The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Time and Its Social Shaping

[ 1 ] Atlantic and Pacific Cultures

[ 2 ] Ladies and gentlemen! When, a few months ago, a British Colonial Secretary stated that the world’s center of gravity had shifted from the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, he indeed spoke words of great significance for the current transformation of the social situation across the entire globe. Only now, in fact, is the world gradually beginning to draw conclusions from the conditions that have taken shape over decades—conditions that have been so significantly transformed by the most brutal of wars—regarding what has long been in the making: the consequences of the fact that not only economic and social relations, but the entire range of human relations across the globe, are striving to transform themselves into a totality, into a unified entity.

[ 3 ] If that is the case, however, then it is also necessary that the external economic structures—which have simply existed since the last third of the 19th century as a result of the transformation of world trade into a global economy—be followed by a profound spiritual transformation across the entire globe, the beginnings of which, admittedly, we can perhaps only begin to glimpse today.

[ 4 ] But then we must take into account that, no matter how social structures around the world may change, people live within these structures and must communicate as human beings if they wish to interact with one another. But mutual understanding requires trust. And trust, in a certain sense, truly involves a kind of insight into the souls of others. However, Western civilization has so far been able, more or less, only to gain a somewhat broader perspective on the European continent and its immediate colonial outposts. A perspective encompassing the entire globe will have to be found.

[ 5 ] This evening, drawing on certain historical foundations—which, however, are directly embedded in humanity’s present existence—we will explore what is actually taking place in this regard. To this end, it will be necessary to first discuss understanding and attempts at communication within Western civilization itself,

[ 6 ] When one hears educated English people speak about Europe, about Central Europe, and in particular about Germany—which for so long has set the tone in Central Europe in certain respects—they usually say—both verbally and in writing—something along the following lines: In our country, everything rests on a certain democratic foundation. The individual plays a decisive role in what happens in intellectual as well as economic life. The vast majority of public affairs is left to the initiative of the individual. But if one looks over to Central Europe—I do not mean to claim that these things are absolutely correct, but merely to characterize what is, in fact, a general opinion—then a certain autocracy becomes apparent, a certain administrative principle carried out by, admittedly, capable administrative officials who, from the center of state life, determine how individual human circumstances are to unfold. There, at least before the war, there was always a strong emphasis on the centralist, more or less autocratic principle. If one were to extend one’s gaze further eastward, then—adhering to the same line of thought—one would actually have to say: Further to the east, one finds not only autocracy, but a kind of patriarchal autocracy, one that is permeated not only by the commands of those who govern, but also by a religious impulse, so that people perceive what they do on earth as being dictated by spiritual, extraterrestrial powers and entities, whose impulses they absorb into their sensibilities.

[ 7 ] Behind this way of looking at things, however, lies something very important that plays a role in all contemporary social structures. One could say that the further one travels westward, the more a person’s entire way of thinking and feeling is connected to the matters they have to attend to. And when one looks at economic matters, this becomes most evident. In the West, a person accomplishes what they set out to do in economic life by truly striving to delve into the details of what is required of them. They have a personal, an immediately personal relationship to the most outward aspects of life. In central Europe, however, this is—in a certain sense—different; for the psychological observer of the world, this must become apparent. There prevails a sense of what the Englishman, from his point of view, calls “scientific administration of the state”—that certain ideas, regarded as the correct ones, should take precedence, shape the laws, and become ingrained in administrative principles, which are first surveyed within an administrative system, within a system of government. And the individual, who then approaches the affairs of daily life—including economic matters—does, of course, initially focus on his economic practice; but he always looks beyond it to what, in a certain sense, has a legal and state-related character—that which must be classified within one of these systems. And he regards the individual actions he takes as a link in such a system. The Englishman is not inclined to conceive of such a system; he focuses only on what concretely arises in the details of life, not on what, as it were, overlays the whole like an overarching system.

[ 8 ] This, however, also points to a historical phenomenon that has become particularly important in recent times. For millions upon millions of people, the name Karl Marx indeed signifies something extraordinary. Even though there have been many changes with regard to the once dogmatically rigid, formulaic Marxism—which, just decades ago, lived on in the souls of many millions of people like a kind of religion—the name Marx still signifies, for the broad masses of the European proletariat, the name of a prophet of social transformation. It is not my intention here to point out the errors of Marxism in any way. Rather, I would like to shed light on the historical phenomenon of Marx from a certain perspective.

[ 9 ] Marx received his education in Central Europe, in Germany, where he absorbed the predisposition toward that systematization, that ordering of ideas, as I have just characterized it. But then he went to the West—to France and, in particular, to England—to study the concrete details of modern social and economic development. What he studied were concrete details, for these alone are alive within the English working class. What he constructed from them is a system of a social organism that only a Central European mind could have conceived. And this system did not take root primarily in the West. Rather, it took root in Central Europe. And one may say: What Marx observed in the West in concrete details, he shaped into a grand, systematic edifice of ideas, and his followers have made it ever more dogmatic and theoretical. It became the ideal of a general organization of all human society from an economic standpoint. In a certain sense, it became the ideal of economic and state organization, as the relevant circles had the opportunity to implement it in the East—albeit to a very, very limited degree, which is also gradually being reduced to absurdity. The essential point, however, is that even such a phenomenon clearly reveals just how fundamentally different the way of thinking in Central Europe is from that of Western Europe. From this, however, one must surmise that the differences across the globe must be even greater, and that only an unbiased perspective—one not swayed by preconceived notions—can truly lead to an understanding of these differences.

[ 10 ] Today, what appears to us as diversity within the small circle of Western civilization must be viewed against the backdrop of the greater world order. For global conditions—as they have historically developed in both the East and the West—play a direct role in shaping our structures, including our social structures, in the present. They influence them just as the impulses of worldviews do, in the sense that I have described here in recent days. And a similar perspective will also be appropriate when attempting to describe the social structures of the present.

[ 11 ] In many of the social structures that exist in the immediate present, there is still much that is now masked, so that its origin is only faintly visible. What arose in the East long ago coexists with what is specifically Central European and with what is beginning to emerge in the West as an entirely new form. In a similar way, this must be said of social structures, just as it had to be explained regarding worldview conditions across the globe.

[ 12 ] But if we turn our gaze eastward—toward that East which Western cultures will eventually have to embrace—we can see today, in people’s ways of thinking and social sensibilities, the remnants of ancient institutions and ancient impulses from which they emerged. Everything that can still be observed today—even though it has certainly fallen into decadence in the East—points back to those times when the East, the Orient, was ruled by priestly theocracies of the most diverse kinds, priestly theocracies that, in the manner that was possible at the time and appropriate to human culture, incorporated into social structures what they believed they had to discern from the spiritual worlds through the ancient, instinctive spiritual vision—precisely in the way I have described in recent days. However, when people today describe, based on historical documents, how the priestly hierarchies in the Orient once ruled in such a way that they taught the people that divine-spiritual beings dwell, as it were, in all natural phenomena, and how one could even, through certain human magical rituals, earn the grace of these gods or the love of these gods, this is indeed true for a certain later epoch of Oriental priestly theocracies—but precisely for a later epoch, when the original character of the Orient was already in decline.

[ 13 ] It is true that in the days of ancient Eastern civilizations, certain select individuals sought a kind of connection with the spiritual world—a connection based on things for which we today, however, can no longer feel the slightest inclination. It was based on certain practices—some of which were carried out in a very physical manner on the human body—certain potions that were brewed, and certain substances that were ingested. It was regarded as a mystery that through the consumption of these potions and substances, the ordinary mode of human sensory activity was suspended and the individual was transported back to times when the purely external laws of nature had not yet taken the form they would later assume, and in which spiritual life, too, did not exist in such an abstract form as it did later, but rather in times when the moral-spiritual was still one with the physical-natural. In the primeval ages of Earth’s development itself, those priest-scholars sought to transport themselves back to that time by bringing their metabolism into a relationship with certain essences of a material nature in the external world.

[ 14 ] What they actually claimed can be understood once again if—now in a completely different way, through the modern path into the supersensory worlds—we can once more recognize what I explained in my last lecture of the first series: that through a certain spiritual insight into one’s own human nature, a person experiences within themselves something like a “memory of the worlds,” and thereby, in their spiritual vision, reaches back to times when, for human beings, the laws of nature were not as they are today—manifesting themselves more or less by chance—and the spiritual laws were not as abstract as they are today, all the way back to the times when the moral-spiritual was still a unity with the physical-natural. Thus, such spiritual insight does not lead to the merely mechanistic Kant-Laplacean primordial mist, but to an origin of the Earth’s development that must be understood in spiritual, soul, and physical terms. What can be attained in this way today as a “world memory” by human beings is achieved—without working on the physical aspect, as I have explained in recent days—in a spiritual-soul-oriented manner through spiritual-soul exercises. That was not the case in those earlier Oriental times. Then, people related to the spiritual world by stimulating their unconscious instincts through the intermingling of their metabolism with essences of one kind or another. They knew, so to speak, what could be developed from their instinctual life—in a kind of dreamlike spiritualization—from every plant, from nature; they knew that when this or that plant was consumed, their organism would be so affected that they could transport themselves into a certain spiritual experience. This was, in fact, the original form in which the leading priests of the Eastern theocracies—who, at the same time, also held full power over social and political structures—connected with the spiritual world. And they believed that through this they received the impulses that served as the actual guiding principles for social life.

[ 15 ] It is fair to say that what later became a belief—or superstition—namely, that this or that natural being was associated with this or that “spirit,” is in fact a decadent cultural product. In truth, the original intention was to say: If one allows these natural beings to influence oneself in a certain way, one is led to a specific kind of spiritual being from whom one can receive this or that impulse, including social ones. And the practice of oracles, the art of divination, and everything astrological were, in essence, already a product of the decline of older worldviews—a conclusion to which external science today is, in essence, already being led, albeit only tentatively. Just as this external science has moved away from viewing blatant polytheism as the foundation of all indigenous peoples and is now already turning its attention to a certain primordial human monotheism, so too will it come to embrace the view that has now emerged from the depths—a view that arises from spiritual scientific research such as that which has been characterized.

[ 16 ] But if there was a full awareness of how impulses of an extraterrestrial nature—spiritual beings—manifest themselves within human nature itself—since they had been discovered through the stirring up of the instincts, through a certain kind of spiritualization of the instincts— one also had to take seriously what played out in these instincts—the instincts that were attributed to the particular nature of the blood, let us say, in a family of a special kind. Even in the manifestations of this instinctual life, one saw something of what is sent down from extraterrestrial spheres to Earth as certain social impulses. It was then only natural that, as this entered a phase of decadence, those who strove for power seized, through their arbitrariness, the prevailing view that looked to this expression of instinctual life—which was sought in the blood and in what could be found through the spiritualization of that blood. As a result, however, something non-spiritual—and, in terms of blood, patriarchal—entered into the entire life of the East. This patriarchal element can, of course, only be discussed by referring to what is already known; but its point of origin lies in the relationships that the ancient priestly ruling classes of the East sought to establish with the spiritual world. That is why this religious element—this awareness that it is actually divine-spiritual powers that must govern all earthly matters, and that no human being should, in essence, issue commands other than by first allowing the power of the divine word to flow into the spirit, into the soul, which is to issue these commands—permeates all social structures of the Orient. As a result, the impulses—which were initially perceived as religious, as impulses of grace from otherworldly powers—took on the character of commandments in relation to social life. Even when it appears in certain Eastern cultures as though we are dealing with laws in the later sense of the word, one easily finds—if one traces back to the spirit of such legislation, such as that of Hammurabi—that it is based on command-like impulses that can be traced back to what was regarded as the communion of chosen individuals with the spiritual world.

[ 17 ] This, however, has persisted—in an increasingly attenuated form—in all social structures based on ecclesiastical and religious foundations. And as much as these things are often masked in social structures today—even in cooperative associations based on religious foundations—one can still see how the impulses of the ancient Orient described above remain effective, albeit in a weakened form. And one cannot understand many aspects of contemporary social structures at all unless one is able to ask: To what extent are human souls attached to such structures? They are attached to them because deep in the subconscious recesses of these souls lie the remnants of the religious inclinations of the Orient—even where the religious views themselves have already taken on entirely different forms, forms that have become detached from economic life, as is the case with the religions of the West. The fact that Eastern religions extend their active influence into the very details of economic life could, in essence, still be observed in its aftereffects in Eastern Europe right up until the war.

[ 18 ] One must speak of these spiritual impulses that permeate social structures if one wishes to understand them. For what is often described today as social structures is actually only the outer appearance. This can be made very clear by examples such as the following.

[ 19 ] Today, we can certainly only look with horror at what is attempting to assert itself as a social organism in Eastern Europe. But when we look at what is happening in Eastern Europe today, we must recall what took place about eight centuries ago in Asia, in China. When we describe how, eight centuries ago in China, a form of government was sought—and to a very large extent realized—with a certain suddenness, one that aimed to regulate all aspects of human life—including those of an economic nature—in every detail through state intervention; when one describes that there were state authorities in China at that time who set prices from week to week, that there were state authorities who specified the manner in which, here and there, and in yet another place, the land was to be cultivated; that there were state authorities that provided the rural population with seeds for the year’s planting; that during this period in China, attempts were made to heavily tax those who were particularly wealthy, so that their fortunes gradually passed into the public domain—when one recalls all of this, then one can say: What certain circles in our time are seeking as a social order in Europe was realized to a high degree eight hundred years ago over a period of thirty years, until the socialist government in question was overthrown and its followers were expelled from China. For thirty years, a system existed there about which one might say: If one were to describe it without mentioning that it refers to China, one might believe it referred to present-day Russia.

[ 20 ] One can point to such things when one wishes to highlight the external aspects of social structures. For then one sees that what is commonly understood as socialism need not be merely a product of our time, but that it was able to emerge eight centuries ago in the Far East from entirely different cultural foundations.

[ 21 ] But if one delves into the essence of what has taken shape socially there and what seeks to shape society today, one notices a significant difference: that in that Chinese socialism, the clear aftereffects of the theocracy—which had always ruled over China and still does today—were present, and that abstract thinking—derived from the natural sciences and having nothing to do with a human awareness of a connection to spiritual worlds—is incorporated into today’s Russian socialism. What appears to be the same in its outward form is not the same when viewed from a spiritual perspective.

[ 22 ] If one starts from precisely this point of view, one will find that the specific form of the theocratic state—or, more accurately, the theocratic social structures—precisely spanned a certain epoch of human history. When these Asian theocracies had reached their zenith, the peoples of Western and Central Europe were still, in a sense, in a state of non-culture, of non-civilization. But as what had taken the form of a theocracy in Asia spread to Europe, it gradually assumed a very special form.

[ 23 ] If one is open-minded enough, one can look for a transitional form in Plato’s utopian state. There is certainly something in it that, I would say, is reminiscent—albeit in a diluted form—of the priestly hierarchies of the East. It is probably for this reason that Plato chose as the ruling leaders of his state those who—albeit now in the Greek sense—had become sages and philosophers. Indeed, within Greek civilization, the philosopher was the successor to what the Eastern priest had been. But in the Platonic utopian state—which does, after all, stem from the views of social life in Plato’s time insofar as it reflects, in a certain way, how social life was perceived then—one can already discern a form into which Oriental social life had been transformed. The relationship between human beings and extrasensory powers was no longer sought. What was to be perceived religiously regarding this relationship was more or less adopted from the antiquity of the Orient; but what was developed independently was something that had not yet played any particular role in the ancient Orient—and which, in essence, still plays no particular role in those social structures that speak to us from the Old Testament. What was now developed independently was the relationship between human beings.

[ 24 ] This relationship between human beings actually reveals itself to us in its most authentic form when we look deeply into the Greek inner life. This inner life was such that human beings still felt, in a certain way, an intimate connection between the spiritual-soul aspect and the natural-physical aspect of their physical being. In the inner life of consciousness, the Greeks did not yet experience such a separation between the physical and the spiritual as we do today. We look inward and feel—I would say, figuratively speaking—the soul in a very subtle way; we feel this soul in such a way that, when we perceive it in ordinary consciousness, we cannot even imagine how it moves the robust body or is influenced by it. It was different for the Greeks. And because that was the case, Goethe actually yearned for it for himself, for his own experience. The Greeks did not have a conception of body and spirit at all like ours. For them, spirit and physicality were one. It was only with Aristotle, the late Greek philosopher, that this concept emerged in a certain sense. Plato still spoke entirely from a spirit in which one soon discerns—even though his view is often described in abstract terms—that he is speaking from a perspective in which the body is still, in fact, permeated by the soul everywhere, even in its organic functions, and in which the soul is still inwardly perceived as so powerful that it, as it were, extends its sensory antennae toward the physical organs everywhere. The soul is still conceived of as more physical, and the body as more spiritual. Such a view, however, is also connected to a certain feeling that manifests itself between one person and another. And it was from this perspective that the distinctive character of Central European civilization emerged.

[ 25 ] If one takes in—with the eye of perception—the way the ancient Greeks perceived the relationship between human beings, and recognizes how this relationship evolved from the ancient relationship between human beings and the divine; if one takes in this transition from the relationship between human beings and the divine to the relationship between human beings themselves, then one can say: What was previously a worldview thoroughly imbued with religion was transformed into a legal worldview, into a worldview appropriate to the state. And from this—from the interplay of the Greek and the Roman-Latin essences—arose what was able to continue in social structures. The priest gradually became merely the successor to the Eastern tribal leader, for in the East the priest was always—even when he remained in the background—the true spiritual leader, even in the presence of Darius and Xerxes. A way of thinking emerges that develops ideas based on this foundation of the relationship between human beings. And this goes so far that even religious life becomes submerged in this—I would say—legal current. A legal element enters into the comprehensive worldview—even extending into the cosmology of that time—which then persists to a greater or lesser extent throughout the entire Middle Ages; one can sense this when studying, for example, the political philosophy of Augustine or that of Thomas Aquinas. The religious impulses themselves, although they remain religious impulses, take on legal forms.

[ 26 ] A striking example of this integration of legal forms into people’s religious cosmological views greets us when we enter the Sistine Chapel in Rome: the marvelous painting of the Last Judgment. Here it presents itself in the most monumental way—that image in which Christ appears as the Judge of the World. By viewing in him the authority to judge the world, this image magnificently symbolizes the transition from the purely religious and ritualistic element to that conception which interweaves the religious with a legal element, which is carried into the view of the world government and the guidance of humanity.

[ 27 ] This legal element, however, is present in all social structures of the Middle Ages and in much of what lives on in our own social structures. When one removes the mask, so to speak, one sees how this legal element is present there, how it has carried religious impulses over from time immemorial. And we can recognize this in modern state institutions—right down to the formation of words and the forms in which laws take effect, particularly those that have flowed down from the Middle Ages—showing how this legal-logical element entered human experience and civilization between East and West during the Middle Ages.

[ 28 ] One could say: The Oriental-Theosophical transforms into the Legal-Logical; the Sophia of the East becomes the Logos of the West, and from the Logos develops once again that which becomes legal structure. This then continues to propagate itself.

[ 29 ] Throughout the entire Middle Ages, legal principles were also decisive for social structures. One need only study the economic systems of the Middle Ages: one will find everywhere that what shapes social structures is imbued with ancient Eastern religiosity and is of a legal nature. This imprints its forms upon social structures.

[ 30 ] And while today one can still see the religious element at work in some aspects of more liberal human associations or in associations arising from religious creeds, one also sees, in the great social structures and political systems that have emerged, the legal worldview increasingly coming to the fore from the background. But one also sees how, in the transition from medieval to modern history, the religious element is increasingly pushed into the background, while the legal element comes to the fore more and more.

[ 31 ] This legal element then finds its way into economic structures. What I am now describing can be traced in every detail by studying the development of Roman law throughout the world. There one sees how, in concepts of property, in customs of possession, and in everything economic, social structures—based on such foundations—were decisive.

[ 32 ] But in the course of human development, the independent economic element in the West has become increasingly prominent as we approach modern times. It can be said that in earlier times, all economic activity was entirely embedded in religious and legal frameworks. The economic element first emancipates itself, in terms of human thought, more so in the West.

[ 33 ] Just try, for a moment, to study an economic element such as that which existed among the Phoenicians, and compare it with what is, admittedly, only the beginning of modern economic systems, and you will notice the difference: how that Phoenician economic system was born out of the impulses I have described, but how, over the course of time, Western economic systems increasingly emancipated themselves from these impulses.

[ 34 ] And so we see a third current emerging alongside the religious and legal ones—one that, at least initially, tends to subject economic conditions themselves to a form of social organization of an independent nature. This tendency originates in the West, which, for its part, more or less adopts what comes from the East and the Center. We see, for example, particularly in American civilization, how economic conditions there—emancipated from other cultural currents—develop out of their own conditions, right up to the trusts and syndicates, and how, out of a certain human inclination—which is precisely an inclination of the West—people seek to keep economic life separate from religious life, while they find it harder to keep it separate from what they have later incorporated from legal thought and sentiment. But we can clearly see how, in their social relations, economic structures are gradually breaking free from the conceptual molds into which they have been cast as the legal element has expanded to encompass them. More and more, we see what is purely economic life striving toward emancipation. Categories may emerge that are drawn from economic life itself,

[ 35 ] This, however, points to something that is bound to give rise to mutual relations among human beings and nations in particular, but also to conflicts between nations—and indeed, conflicts within national communities. For if one considers the fact that in the ancient Orient the religious element extended even beyond the legal and economic spheres, that the legal sphere then became more or less detached while still retaining the economic element, but that the religious sphere became more independent, and that now, in the West, an independent economic life is seeking to take shape, then one must also consider how individual human cultural endeavors relate to such intellectual currents.

[ 36 ] And so one might say: From that theocratic-patriarchal element, which has its roots in the East, the only thing that can actually emerge—with a certain degree of accuracy—is what is suited to agrarian organization, to a social organism based primarily on land cultivation and arable farming. And so we see a certain affinity between agricultural life and the theocratic element. But we also see this playing a role in all social structures in later times. While we must acknowledge that the theocratic element continues to manifest itself in social structures right up to the present day, we must also recognize: As other branches of human activity have come to the fore, they have come into conflict with it, insofar as the theocratic element, in accordance with the nature of human land cultivation, seeks to persist further and further within the agricultural system. This connection exists. However, a rift occurs within this connection when other human activities assert themselves from another direction.

[ 37 ] In this regard, it is worth pointing out something that can be regarded as a barometer of world history in such matters. I recommend that you study, for example, the Austrian parliamentary reports from the 1870s; observe how the people sitting in parliament there share the feeling that: Agriculture is intimately connected to that old order rooted in theocracy and jurisprudence; and now you can sense, however faintly, what later became a major trend—the influx of Western products, including, of course, agricultural products, which stem from a mindset and social order built around a different economic sector: industrialism. Although this is expressed only in subtle hints in the various parliamentary speeches, it is precisely here—where so much has converged and so much can be studied—that one can discern what can bring clarity to broad global perspectives.

[ 38 ] What is taking shape in the West is something to which the theocratic way of thinking applies less than to any other economic sector. It is industrialism. This, of course, does not include agriculture. But agriculture itself is then incorporated into social structures that are quite reminiscent of what has first been cultivated in industrialist thinking.

[ 39 ] This industrialist way of thinking, however, has still not taken on the social structures appropriate to it, even today, no matter how much it has taken on technical forms or how much its technical structures have been developed. For if, on the one hand, we see how there is a connection between the theocratic way of thinking—with its patriarchal nature—and the agrarian system; if we see how, for example in Germany right up to the present day, a true balance between agrarian thinking and industrial thinking is fundamentally impossible for the very reason indicated above; if, therefore, we see this connection, then on the other hand we can see how everything that constitutes commerce is, in essence, intrinsically linked to the state-legal system.

[ 40 ] Therefore, in the ancient Orient, commerce is something of an appendage to the patriarchal administration of human affairs. And commerce develops into the form that has social significance for us today, fundamentally through the legal element. For what must come into play in commerce between human beings takes shape particularly through the legal element. To the extent that it developed in the Orient, certain commandments—translated into legal terms but regarded as thoroughly divine—played a pioneering role. Trade, however, only acquires its social form within the human current that is, in turn, the state-legal one. Thus, we can say: The sphere of economic life that has proven particularly well-suited to states based on law and legal thought is the commercial sector of the economy.

[ 41 ] However, because everything in the whole person must be interconnected, the state-legal element has also become linked to the industrial sphere in recent times, so that as we move further and further west, we find that people do indeed develop their personal relationship to the details primarily through the industrial sphere and what is connected to it, but that they bring commercial relationships into this context. For today, in the social structures of life, the enterprise is in fact conceived precisely as it is commercially integrated into the social order. The entrepreneur sees his own enterprise placed within a commercial context, so that in this respect, too, the second, middle current continues to exert its influence on economic life in the West.

[ 42 ] Rather, we see in other contemporary social structures how this legal-state element continues to exert an influence from beneath the surface—structures that have emerged as humanistic in nature among the broad masses of the people. All manner of social structures have, after all, arisen as byproducts of modern technological life. One need only think of the labor unions. But one can only truly grasp the nature of such unions if one tells oneself: Economic conditions created them; yet anyone who looks at these things with a keen eye knows that even though they were created out of economic conditions—just think of metalworkers’ unions, printers’ unions, and so on—the way people live within them, how they vote, how they view and discuss matters, that is the parliamentary-state-legal, the administrative—that is what stems from the second current I have discussed today. The third current, with its own ideas, is still in its infancy and must yet adopt its social models from what is old.

[ 43 ] And so we see how, in our present time, three principal social formations coexist, each of which, in turn, generally differentiates itself to the greatest extent into one form or another. They coexist in such a way that, I might say, history lives outspread in space. And as we become part of any one of these social structures—any economic association, any political association, or any religious community— we actually live—everywhere, because none exists without touching the others—within a coexistence of that which has arisen successively in history, yet has intermingled in space, and which demands to be understood today, because today is the time when humanity, on a higher level, must regain that naivety which is compatible with full consciousness—that naivety from which creation originally sprang.

[ 44 ] And just as primitive economic and political life was once properly cast in a theocratic form, and just as a duality emerged in a later age—inheriting the religious element from ancient times and further developing the political-legal system with the economic life incorporated into it— so today economic life cries out for an independent form, for living, human ideas that can in turn have a formative effect, just as the Greco-Roman legal forms once did as living impulses, and just as the Eastern religious impulses had a formative effect. But since these three currents of human development are now differentiating from one another, we must be able to consider them in their independence. We must examine social structures from the spiritual perspective—which was initially the sole effective one—we must examine them from the legal perspective, which became the dominant one in the Middle Ages, and we must examine them from the economic perspective, for which the spiritual aspect must also be sought.

[ 45 ] This was intended merely as a reflection on the foundations of contemporary social structures. It was meant to highlight that, in order to understand these social structures, we must approach with genuine understanding the worldviews I referred to at the beginning of my lecture today. To do so, however, we will need living thought. And the fact that this living thought is needed may, on the one hand, be evident from the social tone these reflections have already taken; but it also emerges from observations of immediate contemporary life. Everywhere, there is a longing to infuse economic life, first and foremost, with the appropriate, living impulses of thought.

[ 46 ] And in this regard, educated people in the West are particularly interesting. In an extraordinarily significant treatise, written in England in the very year before the horrific war, a prominent Englishman pointed out how fundamentally different the English way of thinking is from the German one, in the manner I alluded to at the beginning of today’s reflection. But he points out something else as well. He notices how, within the German-speaking population of Central Europe, the idea has always been alive. And he says of thought that it is nevertheless the element in the human soul that, in the most intimate way, repeatedly points to the great mysteries of humanity and the world, so that in cultures that cultivate thought as the German culture does, one repeatedly encounters the deepest mysteries of the world and humanity—even if—and here comes the caveat from this Western European—even if, as he says, one comes to realize the futility of solving them.

[ 47 ] Well, one could rightly speak of the “futility of this solution” if one could point only to that idea which has emerged through abstraction from the juridical-logical essence—an idea which, even as it soars to the highest level, is nonetheless a kind of dead idea. But anyone who senses that, in our time, the birthplace for living thought can take shape within human souls will perhaps not speak of a definitive solution, but of a path that can lead us to solve the social questions set before us in a manner appropriate to the respective age.

[ 48 ] For it is likely that, once reflection on social structures has become part of human development, one cannot say that the social question can now be solved all at once; rather, among the developmental impulses that must extend from the present into the future, reflection on social structures will also have to be included, so that one can say: Admittedly, we cannot speak of solutions, but rather of a kind of living human thinking that will first consciously perceive the goals and then consciously set out on the path toward solving the social enigmas of existence.