The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] Today we want to take another look at the social organism, specifically by drawing a parallel between it and the natural human organism. When such a parallel is drawn, it must be viewed as a means to better understand certain aspects of the social organism. On the other hand, you must not be too pushy with such parallels when addressing the outside world, because today the outside world harbors a strong distrust of such parallels and believes that people are merely engaging in a frivolous game of analogies. Then people will reject the idea. It will be especially important for you to take this into account. From the perspective of spiritual science, the parallel that we have drawn many times before—and which we will explore today from a certain angle—is certainly fruitful and enlightening. It sheds light on many social phenomena of the present. But I would ask you to keep it more in the background until the common prejudices against drawing parallels between the human natural organism and the social organism have subsided. I, too, use this parallel when addressing the outside world. But I refuse to engage in idle games of analogy. This is how I approached it in my Zurich lectures on the social question, and this is how I am approaching it in the book on the social question that is now about to be published. But this caution is not always exercised by those familiar with the anthroposophical worldview. That is why I expressly urge caution. Well, with this caveat in mind, let us today once again consider the social organism from a certain perspective.

[ 2 ] We divide the ordinary natural organism into three parts: the head system—which we might also call the nervous-sensory system—the lung-heart system—which we might also call the rhythmic system—and the metabolic system. All activity of the human organism is contained within these three systems. Whatever takes place in the human body can be classified under one of these three categories. It is noteworthy that each of these systems has its own, independent connection to the outside world. It is precisely from this that we can see that it is by no means arbitrary to divide the natural human organism into these three systems. The nervous-sensory system is connected to the external world through the senses; the respiratory system through the respiratory organs; and the metabolic system through the digestive organs. Each of these systems has its own distinct relationship with the external world.

[ 3 ] Well, in the same way, we can divide the social organism into three sections—a first, second, and third section—so that they are independent of one another. In the social organism, we must then distinguish the three sections as the economic system, the state system or legal system, and the system of spiritual organization.

[ 4 ] I. Head System, Economic System, Nervous and Sensory System

[ 5 ] II. Lung-Heart System, State System, Rhythmic System

[ 6 ] III. Metabolic System and Spiritual Organization

[ 7 ] I ask you to please take into account what I have just written on the board, because it is very important. The head of the social organism is the economic system. The rhythmic system, the circulatory system, and the lung-heart system—that is the state system. And the metabolic system is embodied in the spiritual organization. That is why I have always said: If one wants to visualize this correctly, one must imagine—in contrast to the natural human organism—that the social organism stands on its head. If one engages in a frivolous game of analogies, one might believe that the spiritual organization in humans corresponds to the head system. That is not the case. The spiritual organization corresponds to the metabolic system. We can say that the social organism is nourished by what people in the social organism achieve spiritually. The social organism derives its intellectual capacity from its natural foundation. If a certain people lives in a rich region with many ore mines, abundant mineral resources, and fertile soil, then the social organism is gifted—it can even be gifted to the point of genius. If the soil is barren, if there are few mineral resources, then the social organism is foolish and untalented.

[ 8 ] So you must not simply draw analogies; rather, when you draw a parallel, you must focus on what is correct. As you know, based on experience in the humanities, one must also look for what is correct in other fields rather than merely playing with concepts. If people merely engage in a game of analogies, they will say, for example: “One can compare a person’s waking state to summer and their sleeping state to winter.” You know that this would be completely wrong. I have explained to you repeatedly that if one draws this parallel between the seasons and human life, one must, on the contrary, regard summer as the Earth’s sleeping state and winter as its waking state. Thus, you must regard economic life as the head of the social organism. And what people accomplish spiritually—mind you, in terms of its effect on the social organism—you must regard as the nourishment of the social organism.

[ 9 ] This matter is of extraordinary importance for understanding our time in particular. As I emphasized yesterday, our time fundamentally struggles to find any solution to the social question, precisely because predominantly antisocial impulses are present in contemporary humanity. Antisocial impulses exist in the relationship between one individual and another. Sometimes, however, these antisocial impulses are concealed or hidden. Today, for example, they hide behind national aspirations that are asserting themselves intensely across the globe. Today, people associate these national aspirations with something they still take for granted, whereas what is truly self-evident for the genuine development of humanity in our time is that an international element must come to the fore in the most decisive sense. Yet it is still difficult to discuss this with people today. People generally recognize that the international should take precedence for other nations; they usually do not, however, for their own. When one tries to discuss these matters with people today, one encounters what I once encountered many years ago in another field, within the Anthroposophical Society—which was then known as the Theosophical Society.

[ 10 ] I had to explain that animals have group souls, and that when animals die, they merge into the group souls—that they do not undergo individual reincarnation. A woman who had a dog she loved very much replied: That might be the case for all other animals, but it didn’t apply to this one—her dog—because he had already developed such a distinct individual soul that he would experience personal reincarnation. It was very difficult to get through to the lady. But afterward, when she had left and a few of us were still together, another lady said: She couldn’t understand how such an intelligent woman couldn’t see that her dog didn’t have an individual soul; she had understood that right away! But her parrot—he had an individual soul! That was a completely different matter! — This is a very instructive example of how people judge when topics are raised that are directly related to their personality.

[ 11 ] But there are a wide variety of reasons why, in the present day, certain obstacles arise to what can reasonably be called socialization. If you consider the various insights you have gained from our anthroposophical spiritual science, it will be clear to you that spiritual life initially followed a downward trajectory within human development. Certainly, people today are proud of their highly advanced spiritual development; yet there is actually no spirit in what they think or feel.

[ 12 ] Look back just to the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch, to say the least. The source from which people drew inspiration back then may well have been atavistic clairvoyance, but from this atavistic clairvoyance, people gained a broad wisdom—a wisdom that was spiritually rich in content. People today look back with a certain arrogance on what the Chaldeans and the Egyptians produced. This arrogance is very, very unwarranted. What is brought to light, however, through academic and philological study regarding the wisdom of the Egyptians and Chaldeans is not very fruitful. But that, after all, is “the spirit of the masters themselves.” It does not penetrate to the deep insights that the ancient Egyptian priests, the ancient Egyptian masters of the mysteries, the Chaldean priests, and the Chaldean masters of the mysteries possessed through their clairvoyant wisdom—which, admittedly, still had atavistic overtones. Even within Greco-Roman culture, there was even more wisdom contained than what people today think and feel, and than what flows into their ideas and their concepts of the spiritual. Essentially, people today have become impoverished in spiritual life. And a particular impoverishment of spiritual life has occurred precisely since the advent of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, since the middle of the 15th century. An immense amount of genuine spiritual life has been lost.

[ 13 ] And the human mind became, as it were, increasingly parched. Consequently, it confined itself more and more to conjuring up images of external, sensory life. Human beings no longer wish to believe in—or hold fast to—true revelations from the spiritual world. But what human beings develop within themselves in terms of spiritual content has more than just subjective significance for them. To the extent that what human beings develop spiritually within themselves has significance in life from one person to another, to that extent what human beings have in their minds—what they possess within themselves—is at the same time nourishment for the social organism; the social organism feeds on this. Therefore, you will understand that anyone who speaks knowledgeably about the social organism must say that this social organism has been languishing and starving since the middle of the 15th century. The decline of true spiritual life means a gradual starvation of the social organism—the social organism in all areas. And one can certainly say: The social organism has already become a rather meager, slender personality and threatens to become even slimmer and more meager. If someone were to sketch a symbol of the social organism today, expressed through the human personality, they would have to depict a meager personality, not a plump one. One could not, for example, paint a well-fed little monk today as a symbol of the social organism.

[ 14 ] If you take this into account, you will also be able to understand that, on the contrary, while the stomach of our social organism—which we actually fill with our spiritual achievements—is quite empty, today it is precisely the head, namely the economic life of the social organism, that is particularly active. The social organism thinks a great deal today; the social organism is developing a great deal of intellectuality. It may be a somewhat dangerous comparison, but it really must be made. You know that severe malnutrition, when there is a high level of intellectual activity, simultaneously throws that intellectual activity somewhat into disarray. Now, one must not believe that our social organism is predisposed to go completely mad. But various things happening today—for which not only human beings are responsible, but also what pulsates through the world as social thinking—manifest themselves pathologically in this social organism. And it is precisely for this reason that we speak of the necessity of restoring the social organism to health, because we sense how sick it is. But, as I said, let us set that aside for now—even though the comparison had to be used. The comparison had to be used so that you can see that human development truly proceeds in a lawful manner; that this or that does not happen merely because people subjectively will it, but that what happens arises from a continuous lawfulness. We have now entered a period where the social organism suffers from hunger, and where it thinks too much, where it has overdeveloped its intellectual system.

[ 15 ] This does not mean, however, that there is too much economic activity today. There is far too little. Humanity needs to produce much more. However, this will only happen once the social organism is properly divided into its three parts. But economic life is in fact viewed as if it were the only thing in the world. When I look at the social organism from this perspective—how it wants to deal with everything, absolutely everything, one-sidedly according to the logic of the social organism, according to economic life—I am always reminded of how, out of a certain confusion between the social organism and the individual human organism, the Austrian poet Hermann Rollet once—a very long time ago now—expressed to me great concern about the future of humanity. Hermann Rollet was a very dear man. He compiled that beautiful book on the portraits of Goethe. However, as was fashionable at the time—in the 1870s and 1880s—he was a very enlightened man and therefore proud of how far people had come with their intellectual culture. And so he once expressed to me his deep concern about what would become of people if they were to become smarter and smarter, if they were to think more and more. For then the head would develop more and more at the expense of the rest of the organism. And he believed that, if the Earth continued to evolve, people would truly end up rolling across the Earth as mere heads, as spheres. In saying this, he expressed a genuine concern. And this concern does not apply to the individual human being. But in a certain sense, it does apply—at least in the present day—to the social organism, which has its head in the economic system and which threatens to become more and more of a head.

[ 16 ] What I am telling you here is a very, very practical matter for life today. I have, after all, given lectures several times now in proletarian circles. The proletarian world itself understands one well, but for the time being it is held back by its leaders. For deep down, they are not rooted in individual thinking, but in what is transmitted to them from social thinking—from the thinking of the social organism. If one now presents to these circles what is appropriate and absolutely necessary today—namely, that the social organism must be structured into an economic organization, a political-legal or state organization, and a spiritual organization—one can be quite certain that the programmatic response will be: “Yes, but surely everything must arise from the economic system; what, then, is the point of the other components?” If economic life is placed on its proper foundation, then the legal system—and spiritual life as well—will arise of its own accord.” — People are not aware that this is not individual thinking, but rather the very thinking that murmurs through their minds, emanating from the social organism. Above all, he thinks too much—that is, he thinks only in terms of the economy. He cannot yet bring himself to develop his heart and lungs—that is, a truly separate state. Indeed, he cannot even become clearly aware of his stomach—namely, the necessity of the individual human capacities intervening in the social organism.

[ 17 ] I want you to understand that this kind of thinking today—which seeks to validate only the economic system—is deeply rooted in human development, and that it will therefore take powerful forces to bring about a reversal of this trend. Just consider that it will be necessary for spiritual life to be emancipated, to stand on its own, and for people to come to understand: From the lowest level of schooling all the way up, everything must be separated from the state and allowed to develop independently of economic life. Neither the bourgeois circles nor—and certainly not—the Social Democrats want this today. From their standpoint, the Social Democrats will rightly point out time and again that, in earlier times, a healthy economic life was supported by two pillars: spiritual life and state life. In popular terms, this is expressed by saying: Human economic life must be supported, as has always been the case, by the throne, state life, and the altar—that is, spiritual life. Some say this with disgust, while others—those still steeped in old ideas—say it with enthusiasm: the throne and the altar are necessary. In more recent times, the throne has sometimes become a president’s chair, but that usually makes a difference only in terms of outward appearance; and the altar has sometimes become a Wertheim cash register, but that, too, makes only an outward difference. There is actually no profound difference in terms of feeling. Modern people often like the Wertheim cash register just as much as older people liked the altar.

[ 18 ] But this still harks back to a time that, in a certain sense, had a sense of and receptivity to free intellectual life. Just think—it wasn’t that long ago that the free institutions of higher learning, the universities, were absorbed by the state. Universities used to have their own prestige, their own honor. They were autonomous; they were autonomous bodies. They have completely lost this autonomy. They train civil servants—dutiful, capable civil servants in all fields. But this is countered by a hypertrophy of the social administrative system, of economic life. Everything is conceived by the economic system, and the prospect of the office and the machine in place of the throne and the altar—that is certainly not a prospect that points toward things capable of making the social organism viable! I have told you often enough that the world would become one big accounting system, managed through a kind of workshop-like existence. It is precisely the individual human abilities—which constitute the nourishment for the social organism—that would wither away and be paralyzed if the office and factory, the office and machine, were to take the place of the throne and the altar.

[ 19 ] But all of this is precisely connected to the fact that contemporary human coexistence—that is, individual life—triggers, above all else, a way of thinking that is oriented toward economic life and has meaning and interest only in economic life. This has arisen in recent times as a result of the rise of modern technology, and with modern technology, the modern form of capitalism. As a result, the leading circles first became dependent on what one might call a social intellect oriented solely toward the economic system. I have pointed out time and again how human beings have, so to speak, been absorbed by the objective social intellect, by the deluge of the purely intellectual system with which the social organism around us thinks. We are caught up in this way of thinking today.

[ 20 ] You know, I have often pointed out to you how the human personality, with its own thinking, has gradually been sidelined even in the world of capital. Today, it is objective capital that operates across the earth. The human personality is, in fact, sidelined wherever capital operates effectively. One moment someone is down, the next they’re up; one moment everything is lost, the next everything is won back—and the stocks act on their own, working more and more for themselves. I usually use one symptom as an example. In the first half of the 19th century and well into the last third, individual bankers were the decisive factors. But then, for large enterprises, it has increasingly become the corporations. America, which is somewhat behind in its development, is undergoing this transition right now; it is now making the shift from far-reaching individuality to the objective workings of capital, and will likely display this phenomenon to a remarkable degree. But the individual banker was so powerful that one can accurately gauge his position in social life by recalling—I believe it was in the 1840s, and I’ve told this story here before—how the Minister of Finance of the King of France went to Rothschild to—well, what does a Minister of Finance do?—to borrow money from him on behalf of the French state. Rothschild was in the middle of a meeting with a cobbler or a carpenter, and this business was just as important to him as the King of France’s Minister of Finance—perhaps even more so. The Minister of Finance had himself announced. The servant went in, came back, and said, “Mr. Rothschild asks that you wait a moment; there’s a carpenter in there right now.”—“What, a carpenter? But I am the King of France’s Minister of Finance!” —“Mr. Rothschild says you’ll have to wait,” the servant replied. — But the minister flung open the door and stormed in: “I am the Minister of Finance to the King of France!” — “Please, take a chair; I’m busy with this gentleman first.” — “But I am the Minister of Finance to the King of France!” — “Well then, please, take two chairs!”

[ 21 ] Through something like this, you can glimpse—even though it is only a symptom—personal power. Personal initiative, in this form, had more or less ceased—and was already on the wane—in the realm of economic life even before the catastrophe of war struck. That which thinks within economic life itself—social intelligence—gained the upper hand over the individual intelligence of each person. At first, this social intelligence—this social mind born of economic life, out of the hypertrophy of economic life—is very sober. And that is precisely what should strike the connoisseur of social life, viewed from a higher perspective: just how sober the thinking born of economic life has become today. To begin with, a new kind of group thinking is emerging among people. But this group thinking is exceedingly sober. It was born of the bourgeoisie during the capitalist era, developed into narrow-mindedness and philistinism, spread widely as philistinism, and has now taken hold of socialist thought as its most sober product.

[ 22 ] On this point, my dear friends, there is something very, very noteworthy to say. The circumstances that have unfolded have led to the majority of the proletarian masses being free-thinking and non-believers. Indeed, there are very, very many people leaving the church in these circles. Those who do not leave the church often do so simply because they do not consider the matter very important. But one often hears something else. One often hears it emphasized that socialist doctrine serves as a substitute for the old religions for the proletarian. This is possible only out of a certain frenzy of enthusiasm, not out of true enthusiasm; for, of course, socialist doctrine, which thinks solely in terms of economic life, is something terribly sober and cannot in any way take on a religious character.

[ 23 ] From this, however, you will see that the seriousness with which I have often spoken to you in these lectures is, in fact—one might say—a sacred commandment of world history. When, on the one hand, we trace human development since the Age of the Consciousness Soul through a spiritual-scientific perspective, and when, on the other hand, we consider what—confirming the anthroposophical view—we encounter precisely within socialist thought, when we look at all of this, then we say to ourselves: An immensely important phenomenon of the social organism is its gradual starvation. It does indeed starve if true spiritual life does not enter into people, if spiritual life does not take hold of them! Just as the individual human being must starve if he has no food to eat, so must a social organism starve if people do not come to spiritual life. The social organism really is turned upside down. The individual human being needs food to live; the social organism needs human talents, human gifts, and human inner revelations, so that from these gifts and these inner revelations may emerge that which alone can make the social organism healthy!

[ 24 ] Remember how I have often emphasized this: Today, it is impossible to build something like the Gotthard Tunnel unless, as the director of such a construction project, one is familiar with differential and integral calculus. But that stems from Leibniz; the English say it comes from Newton—well, let them say so. But whether it is one or the other: it was not only the person who laid the stones on top of one another who built the Gotthard Tunnel; Leibniz or Newton also helped build it. This is just one example of how even the most material things truly arise from intellectual life. If you eliminate individual intellectual abilities, you also destroy economic life. It can never be a matter of establishing a world bureaucracy that would certainly eliminate the free initiative of intellectual abilities! This world bureaucracy, which is the ideal of Trotsky and Lenin, would, of course, starve the social organism to death.

[ 25 ] It is precisely those who are sincere about the social question today who must emphasize again and again: Above all, the free development of spiritual science is necessary. This is not simply the introduction of something impractical into contemporary life, but rather the most practical thing of all, because it is immediately and truly necessary. Precisely because people’s individual abilities had been suppressed for so long, the objective events of 1914 came crashing down on them. Their minds were empty, filled at times only with wild ideas. The objective events came crashing down on them. Their individual abilities had atrophied. People were unable to cope with external life. Their concepts, their ideas, their notions were too narrow. They could not extend beyond the objective events. And there was certainly not the slightest trace of mutual understanding left. Thus, these last four and a half years had to be humanity’s great disciplinarian, teaching it that it is necessary for spiritual life to truly flow into the social organism as its nourishment.

[ 26 ] These connections can be understood when one is able to truly view the social organism in this context as a threefold system. One must learn to understand that within the social organism, economic life must independently cultivate its external relationships, and that the political sphere must connect with the political sphere, and the spiritual life with the spiritual life. It is not a matter of one unified political system negotiating with another unified political system. Just as in the human organism, each of the three systems must develop its own specific relationships with the outside world. By regulating international relations among people in such a way that, so to speak, one element always corresponds only with another element, we can best counteract conflicts such as those that erupted in 1914. Just think how much more complicated it will be if two territories were to come into conflict, for the conflict can, after all, initially arise only between one state system and another. It cannot be resolved because the spiritual organization and the economic system—if they are freely centralized within themselves—still have a say in the matter.

[ 27 ] One must simply be clear about this: how differently one’s entire life will take shape once this threefold structure is established. On the other hand, however, one must also be clear about just how deeply entrenched people’s prejudices are today against such a shift in thinking and re-learning. If one wishes to raise the question again and again: Why is there such great resistance to spiritual science? — it is truly not a matter of difficulty in understanding, as we have often emphasized, but rather simply people’s inability to make the decision to reorganize their habits of thought differently from the way these habits have gradually taken shape over the last decades, indeed centuries. It is simply much more comfortable for people to muddle along on the same old track. Is it any wonder, then, that people are once again thinking—as the expression was coined in Bern—of founding a “superstate,” the League of Nations with a “superparliament”? After all, haven’t the old states done such a wonderful job, showing what they can accomplish over the past four and a half years! Well, establishing “supra-states” and “supra-parliaments”—that is a clear sign that people do not wish to break free from the old patterns of thought, that they want to remain trapped within them. While the individual state must be divided into its three parts, people want the opposite. They want to fuse the entire earth—with the exception of those who are currently excluded—into a single, large state. They want the opposite of what is rooted in the developmental forces of our time. That is why precisely those who are deeply immersed in spiritual science should truly recognize—and also translate this into their will—that a vigorous push is necessary against what is still moving in the completely opposite direction today. This push is necessary. We must tell ourselves this again and again. And since we must accustom ourselves to contemplating things inwardly, it will be beneficial to try quite often to experience social issues from this perspective—which I have once again characterized today—through inner meditation, because this can inspire our will. We will then continue talking about this tomorrow. So tomorrow at five o’clock there will be the public eurythmy performance here, and I think I will continue this lecture at half past seven or a quarter to eight.