Language Crisis and Spiritual Thinking in Social Life

GA 192 — 13 July 1919, Stuttgart

Thirteenth Lecture

Eight days ago today, I gave you a kind of reflection here that ended with similar words to those of the last public lecture at the Siegle House on Friday. I pointed out how present-day humanity is faced with two possibilities, one of which must inevitably lead to the decline of Europe's current civilization, while the other is the only way to escape from decay. I would now like to show you how such statements are by no means mere assertions; they are not so simply because they can be derived from real spiritual insight and the resulting knowledge of the conditions of the present development of humanity. But even for those who do not want to engage in this spiritual vision, there are many, many possibilities to see the vision confirmed by the external facts of contemporary life. A few individual facts from the abundance that could be cited are to be cited today.

A little booklet has been published in Münster in Westphalia with the title “Christianity and Socialism” by Johann Plenge, who has already published a number of works from his point of view to help us understand the currents of our time. This booklet contains a lecture by Plenge that he gave based on the impressions he had received from two other lectures. Max Scheler, a philosopher of our time who is actually quite well known, had given a two-part lecture in Münster on April 8 and 9 of this year on the question: What is Christian socialism? And Johann Plenge responded immediately, on April 11, in the final lecture of his social science proseminar at the Academy of Münster, with his own response to Scheler's lectures on “Christianity and Socialism” from his point of view. It is interesting to note what Plenge recounts about the brief prehistory that took place between these two lectures. Scheler, who undoubtedly belongs to the most astute thinkers of the present, had given his double lecture on Christianity and socialism on April 8 and 9, and already on the second day Plenge delivered his reply. Plenge reported that in the meantime he and Scheler had met in person and agreed on various questions, as Plenge said. However, if one really follows what Plenge then said in response to Scheler's remarks, one does not get the impression that these two gentlemen, who are in a sense representatives of contemporary thought, have come to an understanding. but one has the distinct feeling that these two gentlemen, in their backgrounds, have talked past each other, and have talked past each other in such a way that this missing the point is almost characteristic of certain mental and social phenomena in the present day. It is characteristic because today, what I have often characterized here is taking place on the broadest scale: that people today have such strong anti-social drives that even if they have the best will to communicate with each other, they actually always talk past each other. Talking past and thinking past each other is so strong in the present day that one can have conversations of the following kind.

Someone comes to you and you develop certain views, let us say, about pedagogy or something similar, which arise from anthroposophically oriented spiritual scientific demands. These views are such that they actually differ from the views that are currently prevalent, and which are also regarded as extremely good. The person in question often listens and then says in conclusion: “Yes, I completely agree. I have been thinking the same thing for a long time, I see that as the right thing.” But he said exactly the opposite of what had been said, simply because we have now reached a stage in the development of humanity where the same sentences and phrases can be said and mean the opposite of what they mean when spoken by someone else. We have, to a certain extent, distanced ourselves from the inner content of language – this is a characteristic social phenomenon of the present day – we have distanced ourselves from the content of language to such an extent that we can express one thing and also its opposite with the same words and sentence structures. In the face of such a modern phenomenon, it cannot be a matter of averting our gaze from it because it is convenient, but it can only be a matter of looking straight at it and asking ourselves: what actually emerges from such an occurrence? I would now like to give this characteristic example of Scheler-Plenge because, on the one hand, we have here a man who strives for a system of thought that is to give socialism a present-day form, socialism as he imagines it; as he thinks it out of a Catholicism tinged with Christianity, which in his case, in Scheler's, arises out of a truly inner enthusiasm, which arises out of the truly inner, emotional direction of a Catholicism that is Catholicizing and goes as far as the will. From this Catholicizing Christianity, he fights against present-day capitalism, namely the capitalist spirit, and he promises himself only from the spread of his Catholic-Christian way of feeling the possibility that present humanity will be imbued from within, from the heart, with a social attitude, and that then a social order of life will also emanate from this social attitude. Scheler, then, stands on ground on which only that which man develops out of a certain inner knowledge, a sentient knowledge, can flourish. From this point of view, he champions his Christian socialism for the present.

Johann Plenge takes a completely different approach. He does not start from what, so to speak, arises from within as a social insight, but Plenge wants to start from what is present in social life. He wants to start from the phenomena that manifest themselves in social existence. He wants to observe how one person relates to another, how groups of people come together socially, and so on. In contrast to Max Scheler's kind of will science, he therefore advocates a certain social science. And he tries to characterize, from the point of view of this social science, those institutions that he thinks will bring about a certain social order in our human life. Now, as I have already mentioned, these two gentlemen were talking at cross purposes, and Plenge even had the belief — Scheler probably did not have it, I do not know — that they understood each other to a certain extent. They did not understand each other at all. And that is simply because today, in the broadest circles, the element is missing through which people can truly communicate with each other inwardly. And this element is none other than that which is asserted here as the understanding of the spiritual world itself, which can have a harmonizing effect on the various directions of thought and feeling in today's world, and on the directions of will, and from which today minds like Scheler and Plenge still want to keep absolutely away. Such an appearance as that which occurs in the dialogue between Plenge and Scheler permeates our entire present human life.

Now, we are interested in looking at this permeation in relation to Central Europe. And here I would ask you to recall how I developed it here last time, last Sunday: that within Central European spiritual culture we have Goetheanism, and that we also have what I characterized for you the other day, in a somewhat paradoxical way for today's world, as Hegelianism. Hegelianism, Hegel's world view, also has something very remarkable about it historically. As Hegel presents it, it is pure idealism, the comprehension of the world through reason, that is, through the rarest of all substances, spirit. Now the peculiar thing is that, firstly, Hegel had a large number of students, and these students were grouped from the extreme right, from reactionism to the extreme radical left, also grouped in political and religious terms. There was a lively dispute among these students. And you know that the saying was coined that Hegel himself is said to have said before his death in the presence of his students and those who wanted to or were to have them: “Only one has understood me, and he has misunderstood me.”

But now something else has come about. Among the students of this Hegel was also Karl Marx, the founder of the current socialist world view in one of its forms. Under the influence of Hegelism, Karl Marx became a complete materialist, even with regard to the historical view. Quite naturally developing out of Hegelism, Karl Marx became an anti-Hegel. Hegelism has completely, if one wants to speak in its own language, turned into its opposite.

Yes, but how does something like that come about? Something like that comes about because a way of looking at things, as Hegel developed it from his own inner being, and which is the most purified, most diluted spirituality in the form of logical human reason, can only remain healthy in historical development if it develops in a single personal individuality. Even the pupil can no longer develop a healthy spirituality, and in the third generation such a view becomes a completely unhealthy element if one swears by it dogmatically. That is why I told you last time that in relation to such things the grotesque demand arises that one should, for example, immerse oneself in Hegelianism, but only learn from it, as well as from Goetheanism, to fertilize one's own mind, to enter into this element of thinking and viewing oneself, and then one must leave the path and educate oneself further in the same way.

Those who swear by Goethe, swear by Hegel, and thereby simply adopt their dogmas, harm themselves and others. Those who truly want to be Goetheans today must not swear by Goethe dogmatically, but must develop further that which is present in Goethe in an embryonic form. And to an even greater extent this is the case with Hegelianism. In Hegelianism it becomes apparent what is actually present. This Hegelianism in the German development is a highly, highly characteristic phenomenon. For there is something present that is a characteristic of logical thinking in general. No one can actually understand what logical thinking is for the human being who does not understand something of spiritual science. For only spiritual science shows him that there is also another, a supersensible human being, not only the human being who appears to us as the sensual body. These two things, the supersensible and the sensual human being, blur into a single wild chaos for the contemplation of humanity, because what contemporary anatomy and physiology reveal about the human being is a wild chaos. But if one learns to properly distinguish the supersensible human being, of whom I also spoke twice in the recent public lecture, from the sensual human being, then one becomes acquainted with the strange paradoxical fact — spiritual facts are mostly paradoxical for sensual perception — that logical thinking would not exist at all for the development of humanity if people were not born into the physical body and developed there. For logic, especially when developed to its highest level, the sensory body is the appropriate instrument. Therefore, anyone who develops supersensible knowledge, who really immerses themselves in supersensible knowledge, must experience that it is extremely difficult to put this supersensible knowledge into words at all, but that if they want to grasp this supersensible knowledge with ordinary logic, that is, with what is only bound to the instrument of the external physical body, then this supersensible knowledge is killed for them. Then it is over with this supersensible knowledge. On the ground of logic, supersensible knowledge dies. For our human life, it must be brought to a mirror image, as it was with Hegel. But then one must not live in this mirror image, otherwise one is immediately out of the spirit. Therefore it is not the case that Hegel brought German thinking to the highest spiritual development, but that in this spiritual that Hegel offers, the most spiritless is contained, that there is no longer any spirit at all in Hegelism. That is to say: in Hegel the physical body grasps spirituality and at the same time squeezes it out. The highest logic, this Hegel; the most spiritless philosophy, this thought produced by the highest effort of the spirit! No wonder that it breaks down into the materialism of which we are aware, into Marxism, and that it becomes in this way a real phase of development in the nineteenth century.

You see, that is how serious things are at present. And one does not understand what actually lives as substance in our present time if one cannot get involved in such things. The present human race is such that it wants so much to believe in something, that it is so tremendously glad when it can put something forward, or can hear something, upon which it can swear as upon the master word. And when he swears by it, then the greatest harm is done, because the most important demand of the present time is this, that man must develop his free spirituality. And in the moment when he sins against the freedom of his judgment, he makes himself sick at the same time. In the present time man cannot help it, it is an historical fact, he cannot help it if he wants to reach human heights, but he must free himself inwardly. It is more than a vision when one says the following: Imagine the content of Hegel's philosophy as a kind of spiritual scheme, as a kind of etheric body entering the world, working in its purely logical substantiality. If we imagine this ghost of the spirit sweeping across the world, then we have the model for what has occurred physically in the last four to five years as the European world catastrophe. What was most potent in the soul as Hegelianism takes physical form as the horror of the world war catastrophe of the last four to five years. One must have the courage to look into these spiritual connections, otherwise one will not understand anything about the events of the present. People today would like to make it so easy to come to spirituality. But they are prevented from doing so by the demands of the time itself. If we gather together scientific experiences today and develop them to the highest level of logic, we thoroughly expel the spirit from the human being. Plenge does this, of course only to a certain extent. He develops a purely Ahrimanic thinking, as we call it in our spiritual science, and he presents it to the world.

The opposite is the case when people want to develop something from within, as Schopenbaner, Hegel's strange philosophical twin, did in contrast to Hegel. When people want to develop something from within, from the will-like element, the opposite occurs. Then it happens that they repeatedly, not for themselves but for their students, for those who adhere to them dogmatically, want to push people into mere belief in revelation, where one says: Imagination can no longer achieve anything, one must come to the truth from a completely different starting point. This leads to a certain element of faith that is not human, but at most Königsberg-Kantian, and which appeared to a particular degree in Schopenhauer. But the original spirit never has the tendency to fall into the damage, but only those who follow, namely the third generation. That is a law of the world. And Schopenhauerianism is akin to the belief in revelation, which is becoming so popular in our time. The mere acceptance of a revelation, as it is particularly developed in the Catholic Church of the Counterpart, insofar as it is orthodoxly Catholic, and as it has reached its culmination in the declaration of the dogma of infallibility: that is the opposite element. Spirituality that arises from within is drowned in this element. Just as logic drowns the inner being, so mere belief in revelation drowns that which arises from within and seeks to embrace the external world. We see this today as a particularly characteristic phenomenon. And we live in these currents. These currents unconsciously permeate everything that is demanded from the left and right today. What do people know when they praise or denounce this or that outlook on life? What do they know about the forces that lie within these outlooks on life? They know nothing about it. The people on the extreme right have no idea of the content of their intuitive impulses, which make them so conservative and reactionary. The radicals, even the most radical Bolsheviks, have no idea of the content of their instincts, and how they kill with their logic what they want to bring to expression in the outer life. Unconscious life is very strong in humanity today, and it is out of this unconscious life that those things develop which are actually the effective ones and which are to become active in consciousness by means of a spiritual sifting of one's knowledge with what can be taken from the supersensible. What is effective in the present can no longer be sifted in any other way.

Now there are three currents in the present, in the immediate present, but these too are only like the surging waves of what is seething in the depths, and what I could only characterize to you in a few strokes, starting from Max Sche and Johann Plenge and showed you what logical thinking, which was taken to the highest level in the nineteenth century, and what the belief in revelation, which was taken to the highest level in the dogma of infallibility, what these mean for the human soul.

From the seething and swirling that goes on in the depths of the human soul, and which is very extensive, three things come to the surface, but by no means in such a way as to reveal the true inner essence for today's man.

Firstly, let there be no illusions: what is spreading over the world, consciously spreading, is Anglo-American world domination, which is stretching its wings over contemporary civilization. Consider all the individual phenomena during the war years and in today's so-called peace agreements. It is called “peace” because today, often, one's words mean what one should actually mean by the opposite words. All that has happened turns out to be a single manifestation of one of the great contemporary waves of the spread of Anglo-American rule, of the Anglo-American path to world domination. That is one thing. It shows itself in its spread, which will be clever and cunning, through its group soul, in order to counter many things that oppose it.

The second element appears in a completely abstract form, so that it is impossible to show in this abstract form that something reasonable can come out of the ideas and will impulses in which this thing appears today. That is the striving for a so-called League of Nations. This striving for a so-called League of Nations, as it arises particularly in the mind of Woodrow Wilson, is, as it stands today before mankind, still a complete impossibility, because it is one of the worst abstractions, because, as it is conceived, it has no basis in real human life. But the fact that it is there, that it is being discussed, shows that people are nevertheless longing for something international out of this human life, something that they are only talking past – as they talk past everything these days – by developing the theory of a League of Nations.

The third element is the social striving in the present. These are the socialist impulses, these social impulses, which one can say arise from justified, subconscious grounds of a large part of present-day civilized humanity, but that they assert themselves as completely chaotic instincts. For what is spreading today through socialist striving across Europe to the Far East is the saying: I want this, I want that; I set this or that up as an ideal – but nowhere do people know what they actually want to do and what they are actually talking about. That one does not know how to bring things into a certain way of thinking, into a certain content of thought and feeling. Yes, one even hates this content of thought and feeling today. This is particularly characteristic of an article by a certain Seeger, which appears in the first issue of the Tribüne, which is published here in the neighborhood. There the threefold order is rejected in the name of the proletariat and socialism is demanded. Yes, if you were to ask the gentleman to say what he now imagines by socialism, he would of course not be able to say anything of real substance. The most absolute lack of content is shown by talking like that. But that comes from the fact that one no longer comes to any thought content at all, that one only has instinctive sensations and feelings. And in the end it is all the same whether this gentleman calls what he feels and experiences socialism or whether he would give it a different name, for example Europeanism or negativism or something similar; he would speak meaningfully in the same sense. One would always think the same thing when he utters it, that is, nothing. Many people today are not yet aware of this, unfortunately not yet aware of it.

These are the three currents that are emerging from the confused chaos of the soul in the present day: Anglo-American world domination, the longing for such internationality as is expressed in the pursuit of a League of Nations, and socialism. But with the thinking that is widely used today, one will never get behind what is actually behind these currents. For this, a completely, completely different thinking will be necessary, the kind of thinking that does not have the ordinary body logic, but whose logic is born at the same time, as this thinking gushes forth from supersensible knowledge, according to methods that, contrary to current scientific methods, but nevertheless in their sense, must be found in spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical terms.

Now, what I am saying emerges in characteristic phenomena. You know that our own observations, when they become historical, follow a very specific method, which I have often called the method of symptomization here before you. The aim is to recognize what lives in history through symptoms. Not in the way that history is usually viewed in the present, in which we simply consider what follows as causally arising from what came before, in a mechanistic way, but by viewing the development of history as a continuous stream from which phenomena emerge at every point from spiritual depths. In this way, what arises and manifests itself in external phenomena cannot be understood in causal terms, but as a revelation of profound inner processes. And much of what is happening in the present must be recognized in this way in the visible phenomena as a symptom of what is going on deep within.

In these days you may be confronted with a significant symptom. You have all no doubt reflected from some point of view on the subject of the Versailles Peace Treaty, which has wreaked such havoc on our Central European life. As you know, this document has naturally given rise to the most diverse thoughts in people's minds. But one thought, which you can already find in the newspapers, has been given less consideration, and for those who want to dig deeper, it is a thought that points to something extraordinarily characteristic. This is that this Versailles peace instrument, which is to have a profound impact on modern civilization, is not at all comprehensible. If you approach it honestly and try to understand what is actually intended by the individual points, you cannot arrive at a realistic understanding. One cannot understand the thing, one cannot fathom what is actually intended by this peace instrument. Especially when one tries to find out exactly what is meant from the most diverse formulations, it is impossible. It is therefore no wonder that a Frenchman, Professor Aulard, in the “Pays” expresses himself about this peace instrument in the following way. “It is actually my duty as a historian, journalist and citizen to read the peace treaty and form an opinion about it. But so far I have not succeeded, and I must confess that I was not able to read the entire peace treaty to the end."

And that is an honest man. The others read the treaty and believe they understand it. But Aulard feels obliged as a journalist and citizen to understand the treaty; he reads every sentence over and over again and has not yet come to the end because he honestly admits to himself that he cannot understand the thing.

Then he continues: “In my profession, I have studied many cumbersome, obscure diplomatic documents; but the Treaty of Versailles is a mind-boggling task, the like of which I have never encountered. You would think it was not conceived in French; there is no trace of French clarity and order in thought, so that one believes one is dealing with a translation. I will not speak of Anglo-Saxon verbiage. But the treaty is a mass of verbiage and a jumble of articles. I found the explanation of this fact in the last article of the peace treaty. French is no longer the diplomatic language of the world. We have lost that prerogative. It has been taken from us. All the great treaties of modern history have been written in French."

Now it must be said that the French language did not become the language of diplomacy, that is, the language in which it is possible to set down what has been agreed upon at the diplomatic level, for no reason. It has become so because it is the language of a declining modern cultural element and has great concision. This treaty is in English, conceived in English words and sentences, and it makes that impression on those who are accustomed to thinking with old clarity, and it must make that impression. It is true to say that the English language does not have the precision to express what is to be expressed there. But that is the characteristic of the English language, that is, the language spoken by the peoples who are now taking over world domination. The language of the peoples who are now taking over world domination has the peculiarity that one cannot express everything that is to be spiritually surveyed in it directly in the way it arises when one takes language only as it exists today. This English language does not have the possibility of expressing itself in such a way that what is expressed is completely congruent with the spirit. One must be able to contemplate such a thing without becoming emotional about it, without turning it into a kind of English hatred. One must be able to contemplate such a thing as a scientific fact; that is just the way it is. With some study “sine ira” one must contemplate what turns out to be the characteristic of the future world language. But this characteristic of the future world language is something that is extraordinarily beneficial for humanity. There can be nothing better for modern humanity than that within the element of the people that takes over world domination, a language develops that cannot be equated with the spirit.

Consider this fact in connection with another, which I have mentioned in various places, but also here before. I have often said: Among those writers of the past epoch - in the present I could no longer imagine it -, among the writers of the nineteenth century living out, those whom I love most of all for their style, for the way they shape thoughts, is Herman Grimm. Herman Grimm shapes that which has emerged as his view into such thoughts that I have always been extremely fond of dwelling on these thoughts. Nevertheless, when I once spoke with Herman Grimm and wanted to counter only very little of my view of life with his, he simply replied: “Let's leave that, dear doctor, we can't understand each other on that!” It was impossible to say anything to Herman Grimm about the way I viewed the things of the world. He simply could not do otherwise than to brush it away with a wave of his hand. But if you want to know how these things were thought about in the nineteenth century from a certain Central European social background, then you have to go to Herman Grimm, who came from Bern on his mother's side, so he had not only southern German but also Swiss blood in him, who had the uncle Jakob Grimm, the father Wilhelm Grimm, and who had as his wife the daughter of Bettina Brentano, Gisela von Arnim, who was thus completely immersed in a certain social outlook of the nineteenth century. Today, when I read Herman Grimm, it seems to me as if I were reading from a distant past, centuries ago. What appears in Herman Grimm are documents of the nineteenth century. And it has been very interesting for me – as I have often said – that when I looked at history and read Woodrow Wilson's literary reflections, I sometimes found echoes of Herman Grimm that sounded literally familiar to me in Woodrow Wilson. Nevertheless, they are not copied, because Woodrow Wilson might not even understand something if he read Herman Grimm. But if you have an eye for such things, you notice something very peculiar about Wilson. He notices that Wilson speaks as if something were actually being recorded phonographically, as if his consciousness were not fully present during his speech, and as if a demon ruling in the subconscious were gushing forth everything, with the exclusion of the actual personality of Woodrow Wilson, which then mechanically clothes itself in the words and sentences. When you read Woodrow Wilson, you feel as if you are talking to Ahriman himself, who reigns in the depths of Woodrow Wilson's soul. — Herman Grimm is there, with every single sentence, the whole personality is always there; Woodrow Wilson is completely gone, a demon speaks through a human mouth in the depths of the human soul. Those who do not know this do not understand the most important and essential connections for the current world view.

But what is expressed in all this? In all this, the most important thing is expressed. In the Anglo-American language, the connection between the human soul and the language element no longer exists as it did in older times. Language has become separated from the human being; as language, it becomes abstract. When one hears English spoken, certain turns of phrase, especially at the ends of sentences, always seem to one as if one were looking at a tree that has withered in the outermost treetops and at the tips of the branches. Language causes the inner permeation with the soul to die. This evokes the opposite element, the opposite pole of the soul life: the necessity to communicate beyond language.

You see, that is the tremendously important thing. In the future, people will not be able to communicate with each other in English if they do not at the same time develop a direct, elementary, feeling understanding from person to person that is not rooted in language, and that gives life to language. But this means nothing less than that the supersensible human being, the first supersensible human being, must enter into the historical existence of humanity. Until now, people have only spoken out of their physical bodies. What they have achieved as language out of their physical bodies will die out with the English language. It will of course still be there, but it will become more and more an abstract jingle. And people will have to relate socially through their etheric bodies, so that as they speak they will bring about an understanding from thought to thought, a real, not a superstitious, mind reading. Mind reading is a requirement for the coming centuries. Communicating directly from thought to thought and being aware that language will only become more and more a way of drawing the attention of others to one's own thoughts. When speech is still fully soul-based, I can, under certain circumstances, when everything is buzzing in the room here, where people are having witty conversations and everything is mixed up, I can ring a bell, right, then it will become quiet. I have announced that I now want to speak, then people will understand what I am saying. This is how speaking will be in the future. It will certainly have to accompany the development of thought, but it will be a continuous ringing of the other, and the understanding from person to person will have to arise from a much deeper soul element. This is to be enforced by the evolution of humanity in that, among the ruling future peoples, among the Anglo-American peoples, language as such is being deadened, and the necessity arises to confront the demon within the individual human being with the demon in the other human being.

There, of course, the human being - forgive the harsh expression - will face the human being much more nakedly than today. In speech one can lie, but thoughts will show when they are false. But in the transition period one does not recognize their seductive, illusory character. That is also the reason why the fourteen points of Woodrow Wilson so beguiled the world. And now you will understand how to grasp something like the unclear peace treaty as a world symptom of our time. It is very significant that this unclear peace treaty should arise at a time when people are supposed to turn from language, its arrangements and grammar, which emerges only from the physical body, to the direct understanding of thoughts. To the same extent that people will understand the workings of the spirit from person to person, the different languages of the earth will no longer be an obstacle to fraternal cooperation. And only to that extent will a League of Nations become possible. And only to that extent will socialism be possible, to which extent the spiritual will be added to today's purely animalistic relationships - these animalistic relationships between people have almost reached their highest point. Socialism under today's social conditions, which are anti-social, depends on people absorbing spirituality, soulfulness, and being able to understand each other through language. Otherwise it is impossible to arrive at a genuine socialism. One can strive for it, one can talk about it, but one talks about it in mere verbiage. And verbiage is what one always hears in the marketplace of political life today. It is always the same: when you hear a politician from any party today, you hear words that you could more or less say yourself. You hear old party programs that have been known for a long time. You don't even need to listen, but a horrible specter arises from within, a black figure that is and wants to be filled; filled with that which can arise from the transformation of anti-social instincts through the development of social life, but which in the future must flow from spirit to spirit, while language, especially in the past, was in many respects that which first made human beings social beings. From language and from what was brought about through language as a connection between people, patriarchal and other social connections emerged. Now that language is dying out, an inner spirituality must take the place of what was the substance of language. That is the condition of real progress.

But people like Max Scheler and Johann Plenge are not at all interested in such things. Plenge was also one of those who received our appeal “To the German People and the Cultural World” but did not sign it, saying that they liked the appeal very much but found it too unclear and therefore could not put their names to it. I fully understand this, because the whole mental organization of a man like Plenge is such that he can only adhere to the words and the structure of words, that he does not suspect, because of the special nature of the words and the structure of words, that a new spirit is behind it. Therefore, he does not perceive anything of what is actually meant to be said by this call. Because, of course, one cannot put the words and form the sentences in the way that humanity is accustomed to through today's newspaper plague and through the scientific plague, these formed words and formed sentence combinations seem strange to people. And in addition to not finding the spirit, they also find the language unclear. I fully understand both, for there is something to overcome first – which I wanted to characterize through today's lecture – if one is to truly understand what is to be said, so to speak, in a new language.

This is something that should penetrate into culture in general, into the spiritual culture of humanity, in other areas as well. If you ever come to our building site in Dornach, which is intended to house our School of Spiritual Science, you will find everything treated differently than the way things have been treated by art up to now. Even the walls themselves will be treated differently. What does a wall mean in all previous art, in all architecture? A wall means a conclusion. One was inside something that was closed off by the walls, and this also had to be expressed through the artistic motifs, through the artistic forms. One had to feel inside something. In Dornach, this tradition, which is a thousand years old, is being broken. The walls are — of course, artistically this must be taken — not in such a way that one feels closed in, but everything is so shaped, everything is so artistically formed that the wall becomes spiritually transparent, that one has the inner feeling: it ceases to be, this wall. Through each twist and turn, the soul is put into such a mood that it perceives the walls as spiritually transparent. This is taken to the point of physicality in the windows. For the windows I devised the principle of making glass etchings, that is, single-colored glass panes are treated in such a way that they are scratched out with a diamond pencil, and they are only a work of art when the external sun shines through, when a connection is created through the external world. Only the radiance of the sun makes the scratched-out work a work of art. But the artistic element is also preserved in the form: walls that destroy themselves, so that one does not sit inside as in a closed space, but as if one were in direct contact with the macrocosm as a microcosm, as if one were in intimate contact with the whole universe. -– This must be sought in all areas of existence. Speaking abstractly of it, that the sensual world should be a Maya, no longer does it for the future. If one denies the existence of the sensual world, it will only become truly apparent in its existence. But if one overcomes this existence artistically, through the artistic form itself, then what is otherwise to be achieved through contemplation, through thinking, through abstraction, is achieved through the will.

This in turn helps to ensure that language becomes something that is actually spiritually transparent, something that one no longer listens to, but through which one listens in order to hear the thoughts directly. Language must first dry up, as it does in English, in order to become transparent, so that one listens directly to the thoughts, so that that connection from soul to soul occurs, which consists of a kind of mind reading. The English will not be able to do that. English culture will not be able to do that, the culture that produced Shakespeare or Newton or Darwin, despite its size. It cannot do it alone. It can only be done if Central European culture reflects on its better element and contributes to world culture to this spiritual feeling from person to person. We must learn to break thoroughly with what we have developed as a desecration and denial of ourselves in recent decades. We must learn to reconnect with the greatness of Lessing, Herder, Goethe and so on, and learn to name the “German” that we have completely forgotten in recent decades, that we have completely alienated ourselves from. Then we will be able to contribute our share to the development of world culture. And above all, we must learn not to be dreamers and not to indulge in illusions, but to look at reality as it is. This is what is most urgently needed today. We must learn to look more closely at people and to judge them from a certain spiritual point of view. We must have the courage to say: When two people stand opposite each other in the affairs of the present day, as Scheler and Plenge did, then the one, Scheler, speaks in a Luciferic way, out of impulses that he allows to be fertilized by a Catholicizing Christianity. Ahriman speaks to Lucifer, not the human being in between. This human being in between must first be found again. But we must have the courage to look people in the face in this way. Today, people pass each other by without really getting to know each other. They glance at each other superficially and form judgments about others that suit them; they do not form the judgment that is truly true.

This, my dear friends, is why I say that we must stop indulging in illusions. We must develop the courage to face the truth in a way that is still unheard of for many people today.

With this in mind, we must stand between East and West, and we must also have the courage to judge things in the East in such a way that we say to ourselves: That which has often been mentioned here as the national element that lies in the East like a germ that wants to develop into the future is currently being drowned out by an anti-Russian, one could even say anti-human element. For in what is developing in Russia, the extreme consequence of logical thinking, which is both inhumane and stultifying, is developing, which can no longer produce anything productively, but can only plunder the old. It really seems like a tremendous tragedy, like a bitter tragedy, when one looks at what emerged in the Russian East in the second half of the nineteenth century and what reached its highest level in the extraordinary spirit of Soloviev, who, although he is not very well understood in the West, was extraordinary for Russia. In Solowjow, everything that is seminal in Russia is philosophically summarized. In Central Europe, little attention has been paid to Solowjow. A university professor of philosophy, who is very famous, came to the conclusion one day that there is a Solowjow and that these are also thoughts of the present with which he should deal. But since he did not have the inner drive to deal with the matter directly, he told one of his students: “You want to become a doctor, so write me a doctoral dissertation on Solowjow, and at the same time I will be able to teach myself about this Solowjow.” In recent times, this had more or less become the method by which university professors acquired knowledge about unknown figures in intellectual production. The university professor of whom I am speaking is not only a university professor, but a famous philosophical figure of the immediate present.

There is something in this East that will in turn work its way out through the destructive Leninism. But for that to happen, it is necessary that one also learns to understand the third element, the real social striving of the present in its spiritualized form, that one learns to penetrate it with real spiritual science. Then the tragic and bitter phenomenon that appears in Soloviev will come to mind. Then one will say to oneself: on the one hand, a Soloviev, emerging from this European East, full of newly developing, fertilizing spiritual seeds that can flourish in the East, which Europe can only fail to understand them fully; and then, sweeping away this phenomenon, the world war catastrophe, carrying, even in a sealed carriage, through Germany to the east, the executioner of intellectual life, Lenin. And the great deception in Central Europe for many that things need not be taken so seriously!

The disciples of Solovyov appeared on the scene like comets when the Russian Revolution was getting under way. They wanted a renewal of the dull, benumbed, paralyzed spiritual life, which was as dark as a night of the soul, as spiritual death, the killing of the soul with all its relationships. And these people, who seemed to be true disciples of Soloviev, wanted a release: Kartachov, Samarin. They wanted to spark a spiritual movement in Russia from the first sparkling rays of the revolution. In the place of this there arose what now appears as a wild obliteration of all spirit in Lenin, this gravedigger of all spiritual life, where everything is denied that the great figure of Soloviev had presented to the people of the East. And around this central phenomenon, all around, the proletarian masses, seduced by those to whom they adhere as their leaders. This is an infinitely sad phenomenon, which will only lose its sadness when people are willing to see the truth in the confusing facts of the present. An inner will that does not just want to rail against what is happening in the present, but also wants to see the truth and recognize what is happening in the justified proletarian demands across the entire civilized world. But in order to see the present clearly and without illusion, we must be able to distinguish between what is deeply justified, but unconsciously emerging from the broad masses of the proletariat as the still unborn seeds of the future, and what is instinctive because it is the last putrefying remnant of a declining culture. That is what often rises to the surface from the minds of the leaders of the proletariat today. Our time has the misfortune of having to face the most flourishing side by side with the most rotten. That is the fate of those times when an upward trend wants to assert itself alongside a downward trend. Then the downward trend often appears in the form of the upward trend, in the mask of the upward trend. Then one must look very closely. Then one must see in Lenin the former Czar, who appears in a different mask, the same way of thinking that was in the former Czar, only with different words, dead words, useless for what they express. One must see the metamorphosis of Czarism into Leninism in the Russian East of the present. It must be recognized that what appears on the outside can be the opposite of what appears on the outside. That is how difficult it is to see through the circumstances of the present. What is happening historically is as if a person were to approach me with a smiling face, with banal, sweet-talking eyes, with a look that wanted to beguile me, and I would be forced to tell him: Despite your mask, despite your sparkling eyes, your loving smile, you are a devil!

This is required of people in the present day: to seek the truth under the most difficult circumstances. But this testifies that this present time needs to discard all the comforts of thought and feeling and to make an effort to penetrate to the truth. Everything that is expressed today in the words: childlike confession, mere naive acceptance of the Bible, that leads you to bliss. That is not a bliss that leads to this, that is just indulging in the most desolate selfishness of the soul. Everything that wells up today out of this attitude must be observed, must be looked at. And when, instead of a courageous and real penetration into what is necessary for the present time, we encounter aunts-like conceptions of the relationship between anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the threefold social organism, then we must not be glad because this aunts-like conception is seemingly externally buttery and benevolent. We must not believe that we could not reject it. Rather, one must call the aunty-like aunty-like and know that today this aunty-like is the destructive one, that this aunty-like is the one that produces the Bolshevism it wants to reject. The cure can only consist of manly, aunty-free engagement in strict spiritual science. This is what must be laid upon our soul today, what must become an element, a ferment of our soul life. If it cannot do this, then humanity will not advance. If we decide to continue in the old ways of thinking and feeling, we are deciding on decline. It will become uncomfortable from the inside, and extremely uncomfortable from the outside. Or, however, one can pull oneself together through a strong inner power to grasp the spirit, then that which should die will be grasped by the spirit, and the spirit will transform it into a new European civilization, as it calls everything that dies to new life. The spirit will create a new life, and we will in turn have that which is an ascending current of human beings into a spiritual life.