We don’t think the thoughts of Aristotle only because we need the contents. We think along with his thoughts because we learn to know a certain thinking skill that comes from the old Greek period, but that still isn’t a skill that human beings have developed in general. Why should we?
I quote from a lecture that Rudolf Steiner gave for the workers at the Goetheanum:
‘Yes, if this were to continue on earth, all thinking would become chaotic. All frights and catastrophes would overtake us. In our time people no longer know what to do. Therefore they take all forces together and say: Well, our reason doesn’t hold us together, so it must be our nationality that holds us together. The national states only emerge because people no longer know how to hold themselves together. That exactly, the fact that one knows nothing at all about a spiritual world has caused this misery. Everything else is externality, it caused this misery. To say: human beings have earned this, because in former lives they did evil – that is of course nonsense, for it is not the destiny of every individual human being, but it is the collective destiny of every one. But everyone has to experience this on their own in this life. Just think about the amount of misery everyone is experiencing in life now. It does not have its origin in former lives. But in future lives the fruits of the misery in this life will appear. It will be that the human being will be cleverer and that the spiritual world will come more easily to him. The misery we experience now is an education for the future.
‘But we can conclude something else. Anthroposophy started about 1900. It really became quite well-known. But people have fought against it; they didn’t want to hear about the spiritual world. Well, if we have a schoolboy that doesn’t want to learn – at least in earlier times it was done in this way, in modern times this is not done anymore, and I don’t want to say anything about it being right or wrong – in earlier times he would have been spanked! Some started to learn then. It helped for some of them. Well, people didn’t want to learn anything spiritual up to 1914. Then they received from the world destiny, from the general destiny, a beating. We will have to see whether this will help.
‘We have to see this as a general destiny, a destiny for all. What happened? People absolutely ‘unlearned’ thinking. They only think with the thoughts of people they recognise as authorities. People will have to learn to think themselves; every human being must start to think by himself. Otherwise they will be influenced by the spiritual world, precisely because they don’t believe in it, and they will be influenced in a bad way. Then one can say: What has come over the world as misery can truly be seen as destiny-beating, and learn from it.
‘We can organise as many congresses as we want, it will not be of any help. The ones that want to support the Mark will only achieve its going down twice as much, for this reason that what is fully earthly is useless, totally useless. If a body doesn’t have enough fluid in it, it will become sclerotic, calcified. And if the soul has no knowledge about the spiritual world, in the end she will have an intellect that is of no use at all. Humanity is locked into this future if it doesn’t receive spiritual nutrition from the spiritual world.
‘So the only true remedy is that people start to be interested in the spiritual world. You see, in this way I have to answer your question. One has to say it in a rather radical way, but so it is.’
These words were spoken about a century ago – and still apply. We have to take this far, far more seriously now than in those times.
Steiners words are hard, but they could have the effect that we learn to know that we – every one of us – are involved.Why should we develop a pure and independent thinking? by Mieke Mosmuller
