The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] Among the tasks a speaker may set for himself in a particular field is, first and foremost, to thoroughly grasp the subject matter to be addressed in an appropriate manner. There are two aspects to this grasping of the subject matter, insofar as communicating it through speech is concerned. The first is to master the material for a given speech in such a way that one can structure it—that one is, so to speak, enabled to give the speech a coherent composition. Without a coherent composition, a speech cannot truly be understood. The listener may find one aspect or another of an unstructured speech appealing; but in reality, an unstructured speech is not truly received. Insofar as preparation is concerned, one must therefore realize this: Any speech is bound to be poorly received by the audience if it was prepared merely by creating mental images of one point after another, one sentence after another, and going through them one by one during preparation. If one is not able, at least at some stage of preparation, to survey the entire speech as a whole, then one cannot really expect to be understood. The first step is to, so to speak, let the entire speech emerge from a comprehensive idea that one structures, and to allow the composition to take shape by proceeding from such a unified idea that encompasses the whole of the speech.

[ 2 ] The other approach is to draw upon all the experiences one can draw from one’s immediate life for the subject of the speech—that is, to recall as much as possible everything one has directly experienced in the matter at hand—and, once one has a rough outline of the speech, to try to weave those experiences into the composition here and there.

[ 3 ] This will generally serve as the outline for preparation. So during preparation, you have the entire speech laid out before you as if in a tableau. And this tableau is so clear in your mind that, as is only natural, you can place the individual experiences you recall wherever you like—just as if you had written them down on paper: a, b, c, d—and now you had an experience; you know it belongs under d, another under f, and yet another under a—so that, in a sense, you are independent of the sequence of thoughts as they are to be presented later, with regard to this gathering of experiences. Whether one does this by putting it down on paper or by processing it freely without the aid of paper will simply mean that the person who relies on paper will speak less well, and the person who does not rely on paper will speak somewhat better. But of course, one can certainly do both.

[ 4 ] The point, however, is that one must accomplish a third step as well: once one has, on the one hand, the whole—I would never say “the framework”—and, on the other hand, the individual experiences, one must develop the ideas that arise to such an extent that these things can stand before the soul to one’s fullest inner satisfaction.

[ 5 ] Let’s take, for example, a speech on the threefold social order. Here we will say to ourselves: After an introduction—which we will discuss later—and before a conclusion—which we will also discuss later—the structure of such a speech is actually determined by the subject matter itself. The unified idea is determined by the subject matter itself. I say this in relation to this example. If one lives a properly spiritual life, this actually applies to every single case; it is the same for everything. But let us take this obvious example of the threefold structure of the social organism, which we wish to discuss. It is given from the outset that the treatment of our topic yields three parts. We will have to address the nature of spiritual life, the nature of legal and political life, and the nature of economic life.

[ 6 ] Now, however, the task will be to use an appropriate introduction—which, as I said, we will discuss later—to evoke in the audience a sense that it makes sense at all to speak about these things, about a transformation in these things, in the present. But then the task will be not to start right away with explanations of what is meant by a free spiritual life, by a legal and political life based on equality, or by an economic life based on associations; rather, we will have to lead the audience toward these concepts. And one will have to lead people there by building upon what is currently present to the highest degree in the three members of the social organism—that is, what can be perceived most intensely by people today. Only in this way will one be able to build upon what is already familiar.

[ 7 ] Let’s assume we have an audience—and such an audience can indeed be the most pleasant and likable—that is a mixed group of middle-class and working-class people—the latter, in turn, with all sorts of nuances—and if, of course, there are also a few aristocrats present, even Swiss aristocrats, that certainly does no harm at all. So let’s assume we have an audience like this, a jumble of people from all social classes. I emphasize this because, as a speaker, one should always try to sense who one is speaking to before beginning to speak. One should really put oneself in that situation with a vivid sense of it.

[ 8 ] Well, what must one first tell oneself about what can be used as a starting point with today’s audience regarding the threefold social organism? One will say to oneself: It is extremely difficult to build upon the concepts of the bourgeois audience at first, because the bourgeoisie has formed very few mental images about social conditions in recent times, because it has, so to speak, vegetated thoughtlessly with regard to social life. It would always come across as academic if one were to speak about these things today from the perspective of a bourgeois audience. On the other hand, however, one can surely recognize that within the proletarian population there exist exceptionally well-developed concepts regarding all three areas of the social organism, as well as strong feelings and a pronounced social will. And it is precisely the hallmark of our present age that these well-developed concepts exist within the proletarian population.

[ 9 ] However, we must treat these terms with great caution, for we could very easily give rise to the prejudice that we are biased toward the proletarian perspective. We should actually combat this prejudice through the very manner in which we present ourselves. We will, of course, see that if we start from proletarian concepts, we will initially expose ourselves to serious misunderstandings. These misunderstandings did, in fact, arise continuously during the period when it was still possible to work in Central Europe—beginning in April 1919—for the threefold social order. A bourgeois population hears in certain terms only what it has perceived over decades from the agitational behavior of the proletariat. How one actually intends the matter is, at first, hardly understood at all.

[ 10 ] One must be clear that one’s work in the world must be understood, I would say, in terms of the order of the world. The order of the world is such—you need only look at the fish in the sea—that a great, great many fish eggs are laid, yet only a few develop into fish. It must be this way. But you must also approach the tasks you are called upon to solve as a speaker with this natural tendency in mind: Even if only a very few—and those with little enthusiasm—are present at the very first speech, then you have actually already achieved the maximum of what can be achieved. After all, when it comes to matters one is so deeply committed to in life—such as the threefold structure of the social organism—what can be accomplished through public speaking must never be abandoned, but must be taken up and developed further in some way, whether through further speeches or in some other manner. One can say: No speech is truly in vain if it is delivered with this spirit and is followed by the necessary action.

[ 11 ] But one must be absolutely clear that even when speaking to a proletarian population—especially when speaking directly from the perspective of what they think today in terms of their theories, as they have existed for decades—one will still be completely misunderstood. One cannot simply ask oneself: How does one go about it so as not to be misunderstood? — One must simply do it right! But the point is not at all to ask oneself: “How does one go about it so as not to be misunderstood?”—It is not difficult to answer the question: “How does one go about it so as not to be misunderstood?”—You tell people what they have already been thinking anyway! You pass on Marxism or something like that to them in some way. Then, of course, you will be understood.

[ 12 ] But there is, of course, no interest in being understood in this way. Otherwise, one will very soon have the following experience—and one must be fully aware of this experience—: If one speaks today at a proletarian assembly in such a way that the audience can at least understand the terminology—and that is what one must strive for—then one will notice, especially during the discussion, that those who are participating in the discussion have understood nothing. One usually does not get to know the others, because they do not take part in the discussions. Those who have understood nothing usually participate in the discussions following such speeches. And with them, one will notice something along the following lines. I myself have given countless speeches on the threefold social order to what are called in Germany “majority Social Democrats,” independent “Social Democrats,” Communists, and so on. Well, you’ll notice this: When someone stands up in the discussion and thinks they can speak, it’s usually the case that they respond as if you hadn’t actually spoken at all, but as if someone else had spoken in the manner of a Social Democratic agitator at public meetings thirty years ago. You suddenly feel completely transformed. You find yourself thinking something like: “Well, did you happen to have the misfortune of being possessed by the old Bebel at that very moment? Because that’s exactly how you’re being confronted!” The people in question physically hear nothing other than what they’ve been accustomed to hearing for decades. Physically—not just emotionally—they hear nothing else; physically, they hear only what they’ve long been accustomed to. And then they say: “Well, actually, the speaker didn’t tell us anything new at all!”—Because, since they were compelled to use the terminology, they immediately had in their ears—not just in their souls—the entire context of the terminology translated into what they have long been accustomed to. And then they continue speaking in the spirit of what they have long been accustomed to.

[ 13 ] Countless discussions went something like this. At most, a new nuance would sometimes be introduced into the matter because the Communists were now speaking from their newly gained position and might say, for example: Above all, it is necessary to hold political power! It is, after all, quite natural—I speak from experience and give examples that have actually occurred—to hold political power first! And if—as one person once said, for example—if he had political power, let’s say, for instance—as he put it—as Minister of Police, he certainly wouldn’t appoint himself as a registrar, because he was a cobbler, and he could very well see that a cobbler knew nothing about the duties of a registrar. If he were Minister of Police—since he was a cobbler—he certainly would not appoint himself as a registrar!—He did not realize that he was actually saying, implicitly: He felt quite well-suited to be appointed Minister of Police, but not at all to be a registrar! This added a sort of new nuance to the discussion. The nuances were, after all, almost always along these lines.

[ 14 ] Well, even so, we must be clear that, precisely because we are meant to be understood, we must speak from the depths of people’s souls. For when one speaks from the soul, the subconscious does, in a certain sense, go along with it. This is especially true when the speech has been structured as I have already indicated and as I will explain in more detail later. But we must then have concepts that can truly be formulated from experience—that is, in this case, from the experiences of proletarian sensibility—regarding the matters at hand.

[ 15 ] Let us consider the spiritual component of the threefold social organism. With regard to this spiritual component, the proletarian has, since the advent of Marxism, developed very clear concepts—namely, the concept of ideology. He says: Spiritual life has no reality of its own. Religion, concepts of law, concepts of morality, and so on—art, science itself—these are nothing in and of themselves. In reality, only economic processes exist in and of themselves. One can trace in the development of world history how what is truly real consists in the way one stratum of the population relates to another in economic life. Depending on how one stratum of the population relates to another in economic life, the concepts and sentiments in religion, science, art, morality, law, and so on must form of their own accord, like a kind of smoke rising from it. These—law, morality, religion, art—are not realities, but an ideology. — This term “ideology,” with the connotation I have just described, has been heard for decades in all Social Democratic or other proletarian gatherings. And it was, in fact, a particularly sophisticated educational tool designed to help people understand: The bourgeois population speaks of truth in and of itself, of the value of science, of the value of religion, of the value of morality, of art—but in reality, none of this exists in and of itself; rather, all of these are mere illusions that arise from economic processes. One of the leaders of the proletarian world, Franz Mehring, took this idea to a particularly radical extreme in his book *The Lessing Legend*.

[ 16 ] A book—admittedly not a very significant one—by a bourgeois professor named Erich Schmidt had been published about Lessing. It is not very significant because it does not actually deal with Lessing, but rather with a papier-mâché statue falsely called “Lessing,” to which Erich Schmidt attaches the remarks, stories, and accounts that his particular talent—or lack thereof—enabled him to produce. One is not dealing with a human being at all in this book, but with a papier-mâché statue called “Lessing.” The fact that this bourgeois professor had no particularly clear mental images of the real Lessing, but only of a papier-mâché Lessing, was already apparent to me even before the book “Lessing” by Erich Schmidt had not even been written yet, when I heard Erich Schmidt speak in Vienna during a lecture at the Vienna Academy of Sciences, where he had presented the very beginnings of the first chapters of this book on Lessing in condensed form as a speech. I was strangely moved at the time by this speech, which so clearly showed how, when one is placed in a certain social position and is allowed to speak—even before an illustrious Academy of Sciences—one actually doesn’t need to say anything of substance. For at the most important points, where Erich Schmidt presented something that was meant to be characteristic of the personality he was discussing, he would always say—while highlighting some aspect of Lessing’s working methods and writing style—“That’s truly Lessingian!”—And that phrase—“That’s truly Lessingian!”—was heard, I believe, fifty times during that Academy speech.

[ 17 ] Well, when you’re dealing with Ernst Müller from Neu-Babelsberg and you have to describe him, you’ll be able to say exactly the same thing when you talk about his unique way of, say, tidying up his manure pile: That’s so Müller! — You will have said something that carries just as much weight.

[ 18 ] So this was something extraordinarily insignificant. But a true social-democratic writer, such as Franz Mehring, attributed this insignificance of Erich Schmidt’s book on Lessing to the fact that Erich Schmidt was, after all, a bourgeois professor, and he said: “This is simply a bourgeois product.”—And now he set his proletarian product against it. He called this book *The Lessing Legend*. It examines the economic circumstances in which Lessing’s ancestors lived, what they did for a living, how Lessing himself was introduced to economic life in his youth, how he had to become a journalist, how he had to scrape together money—which is, after all, also an economic context—and so on. In short, it demonstrates how Lessing’s interpretation of *Laocoon*, his “Hamburg Dramaturgy,” and his *Minna von Barnhelm* had to be exactly as they are, precisely because Lessing emerged from these specific economic circumstances.

[ 19 ] Following the model of this book, *The Lessing Legend* by the party scholar Mehring, a student at my workers’ educational school—I ran a workers’ educational school for years, teaching public speaking as well—once demonstrated in a trial speech that Kant’s philosophy simply arose from the economic conditions in which Kant developed. And one would always encounter similar things back then, and one can probably still encounter them today, even though they have more or less become mere clichés by now. But that was certainly the case. And that meant that the modern proletarian held the view regarding intellectual life that everything that exists in intellectual life is ideology.

[ 20 ] With regard to political and legal life, the proletarian accepts only what, in turn, manifests itself within economic relations as a relationship between people. For him, however, these are the classes. The ruling class dominates the other classes. And those who belong to a class then develop class consciousness. Thus, what the modern proletarian actually understands about political and legal life is the class, and what concerns him is class consciousness.

[ 21 ] The third component of the social organism is the economic one. Here, too, there are strictly defined concepts within the proletariat, and the central concept that recurs time and again—just as the concepts of ideology and class consciousness do—is that of surplus value. The proletarian understands: When economic activity takes place, a certain value emerges in the economic product; he receives a certain portion of this value as wages, while the rest goes toward something else. He refers to this as “surplus value” and now focuses on this surplus value, which he feels is being taken from him out of the value of the products of his labor.

[ 22 ] If one thinks things through in this way, one can see how, indeed, within that class of the population that has emerged in recent times as the active, the truly aggressive one, there are clearly defined concepts for the three spheres of the threefold social organism. Social life reveals itself in three ways—as a true proletarian theorist might say—first, through its reality, through the value-producing economy. This value-producing economy derives surplus value from economic life itself. Through the power relations that emerge, socially active people are divided into classes within economic life—which is regarded as the sole reality—so that when they reflect on their human worth, they arrive at class consciousness rather than human consciousness. And then, as that which people like to have on Sundays, what they need—but also just for fun in between—so that machines are properly designed, so that people can also make inventions now and then in their free time, right, and so on—then ideology develops, but it emerges as a byproduct of actual reality, of economic life.

[ 23 ] I am certainly not exaggerating; rather, I am describing what lived in the minds of millions—not thousands, but millions—in the decades leading up to the war, and what continued even through the war. The proletarian, then, already has within himself a concept of the threefold social order, and this is where we can build upon it.

[ 24 ] One can take this further in a broader sense. One can build on the fact that, in recent times, economic life—because it inherently carries its own necessity—has developed particularly rapidly, while the other aspects of life, namely intellectual life and political-legal life, have lagged behind. In economic life, people could not afford to lag behind. They had to transition first to global trade and then to the global economy in the last third of the 19th century. There is an inherent necessity here. In a certain sense, this happens of its own accord—until it is ruined, as happened during the war. But because the other spheres did not keep pace—because an abstract intellectualism developed within them—the perception of economic life became exceptionally influential, exerting a suggestive influence on the entire population primarily through its very nature. And what had this suggestive effect did not merely take root in people’s mental images, but became institutionalized. Intellectualism has gradually taken complete hold of social life.

[ 25 ] Intellectualism is characterized by abstraction, by the abstract. In life, let’s say, you have butter; in life, let’s say, you have a Madonna by Raphael; in life, let’s say, you have a toothbrush; in life, let’s say, you have a philosophical work; in life, let’s say, you have a powder compact for women, and so on. There’s a lot in life, isn’t there? I could certainly go on with this list for a long time. But you won’t dispute that these things are very, very different from one another, and that, if one wants to form concepts of all these things, these concepts, these mental images, become very, very different from one another. But in more recent social life, something has developed that has become extraordinarily significant for all aspects of life, and which is not at all that differentiated. For, let’s say, a certain amount of butter costs two francs; a Raphael Madonna costs two million francs; a toothbrush costs perhaps only two and a half francs these days; a philosophical work—perhaps the cheapest one—costs, let’s say, for a single copy, if it’s thin, seventy rappen; a powder compact, if it’s particularly good, ten francs.

[ 26 ] Now we’ve brought the whole thing to a common denominator! Now we just need to treat the numbers—which, after all, also belong in a field—differently. But we’ve spread an abstraction—the monetary prize—over everything.

[ 27 ] This has become deeply ingrained in people’s way of thinking, even if they don’t always admit it to themselves. Certainly, a poet naturally considers himself the center of the world; he doesn’t judge himself that way—nor does a philosopher, and so on. Or, for that matter, a painter! But today, the world judges all these things in this manner when it comes to the social evaluation of people. And so it ultimately turns out that, let’s say, a poet is worth—to a publisher—from the time he began writing his novel until the time he finished it—if the publisher is noble, this poet is worth ten thousand francs. So that is the price of a poet for a certain period of time, isn’t it? We have also reduced it to an equivalent abstraction. [Something is written on the blackboard.]

2.— Fr. Butter
2,000,000.— Fr. Raphael’s Madonna
2.50 Fr. Toothbrush
—.70 Fr. Philosophical Work
10.— Fr. Powder Jar
10,000.— Fr. Poet
3.— Fr. Daily Labor

[ 28 ] Well, I could cite all sorts of examples here as well; but as I’ve already said: the bourgeoisie didn’t really think very deeply about these things. The poet, of course, considers himself—in his little world up there—to be something quite special, but in social life, he was simply worth ten thousand francs. But he didn’t care about that, unless he actually belonged to the proletariat. He didn’t care about that. But the proletarian did care. For he drew the following conclusion from all this: You have no butter, you have no powder, you have no philosophical work, but you have your labor power; you offer that to the factory owner, and it is worth, say, three francs a day to the factory owner: daily labor power.

[ 29 ] You must forgive me for writing “poet” here, because experience has shown that, over the course of the last few decades, the poet has been treated just a little worse than the proletarian with his daily labor. For the latter was still better able to defend himself than the poet, and the ten thousand francs for the poet were generally no more valuable than the three francs in wages for proletarian labor—with the exception of a few, of course, just as it was only natural that poets such as, for example—I don’t know if many still remember them — the late Marlitt, who earned a great deal from *The Secret of the Old Maid*, a novel for which the best review would probably be, as someone once said: “O book, if only you had remained the secret of the old maid!”

[ 30 ] Well, the worker reflected on what he had become as a result of being placed within the abstraction of prices—or, rather, as a result of his labor power being placed there. And what, in economic life, is something simply because it has a price? It is a commodity. In economic life, anything for which a price can be paid must be regarded as a commodity. I said that the bourgeoisie goes about its life with a certain indifference toward such matters. But these concepts emerged from the proletariat, and this gave rise to the idea: We ourselves, with our labor power, have become a commodity.

[ 31 ] This is something that has now interacted with the other three concepts. And anyone who truly understands modern life knows that, if they correctly understand the four concepts of ideology, class consciousness, surplus value, and labor power as a commodity—so that, based on experience, they can engage with life through these four concepts—then they will first encounter, through these four concepts, the reality of consciousness that exists precisely among the active population, among those who consciously seek a transformation of social conditions. And so the task is to reflect on how these four concepts should be approached.

[ 32 ] If one now has an audience composed of both proletarians and the bourgeoisie, one will need to speak in such a way as to first make it clear how the proletarian was inevitably led to these circumstances, how modern life has left the proletarian with no choice but to become familiar with the workings of the economy. That is indeed how it has turned out, let’s say since the middle of the 15th century. That is when it slowly began. For if we go back beyond the middle of the 15th century, we see how, in essence, human beings were still connected to their products. Whoever makes a key puts his soul into that key. Whoever makes a shoe puts his soul into that shoe. And I am quite certain that among people in whom these things have developed in a healthy way, there was no contempt for any such thing. I am completely convinced of this—not merely subjectively convinced, but such things can indeed be proven when it comes down to it—: Jakob Böhme certainly took just as much pleasure in making his boots as in writing his philosophical and mystical works—or Hans Sachs, for example. These attitudes—that the material is despised while the spiritual is overvalued—only emerged with intellectualism and its abstractions in all fields. What has happened is precisely this: through modern economic life, into which technology has poured itself, human beings have become separated from their products, so that no real love can connect them to the act of producing anymore. People who still develop a love for producing within certain professions are becoming increasingly rare. Only in the so-called intellectual professions does this love still exist. Hence the unnatural nature of social distribution and even social structure in recent times. One must go all the way to the East—though today it may no longer be possible, it was certainly the case decades ago—to find professional joy there. I must confess, I was deeply delighted, downright moved, when decades ago in Budapest I met a barber whom I went to for a haircut, and who was always dancing around me and, after he’d trimmed a bit more with the scissors, said, picking up the mirror: “What a wonderful cut I’m giving you!” “What a wonderful cut I’m giving you!”—Go ahead, try to find a barber that enthusiastic in today’s so-called civilization!

[ 33 ] What has happened, then, is the separation of man from his product. He has become indifferent to it. He is placed next to the machine. What does he care about this machine! At most, it interests—not even the designer anymore, but at most the inventor—and the interest the inventor has in it is usually not truly social. For social interest only begins when one can determine the potential value in terms of return on investment—well, when one has reduced the matter to a question of price.

[ 34 ] But what the modern proletarian has come to know above all else is economic life. He is immersed in it. If he is to approach intellectual life, it has no connection whatsoever to his immediate inner life. It does not stir the soul. He perceives it as something foreign, as ideology. It is inherent in the modern historical process that this ideology has developed.

[ 35 ] But once you succeed in arousing in the proletarian the feeling that this is indeed the case, then you have made the first step toward what you are meant to achieve. For today the proletarian listens to you initially with the feeling: It is, after all, an absolute natural necessity that all art, all science, all religion—everything—is ideology. It is far, far from his mind to consider that, with this view, he has in fact become merely the product of modern development. It is very difficult to make him understand this. Once he realizes this, his entire way of thinking is turned on its head; he is horrified by the idea that everything is supposed to be merely ideology, and he becomes aware of the utterly illusory nature of this view. He is, so to speak, the one best prepared to feel revulsion at the fact that everything has become ideology; but you must reach the point where he actually feels it. The thoughts you develop on this subject—or have developed for yourself—are of no interest to the listener. You lead him to feel the matter in the way I have described. For the point is to set the record straight for the proletariat in this way, by imbuing individual sentences with this particular tone.

[ 36 ] For the bourgeoisie, the matter must be framed differently, because what is very good for the proletariat is very bad for the bourgeoisie in this regard. And it is not merely a matter of speaking correctly, but—given today’s diversity of life—it is a matter of speaking well, in the old sense, and also, as far as possible, speaking on behalf of the bourgeois. One must now make it clear to this bourgeois that it is precisely because he was indifferent to what has arisen that he has brought about this situation. Through his actions—or rather, his inaction—the situation has developed to the point where it has become an ideology for the proletariat. One must then make the bourgeois understand: Religion was once something that filled the whole person with inner fervor, from which sprang everything that human beings, in essence, have to accomplish in the external world. Morality was what was sacred to human beings in social life. Art was something through which people found a way to overcome the hardships and burdens of physical life, and so on. But how the value of these spiritual goods has declined over the course of the last few centuries! Given the bourgeois’s view of them, the worker can no longer perceive them as anything other than ideology.

[ 37 ] Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the worker comes into the employer’s office for some reason. He has his own views on the entire operation of the business. Let’s suppose that the bookkeeper, whom he was summoned to see, or the employer himself, has just stepped out. There is a large ledger lying there, in which many things are recorded. The worker has his own views on the way these numbers speak to him. He has, after all, just formed these views. Now, since the accountant or the business owner is currently out and he has arrived half a minute early, he flips through the pages and opens the first page. It says: “With God!” He then realizes that this religious element—the fact that “With God!” is written on the first page—is, in truth, pure ideology, for the worker is fully convinced that there really isn’t much “with God” in what’s written on the following pages of the book. This is entirely in keeping with the way he conceives of world affairs in general: There is as much truth to what people call religion, morals, and so on as there is to what is written on the first page of this book: “With God.” I don’t know whether these books in Switzerland also have “With God!” on the first page; but it is very common for people to have their checkbooks, journals, and so on inscribed “With God.”

[ 38 ] The point, then, is to make it clear to the bourgeoisie: It is the bourgeoisie that is responsible for the emergence of the concept of ideology among the proletariat.

[ 39 ] Then everyone has their part. Then one is ready to examine how spiritual life must once again become a reality, since it has, after all, become an ideology. If one has only ideas about the spirit, without a connection to its true spiritual existence and essence, then it is simply an ideology. This provides the bridge to the realm where one can evoke a mental image of the reality of spiritual life. And then it becomes possible to point out how spiritual life is, in fact, a self-contained reality—not a product of economic life, not a mere ideology—but a reality grounded in itself. One must evoke a sense that spiritual life is a reality grounded in itself. A reality grounded in itself is something other than one grounded merely in the abstract, for that which is grounded in the abstract must be grounded from somewhere else.

[ 40 ] The proletarian says: Ideology is rooted in economic life. — But insofar as human beings devote themselves solely to abstract ideas in their spiritual life, this is indeed something akin to smoke, something illusory. Only when one penetrates through this hazy, illusory quality—through the idea—to the reality of spiritual life, as happens through anthroposophy, only then can spiritual life once again be experienced as real. If spiritual life is merely an ideology, then these very ideas well up from economic life. There, one must organize them; one must give them an artificial effectiveness and structure. That is, after all, what the state has done. In the age when spiritual life evaporated into ideology, the state took it into its own hands in order to at least give the matter a reality that had not been experienced in the spiritual world itself.

[ 41 ] So one must try to make it clear how that which the state has unjustifiably imposed on intellectual life—since it has become ideology—has a reality of its own. After all, it must have some reality. If one has no legs of one’s own and yet wants to walk, one must have artificial ones made. After all, in order to exist, something must have a reality of its own. But intellectual life should have its own reality. One must feel that intellectual life must have its own reality.

[ 42 ] At first, however, you will come across as paradoxical, both to the middle class and to the working class. And you must make them aware that you come across as paradoxical. You can do this by giving the very people who are listening to you a mental image of you thinking just like the proletarian—by speaking in their language—and just like the middle class—by speaking in their language. But then, after you have developed this ability—which is possible with the help of the memories one can draw upon from life experiences—and after you have gone through this process in your preparation, you will be able to speak to people in such a way that, little by little, an understanding of the things for which it must be fostered can be evoked.

[ 43 ] One cannot learn to speak through external instruction. One must, so to speak, learn to speak by understanding how to bring the thinking that underlies speech and the experience that precedes it into the proper relationship with speech.

[ 44 ] Well, today I tried to show you how the material must be approached at first. I built on familiar concepts to show you that the material must not be drawn from some abstract theory, but must be taken from life itself; it must be prepared so that it can then be presented rhetorically. What I have spoken about today is something everyone should now do in their own way as preparation for speaking. It is through such preparation that a speech becomes compelling. By making intellectual preparations—preparations for structuring the speech, as I said at the beginning of today’s remarks: starting with a thought that is then shaped into a composition—the speech becomes clear and coherent, so that the listener can perceive it as a unified whole. The speaker should not use his own thoughts to influence the audience. For if he presents his own thoughts, as I have already said, they are of no interest to any individual. It is only by using one’s own thinking to structure the speech that it becomes clear, and through this clarity, understandable.

[ 45 ] The experiences that the speaker should gather from everywhere—even the worst experiences are still better than none at all!—make the speech compelling. For example, if you tell someone what happened to you—say, while you were walking through a village where someone almost slapped you—it is still better to judge life based on such an experience than to merely theorize. Draw from experience the elements that give the speech its lifeblood, for through thought alone it has only nerves. It gains its lifeblood through experience, and through this lifeblood, which comes from experience, the speech becomes compelling. You speak to the listeners’ minds through composition; you speak to their hearts through your experience. That is what one should regard as a golden rule. Well, we can proceed step by step. Today I wanted first to show, in broad strokes, how one can gradually transform the material into what it must then become in the speech. Then tomorrow at three o’clock, we’ll continue.