Humanity

The Section’s theme of East and West and the study of what makes us human between the cosmos and technology have proven to be highly topical and future-oriented.

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Because of the Coronavirus the world has turned towards Asia, first astonished, then with fear, trying to ward off what rose to the surface there. The Section – almost prophetically, one could say, with hindsight – stayed abreast of such negative associations by starting its series of events in February with a conference on the importance of East Asia for the present culture – a spiritual perception of contrasts that, when brought together, can build a bridge across mistrust, fear and death. We concluded the year with a study of Rudolf Steiner’s cycles on the Gospel of St Mark. Steiner translated a sentence from this gospel as follows: “Grasping the ‘I’ in such a way that we recognize the You in its spirituality, that is the Christ.” This kind of recognition is what the world needs now.

In between we had a conference on Rainer Maria Rilke, for whom language was a means for making the world more humane, and on Johann Wolfgang Goethe‘s Faust 1&2 that also explored the question of being human. During the second intensive study week on Esoteric Science we asked what it means that future world evolution will depend on humanity.

As the harvest from the last two years we published a book on the two transhumanism conferences entitled Das Ende des Menschen? [The end of the human being?], with the following essence: technology needs to be permeated by the intellect, touched by the soul and shaped by the will. Only then will human beings remain free. This work will continue with a study group, across the Sections, on ‘Technology and Transhumanism’.

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