Spirit and Matter: Healing Modern Intellectual Tragedy

GA 213 — 14 July 1922, Dornach

Ninth Lecture

The purpose of last week's lectures was to provide a certain historical perspective, showing how especially deeper-disposed personalities had to struggle with the currents of the 19th century, and in particular, how the contemporary scientific way of thinking prevented deeper natures from finding their way into the spiritual world. When we make observations directed at the personal, as we have done in relation to Franz Brentano, we can see much more intimately, in the inner soul struggles of human beings, in what has taken place in the spirit, what the great struggles and currents of the time are, than when we characterize only in the abstract. In the last issue of our journal 'Das Goetheanum', I pointed out how Franz Brentano, who, starting from Catholicism and immersing himself in the scientific mentality, got stuck, so to speak, in the physical-earthly, no longer found his way back into the spiritual, as he faced another personality who actually - albeit with some modification - suffered the same fate. That is Nietzsche's personality.

Just as one can show in the case of Brentano how the natural-scientific world view took hold of him and never let go of his devout Catholicism, and how one can show how this characterizes the entire course of his philosophical development, one can show something similar in the case of Nietzsche. It can be shown that Nietzsche, starting not from Catholicism but from a different spirit, was also held back by natural science within the physical-sensual, just as he could not, like Brentano, rise into the spiritual, but then his fate took a similar but still different path.

Brentano immersed himself in the spirit of natural science as early as the 1860s, and we have seen how the dogma of infallibility, as a wave of fate bearing down on him from outside, so to speak, then completely alienated him from his church. Nietzsche, who is a few years younger, went through a similar process of development in the 1870s. He did not start out from Catholicism. He actually started from an antique-like artistic world view, from what the modern human being develops as a world view when he absorbs more of the Greek way of looking at the world in his youth. And it can be said that Nietzsche was as passionate about the Greek way of looking at the world and about an artistic world view in general as Brentano was about Catholicism. He believed that in Richard Wagner and his art he found a renewal of Greekness. And just as Brentano had participated in all Catholic practice and had completely absorbed himself in everything that Catholic worship can evoke within a person, so Nietzsche immersed himself in Wagner's art, in which he believed he saw a resurrection of what the Greek way of looking at the world was. This is how he wrote his first writings, and this is how he experienced the irruption of the scientific way of thinking into his soul in the 1870s.

Before that, he was filled with the view that great human ideals are given to man in an independent spiritual sphere, that man can place these great ideals, the moral, the religious ideals, before his soul, that he finds in them the possibility of rising above the physical-human. And Nietzsche finds words of extraordinary enthusiasm and high flight to describe man's assimilation of ideals. Then the scientific view comes over him. And he feels he must increasingly imbue himself with the thought that the physical in man, in its broadest sense, also produces the ideals as results. It is unsettling for him to have to abandon the old belief that ideals are something independent, something rooted in an independent spiritual world, that ideals actually emerge as the results of what bodily-physical processes are. Nietzsche, so to speak, submerges with all that lives in his ideas as ideals into the physiology of human nature. What had previously seemed divine and spiritual to him now seems merely human, even all too human. He used to see how man has devoted himself to idealistic worlds, how he has elevated himself above base nature by devoting himself to them. Now he believed he recognized that man's lower nature develops only one kind of drive, becoming more and more powerful, and that the holding up of ideals is nothing more than a means of intensifying the inner power in man. In short, Nietzsche strove to explain all ideals as a kind of illusion of physiological processes in the broadest sense. He did not, however, conceive of these physiological processes in man in as philistine a way as today's natural science; but he wanted to regard ideals as a result of physiological, physical processes in the broadest sense. And so, for him, ideals became something that clouds the minds of people who do not see through them, while those who see through them are enlightened about the fact that ideals, like ordinary urges, arise from the physiological foundations of the human being and are only intended to bring the physical nature of the human being more and more powerfully to bear in the broadest sense.

Of course, this is a somewhat radical and retouched description, but it essentially reflects what had such a devastating effect on Nietzsche, especially when he believed that he had come to the conclusion that conscience, too, can only be explained from a physiological basis.

It is only that the natures of the two personalities are different: Brentano is a subtle mind, attuned to imagination, to cognition; he uses the natural-scientific method to create, as it were, an instrument with which he then wants to dissect human mental life in a subtle way, just as natural science dissects physical life. But this instrument becomes blunt at the moment when he wants to approach the real spiritual world. Nietzsche, when he comes to the conclusion that, according to the opinion of natural science, the physiological is the basis of everything, or at least according to its consequences, forms an instrument for himself that is not a fine analytical knife, like Brentano's, but a hammer, robust enough to get everything that is spiritual out of the physical, even physiologically. With this instrument, which is now robust enough to transform the moral and the ideal into the physiological, he grinds the intellectual to dust. He titled one of his writings: “Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.”

Brentano shrinks from the spiritual, as it were. Nietzsche crushes the spiritual. Basically, anyone who looks at the inner cultural history of the most recent times must find a profound similarity between these two personalities, despite all their differences. And yet, in the very latest writing of which I spoke to you recently, Brentano has a short chapter on Nietzsche in which he shows that he has nothing but mere rejection for Nietzsche. He calls him a belletristic, dazzling mayfly. He compares him to Jesus and finds that Nietzsche is a caricature of Jesus. One cannot help but say: It is strange that a man of such extraordinary refinement as Franz Brentano did not develop a way of penetrating, even to some extent, into the experiences of another mind that was so similar to his in character and destiny, as I have described.

But this is a general phenomenon of our time and only highlights, with excellent examples, what people are like today. They do not live in each other, they live apart. I have often emphasized that they pass each other by without understanding, and that is also a social phenomenon of our time. People pass each other by, even the strongest seekers of truth. Other people do it too, but with such outstanding personalities, what appears as significant symptoms is actually a general phenomenon of our time. Why do people pass each other by without understanding? We so urgently need the possibility of mutual understanding! Today we so urgently need the possibility that someone penetrates both Nietzsche and Brentano, or for that matter Haeckel, David Friedrich Strauß and so on, in order to show how these different personalities look at the world from the most diverse points of view. But only the spiritual-scientific view, the one that really ascends to the spirit, can achieve such a view that delves into the individual personal points of view. And that is precisely the reason why people do not understand each other: that they do not ascend to the spirit. We must seek the reason why a personality like Brentano, in the mere natural science, remained stuck, in the mere natural science, why he could not create a bridge to another personality, who basically had a very similar fate to his own. Only a spiritual deepening will be able to penetrate the most diverse points of view. But for this, a penetrating study of the human being, a penetrating knowledge of the human being, is necessary. For what do such personalities, who are seized by the scientific methodology of the 19th century, like Brentano and Nietzsche, ultimately face?

One day they are confronted with the fact that, as honest seekers of knowledge and truth, they have, on the one hand, the physical world and the excellent scientific methods for penetrating into it; on the other hand, a spiritual world. Of course, people like Nietzsche and Brentano did not go so far as the superficiality that many today display, who do not even see this spiritual world as the great opposite of the physical world. They see the physical world, they see the spiritual world, but there is no bridge between the two. They see what man wants by virtue of his basic nature; they see the will that is based on instincts and impulses, and they attempt to explain these impulses and instincts from the physiological nature of man, how they accumulate, as it were, into volition. But then they notice that a spiritual world erects ideals above them, which are to be striven for; they notice the 'should' in relation to the 'wanting', and they find no bridge between the 'wanting' and the 'should'. A person like Brentano becomes a psychologist, a scientist of the soul. Physiology is, after all, to a certain extent complete. But he wants to examine the phenomena of the soul. He wants to imitate natural science by investigating the phenomena of the soul. At first he is not at all certain whether he has soul phenomena, because in a sense science denies this. Brentano is actually only certain that there are soul phenomena because he was a devout Catholic for so long, not out of any scientific knowledge.

This dichotomy is terrible in the soul of these people: the spiritual world, the physical world, and no bridge between the two. How do you get from one to the other? The moral ideals are there. But it is not possible to understand how what the moral ideals want can take hold of the human muscles, how it can lead people to action. For science merely says how muscles and bones move according to physical laws, but not how the ought is reflected in the movement of muscles and bones.

The point is that, however perfect the scientific method may be, this scientific century was basically helpless when it came to the human being. You simply could not examine the human being. It did not occur to anyone that the human being is a threefold being, in the way I have described in the last sections of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (The Riddle of the Soul). It was not possible to arrive at the conclusion that the human being can be divided into a nervous-mental human being, which naturally fills the whole human being but is mainly localized in the head; into a rhythmic human being, which in turn permeates the whole human being but is mainly concentrated and localized in the respiratory and circulatory organs; and finally into the metabolic human being of the limbs, which is the remaining human being. This is such a profound fact that everything that is to lead to an understanding of the human being must be linked to it. Of course, one must not say that the three parts of the human being are the head, chest and limbs. I have already said that the human being is a nerve-sense being everywhere, only this is primarily expressed in the head. But look at this head. It is so formed that we cannot but be filled with ever deeper admiration when we consider the structure, especially the nervous structure, of the human head. Within the world of physical phenomena, there is nowhere to be found any real reason why the human head, especially in its inner parts, should be formed precisely as it is.

This is where the realization I have often spoken of here occurs. The human head is modeled on the cosmos in its outer form, if you disregard the base of the head. It is actually spherical in shape (see drawing). Its form is taken from the cosmos. All the cosmic forces in the mother's body also work together to first create the human head during embryonic development. If we look at this spiritually, we see that the human being's soul and spirit live in a spiritual world before the person descends into physical earthly existence, first connecting with the cosmic forces and only then taking hold of the forces of heredity. The actual spiritual-soul-man first forms out of the ether of the world and only then goes to the physically ponderable matter that is offered to him in his mother's body. So actually this head is formed out of the cosmos, and what has descended from man out of spiritual-soul worlds to earth is imagined from this cosmic formation. Therefore, in the physical world, no one understands the structure of the human head who does not explain it in spiritual terms, saying: the human head is an image, an immediate imprint of the spiritual. These wonderful convolutions of the brain, everything that can be discovered physiologically in the human head, is as if it were crystallized spirit, spirit present in material form. The human head is, as a physical body, an immediate image of the spirit.

If someone were to sculpt the spirit as such, they would actually have to study a human head permeated by spirit. Of course, if they are a model artist, they will not capture anything special; but if they are not a model artist, but create from the spiritual, then they will achieve a wonderful image of the innermost nature of the cosmic spiritual forces when they create the human head. What is present in the human head is intuition, inspiration, imagination of cosmic spirituality. It is as if the Godhead itself had wanted to create an image of the spiritual and had placed the human head on it. It is therefore basically comical when people seek images of the spirit, while they have the best, the most magnificent, the most powerful image of the spirit, but precisely the image of the spirit, not the spirit itself, in the human head.

The opposite is the case with the human being with limbs. If you contrast the human being with limbs, they are only attached to the earth. They have only one sense as an attachment to the earth. The arms are somewhat lifted out of the earthly. In animals, those limbs that are arms in humans are also still attuned to the heaviness of the earth. But essentially, the nature of the human limbs is thoroughly organized around the forces of the earth. Just as the human head is a reflection of cosmic spirituality, so what we encounter in the human limbs shows us how the spirit is bound to the forces of the earth. Just study the shape of a human leg with a human foot! If you want to understand it in a plastic way, you have to understand the forces of the earth. Just as you have to understand the highest spirituality if you want to grasp the human head, so, in order to understand the form of the limbs, you have to study what binds the human being to the earth, what presses him to the earth, what causes the human being to be able to walk along the earth and to sustain himself in space within the forces of gravity. All this must be studied, the whole way the earth affects a being that relates to it in this way, as man does. Just as one must study the spirit in order to understand the human head, so one must study the physical of the earth with its forces in order to understand the human being in terms of his limbs and metabolism.

But this has a very significant consequence. Only when one looks into the human being in this way, when one is able to see the human head as it were, in the crystallized, all-encompassing spiritual world, and when one sees in the lines of gravity and again in the lines of momentum, in which the earth turns, the origins of the formations of the human limbs, when one sees through dynamically, in the effect of the forces, the way in which the human being is formed and built, only then can one form an opinion about it.

of the formation of the human limbs, when one sees dynamically, in the effect of the forces, the way in which the human being is formed and built, only then can one form an opinion about how the spiritual and soul life that occurs in the human being itself now works in the human being. And I would like to tell you about this today using two examples.

Two things can play a major role in the human soul that are, to a certain extent, opposed to each other. One is what I would call doubt, and the other is what I would call conviction. One could perhaps also find other, even more succinct words. But you will all feel that we have a kind of polar opposite of the soul when we speak of doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other. Imagine what happens when a person is seized by doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other, and this happens on a more intense level. Try to visualize yourself being seized by doubt about something, even if it is only a matter that is occupying you intensely. It does not have to be a great cosmic truth or a great cosmic riddle, just a matter that interests you greatly. You must go to bed with this doubt. Imagine tossing and turning, feeling restless, and unable to find peace of mind. And then try to visualize how something flows into your soul as a soothing conviction, bringing an inner calm, how, as it were, a warmth of soul can fill you completely. In short, if you really look at the matter impartially from within, you will be able to visualize before your soul the opposite natures of doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other.

What is the difference in relation to the essence of the human being? The human head is modeled out of the cosmic ether from what we were in the spiritual world; the human head is a pure replica of the most human, namely the spiritual human being. Doubting ideas come to the head, but they find no place in the head. The head does not absorb them. They have to pass through the head down to the nature of the limbs. In the nature of the limbs, they combine with everything that becomes grainy in the human material being, that becomes so that it permeates this human material being grainily, that thus takes on an atomistic nature. Doubting ideas pass through him as if our head were permeable to them. The blood first absorbs these doubting ideas, then they are carried down into the whole organism, preferably absorbed by the metabolism, and only then handed over to the nervous system, and they live in all that is atomistic in human nature, that is, granular, salty. They connect with it very intimately. The body absorbs the doubting ideas, and they pass through the head. Only when one understands this special kind of human head, and that the matter of the head is not suitable for doubting ideas, because the head is an image of the truth itself, from which we come when we descend from the spiritual into the physical , we understand: just as light passes through a transparent glass, so do doubting ideas pass through our head and take hold of the other part of the nervous system and disturb our metabolism. The head only takes in doubting ideas to the extent that it itself is a matter of metabolism. But it passes them through its special nervous organization and only takes in convincing ideas.

The convincing ideas find related structures everywhere when they enter the human head. They find accommodation everywhere in the nervous system. They settle in the human being's head first and go out into the rest of the body not through the blood but through the nervous system, which is in a kind of destructive process, so that they pass directly into the whole of the rest of the human being in their spirituality. But they find accommodation in the head, they fill the head. And in the head, from the spirituality of the head form, also from the inner formation, they receive their suitable form for the whole person and therefore work as if they were intimately related to the person, as if the person himself would live in them inwardly, as if they were the person himself. One would like to say: In the convincing representations, the head of the person forms something that is particularly appropriate for the person.

Study the human embryo and you will see that the head forms first, then the rest of the organism; for it is from the head that the forces that form the rest emanate. When you take convincing ideas into your head, it is like this spiritually: they are first taken up spiritually in the head, and the head then sends them to the rest of the human being. Just as the other person is physically reproduced in the embryo according to the human head, so here the spiritual of the convictions and ideas of the other person is radiated, and a person arises from it in a spiritual way from the convincing ideas (left drawing, red). An inner image of a person radiates in that person. And whatever radiates in the form of convincing ideas in a person connects with everything that permeates the person like warmth. Just as the doubting images seize everything granular, everything atomistic, so the convincing images seize the warmth flowing through the body, the first link of the etheric that permeates the whole human being, and do not enter further into the physical.

Try to imagine the presence of doubting and convincing ideas in human nature, and you can grasp the truth of the matter in immediate life every time you feel and experience the beneficial effect of a convincing idea and the torturous effect of doubting ideas.

I have often said that the spirit of language is a spirit that works rationally. And if you ascribe the natural embryo to procreation (drawing on the right, white), you are not at all surprised that this formation is attributed to conviction (on the left, red). We must not regard these things as mere coincidences. They are the deeds of the ruling genius of language, which knows more than the individual human being. I know that today's linguistic science regards this as a gimmick. But once one really looks into the workings and weaving of the ruling language genius, one will regard much of today's philology and linguistics as gimmicks.

But now consider what it all means. You get a picture of how two soul experiences, doubt and conviction, continue to work in the physical person. They provide an absolutely comprehensible bridge from the soul and spirit to the physical. You see a physical person, and through his physical corpuscles in his body you can see the shimmering and undulating of his soul and spiritual experiences: this person is a skeptic, this one a doubter. You can see how the doubting spirit vibrates on in the soul and in the body through the inner structure of the material. You look at the other person, in whom the warmth flows through the limbs in a calm manner, and you see in this calm flow of warmth the physical expression of devotion to one's convictions. You see the spiritual directly expressed in the physical. Only then do you begin to understand the physical. Today's chemist and physicist says when he analyzes the human being: Inside there is lime, phosphorus, oxygen and nitrogen, carbon. Yes, you will never find anything spiritual in oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and hydrogen. Of course Du Bois-Reymond is quite right when he says: A number of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon atoms can be completely indifferent to how they lie and move. Yes, if you look at the substance in the body only as carbon, oxygen and so on, then it is like that. But if you know how a substance works that is receptive to the spirit in the most diverse ways, that is in the main an immediate image of spiritual essence, that is otherwise incorporated into the earth, so that the earthly holds there, which is driven through the head as doubting ideas, then the possibility of thinking ceases. It is not the same in our brain for a number of carbon, nitrogen atoms, and so on, as they lay and moved, as they lie and move. There we see how it matters to the substance whether the heat current flows into it or whether salt formation is at work in it, so that the body develops a tendency to develop a granular structure. These are two contradictions that express themselves in the material and that originate from the spiritual. It is actually the case that we did not end up with materialism in the 19th century because people did not know the spirit. The spirit in its most filtered form was best known in the materialistic age, because all previous ages did not actually have the spirit in its purest form; they always mixed material into the images of the spirit that they formed; they were images in which material was always mixed. Only the age of natural science has brought pure spiritual conceptions. But what the age of natural science had to neglect is just the knowledge of matter in reality, of spirit in matter. What has brought us materialism is the insufficient knowledge of the material nature of the world, the lack of insight into the spiritual weaving and working in the material. Science has become materialistic through ignorance of the material effects. Because people did not know how the spirit works creatively, they imagined this spirit as more and more abstract and abstract. As a result, the moral ideal finally became something that one could not even ask about, because it did not even have the materiality to fly around in space. It was no longer there at all. If you tried to grasp it, it was rather like trying to breathe in an element that is not there. The people of the 19th century seem like someone trying to breathe under the recipient of an air pump! When they gasp for moral ideals, for example, they are not there; they would like to have them, but they are not there because no one wanted to develop a concept of the workings of the spiritual soul in the physical body. Hence all the curious theories arose about the interaction of the physical and the bodily with the soul and spiritual, which were all fabrications, while real knowledge can only be gained by looking closely at the facts.

When we have become familiar with how doubt and conviction permeate and interweave human nature, then we are able to become acquainted with that which we have come to know in man and in turn to know it in the world. We have in the world the sphere of material creation. We see, for example, how matter must form itself in grains out in the world, how it crystallizes. Once we have become familiar with how doubt takes hold of the granularity in us in the organism, we then learn to see doubt outside of us. We look at the mountain (white) that forms with its granular rock; but at the same time we find that the same thing is happening in the mountain that we are getting to know as doubt within us (red), and we get to know the creative power of doubt. The doubt within us makes us grainy because we are human and not nature. Doubt outside in nature has the right effect. When that which works outside in nature moves in us, it causes the wrong. By stepping on the rocks, you are stepping on the physical manifestation of what the deity sends out as doubt so that the world can become grainy. And again, when you study your convictions with a warm sense of being imbued, then you are in that which is being created. So when you think that basically the warmth is to be sought in the womb of the creative forces of the world, then you find that what is cosmic conviction works out of warm matter.

Get to know these things in truth within yourself, then you will also learn to judge the agents out there in the cosmos in the right way. If you see what is crumbling and crumbling away out there, so that we have, so to speak, the first preparation for the atomization of our earthly existence in the universe, as emanations of world doubt, then you will learn to understand much in cosmic existence. And conversely, if you are able to look into the cosmic with conviction, then you will get to know much of the Creative. But these are things by which I only wanted to hint to you how one must first know man in order to have any prospect at all of knowing the cosmic existence.

Well, you see, for Brentano in the 1860s and for Nietzsche in the 1870s, the methods of natural science were there; they found carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, some sulfur, and so on in the brain. There was really nothing spiritual to be recognized in it. And if one applied the method that had led to this to the spirit, then of course one could come to nothing but either the spiritual impotence that Brentano came to, or the wearing down of the spiritual that Nietzsche, who was more of a will nature, came to. But both were subject to the same fate, namely that they could not reach the spiritual from the physical, because they could not find the spiritual in the physical, and therefore did not perceive the spiritual as something powerful enough to bring forth the physical.

Thus, such minds were faced with a physical nature that actually had no meaning because it contained nothing spiritual, and with a spiritual nature that had no power, no might. That is the fate of the most significant minds that in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century faced matter without meaning, faced the spirit without power.

Historians have spoken of ideas in history. This is mind without power. You really cannot put cultural instruments into the hands of ideas, through which culture arises, or through which historical events arise at all; ideas as abstractions are powerless, this is mind without power. In contrast to this is nature, which one studies only in its unspiritual matter: matter without meaning.

You will never find the bridge if you invent the absurdity on one side: matter without sense, and on the other side the un-spirit: spirit without power. Only when one finds the strength in the spirit, the strength in the conviction to drive the warmth through the body because the human being is organized in such and such a way, only when one finds the strength in the doubt to push through the head because there is no affinity with the head and to wear down the rest of the human being internally so that it disintegrates into a granular structure , that is, only when one finds in the spirit that which has the power both to dissolve the granular structure through warmth and to form it in the salt formation process, then one finds a matter in which meaning is, because then the powerful spirit works in such a way that what appears in matter is meaningful. And so we have to look for matter with meaning and spirit with power.

This is what such minds as Brentano and Nietzsche, in their tragic fate, also point to in their personalities.