The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences

GA 76 — 3 April 1921, Dornach

1. Opening Address

Dearly beloved! Ours is a time of doubt and mystery that are given to humanity. And one can say that it is good for anyone who, in their innermost being, can honestly and with strength say to themselves in the face of present-day events: Yes, for me this time is a time of doubt, of mystery and of questions that need to be answered. — For if he could not say this to himself and yet looked with an alert soul at the events of the time, there would actually only be the other pole for him: despair at the continuation of human civilization in the West. And if our time holds hidden doubts, questions and riddles that need to be resolved, then we need the strength of those people who can find their way in the present chaos of civilization and who can bring forth from the flood of questions and riddles that which can lead to a new progress, to a building up of our Western civilization. Everything that is undertaken from this Goetheanum wants to contribute to the forces that time needs so that the doubts and riddles can be resolved in human souls.

In such a time of questions and riddles, the necessity will also arise for much of the content of ancient tradition to appear in a new light. Now shines up to us — as it were, like an ancient sacred legacy of Greek culture — the oft-repeated Apollonian saying: Know thyself! And much of Western civilization since ancient Greek times has been influenced by this saying. But it seems to me that even such a seemingly rock-solid magic word in the development of mankind can only survive today, in our times of great transformation, if it undergoes a kind of transformation itself, absorbing the forces of our time. And so it seems to me that the ancient oracle of Delphi must now sound to people as follows: Know thyself, and become a free being! — We must be able to see world events, insofar as they relate to human beings, swinging back and forth between the two poles of self-knowledge and true human freedom.

Why did Greek wisdom write the significant words on the temple at Delphi: “Know Thyself”? To this Greek wisdom there shone forth, from ancient times, historically undefinable in its origins, an ancient, sacred wisdom and science. The origins of this science go back into the darkness of prehistoric times. In Egypt, people still had direct access to this ancient wisdom. In Greece, people only had a feeling for it, albeit one steeped in noble Greek humanity, and they felt that this wisdom had come to people from the world, from the world itself, which was full of wisdom. Within the world of wisdom, man had felt like a more or less instinctive, more or less unconscious link in the whole of the world. Then, in the Greek feeling, the sense of the independence of the human soul dawned. In addition to the old world knowledge, the self-knowledge of man should be striven for. The ancient wisdom was based on the motto: Know the world and, in the world, know man! This motto of ancient wisdom shone forth in Greek civilization. But the urge to strive for this knowledge of the world with man in it, to strive for independent human self-knowledge, now asserted itself. To the: Know the world! was added: Know thyself. The Greek stood as it were on the shore of the past, absorbing the full content of the past treasures of wisdom. We – and I believe that any impartial person can feel this – stand on a different shore. We stand on the shore of an indeterminate future, but a future that humanity must create in a spiritual sense. And we feel that we need a new motto to help us reflect with all our human strength on what can work from within us into the indefinite future as a creative force. On the shore of the past, the Greeks established the motto: Know Thyself! — On the shore of an indefinite future, we must establish the motto: Become a free being! This building and everything that is done in it is intended to speak about that which lies in the oscillation between the two poles of human contemporary tasks. The short series of presentations of knowledge and art that are to take place in the next few days also intend to speak about this. We stand at the starting point of the great scientific mystery. Humanity has not yet experienced the full courage within itself to face this great, mighty scientific riddle. Natural science has achieved great and mighty things. It has adopted a way of looking at things through which one of the events that our souls see in the chain of causes and effects is necessarily followed by the other. And it is natural science's most natural endeavor to include the human being in this chain of natural necessity. The great ideal of natural science is to study natural phenomena with this law of causation, to perceive them — in accordance with their essence — according to this law of causation, and thus also to understand from man what is to be understood from him according to this law of causation. One does not yet fully understand with living feeling what this striving, this ideal, actually means for human life.

If we completely absorb ourselves in what we, through correct knowledge of nature, take in as the world necessity, then we ourselves, with our consciousness, stand in this world necessity, then we must say to ourselves: everything that is experienced in ourselves is only one link in the chain of necessities. But when we have acquired such an awareness through a proper immersion in the scientific view of life, then our innermost being revolts against this feeling, then an experience that shines through our soul speaks against this feeling, then we say to ourselves: as a human being I am free and I must grasp my freedom, with my knowledge I must penetrate just as much into the fabric of natural phenomena as into the life of my freedom.

If we take up this inner riddle of freedom in the full sense of the word, then we come to say to ourselves: The significant knowledge, the development of which has been going on for the last three to four hundred years and which has so significantly illuminated nature, needs to be extended in order to also illuminate the experience of human freedom. For those would always appear justified who, out of the scientific consciousness of the present, have said and continue to say: We can only comprehend nature; we cannot help but stop short of comprehending human freedom. We must repeat the old Kantian saying: To make room for faith, we must destroy knowledge. Yes, as long as we are immersed in mere knowledge of nature, this saying is true. But then comes the rebellion of human consciousness. And it is precisely in the proper appreciation of the greatest scientific achievements of modern times that the urge must arise to know, to recognize the experience of human freedom. And this knowledge must at the same time be an experience. For, starting from it, we must carry the strength that we gain from it out into social life, which today presents us with no fewer riddles and questions than the life of knowledge and belief. Just as the riddles and questions of knowledge and faith are lived out in the lonely room in inner struggles of the soul, so the other riddles and questions, the social ones, work tumultuously through the world because they are not worked on by human forces that, out of a clear consciousness of freedom, out of a consciousness of freedom experienced in knowledge, know how to work against what surrounds us today as social chaos.

Only those who penetrate the riddle of freedom with living knowledge are capable of bringing the power of harmonious human coexistence into social life. Because in recent centuries we have lost this power precisely by penetrating into the depths of external events, we now live in social chaos. Light will only dawn in this chaos when we step into it with the inner strength that comes from knowing how to see through the riddle of freedom. Just as the ancient Greek once stood questioning before all that an ancient wisdom handed down to him, standing questioning before: Know the world! — and passed over to the: Know thyself! —then we must stand questioning today before the saying: Man, become a free being!

Between these two poles of human activity, between the pole where the Greek sage threw into the multitude of thinkers and unbiased minds the word: Know thyself! - and the other pole, which expresses itself in the words: Man, become a free being! - lies, at bottom, an episode of human development.

It is tangible how an episode of human development lies between these two poles. Take the most modern of people, from whom this School of Spiritual Science borrows its name, Goethe. He found himself in the then already dawning and pressing modern life, sensing it in a time when most still lived fully in the traditions of the old. How did it affect Goethe's soul on the one hand in terms of true knowledge, and on the other hand in terms of true art, and in art in his case also in terms of religious deepening, of religious inwardness? All these impulses surged through his soul – which at that time were actually noticed only by him, at most by some of his friends, but which have since emerged into general human life – all these impulses tend towards the social life grasped in freedom. And when he felt strongly enough what lived in him like the dawn of a new era, he turned his back on the Nordic world and went to the south to sense from what remained of ancient Greek culture what the deepest essence of that Greek culture was. This modern man, Goethe, had wanted to build the wide-spanned bridge in his own soul across the episode between the future tasks of modern humanity and the comprehensive résumé of the past, as it was drawn in Greek culture.

And does not that which Goethe so vividly portrayed in his own personality live today in every human being who wants to strive upwards to that sphere where the great questions of the world can come to meet him in their true forms? Do not those who devote themselves to our education still draw from Greek culture that which should give this education its formal foundation? Is not the heart and mind of those who are educated in our grammar schools still imbued with Greek? We must feel this episode as Goethe felt it, first tragically and then redemptively for humanity. But then we shall also understand how we must turn to the other pole, the pole of human self-knowledge, in a new way, how we must approach it in the moment of world-historical development when the word resounds from our deepest innermost being: Man, become a free being! — also the: Know thyself! — differently than the Greek approached it.

Let us look around us, especially at those who have immersed themselves with all their soul in the modern scientific world view, who have become so great on its soil. We see how man, in observation as well as in experiment, through which so many puzzles have been solved for modern man, immerses himself in material existence. And we should listen more attentively than we are accustomed to to such a saying as was uttered by a Du Bois-Reymond, for example, out of this modern consciousness: where matter haunts, human knowledge can do nothing! — Modern knowledge has become accustomed to penetrating material existence. It has achieved great things in this field. Everywhere it follows how the material world is structured in material phenomena. But in order to decipher the fabric of material phenomena, it must presuppose that which it can never penetrate if it remains on its own ground: the world of matter itself.

It is a long story of what has taken place between the pursuit of human knowledge and the mystery of matter. What has taken place in the theoretical field is of little interest to us at this moment. But attention must be drawn to what has remained as a residue in the human mind, in all human life. No matter how much one believed that one was walking on mere paths of knowledge when dealing with material phenomena, no matter how much one established, by presupposing matter as such, a basis of feeling in the depths of the soul that permeates all human life. And we have such a basis of feeling. We can see it in the best of our contemporaries. They struggle with the material riddle; they wrestle with this material riddle. And a good number of them could not help but rise above this struggle and admit that the human riddle cannot be found, cannot be solved in this way, not even in a relative sense. And yet this solution is necessary for the security of the human soul. One would now like to get to the true essence of man “in the inner being of man”, but one has become accustomed to thinking and feeling one's mind on the outside world, “which cannot be seen through”, on the “conditions of material existence”. What one has become accustomed to doing there renounces seeing through. And if one turns this mind, which renounces seeing through, inwards, then one becomes a mystic in the modern bad sense.

Unfortunately, all too few people realize today that the best ones, who turn away from our knowledge of nature and come to a striving for knowledge of the human interior, have acquired their habits of thinking and feeling by observing “which is inscrutable”, and now they carry into the human interior what they have acquired as habits of thinking and feeling by observing the outside world. But when we turn our gaze, which we have first trained on dark and gloomy “matter”, inwards, it becomes nebulous mysticism, and nebulous mysticism bars the door to the knowledge of ourselves!

This is what everything that is done within this School of Spiritual Science seeks to emphasize. We must avoid the path of nebulous mysticism, as well as the path that leads only to outer scientific necessity and thus to the destruction of the knowledge of freedom. We can avoid these paths only if we seek real spiritual science, not that spiritual science which dare not stop short before the human soul, and which then, having stopped, continues the path by casting mystical fog into this human soul. This spiritual science, as it is meant here, must not do this! With the training that has been gained in bright, clear, light-filled knowledge of external facts, it must be possible to shine a light into the human interior, free of mysticism but in a spiritual scientific way. The: Know Thyself! must not be grasped in a mystical, dark way of life, but in a bright, clear clarity. Then will be united that which springs from man's inner knowledge, from the fulfillment of the word: Know Thyself! — and that which springs from his behavior of recognizing himself in relation to outer nature, under the watchwords: Man, become a free being!

These two words of truth may be seen as two pillars that stand ideally in the spirit when one enters this building: the pillar of truthful, light-filled human self-knowledge and the pillar of human freedom. The first is suited to remind people of that which can provide them with security and support, artistic activity and religious satisfaction. The second is suited to equip them with the strength to contribute to the pressing social issues of the present and the near future. From all that is aimed at here in the fertilization of the individual specialized sciences, as should become particularly apparent in the next few days, the world-historical moment should be grasped, as well as it can be grasped in all modesty, which places us on the shore of an indeterminate future, just as the Greek was placed on the shore of a fulfilled, overwhelming past.

But to do this, we must come to feel the light-filled grasp of the human interior in the knowledge itself, that we no longer merely drag the knowledge from external observation and external experiment, but that we freely raise it and, by permeating it with the inner being of the human being, we place ourselves with this knowledge in the life of freedom, in which mere scientific observation can never place us. From a scientific point of view it is honest to deny freedom, but it is human to protest against this denial and to see in this protest the starting point of a free spiritual science born out of the human soul and its organs.

This spiritual science, because it penetrates not into the dead but into the living, need not be feared as having a deadening effect on art, as does the dead science of the intellect. It will be able to fertilize art with what it draws from the spirit. This knowledge itself will be able to have an artistic effect on the outside, because it descends into human depths in clarity full of light. It will lead from true knowledge to the worship of that which can reveal itself in the human interior. And such knowledge, which only retains the form of mysticism but strives for the light, will at the same time lead human knowledge to religious

worship of the Highest, which lives and moves through the world. New artistic powers and new religious depths will be able to arise out of such knowledge, which grasps the inner being of man. And the life into which such knowledge may enter will be a life in freedom. It will first of all assure man of the consciousness of freedom. Man will no longer need to lose himself in the outer necessities of nature, as he does when he is merely aware of nature scientifically, because this is only a matter of necessity and not of freedom.

And the artist will become free from the mere model in the imitation of external nature, which he can never achieve anyway. From spiritual heights he will draw what he wants to impress on matter. A weak beginning of such a drawing of forms that reveal themselves to the free spirit, that are not linked to imitation in the model, should be what speaks from the forms and the artistic and the other artistic aspects of this structure.

And religious experience should be free from everything that is merely traditional, which approaches the human being as an external, unfree thing: freely grasping what reveals itself as the divine within the human being himself, freely connecting within with that power which, according to its true nature, only truly wants to connect with this human inner being in freedom: the power of Christ.

Knowledge in the most diverse fields – in the outer natural world, in the inner life of man, and in the all-embracing unity of both – that is the new striving for the fulfillment of the word: “Know thyself!” – a threefold step towards freedom: freedom in the inner experience of the most human, freedom in creative work, including artistic work, and freedom in religious experience. That is the other.

The cross-fertilization of the individual sciences and human endeavors, and of all of social life, is intended to lead to this, and will be discussed here over the next few days. It will be shown that not only can certain propositions be derived from the individual sciences, as a modern philosophy that is dying to death would have it, and then pieced together into an abstract world-view, but that a world-view can be gained through spiritual observation that embraces all sense impressions, and that this general world-view, grasped in the light of spirit, can shine into the individual specialized sciences.

It has also been demanded that the world view should draw nourishment from the individual sciences and their results. The time has come when the results of a spiritually experienced world view radiate into the individual sciences. However little the world may realize it today, what happens here in this place should never come from a different tone than the one that is itself impulsed on the one hand by the true: know yourself! - on the other hand from the: man, become a free being! — But this does not only call out to us from the lonely contemplation of science within the human being. This calls out to us in all of our catastrophic time today. And if we summarize what lies deepest in the riddles and questions of the times, that is what I have tried to suggest today.

We may speak in this way to the age about what is given to us by the signs of the times and by the sentient human being who stands within that time. These older people have experienced what it means to live in a catastrophic time. They feel how the ideals of their youth have been lost. They feel how they have poured out into a civilizational chaos what they believed in their youth they were contributing to modern Western civilization. To them, who have experienced such things, we may speak as we have today. For such a word must find the side in the life of the human soul that says: We must still use the rest of our lives to point out to humanity something stronger than what we have done.

And such words may also be spoken to young people. For they still see with full strength what is collapsing, what is living in catastrophe. They can feel, with their full human strength and enthusiasm, that something new and powerful must happen. And the right old person of today will seek out the word that can ignite in youth, so that other times see the souls that look out into the world from the eyes of today's youth, as the souls that look out into the world through today's old eyes must see.

And so one can speak to people of any age. One can speak to those who are called the “old houses” of all kinds in a certain language, and one can speak to young fellow students. Because one can speak not only out of the tasks of the times, but out of the greatest tasks of the human being itself. And we live in a time when the greatest questions of human life have become tasks for our time. We live in a time when we can look into the deepest interior of human beings. And we will see the call to action written there, to act in a direction that we will also find indicated when we look at the outer signs of the time with their clear language.

What lies in this twofold direction of view, I would like to speak about in the next few days. I would like the spoken word to find attention. Because in today's world, to understand the human being means to sense and feel an important thing in human life itself. Only he can rightly and justly place himself in the human activity of our time who is able to say: the signs of the time contain the challenge to look into the depths of the human soul with insight and spiritual recognition. And what the human being can fathom in his or her inner life today is at the same time what the clearly speaking signs of the time challenge us to recognize, feel, will and accomplish.

Rudolf Steiner's opening speech was followed by a lecture by Albert Steffen on “The Becoming of the Work of Art”.

Then Marie Steiner spoke the words of Hilarius, which Rudolf Steiner had already transformed for the opening ceremony of the First School of Spiritual Science: “The Guardian of the Threshold”:

In the name of that spirit which
Announces itself to the souls in our striving,
I appear at this moment
Before people who from now on want to hear
The word that sounds earnestly to the souls here.
Not earlier times could those powers,
that guide the aims of our earthly becoming,
could not reveal themselves in a fully conscious way.
For just as in the child's body,
the powers that are destined to be the vehicles of knowledge
must first gradually mature and grow stronger,
so humanity in its earthly course also had to unfold as a whole.
At first the soul impulses lived in dullness,
which were later to prove worthy of
seeing spiritual light from high worlds.
But when men were wise leaders
In the beginning of the earth, souls devoted to the spirit
Were chosen by higher powers of existence.
They used to send, in the places of knowledge,
The powers of the spirit, the rays of knowledge
Into souls that were only dimly aware
Of their ability to penetrate each other through their vision.
It was only later that spiritual researchers
were able to recruit students from the ranks of humanity
who, through the trials of life, had shown strength of will
proved themselves mature, in the brightness of consciousness,
striving towards spiritual knowledge.
And when the first disciples of the leaders
were later able to cultivate the noble good with dignity,
the unconscious leadership disappeared,
so that free souls were allowed to strive knowingly.
And free souls then chose people
Who were allowed to follow them in the care
Of the treasure of the spirit; and so it went on
From one generation to the next.
All seats of knowledge so far,
Which in truth are, have just arisen
from the highest, which stands in the spiritual spheres.
In earnest seeking we strive here
for the true spiritual human heritage.
We will never speak of knowledge
that does not bear the spirit's own seal,
but only of the light from the spiritual worlds,
which, by beholding, can be opened up to people
Who, aspiring, want to entrust themselves to it
To fathom the depths of their soul.
To strive worthily towards this light
The seriousness of the turn of time
And its need shows us; the signs are truly
Full of meaning, which in the plan of the world
Now clearly reveal spiritual eyes.