Awake! Living Nature Knowledge
GA 220 Intellectual fall from grace and spiritual redemption.
This lecture series took place immediately following the burning of the first Goetheanum.
The translation in the book pictured is much better than the translation on RSarchive.
It discusses the intellectual fall of the present (in conjunction with the “moral fall” of the fall from Eden)—and
I therefore once expressed in a lecture that I held many years ago in Mannheim that mankind, in fact, in its present development, is on the point of reversing the fall of man. What I said was hardly noticed, but consisted in the following: The fall of man was understood to be a moral fall, which ultimately influenced the intellect also. The intellect felt itself to be at the limits of its knowledge. And it is basically one and the same thing—only in a somewhat different form—if the old theology speaks of sin or if Dubois-Reymond speaks of the limits of our ability to know nature. I indicated how one must grasp the spiritual—which, to be sure, has been filtered down into pure thinking—and how, from there, one can reverse the fall of man. I showed how, through spiritualizing the intellect, one can work one's way back up to the divine spiritual.
But the really interesting lecture was the last, lecture 12. While it opens with a discussion and comparison between Friedrich Nietzsche and Herman Grimm, it really is about electricity.
People’s thoughts have been completely caught up in electricity for a very short time. …
And if you look at the ideas that existed before the age of electricity, you can say that they still gave the natural thinker the freedom to at least abstractly think the spiritual into nature. - A tiny remnant of scholastic realism was still present. But electricity got on modern man’s nerves and knocked out everything that was a direct link to the spiritual.
…
And the greatest contrast to electricity is light. And it is a mixture of good and evil to regard light as electricity. One has just lost the real view of evil in the natural order if one is not aware that by electrifying the atoms one actually makes them the carriers of evil, not only, as I explained in the last course, the carriers of the dead, but the carriers of evil. They are made the carriers of the dead by allowing them to be atoms in the first place, by presenting matter atomistically. At the moment when this part of matter is elctrified, at the same moment nature is imagined as evil. Because electric atoms are evil, little demons.
