Anthroposophical Medical Theory and Human Knowledge

GA 319 — 2 October 1923, Vienna

Fourth Lecture

The subject we are to discuss this evening is a very broad one and requires a very extensive foundation. It is, of course, extremely difficult to start at just any point, so please allow me to at least suggest, in a few introductory words, how anthroposophy relates to the cognitive problems and the overall state of mind of contemporary people.

In the course of the nineteenth century, in particular, what had already been prepared in principle since the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries came to pass in the fullest measure, and that which, in relation to the development of the problems of knowledge problems and of that which then practically follows on from the cognitive problems: observation and experiment, carried up to the exact level, and on the other hand, intellect, the subsequent conclusion. Today, anyone who has undergone scientific training in any field has no doubt that in order to arrive at a scientific result, one must experiment and think. Indeed, they do not even entertain the idea that it could be otherwise. In particular, such views do not enter the specialized fields. In this respect, one shrinks from speaking to those who have been trained in any particular field about the consequences of anthroposophical research for those fields. Although on the one hand one would have to say: Only those who have mastered scientific methodology should engage in the kind of anthroposophical research I have in mind. On the other hand, however, some of the results for specialized fields are so paradoxical that it is better to remain silent about them than to speak about them. And if I speak of it, it is because I am convinced that you have all come here not to hear something that will convince you, but at least something that can be taken seriously scientifically.

Anthroposophy wants to be a scientific research, but it does not want to stop at that state of mind, which is fed by the outer experiment and the intellect, but it seeks to gain its insights by developing the human soul forces in the same way that a small child has undeveloped powers that develop into a fully-fledged human being, it is equally possible, once one has reached today's level of scientific education, to progress through a special development of the soul powers. The most important power is the power of memory.

The power of recollection is something that even a few unprejudiced philosophers of the present day say points to something spiritual in man. Now, in the development of the soul's powers, it is important to place before the soul a result that is no longer there. One thus evokes from the depths of the soul something that no longer refers to something directly present, but which, in its entire inner constitution, has not an indeterminate but a very definite relation to a reality. The question arises: Is it possible to further develop that which is active in memory, in the same way that the brain structure is developed in the first years of a person's life, so that it not only creates inner soul structures that point to something that has already been experienced through their own structure, but that point to something that not only represents human past, but also extra-human earthly past? Is it possible to shape the power of insight by means of an inner strengthening in such a way that what is created in a stronger way than the memory images points to something that otherwise does not fall within the field of consciousness of the human being?

If you start from this trust, you present it as a postulate, and if you set about the inner exercises in such a precise way that you follow each step with deliberation, like mathematics, you will have new experiences. Here, with these exercises, it is a matter of taking the steps in such a way that a development of one's own arises from them. It is not something mathematical or similar. If one has certain ideas in this regard, which must be easily comprehensible so that reminiscences do not come into play — it is easiest for mathematicians, who are accustomed from the outset to placing comprehensible contents of consciousness at the center of their mental life — and does not tire, but rather, starting from this point of view, strengthens those soul abilities that express themselves in memory in a more passive behavior of the soul, then one comes to realize that one can draw out of the depths of one's soul life a potentized power of remembrance that preserves the true, organically active forces of earthly life, so that one can actually survey in a time tableau — one can even speak of time perspectives, of an inner lawfulness and structure — that which has taken effect in one over time since one entered earthly life.

At first, there is an insight into one's own self. There is the insight that an etheric body rules in the physical body, which, in its inner lawfulness, has nothing physical but everything temporal. It can appear in pictorial form, so that this knowledge can be called imaginative. And one arrives at the point where, while one otherwise only lives in the present, one can transport oneself back to any moment, so that one experiences it as if it were immediately present. One actually comes into the possibility of speaking of time perspective, just as one can go from one place here to another, so one can inwardly make the journey to a place in time that one has lived through. So that this continuously in time unrolling finer bodily existence arises for the first stage of supersensible knowledge.

I need only briefly hint that there is a further stage in the development of the soul, which is attained by imagining the painting of one's own inner strength, so that not only an empty consciousness arises, which is equal to zero, but which corresponds to the negativity of the present degree of consciousness. This other consciousness results in a complete inner silence, inner peace. Now one can imagine: when all external impressions cease, then the rest is a zero; but the stillness one enters into bears a relationship to the former one as a negative bears to a positive. Then one comes to inspiration instead of imagination. Through this one comes to see the pre-earthly existence of man. This is not a realization gained through speculation, but an insight into the eternal in man. In this way one advances to explore the reality of the spiritual and soul just as one would otherwise explore in the physical life what the senses give. But in the end one sees the whole human being as a composite being. There is no need to get involved in all the quibbling between monistic and dualistic views; that is just as foolish as saying that the chemist is a dualist because he explains water as consisting of hydrogen and oxygen. One recognizes that the human being has a physical part and a spiritual-soul part. The formative activity of the brain, which is a reality, can be seen in the embryonic development. I will use a comparison: if there is soft ground here and footprints on it, a being that has never been on earth might come to explain these traces by some kind of force. But just as the footprints are real and were made by a person who walked over the ground, so too are the brain tracks the product of the soul and spirit.

In this way it is possible to recognize the human being: the human physical body, then the body of formative forces, which one recognizes through imaginative knowledge: the finer human being within the human being, who, despite all exchange of physical substances, is a unified, continuous entity in time, a self-contained reality from one point in time to another.

If we proceed from there to the specialized fields, then the matter becomes, so to speak, serious. The body of formative forces is not yet a soul existence, but could at most come to growth, but not to feeling. We come to the astral body, to the actual soul and to the ego organization. Over the last three to four hundred years, knowledge has developed in such a way that more and more has been left out of the spiritual, higher part of the human organization. As a result, we have had to limit ourselves more and more to what can be deduced from the physical structure of the human organism. I always shy away from explaining such things, because I can understand how it makes people angry.

First of all, we have the human organism. We follow the centripetal and the centrifugal, the so-called sensitive and motor nerves. Yes, this fact arises. I can fully appreciate these reasons, and I can also appreciate how the duality of the nervous system is supported by tabes dorsalis and so on.

But when one knows the higher aspects of the being, then the nerves become something unified; one sees the unity of the nervous system. The sensitive nerves are predisposed to convey sensory impressions; the motor nerves have nothing to do with the will, but rather they have the task of conveying the sensations that are in the periphery, the chemical-physiological processes in the legs and so on. The motor nerves are sensitive to the organism's inner processes, while, as paradoxical as it may sound to modern science, one can actually see the will directly in the soul and assume that the soul and spirit have a direct influence on the physical for the emergence of movement and the effects of the will.

I would like to point out to you the path that can lead to finding this view. For as a modern anatomist, the soul-spiritual is something that can lead to all kinds of hypotheses, but it is something that today is more imagined with an abstract content. Ziehen speaks only of an “emotive emphasis” of the ideas. What one imagines as soul is something so abstract and thin that one does not come to understand the intervention of this soulfulness in the physical.

In the moment when one realizes that the physical body goes from being solid to liquid, to air, and to warmth, then one comes closer to the spiritual. It is, of course, impossible to imagine the spiritual as the organism that modern science imagines. But as soon as one assumes a warmth organism, it is not so difficult to imagine that the inner forces of the body of formative forces intervene in the heat differentiations of the human organism. In one respect, we will have to go through a great deal before we can bring to life what has become frozen in knowledge today. We will find the transition from the physical, which has become more subtle, to the soul, which has become more powerful. And we will be able to say: what is a being of will intervenes directly in the warming processes, from there in the air organism, from there in the aqueous organism. And something is present that is quite different from what modern science believes in relation to the motor nerves; there is a spiritual-soul-physical activity that is brought to consciousness through the motor nerves.