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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 4671 through 4680 of 6552

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190. The Social Question as a Problem of Soul Life: Inner Experience of Language I 28 Mar 1919, Dornach
Translator Unknown

The dead never understand if one speaks to them chiefly in nouns. It to noticeable that when a noun is turned into a verb they begin to understand.
You see when one cultivates such a style today that picture conceptions underlie it, then as a rule one gets the response that people do not understand this, it is very hard to understand.
Take as an example that I have written something on the black-board. Someone says “I do not understand it”. . . Think of the confused abstractions you sometimes have in mind when you say “I do not understand”.
190. The Social Question as a Problem of Soul Life: Inner Experience of Language II 29 Mar 1919, Dornach
Translator Unknown

The other is that language is a mere medium for making oneself understood. Everything that goes on between men as men comes into consideration in it as a means of making themselves understood.
For that men here on the earth merely need a mutual understanding; that deeper, inward feeling for language does not come into it. At the present time this way of understanding language in which language is employed merely as a means of making ourselves mutually understood is actually all that is really experienced.
The latter are completely abstract; and hence are not understood at all by the dead. There are blanks for them when we want to make ourselves understood and express things in language.
190. Past and Future Impulses in Society: Lecture I 21 Mar 1919, Dornach

Man always has something in him somewhere in the subsoil of his soul through which he understands everything that can reveal itself in any time. Only he is usually not far enough with his head understanding, with his intellect.
But it is not a question of playing with analogies, it is a question of training the spirit on the one hand in a correct understanding of the natural man, so that with the spirit trained in this way one can also understand the social organism correctly.
Sometimes one can be confronted with the most justified in the sense of contemporary culture, and one will not understand how that which one who belongs to a class must feel to be completely justified cannot be understood by the other.
190. Past and Future Impulses in Society: Lecture II 22 Mar 1919, Dornach

But later, when this lady was gone and they were still together for a while, another lady said: She could not understand how such a clever woman could not see that her dog had no individual soul; she had understood that right away!
In so far as what man develops inwardly spiritually has a meaning in the life of man to man, in so far what man has in his head, has in himself, is at the same time food for the social organism; the social organism feeds on it. Therefore you will understand that he who speaks of the social organism with understanding must say that this social organism has been starving since the middle of the fifteenth century.
These connections are understood when one is able to really consider the social organism in this respect as a tripartite system.
190. Past and Future Impulses in Society: Lecture III 23 Mar 1919, Dornach

You see, for example, our "Appeal" has now gone through the world. It has been understood by a number of people - that is obvious. Everywhere in the world people have found themselves here or there who have understood it. But a whole number of other people have admittedly not been able to understand him. It is even difficult to imagine what that means, one does not understand the call, because there is nothing in it that actually every person could not understand from the beginning.
How often one can hear, for example, from theater directors of our big cities: One must give more generally understandable things, otherwise the people do not understand. - Mostly, this is based on the fact that the theater directors themselves do not understand better, while the people who go to the theater would actually be happy if they were offered something different.
190. Art As A Bridge Between The Sensible And The Supersensible 30 Mar 1919, Dornach
Translated by Peter Stebbing

one needs, in a devoted manner, to enter into the whole world; for the human being is a microcosm, a little world, and only becomes comprehensible if conceived of as born out of the entire world. Understanding the human being presupposes understanding the world. Yet, how little is a real understanding of the world actually sought (and hence a real understanding of the human being) in a natural scientific age that enters purely into what is external. If nowadays such considerations are deemed to have nothing to do with understanding the social question, it nonetheless remains true that everything I have set forth here is intimately connected with understanding the social question.
In developing the corresponding mood, the social understanding and the social interest will develop. For when do we have no social understanding? We have no social understanding only when we have no interests that transcend our immediate concerns.
190. Spiritual Emptiness and Social Life 13 Apr 1919, Dornach

This is an impulse which must take effect in our times; it is also one of the testings which men of the modern age must undergo. Natural science exists far more for the purpose of educating man than for communicating truths about nature.
Only then will the social institutions in the external world be able, under the influence of human thinking and feeling, to take the form that is called for by these ominous and alarming facts.
Only by entering thus into the super-sensible world, with understanding for what is seen and apprehended in the spirit, will human souls find harmony again. The year 1200 is the time of Walter von der Vogelweide, the time when the spiritual life of Middle Europe is astir with powerful imaginations of which conventional history has little to say.
190. The Spiritual Background of the Social Question: Lecture I 05 Apr 1919, Dornach
Translator Unknown

If people underline something today, they obviously want to draw attention to it and to see in what has thus been underlined the principle substance of the matter.
At first, however, it is difficult to understand how the fact works which I have indicated here in those recent lectures in which I said to you that nouns are hardly understood by the dead.
Certainly the dead understand verbs: they also understand prepositions. They understand everything in which we are compelled to develop pictorial representations.
190. The Spiritual Background of the Social Question: Lecture II 06 Apr 1919, Dornach
Translator Unknown

One really only becomes cleverer by taking one's part in the management of life, by which I do not understand merely the milking of cows and the cooking of cabbage, but the management of life in its widest sense.
One should be able gradually to get the feeling as one's life progresses: you are learning not only from the eternal, sense-perceptible course of things, but also from what is coming up from what underlies the things. With regard to all this, the position is such, today, that from a certain point of view the question inevitably is how are we to get the spiritual life free from the state life!
What comes after that no longer develops by itself, as in older times: development must be sought to get this. In his youth, up to his 27th year, man undergoes a development in which what pertains to humanity flows into him. Up to his 27th year, he is expecting something from life.
190. The Spiritual Background of the Social Question: Lecture III 11 Apr 1919, Dornach
Translator Unknown

If a human being is alone by himself, he will certainly be able to undergo his development in this sense in which we find it intimated in the work How Does One Attain Higher Worlds?
He can only receive, thinks Fritz Mauthner, what is reproduced through Art, by which is understood the whole development of art from the most primitive stages of mankind to what can be indicated today as the highest stage of art.
When men had the old, atavistic clairvoyance in ancient times, their dreams were then no dreams as we understand the term today, but they had a psychic content, in which they perceived something real. And people examined human affairs out of their sleep.

Results 4671 through 4680 of 6552

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