53. The Human Character
GA 68b/1909-10-29/p010
·1909-10-29
·
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 occasional inability to create harmony between the various activities of the human soul has always been a kind of material for artists to use in poetry or other artistic forms of expression. Consider Shakespeare's Hamlet; there is a spiritual activity that the ego cannot reconcile with action. Goethe has already expressed this dichotomy of the soul life in Hamlet by saying: A great task is placed on a soul that is not up to it.
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