Concerning Electricity

GA 220 — 28 January 1923, Dornach

If one looks around among those personalities who have experienced the newer spiritual life, who have developed a feeling of how one can actually carry this present-day spiritual life effectively within oneself - by “today” I mean of course the decades in which we live - then one comes, among others of course, to two personalities, Herman Grimm, who has often been mentioned here in this community, and the other, Friedrich Nietzsche.

With both of them you can say: they tried to live into the intellectual life of the present. They tried to feel how man can experience in his soul what is happening spiritually today. And with Herman Grimm, you fall for his way of depicting people or even individual people out of this sense of time. With Nietzsche, you fall into the trap of looking more at how he himself felt at the time. If you listen to how Herman Grimm describes people in the present in general, or how he describes individual people, then you always have an image in front of you, the description is transformed into an image. And this image seems to me to be the image of a human being, a human figure carrying an enormous burden on his back. I can't help thinking that this is the right image for Herman Grimm's otherwise excellent book on Michelangelo. When you read this book about Michelangelo by Herman Grimm, you get all sorts of beautiful impressions, but ultimately Michelangelo also comes across to you from this book as a man dragging himself along laboriously, carrying a heavy load on his back. And Herman Grimm himself felt this, as he often said: We modern people, he said, drag too much history with us.

We modern people really do carry too much history with us, even if we were lazy lads at school and didn't absorb anything of history, as it is usually called, but we still carry too much history with us through everything that makes an educational impression on us from the age of six. We are not free, we carry the past on our backs.

And if you then look away from Herman Grimm to Nietzsche, Nietzsche himself seems like a personality who wanders through the world somewhat hysterically, constantly shaking himself over this intellectual life of the present. And when you take a closer look at him, regardless of whether he is traveling to Italy or taking a walk in Sils Maria, he shakes himself. But he also shakes in such a way that he keeps his front body slightly bent. And if you then look at why he is shaking, you realize that he actually wants to shake off history, that which man carries on his back as his historical baggage.

And he felt the same way, because at a relatively young age he wrote “On the benefits and disadvantages of history for life”, which roughly translates as: People of the present, get history off your backs or off your humps, for you will lose your lives if you carry history with you all the time. You do not know how to live in the present. You ask at every opportunity: how did the ancients do it? - but you do not bring anything from your original thinking, feeling and will to the surface creatively in order to really live as a person of the present.

These two images that depict man - Herman Grimm, who always portrays him with a tremendous burden on his back, and Nietzsche, who shakes off this burden - these two images are impossible to get rid of if you consider the entire character of intellectual life in the last third of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. And if you then go deeper, you will find that the man of the modern age is actually panting under this historical burden. One might say that the man of more recent times seems like a dog that is very warm and then makes certain gestures with his tongue, which is how the man of more recent times seems under the weight of history. - Indeed, if you look more closely, you notice how man actually gasps and sways under the weight of history.

Let us look at the people of prehistoric times - we must immediately look at prehistoric times again according to the habits of the time, because it is extremely difficult to communicate as contemporary people if we do not at least bring up the images from the old times. The only way to do what we should do in the present is to show what the ancients did and what we do not do. Let's start from such an observation, at least by way of introduction, and then let's get history off the hump.

The ancients, when they looked at nature, they made myths, they were able to form myths out of their creative soul power. They were able to present what happens in nature to the soul in a living, essential way. Modern man can no longer make myths. He does not make myths. If he does try here or there, they are literary, feuilleton-like, they are wooden. First of all, mankind has forgotten how to embody the living in the creative world through myths. The newer man can at best interpret the old myths, as they say. Then, when man could no longer make myths, he at least fell back on history. That was not so long ago. But since he had lost the power to create myths, he could no longer do anything right with history. And so it came about that in the 19th century, for example, in the field of law it was declared: Yes, we cannot create law, we must study historical law. The historical school of law is something very strange, it is an admission of the uncreative man of the present. He says he cannot create law, so he must study the history of law and disseminate the law he learns from history. At the beginning of the 19th century, this was something that was particularly rampant in Central Europe: that people declared themselves incapable of living as contemporary people, that they only wanted to live as historical people.

And Nietzsche, who still had to study in this eternal making of history, wanted to shake this off and wrote his book “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life”. It seemed to him that when he looked back on his student days and all the things they told him about old times, he said: "You can't breathe, it's all dust, it takes your breath away. Away with history! Life instead of history!"

And then came the later period in the 19th century. Fear developed out of the historical mood. And this fear expressed itself in the fact that people began to gnash their teeth if they were to see anything at all into the natural world from a human perspective. They began to call it anthropomorphism. In ancient times, people were quick to look at what man experienced in nature because they knew it came from the divine. Nature also comes from the divine. So if you combine your human content, which is divine, with the human content outside, you get the truth. But the most modern human being really got his teeth chattering and goose bumps when he realized: there is an anthropomorphism somewhere! He became utterly terrified of anthropomorphism.

And we still live in this fear of anthropomorphism today and don't know that we are actually constantly making anthropomorphisms where we don't realize it. When we talk about the elasticity of two spheres in physics, we have something in the word impact - because impact can also be a rib impact that you give with your own hand - that shifts the impact into the elastic force. But you don't notice it there. You notice it when you place a human element into the steering of the world. So that which has developed out of historicism is a hopeless fear of anthropomorphism. And man lives in this fear today.

But in doing so, man breaks all bridges to the outer world. And above all he breaks the bridge to a living comprehension of the Christ-being. For the Christ must live as a living being, not merely as one to be recognized through history. So today it is a matter of not only interpreting and rejecting history, not only interpreting and rejecting the myth-forming power, but of getting even more behind the mystery than one gets with interpretation.

If you want to talk about something of human endeavor today, you generally don't speak freshly from the immediate present, but rather interpret Parzival or some older one. One interprets, one explains. But this explaining is not explaining, it is darkening, because nothing becomes clear, light with this explaining, it becomes darker and darker.

The reason for all this lies in the fact that today we have no courage on two sides to really grasp the world with our souls. On the one hand, we have established a view of nature which proceeds from the misty state of the world through the complex state to heat death. The moral world has no place in this, so we remain within the moral world in abstraction. I have mentioned this several times. Today's man has no power to recognize that what he justifies with his moral impulses are the causes of later future effects, which one will be able to see, which are real. This has been lost with the decline of scholastic realism mentioned yesterday.

As a result, all moral impulses have become something merely thought, with which man knows nothing to do as a higher order of nature. At most he knows how to look at the state into which the earth will be transformed. If he is honest, he must then say to himself: This is the great cemetery. That is where the moral ideals that people have devised will be buried. He has no honest ideas about how a new globe will grow out of the sinking earth, but it will be the full-grown version of the moral impulses that man is developing today. Man today has no courage to think of his moral impulses as the seeds of future worlds. On the one hand, that is what matters. But it depends on something else, which actually requires even greater courage today. On the one hand, we have the moral world order, which we have to imagine is not just an imaginary world order, but one that combines with reality and one day, after the physical world has perished, will be a new physical world. If we do not have the courage to grasp it, we have even less courage for something else.

On the other hand, we see the natural order. This natural order, which is opposed to the moral order, this natural order has brought us the great natural science, the admirable natural science. But let us look today at the main impulse of natural science. This main impulse penetrates into all circles. I would like to say that the farmer today already knows more about what is spread by the scientific world view than he knows about a spiritual world view. But in what way has modern natural science developed? This can be made particularly clear with one example, because this example has developed extraordinarily quickly. Actually, it was only at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries that what today floods our entire external culture as a cultural ritual dawned. Just think of the tremendous contrast! Think of the physicist who prepared a frog's leg: the metal from his window covering was placed between the frog's legs - the frog's leg twitched and he discovered electricity. How long ago was that? Not even a century and a half. And today, electricity is a cultural ritual. But not just a cultural rhyme. You see, when people my age were still young badgers, it never occurred to anyone in the field of physics to talk about atoms, for example, other than to say that they were small, inelastic or, in my opinion, elastic spheres that hit each other and the like, and then they calculated the results of these collisions. At that time, it would never have occurred to anyone to imagine the atom as we imagine it today: as an electron, as an entity that actually consists entirely of electricity.

People's thoughts have been completely caught up in electricity for a very short time. Today we speak of atoms as something where electricity is stored around a kind of small sun, around a center; we speak of electrons. So when we look into the workings of the world, we suspect electricity everywhere. The outer culture is already connected with thinking. People who would not travel on electric tracks would not imagine atoms to be so electric.

And if you look at the ideas that existed before the age of electricity, you can say that they still gave the natural thinker the freedom to at least abstractly think the spiritual into nature. - A tiny remnant of scholastic realism was still present. But electricity got on modern man's nerves and knocked out everything that was a direct link to the spiritual.

It has gone even further. All the honest light that floods through the universe has gradually been slandered as being something similar to electricity. When people talk about these things today, it naturally seems to someone whose head is completely immersed in the electric cultural wave as if they were talking nonsense. But that's because this person, with his head looking at it as nonsense, with his tongue held out like a dog that has become quite warm, and with the burden of history on his back, drags himself along and is burdened with historical concepts and cannot speak from the immediate present.

For you see, with electricity you enter an area that presents itself differently to the imaginative view than other areas of nature. As long as one remained in light, in the world of sounds, that is, in optics and acoustics, there was no need to judge morally that which stone, plant or animal revealed to one in light as colors or in the world of hearing as sounds, because one had an echo, however faint, of the reality of concepts and ideas. But electricity drove out this echo. And if, on the one hand, we are unable to find reality in the world of moral impulses today, we are all the more unable to find the moral in the field of what we now regard as the most important ingredient of nature.

If someone today ascribes real effectiveness to moral impulses, so that they have the power within themselves to later become sensual reality like a plant seed, then he is considered half a fool. But if someone were to come along today and ascribe moral impulses to the effects of nature, he would be considered a complete fool. And yet, anyone who has ever consciously felt the electric current running through his nervous system with real spiritual insight knows that electricity is not merely a natural current, but that electricity in nature is at the same time a moral phenomenon, and that the moment we enter the realm of the electric, we enter the moral at the same time. For if you switch your knuckle anywhere into a closed current, you will immediately feel that you are expanding your inner life into an area of the inner man, where the moral comes out at the same time. You cannot look for the intrinsic electricity that lies within the human being in any other area than where the moral impulses come out at the same time. Whoever experiences the totality of the electric experiences the natural moral at the same time. And unsuspectingly, modern physicists have actually made a strange hocus-pocus. They have imagined the atom electrically and have forgotten, out of the general consciousness of time, that when they imagine the atom electrically, they attribute a moral impulse to this atom, to every atom, and at the same time make it a moral being. But I am speaking incorrectly now. For by making the atom an electron, one does not make it a moral being, but one makes it an immoral being. In electricity, however, the moral impulses, the natural impulses are floating - but these are the immoral ones, these are the instincts of evil that must be overcome by the upper world.

And the greatest contrast to electricity is light. And it is a mixture of good and evil to regard light as electricity. One has just lost the real view of evil in the natural order if one is not aware that by electrifying the atoms one actually makes them the carriers of evil, not only, as I explained in the last course, the carriers of the dead, but the carriers of evil. They are made the carriers of the dead by allowing them to be atoms in the first place, by presenting matter atomistically. At the moment when this part of matter is elctrified, at the same moment nature is imagined as evil. Because electric atoms are evil, little demons.

This actually says quite a lot. For it is thus said that the modern explanation of nature is on the way to being properly associated with evil. Those strange people at the end of the Middle Ages, who were so afraid of Agrippa of Nettesheim, of Trithem of Sponheim and all the others who let them go about with the evil poodle of Faust, expressed all this foolishly. But even if their concepts were wrong, their feelings were not entirely wrong. For when we see the physicist today unsuspectingly declaring that nature consists of electrons, he is in fact declaring that nature consists of little demons of evil. And by merely acknowledging this nature, evil is declared to be the god of the world. If one were a man of the present and did not proceed according to traditional concepts, but according to reality, then one would come to the conclusion that - just as moral impulses have life, have natural life, whereby they realize themselves as a later sensually real world - the electric in nature also has morality. Namely, if the moral has natural reality in the future, the electric had moral reality in the past. And when we look at it today, we see the images of a former moral reality that have turned into evil.

If anthroposophy were fanatical, if anthroposophy were ascetic, there would of course be a thunderstorm following the culture of electricity. But that would be self-evident nonsense, because only those worldviews that do not reckon with reality can talk like that. They can say: Oh, that is ahrimanic! Get away from it! -- This can only be done in abstraction. For if one has just arranged a sectarian meeting and raved about being on guard against Ahriman, then one goes down the stairs and gets on the electric train. So that all this ranting about Ahriman, no matter how holy it sounds - forgive the trivial expression - is garbage. You cannot close your mind to the fact that you have to live with Ahriman. You just have to live with it in the right way, you just have to not let it overwhelm you.

And you can already see from my first mystery drama, from the final image, what unconsciousness about a thing means. Read this final image again and you will see that it is quite different whether I am unconscious about something or whether I consciously grasp it. Ahriman and Lucifer have the highest power over man when man knows nothing of them, when they can work on him without his knowing it. This is expressed precisely in the final image of the first mystery drama. Therefore the Ahrimanic electricity has power over the cultured man only as long as he electrifies the atoms quite unconsciously, unsuspectingly, and believes that it is harmless. He just doesn't realize that he is imagining nature to consist of nothing but little demons of evil. And if he even electrifies light, as a more recent theory has done, then he ascribes the qualities of evil to the good God. It is actually frightening to what a high degree our present-day natural science is a demonolatry, a worship of demons. You just have to become aware of it, because awareness is what counts - we live in the age of the conscious soul.

Why don't we understand how to live in the age of the consciousness soul? We don't understand it because we carry the burden of history on our backs, because we don't work with any new concepts, but with all the old ones.

And when someone senses this, as Nietzsche did, then at first he only comes to criticize, but if he remains in the field of the old, he is not able to somehow show the direction in which development must continue. Take a look at this, I would say, brilliant young Nietzsche, who wrote this brilliant treatise: “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life”, who really demanded with flaming words that one should throw off the burden of history and become a man in the full present, that one should put life in the place of the past. What happened? He took Darwinism and realized - well: the animal has become the human being, that is, the human being has become the superman. - But this superhuman has remained a completely abstract product, has no content, is an empty human sack. You can say all sorts of things about him physically, but you can't arrive at any imagination. Certainly, in Nietzsche's sense, one can call the natural scientists arithmeticians; it is even a very nicely coined word, because today the natural scientists do almost nothing other than calculate. And if someone doesn't calculate, like Goethe for example, they throw him out of the temple of science. But what we are talking about is something else. What is at stake is the courage to recognize the moral in its reality and the natural in its ideality in the right place, to recognize the moral impulses as the germ of later natural orders, to recognize the natural order with its electricity today as a moral order, even if as the anti-moral order, as the evil order. One must have the courage to be able to attribute moral qualities to nature in the right place.

This, of course, requires a correct understanding of human nature. For if man thinks in terms of today's physiology why an immoral impulse to which he gives himself should actually harm his body, he would be a fool if he were to concede this according to today's physiology and biology. For he knows all the modes of action that are active in the blood, in the nerves and so on: nowhere in them is there any mention of the moral. And when there is talk of electricity and an inner electricity is ascribed to man, then man knows nothing of the fact that this electricity can really absorb the immoral impulses. Today we talk about absorbing oxygen, about all kinds of absorption in the material sense. But the fact that electricity absorbs the immoral in us and that this is a law of nature like other laws of nature is not spoken of, just as little as one speaks of the fact that the light we absorb from the outside world preserves in us, absorbs the good, moral impulses. We have to bring the spiritual into physiology.

But we can only do this if we free ourselves from the old conceptual burdens of history, which crawls and stings inside us and, above all, tramples on our backs. We can only do this if we remember: with the decline of scholastic realism, our concepts have become words - words in a bad sense - and words can no longer be used to get at reality. We no longer live the words, otherwise we would still have something alive in the pursuit of sounds. Just think how often I have said this here: The spirit that rules in language is a wise spirit, much wiser than the individual human being is. - People can perceive this at every opportunity if they develop a feeling for the wonderful things that live in the word formations. Just think - and it is no different in other languages - when I say: reflect, I reflect, and: I have reflected! - Today the teacher drags the burden of history into the classroom on his hump, does not hang up this burden, but teaches under this burden with a sticky tongue, at best managing to say grammatically to the pupils: I reflect -, is the present tense, I have reflected -, is the perfect tense.

But if I have come to my senses, I must feel, what does that mean: I have come to my senses? - I have placed myself in the sun! And when I reflect, I have made use of the sunlight that is in me, the o condenses into the i. - In general, when the sun lives in me, it is - the senses! When I give myself to the sun, I know nothing more of the senses, then they are the sun. From the senses I go out into the world. I become a member of the cosmos by absorbing the past. You have to live with the language, you have to feel what it means when an i becomes an o. That is what you do in the world when you let an i become an o in the language!

These things indicate how we need to go back to the foundations of humanity in order to explain such longings as the best people - Herman Grimm, Nietzsche - had. With something like eurythmy, we create something that goes back to the foundations of humanity. That is why it is so important for anthroposophists in particular to understand such artistic creation as eurythmy correctly from its foundations. It is important that we as anthroposophists feel what is really meant by the renewal of civilization.

It is therefore really not important in the present that we bring in more history, but that we become contemporary people. This consciousness must emerge in the souls of anthroposophists. Otherwise it will be misunderstood again and again and again how one is to treat anthroposophy. Here and there such endeavors arise again and again, which show that one proceeds from such a judgment as: Can't we bring a bit of eurythmy here or there so that people can see something eurythmy interspersed with other things? So that people can be accommodated, so that the eurythmic or anthroposophical can be sneaked in according to their own taste? - That must not be our endeavor, but we must present to the world with absolute honesty and integrity what anthroposophy must really want. Otherwise we will get nowhere. We will not achieve the things that I have just characterized and that must be achieved if humanity is not to die off by taking the old into consideration.

Not true, rethinking and reperception were the words I used yesterday. We must come to such a rethinking and reperception, not just to the contemplation of a different world view. And we must have the courage to use moral concepts, in this case anti-moral concepts, when we talk about electricity. After all, modern man is frightened by these things. He feels uncomfortable when he has to admit to himself that when he gets on the electric train he is sitting in the chair of Ahriman. So he prefers to mysticize about it, forming sectarian assemblies in which he says: "One must beware of Ahriman. - But that is not what matters, what matters is that we know: The development of the earth is henceforth one in which the forces of nature themselves, which work into cultural life, must be ahrimanized. And we must be aware of this, because this is the only way to find the right path.

This is also something that belongs to the tasks of the anthroposophist to develop as knowledge within himself. And it really cannot be the case that anthroposophy is merely accepted as a kind of substitute for something that was previously provided in the creeds. They have become boring to many so-called educated people today, anthroposophy is not yet so boring, it is more entertaining; so they do not turn to this or that creed, but to anthroposophy. It cannot be like that, but what is at issue is that out of the consciousness of the times we feel quite objectively that our heart belongs to the heart of God in the world. But this can be achieved precisely through the paths that have been characterized here.