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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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76. The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences: Organic Natural Science and Medicine 06 Apr 1921, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner
And anyone who delves into what actually became a problem for Goethe — you can read about this in my “Introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings”, which is now almost forty years old — will find that Goethe did not want the power of understanding or reason to be applied that it gives science an actual content, that one says something about existence as such out of the power of understanding or reason, so to speak, but rather that this power of understanding or reason is used only to think of the phenomena in such an order that one phenomenon explains the other.
It may be said that not everyone has yet learned to resign themselves to a certain extent when it comes to understanding, as Goethe wanted to do in his own research, even if he did not fully implement it everywhere.
With such a way of thinking, one comes to truly understand man's relationship to his environment, just as one comes to understand, in a certain way, the relationships of the fields that lead us to mathematical judgments in mathematical science.
76. The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences: Linguistics 07 Apr 1921, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner
It was alienated from this, but still sought to understand what such a connection might look like, and it then also translated this connection into all kinds of abstractions.
Actually, everything is said under the assumption of Euclidean coordinate geometry. Under this assumption, one arrives at a certain measure of curvature.
When the criminal anthropologist Moritz Benedikt started working and writing in criminal anthropology, he initially found little understanding in Vienna. He then found extraordinary understanding in a director of a home for dangerous criminals in Hungary.
76. The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences: Social Science and Social Practice 08 Apr 1921, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner
We can say: if we learn to ascend appropriately from something like the understanding of the change of teeth, the understanding of language, to what we then come to, we thereby acquire a knowledge of the immortal nature of the human soul.
It was possible to reach the broad masses of the people. They gradually understood the significance of the impulse of the threefold social order. For it is nonsense to say that it is difficult to understand in itself.
Something like this continues to have an effect when you act out of the positive: try to study these brochures that have been published by “Kommender Tag” and “Futurum”, and try to create understanding for something like this. It is this understanding that the oldest people in particular find extremely difficult to work their way up to.
76. The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences: Closing Address 10 Apr 1921, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner
One has the feeling that something must be struck with such sentences, which understands the signs of the times in a certain direction: “The organization of our universities suffers from great deficiencies.
For if we do not cut ourselves off from our abilities, if we do not paralyze them by accepting the “limits of natural knowledge” scientifically, then we will notice how, little by little, what we understand of the laws of education in nature must give way to what, out of this understanding of the laws of education, shapes itself artistically. One cannot understand the human form, which is also formed out of nature, if one does not convert into artistic intuition what are otherwise only general rules in one's own knowledge.
77a. The Task of Anthroposophy in the Context of Science and Life: Knowledge of Nature and Knowledge of the Mind 27 Jul 1921, Darmstadt

Rudolf Steiner
This should be felt particularly by technicians, because one can develop a feeling there for how the human inner consciousness is changed by looking not only at the establishment of natural laws through observation, through experimentation, but at the weaving of natural laws into what one has to accomplish for the world in terms of instruments, tools, and entire undertakings. In this integration of natural laws into enterprise, in this integration of natural laws into reality, one can feel how human inner composure grows under the influence of a scientific way of thinking. If we understand this in the right way, my dear audience, then we may ask the question on the other hand: Under what circumstances does this composure decrease? Under what circumstances does one lose this sense of self? It is remarkable: with the expansion of material knowledge, the sense of self becomes stronger.
80c. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the Big Questions of Contemporary Civilization: Knowledge of the Spiritual Nature of Man 31 Oct 1922, The Hague

Rudolf Steiner
It is a process of illumination and strengthening. We shall most easily be able to understand what this modern way of observing the soul is to become if I remind you, my dear audience, of how such spiritual knowledge was sought in the more ancient times of human spiritual development.
But you will also find more detailed descriptions there of how the modern person must undertake, what the modern person must undertake to achieve such exact clairvoyance. But here I can only state the principles.
We do not speculate, we do not philosophize in abstract terms, we seek experiences of the spiritual world, and seek to come to an understanding of the spiritual nature of man through experience. In this way we arrive at discovering the eternity of the human soul.
80c. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the Big Questions of Contemporary Civilization: The Knowledge of the Spiritual Essence of the World 03 Nov 1922, The Hague

Rudolf Steiner
But those who came later knew that they could only come to a true understanding of the spiritual, to a knowledge of the spiritual in the world, if they turned to such a teacher.
And in this body-free spiritual, precisely in the power of that thinking that the Galilean, Copernican, Goethean, Darwinian age has brought us, precisely through that thinking, through we understand nature in a completely natural way, we gain an inner strength that makes it possible for us modern people not to seek out a guru in the old way and yet to penetrate the spiritual essence of the world to which we belong.
To meditate means to rest and to rest again and again in thoughts of love, to love purely mental life. We should not underestimate the fact that, given the way we educate and train people today, this is actually quite difficult.
80c. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the Big Questions of Contemporary Civilization: Supernatural Knowledge and Contemporary Science 06 Nov 1922, Delft

Rudolf Steiner
When we have a mathematical problem, it does not depend on whether hundreds of people say yes to it. If I understand the matter all by myself, I am secure. I live with my insight; I am completely immersed in it with my soul.
We must also talk about it, because one only comprehends eternity when one understands the unborn as well as one understands immortality. But immortality can also be visualized. It can be brought to view by the fact that we now not only train our thinking in meditation, so to speak, to the point of inner energy and concreteness, as I have described it, but also by beginning to train our will.
On the other hand, one can understand the picture sensitively, even if one is not a painter. One can understand what the spiritual researcher says if one only devotes one's unprejudiced common sense to it; one will find everything consistent and in harmony with the whole of human life.
81. The Impulse for Renewal in Culture and Science: Anthroposophy and Natural Science 06 Mar 1922, Berlin
Translated by Hanna von Maltitz

Rudolf Steiner
In any case, with the idea of further development something else needs understanding, if one wants to arrive at an anthroposophic understanding, than that which one usually calls further evolution from a theoretical point of view.
What you have appropriated as a system of thought derived from lifeless nature, you simply apply to organic nature. This is what is usually understood today, as the ‘expansion’ of thoughts and theories. This is of course quite the opposite of what Anthroposophy regards under such an idea as the expansion of thinking.
When one looks at lifeless nature one feels to some extent satisfied because research of the phenomena can be done with mathematical thinking. It is quite understandable that Du Bois-Reymond in his wordy and brilliant manner gave his lecture “Regarding the boundaries of Nature's understanding” in which he, I could call it, celebrated the Laplace world view and called it the “astronomical conception” of the entire natural world existence.
81. The Impulse for Renewal in Culture and Science: The Human and the Animal Organisation 06 Mar 1922, Berlin
Translated by Hanna von Maltitz

Rudolf Steiner
Now, one can prepare, in a specific way, how to discover the understanding through biological differences, by finding a foundation in which the animal functions originate and which appears in both man and animal, and this relates to the sense organs.
When you think about this, you would understand the innermost relationship of the human organism with its position of equilibrium in the cosmos.
Through the upright position the nerves and blood organisation work in a different way under the influence of the equilibrium position so that in the human something appears which can't be brought about in the animal.

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