52. The Wrath of Zeus. The Chained Prometheus

GA 68b/1909-10-21/p051 ·1909-10-21 · 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: «Da keine professionellen Stenogramme vorliegen, handelt es sich oftmals um notizenhaft festgehaltene Zusammenfassungen oder Berichte.» (Since no professional shorthand transcripts exist, these are often summaries or reports kept in the form of notes.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68b). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

This is expressed in the fact that Zeus has taken power. Consciousness increasingly makes way for what is to develop into judgment and deliberation. The sure insight that was conveyed by images was lost. Man only began with the first facts of calculating and counting and considering. People were clumsy. They became dull in relation to their old consciousness. They could no longer grasp their environment. They lived in an almost inhuman way. But out of this dullness there developed more and more that which, as we have indicated, was present in the first beginnings and which worked in man in such a way that it gradually brought him to judge, brought him to posit out of his ego into the world something that was not there before. Call it power, call it essence. The Greek genius expresses it by saying: Prometheus works in human nature that sense which makes it possible for human nature to process the individual things of life into art productions by means of tools. Prometheus is the great benefactor of mankind who, in the name of love, has given humanity what it will continue to develop ever further. Zeus, that is the disappointment that Prometheus experiences, would only have developed in man what is independent of judgment, independent of calculation and deliberation, what has not led to the arts. Zeus had left man without fire.

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Cite: GA 68b/1909-10-21/p051 · edition English