Proceedings Colloquium on World History - Waldorf Research Institute

necessary process of history as a flight from the divine, the object of which
is human freedom. But human freedom could not be willed out of human
freedom. It is willed out of what for man is necessity. It is only when necessity
estranges man from the divine that individual freedom can arise. The
necessary in history is not the enemy, but the condition of freedom.
Kant saw freedom as the end of history: the anthroposophist sees it not
as the end but as a new beginning, the setting out on the long road which
leads again to the divine. The first stage on that road is the overcoming of
the rational, which gave man his freedom, by Imagination, which transcends
the barrier that Kant raised between the knower and the thing-initself
which is to be known.
This transcendence in history is the immediate experience of the past as
present which Collingwood and Oakeshott are seeking for. Here again, however,
anthroposophy has a concrete view of the past-in-the-present in its
understanding of reincarnation. It is undoubtedly true that in every word
we speak, every thought we think, every deed we do, we are always unconsciously
evoking the forces of the past and allowing them to live again in us.
Dr. Johnson observed that if the simplest book could be written out of the
unaided powers of one individual, it would be a stupendous achievement.
But the stream of consciousness which descends down the generations, and
makes the writing of a book possible, is met by another stream of which we
are usually equally unaware. This is the stream of our own experiences in
former earth lives, without which we should not have the forces to take
hold of the inheritance on which we enter when we are born.
This conception of reincarnation also reverses what is still the unconscious
assumption of historians. They study the process of history, and even
if they believe (and all do not) that the individual has a vital contribution to
make to that process, or at least that some individuals have made such a
contribution, still fundamentally they see the individual as serving the process
of history, not the process of history the individual. Now when some
people say that the individual exists to serve the State, we call this view
totalitarian, and are proud of our western view that the State exists to serve
the individual. All history, however, which denies reincarnation is totalitarian.
It is only through the fact of repeated earth lives that the process of
history can serve the individual. The humblest biography then takes a new
significance from its historical setting. In the past we have all shared in the
preparation of the present: in the present we are all preparers of what is to
come. We serve the Muse of History. But equally Clio serves us.
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Reprinted from The Golden Blade, 35 Park Road, London, England,
1960.
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