The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. The Pursuit of Knowledge and the Will to Self-discipline

[ 1 ] In the Anthroposophical Society, people come closer to one another than they would if they met in other areas of life. Their shared interest in the spiritual world opens their souls. What one person experiences inwardly in their pursuit of the spiritual becomes meaningful to another. People become communicative when they know they are facing a fellow human being who has an attentive ear for what moves the soul most deeply.

[ 2 ] As a result, it goes without saying that the members of the Society observe each other differently than other people do. But this also carries a danger. People learn to appreciate each other by meeting. They take the deepest joy in the expression of each other's souls. All the noble effects of friendly togetherness can quickly unfold. It stands to reason that these effects can quickly escalate into enthusiasm. Despite its downsides, such enthusiasm should not be met with a cold, sober philistine heart or a superior cosmopolitan attitude. Enthusiasm that has developed into a harmonious state of mind is more spiritually enlightening than a uniformity that rigidly ignores all significant revelations of life.

[ 3 ] However, people who quickly become close to one another can just as quickly drift apart again. Once you have gotten to know the other person well because they have opened up completely, you will soon notice their weaknesses. And then negative enthusiasm can arise. This danger lurks everywhere in the Anthroposophical Society. Counteracting it is one of the tasks of the Society. Anyone who wants to be a true member of the Society should therefore strive for inner tolerance toward others in the depths of their soul. Learning to understand others even when they think and do things that you yourself would not want to think and do should be an ideal.

[ 4 ] This does not have to be synonymous with a lack of judgment regarding weaknesses and mistakes. Understanding is not the same as turning a blind eye. You can talk to someone you love about their mistakes: in many cases, they will see this as the greatest act of friendship. But you can also rebuke others with the attitude of an indifferent judge: they will recoil from your lack of understanding and console themselves with the feeling of resentment that dawns in them toward their critic.

[ 5 ] In many respects, it can be disastrous for the Anthroposophical Society if intolerance and lack of understanding toward other people are brought into it in the form in which they currently dominate life to a large extent. For through the closeness of people, they intensify within the society.

[ 6 ] These are things that strongly indicate how the more lively pursuit of knowledge in the Anthroposophical Society must necessarily be accompanied by the struggle for a refinement of the life of feeling and sensation. The intensified pursuit of knowledge deepens the soul life toward the region where arrogance, overconfidence, indifference to other people, and much else lurk. A lesser pursuit of knowledge has only a weak effect on this region. It leaves it sleeping in the depths of the soul. An active life of knowledge awakens it from its slumber. Habits that have held it down lose their power. The ideal that is directed toward the spiritual can awaken qualities of the soul that would not have become apparent without this ideal. The Anthroposophical Society should be there to counteract the dangers that lurk there by cultivating a noble life of feeling and sensation. There are instincts in human nature that drive people to fear knowledge because they sense such connections. But those who allow their striving for knowledge to lie dormant because cultivating it stirs up their ugly feelings also renounce developing the full scope of the true human being within themselves. It is unworthy of human beings to paralyze their insight because they fear weakness of character. It can only be human to combine the pursuit of knowledge with the will to self-discipline.

[ 7 ] And through anthroposophy, one can do this. One only has to discover the vitality of its ideas. This vitality means that they can also generate strength in the will and warmth in feelings and sensations. It is entirely up to the individual whether they merely imagine anthroposophy or whether they experience it.

[ 8 ] And it will be up to the active members of the society whether the way they develop anthroposophy merely stimulates thoughts or whether it ignites life.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 9 ] 4. For certainty of feeling and for a strong unfolding of his will, man needs a knowledge of the spiritual world. However widely he may feel the greatness, beauty and wisdom of the natural world, this world gives him no answer to the question of his own being. His own being holds together the materials and forces of the natural world in the living and sensitive form of man until the moment when he passes through the gate of death. Then Nature receives this human form, and Nature cannot hold it together; she can but dissolve and disperse it. Great, beautiful, wisdom-filled Nature does indeed answer the question, How is the human form dissolved and destroyed? but not the other question, How is it maintained and held together? No theoretical objection can dispel this question from the feeling soul of man, unless indeed he prefers to lull himself to sleep. The presence of this question must incessantly maintain alive, in every human soul that is really awake, the longing for spiritual paths of World-knowledge.

[ 10 ] 5. For peace in his inner life, man needs Self-knowledge in the Spirit. He finds himself in his Thinking, Feeling and Willing. He sees how Thinking, Feeling and Willing are dependent on the natural man. In all their developments, they must follow the health and sickness, the strengthening and weakening of the body. Every sleep blots them out. Thus the experience of everyday life shows the spiritual consciousness of man in the greatest imaginable dependence on his bodily existence. Man suddenly becomes aware that in this realm of ordinary experience Self-knowledge may be utterly lost—the search for it a vain quest. Then first the anxious question arises: Can there be a Self-knowledge transcending the ordinary experiences of life? Can we have any certainty at all, as to a true Self of man? Anthroposophy would fain answer this question on a firm basis of spiritual experience. In so doing it takes its stand, not on any opinion or belief, but on a conscious experience in the Spirit—an experience in its own nature no less certain than the conscious experience in the body.

Continued in the next issue.