VII. The Questions of Life and the Riddle of Death I

GA 69a/1913-02-16/p006 ·1913-02-16 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: unknown. How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.

The riddle of death approaches the human being particularly. What people know about immortality does often not look scientific. How much passion, how many prejudices are contained in this question. Fear of death or the wish to extend the existence is involved in the evaluation of the question and in the answer that most people want to give themselves. When natural sciences were about to emerge as a worldview, there were people who completely denied the possibility that the soul would exist after death, and one may say, among these deniers were many who often outranked those morally who accepted immortality. These persons said to themselves, we want to sacrifice what we have worked during our life to the public.—These persons regarded that as something morally higher than the selfish wish to carry on the compiled. One cannot deny that such persons are moral.

Read this passage in another edition
DEoriginalENEnglish
Raw JSON: /v1/steiner/en/ga/69a/1913-02-16/p006.json
Cite: GA 69a/1913-02-16/p006 · edition English