5. Natural Death and Spiritual Life

If we look across to the West, we encounter above all a thinker who has also profoundly influenced Central and Eastern European thought for almost a century, a thinker who has had more influence on Central European scientific concepts in particular than is usually realized. He is Herbert Spencer. He looks at human life, and it is most interesting to take his view of life where he applies it to the problem of education. He asks: What must be the real goal of human education? And he comes to say – as I said, I will only mention this in the introduction, not explain it – he comes to say that the real goal of education must be to make proper parents and educators out of all people. Now, what he presents as the goal of education may be of little interest to us today, but the reason why he recognizes this goal of education as his own is. He says: human development reaches a certain conclusion at the moment when a person becomes capable of reproduction, when a person thus enters into sexual maturity. And if the power to produce one's own kind is the highest that a person can achieve in the course of their life, then the highest goal of education must also be to educate and teach these descendants in the appropriate way. And it is clear from the context as a whole, rather than from this single assertion, that this Western thinker actually sees a sure cognitive insight into the human being only by pursuing natural processes to their peak, to the point of producing the same; that he regards, so to speak, everything that man has to strive for most significantly after he has reached sexual maturity, that he regards all so-called intellectual development only as a kind of superstructure, only as a kind of appendage, one might almost say, to the secure natural foundation of human development.