere critique of these things is enough today. Rather, one must see what the actual historical context is. For in a certain sense, one will recognize through this historical context that a temporary decline of European culture, at least according to the current trends of this culture, is a necessity, a completely lawful necessity. And one will arrive at the reconstruction only by recognizing this necessity and not by stopping at a mere criticism. But, as I said, one must also have the inner honesty to really want to go beyond illusions. Illusions are comfortable for our momentary life, but often they are destructive for the real further development of humanity. And today I would like to present a certain reflection to you, which will be, so to speak, a kind of résumé of what has been inwardly acquired here on spiritual scientific ground over the years, and which may be suitable to lead beyond such illusions of the present and to the realities. What we must always remember when we look impartially and without prejudice at the real character of our contemporary culture is that this culture is based entirely on the kind of thinking, feeling and sensing that can flow from the scientific world view. This scientific world view has produced great and powerful advances for humanity in the right environment, and it would be highly foolish to somehow disavow or disown these great and powerful advances for humanity. Only he who fully recognizes it, who, from this side, stands fully on scientific ground, has a right, as I have said many times, to look at the other, which a scientific world view cannot give. What natural science gives us, what it basically seeks solely and exclusively, is a world view that encompasses nature, that encompasses everything that one brings into one's soul when one surveys nature with one's senses and when one forms intellectual combinations from the individual sensory perceptions. It is precisely through its separation from the human being, through the separation of everything that arises from human nature itself, that this scientific world view has grown. You will find a more detailed discussion of this in my two books 'The Human Riddle' and 'The Soul Riddle'.

On the other hand, however, it must also be recognized that everything that can be gained in this way from a scientific point of view, however exact it may be – and its exactness should not be underestimated – cannot provide any information about the actual nature of the human being. The reasons for this can also be found in the two books just mentioned. But I will emphasize only one point here: Those who believe that they can gain something from mere observation of nature in the future, something that also makes man himself understandable, they believe that by perfecting scientific methods they will be able to understand not only the dead, the inanimate, but also, one day, the living. They simply think: So far, it has only been possible to understand physical and chemical laws by scientific means, that is, to understand what was in the dead material; but it is believed that by continuing this kind of investigation, it will be possible to understand the structure of the living from its components, and then the living will have been grasped in a scientific way. The opposite is truly the case. Those who look into the very thing that makes natural science methods great – and they are great – know that they are great because they are limited to understanding the dead, the inorganic, and that the more they perfect themselves, the more they will distance themselves from an understanding of the living. This means that the more we advance on the terrain of natural science, the more the living world eludes our research, and with it the first step towards understanding the human being. In today's reflection, I would like to mention a few things about the fact that this is not just a scientific matter in the present day, not just a theoretical matter, but that it is a cultural matter today. And I would like to start from certain historical facts. When we look back at ancient ways of shaping worldviews, when we look back at what lived on as the legacy of even older worldviews, what lived in Egyptian culture or in the Chaldean- Assyrian-Babylonian culture, not to mention what lived as an old heritage in ancient Indian culture, it is difficult for people today to see through this old way of knowing from their own inner being. We have wonderful research in this field by Assyriologists and Egyptologists, but all this research is not enough to present anything other than the individual facts to human observation. They are not enough to revive the essence of the ancient way of knowing in us. We have sought precisely this on anthroposophical ground, and there the present man will have to free himself from many a prejudice that, as I said, necessarily adheres to him today with a certain regularity. What confronts today's man when he delves into pre-Christian worldviews, that appears to him quite naturally and understandably as something that he can only consider to be overcome, that he can only regard as the expression of a childlike stage of human culture. As I said, for the modern man this is not only understandable, but even self-evident. But for the one who, through a certain inner spiritual development, as you will find indicated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, is able to survey the facts brought up by Assyriologists and Egyptologists with regard to the question: How did the human soul actually relate to the universe in theory and practice in ancient times? It becomes clear that what lived at that time emerged from a completely different inner soul condition, that it was not merely something childlike, but simply a completely different kind of knowledge. And because it is so very different, because it is based on something so very different from the way we actually look at the world, it appears to man as a childish level of culture or as wild superstition. For those ancient beliefs, man was much more a part of the cosmos, of the universe, than he is today for his beliefs. Today, we may find it laughable what ancient peoples said about the connection between man and the universe. But it is no longer laughable when we ourselves penetrate certain secrets through a new kind of research, which cannot be revealed by the scientific world view.

Of course, it is strange for today's man to hear or read that these ancient people saw a connection between the individual forces of our planetary system and what takes place in man himself, or that they saw a connection between the position of the sun in relation to the individual images of the zodiac and, in turn, what takes place in man. Today, people can imagine that their existence is dependent on the composition of the air in a particular area, on the nature of the soil and also on the social order in which they live, but they can no longer imagine a more far-reaching dependence of man on the great processes of the universe. These great cosmic processes have become for him only the object of mathematical-mechanical consideration. This has been the case ever since modern times have selected from the even more comprehensive world picture of the Kep/er that which is subject only to mathematical-mechanical consideration. Indeed, one can say that, to a certain extent, beneath the surface of human culture, which is considered to be the appropriate one for today, there are all sorts of things that are reminiscent of those old views. What is happening today with the revival of old views about the connection between man and the universe. We see the flourishing of astrological and theosophical endeavors, and so on. All these endeavors, as I have often explained here in detail, are nothing more than the very unintelligent old traditions that have sunk below the level of human education required for today. At best, they are wild amateurish attempts driven by people who may feel that there is still a truth, that there are secrets behind what can be scientifically researched, but who do not want to engage with what can arise from the human powers of the present time itself. We must not see the revival of old pre-Christian truths as a goal for our present culture, and the more we try to keep reviving the old, the more we harm real progress. We must be able to ruthlessly reject what, in the guise of sectarianism, stubbornly reigns under the cover of actual culture, otherwise we will not acquire the right in this day and age to cultivate the real science of the spirit alongside natural science.

But we must look at it as it is, precisely because it must be overcome. We must look impartially and without prejudice at what the ancients had as the content of their knowledge. Today, those who reheat things in the way just described treat the matter rather amateurishly. The ancient people realized, for example, that in the innermost part of their soul they felt differently, simply subconsciously differently than usual, when Saturn, Jupiter or Mars were above their heads, especially at their zenith, and that they felt differently in their soul than usual when Venus or Mercury were invisibly below the horizon. From these inner experiences they said to themselves: There is an effect of the upper planets. And by the effect of the superior planets on man he understood that which radiates from Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, which he simply experienced, which he knew, just as we know when a gust of wind strikes us on the side. Mankind has simply lost this feeling. He knew that the radiations of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars are strongest when these three planets are visibly above the horizon. And he knew that the strongest effect on his human organism comes from Venus and Mercury when these planets are below the horizon. Thus, the world, with which he thought of the human being in context, was divided into an upper world, the world of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars - which this upper world was for him, even when Venus and Mercury were visible above the horizon , for he said to himself: above the horizon these two planets do not have their actual effect - and into the lower world, which for him was realized in the outer space, when the two planets together, Mercury and Venus, were below the horizon.

In short, man thought of himself in connection with the whole universe. Today we already fail to consider ourselves in connection with the very nearest part of our universe. Just think about it: the air that you just inhaled, which is working in your organism, will soon be outside of your organism again. That is, what is outside is inside afterwards, what is inside now is outside afterwards. You can only seemingly separate yourself from the outside world by taking the boundary of your skin for reality. But you are in reality nothing more than a piece of this outside world. Because what is inside you now will later be outside, and what is outside will later be inside you. We hardly pay attention to this. In any case, we do not use this eminent, meaningful fact to examine our knowledge. The ancient man thought of this dependence as being further extended because he was of a finer sensitivity, because he could perceive other things than inhaling and exhaling, which today's man also hardly pays attention to. Just as the modern human being can still feel part of the earth's atmosphere when breathing – but only if they reflect a little – so the ancient human being felt part of the whole of the universe that they could see. He thought that everything outside of him in the universe was an effect in the human being, which is why he called it the microcosm. And he thought that everything that manifested itself in this microcosm had a corresponding counterpart somewhere in the great universe, the macrocosm.

The sentence “The microcosm corresponds to the macrocosm” is often spoken today. But as it is spoken today, it is a mere phrase. It is only a phrase if it is not based on the living inner feeling that underlay the more sensitive perception of the ancient human being and that today's human being no longer has. A wonderful picture emerges of the connection between the individual and the universe, whether it is seen as superstition or as ancient wisdom, as ancient science. A wonderful picture emerges when we consider what lies in this ancient wisdom, or in this ancient “superstition” if you will, as the real secrets of man. Now, historically, the matter is as follows. Even in the eighteenth century, and to some extent into the nineteenth, there was, though below the surface of academic science, a continuing tradition of this ancient wisdom, or, for that matter, ancient superstition, in what is called education. There could not have been such spirits as Paracelsus, as Jakob Böhme, not even as Taler or Eckardt or Valentin Weigel, if there had not been this continuous old tradition. These masters would have been quite impossible. But the strange thing is that human receptivity becomes dulled for these old things, the further the nineteenth century progresses. As I said, in the beginning of the nineteenth century much had still been preserved. Then human receptivity, human capacity for these things dulled. And the consciousness of the earlier man: I stand as a man not alone on my two legs or on the soles of my feet, but I stand as a member of the whole universe – this consciousness was no longer present for newer humanity from the depths from which it had blossomed in ancient times. Hence the necessity in world history that today's human being, out of his or her own perception, regards what has been handed down to him from earlier times as an old superstition, as a childlike view of human development. This is what is so misunderstood today: that the human being also lives in a real development with regard to his cognitive faculty. It is remarkable how in this field people do not notice the contradictions in which they live. On the one hand, everyone today speaks of development on the basis of Darwinism, but little is said about the development of the human being itself. That our way of looking at the world did not come into being with the emergence of humanity, but is a product of development, is something that is theoretically admitted; but as soon as it comes to practically living with such a truth, one does not want to stand on the ground of this truth today.

But now the question arises: What is actually real in this old world view in the face of our present way of knowing, what is actually real in these things? The actual reality of these things is that we simply had to make progress in the realm of the dead universe, the mechanical-physical-chemical universe. The progress we have made in the last three to four centuries, and increasingly in the nineteenth century, would not have been possible if the old way of looking at things had continued to be propagated. Those things are properly understood by those who see through them, I might say, at their nodal points.

The mid-nineteenth century is such a turning point in human development. At the end of the 1850s, a whole series of human advances coincided, which, in their peculiar relationship to one another, show us what was actually important and essential and not yet recognized in this mid-nineteenth century within human development. Certain things escape the human observer in this field because they are not considered general education. The fact that a book on “Psycho-Physics” was published by Gustav Theodor Fechner in 1858 usually escapes the observer in this field because it is not considered general education. But anyone who delves into the human development in a subtle way will see that this psychophysics expresses a fundamental trait of the whole modern way of looking at the world. Psycho-physics: seeing the psychic only through the external physical manifestations, that is contained in this book as a special trait in a spirited way; because Gustav Theodor Fechner was a very spirited man.

A second event that coincides with this year is the discovery of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen, which is intended to prove the unity of the universe in a substantial way by looking out into the universe through spectral analysis, that is, if one only looks outward through a human mode of knowledge that is diametrically opposed, or rather, polarically opposed to the view that I characterized to you earlier as feeling oneself to be standing within the whole universe. Spectral analysis sees the material unity; the old world view was merely based on the spiritual unity with the entire cosmos. Here you have two important advances of recent times, which clearly point to what shows the turnaround in the newer view of knowledge. And not without inner connection, held together by the inner nature of man, other phenomena then arise with such appearances. Just take the following. I do not know how many people have made a clear observation on this point; but anyone who has made an effort, who does not speak offhand about these things, but wants to speak from experience, could make the following observation: In 1859, the time when spectral analysis came about and when Fechner's “Psycho-Physics” was published, one could observe that it was the secular year of Schiller's birth, what was said about Schiller at the unveiling of the various Schiller monuments and what was said at the Schiller festivals in 1859. Now, anyone observing these things can really notice how, especially in the secular year, the old veneration of Schiller in the speeches that are held turns into empty phrases, how it no longer exists in its original elementary liveliness, how Schiller's idealism fades and what is still said about Schiller becomes a phrase.

And again, at the same time, the first, so to speak, standard work appears, the first work setting the tone for materialist historical research, Karl Marx's book on political economy. This coincides with many other phenomena. The threads that run through the development of modern humanity become entangled. And once one has occupied oneself with the old view of humanity, as it still existed at the end of the eighteenth century, for example, even the standard-bearers of the French Revolution were concerned with it, and followed the progress of this old view of humanity into the nineteenth century, one sees a dying away, one sees how these sparks fade away. Our friend Sellin recently published a German translation of the works of Lomz and Claude de Saint-Martin, entitled God, Man, and the World. I believe that as many people as possible should read the book and that as many people as possible should be honest enough to admit that they don't really understand a single sentence in its true basis as it appears in this book. Those who have some knowledge of spiritual science, which in turn draws on spiritual principles in a modern way, will have some idea of what is really present in Saint-Martin. But with the education of humanity today, one should be honest about it, one must regard what is in Saint-Martin as pure nonsense. That one is not honest in such matters, that one believes one understands things that are old, is precisely the dishonesty in today's human thinking.

And what has this stage of development of humanity brought about? Precisely the necessity to delve into the mechanical-physical-chemical world order. It is hardly possible to imagine anything more impossible than to come to today's physics or mechanics or chemistry from the point of view of the world view cultivated by Jakob Böhme, or by Paracelsus or Saint-Martin. That is impossible. It is impossible to lump everything together. Humanity had to discard for a time the completely different way of thinking that it had in order to make progress in the physical, chemical and mechanical fields, which is urgently needed for the development of humanity.

But these advances lie in the knowledge of the inanimate, the dead. And it must be emphasized again and again that the scientific world view has grown precisely because it has developed the exact, the powerful, the admirable method for the knowledge of the dead. But what did this mean that had to be temporarily lost for man? Today, this knowledge of the dead lives not only in the conception of nature. In every newspaper article, in general education, it permeates the thought form of people, so that they understand everything according to the pattern of natural science and can no longer do otherwise than to look at everything that is in the world for them according to the pattern of natural science, as if natural science could give the only reality and as if everything that is to be put into reality should also be permeated with a natural scientific way of thinking. But now this natural scientific way of thinking, which is so great in the field of natural science itself, has a certain effect when it is expressed in other human lives. It makes, not in the first generation, perhaps not even in the second, not the researcher himself, but only in the student and in those who then transform the scientific knowledge into world views, it makes anti-social, it justifies anti-social impulses. We must not ignore the fact that it is the consequence of permeating our entire soul with scientific views that we develop anti-social drives, in some dishonest, illusionary way, because that which allows us to penetrate the secrets of nature best removes us from the perception of our neighbor, the human being. And no matter how often we say, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself', if we allow only scientific views to permeate our entire human soul, then antisocial instincts arise in us, which make this sentence, or all sentences of brotherhood, a mere phrase. And so it happens that the call for social order arises at a time when, from another side, the most anti-social instincts are emerging. This is the most significant thing in our time, and the honest person today must look at it urgently. In this examination, one must not be distracted by anything, by clinging to old views, by inflammatory behavior from this or that side. Here, at this point, one must see honestly and straightforwardly. And that is the real inner reason why it is impossible to make progress in the present time without a spiritual renewal, without a recognition of the spiritual world from within the innermost human being. In the course of human evolution, the abilities have been lost that, through observation of the external world, make man appear to himself as a member of the universe. We must rebuild a spiritual world from within. The anthroposophical world view sets itself the task of creating the basis for a truly social shaping of the newer human order. Certainly, it would be very out of place today to speak of cultivating only the inner being; that would be a kind of refined inner egoism. Today one must speak of how the outer institutions must be rebuilt. But we must always bear in mind that we would not make progress in the best-organized institutions if people did not acquire the ability to rebuild a spiritual world from within.

I have tried to make a start at rebuilding a spiritual world from within and presenting it in a popular way in my books “The Riddle of Man” and “The Riddle of Souls”. In the book 'Riddles of the Soul', I pointed out for the first time that if a person really looks at himself inwardly, he is not the chaotic unity that those who today only want to recognize human nature in the corpse, that is, in the dead, speak of. What the human being really is – a head organism, a rhythmic or thoracic organism and a limb organism. The more exact connections can be found in the appendix to my book Von Seelenrätseln (The Riddle of the Soul). the tripartite structure of the human frame, which has been established with all the progress of modern science, must become one of the starting-points for a true conception of man in the future. We must come to realize the great difference that lies within us when we consider ourselves as head, chest and limb people, with everything that is connected with the limbs, namely as sexual organs, which are always only inward extensions of the limb organs, and also as the actual metabolic organs.

When we see the human being as a threefold creature, we understand its higher unity for the first time, whereas today's conventional natural science throws everything into confusion in the human being. For once we have laid the foundation for this view of the threefold nature of the human being, we understand the human being in turn as standing in the universe, but now not as a spatial being, but as a temporal being. And that is what makes the great difference between our way of knowing and the present one. Here Goetheanism has created the elementary basis, here one must continue to research along the path of Goetheanism, and then one comes to a real knowledge of the human being. Then one looks at the human being as he presents himself to us as a being with a head, so that one is able to look insightfully at this form, at this shaping of the head. Then one can see that the formation of the human head is completely connected with embryology and one sees that the embryology of the human being starts from the formation of the head, and the other formations, the other organ formations, are actually added more or less secondarily, in form. But then one also finds that the human head is connected in a completely different way to what a person, when they say “I”, as the chest human being, who is essentially a rhythmic human being. In the head is the most perfect human organization, one might say, from the very beginning of the formation of the human embryo. The head is rounded like the universe itself, and what is not rounding in the head is only different from rounding because it is supposed to be connected with the rest of the organism. The head has a certain independence, except that certain qualities of the head then extend to the other limbs of the human organism, because the whole is a unity, and because what I say about the formation of the head is only developed to an extreme degree in the head, but is metamorphosically repeated in the other limbs of the human being; to speak in Goethean terms: If the head represents, so to speak, in the highest morphological perfection what wants to be realized in man out of inner foundations, then the human being with limbs represents what, I would say, is only rudimentarily humanly formed in man, what gives the human form the least perfection. And the thoracic man is in the thick of it. The thoracic man actually lives through the rhythmic movements, because basically everything in the human being is rhythmically moved. And I have, I would like to say, indicated a most striking rhythm in the development of mankind in earlier lectures. Today's humanity considers such things to be coincidental. But if it considers these things to be coincidental, then that will lead humanity even further into ruinous thinking. I have told you: if you take the number of breaths in one minute, the remarkable thing is that you get a certain rhythm in the number of breaths for one day, for twenty-four hours, and that in twenty-four hours you take as many breaths as you experience 'days in the normal course of a human life if you live to be about seventy-two years old. And that this is the same number as the number of a so-called Platonic solar year, the number of those years in which the sun apparently passes through the entire zodiac.

This is only a small part of the rhythmic process in which the human being lives through his breathing-chest process in the whole universe. The human being is this threefold being. And now, as we contemplate this threefold nature of man, we are standing at the starting point of a realization that I need only hint at today, because basically we have spoken about the details so often; today we have looked at them in relation to their morphological unity. We are at the starting point of a scientific realization that is clearly presented to people: The formation of the head is a consequence of what the human being has gone through before coming into physical existence through birth or conception. The forces that the human being has gone through in the spiritual life before coming into physical existence through conception live in the formation of the head. In all that lives in the formation of the chest, lives that which the human being can experience and develop here between birth and death. And in the formation of the limbs lives the metamorphosed disposition to what man is post mortem, after death, in the spiritual life. That which was actually driven out of the consciousness of European humanity by the Ecumenical Council of 869, the pre-existence of the human soul, which also provides a real insight into the post-existence, will be scientifically proven when people have only first familiarized themselves with the corresponding habits of thought. Then it will be only a step to the realization of repeated earth-lives, of which we have often enough spoken. But all this knowledge must be built up from within. What the old man built out of the contemplation of the universe and its connection with it, because he still had a higher sensitivity, the modern man must build up from within through a strong inner power, which he can acquire in the way I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. And these powers, which the individual can only acquire through knowledge, will be developed socially if we pursue such a science of man that allows us to recognize the soul and spirit in the physical. But not in such a way that we prattle about it in mere phrases. For everything that today's philosophy talks about the soul and spirit is a prattle in mere phrases. One only speaks of realities when one can say: Look at your head, it is the reflection, the mirror image of a prenatal spiritual development. — There you have a real fact, only then does one have the right to speak of these things in terms of the modern world view. Only when one can say: “Your limbs show the transformed pre-formation for the brain formation of the next life on earth” – only then is one standing on solid ground. Then one can speak about these things in concrete terms. And this way of thinking, which, because everything is connected in the human soul, will in turn instill social instincts into humanity. And from this, social feeling will arise. For between the old world view, which relates to space, and the new world view, which relates to time, stands the impulse that has entered humanity as the impulse of Christianity, which means, as it were: away from the outer, mere spatial view – it steers towards the innermost nature of man. But we must not stop at merely directing attention to the confused and chaotic feeling; we must let a concrete world-view shine forth out of this feeling, but a world-view that now places the human being in time within the universe.

We stand in the present between these two things. We have lost the old spatial view, and out of social and human suffering must be born the newer temporal view of the development of man. And Europe has so far devoted itself entirely to the declining spatial view. This Europe must learn to absorb the view of the times. This is the fork in the road that European civilization has taken so far, and at this fork in the road we must decide whether we want to rush headlong into destruction or whether we want to awaken European civilization to a new life. Many speak of destruction; only a few dare to speak of a new life. But individual voices sound strangely out of what is known as European civilization.

The most decadent part of this European civilization is, as I have often explained in detail, in the Romance culture. The Treaty of Versailles is only the last convulsion of the declining Romance culture, which is unconsciously felt, which behaves like a reality in the world for the last time, while inwardly it has long been doomed. But this downfall gives rise to strange intellectual blossoms. And I would like to say that anyone who sees through human development inwardly breathes a sigh of relief when confronted with something like a recent book on art by Benedetto Croce. Benedetto Croce gave four lectures on art in Texas, not in Europe. The first is called “What is Art?” and in this lecture there is a sentence that is nothing more than the essence of a comprehensive Romanesque view of art, that is, an artistic view that emerges from decadent Romanism like the dawning of a new era, like a new plant rises from the rotting plant seed.

“But in the history of thought this attempt has often been made consciously and methodically” - he is referring to the attempt to understand art through today's thinking, and he regards this attempt as a futile one - “starting with the ‘canons’ that Greek and Renaissance artists and theorists for the beauty of bodies, from the speculations about the geometric and arithmetic relationships that are said to be found in figures and sounds, to the investigations of nineteenth-century aesthetes, for example Fechner's, and to the “communications” that the ignorant are in the habit of presenting at the congresses of philosophers, psychologists and naturalists of our day on the relationships of physical phenomena to art.

When I spoke in Munich of the living comprehension of art, of an understanding of art that disregards this understanding of art through dead scientific knowledge, at first, of course, everyone objected. But Croce continues: “If one asks why art cannot be a physical fact, the first answer is” – please listen now! “physical facts have no reality, while art, to which so many devote their whole lives and which fills everyone with divine joy, is supremely real. Therefore it cannot be a physical, that is, unreal fact."

Now I ask you to look in spirit at the perplexed face of European philistinism, that perplexed face, from which one must say: Yes, but everything that is out there in space is real, art is unreal. And here a person, with the finest artistic sensibilities, cries out to you: Art cannot be a physical fact because physical facts are unreal and art must lead precisely to reality.

This is something that must be reversed in a certain respect. And beyond art lies that which is attained on a path whose first elementary steps I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. There is the living contemplation of the true world, of true reality. But it is a great thing to see how a man like Croce already senses that art is more real than what the honest philistine recognizes as the only reality. Because at bottom, when he sees a man killed in a drama, this philistine would like to say: Well, thank God it is not real. Such things show the strong clash between the old and the necessary new, and it will certainly be art, on whose ground the most powerful struggles in the present must take place. For the view that has taken its model only from the dead, the view that has led to such great triumphs in natural science, also sails in social life towards a mere shaping of a dead man, one that must perish. Marxism is built according to the pattern of natural science. He wants to understand the social order as one understands the external natural order. What has he achieved? A beautiful, magnificent, ingenious critique of the modern economic order. But he is faced with the impossibility of putting something in the place of this modern economic order that he has criticized. And anyone who can delve into the question: What kind of structure could be achieved through Marxism, through the living out of Marxism? he will say: Nothing, only destruction, realized criticism, that is, destruction is the only thing that could be achieved. Isn't it strange that where the extreme consequence of Marxism has been drawn for the external life, in Eastern Europe and Russia, a strange criticism emerges, a criticism that could really draw the last consequences of Marxism, that life in the way it had to as a consequence of Marxism, and if it then only comes across such things in a strange way through experience, as stated in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life'. For in the “Key Points” you can find that what actually lives on in individual ideas in Marxism is nothing other than the legacy of the bourgeois world view.

Everywhere people are dealing with a dead world view when they want to build something out of Marxism. And isn't it strange when a critic of what is happening in Russia says the strange sentences: “We relied on the help of bourgeois specialists who were thoroughly imbued with bourgeois psychology and who betrayed us and will continue to betray us for years to come. Nevertheless, it would be childish to pose the question in the sense of whether we could build communism only with purely communist hands and without the help of bourgeois specialists.” And further: ‘Without the heritage of capitalist culture, we cannot build socialism. Communism cannot be built on anything other than what capitalism has left us.’

That means: we carry over the bourgeois philistines simply because we have no real content for communism. Now, a strange confession: communism can only be built on the legacy of what capitalism has left behind. And further: “Practically we have to create a communist society with the hands of our enemies,” that is, with bourgeois hands. That is, we have to establish an inverted class society; that is, not to abolish a class state, but to turn into helots those who were formerly at the top. “Practically we have to create a communist society with the hands of our enemies. This seems to be a contradiction, perhaps even an insoluble contradiction. » Please listen to the sentence as it is! «In reality, however, only in this way can the task of building communism be solved.

So it seems to be an insoluble contradiction, but in reality only with the help of this insoluble contradiction can the building of communism be solved.

And further: “This presented enormous difficulties, but only in this way could they be solved. The organizational, creative, joint work must drive the bourgeois specialists into a corner so that they are forced to march in the ranks of the proletariat, however much they resist it and however much they may fight against it step by step. We must educate them to a high level as technical and cultural forces in order to keep them for ourselves and to turn the uncultivated and wild capitalist country into a communist cultural country.

Now, this is a dry statement of what must be done if a new idea, a new spirit, is not to be born: the only way forward is to continue to work with the legacy of capitalist culture. But since the mode of thinking extends only to the dead, this can only lead to the annihilation of European civilization. And this annihilation, which is coming from the East, will surely come and spread to the West if a new way of thinking does not take hold in European humanity, if people are not able to look at reality quite differently than it has been looked at for the last three to four centuries, and, at its culmination, in today's world.

Now let us ask ourselves: What about the one whose inheritance is to be taken up? What about that? We have just heard a voice about how the East is to be built on the heritage of the Old; for until now it has been built entirely on the heritage of the Old. There is still no new thing for the outside world, which must first come out of a renewal of the spirit. But what has the old brought about in terms of spirituality? This can be seen from the symptoms. I recently spoke in Heilbronn. I do not care what the line-shagger says about my lecture, that is not the point, but this line-shagger finds it appropriate to express the current world view in a short, concise sentence. He says: “The banality of his whole presentation, which is strongly reminiscent of American propaganda, was most clearly demonstrated by the way he incorporated the old slogans of the French Revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity – into his tripartite structure.”

So, in today's civilization, there is the possibility that it will be spoken out of: liberty, equality, fraternity are hits, are old hits. Let this sink into your souls, let it sink into your hearts. As Hamlet said, “Writing tablet, writing tablet! That a man can always smile and smile and still be a scoundrel!” Write this down in your soul: in today's culture, there is the possibility to call freedom, equality, fraternity “old hits”! And then one wonders where the impulses for the downfall of this culture lie? Don't be too comfortable, my dear friends, don't be casual! Tell people that this is possible, that the noblest goods of humanity are being dragged through the mud these days by what calls itself “European education”. Then you will perhaps be able to convey this spiritual after all, if you can only make it clear to people what they are oversleeping in their souls. For today people read right over these things, they take them for granted. But these things must be looked at. And until it is seen how strong the impulses of decline are, how trivial that is which has finally sailed into this world war catastrophe, there will be no salvation. And if there is to be salvation, it will only be possible if it emerges from humanity's renewed immersion in its spiritual depths. We cannot see the goal in a mere rehashing of old spirituality today. We must today inwardly muster the strength to create a new spirituality. The destiny of Europe depends on this: either this new spirituality, or Europe will become a tomb with regard to its culture! There is no third way, and for one or the other humanity must decide. Either into ruin, or courageously into the new spirituality!