I. The Mission of Spiritual Science

Count von Hoditz turns to important figures in the history of thought, for instance to Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., and asks what Aristotle says in answer to this question—what the essential being of man really is.[^2] He says: Aristotle's answer is that man is a rational animal. Then he turns to a later thinker, Descartes, and puts the same question, and here the answer is that man is a thinking being.[^3] But on reflection he comes to feel that these two representative thinkers can give no answer to his question; for—as he says—in the answers of Aristotle and Descartes he wanted to learn what man is and what he ought to do. When Aristotle says that man is a rational animal, that is no answer to the question of what man is, for it throws no light on the nature of rationality. Nor does Descartes in the seventeenth century tell us what man ought to do in accordance with his nature as a thinking being. For although we may know that man is a thinking being, we do not know what he must think in order to take hold of life in the right way, in order to relate his thought to life.