Thirteenth Lecture

Those who swear by Goethe, swear by Hegel, and thereby simply adopt their dogmas, harm themselves and others. Those who truly want to be Goetheans today must not swear by Goethe dogmatically, but must develop further that which is present in Goethe in an embryonic form. And to an even greater extent this is the case with Hegelianism. In Hegelianism it becomes apparent what is actually present. This Hegelianism in the German development is a highly, highly characteristic phenomenon. For there is something present that is a characteristic of logical thinking in general. No one can actually understand what logical thinking is for the human being who does not understand something of spiritual science. For only spiritual science shows him that there is also another, a supersensible human being, not only the human being who appears to us as the sensual body. These two things, the supersensible and the sensual human being, blur into a single wild chaos for the contemplation of humanity, because what contemporary anatomy and physiology reveal about the human being is a wild chaos. But if one learns to properly distinguish the supersensible human being, of whom I also spoke twice in the recent public lecture, from the sensual human being, then one becomes acquainted with the strange paradoxical fact — spiritual facts are mostly paradoxical for sensual perception — that logical thinking would not exist at all for the development of humanity if people were not born into the physical body and developed there. For logic, especially when developed to its highest level, the sensory body is the appropriate instrument. Therefore, anyone who develops supersensible knowledge, who really immerses themselves in supersensible knowledge, must experience that it is extremely difficult to put this supersensible knowledge into words at all, but that if they want to grasp this supersensible knowledge with ordinary logic, that is, with what is only bound to the instrument of the external physical body, then this supersensible knowledge is killed for them. Then it is over with this supersensible knowledge. On the ground of logic, supersensible knowledge dies. For our human life, it must be brought to a mirror image, as it was with Hegel. But then one must not live in this mirror image, otherwise one is immediately out of the spirit. Therefore it is not the case that Hegel brought German thinking to the highest spiritual development, but that in this spiritual that Hegel offers, the most spiritless is contained, that there is no longer any spirit at all in Hegelism. That is to say: in Hegel the physical body grasps spirituality and at the same time squeezes it out. The highest logic, this Hegel; the most spiritless philosophy, this thought produced by the highest effort of the spirit! No wonder that it breaks down into the materialism of which we are aware, into Marxism, and that it becomes in this way a real phase of development in the nineteenth century.