The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. The Need for Cultural Renewal

[ 1 ] I was asked to speak this evening on the topic “The Necessity of Cultural Renewal.” Over the past few days, I have taken the liberty of speaking about anthroposophical spiritual science. This is a field in which, generally speaking, an individual is free to speak if he believes he is entitled to share one thing or another with his fellow human beings based on specific research findings or insights. For this is, after all, the expression of an individual impulse, even though one must certainly be of the opinion that one is dealing with something that could concern all fellow human beings from some perspective or another. However, I feel quite differently about today’s topic. If one is to speak of the necessity of cultural renewal in our time, then such a topic is justified only if one can truly perceive that it corresponds to a general consensus, and if there is a belief in or a will toward what one might call cultural renewal. The individual must therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, become an interpreter of a generally prevailing view. For arbitrary individual opinions, when faced with such a question, would be something that could only give rise to immodesty and arrogance. Hence, the question arises above all else: Does this topic correspond to a sentiment that is generally prevalent today, to a sum of feelings that exist in wider circles? One may, however, believe—if one surveys with an unbiased eye what exists in the hearts, in the various moods and states of mind of our contemporary society—that this topic of the necessity of cultural renewal is justified in many respects. Do we not see how many of our contemporaries, in the most diverse areas of life, feel that something must enter our spiritual life and the other aspects of our human coexistence—something that, in some form, should correspond to a search that is clearly present?

[ 2 ] Seeking souls—we find them today in many areas of artistic life. Seeking souls—who could fail to have noticed them?—are found above all among today’s youth. It is precisely among today’s youth that we find a longing for something that they cannot find in what the prevailing spirit of the times offers them. We find searching souls above all in the realm of ethical and religious life. Countless questions—some voiced, but even more unspoken, merely felt—lie in human hearts today in an ethical-religious context. And when we consider social life, the very course of the world itself—everything, one might say, that happens in these spheres of life—appears to us as one great question: Where is a kind of cultural renewal of this social life to come from?

[ 3 ] Even so, when faced with these most diverse questions, the individual should not go so far in his response as to believe that he is making a small contribution toward meeting the general need in this area. And perhaps the remarks I have made in the various lectures over the past few days, based on anthroposophical spiritual research, to raise a few points regarding our topic today, because—even though this anthroposophical spiritual science knows that it can offer, at most, something in its very early stages and is only able to provide inspiration for many of the things people are seeking today—this anthroposophical research aims precisely to provide such seeds. An attempt has been made to establish the School of Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, in Dornach, Switzerland. And it can be said that at least an attempt has been made to enrich the individual scientific fields by bringing into medicine, the natural sciences, sociology, history, and the most diverse other areas of human inquiry—alongside what the extraordinary, significant methods of recent times have been able to contribute—that which can be gained through direct research into the spiritual world itself. And it is precisely in this field that an effort is being made to provide practical applications in a pedagogical and didactic manner through the “Waldorf School” in Stuttgart. Attempts have even been made to achieve certain things in the economic sphere. It must be said, however, that our current circumstances are so difficult that we will first have to test whether these economic initiatives can—I won’t say “achieve,” but rather “inspire”—what a large number of people are seeking today in terms of a genuine cultural renewal.

[ 4 ] So let me speak first about this search. Of course, I cannot speak here from the perspective of your national culture—within which I can, to my deepest satisfaction, consider myself merely a guest—but only from an international perspective. But how can anyone who has a heart, a mind, a spirit, and an open soul for what the part of humanity that will be more important in the future now sees before them as their longing—how can anyone who observes this with an unbiased mind fail to turn their gaze first to the quest of youth! Everywhere we find that it is precisely our youth who have the yearning—arising, I might say, from something that is at first entirely undefined—to receive something new. And the very serious, significant question must arise: Why is it, then, that our youth can no longer find full satisfaction in what we, as older people, have been able to give them? And I believe precisely that this search on the part of youth is connected to the most intimate, deepest impulses of the soul that give rise to this general human search in the present. I believe that, in this regard, one must indeed delve deeply into the human mind if one wishes to assess the true underlying basis of what is, admittedly, visible on the surface—the call for cultural renewal. One will have to look into the many depths of human inner life, and above all, one must not merely inquire into the cultural characteristics of the immediate present, but must cast one’s gaze over a somewhat longer period of time.

[ 5 ] Anyone who approaches this with an open mind will find that the particular state of mind of contemporary humanity has been shaped in the context of international relations over the last three, four, or five centuries, and they will find that these last three, four, or five centuries essentially reveal something entirely new in terms of the human state of mind compared to what—as a truly unbiased historical view reveals—was still present in the distant past as the spiritual disposition of the West in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. When one looks back to these earlier times of Western spiritual life, one finds everywhere that the human soul-spiritual perspective and the physical, sensory perspective were not separated in the strict sense, as was later the case, and as is the case in our immediate present. People of earlier centuries, in directing their senses toward the physical environment, suspected something spiritual in all things perceptible to the senses. Admittedly, they no longer conceived of the world in spiritual terms to the same degree as, perhaps, the ancient Egyptians or even the ancient Greeks, who saw in the celestial world the outward embodiment of spiritual and soul entities; but they still had a sense that the spiritual permeates everything in their physical environment. And again, when this person of earlier centuries looked within himself, he did not strictly separate the physical-bodily from the soul, from thinking, from feeling, from willing. I would say that, by being conscious of his soul, a person also felt conscious of his bodily limbs and organs, and he saw something soul-physical in these bodily organs within his own organism. He perceived the soul-physical in the world outside, and the soul-physical within his own inner being. And so they were able to feel a certain kinship, a certain familiarity with their surroundings. They could say to themselves: That which lives within me also lives, in a certain sense, in the world into which certain divine-spiritual powers—which govern and guide the world—have placed me. - Human beings felt a kinship and familiarity with the world. They felt, as it were, like a limb of the great spiritual-soul-physical world organism.

[ 6 ] This is a feeling we understand very little today, precisely because times have become quite different over the past few centuries. And this change is not merely evident among theorists and scientists; it is evident in every single human heart, in every single human soul. It is expressed not only in how we view the world scientifically today, but also in how we incorporate the spirit of physical matter into our artistic creation and appreciation. It is expressed in how we encounter our fellow human beings in social life, how we understand them, and what we demand of them. Finally, it is also expressed in how we feel about our own moral and religious impulses, how we experience the divine within our own hearts and souls, and how we relate to that which, in the deepest sense, has unraveled the spirit of earthly existence for the Earth: how we relate to the deeper inner meaning of Christianity.

[ 7 ] So one might say: What is being sought in the broadest circles is likely to be related in some way to this transformation. And what is this transformation like? — Well, in recent centuries, the age that is so often called the age of intellectualism has indeed dawned. It was not intellectualism, it was not the abstract use of reason, that once, in earlier centuries, made human beings so familiar and attuned to their surroundings, as I have just attempted to characterize in broad terms. It is only modern man who, within the course of human development, has truly learned to place his full trust in the intellect and reason when observing the world—and even when experiencing it.

[ 8 ] However, two conditions arise in human life that are intrinsically linked: internally, intellectualism—trust in the authority of reason and the intellect—and externally, faith in natural phenomena and a sense for observing them. Internally, modern man developed a tendency to subject everything to the power of rational, intellectual, and intellectualistic consideration. And it followed naturally that this inner capacity is, above all else, applicable only to natural phenomena—to everything that can be observed through the senses and analyzed or combined in concepts. These two things, I would say—the unimpeded observation of nature and the development of the intellectual—were the two great, significant educational tools of the past centuries, the educational tools that exerted their greatest influence on civilized humanity in the 19th century, and which also bore fruit in the 20th century.

[ 9 ] Now, it is a peculiarity that when one devotes oneself to the use of reason, one becomes, in a certain sense, lonely in one’s inner experience. The exercise of reason has something—it is clearly evident in its pictorial character—that, in a certain way, becomes alien to immediate feeling, that takes on a cold, sober nuance of life, and that, in turn, can truly develop only in the proper sense through external nature, through everything that surrounds human beings. And while one may well find deeply satisfying explanations for the natural world through such a relationship—through such a connection between human beings and the world—one no longer has the same opportunity as in the past to, so to speak, find oneself in the external natural world. What shone out to people of earlier centuries as spiritual and soulful from the colorful, the resonant, the warm and cold world, from the seasons—they felt this, they experienced it as something akin to what lived within their own inner being. That which we experience through the intellect—the entire external natural existence, I might say, everything we discover through intellectual research in physics, chemistry, and biology—we cannot directly bring into our own humanity through our feelings. Certainly, we can strive to investigate the inner human organic structure biologically; we can even go so far as to seek to investigate the chemistry of the human organism. But we will never be able to find that what we bring from the study of external nature into our understanding of our own humanity truly grips our sensibility—that it ultimately crystallizes into a religious or ethical sensibility toward the world—that it ultimately crystallizes, for example, in the feeling: “I am a part of this world; it is spiritual and soulful, and so am I.”

[ 10 ] This feeling does not shine through in what we have been able to learn so magnificently over the past few centuries through the inspiration of the natural sciences. And so it has come to pass that precisely what has brought humanity its greatest and most significant achievements—what has transformed modern existence as a whole—has also alienated humanity from itself. That human beings can stand in the world and look up in admiration at their mathematical judgments about the spatial world, about the stars and their movements; that they can, with a certain scientific awe, fathom what lives in plants, animals, and so on— has, despite all the problems that remain unsolved, something satisfying about the way human beings can, on the one hand, unravel nature in this manner through the application of precisely this natural science, through the application of their intellect, their reason, and their use of understanding. But what human beings could not attain by this path is the knowledge of themselves. The science we have of the stars, the science we have in physics and chemistry, the science we have in biology, and in more recent times even the science of history—none of these tell human beings anything about their deepest longing with regard to their own humanity. And as a result, a search has arisen more and more strongly.

[ 11 ] And this search is none other than modern man’s search for humanity itself. No matter how hard one tries to summarize what this search entails in the most diverse fields, one finds everywhere that people are actually seeking to unravel the mystery of their own selves—the mystery of humanity itself. This is not merely a matter of interest to theorists; it is something that deeply affects all states of the human soul. Certainly, for anyone interested in such matters, it is deeply evocative of longing when research into nature directly points them toward fathoming what lies hidden beyond the vastness of natural existence: human beings with their essence, which, after all, extends far beyond what can be experienced in the outer realms of nature. But I would like to say: That is actually where the great mystery begins.

[ 12 ] The other aspect lies in the fact that we have also allowed our feelings—and indeed our entire upbringing—to be influenced by what has emerged in this way over the past few centuries. And our external life is very much a reflection of this. More than one might think, our external life reflects what has emerged in the spiritual life of humanity’s recent development in the manner just described.

[ 13 ] We do not merely ask in vain, in a theoretical sense, about the human being—oh no, today we pass each other by, person to person, and, under the influence of our modern education, have not acquired the ability to understand our fellow human beings from within—the ability to look into what lives in the human soul with a kind of clairvoyant compassion, as existed in many older cultures. We make many demands of life, but as a rule, we pass each other by, person to person. Not only have we lost a theoretical understanding of humanity for the reasons stated, but we have also lost an intuitive understanding of humanity for every hour of the day that we live among our fellow human beings. And perhaps nothing can make us more aware of how we have lost this understanding of our fellow human beings than the very emergence of the social question in its present form. Why, then, is the call for social reforms, for social renewal, so loud? It rings out precisely because we have actually become quite antisocial people. Fundamentally, people always demand most of all that which they lack the most, and in the loud call for socialism, it is actually revealed—to ears that can listen impartially—that we have become such unsocial people, that we do not understand one another, that we are incapable of forming a social organism, and that we therefore hope that our reason, which has undergone such a high level of development, that intellectualism, will lead us back to such a social organism after all.

[ 14 ] It is precisely the social question itself that shows us how alienated we have actually become from one another as human beings. The religious question confronts us in the present—indeed, throughout modern times—precisely because human beings have lost the direct inner experience of being directly connected to the divine essence of the world, of experiencing how that which speaks within them is an expression of the divine-spiritual. Once again, it is out of this lack that the call for religious renewal arises.

[ 15 ] If we now look more deeply into life—into our present-day life of searching—from such starting points, we do indeed find that intellectual culture, intellectual contemplation, which has even caused human feeling to gradually fade, is, at its core, something bound to a specific stage of human life. We must not succumb to any deception or illusion: the individual human being, in essence, only awakens to the intellect with sexual maturity, in young adulthood. He awakens to intellectualism at that stage of his life when he is to step out into the world to work. But intellectualism is not something that can be our own, something that can move our soul, when we are children or when we are in school age immediately following childhood. In this youthful stage of life, the state of the soul must be different from what it can be later on. And the intellectual aspect that is useful in the life of today’s humanity cannot be fully expressed—indeed, it must not be fully expressed—during youth, for it would have a chilling, stifling, and paralyzing effect on the vital forces of youth. And this is actually how it has come to be—one must look into the more intimate details of life if one wishes to understand the searching present—that we grow into a culture which, as paradoxical as it sounds, robs us, in our mature years, of the most beautiful memories of our childhood.

[ 16 ] When we look back in our memories on what we experienced as children, we cannot bring to the surface—with the necessary intensity and warmth—what often lies buried in the unconscious, what can emerge only in dark premonitions, memories, or sometimes merely as tints of thoughts and memories. We end up no longer fully understanding ourselves. We look back on our childhood as if it were a mystery. We no longer know how to speak from our whole, complete selves and to infuse the language we use as adults with that nuance which allows what the child experiences in its living wisdom—when it turns its innocent eyes toward the world, when it unfolds its will in the first years of life—to resonate through that adult language.

[ 17 ] One does not truly study history unless, through history, one comes to understand how childhood development has played a role everywhere in the evolution of humanity, even as the language of mature human beings has come to be heard. We spend our childhood unconsciously, but we spend it in such a way that what we bring with us from our spiritual-soul life—from our pre-existing life—through birth and our connection with the physical body is still intensely present in this unconscious inner life. must not be allowed to run its course in youth, for it would have a chilling, deadly, and paralyzing effect on the forces of youth. And this is actually how it has come to be—one must look into the more intimate details of life if one wishes to understand the searching present—that we grow into a culture which, as paradoxical as it sounds, robs us, in our mature years, of the most beautiful memories of our childhood.

[ 18 ] When we look back in our memories on what we experienced as children, we cannot bring to the surface—with the necessary intensity and warmth—what often lies buried in the unconscious, what can emerge only in dark premonitions, memories, or sometimes merely as tints of thoughts and memories. We end up no longer fully understanding ourselves. We look back on our childhood as if it were a mystery. We no longer know how to speak from our whole, complete selves and to infuse the language we use as adults with the nuance that allows what the child experiences in its living wisdom—when it turns its innocent eyes toward the world, when it unfolds its will in the first years of life—to resonate through that adult language.

[ 19 ] One does not truly study history unless, through history, one comes to understand how childhood development has played a role everywhere in the evolution of humanity, even as the language of mature human beings has taken shape. We spend our childhood unconsciously, but we spend it in such a way that what we bring with us from our spiritual-soul life—from our pre-existing life—through birth and our connection with the physical body is still intensely present in this unconscious inner life. Whoever is able to observe a child—whoever has the soul and the sense to make this observation—will have the greatest mystery revealed to them when they see how, week by week, what the human being brings with them from a spiritual-soul existence into this earthly-physical world emerges in the child. That which unconsciously embodies and infuses the eternal into the human limbs and the entire human organism causes an inner permeation with the spiritual-soul aspect; but this is later struck, as it were, by a chilling substance when that which is actually present only for earthly affairs—when the intellect takes precedence—

[ 20 ] Anyone today who is self-aware enough to reflect on these intimate matters knows how a gentle mist spreads over what seeks to penetrate from our childhood into our mature consciousness, knows how we cannot possibly convey in our now-outdated words what lives so vividly in the child—and, because it affects us spiritually and emotionally, essentially lives much more deeply in the child’s spirit and soul than it can later in intellectualism.

[ 21 ] A witty writer of the 18th and 19th centuries once said: “A person learns more in the first three years of life than in the first three years of academic study.” — I certainly do not mean to offend academics in the slightest, for I hold them in high regard; yet I also believe that, in terms of our entire, our full humanity, we learn more in the first three years of life—when we ourselves are still shaping our organism from our unconscious wisdom—than we can ever learn later on. Yet in our present culture, we are very much inclined to actually forget these three most important years of learning—or at least not to bring them to life in the appropriate way—in what later becomes the expression of our desire, above all through such a teaching staff, to strive for a school reform that finds the way to speak to children again—as to true friends—through the spiritual rejuvenation of later years. For anyone who has truly acquired a sense of spiritual life finds that every child is a revelation, and knows that the child—whether younger or more mature—gives him even more—if he is open to it—than he can give to the child. As paradoxical as it sounds, this is precisely the nuance that can lead us to a kind of cultural renewal in this very area.

[ 22 ] And if, so to speak, we allow ourselves to be illuminated by this light in regard to what we otherwise encounter in life, then we must say: When we see so clearly that human beings seek—and must seek—one another—namely, that the human being who has become one-sided through intellectualism seeks the whole, complete human being—then this also confronts us very strongly in many other areas today.

[ 23 ] When we look back, especially to the very period in which the great, inestimable achievements of modern culture emerged, we see how this culture could only have been attained by humanity sacrificing a part of its full humanity. Humanity looked out into the vastness of space. It was able to craft the instruments through which the stars revealed their nature and movements. Yet for centuries now, what humanity has encountered has essentially come to provide it with a mathematical-physical worldview. Today we no longer have any sense of how human beings once looked out into the cosmos and saw in the movement of the stars the revelation of the spiritual in the cosmos, just as they now see the revelation of the spiritual and the soul in human physiognomy. What appears to us in the cosmos is a dry, old—though by no means to be underestimated—mathematical-mechanical reality. We look up and see, in essence, a great cosmic mechanism. More and more, the ideal has emerged of seeing this great cosmic mechanism everywhere in our view of the world. And what has become of it today?

[ 24 ] It may still seem paradoxical to some of my contemporaries, but I believe that it is evident to the impartial observer everywhere: Today, within social human life, what surrounds us everywhere—our contemporary culture—responds to the conception of the world mechanism. For today, our social life—as well as our ethical and legal life—and indeed, to a certain extent, as I will show shortly, even our religious life, has become mechanistic.

[ 25 ] We see how the view persists among millions upon millions of people that, within the historical development of humanity, there are no spiritual forces at work, but only economic forces; and that what lives on in art, religion, customs, science, law, and so on is, in a sense, a mist rising from what takes place in the sole historical reality—economic life. Economic forms are said to be the real thing, and as these economic forms influence human beings—so some say today, and one need only have a heart to sense the tragedy of this statement—what emerges is what human beings develop as law, custom, religion, art, and so on, and that is ideology. In this way, we have entered a current that has indeed brought us great things in Western intellectual life, but which has now reached the opposite pole from what once existed in Eastern culture in older, better times—for today, Eastern culture, too, has certainly fallen into decadence. There was one-sidedness there; now, however, there is one-sidedness here as well.

[ 26 ] Let us remember that there once was a time in earthly life—especially over in the Orient—when humanity regarded the external sensory world as Maya, as the great illusion, as a mere world of appearances, and regarded what stirs within a person—what they think, what they perceive, what they feel, and what lives in their impulses of will—as the only true reality. There was once this other one-sided view, whereby when a person looked inward, they saw truth and true being in their world of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and outwardly saw Maya, the great illusion. Today we have arrived at the opposite one-sided perspective. From the standpoint of contemporary culture, we see the material sensory world everywhere around us and call it true being. And millions of people see true being only in the sensory unfolding of economic processes and call that which lives within the human being—as well as that which the human being brings forth from within as cultural development—ideology. It is, in essence, the same thing that the Easterners of old once called “maya,” or illusion—what millions upon millions of people today call “ideology”—merely a different word, albeit used in the opposite sense. The Easterners might have used “ideology” to refer to the external world and “reality” to refer to their inner world. Within our culture, we have reached a point where countless people express this with opposite one-sidedness.

[ 27 ] And so we see this taking shape especially in our social life—and we can say: It has brought great, significant triumphs to science, but it has brought difficulties to human intellectual life, to ethical life, and to social life. But what lies before us—this mechanization of life—does not exist merely in the ideas of millions; it is also a reality. Our external life has become mechanized, and today, with our culture, we find ourselves in an age that provides the human response in social, ethical, and religious life. However, the great ideas that were first established as a worldview during the great age of Galileo, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno require that they be infused with humanity in a different way than has been possible thus far. For the mechanization of our human life is, in a sense, the cultural response to the mechanization of our intellectual, rational, and scientific life.

[ 28 ] And we see this in every detail. Today we study the natural sciences. We study the animal kingdom, from the lowest, simplest, and most imperfect forms all the way up to human beings. Based on a highly respected science, we then place human beings at the end of the chain of organisms. What does this tell us about him? We come to recognize that he is the highest animal. Certainly, this is significant in a certain sense, but we come to know him only in relation to other beings; we do not come to know him as he experiences himself as a human being. We come to know what the human being develops in relation to other beings, but not what he is in relation to himself. Human beings lose themselves by viewing the external world in a magnificent way, as is characteristic of modern times. Hence the search for the human being, because human beings are, in a certain sense, losing themselves precisely through the greatest achievements of modern times. And when we then look at human coexistence within the social organism, we see how, within this social organism, people must live together through what they provide for one another. With regard to this necessity, modern times have indeed come a long way. A division of labor has taken hold in the most diverse areas of social life. With regard to external, mechanized life, we must work in such a way that the principle applies: All for one, one for all! — We have had to learn, with regard to external life, to work for one another. Yet even here it becomes clear to us once again how, for those who do not preserve old traditions but have grown up precisely within the most modern form of life, this human work has become completely detached from the human being—just as our understanding actually gives us only the nature of the external human being. Thus, our conception—our sense—of human work, through which we help our fellow human beings and through which we must cooperate with them, has become an external one. We do not look to see how a person’s achievement develops out of their soul-sensory-spiritual existence, how the work becomes detached from the person to whom we are emotionally close—a being just like ourselves—nor do we look with feeling to see how they perform the work for us. No, in social life today we look at the product; we see how much human labor has gone into it and judge that labor by the extent to which we find it in the product. This is so deeply ingrained that, in an escalation of this great error of modern times, Karl Marx refers to everything that circulates as human achievement in commodities and goods—and that must be created for human use and consumption—as “crystallized,” or “coagulated,” labor. We evaluate labor in isolation from the human being, just as we have primarily acquired the ability to observe nature in isolation from the human being. In our assessment of human achievement, we have truly been influenced by what we have learned to know and observe about human beings as natural beings. We penetrate only as far as the natural aspect of human beings—in a sense, only to the point that human beings are the highest animals—but we do not penetrate to the deepest inner core of human beings.

[ 29 ] But even when we see a person at work, we do not see how that work springs forth from him; rather, we wait until the product, the result, is there, and we look for the work only in what has been separated from the person. And there stands the human being as a social being in our midst, knowing that he must indeed, often must invest his human dignity into his work, and he sees that it is not this human dignity that is valued—not the way in which this work springs forth from the person—but rather that this work is valued only insofar as it has been crystallized into the external product that then enters the market, where labor, having been subsumed into the commodity, has, so to speak, become a commodity in its own right. Thus we see how human beings have lost themselves in this regard as well, how they have, in a sense, lost a part of their very being—their work—to the mechanisms of today’s culture.

[ 30 ] We see this above all in the legal aspect of the social organism. When we look at how spiritual life prevails among us, we find that the spirit exists only in abstract thoughts, that we place our trust only in these abstract thoughts, that we have strayed from the realization that the spirit lives directly within us, that the spirit enters us as we engage with it, and that our soul is not merely filled with thoughts but is truly permeated by the spirit when we devote ourselves to spiritual activity. Humanity has lost this connection with the spirit as its view of nature has expanded. — This is with regard to spiritual life.

[ 31 ] With regard to our legal and social context, to our political structure, we can see from the example of work how that which is connected to human nature has become severed from human nature itself. When we observe the human soul in human interaction—one person facing another—we do not see how feeling is kindled and warmed when one person beholds the work of another. No warmth wells up for the working person. We do not see the work unfolding within the human being; no, we see that which can no longer warm or ignite compassion—we see the work after it has left the human being and congealed into the product. Thus, we also lose sight of the human being in this realm—the realm of legal coexistence.

[ 32 ] And let’s take a look at the realm of economic life. In the realm of economic life, people must, of course, provide themselves with what they need for their consumption. What people need for their consumption is, after all, nothing other than that for which they develop their abilities. The more people are able to develop their abilities, the better they will be able to manage economic affairs for others, for themselves, and for human society as a whole. The development of abilities is what matters in economic life. An employee will, when the focus is primarily on the people involved, look to a competent, capable supervisor to ensure his own benefit. This can certainly be achieved, for those who must be guided physically and mentally in their work will very soon see that they thrive better under a capable supervisor than under an incapable one. But are our economic endeavors today directed, above all, toward observing humanity at work and then asking everywhere: Where are the greater abilities? — To look at this living essence in human beings, at this purely human quality, and to place people in economic life according to their abilities so that they can do the best for their fellow human beings—that would be the kind of perspective, the kind of culture, that could find the human being within the human being. But that is precisely the peculiarity of the matter: that our culture cannot find the human being within the human being, that we have gradually—as is evident to the unbiased observer—lost the ability to judge people correctly according to their abilities.

[ 33 ] Certainly, the very system through which human abilities are supposed to be demonstrated—the examination system—has indeed grown in importance in our modern culture. But above all, the point is not to truly explore how human beings can best intervene in life, for life—which has become mechanized—demands something else first and foremost. Today, there are indeed many calls to place the best people in the right positions according to need. Yet for the time being, this remains a pious hope, and we see that economic life—just like other spheres, such as intellectual life and legal life—is, above all, becoming separated from the human being. Above all, we do not focus on the human being—on his or her active engagement in economic life—but rather on how he or she can best connect with something that is not truly human. We also see economic life detaching itself from the human being. It is therefore no wonder that the call for a renewal of our contemporary culture—in virtually all areas of life—stems from the search for the human being.

[ 34 ] And finally, it is no different in art. When we look back at Greek civilization, the Greek tragic poets seem to us today as though they had composed their dramas in the same way that plays are still written today. Yet the Greek view of life was by no means the same as it is today. The Greeks spoke of catharsis, of purification, of the cleansing that is to take place through a drama. And what did they mean by this catharsis, by this purification? They meant that a person who participated in the performance of such a tragedy or any other play experiences something in their soul through which they undergo simulated passions. But this process of experiencing has a purifying, cleansing, and thus healing effect extending even into the physical organism—but above all on the soul. And the most important aspect of Greek drama was something that was as much a higher spiritual impulse as, I would say, a medical one. The Greeks saw a kind of healing process in what they sought to offer their fellow human beings through their art at the height of its artistic perfection. Of course, we cannot become Greeks again. This is meant to illustrate that we have indeed entered into a mechanization of life that, in a certain way, denies the human being—and that the deep longing that pervades today’s world as a search for the human being itself is understandable.

[ 35 ] The so-called “threefold social order,” as developed from anthroposophical spiritual science, aims at nothing other than serving this search. It is often misunderstood. Yet it seeks nothing other than the paths that can lead to a situation in which, within spiritual life, one might once again find not merely the abstract spirit—or, at most, reflection on the spirit—not merely a pale world of thought, but the living spirit; that in legal and political life we may once again find not merely what, for example, flows into the product as labor, but the human appreciation of labor—that human appreciation of labor which arises in human coexistence when one person faces another as a human being, in pure humanity. And in the economic sphere, this threefold social order seeks associations in which people come together as consumers and as producers—in such a way that, drawing on their diverse, humanly recognized interests, they can also organize economic life through association.

[ 36 ] We assess economic needs solely on the basis of market mechanisms. Associations are meant to be a community of living human beings who recognize these needs—an organism capable of regulating the conditions of production based on human coexistence and an understanding of the needs arising from that coexistence. And so the threefold structure of the social organism seeks to bring these three elements—spiritual life, the legal life, and the economic life—into such a relationship, into such conditions within the social organism, that the human element may once again be found everywhere: in a free spiritual life that does not serve economic interests or arise from them, that does not serve state interests or arise from them at all, but that is to stand on its own and serve to develop human capacities in the best possible way. This free spiritual life seeks to reveal the human being to the human being: human to human. So that the human being might be found in the free spiritual life by once again experiencing the spirit, thereby harmoniously developing their faculties, and from such a relatively independent spiritual life, sending into state life and economic life—in a fruitful way—precisely those human beings with the best-developed faculties. If economic life or political life dictates which abilities are to be developed, then those abilities cannot flourish on their own. If, however, they leave spiritual life completely free—so that it can draw from its own depths within the world what each individual brings into existence from spiritual-divine realms—then the other spheres of life will be enriched in the broadest sense. Political life should foster what people—by relating to one another as equals—can develop in terms of a sense of justice and a moral disposition. Economic life should, through appropriate associations, enable people to find their place in economic life according to their needs and abilities. The threefold social order does not seek a mechanistic separation of these three spheres, but rather aims, through the relative autonomy of these three members, to enable human beings to rediscover, through the three spheres of life, a full humanity that they have, in essence, lost and for which they are searching. In this sense, one can certainly speak of the necessity of a cultural renewal, which, however, becomes particularly evident when one looks even more deeply into the human inner being, into that part of the human inner being where, if a person wishes to be a fully human being—if they wish to fully experience their human dignity and their value in the world as a human being—they must connect with the divine-spiritual, where they must feel and experience their eternal essence; in other words, when we look at the religious life of human beings. Of course, I merely wish to say that this corresponds to the convictions of anthroposophical spiritual science; I do not wish to impose this specific solution on anyone, particularly in relation to today’s topic. But in this anthroposophical spiritual science, an effort is made, above all, to recognize once again how Christianity has positioned itself within human evolution on Earth. What can be explored in the spiritual world through an anthroposophical approach points to the Mystery of Golgotha. Historical development is traced in relation to this Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 37 ] A spiritual contemplation of human history reveals that humanity did indeed possess in primeval times a kind of primordial revelation, a kind of primordial wisdom—albeit instinctive—that this wisdom gradually faded more and more, grew paler, and that this fading would have had to intensify more and more. And if nothing else had come along, we would already be living today in a kind of pale, unwise spiritual life that could have nothing to do with the warmth of our soul life, had earthly life not been fertilized by the extraterrestrial at a certain point in time. Spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense can once again point to the man Jesus, who walked the land of Palestine at the beginning of our era. We see how, more and more, contemporary external Christianity regards this man Jesus as a mere human being, whereas in earlier times people saw in this man Jesus a being who, from spiritual, extraterrestrial worlds, had united with him and thereby became Christ Jesus. Spiritual science, in turn, by seeking to explore the extraterrestrial through spiritual contemplation, aims not only to point to the human being Jesus, but also to the Christ, who, like an extraterrestrial principle, descended from the heights of heaven into human life on Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. And the development of humanity on Earth has become different since the Mystery of Golgotha than it was before. A fertilization by the heavenly worlds has taken place. As modern humanity, from within its present-day culture, focuses more and more solely on the human being Jesus, it essentially loses what alone can satisfy it in terms of true religious devotion when it looks to Christ Jesus. By focusing solely on the human being Jesus, they are, in essence, also losing what might be of particular value to them in this human being, Jesus. For humanity has, after all, lost the human being. Nor do they know how to seek the human being in a truly religious way in Jesus of Nazareth. But by deepening spiritual-religious life—and thereby reopening the source of religious devotion, that is, enabling one to seek the divine in the human being—anthroposophical spiritual science also rediscovers the superhuman Christ in the human being Jesus and, in the truest sense, advances toward Christ Jesus. It is not a belittling of the Mystery of Golgotha when it says: That which was previously otherworldly has descended to Earth. — And what does one experience with such an endeavor in the age of today’s culture?

[ 38 ] Well, it is precisely this tendency of anthroposophical spiritual science toward an extraterrestrial perspective that has been criticized: that anthroposophy is not Christianity, cannot be Christianity, because it replaces the purely human aspect of Christ Jesus with a supernatural being, a cosmic being. Some even perceive it as an insult that Christ is said to have been drawn into Jesus from the cosmic expanses of the heavens. Why is that so? It is so because, even in religion and in religious sentiment, when human beings gaze upon the heavenly expanses, they see only the mathematical-mechanical cosmos—in a sense, only the great machinery. And so even the religious person—even those who seek to teach religion today—assume that seeking Christ in the vastness of the cosmos prior to the Mystery of Golgotha would amount to mechanizing religion. Spiritual science does not mechanize religion, nor does it de-Christianize Christianity; rather, it permeates outer life with the spirit by showing: There is not merely mechanism in the cosmos; there is not merely what can be experienced through mathematics and the natural sciences; there is spirituality. — While today’s theologian often believes that anthroposophy allows Christ to come to Jesus from the cold expanse of space, descending from the sun, the truth is that anthroposophy seeks precisely to see the spiritual in the extraterrestrial as well, and seeks to bring joy to the Earth by revealing that a force acted upon it from the heavens, so that this Being—who gave the Earth meaning through the Mystery of Golgotha—united Himself from the heights of heaven with the earthly development of humanity.

[ 39 ] Indeed, spiritual science—in the form of anthroposophy—seeks to revitalize religious life, to truly warm the heart of religious life, and to lead people back to the original source of the divine. And it does so by listening to what lies within the call for a renewal of our culture.

[ 40 ] Today we have a magnificent science; we stand in awe of this magnificent modern science, which has achieved so much in relation to our contemporary culture. But we see how, alongside this science, there arises a call for religious renewal, for a renewed deepening of religious life. So, on the one hand, we are supposed to have a science that wants nothing to do with religion, and alongside science, we are supposed to have a religious renewal. That is the dream of many. It will be a futile dream. For the content of religion can never emerge from anything other than what a given era believes it knows. And when we look back to the times when religions were fully lived, religion always contained precisely that which served as the body of knowledge for the age in question—only in a special way: as worship, with a touch of piety, with a touch of devotion, and usually—and this is extraordinarily significant—with reverence above all else for the particular founder of the religion. That is why our age, our culture, will not be satisfied with religious content that is not in harmony with what our time is capable of knowing.

[ 41 ] Therefore, anthroposophical spiritual science does not seek religion alongside science, but rather seeks to elevate science itself to such an extent that this science can once again become religious. It does not seek a science devoid of religion alongside an unscientific religion; rather, it seeks a science that can, from within itself and through its own source, give rise to religious life—because it seeks a science that does not rest one-sidedly on the intellect, but is grounded in the whole human being, in everything that lives within the human being. And such a science does not have a destructive effect on religious life; above all, it does not have a destructive effect on Christian life, but rather it will shed such light upon it that one can see, in what has entered into the development of the Earth as the Mystery of Golgotha, the eternal, supersensible significance with which humanity has been blessed through this event. And from the contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha, religious enthusiasm and inner religious bliss will arise—both emotionally and morally in the will—which cannot be destroyed but can be illuminated in the right way by what can be perceived and known about the entry of Christ Jesus into the earthly development of humanity.

[ 42 ] Thus, this spiritual science seeks to meet the search for the human being. As I said, this was intended, in a sense, merely to make a small contribution to the cultural renewal that is so eagerly awaited and hoped for today. It was meant only to illustrate how one might conceive of the profound, inner, human significance of those longings that find expression in a question such as that concerning the renewal of our culture.

[ 43 ] And these reflections were also intended to show how, at its core, this call for cultural renewal is at the same time a call for insight, for a renewed sense of what is truly human; just as it is true that the question regarding the nature of this quest for cultural renewal actually stems from our search for a full sense of what it means to be human, for a full experience of humanity. And one may well believe that we will perhaps arrive at an interpretation of today’s often vague call for cultural renewal if we tell ourselves that, in a truly significant way, the renewal of the question that has echoed down to us from ancient Greece now stands before the seeking human being: “Man, know thyself.”

[ 44 ] Certainly, the centuries and millennia have focused their noblest aspirations on this question. Today, however, it is more than ever the most crucial question of destiny. And however the individual—as I believe I have hinted at—might answer the question: How should culture be renewed? — in one way or another, the answer will have to be along these lines: How can we, through a fully human endeavor, rediscover humanity itself, so that human beings may once again find in one another—in those who can devote themselves entirely to the world and their fellow human beings—their moral, social, intellectual, and religious fulfillment? — That, it seems to me, is the question of the renewal of our culture.