The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. Human Beings in the Social Order: Individuality and Community

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen, as I attempt today to bring my description of contemporary social life and the social demands of our time to a certain conclusion, I am aware that everything I have been able to say here—and will be able to say—about social life and social issues can serve only as very tentative guidelines. For the social question in our time is a very comprehensive, very universal one, and above all, two considerations are necessary for anyone who wishes to gain a perspective on the social question. First, it is necessary to take into account the current historical moment of humanity, and second, it is necessary to take into account the immediate external, earthly-spatial conditions.

[ 2 ] The current historical moment in human history is one that must be viewed with the most impartial understanding possible. It is very easy to overlook, due to prejudices and, in particular, preconceptions, what is happening in the depths—I do not even mean the depths of human souls, but of human nature—in the present.

[ 3 ] It’s very easy to be misunderstood when you say something like this, because people have said it at almost every time in history—and they still say it today: We are living in a time of transition. Certainly, we always live in a transitional period—namely, from the past to the future—and the point is not to know that we are living in a transitional period—that goes without saying; it is a truism—but rather to understand what characterizes this transition, what the transition consists of. And here one must say: the present does not merely encompass the current year or even just the current decade; rather, the present encompasses a long period of time. This period has been developing since the 15th century, and the 19th century marked its culmination. We are living within this period today, but humanity in general has yet to gain much understanding of the distinctive nature of this moment in world history in which we find ourselves.

[ 4 ] It must be said: What one must observe today—if one wishes to gain any insight into social life at all—is that people everywhere are striving to break free from old ways of thinking and simply want to be human, to be free human beings.

[ 5 ] That is why, above all else, we need today—as one might say in German—a worldview of freedom; here, it must be noted, because the word “freedom” has a different meaning here: a worldview of spiritual activity, of action, of thought, of feeling, arising from human spiritual individuality.

[ 6 ] In the early 1990s, I attempted to portray the image of human beings—how they strive today, how they are when one looks not at their minds but at their subconscious—in my *Philosophy of Freedom*, which has been translated into English here. In the past, human beings were bound by ties that determined their thinking and actions. Consider a person from the Middle Ages: He is not a human being in the same sense as we are today; above all, he is a member of a social class, a caste. He is not a human being; he is a Christian, a nobleman, a citizen. Everything he thinks is bourgeois, aristocratic, or priestly. It was only in the course of the last few centuries that human beings were freed from such contexts. In earlier times, when it came to positioning oneself socially within the human community as an individual, people asked: What is proper for a priest? How should one, as a priest, relate to other people? How should one behave toward others as a citizen? How should one behave toward others as a noble? — Today we ask: How does a person behave when he or she can be fully aware of his or her human dignity and human rights?

[ 7 ] But then a person must find something within himself. He must find within himself the impulses that were once provided by the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the priesthood—and that drove him to his social actions—he must find these impulses within himself. And he cannot find them in his body; he must find them in the spirit that is imprinted on his soul. That is why, in my *Philosophy of Freedom*, I described the moral impulse—which is at the same time the deepest social impulse, the moral driving force within the human being—as moral intuition. Something must arise within a person that tells him, in the most concrete situations of life: This is how you should act.

[ 8 ] You see, everything there is centered on human individuality. One must look at the individual person, at their individuality, and must assume: In this heart, in this soul, there are moral intuitions. All education must aim to awaken these moral intuitions, so that every person feels within themselves: I am not of this earth alone; I am not merely a product of physical heredity; I have descended from the spiritual worlds to earth and have a task to fulfill on this earth as this single, individual human being.

[ 9 ] But one must know not only that one has something to do, but also what one has to do. One must find within oneself, in each specific situation, what one is to do. The soul must tell you this. The vague sense of conscience must become moral, individual intuition. This means: becoming free as a human being—that is, relying only on what lies within human beings themselves.

[ 10 ] And some people took great offense at this, because they believed it meant that all moral and social matters were left to the whims of the individual. That is not the case; rather, it is founded on the very basis upon which social life alone can stand—namely, on the basis of trust. We must be able to cultivate this trust even when it comes to the major issues of life. As for the minor issues of life, we already have it; for when I walk out the door and Mr. K. meets me outside, I have an unconscious trust that he will not lunge at me and knock me down simply because he is going about his business; I adjust my own behavior based on this trust, and we step aside for one another so that we do not collide. We do this in the small details of life. This is something that, if the free person truly understands themselves, can be applied everywhere in all matters of life. But it is necessary for trust to prevail from person to person. In this trust—which is a golden word—in the cultivation of this trust, in the belief in the individual human being, not merely in the nation or in humanity, in this cultivation of belief in the individual human being lies the sole impulse for the social life of the future; for, on the one hand, only this trust leads from the individual human being to the community.

[ 11 ] And the other principle is this: if there is no one there to force us to do anything, we must find the motivation within ourselves. We must also find within ourselves the motivation that comes from our feelings, our emotions, and our soul.

[ 12 ] What does that mean? When I used to be a priest, I knew how I fit into social life. I didn’t exactly need to look it up in a book, but I knew: This is how I was supposed to behave. When I wore the religious habit, I knew that wearing it imposed very specific duties on me. When I carried the nobleman’s sword, I knew that nobility defined my humanity. I was guided; I was ordered within social life. When I was a citizen, it was the same.

[ 13 ] This is something—whether you choose to criticize or praise it is beside the point—that has fallen by the wayside in humanity’s present moment. You can find as many people as you like who would like to have all of that back, but world history tells a different story. It’s no use drawing up abstract plans for all kinds of communities; the only thing that helps is to look at world history.

[ 14 ] And this brings us to the question: What should now be the emotional impetus for social action, if it is no longer the virtue of the priesthood, no longer the virtue of the bourgeoisie, no longer the virtue of the nobility—the virtue of the fourth estate—that drives it from behind?

[ 15 ] This can only happen if we can place the same kind of trust in what we have to do—especially toward other people—as we place in a person when we love them. To be free means to express oneself through actions that one loves.

[ 16 ] Trust is the one golden word that must govern social life in the future; love for what one has to do is the other golden word. And in the future, those actions that are motivated by universal love for humanity will be socially good.

[ 17 ] But one must first learn to understand this universal love for humanity. One must not conveniently convince oneself that it is already there. It simply isn’t there. And the more one tells oneself, “It is not there,” the better it is. For this universal love of humanity must be a love of action; it must become active; it must be able to express itself freely. Then, however, it will gradually evolve from a judgment confined to the hearth or the vicinity of the church tower into a universal judgment, a judgment on the world.

[ 18 ] And now I ask you from this perspective: How does such a universal judgment relate, for example, to what now speaks to us in a heartbreaking way as—I would say—the most terrible illustration of social chaos, namely the terrible suffering in Eastern Europe, in Russia? How does it relate to that?

[ 19 ] The point is to ask the right question when faced with such a matter. And the right question is this: Is there today on Earth—and we must focus on Earth here, because since the last third of the 19th century we have no longer had a national economy but a global economy; that is the important point to consider in social life—is there today on Earth too little food for all of humanity? No one will answer in the affirmative. There is not too little food on Earth for all of humanity! Should such a time ever come, then people must find other means through their own ingenuity. Today, however, we must still say: If countless people are starving in one part of the world, it is the human institutions of the past decades that have caused this. For these human institutions are not structured in such a way that the right food reaches the starving region of the world at the right time. It all depends on how people on Earth distribute this food in the right way at the right moment.

[ 20 ] What has happened? At a historic moment, a vast expanse of land in Russia—as a continuation of the tsarist regime born of pure intellectualism and pure abstraction—has been cut off from the world, locked away. A national sentiment—grand in scope, yet confined to a specific territory—has cut Russia off from the world and prevented those social institutions from prevailing across the globe that would make it possible, should nature fail in one place, for human hands to intervene extensively in nature in another place.

[ 21 ] The gaze that observes social misery today must, if one has the right perspective, lead people to say “mea culpa”—to each and every person to say “mea culpa.” For the fact that the individual feels himself to be a unique being does not preclude his also feeling connected to all of humanity. In the course of human development, one has no right to feel oneself as an individual unless one simultaneously feels oneself to be a member of all humanity.

[ 22 ] This is, I would say, the fundamental tone, the fundamental note that must emerge from any philosophy of freedom, one that must place human beings within the social order in an entirely different way. The questions then become quite different.

[ 23 ] What questions have been raised regarding social relations over the past few centuries—particularly in the 19th century—and what has become of these questions, which first arose among the upper classes, among the millions of the proletariat? Why, in the view of many, has the proletariat of millions gone astray today? Because it has adopted false teachings from the upper classes. It was the pupil of the upper classes; the proletariat did not formulate these teachings on its own.

[ 24 ] What matters is that one sees things clearly. People have said: Human beings are the product of their circumstances; human beings are shaped by the social conditions and institutions that surround them. Others have said: Social conditions are what people have made them to be. — All these theories are about as sensible as if someone were to say or ask: Is the physical human being the product of his head or the product of his stomach? The physical human being is neither the product of his head nor the product of his stomach, but rather the product of the constant interaction between head and stomach. They must always work together. The head is both cause and effect; the stomach is both cause and effect. And if we delve deeper into the human organism, we even find that the stomach is shaped by the head; for in embryonic life, the head develops first, and only then does the stomach form; and in turn, the stomach shapes the organism. Thus, we need not ask: Are circumstances and the environment the cause of why people are this way or that? Or is it people who have shaped the environment and circumstances? We must be clear that everything is both cause and effect, that everything interacts, and that above all, we must ask today: What kinds of institutions must be in place so that people can have the right thoughts in social relationships? And what kinds of thoughts must exist so that these right social institutions can also arise in our thinking?

[ 25 ] In fact, especially when it comes to external, practical life, people tend to think: First comes this, then comes that. That won’t get you anywhere in the world. You can only move forward if you think in circles. But most people think: “It’s like a millwheel turning in your head.” They can’t do that. One must think in a circular way; one must realize, when looking at external circumstances, that they are created by human beings, but they also shape human beings; or when looking at human actions, that they create external circumstances, but are in turn shaped by those external circumstances. And so we must constantly dance back and forth with our thoughts if we want to grasp reality. And people don’t want that. When people organize anything, they want, above all, a program: first, second, third, up to twelfth if you like, with twelve being the last and one the first. But that is lifeless. For every program must be such that it can also be reversed—that one can start at twelve and work backward to one—just as the stomach nourishes the organism, and if the nerves located beneath the cerebellum are not functioning properly, one cannot breathe properly. Just as this reverses itself in life, so too must we ensure in social life that everything reverses itself.

[ 26 ] And so my book, *The Key Points of the Social Question*, based as it is on social conditions, had to assume readers capable of reversing their line of thought. But people don’t want that; they want to read from beginning to end and then know: Now they have reached the end. They don’t want to consider that the end is the beginning. And so the worst misunderstanding of this socially oriented book was that it was misread. And people continue to misread it. They do not want to adapt their thinking to life; rather, they want life to adapt to their thinking. But that is by no means the premise of the social institutions underlying these descriptions. I will continue this discussion in the next section.

[ 27 ] Ladies and gentlemen, when people began to discuss the threefold social order, I heard a curious opinion. The threefold social order focuses on the three currents in social life that I have characterized in recent days: on spiritual life as such, as it exists today as a legacy of theocracy; for all spiritual life can ultimately be traced back to that which was initially the cause in the theocracies. Second, to what I call legal-political life; third, to what is called economic life. When attention was first turned to the three ideas of the threefold social order—the impulse behind the threefold social order—the first to speak up were those people who are perhaps quite firmly grounded in the world through their physical bodies, who may even be factory owners in their outward lives, or pastors in their outward lives—that is, who are situated somewhere in the outer world through their physical existence. They came forward and declared: “Oh yes, now we can be glad; now a new idea is emerging that finally brings the old, magnificent Platonic idea back into its own, for it is, after all, merely a revival of what Plato presented as the division of humanity into the class of producers, the class of warriors, and the class of teachers. Thus we have once again honored the old Plato.

[ 28 ] Well, ladies and gentlemen, I had nothing else to say except this: For all those people who, when a new idea arises, first go to the library to look up where it is cataloged, that may be the case; but for those who understand the threefold social order, it is the exact opposite of what Plato described as the nourishing class, the defending class, and the teaching class—the exact opposite. And this is because Plato lived so many years before the Mystery of Golgotha. For that time, the division into the nourishing class, the teaching class, and the defending class was correct; to want to revive it today, however, is absurd. For the threefold social order is not about dividing people once again, so that one person is confined to the teaching estate, another to the military estate—the legal and military estate—and yet another to the productive estate; rather, it concerns institutions in which anyone can take part in turn, because in modern times we are dealing with human beings, not with estates. Thus, the point is that there is an institution in which the spiritual life of human beings is universally cultivated, which must be based solely on the abilities of individuals; second, there is the state-legal institution in its independence, without any intention of engulfing the other members of the social organism; and third, there is an institution that is purely economic.

[ 29 ] The state-legal system will deal with everything that individuals have to agree upon with one another, everything that must be determined on a person-to-person basis.

[ 30 ] In spiritual life, not everyone can form a judgment; in spiritual life, each person can only form the judgment for which they are capable. Everything must arise from individuality. Spiritual life must be built upon individualities. Spiritual life necessitates that it be a self-contained, unified whole. — You will say: That is not the case. — But I will come to that in a moment.

[ 31 ] Life within the legal and governmental sphere requires that people, in the spirit of the democracy that has already emerged—where people, as human beings, have the opportunity to communicate with one another about matters on which every person must form a judgment, matters for which there is no objective or specialized knowledge, but on which every person must form a judgment— There is such a sphere of life, namely the legal and political sphere.

[ 32 ] And third, the economic sphere. Here it becomes clear that everything cannot proceed from the judgment of the individual—the individual’s judgment is irrelevant, for it can never be correct—but rather from associations, from communities of people who, through the convergence of their judgments, arrive at a collective judgment. What matters is not that one says the state or any other community should be divided into three parts, but that each of these three parts can do what it is supposed to do so that the social organism functions properly.

[ 33 ] With the way of thinking I am advocating here, ladies and gentlemen, one can be fully engaged in the world. Under certain circumstances—and I’m only citing this hypothetically—one can, based on one’s abilities, want this or that; one may even possess the skill and technique to want this or that; but what one does oneself as a human being is, after all, carried on by other people. I act; that matters, but it is not everything and not the main thing. What matters is that my action is sensibly carried on by another, that it is carried on further by a third, a fourth, and so on. For this to happen, however, the social organism must be managed in such a way that the traces of my action do not disappear. Otherwise, I do something in Oxford; it is carried on, carried on; but in Whitechapel, there is no trace of it left. Then we see only the outward symptom; then we see only that there is misery there. But misery must arise when human forces cannot be properly integrated into the social organism.

[ 34 ] We look at Russia—misery. Why? Because social forces cannot intervene properly in the social organism; because the social organism is not structured correctly according to its three natural members. If a social organism is structured in such a way that spiritual life within it is freely directed toward individualities, that there is a legal and political life which regulates all matters for which every human being is competent—regardless of their level of education and so on—and if, thirdly, there is an independent economic life that deals solely with production, the consumption of goods, and circulation, then this organism is structured in such a way that the individual action a person can perform truly flows through the social organism just as blood flows through the human body.

[ 35 ] Yes, that can be understood based on a genuine understanding of the real world. But people must also understand it based on such a real understanding of the world. When something like this is said today, and then someone comes along and explains it theoretically using doctrinal Marxism and intellectualism, then of course it isn’t understood at all; then people have no idea what he means—he who doesn’t stay on the surface and see the misery there, and says: “Nothing can be improved there; we must first bring people into such social contexts that the misery disappears from the very fabric of human relationships. That is it.”

[ 36 ] And we must be clear about this: gradually, what was originally theocracy has become detached from life. For in those places where the original theocrats lived, there were no libraries; science was not organized in libraries; there, when one prepared to master a science, one did not sit down and study old books, but rather lived with the living essence of human beings. There, one looked at people. There, one asked oneself: What is to be done with human beings out there? The library was the world. People did not look into books, but at human physiognomy; they paid attention to human souls and read them; they did not look into books, but looked at people. Gradually, our knowledge has found its way into libraries or has been stored in some other way, separated from human beings.

[ 37 ] We need a spiritual life that is, in turn, fully rooted in the world; we need a spiritual life in which books are written from life itself, have an impact on life, and serve only as inspiration for life—intended solely as means and ways to support life. We must step out of the library. We must step out of the library and into life, especially in our spiritual life. And we must have an educational system that does not follow rules, but rather adapts to the children who are actually there, based on an understanding of human nature; a system that gets to know the children through this understanding of human nature and discerns from within the child itself what needs to be done each day, each week, and each year.

[ 38 ] We need a state-legal system in which people face one another, where judgments are based solely on the legitimate authority that each individual possesses—as I have already said—regardless of their profession or any other circumstances in which they find themselves. This is part of the state-legal order; it is what makes all people equal.

[ 39 ] What will then enter into spiritual life if spiritual life is understood in the way I have just described? From economic life, the management of capital will naturally and gradually find its way into spiritual life. People may complain about capitalism today—but there’s nothing one can do about it; after all, we need capitalism. The issue is not that capital exists or that capitalism exists, but rather: what social forces are at work within capital and capitalism. Capitalism arose from humanity’s spiritual inventiveness. It emerged from the spiritual realm through the division of labor and spiritual insight. I merely stated in my “Key Points”—simply by way of illustration, since I did not wish to present a utopia—how this flow of capital toward the spiritual member of the social organism might occur: by having the person who has initially acquired capital—and thereby has working capital—and who is personally involved in this work of capital, by having that person, just as is done today with books, which pass into the public domain after thirty years, ensures that the capital passes into the public domain. I did not present this as a utopian viewpoint, but rather said that this might be a way to give capital this flow, so that, instead of stagnating everywhere, it enters the bloodstream of social life. Everything I have said is meant as an illustration; these are not dogmas, not utopian concepts, but rather I wanted to suggest something that might come about through association.

[ 40 ] But perhaps something entirely different might happen. Those who think in a way that is full of life do not lay down dogmas to be carried out, but rather count on people to bring forth from their context whatever is socially meaningful and purposeful, provided these people are placed within the social organism in the right way. Everywhere, the focus is on people, not on dogmas. But I have had to experience it myself: what was actually meant by the “key points” was not discussed at all. Instead, people asked: How can we ensure that, after so many years, capital is bequeathed to the most capable? And so on. People don’t really want anything real; they only want utopias. But that is precisely what stands in the way of an open-minded reception of an impulse such as that embodied in the threefold social order.

[ 41 ] And so we will see that when legal and political life is able to take effect in the proper way, it will, above all, encompass human labor. Human labor is, after all, completely embedded in economic life today. It is not treated as something determined from person to person. Around 1905, I wrote an essay on the social question, in which I sought to make clear that, under our current division of labor, labor becomes merely a commodity as it flows into the rest of the social organism. For ourselves, in reality, our work has only an apparent value. Only what others do for us has value; whereas what we do is supposed to have value for others. This is something that technology has already achieved. It’s just that our morality hasn’t caught up yet. Technically, within today’s social order, one cannot make anything for oneself—not even a skirt. Even if one makes the coat oneself, it has the same price as it would have if it were made by someone else within the entire social order. That is to say, what places the coat within the economic sphere is universal; it is determined by the community. It is merely an illusion to think that a coat made by a tailor for oneself is cheaper. You can calculate this with numbers, and it appears cheaper. But if you were to place it within an overall balance sheet, you would see: just as you cannot step out of your own skin, so too, by making a garment for yourself, you cannot change or eliminate the economic reality. Even the garment you have made for yourself must be paid for in full. Work is what one person does for another; it cannot be measured solely by how much working time is required in a factory. The valuation of work leads, in the most fundamental sense, into the realm of law and the state-legal order.

[ 42 ] You can see that this is not outdated but rather timely from the fact that labor is protected and safeguarded everywhere, and so on. But these are not half-measures—they are quarter-measures—that can only take full effect when there is a proper threefold social order. For only then will human beings truly face one another, and only then will labor find proper regulation—when human dignity speaks to human dignity, based on that which all human beings are competent to do.

[ 43 ] Then you will say: Yes, there can never be enough work if work is determined in this way in a democratic state. Yes, that is one of the points where the social sphere leads into the general-historical, into the general development of humanity. Economic life must not determine work. It must be confined, on the one hand, by nature, and on the other, by state-determined labor. Just as a committee cannot determine now how many rainy days there will be in 1923 so that the economy can function properly in 1923, just as one must accept and reckon with what nature provides as a given, so too must one, within an autonomous economic organism, reckon with what is given—namely, the amount of labor that arises within the state-legal organism. I can only mention this in general terms as a characteristic.

[ 44 ] In the economic segment of the social organism, there will be associations in which consumers, producers, and merchants alike will, based on their life experiences, form an associative judgment—not an individual one, which has no significance at all—an associative judgment. This cannot be achieved today by merely pursuing the small beginnings that already exist. The fact that these small beginnings exist proves that there is an unconscious intention within humanity to do it this way. People are founding cooperatives, labor unions, and all kinds of communities. Certainly, this testifies to the fact that the impulse is there. But if they found a cooperative today alongside the existing social order, that cooperative must either grow into the existing social order—setting prices in line with it and bringing goods to market in the usual way—or else it must fail. What the threefold social order is all about is not creating realities out of a utopian idea, but rather taking hold of what is real; the institutions that currently exist—those that consume, those that produce, the entrepreneur—what is already there without the need for new foundations—that is what should be brought together into associations. One should not ask at all: How does one establish new associations? — But rather: How does one bring together the economic organizations and institutions that already exist into associations? — Then, above all, within these associations, something will come about naturally from economic experience—something from which a social order can actually emerge—just as human health arises from a healthy human organism in human life—namely, an economic circulation: money for production, money for loans, and money for gifts, endowments. Without these three elements, there is no social organism. People can rail as much as they like today against endowments and donations—they must exist. People are merely deluding themselves. They tell themselves: Yes, in a healthy social organism there are no donations. But they pay their taxes. Taxes are merely a roundabout way of doing things; for within them lie the donations we make to schools and so on—those are the donations.

[ 45 ] People, however, should have a social order in which they can always see how things work and do not delude themselves. When they gradually come to understand social life from what is now a confused jumble of everything, then they will see money flowing—as production money, loan money, and gift money—just as they now see blood flowing in a healthy human organism. And they will see how, on the one hand, the money involved in trade, circulation, production, and earnings—that is, the money invested so that, through lending and the accrual of interest, it flows back into production—is connected to human beings; and on the other hand, the gift money, which must flow into what constitutes free spiritual life.

[ 46 ] The only way for people to participate in social life is for everyone to see, through free association, that this is how life works—only then can health enter the social organism. In contrast to this idea of threefold social organization, all abstract thinking is frowned upon. There is only living thinking.

[ 47 ] But even in economics today, we no longer have vibrant thinking. We have abstract thinking everywhere. For where does today’s economy really come to life? How did it begin, as it emerged from the time when people would take some dirty scrap of paper and write down their income and expenses? When matters became more complicated, they turned to those in the priesthood—the clergy—who became the scribes. Drawing on their knowledge, they interpreted what they understood of external life. Today—who is the successor to the clergyman, the scribe, who was taken from the church to record the prince’s finances? It is the accountant. The accountant has only a very faint remnant of this in his cash book or general ledger—and even that is found in only a few regions. When you open the first page—I don’t know if it’s still like that here—it says: “With God.” Such accounting books exist in certain regions. “With God” is written there. It still recalls the old days. If you turn the pages further, you’ll find little that is “with God.” Well, everything that ought to be full of life—that which must appear as life in our associations, that which cannot be captured in the books—has been abstracted away.

[ 48 ] And so the threefold social order is really not about going back to the old way of shuffling around these concepts we have— spiritual life, political life, and economic life—back and forth in the old way, and to shuffle them around a little differently than has been attempted in recent times; rather, it is a matter of grasping the concept of the organism in the first place, and of bringing back to life that which has gradually been forced so immensely into the abstract. This bringing back to life is what really matters. For everyone will be part of the associations of economic life; even the representatives of intellectual life will be part of it, because they eat. The representatives of the state will be part of it. And conversely, everyone will be part of the other branches as well.

[ 49 ] But then something inevitably follows that shocks people terribly when you talk about it today—of course, one sometimes puts forward something paradoxical to characterize the matter more precisely. I once said to an industrialist, who is an outstanding person in his field: We’ll truly be entering into life when you have a person in the factory who immerses himself fully in the life of the factory, who is fully present there with his whole being; then some university—a technical university—comes along and takes this person out of the factory—not the one who’s just been trained, but this one, taken right out of life itself. It places him there so that for five or ten years he can tell the young men and women what needs to be said based on real life experience. Then, when that has become a bit outdated, he may return to the factory. — Life becomes complicated, but that is what the times demand; there is no other way.

[ 50 ] Just as new life will continually flow through the social order—or the social order will fall into decadence—so we must say: Either human beings must truly become human, that is, they must be able to circulate their abilities within the social organism, or we will fall into decadence. One can, of course, choose decadence if one wishes, if one wants to remain stuck in the old way of thinking; but evolution simply does not allow us to stand still. That is what matters.

[ 51 ] In conclusion, I would like to say: I was able to develop a deeper sense of what needed to be said from the perspective I have been discussing here. This perspective should not be understood in a one-sided way as a “spiritual” one; rather, it is called “spiritual” only because it seeks to arise from the spirit of life. Thus, I was able to characterize—more intuitively—the impulse that is meant to come to life through this social idea. That is all that can be said in three lectures.

[ 52 ] But, ladies and gentlemen, the fact that I was able and permitted to do this here is precisely what I would like to thank you for most sincerely now that I am about to conclude these lectures. I feel this gratitude most deeply in my heart, first and foremost toward Mrs. Mackenzie, who heads this committee; without her efforts, the entire Oxford project could never have come to fruition. First and foremost, my most sincere and heartfelt thanks go to Mrs. Mackenzie, and then to the entire committee that has stood by her side. In particular, I would also like to express my gratitude that what we have been able to classify as artistic—as part of the endeavor we wish to send out into the world from Dornach—and that the art of eurythmy has also been able to find concrete expression here in Oxford during this meeting. For this, my heartfelt thanks to all those who have contributed to making it possible! You will sense that this gratitude must be a serious one when I tell you that the Goetheanum in Dornach was, after all, established as a starting point for that which only becomes a reality when events such as those that have now taken place here in Oxford occur. And that this requires understanding and good hearts—you will be able to see this from what I am about to say, which I do not mean as an allusion, truly not, but I would nevertheless like to mention that we will likely have to suspend construction in November; we will not be able to continue because we lack the necessary funds. We believe, however, that these funds still exist somewhere in the world, and that therefore something is also stalling somewhere in that regard. If things continue as they would in a properly functioning social organism, then—but this is something that weighs heavily on us in Dornach with the greatest concern—this project, having been undertaken, might have to be interrupted due to unfavorable circumstances, if understanding for its continuation is not found at the right time. I mention this so that you may see how sincerely meant the thanks are that I am expressing to you here.

[ 53 ] While I have attempted to distinguish, on the one hand, the educational aspect and, on the other, the social aspect, I would nevertheless like to point out that this should be cultivated from Dornach as a universal endeavor. After all, when the anthroposophical movement was founded, it started from a worldview and epistemological standpoint. And it was only when people in our time saw and felt—from the forces of decline that are at work in our age—that something must happen both in the educational and social spheres that they came to me with the question: What does anthroposophy have to say about founding schools that count on full life, on a future that springs from the deeper human forces? For nothing can be gained for the future from the surface of human powers. This educational movement did not arise out of some eccentricity, nor from an abstract idea, but because people came who posed this question to anthroposophy—people who wanted to know what anthroposophy had to say based on life itself, not out of some sectarian endeavor.

[ 54 ] And this was even more true of the social question. Here, too, people whose hearts were broken by what is currently leading to decline came forward and wanted to know what anthroposophical insight—through its genuine penetration into reality—has to say about the impulses that should be sent from the present into the future.

[ 55 ] I would like to conclude by expressing my heartfelt thanks for the understanding I have found here, while emphasizing once more that what must be said in precisely this way depends on its being incorporated into the fullness of life, on its extending beyond the college into the world where people live—so that it is not merely antiquarian scholarship, but rather that it is precisely in the centers of intellectual life that the impulses arise which ensure that even in the factories there are the right people managing the capital from which life flows. No one will hold it against me that I have illustrated this with examples that present themselves, if I repeat once again what I have already said several times: that it was a particularly joyful experience for me to be able to explore these impulses here in Oxford, where every step out onto the street is inspiring because of its venerable age, and where what is needed by those who wish to speak from the spirit has a particularly powerful effect.

[ 56 ] In earlier times, the spirit that must come alive today—and that is meant to shape the future—was not yet alive, but a spirit was alive nonetheless. And this spirit can have an inspiring effect. That is why it was deeply satisfying for me to be able to deliver these lectures and offer these insights right here in Oxford, under the influence of what is time-honored and venerable.

[ 57 ] I must conclude by expressing my gratitude. You will all understand that I am extremely grateful to Mr. Kaufmann, who has produced these translations here with great dedication. When one realizes how much effort is required to translate relatively difficult material, and how much that can drain a person’s energy even in a short period of time, one can truly appreciate the work that Mr. Kaufmann in particular has done over the past few weeks in Oxford for this Holiday Conference. I would like to express my gratitude to him here—and I hope many others will do the same—and I ask that he do me one last favor as a translator and translate what I have just said here as faithfully and literally as he translated the previous text.