The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Closing Remarks Following Carl Unger’s Lecture on “Technology as a Free Art”

[ 1 ] Dear fellow students, distinguished guests! I would very much like to stick strictly to the topic, and since we will be discussing the threefold social order later, I will postpone all questions relating to it until then. However, I do believe it is justified to say a few words about the threefold division here as well, since Dr. Unger himself, in his discussions, has taken the idea of the threefold division as the foundation for his views on the creation of technology as a free art.

[ 2 ] In a certain sense, one cannot quite maintain—I also expressed this in my “Key Points of the Social Question,” and Dr. Unger surely meant the same thing— one cannot maintain, in the strict sense of the word, that the idea of threefolding as such—that is, the threefolding of the social organism as an idea, as a concept—is a kind of new discovery. Rather, perhaps there is a kind of new discovery in the social laws to which I referred in my essays from 1905. The idea of threefolding is actually an old one, and it has also been mentioned frequently in the form of the “idea of threefolding.” What is essential—how the idea of threefolding presents itself to you here and how it manifests itself in the present—is not its actual conceptual character, but rather the position it seeks to occupy in relation to the entire social organism. The idea of dividing the entire life of humanity into a spiritual part, a political-legal part, and an economic part—this idea was bound to arise again and again; and here and there, if the claim were made that we are dealing here with something completely new as an idea, I believe that claims to primacy—which are very familiar to me—would quite naturally be made. That is why I pointed out in the “Key Points” that, as the idea of threefolding appears here, it is in fact something entirely different.

[ 3 ] This idea of threefold social organization, as advocated by me, for example, has emerged entirely from decades of observing the needs of humanity today. Indeed, if one looks at the circumstances of the present with open eyes, one had to recognize as early as the end of the 19th century that events were heading toward a catastrophe. And in the spring of 1914, I pointed this out in a series of lectures I gave in Vienna to a small group—a larger audience would likely have laughed at me at the time because of my remarks—that in the very near future, conditions in the civilized world—I did not say at the time merely “European conditions”—were heading toward a decisive catastrophe. You see, this was at a time when we were already very close to the catastrophe. Nevertheless, in the weeks that followed, we had to witness people who, in their positions, were responsible for the course of events, speaking in roughly the following manner. A statesman in a position of responsibility—one whom one might call “outstanding”—though, of course, only in the sense that our age so often uses the term “outstanding”—said, when the general world situation was being discussed in parliament, that Central Europe’s relations with Russia were as favorable as could be imagined; one could be convinced that peace was becoming more and more consolidated. He was able to say this because of the friendly, neighborly relations that prevailed, for example, between St. Petersburg and Berlin. — This is how officials spoke in May 1914, after they—just as I had done— had previously been compelled to point out with all our energy that conditions were bound to lead to a catastrophe—simply because the three elements of human coexistence—the spiritual, the legal, and the economic—had become so intertwined throughout social life that the catastrophe, in its depths, could really only be seen in the upheaval of these three spheres. One could indeed see—especially if one had an eye for it—how the rampant intellectualism of recent times was affecting our entire public life, how people’s complete devotion to the intellectualist element, as it had developed in the prevailing scientific mindset—which, after all, had permeated everything else as well— one could see how this devotion to intellectualism was, in a certain sense, paving the way for catastrophe. Therein lie the deeper reasons, and anyone who does not yet see them there today cannot participate fruitfully in a discussion about constructive forces.

[ 4 ] You see, back then one could actually experience something like that—I’m not saying this out of immodesty, but because it strikes me as symptomatically significant as a personal experience—: In 1914, at the beginning of summer, I gave a lecture in Paris on the topics I usually speak about—and which I also spoke about yesterday, for example. This lecture was not given for a German colony there, but was translated word for word; it was thus explicitly intended for the French, not for German colonists living in Paris—who were not even in the audience. So in May 1914, with what had flowed from German spiritual life in the strictest sense—for fundamentally, everything that is presented here as anthroposophy has flowed from German spiritual life—one could somehow make a certain impression with it throughout the world. We had reached that point in the spiritual realm. But what worked against this, once again, was the economic realm. And one need only look closely at how this lack of harmony between spiritual life and economic life—if I may use that critical term—was the root phenomenon of all the events that were unfolding in the 1880s and had reached their peak at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Of course, countless forces and currents converge here, so it is naturally impossible to summarize everything in just a few words.

[ 5 ] But if one wishes to highlight an important phenomenon, a fundamental phenomenon, one could do so in much the same way as I once did in a lecture in Nuremberg in 1908. At that time, I pointed out how characteristic it is of modern social life that the personal has, in fact, been increasingly marginalized, particularly in what is called capitalism—in capitalism in general—without wishing to condemn capital in the economy, for, of course, modern economic life cannot be conducted without capital investments—that is, without capitalism—and to speak of capitalism as is often done today is nothing other than the purest form of layman’s thinking or dilettantism. What is at issue is that the capitalist system has, fundamentally speaking, since the beginning of the 20th century—though the groundwork was laid earlier—become increasingly impersonal. I’d like to cite an anecdote here; anecdotes are, after all, sometimes characteristic of what took place. When international economic life was still more dependent on the individual, it once happened that the finance minister of the King of France had to go to Rothschild in Paris because the king, for reasons you can easily imagine, had to turn to the banker. He arrived just as Rothschild was dealing with a leather merchant. Now, capitalism does lead to a certain instinctive socialism—one must realize that. Rothschild, who was, of course, very powerful and who, in everything he managed in a capitalist manner, emphasized the personal element rather than the impersonal capitalist one—Rothschild was, in other words, in the midst of a transaction with a leather merchant. The servant came in and announced the king’s finance minister. “Tell him to wait until I’m finished,” said Rothschild. The servant couldn’t quite make sense of that, and the man waiting outside certainly couldn’t either. He thought there must be some misunderstanding. “Please tell him,” he sent the servant back, “that the minister of the King of France is here.” — Rothschild had him told again, “Yes, he’ll just have to wait.” The minister couldn’t make head or tail of it; he flung open the door and stepped inside. “I am the Minister of Finance of the King of France,” he said. “Very well,” said Rothschild, “I’m still busy. Please take a chair and sit down.” “Yes, but I am the Minister of Finance of the King of France!” “Please take two chairs,” said Rothschild.

[ 6 ] I am telling you this so that you, too, can see from this anecdote that there was indeed something at work in capitalism that lay in personal will and personal emotions. This personal element came to an end. What I have said is, of course, not a line of reasoning, but merely an illustration. A proof would have to be presented over the course of a whole series of lectures. But precisely at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, this personal element shifted toward the purely objective. I would say: Forces came into play through which the masses of capital moved as if of their own accord. Share capital came to the fore in place of individual capital, and society took the place of the influence of the individual personality. With this, an impersonal element emerged, so that in modern economic life, the individual was gradually drawn into an impersonal framework. And in place of personal initiative came what might be called routine. It was no longer possible to develop anything other than routine in economic life. Anyone who studies economic history will find how these factors are rooted in the development of modern economic life, and how they were the very forces that drove us toward the terrible global catastrophe. — That catastrophe was now upon us, and so it was precisely at this time that one could believe the right moment had arrived for people to realize, through their practical experience of life, that the interplay of these three spheres must be sought in an appropriate manner. And that is the essence of what emerged as the threefold structure of the social organism: not the idea as such, but the way in which, in every detail, things are conceived from the concrete reality of immediate practical life. There is something thoroughly anti-utopian in this impulse toward threefolding, as it appears here—something that rejects any kind of utopia and seeks only to work from the practical realities of life.

[ 7 ] This is precisely what is so rarely recognized and what—even by supporters of the so-called threefold social order—is not given due consideration. It happens very often that the threefold social order is discussed—even by its proponents—as if it were a utopia, as if it had not emerged from what all people actually want in their respective fields. One simply needs to bring together these individual wills. People are usually not conscious of what they want, but they want it nonetheless. The subconscious plays a much greater role in social life than one might think. That is why people have told me time and again: “Yes, what is written in the ‘Key Points’—which, after all, underlie the threefold social order as it appears today—is exactly what this or that society wants in this or that field.” — Someone else brought up a different specialized field. “That’s nothing new,” they said. — “All the better,” I said. The less new something is, the better. The more it is rooted in what people already want, the better. It simply comes down to ensuring that a certain degree of mutual understanding develops among the individual specialized fields. And in this regard, I do believe that Dr. Unger’s lecture today was of extraordinary importance, precisely because it was entirely inspired by the idea that, ultimately, what the technician seeks in his field cannot be resolved as a separate issue without turning one’s gaze toward social life as a whole. It is therefore of little significance when people say that these specialized ideas have already been expressed, or have surfaced here and there in echoes, or when they claim that everything has already been said before. Let us assume the most extreme hypothesis. Let us assume that Dr. Unger said nothing new at all, but that his ideas had, for my sake, been expressed for decades by the most diverse technical disciplines and societies. I believe, however, that one must agree with me on one point, even if this hypothesis were correct: these ideas have not been implemented—surely no one would claim otherwise. Many may claim that they were cherished, but no one can claim that they were implemented. They remain questions today, just as they were questions decades ago. And this is because they were treated in a specialized manner, so that the engineer confined himself to his own field and addressed all specialized technical questions from within that field. But that is not how things can be solved today. We do not merely have a global economy; we also have a global consciousness—something that extends across the entire world and that, in the economic and technical spheres, can only be addressed as a global issue. The reason why a solution could not be found is that the technician was, in a sense, on his own. The technician must even have found this isolation painful, precisely because—having developed into a modern technician—he represents the very epitome of modern life. One can say of the most diverse other professions in modern life: here and there they have their roots. What the modern engineer is, he has become through modern technology. He represents a profession within the entire social order, and his specific occupation gives rise to a social context that is itself a social issue. But this can only be addressed in the context of social life as a whole. Therefore, what Dr. Unger has formulated with the phrase “technology as a free art” will remain a utopia as long as no connection is found between the specific desires and ideas of technicians and universal social ideas. What the technician needs most is to acquire a universal perspective on social needs, precisely because he has positioned himself as something new within modern life. The farmer, too, needs this social perspective, insofar as agriculture itself is permeated by technology. But as a farmer, he is an age-old figure. Yet it is precisely in that which has entered modern social development as something entirely new that the essence of the social question must emerge most significantly. And that is what perhaps needs to be emphasized most of all. I do not wish to go into specific questions of threefolding that immediately arise when discussing specific technical issues. The essential point is that technical issues are treated as a chapter within the broader, general social questions. It is not a matter of assuming, for example, that from an anthroposophical perspective one simply wants to incorporate the technical issue into the threefolding movement from the outside. The threefold social order movement would be nothing more than a catchphrase if one were to treat the matter in this way. But this is not about catchphrases; it is about something else. What is at stake is that through this movement—which could also be called by another name—the three members of social life are to be brought into a proper relationship with respect to intellectualism, which strives to to lump everything together, even if it then takes out of that lump, for example, the Fourteen Points, which—insofar as they were Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points—truly leave nothing to be desired in terms of their intellectualism. I first articulated the idea of the threefold social order precisely at a terribly serious moment when, once again, people were not seeking solutions to these questions from practical life experience, but rather from their minds, from intellectualism—as exemplified by Wilson’s Fourteen Points. One could see, especially abroad, how these Fourteen Points, when they appeared, appealed to something pathological in humanity, and it was most regrettable that at the most critical moment in recent German historical development, in the fall of 1918, Central Europe actually went along with these Fourteen Points and failed to see how, precisely at this very moment, we are compelled to engage directly with practical life—without any abstract theories—and to study matters from that perspective. The Fourteen Points were a utopia; subsequent developments have shown this. Humanity will have to come to realize that nothing can be achieved with such utopias, but that something is achieved only when one engages realistically with what is there; when one knows how to think, based on what exists, not merely logically—which is easy today—but in a realistic way.

[ 8 ] Anthroposophy strives for this kind of thinking, which can only be understood if, when speaking of the spirit, one does not act like that farmer who was shown a magnet and said: “Oh, nonsense—that’s just a horseshoe; I’ll use it to shoe my horse.” — That is roughly how someone behaves toward reality when they deny the spiritual aspect of that reality. And there is no getting around the fact that if someone wants to think in accordance with reality, they must also address the spiritual. That is why anthroposophy is a spiritual science. And what it has in common with the deepest, most significant demands of our time is that it seeks to be grounded in reality—that is, to be practical—wherever practical matters are concerned, particularly in economic and technical life. And everyone—even if they hold, or believe themselves to hold, this or that divergent view—such as, for example, that anthroposophy does not concern itself enough with God, which is a completely unfounded opinion, or that, for some people, it concerns itself far too much with God, and who are opponents from this perspective, and likewise the other points mentioned here, which are expressed from different viewpoints— but everyone—even if they hold other views on one thing or another—if they are serious about shaping our social conditions in a way that corresponds to reality in any specific field, based on a universal understanding of the whole, will also find points of connection with what is known as the anthroposophical movement. For it does not seek to be fanciful, but rather to be human. And it will gladly join forces with those who understand what it means to be human.