The Human Soul, Fate and Death

GA 70a — 20 March 1915, Munich

10. Roots and Blossoms of German Intellectual Life

According to incomplete, summary notes

Dear attendees, there is no need to dwell on the reasons why these two lectures are dedicated to the consideration of German intellectual life in these fateful times. Our feelings must naturally be directed towards what the German people have to defend, locked inside a great fortress. Not only do our enemies today talk about their own bravery in such a way that they not only count on their weapons, but also on the hunger over which they believe they have power. They are also trying hard to persuade themselves and others that the German people have a spiritual essence within them that is not worth preserving. We are like being locked in a fortress, not only surrounded by the roar of weapons, but also, in a cowardly manner, by hunger. The question arises as to what the German essence, the German spirit is, which is to be defended in the face of the changing winds. It goes without saying that spiritual science can only be expressed as a result, as an attitude. What was most attacked before spiritual science emerged in modern culture was something that modern culture had more or less lost. The concept of the folk soul is not abstract for certain character peculiarities, but it is a real entity for the spiritual eye, so that, as we allocate the entity of outer nature to the four realms, we recognize beings with individuality in spiritual science, beings with individuality. Therefore, we speak of different folk souls of the individual peoples, as one speaks of what is in reality of the outer senses. Only when one tries to see the German national soul within the German nation does one get a true idea of spiritual science. However, one must then also speak of the soul of the individual. Psychology speaks of it, but in such a way that it sees a chaotic jumble of will impulses and thoughts. Spiritual science cannot speak in this way.

The world will increasingly recognize that a genuine scientific consideration of the soul must take into account the threefold nature of the soul. Just as a physicist distinguishes the rainbow shades of yellowish-reddish, green, and blue-violet in light, so too, in the same genuine scientific sense, spiritual science will have to acknowledge that the soul expresses itself in three forms: as a sentient soul, inasmuch as it encompasses everything instinctual that does not arise from the brightness of thought, as in the reddish-yellowish. In green, the soul of reason reveals itself. As the blue-violet is in the light, so is the human soul, which can be called the soul of consciousness. This distinction is not arbitrary, but arises from a closer examination of what it means to be human, what is connected to the human spirit through the noblest core, what goes through birth and death, the eternal, where it all leads to, what is in the subconscious, even in the dream-like: the eternal core of being. The intellectual soul stands in the midst of the soul's nuances, like the color green in the midst of light. Through ideas and concepts, it is connected to the eternal and pours out onto the outside with the temporal and the transitory. In the present, it lives out with all the qualities that keep the human being firmly grounded, but which are also the temporary ones that only reveal themselves between birth and death. This structure is something truly real. The light lives in all color nuances, and so the human ego lives as the actual self-grasping in all three soul nuances.

The folk souls in the sense of spiritual science differ in such a way that one folk soul, for example, preferably takes hold of the individual in the scale of feeling. Of course, the individual human being can rise above the popular to the general human. What I say applies as long as he experiences himself in his nationality. The way in which the human being stands in his nation offers, as it were, a relationship between the sentient soul and the national soul. What works in will take hold of the drives and passions. We have this in the Italian nationality. In a second case, when the national soul works in the intellectual soul, permeating the views, thinking, concepts and ideas of individual nationalities, we can observe this within the French nationality. And where the national soul works in the consciousness soul, which is currently the most transient and is completely bound to the physical world, we can observe this in the British people at the present time.

I am aware that what I am saying is not based solely on observations of the present. Many here know that I have been saying this for years. On the other hand, I know that it will gradually become part of human knowledge, just as light in its various colors is part of physical science. Since a direct relationship to the folk soul is expressed in all three soul-members, to the whole rule and weave of the soul within the human being, we have considered the relationship of the individual German, insofar as he belongs to Germanness, to his folk soul. In this way, one can gain insights into the peculiar national cultures of the individual peoples. One can say even more for the sake of enlightenment.

The Western nations had a special link to the collective soul of the folk soul. They added this to the culture in such a way that they participate in a folk age that is different from that of the Germans. They tie in with what comes from Greco-Roman and earlier cultures. So they tie in with what emerged as a current from ancient times, which appears as an immature age of nations compared to the German one, where the individual grasps himself as a special thinker, where he does not listen to mythologies, to something coming from outside, but seeks to arrive at a worldview through his own judgment. The German entered European culture in manhood. Thus, one people can be understood while another people is going through a completely different age. One must know that all peoples went through a clairvoyant age before that. I have mentioned how Ludwig Laistner has not yet fully recognized that all myths, all pictorial narratives, come from a time when people still had clairvoyance, not a dream state, but not fully awake, a state that shows reality, but in images. What the Greeks, the Romans, the peoples of Europe depict in their myths and legends is only one expression of what the individual peoples have really experienced. This has already been done in the “Riddles of the Sphinx”. It depends on how a people goes through the transition from ancient clairvoyance to later clairvoyance, one could say to scientific knowledge. We find everywhere that the world view of the German goes into the whole disposition, while the others were still in a less mature state of mind when they came out of ancient clairvoyance. Their world view has formed itself as if [instinctively]. Their self was not fully present. Even Christianity is still felt as if it were brought from outside. When one sees pictures, one says, they are there, so say these peoples, the world view is there.

The German people are different. They confront us as they experience the great clash with the Romance peoples of the south; there they are already beyond the stage that we have in the oldest stories, myths, the personality is what is emphasized. We feel in the “Nibelungenlied” that everything depends on the human personal qualities playing out, courage and so on, what the human being can suffer. The other people are confronted with what they are looking at. In the “Nibelungenlied”, the German is personally linked to what he has had depicted. When the “Nibelungenlied” was already overcome, a figure from it was used by Richard Wagner; Brünhilde, Hagen, Siegfried. In the “Nibelungenlied” we see how the Central European Germanic peoples connected with other cultures. It was necessary for the Germanic peoples to form a worldview through their own efforts. It had to differ from that which was unfolding all around them. What appeared at the height of Italian art in Dante must be compared with Wolfram von Eschenbach's “Parzival”. In Dante's “Divine Comedy”, a sum of images leads up, connected at the top with medieval scholasticism. And how Dante's personalities are shaped by the passions. How isolated Dante's “Divine Comedy” is from the human. In “Parzival,” the portrayal of the human soul is such that the soul itself is present with everything that lives in it, that the soul only progresses through that with which it lives in its most intimate. Then we see that the German spirit cannot go to a worldview that is presented to it as a revelation, but that it wants to have it as an intimate experience of the soul, as every concept wants to be experienced.

One must see in the time of German mysticism, Meister Eckhardt, Tauler, how they describe the coexistence of the individual human souls with the spirit. It is, as it were, a dialogue between the individual German and the spirit of the people, in which the soul is present with all its sufferings and bliss. The soul must become very still, throw out what it is itself, and be only in its secret closet, then it is with its God, experiences what pervades it as the divine. The mood that it can undergo is wonderful, what rules and moves in the universe, when it lets God rule in it. Later, in Angelus Silesius, this intimate togetherness is expressed in dogmatic sayings. He mentions:

I neither die nor live. God himself dies in me, And what I am to live, he also lives for and for. I die and live God: if I want to live for him forever, Then I must also give up the ghost for him forever.

The soul is filled with the divine spiritual, but since God cannot die, death is only an appearance. Thus, someone like Jakob Böhme, who is very popular in German spiritual life, feels the soul, which does not pass through the vital organs but is the eternal core of being within the body, still fully conscious in the body.

Dying is a new birth: “He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies,” that is, he who does not turn his attention to what passes through the portal of death. Wherever we look, we can see the German spirit's world view in such a way that nothing shines forth from the old point of view into the time when he wants to gain a new world view. His self is firmly established in carrying all his strength and efficiency into the outer world of sense. We see, when in the Romanic culture the nations accepted Christianity, how a strong ascetic current emerges, how the human self separates, its thinking separates. But the German cannot so easily cast aside what is his own self, and so he will carry this into many views of the spiritual and divine in nature, just as in the Song of the Nibelungs, lamentation is derived from bliss and sorrow from suffering. Nature cannot fully satisfy the soul; if it does not see the supersensible in it, it must appear tragic until one sees through the veil of nature that by which one does not perish. Therein lie the roots of German spiritual life.

What was produced later produced the flower in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which leads to a worldview. Always in the national, not in the individual, we see everything in Italy coming out in relation to the passions, in France that which stimulates the mind, that which encourages abstract ideas-tendencies. All schematizing, all bringing into a system, behind which the self runs. They say there that rhymeless verses are not poetic, that there is no rounding off. It is the same everywhere, especially in relation to rationalism. It is the same in all fields, one cannot see beyond it, one must elevate oneself with the self to what is schematized. The German essence should live intimately in what it unfolds as experience up to the supersensible. In alliteration, the soul's immediate feeling passes over, there it is striven for by the intimate progression of the soul itself, not by rhyme.

Within British nationality, that which relates to the transitory, to the external sense world, would be. It is empiricism, as rationalism is in French nationality. Idealism is basically the original field, which becomes the direct roots of German intellectual life. From this it can be understood how Darwin's system of nature was able to pursue the purely material from the British mind, as with the philosopher Locke, and to glimpse the religious aspect alongside it, without grasping it through experience, as the German mind does.

The English mind was prevented from making the same radical mistake by its adherence to matter that Haeckel made out of the merits of the German mind: to make a monistic world view out of Darwin's system of nature. Little by little, spiritual science must unfold in such a way that it not only has idealism, but also imbues it with spiritual weaving. It is uncomfortable to live up to the great German philosophers in terms of what they experienced at the full sap of their thoughts. One sees how this includes the fruit of real, actual spiritual realizations. The German spirit has advanced from the root to the flower, which includes the hope that the fruit, the spiritual realization, will come from it. This German spiritual insight will still have much to say about the development of the world as a whole. It concerns us, and it is this that will have to be defended against the enemies who rail and revile, who go so far as to fall prey to mental illness over the German essence.

In the prime of German intellectual life stands Lessing. I would like to draw your attention to his testament, “The Education of the Human Race.” He sees himself forced to assume that the soul must pass through life not just once, but repeatedly. Clever people say that Lessing was already growing old at the time. One can move from Lessing to Herder, who, in opposition to Voltaire's rationalism that ideas should live out in history, said that it is not ideas, but behind them are weaving, real entities, concrete spirit. He already points to spirit-cognition, says that the culture of the earth will not perish before enlightenment has occurred.

One flowering of this intimate coexistence of the individual soul with the spiritual, of the striving for a worldview from within the real personality, is “Faust”, which no other nation can match. It is not artistically rounded off, and the second part is aesthetically contestable in many ways. But the striving for a popular worldview becomes in it a continuous experience of the self, of the I. Faust strives to go beyond what can be given from the outside, to enter into dialogue with the concrete spirit. He really has it around him in all reality, and when he wants to lead it to the sources of life, his counterpart Mephisto comes to meet him. Faust calls out to him: “In your nothingness, I hope to find the All”. This is a truly German saying, it does not lead to nothingness, but to the source of existence. Through pain and suffering, Faust seeks what is inadequate for the merely external. Those who immerse themselves in the intimate striving of the German spirit are left with the impression of madness, as expressed by the world in a journal that has indeed gone mad: “Robbery was the slogan of the German race at all times”.

That is how far the European world has come in its judgment of the German spirit with the unilluminated intellectual! Hebbel said: “Everyone basically hates the German essence - that was a long time ago - as the bad hate the good. If they would succeed in eradicating it, they would have to scrape it out of the grave with nails afterwards.”

The moods that are now coming from abroad as pathological phenomena have long since been formed as intellectual currents from the passions present in the nationalities, to which only one image of the soul is assigned, while the German must sacrifice the whole soul on the altar of intellectual existence. Only the sacrificed soul gives back what arises from the sacrificial fire. The others seek only through individual shades of the soul. This may now be emphasized, where the German essence is so reviled.

Is there not some truth in the words of someone who says: “Germany made [the most significant revolution of modern times], the Reformation.” This is a proud word about the German essence, which relates to the others as higher mathematics relates to elementary mathematics. It was said in Paris in 1870 by Ernest Renan. In the same letter, when compared with it, one can see what a contrast there is between what Central Europe strives for in terms of world view and how it wants to live it out, and how it is in the West, even when tackling the highest problems such as “The Life of Jesus”.

We always have to hear that Central Europe wanted the war. But let us listen from France to Germany. He – Renan – believes that the Germans should be careful not to take land from the French, and that the French would then improve and realize that they had started the war unjustly. David Friedrich Strauß, to whom the letter was addressed, replied that Renan should forgive him, but that he could not see Gaul as a penitent Magdalene. Renan then says that there is a current in France that says that if France's integrity is saved, we – the French – will make up for the mistake of the previously stolen Alsace-Lorraine, not through revenge; it is different if they have to cede Alsace-Lorraine, then there will be hatred, and the eternal goal will be the destruction of the German race.

Rationalism is capable of saying: just as in higher mathematics, annihilation follows from the alliance with anyone who offers himself. Such logic is a bitter pain, a contradiction that mocks everything that is natural feeling. There is no need to sing the praises of self in order to characterize what has become of the German people through the pursuit of an intimate worldview.

In the West and Northwest, among the British people, there is no understanding; it is impossible for them to even absorb the basic nerve of the German being, nor in the East. Slavophilism has developed there, and it is imbued with the idea that what lives in the West as culture is rotten and must be replaced by what it itself has. And we are in the West of Russia! The individual Russian person is so attached to his or her national soul that it does not yet have an effect on them, that it has not yet taken hold of either the individual soul nuance or the whole self, but rather it hovers like a cloud over what the individual person experiences. The individual soul is not yet reached by it.

In what Italian culture produces in the way of emotional culture, in French rationalism, in British empiricism, we can see the popular soul coming to life. With the Russian people, it hovers over the experience, which is why the Orthodox religion, which has become completely rigid, is allowed to spread over the individual, who bows down under it but is not seized by it. He does not strive to receive spiritual life, but humbles himself under the yoke, bending from the outside. It is a saddening impression to attend such an Orthodox service at the Österfeiern, as the individual behaves quite impersonally towards what is happening, taking in nothing personal. It is precisely in this that superiority to the West is sought. In what is produced as a necessary result of the whole Central European spirit, salvation could be found there in the east, but in Slavophilism they resist developing the mind, absorbing something of what should have been incorporated into the soul of the Russian people. Those who have risen above the level of brutal Slavophilism, who have brought the torch of war and brutal warfare, have realized this.

One of these discerning minds was Solowjow. He is not a Faustian soul, but wants to look up in humility. Therefore, what remains in him is what lives in the individual Russian soul, an anarchy of the soul. We can follow it up to Solowjow, despite his tremendous greatness. [...] Solowjow had to ask himself: What can we offer from here in Central Europe? There is a deep misunderstanding between the East and Central Europe. Why is Central Europe hated by Eastern Europe? He says: When Europe looks at our pretensions and demands, it is heard that it is something great, but what we can offer from the substance of our people, we can only babble phrases.

Even where the German spirit is fully experienced, there is everywhere such hatred, which had been preparing for a long, long time, as it is now, one can say, in a morbid way. What presents itself as a sign in this fateful time is an admonition to the German soul to become truly aware of its mission. This war can be a kind of warning for many. We will have to unlearn many things if we are to become aware of the German spirit.

It was possible that this man was admired as one of the reconciling spirits between Germany and the West. The novel was celebrated as a work of art, as if born out of the spirit of music itself, according to the critic Stefan Zweig of the “Berliner Tageblatt”. Then people were amazed that Romain Rolland joined the chorus of vilification against Germany. There we see how the events that are now unfolding have been prepared.

One can only say that from all that this time will and must bring, from the sum of blood, suffering, death, but also of courage and bravery, a warning must arise for everyone to become aware of what that body, which can be called the German people, holds in its striving to grasp the spiritual world, to grasp that which can enlighten people about their destiny. Nothing can be emphasized sharply enough in the present to lead to a deepening of that which has emerged from the roots over the centuries to flourish, and which now gives the hope of also bearing fruit. Anyone who takes spiritual science concretely and not just as an abstract hope can say that the individual person can die, but that a nation must not die before it has fulfilled its task. It is therefore feelings of hope and confidence that this event can awaken in us if we immerse ourselves more and more in the roots and blossoms of German intellectual life.

I will not choose my words to summarize, but rather a poem from the collection of an Austrian poet, Fercher von Steinwand, “German Sounds from Austria”: “Kyffhäuser Guests”. Each person in this poem expresses in his own way how the German spirit works, but one person expresses very deeply and powerfully what the German people can express when they draw from the roots and blossoms of the German spirit: what springs from the riddles of this earth,

what finds hearts, what masters minds,
What flows eternally speaking from the stars
And discloses an inimitable God;
What seemingly has been lost from time and world
And yet shoots around us in a thousand streams:
That is the primal power inherent in the German spirit,
To speak this out clearly, he has consciously sworn!