Thirteenth Lecture

Today I would like to talk about how the human being initially finds himself in the world between two extremes in his inner experience. Let us dwell first on the inner experience of the human being. On the one hand, the human being experiences the world of ideas, but he experiences it in such a way that the more he immerses himself in this world of ideas, the more abstract and cold it appears to him. When man rises to the level of ideas, he feels that he cannot become inwardly warm. But he feels something quite different. He feels that in these ideas, which are then also expanded into natural laws, into world laws, he has something that, as an idea, does not include a reality, that as an idea is basically merely an image. Therefore, when faced with the world of ideas, the human being does not feel, let us say, that he wants to somehow implant his own existence in this world of ideas in a cognitive way. No matter how much the human being likes to reflect, he gradually retains the feeling, even with the most perfectly spun philosophy, that he cannot find proof of his real existence in the universe in the world of ideas. The ideas have something, as it were, rootless about them, as they are experienced in ordinary life between birth and death. That is the one, so to speak, the one pole of outer experience in ordinary existence: the abstract, sober, cold ideas, in which one cannot anchor, nor would one want to anchor, the reality of the actual human being. And finally, modern humanity has not warmed to Descartes' maxim: “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), because no matter how much people think, they also feel: there is no getting out of thinking for the time being.