5. The Beyond of the Senses and the Beyond of the Soul

And so much could be shown in the present day that would draw attention to the fact that, I would say, the admirable scientific way of looking at things has led us away from the paths that lead to the soul. For some, however, it has been quite the opposite. There are people in the present who sense what I have said today. For example, there is a personality in the present who senses that what lives in the soul between birth and death in the form of thinking, feeling and willing is only something that is conditioned by the body, while the eternal comes from the comes out of the spiritual world, enters into existence through birth, transforms itself in the body so that it works in the body, and then leaves again through death, and that what works in the body is not the true soul. The personality that I mean recognizes this. But it says that in what lives in ordinary consciousness, we only have images. This personality calls it “events”. Behind these lie the primal factors that are experienced in the seeing consciousness as beyond the soul and beyond the senses. But the personality that I mean does not want to go into this seeing consciousness. And so it stands before the occurrences, again, I would like to say, smashing a thick mirror over and over again, and saying: Behind it the primal factors must be. But it rages. And by raging against the mirror surface and not wanting to come to the seeing consciousness, it believes that all philosophy has only raged. With Fichte one can see (I have spoken about this in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man)) that he did not rave, but that he pointed to the seeing consciousness in an important point. The personality I am referring to now, which does recognize the image-nature of ordinary consciousness, says: “He who cannot laugh (at Fichte) cannot philosophize either.” And as this personality lets all philosophers from Plato and Heraclitus to the present day pass before it in their interrelations, it calls these philosophies “The Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. And there is an interesting sentence on page 132: “We have no more philosophy than an animal, and only the frantic attempt to arrive at a philosophy and the final surrender to not-knowing distinguish us from the animal.”