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 Rudolf
Steiner onEmpathy, Einfühlung |
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NOTE: On this page are key lines with abbreviations from original Rudolf Steiner
material, tailored to a basic schema that should help development in general: [DETAILS]. Full references to the Rudolf Steiner
material are at the bottom of the page.Supporting and healthful "well medleys" are presupposed throughout too:
Rudolf Steiner on Empathy, Einfühlung
Handling brambles
To be merely listening includes being, and being is found by being the one you are,
markedly independent as yourself. On that truly noble basis the world we are living in can
be better understood; it is done by queries and being yourself hand in hand.It has also to be grasped that in part our world of men is shaped by our attitudes, concepts and much else we harbour, rightly or wrongly - and that understanding is to rise (at times) above mere words into something else. Empathy, Einfühlung, is for that, in part.
We live and shape speech, and
moods of men and nature flash up sometimes
IN THE thought of John Scotus Erigena, the outer world is not so widely separate
from man . . . We can have no clear idea of what this really means unless we consider . .
.It is necessary for us to transform our attitude of soul if we are to penetrate into the nature of things, into the being of man and into the nature of the relation of man to the world in a way fitted to the age in which we are living.
[Once there was a time] when the mind of man was not only capable of grasping the process of [transformation] in the world of the living, but of experiencing the sentient life connected with the animal creation and of beholding in direct vision the world of sentient being.
In an age when we try to probe everything with the conscious mind, we must
deliberately adjust ourselves to an entirely new way of viewing the world around us.
¤
Man can have a living experience of the plant-world around . . . He shares in the
life of feeling of other beings when he experiences not only the world of the living but the
sentient life of other beings and when he is inwardly sensitive not only to speech but to
the artistic element at work in the shaping of speech.
Goethe was a man who found it inwardly and spiritually impossible to share in the
mental attitude of his contemporaries . . . But he really did not feel at home . . . There
was always a kind of inner opposition to what his contemporaries were thinking about the
world and about life . . . There is something else in Goethe - a kind of appeal to what
lives in Nature . . . Goethe appeals to the revelations of Nature rather than to the
revelations of the human mind. And this was the real temper of his soul . . . Think of him
as a child . . . how as a boy of seven he built an altar . . . to bring an offering to the
great God of Nature.
Then a great longing to go to Italy seizes him . . . bear in mind the overwhelming
change that came upon him in Italy. . . . At last Goethe is satisfied with an environment,
an artistic environment enfilled with ideas . . . [And] in the course of his Italian journey
the idea of metamorphosis arises from this mood . . . the thought of metamorphosis in the
whole of Nature flashes up . . .
An inner change of mental outlook is essential if we are to realise what Goethe
really had in his mind when . . . [a]fter he had been to Italy, Goethe really hated the
first version of Faust which he had written earlier. . . . Goethe did not feel at home . . .
with purely intellectualistic thought.
To be "merely listening" is
done with one's whole being, and from that basis understanding follows
TODAY, when it has become thoroughly decadent, oriental civilisation points to
former conditions of life in its heyday. . . . this age, too, was preceded by others still
more ancient.[Intellectuality] is an element which imprisons the living in an interior chamber of the soul and in which we cannot share when we are merely listening to a word that is uttered. For when we listen to words, we are hearing merely what the head of another being . . .
As we listen to the words . . . if our ears are sensitive to the sound of his words, to the rhythm of his words, to the moulding of his words, then we are hearing an expression of his whole being. . . . when we rise to a sphere where we understand the process wherein sound itself is moulded and shaped - although it is a process empty alike of concept and of word, unheard and simply experienced inwardly - we experience that from which feeling itself arises.
Realise in order to penetrate into the nature of things. * ¤
The Greeks constructed a world-system from observation . . . from the world of the
living . . . because the content of the soul was itself living . . . [Mod]
Through the centuries some
men and women have penetrated faith or nature and seen better
MAN AND the world are more easily understood if we study the changes that have taken
place in the mental outlook of man through the centuries.Only when we picture this process quite clearly shall we be able to realise that in order to penetrate into the nature of things . . .
Summary
- We live and shape speech, and moods of men and nature flash up sometimes.
- To be "merely listening" is done with one's whole being, and from that basis understanding follows.
- Through the centuries some men and women have penetrated faith or nature and seen better. We can learn from them, and their accummulated knowledge in so many walks of life. Good schooling is in part derived from the standards and methods inculcated above.
It is good to shape concepts and words that fit in - to exist, live, continue
living too - and learn the methods that makes living easy, though developing proficiency.
Elephant Empathy seemed at fault
The
British painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) announced that he wanted to buy an
elephant. When his friends asked what that could be good for, he said,"So I can teach it to wash the windows of my house."
When hey still seemed puzzled, he added,
"Then everyone would stare and say, 'That elephant is washing the windows of the house in which lives Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the famous artist."
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Miscellaneous
SOURCE:Steiner, Rudolf. "Goethe and the Evolution of Consciousness". 1 Lecture given in Dornach, August 19, 1921. GA 206. English translation by H. Collison, 1932. At Rudolf Steiner Archive. [Online work].
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