85. Life Itself Creates the Human Mystery

Notes 5456-5461, undated, circa 1917.

Life itself creates the human riddle. – The soul decays without spiritual nourishment. While self-deception is possible, actual death is not. – The animal is incorporated into the evolution of the world; but not the human being. – He must incorporate himself.

There is progress in modern science that was hoped to help solve the riddles of existence.

The advances in physics and chemistry. The path led to the atom. It was hoped that the facts of the external world could be understood from the way atoms fit together.

Where did we end up: “that an iron atom must be more complicated than a Steinway grand piano” - A. Rowland based on spectral-analytical observations. (Kolbe calls van 't Hoff's stereometric formulas “hallucinations”.)

And in biology: Nägeli:

The ovum contains all the essential characteristics of the species just as much as the developed organism does, and as ovums the organisms differ from each other no less than in the developed state. The hen's egg contains the species just as completely as the hen does, and the hen's egg is just as different from the frog's egg as the hen is from the frog.

Thus, we encounter the same world in miniature. Therefore, we will not be able to answer the questions that arise in the context of the world of ordinary observation by looking at the world of the microscopic.

Likewise, we encounter nothing in the astronomically or geologically large that is not also present in the terrestrial world.

People who receive a feeling from this fact arrive at philosophy. This seeks to arrive at a solution to the human riddle from the concepts developed in the ordinary world. But these concepts only lead to the insight that they are powerless to answer the questions that man must ask.

Anthroposophy is therefore based on what is developed in man through an awakening with the help of the invigoration of thinking. In the physical, the spiritual becomes spiritually perceptible. Thinking, which is otherwise only produced in the physical world as a dead thing, is thereby truly connected with the soul life. Together with the soul, it interacts differently with the outside world. Anthroposophy thus comes to experience the etheric body.

Instinctively, Troxler's “Riddle of Man” p. 94 and I. H. Fichte ibid. p. 82ff.

Secondly, anthroposophy comes to recognize that this being can also be observed. The ether body is found when the thought process is detached from external perception. The soul body is found when the will is detached from the drives, affects, etc. In connection with these, it is blind; when it is detached from them, it sees spiritually. There is an “inner man.” Ed. v. Hartmann pointed to him as a hypothesis.

The fate of his philosophy.

The “inner man” can be found in a more recent philosophy as the “subconscious” (subliminal consciousness).

James calls this “the discovery made for the first time in 1886”.

Anthroposophy seeks the means to make use of this consciousness.

G. Tyrrel (translated into German in 1909 by E. Wolff. Between Scylla and Charybdis) speaks of a “sphere of dark knowledge and darkly knowable objects”.

Just as in the physical world, past experiences are brought into the present consciousness through memory, so the experiences of the subconscious person are brought into the realm of ordinary consciousness. (Otherwise they only come up in the form of dark impulses).

What a philosophy like Hartmann's instinctively postulated comes about: ordinary consciousness participates in the interaction of the “inner man” with the “spiritual world”.

Insight into the details of the spiritual world is not sought; it arises as a consequence. (Example of how some want the one without the other.) (Verification is absurdly demanded by those who do not understand.)

In the experience of thinking, the world is experienced - that which is sought through knowledge. However, the questions are not put aside. One does not have to enter into another world; one is constantly in it. One must develop a spiritual eye for this other world.

One must not step out of the spirit, but experience the rhythm of the world in the spirit. (Comparison with a person traveling in a train. The inner experiences in different ages.)

Anthroposophy has a different starting point from the mystical endeavors of the past, with which it is often confused. These were based on religious experiences. They therefore led to sectarianism. Because they have subjective content. Followers gained only through authority. Anthroposophy is based on scientific experiences. Also from scientific needs. It leads to religious experience. Therefore, it has a different effect than modern natural philosophy and philosophy. One will understand theology again. He does not really love Christianity who believes it endangered by knowledge. “On the Riddle of Man” $. 273.

J. Böhme:

All this is Babel, which clashes with each other and argues about the letter; for these all stand in one root, the Spirit of God. Who judges the birds in the forest, who praise the Lord with many a voice, each in its own way? All their sounds proceed from God's power, and before him they play. Therefore men, who quarrel and despise each other about science and about the will of God, are more foolish than the birds of the forest and more useless than the meadow flowers, which nevertheless keep silent to the Spirit of God and let him reveal his wisdom and power through them. What should they quarrel about for long around that in which they live and whose essence they themselves are?

Arrhenius:

Sometimes we hear it said that we live in the “best of all possible worlds”; it is difficult to say anything well-founded about that, but we - at least the natural scientists - can say with complete certainty that we live in the best of times. We can say, with the great connoisseur of nature and man, Goethe, in the firm hope that the future will only get better: It is a great delight
to place oneself in the spirit of the times.
To see how a wise man thought before us,
And how we have then ultimately come so gloriously far.

But Faust (alone):

How can I not despair when I think
Of all the empty stuff I know,
How I dig for treasure with my greedy hand,
And am glad when I find earthworms!

It is a great experience
to rise to the spirit of the times
to hear how so many a true sage speaks:
Only by striving do we reach the light!

Kolbe: van 't Hoff had “mounted Pegasus (apparently borrowed from the veterinary school)” to announce: “how the atoms in space appeared to him on the chemical Parnass he had scaled by bold flight.”

Goethe:

Man in himself, insofar as he uses his healthy senses, is the greatest and most accurate physical apparatus that can exist, and that is precisely the greatest misfortune of modern physics, that one has separated the experiments, as it were, from man, and recognize nature only in what artificial instruments show, yes, what it can achieve, thereby limiting and wanting to prove.

But

But man stands so high that the otherwise unrepresentable is represented in him. What is a string and all its mechanical divisions compared to the musician's ear? Yes, one can say what the elementary phenomena of nature themselves are compared to man, who has to tame and modify them all in order to assimilate them to some extent.

O. Hertwig:

The principle of utility, the conviction of the necessity of unrestricted commercial and social competition, and materialistic schools of philosophy are forces that played a major role in the [modern] development of humans even without Darwin. Those who were already under their influence welcomed Darwinism as a scientific confirmation of ideas already familiar and dear to them from other sources. They could now see themselves, as it were, in the mirror of science. The interpretation of Darwin's theory, with its imprecisions and ambiguities, also allowed for a wide range of applications in other areas of economic, social and political life. From it, everyone could, as from a Delphic oracle, depending on what he wanted, draw his conclusions about social, political, hygienic, medical and other issues and, to support his assertions, invoke the science of biology, reworked in a Darwinian way, with its unalterable laws of nature. But if these supposed laws are not such, should there not also be social dangers when they are applied in other areas? One should not believe that human society can use phrases such as “relentless struggle for existence” [1], “selection of the suitable” [2], “the useful” [3], “the expedient” [4], improvement by natural selection [5] etc. in their transfer to the various fields, like daily bread, without being influenced more deeply and lastingly in the whole direction of their idea formation!

1. unrelenting struggle for existence: fruitful harmony of souls
2. Selection of the suitable: Cultivation of every justified aspiration
3. of the useful: Recognition of the usefulness of the spiritual
4. of the expedient: of that which elevates life
5. Perfection through breeding selection: Perfection through the mutual complementation of people