{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 28/l25/p017-p021","extent":"range","passage_number":17,"through":21,"paragraph_count":5,"first_locus":"GA 28/l25/p017","last_locus":"GA 28/l25/p021","lang":"en","edition":"APC1928","edition_basis":"Marie Steiner edition (posthumous)","is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"title":"Chapter XXV","date":null,"location":null,"alignment_confidence":"high","alignment_reason":"beads:length","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":null,"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["APC1928"]},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":1.14,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":2458,"original_word_count":2159,"may_be_abridged":false},"site_heading":"Theatre as Creative Spiritual-Artistic Revelation","site_heading_note":"A heading the site wrote for this unit from a summary of it; not in the edition, and not the words of Rudolf Steiner or of the translator. Cite the unit by its title and locus, never by this heading, and do not quote it.","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/28/l25/p017-p021","json_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/28/l25/p017-p021.json","lecture_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/28/l25#p017","word_count":962,"quote_safe":true,"passages":[{"passage_number":17,"locus":"GA 28/l25/p017","text":"This can clearly be seen from the essays and abstracts of lectures that I wrote. It is only necessary to set over against those individual passages which have a materialistic note others in which I speak of the spirit, of the eternal. So it is in the article *Ein Wiener Dichter*.[^2] Of Peter Attenberg I say there. “What most interests the person who enters deeply into the world harmony seems foreign to him ... From the eternal ideas no light penetrates into Attenberg's eyes ...” ( *Magazin*, July 17, 1897). And the fact that this “eternal world harmony” cannot be meant to signify something materialistic and mechanical becomes clear in utterances such as those in the essay on Rudolf Heidenhain (November 6, 1897): “Our conception of nature is clearly striving toward the goal of explaining the life of the organism according to the same laws by which the phenomena of inanimate nature must also be explained. General laws of mechanics, physics, chemistry are sought for in the bodies of animals and plants. The same sort of laws that control a machine must also be operative in the organism – only in immeasurably more complicated and scarcely comprehensible form. Nothing is to be added to these laws in order to render possible an explanation of the phenomenon we call life ... The mechanistic conception of the phenomena of life steadily gains ground. But it will never satisfy one who has the capacity to cast a deeper glance into nature's processes. Contemporary researchers in nature are too cowardly in their thinking. Where the wisdom of their mechanistic explanations fails, they say the thing is to us inexplicable ... A bold thinking lifts itself to a higher manner of perception. It seeks to explain by higher laws that which is not of a mechanical character. All our natural-scientific thinking remains behind our natural scientific experience. At present the natural-scientific form of thinking is much praised. In regard to this, it is said that we live in a natural-scientific age. But at bottom this natural-scientific age is the poorest that history has to show. Its characteristic is to hang fast to the mere facts and the mechanistic forms of explanation. Life will never be grasped by this form of thinking because such a grasp requires a higher manner of conceiving than that which belongs to the explanation of a machine.”","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":396,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/28/l25/p017","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 28/l25/p017"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. That is a check on NAMES only: a translation can keep every name and still reverse who acts on whom, change a number, or soften a claim. Read the German for anything you intend to rest an argument on."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":18,"locus":"GA 28/l25/p018","text":"Is it not obvious that one who speaks thus of the explanation of “life” cannot think materialistically of the explanation of “spirit”?","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":22,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/28/l25/p018","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"This passage or its German counterpart is too short to compare (a heading or a fragment)."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":19,"locus":"GA 28/l25/p019","text":"But I often spoke of the fact that the “spirit issues” from the bosom of nature. What is meant here by “spirit”? All that out of human thinking, feelings, and willing which begets “culture.” To speak of another “spirit” would then have been quite futile. For no one would have understood me if I had said: “That which appears in man as spirit and lies at the basis of nature is neither spirit nor nature, but the complete unity of both.” This unity – the creative Spirit which in its creating brings matter into existence and thereby is at the same time matter, but which also shows itself wholly as spirit – this unity is grasped by an idea which lay as far as possible from the habits of thought of that period. But it would have been necessary to speak of such an idea if one was to present in a spiritual form of thinking the primal state of the evolution of earth and man and the spiritual material Powers still active to-day in man himself, which on the one hand form his body and on the other cause to issue forth the living spiritual by means of which he creates culture. But external nature would have needed to be so discussed that in it the primal spiritual-material is represented as dead in natural laws.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":226,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/28/l25/p019","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 28/l25/p019"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. That is a check on NAMES only: a translation can keep every name and still reverse who acts on whom, change a number, or soften a claim. 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This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":21,"locus":"GA 28/l25/p021","text":"It could be linked up only with natural-scientific experience, not with natural-scientific thinking. In this experience there was something present which could set in shining light before a man's own mind a true, spirit-filled thinking regarding the world and man – something out of which might again be found the spirit now lost from the sort of knowledge confirmed by tradition and accepted on faith. The perception of spirit-nature I desired to draw from the experience of nature. I wished to speak of what is to be found on “this side” as the spiritual-natural, as the essentially divine. For in the knowledge confirmed by tradition the divine had come to belong to “the beyond” because the spirit of “this side” was not recognized and was therefore sundered from the perceptible world. It had become something which had been submerged in man's consciousness into an ever increasing darkness. Not the rejection of the divine-spiritual, but its setting within the world, its calling to “this side,” lay in such sentences as the following in one of the lectures before the Free Literary Society: “I believe that natural science can give back to us the consciousness of freedom in a form more beautiful than that in which men have yet possessed it. In the life of our souls there operate laws which are just as natural as those which send the heavenly bodies round the sun. *But these laws represent something which is higher than all the rest of nature. This something is present nowhere save in man alone. Whatever flows from this, in that is man free. He lifts himself above the fixed necessity of laws of the inorganic and organic; he heeds and follows only himself.”* (The last sentences are italicized here[^3] for the first time; they were not italicized in the Magazine. For these sentences see the Magazine of 12th February, 1898.)","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":312,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/28/l25/p021","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 28/l25/p021"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. 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See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}],"witnesses":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"first_passage":1,"last_passage":21,"passage_count":21,"word_count":2159},{"lang":"en","edition":"APC1928","is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"first_passage":1,"last_passage":25,"passage_count":25,"word_count":2458,"completeness":{"ratio":1.14,"band":"comparable","note":null}}],"aligned_witness":{"status":"aligned","lang":"de","edition":"original","confidence":"high","passages":[{"locus":"GA 28/l25/p017","passage_number":17,"text":"Man kann das auch aus den Aufsätzen und Vortragsauszügen, die ich geschrieben habe, deutlich ersehen. Man muß nur den einzelnen materialistisch klingenden Stellen andere gegenüberhalten, in denen ich vom Geistigen, vom Ewigen spreche. So in dem Artikel: «Ein Wiener Dichter». Von Peter Altenberg sage ich da: «Was den Menschen, der sich in die ewige Weltharmonie vertieft, am meisten interessiert, scheint ihm fremd zu sein... Von den ewigen Ideen dringt kein Licht in Altenbergs Augen...» («Magazin» vom 17. Juli 1897). Und daß mit dieser «ewigen Weltenharmonie» nicht eine mechanisch-materialistische gemeint sein kann, wird deutlich an Aussprüchen wie die im Aufsatz über Rudolf Heidenhain (vom 6. November 1897): «Unsere Naturauffassung strebt deutlich dem Ziele zu, das Leben der Organismen nach denselben Gesetzen zu erklären, nach denen auch die Erscheinungen der leblosen Natur erklärt werden müssen. Mechanische, physikalische, chemische Gesetzmäßigkeit wird im tierischen und pflanzlichen Körper gesucht. Dieselbe Art von Gesetzen, die eine Maschine beherrschen, sollen, nur in unendlich komplizierter und schwer zu erkennender Form, auch im Organismus tätig sein. Nichts soll zu diesen Gesetzen hinzutreten, um das Phänomen, das wir Leben nennen, möglich zu machen ... Die mechanistische Auffassung der Lebenserscheinungen gewinnt immer mehr an Boden. Sie wird aber denjenigen nie befriedigen, der fähig ist, einen tieferen Blick in die Naturvorgänge zu tun... Die Naturforscher von heute sind in ihrem Denken zu feige. Wo ihnen die Weisheit ihrer mechanischen Erklärungen ausgeht, da sagen sie, für uns ist die Sache nicht erklärbar... Ein kühnes Denken erhebt sich zu einer höhern Anschauungsweise. Es versucht, nach höhern Gesezen zu erklären, was nicht mechanischer Art ist. All unser naturwissenschaftliches Denken bleibt hinter unserer naturwissenschaftlichen Erfahrung zurück. Man rühmt heute die naturwissenschaftliche Denkart sehr. Man spricht davon, daß wir im naturwissenschaftlichen Zeitalter leben. Aber im Grunde ist dieses naturwissenschaftliche Zeitalter das ärmlichste, das die Geschichte zu verzeichnen hat. Hängenbleiben an den bloßen Tatsachen und an den mechanischen Erklärungsarten ist sein Charakteristikum. Das Leben wird von dieser Denkart nie begriffen, weil zu einem solchen Begreifen eine höhere Vorstellungsweise gehört als zur Erklärung einer Maschine.»","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":336,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/28/l25/p017"},{"locus":"GA 28/l25/p018","passage_number":18,"text":"Ist nicht völlig selbstverständlich, daß, wer so von der Erklärung des *«Lebens »* spricht, von der des *«Geistes»* nicht im materialistischen Sinne denken kann?","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":24,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/28/l25/p018"},{"locus":"GA 28/l25/p019","passage_number":19,"text":"Aber ich spreche öfter davon, daß der «Geist» aus dem Schoße der Natur «hervorgehe». Was ist da mit «Geist» gemeint? Alles das, was aus menschlichem Denken, Fühlen und Wollen die «Kultur» erzeugt. Von einem andern «Geiste» zu sprechen, wäre damals ganz zwecklos gewesen. Denn niemand hätte mich verstanden, wenn ich gesagt hätte: dem, was am Menschen als Geist erscheint, und der Natur liegt etwas zugrunde, das weder Geist, noch Natur ist, sondern die vollkommene Einheit beider. Diese Einheit: schaffender Geist, der den Stoff in seinem Schaffen zum Dasein bringt und dadurch zugleich Stoff ist, der ganz als Geist sich darstellt: diese Einheit wird durch eine Idee begriffen, die den damaligen Denkgewohnheiten so fern wie möglich lag. Von einer solchen Idee aber hätte gesprochen werden müssen, wenn in geistgemäßer Anschauungsart die Urzustände der Erd- und Menschheitsentwickelung und die heute noch im Menschen selbst tätigen geist-stofflichen Mächte hätten dargestellt werden sollen, die auf der einen Seite seinen Körper bilden, auf der andern das lebendig Geistige aus sich hervorgehen lassen, durch das er die Kultur schafft. Die äußere Natur aber hätte so besprochen werden müssen, daß in ihr das ursprünglich Geist-Stoffliche als erstorben in den abstrakten Naturgesetzen sich darstellt.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":196,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/28/l25/p019"},{"locus":"GA 28/l25/p020","passage_number":20,"text":"Das alles konnte nicht gegeben werden.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":6,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/28/l25/p020"},{"locus":"GA 28/l25/p021","passage_number":21,"text":"Es konnte nur angeknüpft werden an die naturwissenschaftliche Erfahrung, nicht an das naturwissenschaftliche Denken. In dieser Erfahrung lag etwas vor, das einem wahren, geisterfüllten Denken gegenüber die Welt und den Menschen lichtvoll vor dessen eigene Seele stellen konnte. Etwas, aus dem der Geist wiedergefunden werden konnte, der in den traditionell bewahrten und geglaubten Bekenntnissen verlorengegangen war. Die Geist-Natur-Anschauung wollte ich aus der Naturerfahrung herausholen. Sprechen wollte ich von dem, was im «Diesseits» als das Geistig-Natürliche, als das wesenhaft Göttliche zu finden ist. Denn in den traditionell bewahrten Bekenntnissen war dies Göttliche zu einem «Jenseits» geworden, weil man den Geist des «Diesseits» nicht anerkannte und ihn daher von der wahrnehmbaren Welt absonderte. Er war zu etwas geworden, das für das menschliche Bewußtsein in ein immer stärkeres Dunkel untergetaucht war. Nicht die Ablehnung des Göttlich-Geistigen, sondern die Hereinstellung in die Welt, die Anrufung desselben im «Diesseits» lag in solchen Sätzen, wie dem in einem der Vorträge für die «Freie literarische Gesellschaft»: «Ich glaube, die Naturwissenschaft kann uns in schönerer Form, als die Menschen es je gehabt haben, das Bewußtsein der Freiheit wiedergeben. In unserem Seelenleben wirken Gesetze, die ebenso natürlich sind wie diejenigen, welche die Himmelskörper um die Sonne treiben. *Aber diese Gesetze stellen ein Etwas dar, das höher ist als alle übrige Natur. Dieses Etwas ist sonst nirgends vorhanden als im Menschen. Was aus diesem fließt, darinnen ist der Mensch frei. Er erhebt sich über die starre Notwendigkeit der unorganischen und organischen Gesetzmäßigkeit, gehorcht und folgt nur sich selbst.»* (Die letzten Sätze sind erst hier unterstrichen, waren es noch nicht im «Magazin». Vgl. für diese Sätze das «Magazin» vom 12. Februar 1898.)","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":271,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/28/l25/p021"}],"beads":[{"from":[17],"to":[17],"confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed"},{"from":[18],"to":[18],"confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed"},{"from":[19],"to":[19],"confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed"},{"from":[20],"to":[20],"confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed"},{"from":[21],"to":[21],"confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed"}],"note":"Paired by the paragraph aligner; each language numbers its own paragraphs. A bead at either end of the span can carry text beyond it (the `from` numbers show what each bead covers)."}}