The Origin and Goal of the Human Being

GA 53 — 3 November 1904, Berlin

Theosophy and Tolstoy

The two mental images that must guide us through the labyrinth of world phenomena are life and form. Life is constantly changing in thousands upon thousands of forms. This life expresses itself in its most diverse manifestations. It would be without any outward revelation, without the possibility of presenting itself in the world, if it did not appear in ever new and new forms. Form is the revelation of life. But everything would disappear in the rigidity of form, all life would be lost if form did not continually renew itself in life, if it did not again and again become a seed in order to create new forms from the old ones. The seed of the plant becomes the developed form of the plant, and this plant must in turn become a seed and give existence to a new form. This is how it is everywhere in nature, and this is precisely how it is in the spiritual life of human beings. In the spiritual life of human beings and humanity, too, forms change, and life is sustained through the most diverse forms. But life would become rigid if forms were not constantly renewed, if new life did not spring forth from old forms.

As the ages change in the course of human history, we see life changing in the most diverse forms in these ages, even in the grand history. In the lecture on “Theosophy and Darwin,” we saw the manifold forms in which human cultures and what we call history have expressed themselves since then. We have seen some of these forms in the ancient Vedic culture of India. We have seen this change of form through the ancient Persian, then through the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian-Egyptian, then the Greco-Roman culture, and finally through Christian culture up to our time. But what is significant about the spiritual development of our time is that a common life is increasingly pouring out into forms, and our age can rightly be called the age of forms, the age in which human beings are taught in every way to live out their lives in form.

Wherever we look, we see the rule of form. We have the most brilliant example in Darwin. What did Darwin investigate and pass on to humanity in his teachings? The origin and transformation of animal and plant species in the struggle for existence. This is proof that our science is focused on external form. And what did Darwin have to explain, and explain openly? I have shown you how he emphasized that plants and animals live out their lives in the most diverse forms, but that, according to his conviction, there were original forms into which life was breathed by a world-shaping creator. That is Darwin's own statement. Darwin's gaze is directed toward the development of forms, toward the development of external appearance, and he himself feels the impossibility of penetrating into that which animates these forms. He accepts this life as a given; he does not want to explain this life. He does not look at it at all; rather, for him, the only question is how life develops.

Let us consider life in another field, the field of art. I want to speak only of one characteristic phenomenon of our artistic life, but I would like to illuminate it in its most radical manifestation precisely in this context. What a stir the buzzword naturalism—not meant in a negative sense—caused in the 1870s and 1880s! And this buzzword, naturalism, is entirely in keeping with the character of our time. This naturalism came out most radically in the Frenchman Zola. How powerfully he depicts human life! But his gaze is not directed directly at human life, but at the forms in which this human life is expressed. How it is expressed in mines, in factories, in neighborhoods where people perish in immorality, and so on—Zola depicts all these different manifestations of life, and basically all naturalists depict the same thing. They do not focus on life itself, but only on the forms in which life is expressed. Consider our sociologists, who are supposed to provide data on how life has developed and how it should develop in the future. The catchphrase of the materialist conception of history and historical materialism has been much talked about. But how do sociologists view the matter? They do not look at the human soul, not at the inner workings of the human spirit; they look at external life as it is represented in our economic life, how trade and industry flourish in this or that region, and how people must live as a result of this external structure of life. That is how sociologists view life. They say: What do we care about ethics and the idea of morality! Create better external forms, better external living conditions for people, and morality and standards of living will automatically rise. — Yes, in the form of Marxism, modern sociology has asserted that it is not the ideal forces in human life that are the most important, but the external forms of economic life.

All this shows you that we have arrived at a stage of development in which people's gaze is directed primarily toward the form of external existence. If you take the greatest poet of our time, Zbsen, you will see how his gaze is directed toward this form of existence and how, because he is simultaneously filled with the warmest feelings for the life of the soul, for a free life, he has, so to speak, been driven to despair by the way in which these forms have developed. This is the case with Henrik Ibsen. It is he who shows us life in its most diverse forms, who shows us how life in form always evokes contradictions, how souls perish and wither under the pressure of life forms. Symbolically, it is precisely for the forgetting of the spiritual-soul that he concluded his poem: “When we dead awaken.” It is as if he wanted to say: We modern people of contemporary culture are so completely enclosed in the external form of life that we have so often mastered . .. and when we awaken, how does the sight of spiritual life present itself to us in the fixed forms of society and worldview of the West? — This is the basic tendency in Ibsen's dramas, which is also expressed in his dramatic testament.

We have thus shed some light on the culture of forms in the West. In considering Darwinism, we have seen how the culture of forms is directed toward the external, mechanical life of nature, and how our soul is harnessed to completely circumscribed forms of life and society. We have seen how this has been achieved slowly and gradually, how our fifth, Aryan race has passed from the spirit of the ancient Vedic culture, which formed the mental image of life as animated as a result of direct observation, through the Persian, Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian culture, then through the Greco-Roman culture with its view that all of nature is animated. Among the Greeks, even the philosophers think that all of nature is animated. Then, in the 16th century, Giordano Bruno came along, who still found life in all of nature, in the entire universe, in the entire great world of stars. Then, in even later times, life gradually descended to complete entanglement with the outer form. That is the lowest level. I do not say this in a derogatory way, for every point of view is necessary. What makes a plant beautiful is its outer form, that which emerges from every aspect of the seed. Our cultural life has been externalized in many ways and has taken on the most diverse external forms. This must be so. Theosophy must understand this as an absolute necessity. It would be least appropriate for theosophists to criticize this. Just as a culture filled with spirit and life was once necessary, so too is a culture of form necessary for our age. A culture of form arose in science, in Darwinism, a culture of form in naturalism, a culture of form in sociology.

In the midst of this reflection, we must pause and ask ourselves: What must happen in our spiritual-scientific sense — we will once again consider the necessary reversal of the human spirit in the “Basic Concepts of Theosophy” — what must happen, then, when the form has been expressed? — It must renew itself; new, germinal life must enter into the form again!

Anyone who observes Zola's contemporary Tolstoy — first and foremost the artist — attentively and impartially from the point of view I have just outlined will find that in the artist, the observer of the various types of the Russian people, for example the soldier types, the type of the warlike man, which he described in “War and Peace” and later in “Anna Karenina,” a completely different tone prevails than in Western naturalism. Tolstoy is looking for something else everywhere. He can describe the soldier, the civil servant, the people of any social class, the people within a gender or a race — everywhere he seeks the soul, the living soul that expresses itself in everyone, albeit not in the same way. He lays out the simple, straight lines of the soul — but at the most diverse levels and in the most diverse forms of life. What is life in its various forms, in its manifold diversity, what is the one life? — this is a fundamental question that runs through Tolstoy's writings. And from here he then finds the possibility of understanding life even where it seemingly negates itself, where this life passes into death. Death remains the great stumbling block for the materialistic worldview. How can someone who only recognizes the external material world understand death, how can they finally come to terms with life, when death stands like a gate at the end of this life, filling them with fear and terror? Even as an artist, Tolstoy has already moved beyond this materialistic standpoint. Already in the novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” you can see how artistically the most materialistic is overcome, how in this character of Ivan a complete harmony is established in his innermost life. We have before us a sick person, not sick in body, but sick in soul. We hear and see from all the words Tolstoy says to us that he does not believe that the body is inhabited by a soul that has nothing to do with the body; rather, we hear from his words that he finds the expression of the soul in physical expression, that the soul makes the body sick when it is sick, that it is the soul that flows through the veins of the body. We see from this form of artistic representation how life finds itself. And a peculiar conception of death confronts us there, not as a theory, not as a dogma, but in feeling. This idea allows us to understand death not as an end, but as an outpouring of personality into the universe, as a loss in infinity and a rediscovery in the great primal spirit of the world. In this way, the problem of death is solved in a wonderful artistic manner. Death has become a blessing in life. The dying person feels the metamorphosis from one form of life to another.

This was Leo Tolstoy as an artistic contemporary of the naturalists: the seeker of life, the questioner of the mystery of life in its various forms. It could not be otherwise than that for him this mystery of life also became the center of his soul, his thinking and feeling, in a scientific and religious sense. Thus he sought to explore this mystery of life, seeking not only form but also life itself, wherever he encountered it. That is why he became the prophet of a new era that must overcome our own, an era that, in contrast to the development of natural science, will once again feel and recognize life. In Tolstoy's entire critique of Western culture, we see nothing other than the expression of a spirit that represents a young, fresh, childlike life, that wants to infuse it into the evolving human race, that cannot be satisfied with a culture that is mature, even overripe, expressed in its external form. This is the contrast between Tolstoy and Western culture. From this point of view, he criticizes the social forms and ways of life of the West — everything, in fact. That is the standpoint of his criticism.

We have seen in Darwinism that Western science has come to understand the forms of life, but that Darwin declared himself incapable of understanding anything about life itself, which he takes for granted as a fact. The entire culture of the West is built on the observation of form: we observe the external form in the development of stones, plants, animals, and humans. Wherever you open any of the books of Western science, it is form that is in the foreground. Let us recall once again what we have already considered: how Western researchers admit that they are faced with the mystery of life and are unable to penetrate it. The words “Ignoramus, ignorabimus” echo in our ears whenever science is asked to provide information about life itself. This science has something to say about how life takes shape in forms. But it knows nothing about how life itself behaves. It despairs of solving this mystery and says only: Ignorabimus. Tolstoy has found the right word, the right principle for contemplating life itself. I would like to read you a decisive passage from which you will see how he represents the standpoint of life in relation to all science of the forms of life:

“The false knowledge of our time” (in the West) “assumes that we know what we cannot know and that we cannot know what we really know. To the person with false knowledge, it seems that he knows everything that appears to him in space and time and that he does not know what is known to him through his rational consciousness.”

Such a person seems to think that the good in general and his own good are the most unfathomable objects for him. Almost as unfathomable to him are his reason and his rational consciousness; he seems somewhat more fathomable to himself as an animal; even more fathomable to him are animals and plants, and most fathomable of all is dead, infinitely widespread matter.

Something similar happens with the human face. Humans always unconsciously direct their gaze toward the most distant objects, which therefore appear to them to be the simplest in terms of color and contours: the sky, the horizon, distant fields and forests. These objects appear to them to be all the more definite and simple the farther away they are, and, conversely, the closer the object is, the more varied its contours and colors are. — "Isn't the same thing true of man's false knowledge? That which is undoubtedly known to him — his rational consciousness — appears to him to be unfathomable because it is not simple, but that which is unattainable to him — boundless, eternal matter — appears to him to be easily fathomable because it appears simple in the distance.

And yet the opposite is true."

The Western scientist first looks at stable, inanimate matter. Then he sees how plants, animals, and humans are built up from this as a result of chemical and physical forces; he sees how inanimate matter moves, clumps together, and ultimately produces the movement of the brain. But he cannot comprehend how life comes about, for what he examines is nothing but the form of life. Tolstoy says: Life is closest to us, we are immersed in it, we are life itself; of course, if we want to understand life by observing and examining it in its form, we will never understand it. We only need to see it within ourselves, we only need to live it, then we have life. Those who believe they cannot understand it do not understand life at all. - This is where Tolstoy begins his reflection on life and examines what humans can grasp as their life, even if the sophisticated, overripe way of thinking cannot comprehend it in the broad outlines of simple thinking: If you want to understand form correctly, you must look inside. If you only want to explore the formal laws of nature, how will you distinguish between meaningful life and meaningless life? According to the same higher laws, organisms are healthy and organisms become sick; according to exactly the same laws of nature, humans become sick just as they are healthy. — Once again, Tolstoy expresses himself in a significant way in his essay “On Life”:

"No matter how strong and rapid the movements of a person may be in feverish delirium, in madness or agony, in drunkenness, even in the outbreak of passion, we do not recognize the person as alive, do not treat him as a living person, and merely acknowledge his potential for life. But no matter how weak and immobile a person may be, when we see that their animal personality has submitted to reason, we recognize them as alive and treat them as such."

Tolstoy believes that the outer form only gains meaning for us when we do not merely study it externally, but when we directly grasp that which is not form, that which is only spirit, the inner, the essential. We can never penetrate to true life if we merely seek to grasp the form; but we will understand the forms if we move from life to form.

But Tolstoy does not approach his problem solely in this scientific way; he also approaches it from the moral side. How do we, in our human form, attain this true life, that which is lawful even in its external form? Tolstoy made this clear to himself by asking: How do I satisfy — how do my fellow human beings satisfy the need for their own well-being? How do I achieve satisfaction in my immediate personal life? Starting from the structure of animal life, human beings have no other question than: How do I satisfy the needs of the external form of life? — That is a low-level view. Those who say that it is not the individual who has to satisfy his needs, but that he has to fit into the common good, to integrate himself into a community, and not only to provide for what satisfies his own external life in its form, but that he has to see to it that this form of life is satisfied in all living beings, have a somewhat higher view. We should integrate ourselves into the community and subordinate ourselves to the needs of society. This is what numerous personalities, numerous ethicists and sociologists in the cultural development of the West regard as the ideal: the subordination of the needs of the individual to the needs of the community. But this is not the highest ideal, says Tolstoy, for what else do I have in mind but the external form? How one lives in the community, how one integrates into it, refers only to the external form. And these external forms are constantly changing. And if my individual personal life is not to be the immediate purpose, why should the life of the many be the purpose? If the personal well-being of the individual human life form is not an ideal, then the sum of many individuals cannot create an ideal of the common good. Neither the welfare of the individual nor the welfare of all can be the ideal: this only applies to the forms in which life first lives. Where do we recognize life? To whom should we submit ourselves, if not to the needs dictated by our lower nature, if not to what the common good or humanity prescribes?

That which desires welfare and happiness in the individual and in the community is, in its most diverse forms, life itself. Let us therefore grasp our moral, our innermost ideal not according to external forms, but according to what yields itself to the soul, what presents itself to the soul in its innermost being, through the God who lives in it, as an ideal. This is the reason why Tolstoy again draws on a kind of higher form of Christianity, which he considers to be true Christianity: seek the kingdom of God not in outward gestures, in forms, but within. Then you will realize what your duty is when you grasp the life of the soul, when you allow yourself to be inspired by the God within you, when you listen to what your soul is saying to you. Do not lose yourself in forms, however great and powerful they may be! Return to the original, unified life, to the divine life within yourself. When human beings do not absorb ethical ideals and cultural ideals from outside, but allow what springs from their hearts, what God has placed in their souls, to flow out from their souls, then they have ceased to live merely in form, then they truly have a moral character. That is inner morality and inspiration.

From this point of view, he attempts a complete renewal of all life and worldview in the form of what he calls his original Christianity. Christianity has become externalized according to his view, has adapted to the various forms of life that have emerged from the culture of different centuries. And he expects a time to come again when the form will be pulsating with new inner life, when life must once more be grasped in a direct way. That is why he never tires of pointing out, in new forms and ever new forms, that it is important to grasp the simplicity of the soul, not the complicated life that always wants to experience something new. No! Tolstoy prescribes as an ideal that the simplicity of the soul must strike the right note, that the confusion of external science, external artistic representation, and the luxury of modern life must first be connected with the immediate simplicity that wells up in the soul of every individual, regardless of their form of life and society. And so he becomes a harsh critic of the various cultural forms of Western Europe, he becomes a harsh critic of Western science. He declares that this science has gradually become rigidified into dogma, like theology, and that Western scientists appear to be genuine dogmatists filled with a false spirit. He judges these scientists harshly. Above all, he judges what is striven for as an ideal in these scientific forms, and those who seek the “be-all and end-all” of all striving in our sensual well-being. For centuries, humanity has striven to bring forms to their highest level, to see the highest in external possessions and external well-being. And now—we know that we should not condemn this, but rather regard it as a necessity—well-being should not be limited to individual classes and strata, but should be shared by all. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with that, but Tolstoy objects to the form in which Western sociology and Western socialism attempt to achieve it. What does this socialism say? It assumes that external forms of life can be transformed. The nature of material culture should lead people to a higher standard of living, to a higher way of life. And then it is believed that those who are better off, who have better external prospects, will also have higher moral standards. All moral efforts of socialization are directed toward subjecting the external form to a revolution.

Tolstoy opposes this. For it is precisely the result of cultural development that it has led to the formation of the most diverse class and status differences. Do you believe that if you push this culture of form to the extreme, you will really achieve a higher cultural ideal? You must grasp the human being where he gives himself form. You must improve his soul, pour divine moral powers into his soul, then he will transform the form from within his life. This is Tolstoy's socialism, and it is his view that no renewal of moral culture can ever arise from any transformation of the formal culture of the West, but that this renewal must come from the soul, from within. Therefore, he does not become a preacher of a dogmatic moral ideal, but a promoter of a complete transformation of the human soul. He does not say that human morality increases when human external circumstances improve, but rather: precisely because you have started from the external form, the gloominess that you live in has poured over you. You will only be able to overcome this way of life again when you transform people from within. — In sociology, as in Darwinian scientific observation, we have the last remnants of the old culture of form. But we have the beginnings of a new culture of life. Just as we have the descending line there, we have the ascending line here. Just as the old man, who has already reached his destiny, his way of life, is incapable of completely renewing himself, just as the new way of life emerges from the freshly growing child through inner animation from what is still undifferentiated and allows diversity to sprout, so too can a new way of life emerge from an old cultural people. That is why Tolstoy sees the Russian people as a people not yet taken over by Western cultural forms; he sees them as the people within whom this life of the future must sprout. It is precisely from his observation of this Slavic people, who today still view European cultural ideals—both European science and European art—with dull indifference, that Tolstoy asserts that an undifferentiated spirit lives within them, one that must become the bearer of the future cultural ideal. In this he sees what is to come. His criticism is based on the great law of evolution, the law that teaches us about the change of forms and the continual new germination of life.

In the tenth chapter of his book “On Life,” he writes: “And the law that we know within ourselves as the law of our life is the same law according to which all external phenomena in the world take place, with the only difference being that we know this law within ourselves as something that we ourselves must carry out — but in external phenomena as something that takes place according to these laws without our intervention.”

Thus Tolstoy places himself within the ever-changing life that is in the process of development. We would be very poor representatives of spiritual science if we could not understand such a phenomenon in the right sense; we would be poor spiritual scientists if we only wanted to preach ancient truths. Why do we make the content of ancient wisdom our own? Because ancient wisdom teaches us to understand life in its depths, because it shows us how the divine always appears again and again in the most diverse forms. A poor representative of spiritual science would be someone who became a dogmatist, who only wanted to preach what ancient wisdom contains, who withdrew and faced life coldly and alienated, blind and deaf to what is happening in the immediate present. The wisdom teachings have not taught us ancient wisdom so that we can repeat it in words, but so that we can live it and learn to understand what is around us. The development of our own race, which has broken down into different forms since the ancient Indian culture up to our own, is described and outlined for us in detail in that ancient wisdom. And there is also talk of a future development, of a development into the immediate future. We are told that we are at the beginning of a new era. Our intellect, our intelligence, have attained their form as a result of passing through the various realms of existence. Our physical powers of understanding have achieved their highest triumphs in the culture of form of our time. The mind has penetrated the natural laws of form and, in mastering these natural laws, has reached the highest level, in the great and mighty advances of technology, in the great and mighty advances of our lives. Now we stand at the beginning of an epoch in which something must pour into this intellect, something that must grasp human beings from within and shape them. That is why the theosophical movement has chosen as its motto and set itself the goal of forming the core, the seed of a universal brotherhood of humanity. No distinction should be made according to views, class, gender, skin color, or religious beliefs; life is to be sought in all these forms. What we envision as our spiritual ideal is an ideal of love, which human beings, when they become aware of their divinity, experience as the kingdom of God within them. Theosophy refers to manas as the culture of intellectuality, the culture of the mind; to buddhi as that which is permeated by the inner essence, by love, that which does not want to be wise without being filled with love. And just as our race has brought it to the culture of Manas through the intellect, so the next step will be to bring it to the individuality filled with love, where human beings act out of their higher, inner, divine nature and are absorbed neither in the chaos of outer nature nor in science nor in social life. If we grasp the spiritual ideal in this way, then we can say that we understand this ideal correctly, and then we must not misjudge a personality who lives among us and who wants to give new impulses to the development of humanity.

How beautiful and consistent with our teachings are many of Tolstoy's statements regarding the conception of the human being in his immediacy. I would like to read just one more passage that is particularly characteristic of his moral ideal: "The whole life of these people is directed toward the imagined enlargement of their personal well-being. They see the welfare of the personality only in the satisfaction of their needs. They call all those conditions of existence of the personality to which they have directed their reason the needs of the personality. However, the conscious needs — those to which their reason is directed — always grow infinitely as a result of this consciousness. The satisfaction of these growing needs closes them off from the demands of their true life."

Tolstoy says, then, that personality does not include rational consciousness. Personality is a characteristic of animals and of humans as animals. Rational consciousness is a characteristic of humans alone. Only when humans transcend mere personality, when they become aware of the preponderance of individuality over the personal, when they understand how to become impersonal, how to let impersonal life reign within themselves, do they step out of the culture entangled in external forms and into a vibrant culture of the future.

Even if it is not what theosophy recognizes as its ideal, even if it is not the ethical consequence we draw from theosophy, it is nevertheless a step toward the ideal, since human beings only learn to live when they look not at personality but at the eternal and imperishable.

This eternal and imperishable, the Buddhi, the seed of wisdom that rests in the soul, is what must replace the mere culture of the intellect. There is much evidence that Theosophy is right in its view of the future of human development. The most important, however, is that similar forces are already asserting themselves in life itself, which we must now truly grasp and understand in order to fill ourselves with their ideals.

The great thing about Tolstoy is that he wants to lift people out of the narrow circle of their thoughts and deepen them spiritually, that he wants to show them that ideals are not outside in the material world, but can only spring from the soul.

If we are true theosophists, then we will recognize evolution; then we will not remain blind and deaf to what shines toward us in our present in the theosophical sense, but we will truly recognize these forces, which are usually spoken of in a poetic way in theosophical writings.

It must be the characteristic of a theosophist that he has overcome darkness and error, that he has learned to assess and recognize life and the world in the right way.

A theosophist who would withdraw, remain cold and alienated from life, would be a poor theosophist, no matter how much he knew. Such theosophists, who lead us up from the sensory world to a higher one, who themselves look into supersensible worlds, should also teach us on the other side how we can observe the supersensible on the physical plane and not lose ourselves in the sensory.

We explore the causes that come from the spiritual in order to fully understand the sensory, which is the effect of the spiritual. We do not understand the sensory if we remain within the sensory, for the causes of sensory life come from the spiritual.

Theosophy wants to make us clairvoyant in the sensory world, which is why it speaks of ancient wisdom. It wants to transform human beings so that they can see clearly into the high supersensible mysteries of existence, but this should not be achieved at the expense of understanding what is immediately around us.

As I said, a poor clairvoyant if he were blind and deaf to what is happening in the sensory world, to what his contemporaries in his immediate surroundings are capable of accomplishing, and he would also be a poor clairvoyant if he were unable to recognize in a personality that which leads people into the supersensible in our time. What good would it do us if we became clairvoyant and were unable to recognize what lies immediately before us as our next task?

A theosophist must not withdraw from life; he must know how to apply theosophy directly to life. If theosophy is to lead us up to higher worlds, we must bring supernatural insights down to our physical plane. We must recognize the causes that lie in the spiritual realm. Theosophists should stand in life, understand the world in which their contemporaries live, and recognize the spiritual causes for the various epochs of development.