74. The Riddle of Death as a Riddle of Life
GA 246/1916-03-03/p073
·1916-03-03
·
English
HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Nach zum Teil bruchstückhaften Mitschriften» (From transcripts that are in part fragmentary). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 246), which also speaks of "fragmentarischen Hörernotizen und Vortragszusammenfassungen". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
Well, that's just a disease that needs to be cured! -said the gentleman in question. It doesn't help to say to such a gentleman what I had to say to him ..., because it's certainly the worst thing to have half-correct, quarter-correct mental images: Yes, but imagine what an illness is! A disease is not there because it has to afflict a person, but because something was wrong beforehand. So war is not sent by the spiritual world of humanity for the sake of war, but because what came before was not in order. It is not war that is abnormal: just as illness is there - the process of illness is there - to compensate for something that is not in order in the organism, so is war.
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