The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. The Times and Its Social Hopes: Europe-America

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Anyone who wants to discover forces within the social order today that give rise to hope must look for them in hidden places. Social hardships and shortcomings are, after all, obvious. Hope—especially well-founded hope—is less so.

[ 2 ] However, there are idealists—some on a larger scale, others on a smaller one—who, even in the face of today’s major societal difficulties, seek a solution in this or that formula, devising all sorts of social institutions within which humanity—or at least a part of humanity—could flourish better than has been the case so far. But I believe that today, if I may put it that way, our intelligence—our general intelligence—has actually advanced to such an extent that it is relatively easy to devise any social system based on so-called rational grounds. And today one can already be familiar with quite a number of social systems representing the most diverse political shades without actually finding any of them particularly bad, and yet without really expecting much from them. In any case, anyone who perceives today’s social order not merely from the perspective of what one can conceive of regarding it, but from the standpoint of an understanding of human nature, can really only say that social hopes can arise if human beings can once again draw closer to one another in their very essence, so to speak.

[ 3 ] Above all, it is truly no longer a matter of devising institutions, but rather of finding people so that one can stand alongside them within those social institutions. And here one must even admit that if people can be found in this way within the social order—or even within today’s social chaos—then, to a greater or lesser extent, this or that external institution can also serve the same goal. For it is indeed true that, in social relationships, people can flourish in the most diverse ways, even within the most varied social institutions.

[ 4 ] Today, it is people who matter, not institutions alone. That is why, especially in those circles where the social question is still felt more than it is thought about, it has evoked a certain sense of satisfaction that in my “Key Points of the Social Question,” I did not merely point out how one thing or another could be organized differently, for example, but rather that much depends today on the person who, for instance, has to run a business being able—with his whole being, either personally or through assistants—to engage with the workforce employed in that business, so that he draws close to them, first of all by truly discussing everything that goes on in his enterprise—from purchasing and acquiring raw materials to bringing the finished product to market and the way it enters consumption—in a human manner with those involved in the enterprise. If one repeatedly discusses this entire process in a human-centered manner with those involved in the enterprise, then one lays a foundation upon which to build everything else that is otherwise desirable and worthy of pursuit in today’s social context.

[ 5 ] But that is not enough when speaking to people in this expert manner; something else is also necessary. And today, I would like to talk specifically about what is necessary for us to regain hope for society.

[ 6 ] It has long been a widespread view that a person who plays a leading role in society must, above all, seek a way to reach the vast masses. Efforts in this direction were made throughout the entire 19th century. And as the social question became increasingly pressing, one could observe how, over the course of several months, this or that person would work as a laborer in factories to gain firsthand experience of the workers’ lives. There have been court councilors who, after they themselves had already retired—that is, after they had in fact already completed their social work—went among the workers and were then astonished at what life was actually like for the people. In short, there have long been efforts to get to know the people of the broad masses, especially the proletariat. And it is fair to say that our literature, our writings, and our art have achieved something significant, something great in this regard. What painting and the other arts, as well as literature, have accomplished in terms of depicting—sometimes in a deeply moving way—what is happening among the proletariat and among the broader masses must, of course, be fully acknowledged. But when it comes to the major issues of the present, what really matters is not that the leaders, above all else, come to know what is alive among the proletariat or otherwise among the broad masses; and, fundamentally speaking, it matters little today whether one depicts—with artistic sensibility and from the heart—how the broad masses live, how they are plagued by misery, for example, or by worries, how they strive, what ideas and goals they have, and so on. I would like to say: What matters less today is that we find a way to understand the broad masses; rather, what matters is that we find a way to be understood by these broad masses—that we go into the factory, into any enterprise, and speak in such a way that we are not perceived as academic, that we are not perceived as “educated,” or as “theoretical,” but that we are perceived as human beings—perceived in such a way that what we have to say truly speaks to people’s souls.

[ 7 ] There have long been commendable efforts to establish all kinds of adult education centers, public education institutions, and so on. What is presented to the people there does indeed hold their interest for a while because of the strangeness inherent in some scientific findings; it creates a sensation when we accompany it with photographs, for example, or when we even take people to menageries and the like. But one should not labor under the illusion that this does not truly speak to their souls, that it does not touch their hearts. We can speak to people’s souls and touch their hearts only if we have something to say about how human beings are situated within the whole of existence. Today, however, leading figures still hold quite peculiar views on this matter. They imagine that the members of the broad masses are not, as they put it, interested in “philosophical questions,” for example. Oh no! If one can only find the right language into which this must be poured, then eyes light up, and hearts open. If, for example, one starts from very simple scientific facts and knows how to treat these simple scientific facts in such a way that, ultimately, the nature of the human being and the human purpose emerge from the consideration—and by showing people that these things are well-founded, while at the same time demonstrating that this is not fragmented knowledge that can at best be of interest during one’s leisure hours, but rather something that a person can take into their soul so that they have nourishment for the soul—if one succeeds in this, only then has one taken the first step toward building trust between the so-called people and the leading figures. Today you can speak from the party’s standpoint; today you can somehow introduce concepts like “capitalism,” “labor,” “surplus value,” and the like to the people: the people will gradually make these concepts their own; then you can speak in party terms. But with this party-style rhetoric, you will not persuade people to participate in social structures in which they actually take part with their whole humanity, to work together so that what one must hope for may come to pass—namely, that the forces of ascent, rather than those of decline, may prevail.

[ 8 ] Well, if one simply has the will to engage in such matters, then one can perceive what is actually at work there—where the obstacles and inhibitions still lie today. I myself was a teacher at a workers’ educational school for many years. I taught a wide variety of subjects there. I never conformed to any party dogma; but I also never encountered any resistance in the understanding shown to me, particularly on the part of the proletariat, when, for example, I taught history in such a way that I consistently highlighted how history is not something that can be reduced to a materialist view of history, but rather something in which spiritual forces and spiritual impulses are at work. And I was even able to evoke a certain understanding of why, for example, Marx—who was very well known at the time in the circles of my listeners—came to the view known as “historical materialism,” which holds that everything that exists as spiritual is merely an expression of mechanistic, economic, and other such circumstances. I was able to help people understand that this stems from the fact that, in historical life since about the 16th century, the forces through which economic life has become so dominant and decisive have indeed come to the fore more and more, so that art, science, and so on actually appear—and in a certain sense even are—as results of economic life, of mechanistic life. And because Marx was familiar only with recent history, he arrived at his error.

[ 9 ] But I do not wish to take sides with one or the other; I merely want to point out that even this has been understood. It was not the listeners’ lack of trust that made this kind of public instruction impossible, but the fact that one day the established leaders realized: this is not being taught according to party dogma; it is being taught in such a way that, to the best of one’s knowledge and judgment, what is presented for illustration is drawn from human experience. And these established leaders became afraid that the audience would grow larger and larger. And one day, a representative of these leaders appeared at a meeting that had been convened for the purpose of determining whether I was suitable to be a teacher at the workers’ educational school. A labor leader appeared. And when I remarked, “Yes, if a principle of progress is to be upheld within these circles, then at least complete freedom of teaching must prevail here”—this envoy replied, “Freedom—we do not recognize that! We recognize only reasonable coercion.”

[ 10 ] Well, it was this view that ultimately led to my expulsion from the teaching staff of that workers’ educational school. But for me personally, it was a truly important learning experience—not so much the expulsion itself in the end, but rather the time spent beforehand among the broad masses of the people, who are to be found precisely within the modern proletariat—a learning experience fundamentally because one could see: If one speaks solely from a place of full humanity—if one speaks in such a way that the listeners have the impression: here we are being told something that touches our very hearts, that has to do with our humanity, that has to do with our existence as earthly beings—then they regard this way of thinking, which springs from a worldview, as the most important thing that can be offered to them today. There is a sense that, above all, enlightenment—not in the partisan sense, but in the general human sense—must reach the masses. People are craving, more or less unconsciously, what arises from a truly broad worldview.

[ 11 ] And how could it be otherwise, my esteemed audience! Let us consider how vast numbers of people today are assigned to their work in such a way that this work cannot possibly interest them. They perform this work as if they were faced with something that bears no relation whatsoever to their humanity. Consequently, the associations, cooperatives, and unions—toward which there is a certain inclination in these circles—are organized along occupational lines—there are metalworkers’ unions, printers’ unions, and so on—but that, fundamentally, they have very little to do with this aspect of production; rather, they are primarily concerned with what is generally human in the realm of material life—that is, consumption, that is, the assertion of human needs. With regard to production, humanity has had to resign itself to its fate; with regard to consumption, however, by no means to the same degree. And so today a large part of modern humanity faces a form of work that forces people to turn entirely inward. He cannot be interested in his surroundings; he cannot be interested in what he does from morning to night unless he is taught in such a way that he can take an interest in it; above all, he is interested—and this is why we must begin here—in what presents itself to him when he is alone with himself after work, when he can focus solely on what he is as a human being. And we must say that when we look at the social chaos of our day, we find quite clearly that many people—even among the leading classes—have been torn away from what constitutes an immediate interest, an immediate connection to what one does. It is, after all, not merely an open secret, but something known in the widest circles, that today even many who have an intellectual profession actually have so little interest in that very profession that they, too, are compelled to take an interest in themselves as human beings only when they step away from their profession. But this alone shows that it is necessary to bring humanity to people today if one wishes to lay the foundation for social hopes.

[ 12 ] When it comes to intellectual culture, we have indeed achieved an extraordinary great deal. Today we can point to all that human intelligence has accomplished. And there is certainly an extraordinary amount to be learned when the results of human achievements in science, art, and so on are brought to the people. But that cannot be the point; rather, the point is that we are able not only to disseminate intellectual education today to lay the groundwork for social structures, but also to be able to inspire people, to stir their enthusiasm—not by using grand and lofty words or crafting beautiful speeches, but by having something to say that makes people feel and sense: “This touches my very humanity.”

[ 13 ] But if we approach people today with a worldview derived from what is currently popular—and from what has already been recognized and established by our excellent, magnificent sciences—one will soon realize how impossible it is to truly touch people’s hearts with it, to give them something that speaks to their humanity. People will always perceive this as something external—something that can be given to them in the usual way—and above all, they will feel that when they then speak with confidence—because their trust has been earned through other qualities—they will say to you: “Yes, that would all be quite nice; but first of all, we can’t understand it at all, because there are so many things in it that require special prior training, so that we can’t understand it, and second, it isn’t simple enough for us; it’s something that tells us: You can’t cross over there.” - I have heard many people speak this way about what are now adult education centers, public libraries, and the like. But if, precisely on the basis of such an experience, one seeks a way to enter social life, then one must simply look deeper to find out what the real reason is. And here I am again compelled—I would like to say—to incorporate a worldview-related point as an aside.

[ 14 ] When we look across—as we have done so often in recent days—at the Asian and Eastern cultures, so many remnants of which are still present in our schools, even in our middle schools and high schools, we find that there is indeed something at the pinnacle of their education that must still be of inestimable value to us today. But what is characteristic—what was once discovered in this realm of world knowledge and worldviews—was grasped by the human spirit, which later developed into the intellect, of which I have also spoken these days as the special force of the modern era. Our modern, particularly highly developed intellect is, in essence, a late product of what was once dreamlike clairvoyance in the Orient. This dreamlike clairvoyance shed what was an immediate insight into the external world and developed into our inner logical order—into what is today the primary means of attaining knowledge of nature.

[ 15 ] And, when it comes down to it, we must also recognize that what we have today in Europe as the means of communicating worldviews is a legacy we have inherited from the East. Not only did the medieval scholastics speak in such a way that their forms of expression, concepts, and ideas contained the spiritual forces that had come over from the East, but we, too—even if we deny it — speak, even in chemistry and physics, using words we would not use if our education, all the way up to the higher schools, were not essentially the result of what came over from the East.

[ 16 ] But as what used to be clairvoyance has become intellect, it has simultaneously given rise, as if from another branch, to what has in many ways become decisive for the worldview of broad masses of people, views that have, in fact, largely died out in Europe today, that have been eradicated by modern elementary school education, and that survive only in fragments among the least educated classes. While, on the one hand, the intellect has developed to marvelous heights, there developed—far more than today’s history of the soul reveals—at the very foundation of folk culture that which certain subjective experiences simply projected involuntarily out into space; this took on the most diverse forms, yet can be designated by the single term “superstition in ghosts.” This belief in ghosts—which consists of projecting subjective experiences objectively into space and time—played a much greater role in the course of humanity’s historical development than is generally realized today. And even though today any reasonably educated person recognizes this belief in ghosts as superstition, the feelings that developed under the influence of this belief still live on within us in many cases in an atavistic way. And in many ways—insofar as we are, in this respect as well, descendants of the Eastern spirit—we continue to work, at least in our art and in other areas of life, with the feelings that have arisen from this current in human development.

[ 17 ] Anyone who takes a closer look at what is emerging—I would say, from the depths of social humanity in our time—anyone who can look at the human being who has been shaped by the technical, by the mechanical nature of modern times, who can look into that person’s heart, into the nature of their soul—such a person sees that, fundamentally, in this human being—who has not gone through what today makes the intellect valuable to us above all else, namely secondary and higher education—that in this human being there is no inner, genuine, non-rhetorical interest in all that can develop within the intellect, is nevertheless absent—but rather something entirely different. I would like to say: What is revealed here is something elemental that rises from the depths, moving upward within our social order—something elemental that is scarcely understood in Europe today because, fundamentally, it is something new and, if understood, can show how one must present a worldview to the broad masses.

[ 18 ] Anyone today who grows up as part of humanity without any connection to the legacy of the Orient—and who is thus left to his own devices, just as the proletarian is, and just as are many many people of the higher classes, it is not primarily the intellect that enters the sphere of their interest; for them, it is the will above all else—that which surges up from the depths into the soul, that which comes entirely from within the human being. Because this has, after all, been recognized outwardly, there is also a certain longing today to regard the human being as a being of will. And many do indeed believe that they can only speak to the broad masses on an ideological level if they focus above all on the volitional aspect of the human being. Out of these longings has arisen what is so often seen: the presentation to the broad masses of “primitive culture,” in which human beings are still creatures of instinct. They present to the proletariat how people lived in simple circumstances during such primeval times, and then seek to draw conclusions about what social order should be today. A great deal of time is spent today in public education on depicting these primitive, instinct-driven human relationships. And there are many other examples that point to this: there is a certain instinct to downplay the volitional aspect when it comes to presenting a worldview to people.

[ 19 ] Out of a certain craving for sensation, people today do indeed accept such depictions; in a sense, they also feel—in their own nature, which has not yet risen to a higher level of education—something akin to this instinctual aspect of human nature. But if one wants to inspire people, if one does not want their souls to become desolate, if one wants to reach the whole person, then this approach simply won’t do.

[ 20 ] And one really has to be something of a “complete human being” if one wants to answer the question: Why can’t one get by? — Well, it’s not for that reason—because when one stands at the cutting edge of science today and has assimilated what is currently scientifically accepted, one develops, precisely through that process, something that, while not yet recognized as such, is nonetheless a modern superstition: Just as the educated person of a later age has come to perceive the old superstitions about ghosts as such, so today, in a sense, the broad masses of humanity perceive—as if prophetically, as if looking into the future—as a kind of superstition precisely those ideas, concepts, and notions that we put forward about these primitive conditions in human nature.

[ 21 ] What are we actually arguing here? We are arguing that humanity is originally governed by a life of instincts. This is something quite obscure that reigns in the unconscious realms, something one does not wish to define more precisely: the life of instincts, into which shine the instincts found in animals as well, and everything indeterminate in human expressions of will and feelings. One points to something that reigns within the human being like a natural, organic force. Today, it is often regarded as an ideal to portray the human being in such a way that what lies within the human interior is represented as much as possible as material processes, merely elevated to the vague concepts of the life of drives, the life of instincts, and so on.

[ 22 ] But let us recall what I have been discussing here in recent days regarding the inner nature of human beings. I have described how spiritual scientific exercises, through development, lead a person to truly look into their inner being. They then come to view their inner organism not from the outside, as a modern physiologist or anatomist would, but rather in the way that things within this organism can be experienced from within. Once one has pierced through the mirror of memory, one looks down upon the lungs, the heart, and so on as things whose physical form is merely the outer expression, the outer manifestation of the spiritual—namely, a spiritual reality that I have been able to describe as a world memory connected to the great cosmos.

[ 23 ] This is something that only a person who is today turned inward by their work can intuit. Yet they must yearn everywhere to gain an understanding of it. But we attain this understanding only when we see through what we are actually doing—when we see through what lives within us as spiritual and soul-like, which is not even our own, does not belong to our human personality, but is, so to speak, the gulf that the cosmos sends into us as human beings—when we see through this in its spiritual-soul-like essence. A person can only truly know another person if, by looking within themselves, they also come to understand the fundamental nature of their physical being as something spiritual and soulful. But then, once we know this, we also know that when we speak of “drives,” “instincts,” and all that which people are so fond of discussing today, it is something we place before our true inner nature, just as superstition once placed ghosts before the outer natural world. Indeed, when we speak of “drives,” “instincts,” and the like in human beings, this is merely—I would say—the soul aspect obscured by our perception. When we speak of human nature in truth, we must not see the ghosts of the life of the drives, the passions, and the like; rather, we must look through them to the truth, we must, so to speak, overcome the “real ghost-like” element within us—which constitutes every definition of drives, desires, passions, will, and the like—just as we have overcome the ghosts in relation to the external natural order. With these ghosts, we have placed what arises within us before external nature, projecting the subjective into the objective. Here we present something that is of a spiritual-soul nature in its objectivity as if it were material; our drives and instincts, in the definitions as they are given, are the materialized ghosts—transferred into the inner being of the human being—that stand in the way of the truth of the spiritual-soul. This is something that is scarcely understood today as a fact of knowledge, but which is sensed when we seek to approach a human being with genuine knowledge of humanity—a human being who, from the depths of his unconscious (and in these depths of the unconscious lies, in a sense, the spiritual-soul aspect), intuits: “You must not come to me with these material spectres!” You should tell me something about how the human being has become one with the cosmos!

[ 24 ] Ladies and gentlemen! If one has a sense of social compassion today, then that inner feeling surges when something like what happened to me a few weeks ago occurs—when I was asked to speak to a group of workers. My initial task was to discuss concepts of economics. But I always structure things so that I let the people choose the topics themselves—I have them hand me the topic or tell me what it is before the lecture begins—so that what is to be conveyed to them as insight is drawn directly from their own thoughts. And lo and behold, one of the workers pulled out an issue of our magazine *Die Drei* and said he had read an essay of mine in it and hadn’t quite understood what the planet that preceded the Earth was actually like—the one that then passed into darkness and from which the Earth subsequently emerged. And I was able to begin presenting these workers with genuine spiritual-scientific discussions in a straightforward, simple manner. And one could see: whereas when one speaks dryly in abstract terms, they tend to feel something like: “That doesn’t mean anything special to us!”—their eyes light up when one speaks of such things, because they feel: here is something from which their soul can draw nourishment, just as their body draws nourishment from the food it consumes—how their eyes light up when one gives them something that now penetrates the whole human being, in heart and soul—something that is not merely a world idea, but a worldview in the sense that there is real life in this worldview, that it can arouse enthusiasm, even when the worker has just come straight from the machine.

[ 25 ] And I do believe that such social action must come before anything else before we can even begin to win people over—and they must be won over—to shape society accordingly. How long that takes depends on people’s goodwill. I know how many people say: “Yes, you’re pointing us toward something that can’t become a reality for another four or five centuries.” I always reply: “Certainly, if too few people want it. But with all these matters, it is not a question of calculating how long it might take for people to arrive at such social structures, but rather of setting aside such calculations and letting the matter take root in our will.” If this will is present in a sufficiently large number of people, then we can hope that what we otherwise imagine—in an intellectualistic way—might take centuries can be achieved in a time that is not at all too long. Nothing hinders us more from arriving at such social structures than the hesitation that arises from such calculations. Let us not concern ourselves at first with what the calculations yield in an intellectualistic sense, but rather seek to reach out to people, and we will see how we will find very rapid understanding with a worldview that does not present them with materialized spectres, but rather reveals to them the connection between humanity and the cosmos.

[ 26 ] Today, the understanding is this: When one approaches those who are called upon to judge such a worldview, they compare it to what already exists, and then conclude that it is amateurish, dilettantish, and so on. Or the opposite may be the case: When one must speak today about these things—which truly touch the innermost being of the human being in such a way that the drives, instincts, and the like are spiritualized—one is compelled to clothe this in the scientific forms in use today; otherwise, one is rejected out of hand for speaking of these things. If one does this, then people say: You’re speaking in a language that isn’t for the people. We already know that. That is why, even when speaking to those who demand a scientific education, one places these ideas within entirely different conceptual frameworks. Yet what is being conveyed is essentially the same. It is precisely then that one sees that the person whose intellect is not initially channeled into specific directions by this or that intellectual background actually understands it. Admittedly, one must first overcome the period in which, precisely because one does this, one is thrown out of workers’ educational schools by those who consider themselves the appointed leaders of what is regarded as the broad masses of the people.

[ 27 ] Well, I had to point out to you that, given the nature of the general public today, a worldview in the form of an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is simply a necessity. For only from such a worldview—one that, when speaking of human beings, can truly speak of the spiritual—can the hope spring forth that we will find social understanding. And then, from this social understanding, we can move on to further understanding with those who share it. That can be a source of hope.

[ 28 ] This hope is exceptionally close to our hearts here in Central Europe. Throughout the 19th century, the finest minds in Central Europe sought an educational method through which one could, so to speak, grasp the child by the will. They already sensed that modern human beings must be grasped by the will. They did not, however, understand this in the way that the worldview advocated here can comprehend it. But they sensed it. Consequently, efforts were made to find those intellectualistic methods through which one could approach the will of children by way of the imagination, and grasp the child’s will through its powers of thought. And a great deal of good has been accomplished, particularly in Central Europe, stemming from the German spirit—a fact acknowledged with full recognition in the West, at least until the war. In England, it has always been pointed out how, in Central Europe, one sought to grasp the will indirectly through pedagogical methods, and how this was transplanted to England. This has always been acknowledged and described.

[ 29 ] But if we go even further west, to America, we find that the spiritual-geographical conditions have given rise to a certain form of—I would say, though I do not wish to offend anyone—a primitive worldview, one that nevertheless contains remarkable seeds for the future. We find, for example, that in America in particular, educated people, when they summarize what they think about human beings, say: What a person conceives intellectually depends on which party circumstances have led him to join, which sect he belongs to; but insofar as he thus echoes the opinion of his sect, his class, or his party, he does indeed make use of his intellect; but what this springs from is not the intellect, but the will. And time and again, we see references within American literature in particular to the human will as the original essence. Americans in particular are fond of quoting writers today who say: “The intellect today is nothing more than a minister of the state, and the ruler is the will—even if this intellect is a costly minister, as Carlyle has said.”

[ 30 ] But this is not a view that has been constructed theoretically; it is a view that has become second nature, especially among educated Americans. That is also how physiologists there speak. And anyone with an ear for such things can sense a very clear difference between the language of physiologists in Europe and that of physiologists in America. There, people speak very clearly about how the human brain is shaped by the way a person is situated in the world. They believe that the brain is a mechanism that—even down to its language centers—is dependent on the way a person moves, how they navigate the world, and so on, so that these people view the unfolding of the will within the world as the primal aspect of the human being and everything the brain produces as secondary—as something that, fundamentally, has little to do with human individuality. These people say: If you want to get to know a person’s individuality, look at their will; look at how their will developed in childhood—from their family, from the sect, from the party, and so on; and then observe how he develops an intellect that—as an American once put it—has no more to do with his true nature than a horse used for riding has to do with the rider.

[ 31 ] Well, even though the Eastern element has also made its way to America as part of its heritage, we have drawn directly from education what we find in the foundations of human existence in Europe. And, one might say, our own America—the America within Europe—is humanity’s instinctive pointing toward the will, that is, toward a large class of people in Europe. But this also provides the ground on which Europe must truly come to an understanding with America if social understanding is to spread across the globe.

[ 32 ] And in fact, we find that some of what Americans have developed are actually the primitive beginnings of such exercises, through which one arrives at a spiritual vision. Thus, time and again, the Americans extol self-control, self-discipline, and self-education as what really matters; that what matters is not having learned something, but rather implanting something into one’s will through the repeated performance of the same exercise. One knows the significance of repeating these ideas—repeating them rhythmically—and how this process affects the very center of the human being, the will. One encounters remarkable forms within this conscious reference to what must actually represent the innermost core of human being for modern people.

[ 33 ] And it is precisely from such an understanding that we can develop the insight leading us to recognize that we must approach the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being through the consideration of the will. This opens up the prospect of a worldview which—even if the proletariat must still be materialistic today—can nevertheless be as it is presented here, and which, I would say, can be found as a force emerging from social conditions themselves, precisely through an understanding between Europe and America.

[ 34 ] In Central Europe in particular, the noblest minds strove to find those intellectual concepts that could then capture the children’s hearts and wills. The educators of Central Europe in the 19th century sought to invent the art of conquering the will through the intellect. But they remained stuck in abstract thinking, which had not yet progressed to living thought. They were still immersed in the Oriental world, within the Oriental heritage, and it was from this ancient Oriental heritage that they sought to seize the will.

[ 35 ] Then a large crowd of people came along and imposed its will everywhere. And we live today in a time that stands in stark contrast to what once existed to maintain social order. Even if one is not of a reactionary bent, one must still recognize how, in earlier times, a person—even if he were a prince—would sit in the same pew as the humblest peasant in the village, and the one who spoke from the spiritual life spoke for everyone, had something to say that moved them all. The very obvious image—of how the spirit holds social orders together—was just as certainly present in earlier times as it came to us as a legacy from the East, as it is grasped by the mind and only then sinks into the heart. Now something has crept in that arises from the will. We must once again find the way to speak ideologically from a spirit that moves everyone, from the least educated to the most educated: Only in this way can we work together, think together, feel together, will together, and ground social hopes in the present for the future.

[ 36 ] But this will come about if an understanding can be fostered between the new seeds in Europe—as they have been described in recent days—and what is emerging in America, which I would say is at an even higher level of culture for the educated in general. A mutual understanding aimed at reaching out toward the West will lay the groundwork for an understanding of an inner Western spiritual development.

[ 37 ] And if we, as Westerners, show that we are capable of conjuring up something spiritual from what we grasp within ourselves, to conjure up something spiritual—if we can set the European-American spirit against the Eastern spirit, which is currently mired in decadence—only then will the global economy and global trade, which today exist only on the surface, become possible in the true sense of the word through mutual trust among people. For even if Asians today conduct business with us Westerners in whatever form, they still feel in their hearts: “Those machines you have there—they don’t impress us! You’re turning yourselves into intellectualistic machines with them!” These are inwardly focused people; not even X-rays can impress them. The Oriental will say: Well, yes, you can physically look into the human interior; but for what truly matters, we need no apparatus—our clairvoyant inner being provides that for us. —Whether this is justified or not, it is a mindset, a perspective that exists in the Orient. Over there, people firmly believe that the spirit arose from the human nature of the Orient, and they look down with a certain contempt upon everything that, as they see it, submits to the coercion of technology and mechanistic thought—so that the human being himself functions within the social order like a wheel in a machine.

[ 38 ] Only then, however—when, based on the foundations I have described, drawing together the European and American spirits, one creates a spiritual worldview of one’s own—only then will the bridge to the Orient be built. For this to happen, however, the world must now turn its gaze toward Central Europe, which has come the farthest in shaping the intellect according to living thought. The thinkers of the early 19th century—Hegel, Fichte, Schelling—went the farthest in shaping thought into life. At the very least, they believed that what they perceived—albeit still in abstract thought—as the substantial content of the world contained a living spiritual essence. It was, however, only the seed of living thought. That is why Central Europe also abandoned the paths they had set out on. These paths must be rediscovered by truly bringing thought to life. Central European understanding will be able to bring this about.

[ 39 ] But when the West has once again given birth to the spirit within itself, when the East sees not only its own spirit, but can also recognize in the merchant and the businessman the representative of a spiritual worldview, then it, too, will no longer look down with arrogance; then it will be able to communicate. But that is what we must seek if we are to have any social hopes. We cannot have any if we do not recognize what must disappear.

[ 40 ] Here in Austria, there was a spirit who declared that, ultimately, everything would collapse, but that new life would blossom from the ruins. Well then, only when one is able to shift one’s gaze from the external-social to the internal-social can this hope blossom. But then one must not necessarily want to preserve the old orders; rather, one must have the courage to regard as worthy of collapse that which must collapse. For the saying remains true: Nothing can unfold to its full fruit unless it is first cast into the earth as a seed, so that it may first rot. Well, the word “rot” is not quite right here; but the image still holds true. By correctly recognizing what we must let fall as rotten, we must move toward the new shoots, toward that which must blossom as a new life from the ruins. Only in this way will we be able to gain social hope for the future in our time.