עברית The Colmar Lecture in Context
The Struggles with the Spiritualization of Thinking ‘inside the Grave of Modern Civilization’ at the end of the 20th Century
From the Colmar lecture, 1st June, 2007:
Anthroposophy & Contemporary Philosophy in Dialogue
At the end of last century, most intensively in 1997-9, I experienced a decisive culmination of the spiritual battle that continued through the whole 20th century, since the death of Rudolf Steiner in 1925. The closer we got to the end of the century, the more I could experience how the Ahrimanic spirits are celebrating their global victory, and by 1998 it seemed that no power can stand in their way. I could experience that a mightly cosmic-earthly question resounded with outmost seriousness and urgency: can Michael find such souls who would participate actively in the great spiritual battle of our time?- The Colmar lecture, that was delivered in 2007, describes some of these spiritual struggles that made possible the breakthrough to the new, second Michaelic century...
An Excrept from the Colmar Lecture
Dear Friends,
Firstly I would like to say what a great pleasure it is that I am able to be here with you, and to add also that this is the first working visit that I have made to France.
But strangely enough though I don't speak or read French I have always been closely following the developments of French cultural-spiritual life in the twentieth century and also today.
And particularly I am engaged for many years with French thinking and Philosophy. And I would like in this lecture to make you aware of the role that French thinking plays in the invisible spiritual drama of our time.
I referred to what took place in the 20thCentury behind the curtains of world events in my books about The Spiritual Event of the 20th centuryand The New Experience of the Supersensible, now translated also to French. Both books were written at the beginning of the 90' of last century. There I described my spiritual-scientific research on the esoteric, super-and sub- sensible realities graspable only by means of modern spiritual scientific research methods. Until the 60' very little light was created on the earth at all- and so much darkness. Not that the darkness producing forces and events have diminished since then; on the contrary, they increase exponentially; but the good news are that in all walks of life, thought, science, art and social life, new forces of hope started to flow in the 60' and in my books I described the hidden sources out of which these spiritual forces are flowing. And some of those rare and precious rays of light emanated from French creativity in the second half of the last century.
During the whole European catastrophe of the 20th Century, before, between and after the two world wars and during the cold war, there took place right here in France a very intense and vital intellectual, but also cultural and political debate. The forces at work in thinking, with all their ingenuity, were not yet strong enough to penetrate social and political realities. While many believed to be so "revolutionary" and radical they could never really break through to new social ideas and social formations. Nevertheless, in the field of Philosophy this was different. Here some true creativity took place which was indeed striving to break new grounds.
The last century had enormous task coupled with the most grave and fateful results for good or ill. This task can be described of course in various ways. However, for our purposes tonight, because we are approaching this task from the point of view of the development of thinking, we can, generally speaking, call it: the spiritualization of consciousness or more specifically: spiritualization of the intellect (and thinking).
The is an expression used often by Rudolf Steiner. His whole impulse, the outmost exertion of his will and love was poured into this deed. And his life long hopes and were that free humans will do what he himself was striving to do: to transform themselves truly! He had sincerely hoped that this will be achieved at least by a limited number of people already at the beginning of the 20th century, that it would then be taken up by ever more people during the course of the whole century, to reach a certain intensive culmination at the end of the century and in a transformed manner will powerfully enter the global scene of the 21st century as world-changing creative power.
It is not enough nowadays that one person does something alone even if he is the greatest initiate, because others should no longer be simply led or pushed in his steps- unless we are speaking of impulses of evil.The good can only spring forth from the depth of free human hearts and minds, working together in mutual help and understanding.
And if you look at the world situation today, Anthroposophy included, from this point of view, you can surely say: well, then, we are definitely only at the very beginning! We are all therefore kindly invited to begin again, anew; if we understand truly what was said above, we are asked to see ourselves as real beginners. Ever more people should understand that the Zeitgeist is now seeking new beginners, and is quite loathsome and fed up with so many "knowers" that are constantly creating such havoc in our social, spiritual an economic life.
This spiritualization of the intellect is the first and unavoidable step needed as foundation for further transformations of human nature and society. It is the precondition for the spiritualization of our social, cultural, political and economic life. This is our main entry point, simply because we have become thinking beings in the last centuries; everything we do start from thinking and wrong thinking is immediately a source of moral-social destructive forces, and truthful thinking a building and healing power.
For this reason Steiner referred to his so-called "non-Anthroposophical" book, The Philosophy of Freedom, as his most important spiritual creation.
By means of this book, he said, if properly understood and practiced, each person can begin without any former spiritual knowledge or belief; from her or his daily thinking consciousness, daily perceiving consciousness, daily moral activity and social experiences. Each can start here from where one stands in real life.
And I have made the experience early on with myself and now also with friends and students in Israel, that with the Philosophy of Freedom, if you take it in the right manner, it is indeed the case that it gives us powerful means to realise this spiritualization and bring it to consciousness.
And now this was my own spiritual scientific way of development from my 21st year of life until my 35th. After starting from Steiner's general Anthroposophical work I then concentrated specifically on his philosophical-social work. For the building of the Harduf community, on the one hand, and for my spiritual research on the other, I searched for the hidden stream of becoming of Anthroposophy, for its living supersensible continuation. How can Steiner's starting point for thinking be continually updated, brought into the stream of the developing Zeitgeist? This was my burning daily problem. I was also aware of the retarding forces at work also inside his legacy. So I was conscious early on that I must create my own way as I go alone and that it is not simply given out there. And when you search in this way you have to find Michael's foot steps in history and in present day spiritual, cultural and social life. This is the reason why I was intensively following the new developments in the sciences, arts, social life and also in thinking and Philosophy in the course of the whole 20th Century.
Then I found, through life itself, through my work itself, that – this applies for my own experience, one cannot generalize - that whenever and wherever I looked for a way to continue after 1925 – after Steiner's death – the way that would lead to a further development of thinking and the spiritualization of the intellect, it was leading to the abyss opened with the last two German thinkers- the (converted) Jew Edmund Husserl and his National Socialist pupil Martin Heidegger, through the ruins of European culture in the second world war, and into the 50' and 60' as I mentioned above. (You can read about my knowledge struggles in this regard in the introduction I wrote to the German translation of my book: The New Experience of the Supersensible.) And it was in this following in the tragic steps of Husserl and Heidegger that I came to French Philosophy, because the French thinkers were the most ardent and receptive pupils of German thought.
[...]
The French Philosophical Century
As was said above, since the twenties and thirties, between the wars and during the cold war and later, we find the beginning of a great series of French thinkers that always begin by assimilating German Philosophy. The most recent philosophical food supply for French thinking comes from the great German fourfold "Gotterdammerung" stream: Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. Let us now invite and introduce shortly few of them. But kindly be reminded that this introduction can only be episodic, sporadic and fragmentary, a flitting-momentary inscription marked on a narrow and rapidly vanishing path….
Perhaps one beginning can be made with another born Jew, Henri Bergson, contemporary of Steiner, resurrected from oblivion by Deleuze that used especially his early book "Matter and Memory" from 1896 (two years after The Philosophy of Freedom) as one of his major starting points. And then – more or less in the same generation - we have the great phenomenologist Merleau Pontywhose book The Phenomenology of Perception is a fine study of sense-perception and perceptual consciousness, who latter was increasingly pushing the limits of perception into the supersensible, striving to transform sense-perception and body experience into spiritual experience. Then somewhat at the other pole you can take the "dark" Maurice Blansho whose writings on The Space of Literature exerted strong fascination through the century, and then we are already with the greatly influential Sartre!
Sartre transformed the fundamental ontology of Heidegger into phenomenological Existentialism and wrote his main work, Being and Nothingness during the war as reply to Heidegger's Being and Time from 1927. Just read for example the chapter on "the look of the other" in this book, and you will find a most exact and brilliant Phenomenological research of the perception, being and relation of the other that is without precedent in the history of Philosophy or science.
After the war we see the emergence of the stream of Frenchstructuralismwith among others Levi-Strauss and his school. They had a significantly fruitful influence, right up until our times, in Anthropology, Sociology, myth study and ancient cultures.
But this was all prologue, setting the stage to what, since the 60', will become the truly exciting 30 years -sixties, seventies, eighties- in which one next to the other you see the appearance of shining, most brilliant stars over the intellectual horizon of France, now world renown, but then it was all beginning; I am sure you are all familiar with those remarkable names…
First let us name another Jew-born; I mean Jacques Derrida, an Algérien borne French. He is now the rather famous, but not always truly understood, founder of a philosophical stream that he called "Deconstruction". - Derrida was Foucault's opponent, though more at friendship- from rather far away- with Deleuze. His effort was directed towards deconstructing and dismantling the centralistic-centralizing, father-god, mono-theistic forces working in past and present philosophy and literature, not as a goal in itself, but as means of uncovering the peripheral forces working in language and writing. He discovered and described some of the formative strategies of decentralized, peripheral forces that in spiritual science are called "etheric formative forces" and revealed the texture of the text, the weaving of the text through the wrap and wool of language's art of tapestry. The late Derrida is increasingly influenced by Levinas and turns his attention to ethical, political and religious investigations, studying the problems of radical alterity, the transcendental otherness of the other as unbridgeable difference. He died in 9 October, 2004 and has an ever growing circle of influence extending far away, for instance, he is felt strongly in the Americas. Derrida is one of few philosophers of the 20th century that became known as cultural figure outside the philosophical milieu.
The concept of "postmodernism" is articulated for the first time as a philosophical concept in Jean-François Lyotard's The Post Modern Condition - A report on knowledge, from 1979. Inspired by Kant's idea of the experience and cognition of the sublime (part of Kant's Critic of Judgment), he tried to create a non-positivist "eventful" concept of knowledge and art and apply it to social and political thought.
We could have named here other names, for example, the truly brilliant Paul Virilio, original thinker of modern and post-modern technology, military and urbanism and architecture, whose writings have influenced many fields. And then how can we not mention Jean Baudrillard who died last March, a sharp-minded observer and critic of electronic communication and globalized media and TV, that also wrote a short and remarkable text on the Spirit of Terrorism after the terror attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York at 11. September 2001.
And then we come to Emmanuel Levinas (we mentioned him above in connection with his teacher Heidegger). A Lithuanian born Jew that became after the war an orthodox Jew and remained observant of the commandments and Tora for the rest of his life, is beside Derrida the most widely known French Philosopher of our time, and his influence is steadily growing also now. He introduced innovatively and radically the concept of "the other“ not through Phenomenology as developed by Husserl, Heidegger or Sartre, but through such remarkable concepts as "the face of the other" and "the mortality of the other" to which I am primordially responsible. This way, so Levinas believed, is the only way to create a contra-Cain force, which is the true mission of Judaism that was suppressed by western Philosophy, Christianity and middle European culture. He sought to resurrect Abel and find the answer to Cain's primordial brother's murder, which he experienced as repeated on European and Global scale in the 20th century, especially in the annihilation of the Jews (original Abel's sons) by the German (modern Cain's sons), and in every and each persecution of the weak wherever they are. This constitutes the essence of his thought: I am my brother's keeper!In this manner Levinas tried to bring a new religious- moral impulse into the philosophical and cultural-political discourses and consciousness of the post-Holocaust world.
And perhaps the last of these great figures to be mentioned now, because our time is short, would be Alain Badiou who still lives and works today, a militant Leninist (actually Maoist-Leninist), that begun as disciple of Sartre and the French philosopher-guru of psychoanalysis, Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan, and was grooming himself to become life long contender of Deleuze. He is the rather lonely and last star still shining in the twilight zone of a truly wonderful French philosophical century. Badiou wrote an excellent students' introduction to his thought called Ethics: An essay on the understanding of evil, and just to give you an example of his varied fields of interest, he wrote the best book on St. Paul that I read in recent literature; yes, this belongs to the strange and audacious symptomatic of our time: A French non-repentant Maoist-Leninist writes best book on St. Paul!.
And these are only the more clearly marked names in history which are but the more strongly visible planets shining on the background of a whole spiritual-cultural European and French historical constellation, caused by the destruction of Europe in the last century and the vacuum created by the disappearance of German thinking. These are some of the more visible representatives of dozens of creative and original thinkers, artists, and scientists in the 20th century that lived in France.
But now there was the one who was so daring and inspiring in his originality that in a way he really towered them all, so much so, that Deleuze said: The author that wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge makes it possible for us to hope that true philosophy will again be possible. And he meant Michel Foucault.
"Foucault is closer to Goethe than to Newton", Deleuze writes (in his fine book Foucault), because as for Goethe "the light-being is strictly indivisible condition, an a priori that is uniquely able to lay visibilities open to sight and by the same stroke to the other senses", so is Foucault's new concept of language and thinking: their essential being is the imperceptible force that make all discourse visible and possible at all.
And this is the reason why Foucault could prepare and open the way for the truly most significant French thinker of the 20th century, namely, Gilles Deleuzehimself. Even the otherwise careful and rather restrained Derrida, speaking at Deleuze's funeral, exclaimed: "The author of Repetition and Difference (one of Deleuze's main books) is the sublime philosopher of the event".
Like a sun which outshines all the intellectual French stars but also contextualizing them, giving them their historical formation and placing thinking on its way in the trajectory and direction of its future cosmic destination and constellation, Deleuze fully deserves Foucault's statement: "the whole Philosophical 20th century will one day be called the Deleuzian century". And elsewhere: "A lightening storm was produced which will bear the name of Deleuze: new thought is possible; thought is again possible."
It was Deleuze, alone and together with his collaborator and co-author Felix Guattari, that actually pointed out philosophy's future role and task, in all his writings. Aphoristically speaking, let us pick one statement which can be inscribed- from the point of view presented in this lecture- as symptomatic signpost in the evolution of philosophy. We find it in his last book, written together with Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? There we find this statement: "The sole purpose of philosophy is to be worthy of the event".
This powerful transformation of the role of philosophy by Deleuze is a result of a common project, to which each of the above mentioned thinkers contributed, starting with Heidegger who was the first to thematise the "event" as a central philosophical concept. Because of our limitations here suffice it to say that with this concept Deleuze expresses a complicated and multi-levelled happening, which he described and varied repeatedly in his works during three decades.
Translated somewhat into our words this "event" will be understood as pulsing systole and diastole, a breathing of immanent life, the always occurring incarnation and excarnation process in every single element of matter, space time and consciousness. Deleuze conceived life and sensibility as existing everywhere in nature, culture and cosmos with and without organic-bodily or material foundations.If we rephrase his statement in this sense we may formulate it therefore thus: The sole purpose of philosophy is to be worthy of the ever pulsating, breathing, vibrating movement of universal immanent life".
Riddles and Problems of the Spiritualization of Thinking.
Above we brought Guattari & Deleuze revolutionary restatement of the meaning and essence of philosophy.
Over against this newly assigned role of philosophy we will place now some of Steiner's statements.
He says for example: now that the role of philosophy was fulfilled (meaning at the end on the 19th century), "we must have the courage to let the lightening of the will strike directly into thinking through the wholly singular being of the individual person". This will element can fire thinking and release it from its bodily fetters, freeing its wings to soar and ascend into the open cosmic etheric universe. Then it will no longer be the same "I" who thinks, but it will be the stream of cosmic thought that flows through my transformed being. "IT thinks in me" will become a truthful experience and real supersensible event. But precisely this remarkable spiritual achievement, namely, the "IT thinks" poses serious problems of epistemology, identity, and of course ethics, which cannot be resolved by means of present day philosophy and science.
The main problem here is, as a matter of fact, this: When IT thinks in me, who is this "me" in and through which IT thinks? In the night, when IT really not only thinks in me but builds and shapes the foundation of all my existence, my ordinary self-consciousness totally withdraws and is wholly absent; I become unconscious in order to allow IT to take my existence over, because my ordinary self cannot yet at all fulfill in spiritual self consciousness the needed maintenance of my whole being. Therefore in the night, and also unconsciously during the day, I am given to IT's cosmic guidance and healing forces and beings.
I hope I succeeded in making this problem perhaps a little more problematic and concrete for you: how can this depersonalization and over-personalization process be experienced consciously? How does the one self- the ordinary-go out, and the other- the Higher Self- come in, and who is the "one" (now already two but it will be multiplied greatly the more the spiritualization process advances) that mutually recognizes, organizes, brings the two- and the many- into harmonic composition? And in what sort of Self- consciousness would this "IT thinks" become conscious?
The same problem can also be expressed in this manner. Steiner said that he regards Descartes' famous statement "I think therefore I am" as nothing less than "the greatest failure in the evolution of modern thinking… because precisely there, where I think, I am not… because ordinary thinking is mere empty picture, image, representation, and is bereft of any real, substantial being". Now this statement characterizes an essential existential as well as philosophical experience of postmodernism as a whole and especially of the above mentioned French philosophers.
Now what postmodern thought could achieve to a certain extent and in various ways and different degrees, is part of this first aspect, namely, the "cosmization" of thinking and the realization of "the thought of the outside" and the IT thinks inside (Foucault-Deleuze); but it felt that it must sacrifice the reality of the subject, the individual, to achieve this. But with this complete sacrifice we cannot concur; however, we must also admit, as was pointed out above, that apart from Steiner's own lived initiatory example, we don't have other first-hand descriptions of a successfully carried out experiential solution of this dilemma.
Therefore we may say: postmodern philosophy did develop in original and new manner some aspects related to the spiritualization of thinking, but stopped at the threshold in relation to the deeper problems of the "I". Now, as we will see later in greater detail, the celebrated- though little understood- statements of Foucault on the death of the subject, author, etc. can only be understood as symptoms pointing to this unresolved problem.
Let me summarize briefly the first main stages in the process of the spiritualization of thinking and then indicate the full meaning of Steiner's understanding of "the sole purpose of philosophy".
[...]
Some Personal Remarks
An important part of my spiritual path and struggle in the 80’ and 90’ of last century, was dedicated to the confrontation with the philosophy of the 20th century, especially in its German-French form. It started with the Phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger, and continued to the confrontation with the post-structural French philosophy, expressed most finely in the philosophy of Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Badiou- to mention only the leading figures. I shared some aspects of this struggle in my Colmar lecture from June 1st, 2007, published in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century. I was conscious that my struggle with this powerful forms of thinking is part of new anthroposophical task at the end of the century, and that it is required, to bring about the culmination of anthroposophy, ‘inside the grave of civilization’.
In the lecture I pointed out, for example, that ’in accordance with the medieval manner of discourse—which was much more civilized (that is, truthful) than ours—we may use the term “dispute” for this rare and unique dialogic battle or battled dialogue—for a true combat of the spirits. The greatest of spiritual battles was preordained [for the end of the 20th century] but never fought in history, because the spiritual battle of the 20th century, as I mentioned above, was decided for the worst early on. When in the second half of the century and especially towards its end the great culmination of anthroposophy should have taken place, only the other stream was culminating, alone. Its true opponent was simply not present out there to fight, because the first decisive Michaelic battle was lost already in the beginning of the 20th century.
However, this was only the first century of Michael’s present age as Zeitgeist, with the first of three great battles, and so many smaller ones in between! Presently we are humbly striving to prepare some suitable starting points for the second great battle—the battle of the 21st century. Now [to the extent] that we are seriously working on self-transformation, and with it on true spiritualization of the intellect, we are strongly attracted to our rivals, or to their legacy, because our living striving is asking for a true dialogue- battle, without which it cannot thrive and develop further. And we will have at our side Deleuze’s being, leading, and the beings of his colleagues. They will serve as a strongly awakening, reminding, and truly challenging warning—and as a stark temptation as well—so that we may realize on the earth, now and in the near future, the great supersensible battle raging in the spiritual worlds closest to us, between Michael and his hosts and the adversarial—but always also helpful—spirits!"
So we can say: Gilles Deleuze went farthest along the way to fulfil this task - the spiritualization of thinking, but he accomplished it in a strongly one sided way. With Deleuzian thinking we have before us at the end of the 20th century the best example how far one could have travelled in the end of last century to bring this goal to a certain temporary culmination.
So that I have always said to myself, as I continued to study the development of consciousness through the scientific, political, artistic, and philosophical together with the Anthroposophical developments of last century, I had to say to myself again and again at the end of the century – this was particularly strong in the nineties –the following:
I said to myself: here we have this wonderful line up of characters, thinkers, as well as artists and scientists, throughout the whole of the century, so brilliant, so shiningly original, who strive strongly to bring thinking further.
Then I looked at my own efforts and I said to myself: in order to develop my own Anthroposophical thinking further, I had to go through these schools of thoughts, I really had to delve very deeply, without prejudice, into the work of many individual thinkers, and I really had to struggle in order to transform each stage, each person's thinking, each decade, to arrive at what these developments, as part of the stream of the ongoing spiritualization of the intellect could offer, enrich, challenge, also tempt and mislead.
I must confess that I experienced myself pretty much alone in this battle. I couldn't find anybody even amongst thinking anthroposophists, who- in that sense – I mean explicitly in that sense - wished to engage with this struggle.
This is why I say: in that sense. There were of course always those eager to refute each other, and were also eager to refute post-modern philosophy. This was always there.
I wasn't interested in refuting anything or anybody, I was too occupied with trying to grapple with the deeper spiritual impulses at work through these thinkers, which either corresponded to our time spirit or fought against it, or mixed the two in so many bizarre ways. There I could find some important and hidden footsteps and clues that guided me on the way of the spiritualization of thinking.
And of course the same non-dispute happens all the time also on the other side. One could not discover any wish to be even slightly aware Steiner's contribution in those thinkers that I have mentioned: a conscious un-knowing served well by the absence of presently engaged anthroposophists!
That was, and still is today, a strange situation. I always said to myself: what's happening here? It is as if I am observing a strange dramatic performance. The stage is set and some players are busy performing; they speak and act wholly unaware of the grotesque situation. They are not aware that the other players, their counterparts, aren’t even there! I then understood that what I see is only a half-play, a spiritual dramatic piece cut in twain. I observed that the real script isn't played and that what is played isn't the real script at all! I said to myself, this should have been a whole scene of battle, but what we have is only a half. The other group is not even there! It is playing no role what-so-ever in the script that they themselves wrote; They wrote it bravely in spirit… with the strength given to them in the supersensible Michaelic school in the sun sphere by the Michaelic beings, but on the earth they ignored, also forgotten and in that sense also betrayed, the roles that they appointed for themselves before birth.
I thought to myself, really that’s how it should have been from the beginning of the century to its very end. A perpetual huge battle, most fruitful dialogue – because spiritually seen a true, sincere dialogue is also a battle, a real brotherly dispute should take place between thinkers deeply connected to Anthroposophy andthose thinkers that I have mentioned above. This was growing most clear the more the end of the century drew near.
This dispute was well prepared - as we shall presently see- in the middle Ages and was predestined to take place in the 20th century. But we live in the age of freedom, in which all former scripts are easily changed by the present decisions of the preset players!
Return to the Future
Returning to the future, let us now first go back to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20thcentury, to which we referred to earlier.
Now Steiner publishes the Philosophy of Freedom in 1894 as individual-singular- spiritual achievement, unaccepted and unrecognized by general middle European culture. This was inauguration event, laying the foundation stone on which the future spiritual life of humanity will be build. A first human being was individually capable for the very first time in human history to realize in and through the spiritualization of the intellect, in and through pure thinking, an actual production and creation of the eternal, moral, spiritual substance of a human individuality as genuine self-conscious spirit-reality.
And he could achieve this remarkable deed as a free and modern human being, without depending on any given mystical or atavistic supersensible consciousness and esoteric traditions: A free deed of actualization and realization of new selfhood through cosmic thinking. The power of transformation, transubstantiation, metamorphosis, was so strongly individualized in the Middle Ages that an answer could have been given now to the unresolved riddle and problem with which Thomas Aquinas died: How can thinking be redeemed and with it and through it the human self?
This is also, as I said before, the main theme of my work published in 1995 with the title: The Modern Experience of the Supersensible, which I subtitled: the knowledge drama of the second coming.
[...]
Steiner went ahead and pioneered, all alone, this individual deed through his sacrifice and toil for humanity. We are invited to be as beginners as he was when he conceived and wrote this humble book, the seed for the spiritualization of thinking, consciousness, and humanity and the earth in the future: The Philosophy of Freedom.
He made it possible. And even despite the fact that not his but Heidegger's concept of the human triumphed over Europe and the whole globe today, Steiner's deed made it possible that in the historical moment in which "freedom [lighted] up in the human being for a single cosmic moment…", it will not be lost, and that, in face of the fiercest evil of annihilation, brought about by so many "commanders of annihilation" all over the earth in the course of the whole 20the century, "… in the very same moment the human being would [not any longer only] dissolve away ...".
And therefore, indeed: "We are here pointing to the abyss of nothingness in human evolution which man must cross when he becomes a free being. It is the working of Michael and the Christ-impulse which makes it possible for him to leap across the gulf."
And though on the much hoped-for large scale this battle didn't take place at the end of the 20thcentury, I wanted to tell you that it still may become a fruitful and joyful seed of new life in each of our hearts. This was the sole purpose of my sharing tonight, "to make philosophy worthy of this event". I wanted to inscribe it here in my first working visit to France, Colmar and Alsace: to share with you some of my experiences in the last decades of the last century, in order to encourage you too to begin and become beginners of the now beginning new Michaelic century.
Thank you very much!
read the whole lecture in the book Spiritual Science in the 21st Century