The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Richard Eriksen will give a lecture on 'The Philosophical Basis for the Threefold Social Organism'. This will be followed by a discussion, at the end of which Rudolf Steiner will comment again on various questions.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear participants, the questions that have been asked and that I would like to address are as follows. First, the first question:

What should be the answer when the outside world asks us the practical question: How should the worker in the threefold social organism get his money?

Now, I believe that this question in its purely external nature is clearly answered in the “Key Points”. The point is that, in the sense of the key points - from those conditions that are stated there - the structure of the social organism must be such that there is a manager for those who need such a manager and work under his leadership, and that the manager will essentially also be the mediator for how the products produced jointly with the worker are to be brought into the market. This will naturally also bring about a different attitude in the administration of what figures as money in the threefold social organism. In accordance with those contractual agreements, which are also characterized in the “key points”, the worker will receive his money from the supervisor. This is a purely external process, which, as an external process, will hardly differ much from what is customary now. But, ladies and gentlemen, we are not concerned with such external processes, but with the question of what functions money will play in the threefold social organism. Today, when it is paper money, money itself is a commodity inserted among other commodities. In the threefolded social organism, money must gradually lose this character. And of course, pricing can only take place within the economic part of the social organism. The banknotes must increasingly become part of the large accounting that takes place between all people who are involved in economic life - and that includes all people in any closed area. When this large-scale bookkeeping comes about of its own accord, then the banknotes simply represent what is to be recorded on the assets side. Those who think in the abstract, who think in the way that one thinks in bourgeois circles, think that such bookkeeping already exists. This is nonsense, of course, because it is not desirable as it is. But such an accounting, as one will need it, it forms itself completely by itself, it will not be abstractly a large accounting somehow, but it is then simply present in reality. And what matters is that a certain relationship arises between the work manager and the person who has to work under the direction of the work manager. And for such a relationship it is meaningless if the worker receives the money from the foreman, just as it is meaningless now if, say, you are a civil servant somewhere and receive the money from the till. These things must be seen in the context of the whole complex of questions of capital and human labor; only then does it, I would say, acquire the right nuance.

The second question:

How should one imagine the transition from today's social and economic conditions to the practical realization of threefolding?

Actually, the basic ideas of my “Key Points of the Social Question” do not allow for such a question to be asked. This is because what is advocated in the “Key Points” is not some utopia that is to take the place of what is there now and where a transition would have to be created between the present conditions and those that follow. Rather, the point is to bring about this threefold order, if only the threefold idea is understood by a sufficiently large number of people, and if, out of this understanding, people will take care of their spiritual, state and economic conditions. This threefold social order comes into being in the same way that a skirt comes into being when a tailor has learned how to sew a skirt; then he can also realize it. And so, because it is conceived as something thoroughly practical, the threefold social organism will be realized. There is no need for a transition. That is why I said in the key points: what is meant here can be tackled at any moment, and there is no need to worry about a transition. It is just as unnecessary to think about a transition as it is to worry about the question: Yes, I have a person who is now 17 years old and will be 18 next year; what will the transition be like between the 17th and 18th year?

There is no need to ask such questions when one is concerned with a practical idea that simply looks at what is now and asks: What do present conditions demand? If they are to develop naturally, not unnaturally, they demand precisely what threefolding gives; and there is no need to think of a special transition. Today's social and economic conditions are such that one can either continue to treat them unnaturally or set up some utopia, such as Leninism or Trotskyism, and try to shape them from that starting point. Or one can approach them naturally, and then one has threefolding. And that is what it is really about. So you cannot ask how the transition to practical realization happens, but you must always grasp these things in the concrete. But, you see, in the concrete, people do not like to grasp things.

During the time when the threefold social order was still the subject of discussion within a relatively small circle, the question was posed somewhat differently than it is now, because at that time there was a terrible fear that everything could be broken. The question was: What should the government actually do? You simply had to say what was practical for the government: namely, simply to acknowledge that the spiritual and economic life should be more free. When a labor minister once asked me what he should do, I had to answer: You see, the difficulties arise from the fact that the three limbs of the social organism have been thrown together; they now stand in such a way that on the one hand they have mandates that only belong in the state under the rule of law, and on the other hand only in economic life. And so one would actually like to see — which I do not exactly want to happen to you personally — one would actually like to see you beaten in half by the honest Swabian in the middle, like the Turk. The division would have to begin with the labor minister in question. Now you see, these are the things that must be pointed out again and again: that threefolding must be thought of as an eminently practical matter. Then people will not ask questions like the one about the transition from today's conditions to the practical realization of threefolding.

A third question:

A member of the Group for the Threefolding of the Social Organism is an authorized signatory for a large corporate society whose activities span a network across the north of England; it has 10 million members. He would like to know to what extent such a corporate society is in line with the principle of threefolding and where it deviates from it.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the person in question will probably only be able to answer that for himself personally, because he will very soon notice that this company, for which he is an authorized signatory, has very little to do with the threefold social order; he will either be able to be an authorized signatory for that company or want to work for the threefold social order. The two will not easily go together. Whether he will be able to propagate the threefold social order within the corporate society will depend entirely on whether he is able, through the strength of his spirit, through everything he has to say to found the threefold social order, to win the 10 million members over to the threefold social order. If he can win them over, then his work as a procurator is fully justified within these 10 million, and then one would like to congratulate him as a staunch representative of the threefold order. But I don't think these two activities can be reconciled: being a representative of the threefold order and a procurator for a corporate society. But, of course, sometimes they are compatible; in the threefold social order, it all depends on the people involved. We in the threefold order have seen and experienced this over and over again.

Now a few words; it is too late to elaborate on some things today that I would like to. You see, it is indeed the case that certain things are always approached from the wrong angle.

For example, it has been demanded that the proletariat should be spoken to in a way that is understandable to the masses. Yes, you see, the way the proletariat was spoken to in Stuttgart from April 1919 onwards was so understandable to the masses that very soon thousands and thousands of workers came together and found the language to be perfectly understandable. Then people came along who spoke in old Marxist phrases. Yes, my dear audience, if an audience, I would say a socially inexperienced audience, an audience that had not yet been stuffed full of Marxist buzzwords, had listened to what these leaders sometimes said to their flock in Marxist phrases and the like, then these people would have said: totally incomprehensible. They only found it understandable because they sometimes picked up a word – “surplus value” and so on – that the people who were the leaders at the time poured into a socialist sauce that was truly not meant to be understood by the masses; it was often incomprehensible because it was nonsense. Yes, but “common understanding” – a lot of nonsense is done with such things. It must be said that what is often referred to today in working-class circles as “common understanding” is actually something - I have indeed shown such heirlooms in my “Key Points of the Social Question” - that the proletariat has received from the bourgeoisie. What is called incomprehensibility there is also something that the proletariat has taken over from the bourgeoisie.

This common understanding, yes, you see, that too must have been experienced in practice. Once, many years ago, I was invited to Berlin to speak about Goethe's “Faust.” The audience included people who truly were not workers, but rather citizens with wallets and many others who were not workers either. At that time I had tried to speak about Goethe's “Faust” in the way one must speak. There were also people who said afterwards: Yes, Goethe's “Faust”, you can't really have that in the theater in the evening; that's not a play the way Blumenthal makes plays; that's a science; you don't want that in the evening, such a science. And when one remembers the viewpoints from which popular education is and has been practiced, especially in the last few decades, let us say, for example, by theater poets who made in popular understanding – but actually only for their pocket – then one only gets a historical idea of what is meant by popular understanding. And you realize that this demand for popular understanding is something that the working class still has to get rid of as a remnant of what it has inherited from the bourgeoisie, from this comfortable, sleepy bourgeoisie that does not want to think. For common comprehensibility is actually the demand to listen to something that does not require thinking. But we have come into this catastrophic time precisely because people do not want to think. And we will not get out of it until people decide to think.

Now, basically, what is called socialism today is the ultimate in abstraction. Isn't it true that we often hear people grumble about “-ists” and “-isms.” In addition to “idealism,” “spiritualism,” “realism,” “mechanism,” “idealists,” and “spiritualists,” in more recent times we have also been given: “Bolshevism” and “Bolshevists,” “Marxists” and “Marxism.” At least one concept can be associated with 'mechanism': 'mechanical'; 'spiritualists', 'spiritualism' can be associated with the concept 'spiritual'; 'idealism' still contains the word 'ideal'. But 'Bolshevism' and 'Bolshevists', 'Marxists', 'Marxism' — there is nothing at all left in the words. It is the “ism” of Marx, Marxists are those who want Marx. It is the bitterest irony, the ultimate in abstraction that one could ever have pushed; it is indeed something grotesque when one considers how far abstraction has come precisely in a movement that wants to be universally understood.

And now, in conclusion, something about what has been said about the two social laws, as I formulated them, the law of individualism and the law of socialism. I formulated one of these laws in connection with a book by Ludwig Stein. At the time, I had to discuss a book by Ludwig Stein, a thick book about the social question from a philosophical point of view. It was not easy to wind one's way through the web of Ludwig Stein's thoughts, this typical philosopher of the present day. It is the same Ludwig Stein who, because he had written so much, had to write so quickly that the following once happened to him: When he wanted to prove in a book that only people in the temperate zone of the earth can develop a culture, he said that it was quite natural that only people in the temperate zone can develop a real culture, because at the North Pole they would have to freeze to death and at the South Pole they would have to burn. Well, you see, that is the enunciation of a philosopher who taught at the Faculty of Philosophy in Bern for many years. And that philosopher enjoyed a certain reputation.

You see how grotesque such abstractness can become, that occurred to me once in Weimar. Another Bernese professor worked with us in the Goethe and Schiller Archive, and this other professor told the following story. We got into a conversation about the early works of Robert Saitschick. Saitschick really did produce some first works that were quite respectable; it was only later that he became such a “Kohler” as he is now. Robert Saitschick was a private lecturer at the University of Bern at the time, the Ludwig Stein Professor. Robert Saitschick was a poor fellow; and Ludwig Stein, in addition to being a professor at the University of Bern, owned a whole row of houses on Köpenickerstraße in Berlin. And that is why this Professor Ludwig Stein was also known in Berlin. For example, I couldn't get rid of him at all; when I was in Berlin from time to time, Stein also came, who then, after I had written this review, said to me: I would like to speak as their positive with my comparative again. - That was the constant joke he made. Well, Stein was a full professor in Bern, Saitschick a private lecturer, and the professor who told me – he was, by the way, a very honest, dear gentleman, but still very much caught up in university ideas – said: That Robert Saitschick, he's a completely unqualified guy, you can't talk about him at all. I said: He actually wrote some pretty nice books. “Yes,” said the professor, ”but just think what he did. He's a very poor fellow, and he asked his professor for a loan. The professor gave him the money, and when it took too long, he asked Saitschick to give the money back. And this is what he did: he said, “Professor, now that you have said that, I demand that you sign a document stating that you are a mean fellow.” And the professor signed this document! The professor told me that; I am only repeating what he told me: Well, you see, a private lecturer who forces his professor to issue him with such a document, that's a pretty mean guy. — That's just the university's view.

Yes, well, I had to review this book by Ludwig Stein, and I had to point out that the natural course of human development in social terms is that people first live in bonds, in associations, and then the individual works his way out of the associations to achieve individuality. Later, I tried to formulate the other law, the law of social life, from an independent point of view, and showed that the whole social constitution can only develop if the individual, in the economic context, does not live on what he himself but when he gives what he earns to the community and when he in turn receives from the community - how this happens is shown by the “key points”, and I have explained this in Zurich. Now, anyone who can see through social connections today knows - even if it looks different at first - that the one who makes a skirt for himself today does not actually produce it in reality. That he produces it – in a field where we have such an extensive division of labor today, that is only an illusion, because what he produces is consumed by himself. But this law of social life is absolutely valid. The situation is such that this law can only be consciously realized by those who break away from the associations and become individuals. These two things are perhaps in contradiction in the abstract; in reality they demand each other, they belong together. First the individuality must free itself from the associations, so that out of the individuality the social can be realized. That is the solution of the riddle in this case. And so various apparent contradictions would be resolved if one were willing to go into them.

Of course there would be an enormous amount to add to what has been said today; but time is so advanced and I believe that these threefolding evenings will continue, so that we may be able to talk about such things next time.

Roman Boos: Dear attendees, the question of how judgment is formed in the threefold social organism is to be addressed this evening. Dr. Steiner will give the introductory lecture. I would like to ask you now to take an active part in the discussion, and especially those of you who have something to say about the problems that will be presented today, to speak up then. I now ask Dr. Steiner to begin his lecture.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! I would like to introduce this evening's discussion with a few remarks about how a social judgment, on which a new social order must be built, can come about. I should say at the outset that it will not be easy to speak about this subject in a popular way. One should actually recognize the impossibility of speaking about this subject in a popular way from the facts that we now live in.

You see, our time is basically in many ways quite opposed to man forming a healthy social judgment. It is true that much is said today about man as a social being, about social conditions and social demands in general. But this talk about social demands is not really based on a deep understanding of what a social being actually is. We need not be surprised at this, because it is only in the present time that we are at the beginning of the time in which humanity is to mature to form a social judgment. In a sense, humanity has not needed to form a social judgment until now. Why? Of course, human beings have always lived in some kind of social circumstances, but basically they have not – not until now – organized these social circumstances out of their social consciousness, out of a real understanding. They have, if I may say so, received them in an ordered way through a kind of instinctive activity. Up to the present form of the state, which, in Europe, is basically no more than three or four hundred years old, people have formed connections more out of their instincts, and it has not actually come to grouping people out of judgment, consideration and understanding. Out of this understanding, out of a truly clear judgment, the threefold social organism wants to tackle the social question. In doing so, it is basically doing something that is still quite unfamiliar to people and that is highly uncomfortable for the vast majority of people today.

What has actually happened? The earlier social associations and the present state association have developed from human instincts, and people today simply accept this association, which is still combined with all sorts of national instincts. They grow into this association. Instinctively, they grow into this association and avoid thinking about it – or at least they avoid thinking about it to a certain extent. At most, one thinks about the extent to which one wants to have a say in the affairs of the state, but the framework of the state is accepted. They accept it, even the most radical wing of the socialists; Lenin and Trotsky also accept the state, the state that is put together out of all sorts of things, but instinctively, the state that was ultimately worked on by the old tsars. They accept it and at most wonder how they should shape what they want within this state. The question of whether the state should be left as it is or whether a different structure should be adopted that is based on understanding is not even raised. But you see, this question – how can the instinctive nature of the old social life be transformed into a social life that is born out of the human soul? – is the main question underlying the impulse for the threefold social organism. This question cannot be resolved in any other way than by the emergence of a more thorough knowledge of the human being, more thorough than the knowledge of the human being that has existed in recent centuries and that exists in the present.

One can say that the impulse for the threefold social order arose directly from the question: How should man come to a judgment about how he should live together with other people? It arose from a correct observation of what man must demand in the present. But most people do not seriously want to respond to the demands of the present. They would prefer to take the existing situation and make more or less radical improvements here and there. For example, it is probably easier to talk to an Englishman about anything but the threefold social order, since he usually takes it for granted that the unified state of England is an ideal that must not be challenged. Wherever you touch on the subject, you notice this prejudice. But this is nothing more than the persistence of the old human instincts in relation to social coexistence, and we must get beyond them. We must come to a conscious coexistence. This is highly inconvenient for people today, because they do not really want to come to a judgment out of an inner activity, out of an inner activity. They would basically like, as I said, to have a say in what is already there, but they do not really want to think thoroughly about how to deal with what is there and how to rectify what has been led into the absurd by the last catastrophes. This absolutely new aspect of threefolding is something that people basically do not want to see. They are not willing to make the effort of forming a social judgment.

You see, the question: how does a social judgment come about? - immediately breaks down into three separate questions when approached in the right spiritual-scientific way. And the sources from which the threefold social organism flows are actually based on this, that the question of how to form a social judgment is immediately divided into three separate questions. It is impossible to arrive at a judgment in the same way in the common spiritual life, in the social spiritual life, as in the legal or state life or in the economic life. Recently an essay appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt entitled 'Political Scholasticism'. In it, a very clever gentleman – journalists are usually clever – makes fun of the fact that in contemporary public life, people strive to separate the political from the economic. He would, of course, also make fun of it and call it a scholastic hair-splitting if one wanted to separate public life into the three parts, the spiritual part, the legal or state part and the economic part, because he has a very special reason, a reason that is so very easy for the man of the present time to understand. He says: Yes, in real life the economic, political and intellectual life is nowhere separated; they flow into each other everywhere, so it is scholastic to separate them. Now, my esteemed audience, I think one could also say that one should not perceive the head and the trunk and the limbs of a person separately, because in real life they belong together. Of course, the three limbs of the social organism also belong together, but one cannot get by if one confuses the one with the other – just as little as nature would get by if it grew a foot or a hand on the shoulders instead of a head, if it were to shape the head into a hand. It is a particular characteristic of these clever people of the present day that they have taken the greatest happiness with the most stupid of our time, because the most stupid today appears to be the most intellectually clever of the great multitude.

What matters is that at the moment when humanity is no longer to enter public life instinctively, but more consciously than before, the whole way in which man stands in the spiritual life of culture, how he stands in the life of law and the state, how he stands in the life of economics, is different. It is just as different as the blood circulation is different in the head, in the feet or in the legs, and different in the heart - and yet the three work together in just the right way when they are organized separately in the right way.

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And we too, as human beings, have to form our social judgment in various ways in the field of intellectual life, in the field of legal or state life, and in the field of economic life. But we have to find ways to arrive at a truly sound judgment in the three fields. In general, this path - basically there are three paths - is really quite heavily obstructed by the prejudices of the time. Many obstacles must first be removed from the way.

In order to arrive at a sound social judgment in spiritual life, it must be clear that today's man is utterly incapable of even posing the question: What does social mean in spiritual life? What does human coexistence mean in spiritual terms? We still do not have a knowledge of man that, I would not even say, provides answers to such questions, but I would just say that it encourages such questions. This knowledge of man must first be created by spiritual science and made popular among mankind. One must raise the question properly and reasonably: What difference does it make whether I am facing a human being or whether I, as a lonely observer of nature, have only nature facing me, thus gaining knowledge of this nature by directly facing nature as an observer? I enter into a certain reciprocal relationship with nature; I allow nature to make impressions on me; I process these impressions, form inner images about these impressions by entering into a reciprocal relationship with nature; I take something in from outside, process it inwardly. That is basically the simple fact. It looks the same on the outside when I listen to a person, that is, enter into a spiritual relationship with him, find in his words the meaning that he puts into them. The words of the person make an impression on me; I process them inwardly into ideas. I enter into interaction with other people. One might think that whether I interact with nature or with other people is basically the same. But it is not. Anyone who claims that it is the same has not even looked at the matter in the right way. You have to pay attention to these things.

You see, I would now like to give a specific example. There is a fact in German intellectual life without which this German intellectual life is inconceivable. When one describes the intellectual life of a certain area, then one usually describes – depending on what one has reason to do – either the economic conditions of the time when this intellectual life developed, or one describes individual great personalities who, through their ingenious achievements, have fertilized this intellectual life. But now I want to mention a fact of a quite different nature, without which the special character of German intellectual life in the 19th century is inconceivable. I would like to speak of an archetypal phenomenon of social intellectual coexistence: the ten-year intimate relationship between Goethe and Schiller. One cannot say that Goethe gave Schiller something or that Schiller gave Goethe something and that they worked together. That does not capture the fact that I mean, but it is something else. Schiller became something through Goethe that he would never have become alone. Goethe became something through Schiller that he would never have become alone. And if you only have Goethe and only have Schiller and think about their effect on the German people, you do not get what actually happened. Because if you only have Goethe or only have Schiller and consider the effects that emanate from emanating from both, there is not yet what has become, but a third, quite invisible, but of tremendously strong effect, arises from the confluence of the two (It is drawn on the blackboard). You see, that is an archetypal phenomenon of social interaction in the spiritual realm.

What is the actual basis for this? Today's rough science does not study such things, because today's science does not penetrate to the human being at all. Spiritual science will study such things and only through this will it bring light into the social and spiritual life of people. Those of you who have heard something about spiritual science know what I am only briefly hinting at now. Spiritual science shows that the development of the human being is a real, actual fact. It shows that as a person develops, he becomes ever more mature and original, ever bringing forth different and different things from the depths of his being. And if social life suppresses this bringing forth, then that social life is wrong and must be brought into line.

Now, Goethe and Schiller were both individuals and personalities who were socially blessed in the highest sense. When did it happen that one can say that Schiller understood Goethe best, and that Goethe understood Schiller best? They were able to converse with each other best, to exchange their ideas best, and to achieve something together, this invisible something, which in turn had an effect and is one of the most significant facts in German intellectual life. I have tried very hard to determine the year of the most intimate period of their lives together, the time when the ideas of one, I would say, most thoroughly penetrated the ideas of the other. I think it was around 1795 or 1796 (written on the board). 1796, there is really something very special about this collaboration between Goethe and Schiller.

If one now investigates why Schiller of all people understood Goethe best in this year and why Goethe allowed himself to be understood best by Schiller in this year, one comes to this. Schiller was born in 1759; so he was thirty-seven years old in 1796. Goethe was ten years older; so he was forty-seven years old. Now spiritual science shows us that there are various life junctions in human life; they are not usually taken into account today: the change of teeth - the human being becomes something else by surviving the change of teeth, also in the spiritual-soul relationship -, sexual maturity, later transitions - these are less noticeable, but they are still there in the 28th year, again in the 35th and in the 42nd year. If one is really able to observe this inner human life, then one knows that the beginning of the 40s, I would say on average the 42nd year, when the human being develops inwardly, when he undergoes an inner spiritual life, this 42nd year is something very special. Between the 35th year and the 42nd year, what can be called the consciousness soul matures in the human being. And it has become fully mature, this judging consciousness soul, this conscious soul that enters into a relationship with the world entirely from the ego – this consciousness soul becomes mature at that point. Schiller at 37 was five years younger than 42, Goethe at 47 was five years older than 42. Goethe had passed the 42nd year just as much as Schiller was below it.

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Schiller was at the same stage in the development of the consciousness soul, Goethe was beyond it; they were at the same distance from it. What does that mean? In relation to the soul, it means a similar contrast. I know that such comparisons are daring, but our language is also coarse, and therefore one can only use daring comparisons when one has important, fundamental facts to cite. For the soul-spiritual, it means a similar contrast as the male and female for the physical-sexual. In relation to physical development, the sexualities are unevenly developed. Out of courtesy to the ladies, and in order not to make the gentlemen arrogant, I will not say which sexuality is a later development and which sexuality is an earlier development, but they are of a different temporal development. It is not the whole human being, the head does not take part in it, so those whose sexuality must be thought of in an earlier stage of development need not feel offended. But it is not so in relation to the soul; there the earlier can come together with the later, then a very special fertilization arises. Then something arises that can only arise through this different kind of combination at different times. This is, of course, a special case; here, in social life, the interplay of soul to soul is formed in a special way. Whenever people influence each other, something arises that can never arise from the mere interaction of human beings and nature. You see, you get a certain idea of what it actually means to let something that comes not from nature but from another human being take effect on you.

This became a very particular problem for me when I immersed myself in Nietzsche, for example. Nietzsche had something that a whole range of people with a similar background to Nietzsche's now also have; it's just that he had it in a particularly radical sense. For example, he looked at philosophers, the ancient Greek philosophers, he looked at Schopenhauer, he looked at Eduard von Hartmann and so on. It can be said that Nietzsche was never really interested in the content of a philosophy. The content of the philosophy, the content of the world view, was actually of no great importance to him; but he was interested in the person. What Thales was thinking as the content of his world view is of no importance to him, but how this person Thales lives his way to his concepts is what interests him. This is what interests him about Heraclitus, not the content of Heraclitus' philosophy. It is precisely that which comes from a human being that has an effect on him, and in this way Nietzsche shows himself to be an especially modern character. But this will become the general constitution of the human soul life. Today people still argue about opinions in many ways. They will have to stop arguing about opinions for the simple reason that everyone must have their own opinion. Just as if you have a tree and photograph it from different sides, it is still the same tree, but the photographs look quite different; so everyone can have their own opinion, depending on - it just depends on the point of view they take. If he is reasonable in today's sense, he no longer argues about opinions, but at most finds some opinions healthy and some unhealthy. He no longer argues about opinions. It would be the same as if someone looked at different photographs and then said: Yes, they are quite different, these are right and those are wrong. At most, one can be interested in how someone arrives at their opinion: whether it is particularly clever or foolish, whether it is low and bears no fruit or whether it is high and beneficial for humanity.

Today it is a matter of really clarifying how people relate to each other in their spiritual and social coexistence, and how one person has something to give to another. This is particularly evident when we see what a growing child must receive from the other person who is his or her teacher. There are quite different forces at work than between Goethe and Schiller, even if they are not placed in such a lofty position, but there are more complicated forces at play. What I am developing here now provides a way to find the path to how one can rise to a truly social judgment in the realm of spiritual life.

You see, I said before that I cannot speak in a particularly popular way today, because if I want to discuss these questions from the point of view of an as yet unknown human science, at least in wider circles, I have to start from that point of view. In my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (The Riddle of the Soul) I have pointed out how the human being is a threefold being: he is a head human being or nervous-sensory human being, a rhythmic human being, and a metabolic human being. The nerve-sense human being encompasses everything that is the senses and what the organs of the head are. The rhythmic human being, the trunk human being, could also be said to encompass what is rhythmic in the human being, what is the movement of the heart, the movement of the lungs, and so on. The third, the metabolic human being, encompasses everything else.

These three aspects are found in human nature; in a sense they are fundamentally different from each other, but it is difficult to pinpoint their actual differences. In the case of the rhythmic person, the following can be emphasized. You will hear more about the rhythmic in the human being later on this evening when Dr. Boos speaks about the formation of social judgment in legal or state life, which will then make up the second part of the introduction. Dr. Boos will speak about what is particularly close to him, about the formation of social judgment in the second link of the social organism, in legal and state life. But now I would like to emphasize the following: the rhythmic activity in man is particularly evident when we consider how man breathes in the outer air, processes it within himself, how he breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbonic acid. Inhalation – exhalation, inhalation – exhalation: this is one of the rhythms that are active in man. It is a relatively easy process to understand: inhalation – exhalation = rhythmic activity.

The other two activities can perhaps only be understood by starting from this rhythmic activity. In a sense, the whole human being is actually predisposed to rhythmic activity. But with ordinary science, we do not recognize the nervous sensory activity, the actual main activity, at all. It cannot be compared with the activity of the lungs and the heart, with rhythmic activity. I can only mention something that may seem paradoxical to those who are less familiar with spiritual science, with anthroposophy, but which will be confirmed by a real science. In the future, what I am saying now will be known to the world as a completely exact scientific fact when the necessary conditions are understood. During inhalation and exhalation, there is a certain equilibrium. This equilibrium that exists could be depicted as a pendulum that goes back and forth. It goes up just as high on one side as on the other. It swings back and forth. There is also an equilibrium between inhalation and exhalation, inhalation and exhalation and so on.

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If a person did not live together with other people in a spiritual and soulful way, if a person were lonely and could only observe nature, that is, could only enter into an interrelationship with nature, look at nature and inwardly process it into images, then something very special would happen to that person. As I said, today this seems highly paradoxical to people, but it is nevertheless the case: his head would become too light. By observing nature, we are, after all, engaged in an activity. We are not doing nothing by observing nature; everything in us is engaged in a certain activity. This activity is, so to speak, a sucking activity at the head of man – not at the whole organism, but at the head of man, a sucking activity. And this sucking activity must be balanced, otherwise our head would become too light; we would become unconscious. It is compensated for by the fact that the head, which has become too light, undergoes a metabolism, blood nourishment, and all that is deposited in the head. And so, by observing nature, we continually have a lightening of the head and a subsequent heaviness due to the digestive activity going up into the head.

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This balancing must take place. It is a higher rhythmic activity. But this activity would become extremely one-sided if the human being were only in contact with nature. Man would indeed become too light in his head if he were only in contact with nature outside; he would not send enough balancing metabolic activity up into his head from within. He does this to a sufficient extent when he enters into a relationship with his fellow human beings.

That is why you feel a certain pleasure when you enter into a relationship with your fellow human beings, when you exchange thoughts or ideas with them, when they teach you or the like. It is one thing to walk through nature alone and quite another to stand face to face with a person who expresses his ideas to you. When you are confronted with a person who expresses his ideas to you – you should just consider this carefully in self-observation – then you have a certain feeling of well-being. And he who can analyze this feeling of well-being will find a similarity between it and the feeling he has when he digests. It is a great similarity, only one feeling goes to the stomach, the other goes up to the head. You see, that is precisely the peculiarity of materialism: these subtle material processes in the human body remain closed to materialism. The fact that a hidden digestive activity takes place in the head precisely because one is sitting opposite a person with whom one is talking, with whom one is exchanging ideas, is something that people do not notice through today's crude science. Therefore, they cannot answer social questions, questions about the human context, even if they are quite trivial.

For the spiritual scientist, the anthroposophist, it is quite clear why the coffee sisters are so keen to sit together. They don't just sit together because they like coffee, but because they then digest themselves. The digestion goes to the head, and they feel that as a sense of well-being. And when coffee sister sits next to coffee sister, or even, I can't say coffee brother, but skat brother sits next to skat brother at the twilight drink, and so on, the same thing naturally takes place among men. I don't want to offend anyone, but when people sit together like that, yes, they feel the digestive activity going on behind their heads, and that means a certain sense of well-being. What happens there is really necessary for human life. It is really necessary, but it can be used for higher activity than just for the evening drink and for being a coffee nurse. Just as the blood must not stand still in the human being, so must what happens in the head not stand still. A stunted rhythm would occur in the nervous system if we did not have the right kind of spiritual connection with people outside. Our right humanity, that we become right people, depends on our coming into a reasonable connection with other people.

And so one can only form a social judgment when one realizes what is necessary for the human being – just as necessary as being born. When one realizes that the human being must come into a spiritual and soul connection with other human beings, only then can one form a correct social judgment about the way in which the spiritual element of the social organism must be formed. For then one knows that this social life is based on the fact that man must come into a right individual relationship with man, that no abstract state life must intervene there, that nothing must be organized from above, but that everything depends on the fact that the original original in the human being can approach the original in the other human being, that there is real, genuine freedom, direct freedom from individual to individual, be it in the social coexistence of the teacher with his students, be it in social coexistence in general. People wither away when school regulations or regulations about intellectual social life make it impossible for what is in one person to have a fertilizing effect on what is in another. A truly social judgment in the realm of spiritual life can only develop when that which elevates one person above themselves, when that which is more in one person than in another, can have an effect on the other person and when, in turn, that which is more in the other person than in oneself can have an effect on oneself. One can only understand the necessity of freedom in spiritual life when one realizes that this human coexistence can only develop in a spiritual and psychological way if what comes into existence with us through birth and what develops through our abilities can freely influence other people. Therefore, the spiritual element of the social organism must also be administered only within itself. The person who is active in the spiritual life must at the same time be in charge of the administration of the spiritual life. So: self-administration within this spiritual realm. You see, that is what is very special about this spiritual life, which arises from a true understanding of the human being.

Dr. Boos will then describe the legal life in more detail from the same point of view. The legal life proceeds as follows: when humanity, through the demands of the present, is increasingly moving towards a democratic state, so that the mature human being is confronted by another mature human being, we are not yet dealing with what works across from one person to another in the way I have described for the spiritual life, where the digestive activity shoots up into the head. In the sphere of right living, where one fully developed human being is confronted with another, no such changes take place as in the spiritual life, but only interactions between human being and human being. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect I will now omit this middle aspect and move on to economic life, to the third link in the social organism. This economic life is not really understood today in such a way that a real social judgment can be formed from this understanding. What, in fact, can be called economic life? You see, you can clearly define economic life when you think of it in terms of the social organism. If we take any kind of animal, we cannot say that it lives in a social community in the human sense, because the animal finds what it desires in nature itself. It takes what it needs to live from the external nature; what is initially outside in nature passes into the animal, the animal processes it and releases it again – another kind of interaction. You see: here we have something that, I would say, is organized into nature. Such an animal species, so to speak, only continues the life of nature within itself. Nothing is changed in nature. The animal takes in what is in nature for its nourishment – just as it is in nature. We can find a complete opposite to this, and this contrast is present in zoo animals, which receive everything they eat through human intervention. Here, human reason supplies the animal with nourishment, and the human organization first assesses what the animals then receive. As a result, the animals are actually completely torn out of nature. Domestic animals are also completely torn out of nature; they are, so to speak, so changed that they not only absorb natural food substances into their inner being, but that food prepared by human reason is grafted into them. Domestic animals become a means of expression of that which, so to speak, has been processed spiritually, but they themselves do nothing to it. Animals are either such that they take in what is in nature unchanged in their own activity, or, when humans feed them something, they cannot contribute anything to it; they do not help to prepare what is fed to them.

In the middle, between these two extremes, is human economic activity, insofar as it lives in the social organism, at most not when man is at the lower level of a hunting people, when he still takes what is in nature unchanged, if he enjoys it raw, which he actually no longer does today. But the moment human culture begins in this respect, man takes something that he has already prepared himself, where he changes nature. The animal does not do that, and if it is a domestic animal, something foreign is supplied to it. That is actually economic activity: what man does in communion with nature by supplying himself with changed nature. We can say that all economic activity of man actually lies between these two extremes: between what the animal, which is not yet a social being, takes unchanged from nature, and what the domestic animal takes in, which is now fed entirely in the stable, only with what humans prepare for it. And when man works, he is involved with his economic activity between his inner being and nature. And this economic life that we know in the social organism is actually only a systematic summary of what individuals do in the direction that I have characterized.

Let us compare the economic life in a social context with the spiritual life that we have just characterized. The spiritual life is based on the fact that the individual human being, so to speak, has too much. What people possess spiritually, they usually give away very gladly; they are generous in this way and gladly hand it over to others. In contrast to material possessions, people are not as generous in the same sense; they prefer to keep material possessions for themselves. But what they possess spiritually, they are very happy to give away; they are generous in this way. But this is based on a good universal law. Man can indeed go beyond himself in a spiritual sense; and in the way I have just described it, it is beneficial for the other person when man gives him something, even if he in turn does not accept anything from the other. That is to say, when a person enters social life in a spiritual way, I would say that, in his inner being, he has too much judgment, too many ideas; he is compelled to give, he must communicate with others.

In economic life, it is exactly the opposite. But one can only come to this conclusion if one starts from experience, not from some kind of theoretical science. In economic life, one cannot arrive at a judgment in the same way as in the life of the spirit, that is, from person to person. Rather, in economic life one can only come to a judgment when one stands as an individual human being or as a human being placed in some association in relation to another association. Therefore, the impulse for the threefold social order demands the associative: people must associate according to their occupations or according to producers, consumers and so on. In the economic sphere, the association will be confronted with the association. Let us compare this to the individual human being, who, for my sake, has a lot of spirit in his head; he can share this spirit with many people. One person may absorb it better, another worse, but he can communicate this spirit that he has to many people. So there is the possibility that a person can give what he has of spirit to many people. In economic life, it is exactly the other way around.

At first we have no idea about economic life at all. What I said to some of you yesterday is absolutely true: if you want to judge what is right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy in economic life, and you just want to deduce it from the inner being, then you you are just like that character in a Jean Paul novel who wakes up in the middle of the night in a dark room and thinks about what time it is, who wants to find out what time it is in the dark room where he can't see or hear anything. You can't work out what time it is by thinking about it. You can't come to an economic judgment through thinking or through inner development. You can't even come to an economic judgment when you are negotiating with another person. Goethe and Schiller were good at exchanging spiritual and psychological ideas. Two people together cannot come to an economic judgment. One can only come to an economic judgment when one is faced with a group of people who have had experiences, each in his own field, and when one then takes in as judgment what they, as an association, as a group, have worked out. Just as you have to look at your watch if you want to know what time it is, in order to arrive at an economic judgment, you have to take on board the experiences of an association. And one can hear very beautiful things about the duty of one person towards another, about the rights of one person towards another when they are face to face; but one cannot come to an economic judgment when only one person is confronted with another, but one can only come to an economic judgment if one understands what is laid down in associations, in groups of people, in mutual economic intercourse as economic experience. There, the exact opposite of how one lives together socially, spiritually and soulfully must be present. In the spiritual and soul realm, the individual human being must give to others what he develops within himself. In the economic sphere, the individual must absorb the experiences gained by the association. If I want to form an economic judgment, I can only do so if I have asked associations what experiences they have had with this or that article in production, in mutual dealings, and so on. And this is what it comes down to when forming a social judgment in the economic sphere: that such associations make up the economic body of the threefold social organism and that each individual belongs to such associations. In order to arrive at an economic judgment, from which one can in turn act, the economic experiences of the associations must be available. What we are meant to learn scientifically, cognitively, we must acquire in the free spiritual life through individual experiences. What is to inspire us in our economic will must be experienced by the individual through the experiences handed down to him by associations. Only by uniting with people who are economically active can we ourselves arrive at an economic will.

The formation of judgment in the spiritual-mental and economic spheres is radically different. And an economic life cannot flourish alongside a spiritual life if the two spheres receive orders from one and the same place, but only if the spiritual life is such that the individual can freely hand over to another what he has within it. And economic life can flourish only when the associations are such that the economic branches related to one another by production or consumption are united associatively, and thus the economic judgment, which again underlies the economic will, arises. Otherwise, it becomes a muddle, and we end up with the reactionary, liberal or social ideas of modern times, where we never realize how radically different human activities are in the spiritual, economic and, in the middle, legal or state spheres.

Basically, it is so difficult for people today to arrive at a sound judgment in this area because they have been led astray by the traditional creeds from seeing the real structure of the human being in body, soul and spirit. Man is said to be only a duality, only body and soul. As a result, everything is mixed up. Only when we divide the human being into spirit, soul and body, only when we know how the spirit is that which we bring into existence through birth, how the spirit is that which brings forth the potential for development within us, which we must bring into the social sphere, only then will we get an idea of how this spiritual part of the social organism must have a separate existence. When we know how everything that springs from the soul, which is intimately connected with our rhythmic life, is the product of human beings living together in circles of duty, work and love, then we can see what must be present in the democratic state as the legal organization of the threefold organism. And when we realize that we cannot arrive at an economic judgment and therefore cannot engage in economic activity without being integrated into a fabric of associations in the threefold social organism, then we come to see how only that which is a special kind of judgment in the economic field can lead to help in the future.

It is the task of the present to achieve a true understanding of the human being and, on the basis of this true understanding of the human being, to then arrive at an understanding of what today is striving for a true understanding. Man judges quite differently in the social life in the spiritual realm than in the legal realm, and it is quite different again than in the economic realm. Therefore, if these three very differently structured social contexts are to develop in a healthy way in the future, they must also be administered separately and then work together. Just as in the individual organism it is not possible to form anything other than the shape of a head where the head is to be, nor a hand or foot or heart or liver, so the spiritual organism must not be systematized in the same way as the economic organism or the legal organism. But precisely when they are properly organized in the right place, they work together to form a whole, just as the hand and foot and trunk and head of the human being work together to form a whole. The right unity arises precisely from the fact that each is properly organized in its own way.

As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, the idea presented to humanity in the form of the threefold social organism is truly not a frivolous one, but one that has been extracted from a real science. This science must, of course, first be fought for against all the scientific chaos that prevails today. But it is, I might say, not only a wall, it is a thick barrier of prejudices through which one must first fight, first fight with what must underlie the science of man, and then with what emerges from this true science of man as an impulse for a real social reconstruction. One can say: It makes one's heart bleed when one looks today into this chaos of social misconceptions that reigns everywhere, and at the social drowsiness. And one must say: It is indeed not possible for everyone to make a social new order out of what has been taken up by this European humanity as a prejudice from a mistaken science for three to four centuries. It is a terrible thing when people talk about a social order based on a science that can never justify a social judgment because it does not know man. That science, ladies and gentlemen, does not regard man as man, but only as the highest link in the animal series. It does not ask: What is man? - but: What are the animals? It only says: When the animals develop to the highest level, that is precisely the human being. One does not ask what the human being is, but the animals are there, and in the series of animals, the human being is added as the last one, without saying anything different about the human being than what is said about the animal being. Such a science will never create a social reconstruction.

What is so distressing is not that people today are not radical enough to say to themselves: We must first demand real knowledge, real science – but that they are more faithful today to external scientific authority than Catholics ever were in the past to papal authority. At that time, at least some still rebelled against this papal authority. Today, however, everything is subjugated to scientific authority, even radical socialists like Lunacharsky; when it comes to defending the old science against a renewal of science, he crawls under scientific authority because he cannot imagine that science itself needs to be transformed if we want to make progress. These things must be taken very seriously and they must be said. And no matter how many social clubs, liberal communities, development communities, women's mobs or women's clubs people join, nothing will come of it if the matter is not approached radically, if one does not start from the point where one can arrive at a real social judgment: And this is only a social human knowledge that can give what today's science cannot give. And only a real spiritual science can give a renewal of science.

That is what I wanted to say in introduction to this evening. I now ask Dr. Boos to speak about the second part of the social organism, about the life of rights.

Roman Boos speaks about “The formation of judgment in the legal aspect of the social organism.” After that, a discussion will take place.

Roman Boos: Perhaps someone still has a question to ask, or perhaps someone would like to add something? - That does not seem to be the case. I do not know if Dr. Steiner could be asked for a final word. It is very late and I do not know if there are any other questions that Dr. Steiner would like to address.

Rudolf Steiner: Taking into account the lateness of the hour, I would just like to add a few words, because a closing word is customary at a discussion. This evening's two topics, the demand for a social reorganization on the one hand and on the other hand the necessity to penetrate to the sources of spiritual science, because only there can the forces be found to do justice to the demands of the day, these two things must always be emphasized again in all seriousness from this point of view. This has often been said, but it cannot be said too often.

I began by saying today that people have grown instinctively into the present social orders, and in fact the materialists would also instinctively like to remain in them. They do not want to take into account that today is the time to move on to the activity of judgment, that is, to consciousness, and to create a new social world out of consciousness. But we must penetrate to this consciousness if we do not simply want to continue the disastrous policies of recent years, which have taken hold in such a terrible way and are now being continued within European civilizational life and its appendages. I have already pointed out here how a mind like Oswald Spengler's, which is, after all, ingenious on the one hand but sick on the other, can seriously attempt to prove scientifically that the Occident must have arrived at barbarism, at complete and utter decline, at the beginning of the third millennium. One gets the same pain that I spoke of at the end of my introductory words today when one sees how extraordinarily difficult it is to instill in the minds of the present the sense of the seriousness of the times, and how much more difficult it is to instill the sense of the necessity to carry out a real transformation with the knowledge of the present.

My dear audience, do not say that this knowledge of the present is only found in a few scholars or in some contemporary views of people. No, this knowledge is everywhere, only people do not admit it to themselves. What matters is not whether one holds this or that hypothesis, this or that scientific theory, but whether one's whole life of ideas and feelings is moving in a certain direction, which ultimately amounts to this scientific life of the present, which impoverishes and empties the human being. Of course, some people may not be concerned that it is the consequence of contemporary science that the earth originated from a nebula and will end up in some final state of heat in which all life will be destroyed. Perhaps there are even some who say: That may be, but I don't care. — But, my dear audience, that is not the point. Open any chemistry, any physiology, any zoology or any anthropology today, read five lines in it and take these five lines – it says something along those lines. Regardless of whether you open this or that and take this or that, you are in the direction that leads to these views. Of course, today it is convenient when you want to know something about this or that to resort to the usual things and not to think that even something like this needs a thorough transformation. Today it is convenient if you want to learn something about malachite, to go to the encyclopedia, take out the volume with “M”, open “Malachit” and read what is in there. If you accept it uncritically, regardless of what you otherwise think, and if you are not aware that you are living in a serious time of transformation, then you are asleep, then you are not prepared for what is necessary in today's world. Today it is a matter of not just becoming aware of the seriousness at some times when reflecting on the ultimate problems of world view, but today it is a matter of being aware every minute of the day that it is our duty to work on the transformation, because we live in a thoroughly serious time. And just in these days we are again experiencing the tragedy that the most important problems are unfolding, perhaps even more important than during the external years of war, and that people are trying to sleep as much as possible, not even participating with their consciousness in what is actually taking place.

To accept anthroposophy as a confession does not mean merely to advocate this or that in theory, to speak of etheric body and astral body, of reincarnation and karma. To accept anthroposophy means to be connected in one's feelings, with one's whole being, to that which is now taking place in the day and now in the great epoch as the impulse of a significant transformation. And when you look into the sleeping people today, your heart bleeds. Because today it depends on waking up. And again and again I would like to say, and I would like to conclude every discussion with it: try to get to the sources of spiritual knowledge, because with the water that comes from these sources, you splash yourself from a real source of consciousness. This knowledge touches one's own personality in such a way that one, I would say, takes it up from the deepest depths of one's earthly nature and into one's human inner being: wake up and fulfill your tasks in the face of the great demands of the time.

Roman Boos: It will be announced what will be discussed here a week from today. This concludes today's event.

Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz will give a lecture on “The Testament of Peter the Great”. After the discussion, Rudolf Steiner will give a concluding word.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear attendees! There would, of course, be an enormous amount to say in connection with the very stimulating remarks of Count Polzer and the various questions that have been raised by this or that in the discussion. However, due to the late hour, we will probably have to limit ourselves to a few points.

I would first like to point out that Count Polzer obviously wanted to emphasize the importance for European politics of the legacy of Peter the Great rather than the details of the effectiveness of this legacy of Peter the Great. And with regard to this, I would like to say that things like this legacy of Peter the Great can only be judged from the overall context of the events in which they somehow came about. It just so happens that in the years referred to by Count Polzer, in the 1870s, in the years following the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and then in the years of Count Taaffe's government in Austria, a great deal happened in Austria that was along the lines of the effect of Peter the Great's testament. One could single out various events from the abundance of these events, each would be just as good as the other to illustrate what one wants to say. I will only highlight a few events that seemingly have nothing to do with Peter the Great's testament at first, but in which this testament is definitely effective.

Let us take the end of the period to which Count Polzer has drawn particular attention: the period during which Austria had received the mandate from the Berlin Treaty to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. The occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina led to a very significant dispute within Austrian politics. As Count Polzer has already emphasized, there were fierce opponents of this shift of the center of gravity, which pushed Austria eastward, and there were supporters of this occupation, this shift of the center of gravity eastward, in Austria. Supporters were actually essentially those who, in some way, had very special reasons to make themselves servants of Habsburg domestic politics. One must just bear in mind that Habsburg domestic policy at that time had already sunk to such a point of decadence that it was basically a mere prestige policy even then. What had been in preparation for a century had indeed been fulfilled with the Austro-Prussian War, and the Habsburgs needed some kind of compensation for it. They therefore resorted to what was now offered to Austria. Now, however, we can fully consider everything that was basically contained in that point of Peter the Great's testament, which indicates how to bring more and more discord and quarrel to Austria by seemingly giving it something. The occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was a real bone of contention, and it was only saved because the so-called Bosnian Left split off from the so-called German Left in the Austrian Reichsrat, which was still a factor at the time.

You see, the leader of the German Left Party in the Austrian Reichsrat was the deputy Herbst. Herbst's policy developed out of the policy after 1866; it was a policy that was welded together out of a certain aspiration to give Austria a kind of German character, but at the same time to give it a kind of abstract liberal character. This policy resisted the occupation of Bosnia, particularly in the person of Deputy Herbst, because the Herbst people said to themselves: If Austria gets any more Slavs – and it was an addition of Slavs that they got there with Bosnia and Herzegovina, except for the Turkish element, which was also found there. If Austria gets more Slavs, it will be all the less possible for the German element to be given special priority in Austria in the future. Well, this fall was indeed an epigrammatic rebuff by Bismarck. Bismarck was determined to create some kind of confusion in Austria, to make Austria shift its center of gravity to the east, so that no more aspirations could arise on the part of the Habsburgs against the aspirations of the Hohenzollerns. For a large part of 19th-century Central European politics, especially in the mid-19th century and the second half, was actually a dispute between the two dynasties, the Habsburg and the Hohenzollern dynasties. Bismarck, who wanted to expand the Hohenzollern power base, wanted to push Austria towards the Slavs, towards the East, and so it suited him very little that these Herbst people in Austria were working against him. Bismarck then also coined a witty epigram, as was his way, which was one of those epigrams of political life that killed the one they hit. He called the Herbstleute the “Herbstzeitlosen” (autumn daffodils), maintaining that the time simply demanded that Austria's center of gravity be shifted eastward, out of Austria, and that anyone who did not know how to adapt to this temporal imperative was an “Herbstzeitlose,” because the leader of this Austrian German liberal party was Herbst. Well, the whole thing was saved by the fact that at that time the younger Plener, while he was previously fully immersed in the party of the Herbst people, emerged with a certain following, which could form a majority in the Austrian Reichsrat for the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Plener formed the Bosnian Left at that time.

Ernst von Plener is precisely the kind of person that Count Polzer wanted to talk about today. Plener was a speaker in the Austrian parliament who was very much in the style of the liberalist average speaker, a man who spoke in the Austrian Reichsrat in such a way that he would have put forward what he put forward much more correctly in England. Plener had been attaché at the Austrian Embassy in London for many years and had become very familiar with what is called English parliamentarism. This English parliamentarism, which had grown out of the English element and fitted it very well, was now more or less successfully transferred to the whole of Europe, and it is one of those factors that prove how much the Western impulses gradually gained influence over Europe. I would like to say: when Plener spoke in the Viennese Parliament, he was actually speaking as a politician who had been thoroughly trained in the English political mold. Of course, for Austria, to which it did not fit at all, this had something extraordinarily abstract. One has only to consider what was thrown together in this Austria from the most diverse nationalities, but held together by the clericalism of the Habsburg power base. The English stereotype of opinion with its pendulum system of left and right actually fitted into this like a completely abstract element. And for someone as abstract as Plener, it was never a matter of thinking from the perspective of the specific effective forces, but he could always do otherwise. And Herbst, who was stubborn and bullish in certain respects, stuck to his German liberal point of view. On the other hand, Plener, who was a kind of man of the world – I can still see him before me today: he never came to parliament in anything but light-colored trousers, which were always turned up at the bottom, and with a kind of beard that was halfway between a mutton-chop and a diplomatic goatee – Plener could always do otherwise. He formed the Bosnian Left in order to do a service to Emperor Franz Joseph and the Habsburg power base that could be honored later. I must say that there always seemed to me to be a certain connection between two events: the formation of the Bosnian Left in the Austrian parliament by Ernst von Plener on the occasion of the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a later event that seems insignificant but must be considered symptomatic. Plener then became finance minister for a short time when the Taaffe Ministry was replaced by the coalition Windischgrätz Ministry; he had always striven for this. But the glory did not last long. Then something happened that actually always indicates that underground forces are at play. Plener became president of the Supreme Audit Office and then, oddly enough, withdrew from politics when he had become president, despite always having played a prominent role in his party. And when he was interviewed about why he had withdrawn, he replied: “This is something that concerns only me and my emperor, it is a secret I will not discuss.”

I have always seen a certain connection between the events that took place during the formation of the Bosnian Left in the 1970s and this event, which did not take place until the 1990s. Let us now take a look at the situation after the Bosnian occupation. In Austria, the second Taaffe Ministry was formed after the last phases of the system of concessionary governments, which had come about precisely because of the attempt, after the Austro-Prussian War, to see whether one could manage with the German element in Austria or not. This was attempted with the so-called Ministry of the Bourgeoisie from 1867 to 1870, first with Prince Carlos Auersperg, then came the episode under Potocki and Hohenwart, where the Slav element asserted itself. But then, from 1871 until the end of the 1870s, there was the ministry under Adolf Prince Auersperg, which was again a kind of bourgeois ministry, and which, as I said, formed the last phase of what was attempted there. Then came the Taaffe Ministry. Let us take a look at this ministry. It managed the affairs of government in Austria for more than a decade, one might say, in the 1880s, and there, I would say, everything that is a compendium of European politics took place. Taaffe is Prime Minister; he remains at the head of the ministry despite being quite an incompetent head. He mainly stays in the ministry because he is particularly good at projecting rabbits on the wall with his handkerchief and fingers during the evening entertainment at court. The ladies at court liked it so much when Count Taaffe made rabbits and other similar tricks, and that is how he stayed in the Austrian government for so long. Now one can say that in the 1880s, Germanism was pushed back in Austria. The countries on this side of the Leitha – yes, this area didn't really have a name. This area, what was on this side of the Leitha, was called “the Kingdoms and Lands represented in the Reichsrat”, and the lands over there, on the other side of the Leitha, at least had a more comprehensive name, they were called “the lands of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen.” The lands on this side of the Leitha, that is, “the Kingdoms and Lands represented in the Reichsrat,” were ruled at that time by the ministry headed by Taaffe. Certain humor magazines wrote about Taaffe in a very strange way: Ta - affe (it is written on the blackboard).

Now, it was also difficult to find a common name for these countries, because what did this area of “the kingdoms and countries represented in the Reichsrat” include? First there was Bukowina, then the adjoining Kingdom of Galicia with Ruthenia and Lemberg as its capital; Krakow would be there (drawn on the board). This Galicia was mainly inhabited by the Polish element (shaded, left), but here it was inhabited by the Ruthenian element (shaded, right) – the Ruthenians a kind of Slav, the Poles a kind of Slav. Further on was the Silesian area, the Moravian area and the Bohemian area – Slavs and Germans thrown together everywhere. Then comes Lower and Upper Austria, Salzburg, Vorarlberg, Tyrol, Styria down to Brunn – mostly German; then South Slav, Slovenian near Carinthia and Carniola; down here Istria and Dalmatia. Over here, on the other side of the Leitha, were the lands of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen: here Hungary with Transylvania, then Croatia with Slavonia. We would have to look for the Leitha somewhere around here; everything that was over here, all these motley groups of people, they formed the “kingdoms and countries represented in the imperial council”.

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Now, what was the representation of the “kingdoms and countries represented in the Reichsrat” in Vienna like? It was, in fact, remarkable enough. You see, if you looked at the ministerial bench: in the middle sat the rabbit manufacturer Taaffe, with his receding forehead, at his side on the right Dunajewski, the finance minister, a Pole, then there was a striking personality, Minister Prazäk, a Czech, then Smolka, another Pole, one of those Poles who were once beheaded in effigy in Austria because they were traitors, but who had then risen [politically] again. One can say: when these personalities were spoken of, it was, in a sense, extremely interesting.

On the first bench of the left - let's say, for example, that it would have been a budget debate - sat a good German, Carneri; you know the figure of Carneri from my book “The Riddle of Man”. He began the debate in a Central European sense; he hurled the most terrible accusations at this Taaffe ministry. One of his most effective speeches ended with the words – it was perhaps in 1883 –: Poor Austria! – Then a little further away sat Herbst, Plener and so on. But all the speakers in Austria spoke as people of a perished trend spoke. What Carneri spoke, for example, was beautiful, spirited, great, but it was not something that could live. But something else lived in Austria in those days; something really lived in Austria when, for example, the Polish deputy Otto Hausner spoke. In Austria it didn't matter if a member of parliament had a German name; because if, for example, your name was Grégr and you were a young Czech liberal member of parliament, then you had a name with a catch, because before you became Czech you were called Gröger; such metamorphoses happen. When Otto Hausner spoke, he emphasized at the same time that he was speaking from the Polish element, and he did so, although he emphasized that he had Rhaetian-Alemannic blood in his veins - although I don't know what Rhaetian-Alemannic blood is. He was not a person I liked. I still vividly remember: when you walked down Vienna's Herrengasse and old Hausner came along, this old dandy with his monocle, who still cleaned himself, even though he wasn't really a cute-looking old man; he wasn't exactly a particularly likeable personality. It must be said that when Hausner spoke during these crucial years, he spoke in such a way that world history rolled through him. And I would like to say that when Otto Hausner spoke, one could hear the words of Peter the Great's testament rolling. One could hear them roll when he spoke of the fact that the people of Austria should not allow themselves to be duped by Berlin, by Bismarck, that they should not accept the Berlin Treaty. Time was speaking, the rolling time, when Otto Hausner spoke about the Arlberg railway, how he saw it as a strategic railway to make an alliance between Austria and France possible against German politics. And one would like to say that in the speeches of Otto Hausner from that time there was something prophetic that foretold everything that would come later. In particular, however, one of Hausner's speeches was effective: on “Germanness and the German Reich”, in which he rhetorically gave a wonderful characterization of all the dark sides, especially the dark sides of Germanness and the German character, never the light sides. Everything in Central Europe that was actually working towards its downfall, this Polish deputy, Otto Hausner, knew how to explain in a wonderful way in his speech at the time. Apart from him, there was another strange character who often spoke, his name was Dzieduszycki. It was extraordinarily strange, because when he spoke, one had the feeling that he had not just one, but two lumps in his throat, running after each other and back again. But still, when he spoke, world history rolled through what he said. It was world history that spoke – and so did many of those sitting there. And yet, when these people spoke only from their personalities, it was not world history at all.

At the time when the school law in Austria, which had already been ruined by the liberals, was to be completely ruined, how did the majority come about? I will tell you a great secret: despite Austrian politics, Austria actually had the best grammar schools until the 1970s; and it was only with great difficulty that the later Minister of Education, Gautsch, managed to destroy these grammar schools, which were good from a certain point of view. And do you know who was to blame for the fact that these good grammar schools in Austria - good for the time - had been founded? It was the arch-clerical Leo Graf Thun who introduced these grammar schools in Austria. It was just the case in Austria that, strangely enough, objectivity sometimes interacted with very bullish politics. This Leo Count Thun, who was a cleric and was completely black in many respects, he brought about a brilliant school system in Austria, but it was then dismantled by the liberals, and what the liberals left behind was to be ruined even more later on. How did the majority in the Reichsrat develop in these matters? Yes, these majorities came about in a strange way. There were the Ruthenians, and there were the Poles. If one wanted to push through certain things that were easier to implement with the Poles, then one formed a ministry consisting of Germans and Poles. And if one wanted to push through something else, then one excluded the Poles and formed a majority of Germans and Ruthenians. The Ruthenians and the Poles, who then fought each other terribly, were used to tip the scales. And depending on what was thrown into the scales in the end, the opposite result was achieved. Now, at that time, when the school law was to be completely destroyed, the Poles were the tip of the scales; something was to be negotiated between the clergy and the Poles. If the clergy went along with the Poles, it was said, then the school law could be destroyed. But the Poles were intelligent enough to object that this could not be done to Galicia, to impose such a [new] school law on their country. And so they resorted to a way out and said: Yes, we will go together with you, we will eliminate the [old] school law, only Galicia will be excepted. The strange thing about this was that a Slav element was used as a cover, but this Slav element excluded itself from what it clearly admitted it wanted to exclude from its own country. Such were the special circumstances in Austria at that time.

There was also the characteristic figure of the old Czech Rieger. While the Germans ruled in a liberal, formalistic and abstract way, the Czechs did not come to the Viennese parliament; they absented themselves. Count Taaffe had now earned the great external merit of bringing the Czech Club back into the parliament. So now Rieger was also among these Viennese parliamentarians: an extraordinarily characteristic figure full of inner fire, a somewhat shaky little figure, but with a powerful head, with eyes from which one believed that not just one devil, but several devils, spitting fire, would come out at the end. There was indeed something extraordinarily lively in him.

You see, that was the situation. You could say that you knew there was an element that you couldn't grasp, but it was clear to see that this peculiar configuration in Austria was really the result of Peter the Great's legacy. When you had these concrete circumstances in front of you, you knew that something like that existed. In fact, one knew exactly why, for example, Count Andrássy's policy – who, despite being Hungarian, was Austrian Foreign Minister for a while – was difficult to implement: because people could not imagine that Austria should shift its center of gravity to the east, to the Slavic countries. One could see that the Slavic element was asserting itself, but one could not say anything other than: Yes, what will actually come of it all? What will come of it? What is it, the whole? And you could actually see the Slavic element at work, especially under this Taaffe, the incompetent Taaffe – he did have some very capable Slavic minds among his ministers, such as Dunajewski, the Polish finance minister, or Prazák. But it was through the Slavic element that confusion reigned; capable minds, quite excellent minds in some cases, but confusion reigned throughout. And it was even more the case when combined with the German element.

Now, please, imagine this together with something else, imagine that Peter the Great is the person who goes to the West, to the Hague, in his youth, and comes back to St. Petersburg from the West, that he is the person who strives to introduce Western ways into Russia against the efforts of many who believed they were truly Russian, Orthodox Russian people. Try to realize what the relationship is in this story between what it means to be Russian and what Peter the Great brought into Russia. What he brought in, Peter the Great, was not something that would only have an effect in the short or even medium term; it was something that provided an impulse that extended over the centuries. One could say that one knows what Slavdom rooted in Russia wants, one knows how it interacts with differentiated Slavdom, but there is still something in it that was brought from the West by Peter the Great. Now, Peter the Great did not write anything down, but he did pursue a certain course in his government activities; what he did is oriented in a certain direction, in a certain style. And so that which comes from Slavdom alone rolls along in parallel and interweaves with the other, which was brought from the West through Peter the Great, who had become powerful in soul there. Now imagine yourself in any period after Peter the Great and look at European politics – can you not say: Yes, in what continues to have an effect from Peter the Great, there are concrete factors in it that have an effect? – Anyone who has seen things like the ones I have described to you now knows that they are there.

Now along comes a Sokolnicki, and he meditates on the conditions under which he lived. There, in the depths of his soul, he turns to what is called the “Testament of Peter the Great”. He asks himself: What forces lie in what Peter the Great started? What will happen if this comes to pass? What would it be like to write down the unwritten testament of Peter the Great, to think it written down from what partly results from inspiration, partly from state papers and the like? - Do you have to ask how the person dipped the pen in the ink or what ink he used or how he held the pen when you ask about the origin of a document? It is not so in world history.

I have often related a small matter that happened to me. I have tried to show how Goethe's essay On Nature, the Hymn to Nature, came into being. I proved that Goethe went for a walk along the Ilm with a Swiss man named Tobler and spoke this essay to himself. Tobler had such an excellent memory that he went home afterwards and wrote down what he had heard from Goethe and had it published in the Tiefurter Journal, which was just found at the time I was in Weimar. In the 7th volume of the Goethe-Jahrbücher, I have now tried to prove, for internal and intellectual reasons, that this essay in the Tiefurter Journal was by Goethe, despite the fact that this essay “Die Natur” is printed in the Journal as literally as possible according to Dobler's manuscript.

The point is that one cannot get along historically if one asks about the origin of the most important things in a, I would say prosaically philistine, literal, philological way. Certainly, with regard to the writing, the testament is a forgery - but it is a true reality. And we have the real origin of the Testament, precisely that origin that Count Polzer tried to prove, when we say to ourselves: Sokolnicki, in a kind of meditation and inner contemplation, wrote this down in connection with what was there, with what happened. But he did not conjure it out of thin air or experience it through some kind of inner mysticism; rather, he saw it in the context of world events. And one could say: he wanted to achieve precisely what had been inaugurated by Peter the Great, what he had brought from the West, but what had not yet happened.

And now let us take a look at this Babylonian Tower of the Austrian Reichsrat under the Taaffe Ministry, as I have just described it. Let us see how the Slavic element is represented, how it is precisely the talented element, but can only bring confusion. And if you get to the bottom of it, you find in what is expressed there something like a continued effect of this testament of Peter the Great. So you can say: Yes, this testament of Peter the Great, it works as an historical force, but at the same time, if you look at the concrete facts, it works in such a way that it confuses. Now, add to this what I have often said on other occasions, namely, that the West inaugurated a later policy, of which I have said that it can be traced quite well back to the 1660s. This policy consists in the fact that it was sought to bring about in the East that which was then sufficiently fulfilled in all its details, and which then basically produced the world war catastrophe. Then one can say to oneself, if one is now able to think historically, inwardly historically: Yes, is not the whole thing with Peter the Great a wonderful prelude, a grandiose prelude to what came later? I would like to say that if some spirit had wanted to produce what came later in the 20th century, it could not have done better to cause the confusion that emanates from the East than by letting Peter the Great come to The Hague, where various things were concocted in relation to the interconnections of European politics, because there is a short way to the Anglo-American one. But Peter the Great then went back to St. Petersburg, and there he inaugurated what was to have a lasting effect as the “Testament of Peter the Great,” whereby one initiated in a wonderful way that which created the very conditions needed to bring about what happened later.

Of course, when one says something like this, it always sounds as if things were deliberately being dragged into paradoxes; but when one has to summarize something, one cannot avoid putting some things more sharply than others. But I wanted to show – if you wanted to describe it exactly, you would have to say some things differently – how Peter the Great's testament is actually a real historical force, even though, as Count Polzer said, it is a forgery and Peter the Great never wrote anything like this testament or the like. I have shown you how it has had an impact, as can be seen from the example of the kingdoms and countries represented in the Austrian Reichsrat. I have shown you how one can say that when one takes Hausner's speeches about civilization and reads all the speeches that were delivered by Prazák and others, one can feel, I would say feel the wind that comes from this Peter the Great. In all the speeches that were held for and against the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, you can feel how something had to be done in the struggles that took place at the time. One tried to bring meaning into Austrian politics: no meaning could be brought in because that which was supposed to take away the meaning was at work, that which was supposed to cause confusion in order to be able to bring about that which then came in the 19th century and later.

Unfortunately, there was not enough time to discuss these matters in as much detail as would be necessary to present them as evidence. However, it is clear that we can see the effects of Peter the Great's legacy and that it is essential to understand the impact of this legacy. For this testament – I am not saying this now with a moralizing nuance, but purely as a fact, without emotion – this testament of Peter the Great actually destroyed Austria, of course in addition to the inability of the Germans in Austria to understand this testament.

And therefore one can already say: Whoever really wants something promising must simply replace the testament of Peter the Great with another document. And for that it is necessary to seek out the forces that were just described by those theses to which Count Polzer has already referred. I do not want to go into this matter now. I just wanted to give a few brief indications of how one has to imagine how Peter the Great's testament is a reality that has drawn circles, and how these circles are also political-historical realities.

Ernst Uehli speaks as an introduction on the topic “The Artist in the Threefold Social Organism”. This is followed by a discussion in the course of which Paul Baumann asks Rudolf Steiner the question:

Paul Baumann: What is the relationship between the artist or his work and the social cell? Does he not also have to do preparatory work?

Rudolf Steiner: When it is a question of art and social life, I actually always have a certain unsatisfactory feeling in a discussion concerning these two things, for the simple reason that the whole way of thinking, of soul-attitude, comes into question when one speaks of social organization, of social structure, must be somewhat different than that which one must have when one speaks of art, of its proper emergence from human nature and its assertion in life, before human beings.

In a certain respect, the two areas are not really comparable. And precisely because they are not comparable — not because they are comparable but because they are not comparable — it seems to me that the whole position of art in relation to the artist and to humanity can be illuminated from the point of view of the threefold social organism. When speaking of art in the social organism, we should never forget that art belongs to the highest blossoms of human life and that everything is harmful to art that makes it impossible to count it among the highest blossoms of the development of human life. And so we must say: If it becomes possible for a threefold social organism to shape life in general in such a way that artists and art can emerge from this life, this will be a certain test for the correctness, and also for the inner justification, of the threefold social organism. But the question will not be posed in this way: How should one or other thing be organized in the threefold social organism in order to arrive at a right fostering of art or a right assertion of the artist? Above all, the question will be: How will people live in the threefold social organism? One could say that if the idea of the threefold social order were some kind of utopian idea, then one could of course say what one says about utopias: people will live happily – as happily as can be. Now the idea of the threefold social order does not start from such utopian conditions, but simply asks: What is the natural structure, the self-evident structure of the social organism? One could well imagine that some person might have the idea that man as such could be much more beautiful than he is, and that nature has not actually done everything to make man beautiful enough. Yes, but the way the world is, man had to become as he is. It may be, of course, that some Lenin or Trotsky says: the social organism must be so and so. But that is not the point. It matters just as little whether someone imagines a different nature of man than can arise from the whole of nature. What matters is what inner laws the social organism must have. And if we understand the threefold social organism from this thoroughly practical point of view, we can then also gain ideas about what will be possible in this threefold social organism. Above all, a certain economic utilization of time will be possible in the threefold social organism, without the need for compulsion at work or similar fine things that would thoroughly eradicate all freedom. It will simply be impossible, due to the way things work out in the three-tiered social organism, for as many people as now to loiter around uselessly. I know that these words “loitering around uselessly” may cause misunderstandings, because people will say: Yes, the actual loiterers, the actual life-dawdlers, are very few. But that is not the point. The point is whether those people who do a lot, do something that is absolutely necessary for life, whether they do something that is rationally and fruitfully integrated into life.

If you consider any branch of life today – I will immediately highlight the one that is most fragile in this life today – if you consider journalism, for example, and see how much human labor is required, from the typesetter to all the others who are involved in producing newspapers. Take all the work that is done there – the majority of this work is done by people who are drifting through life, because the majority of this work is actually unnecessary work. All this can be done more rationally without employing so many people. The point is not to have as many people as possible doing something so that they can live, but rather to carry out those activities that are necessary for the fruitful development of this life, this social cycle, in the sense of a truly social life cycle. All the chaotic developments that are taking place today with regard to the utilization of human labor power are connected with the fact that we do not really have a social organism, but rather a social chaos caused by the deification of the unitary state. I have often emphasized examples of this social chaos. Just imagine how many books are printed today, of which fewer than fifty copies are sold. Now, take such a book – how many people are involved in its production! They make a living, but they do unnecessary work. If they did something else, it would be wiser and countless other people would be relieved in a certain way. But as it is, countless typesetters and bookbinders are working, making piles of books – mostly lyric poems, but other things are also considered – piles of books are being produced; almost all of them have to be pulped again. But there are many unnecessary things like this in today's life; countless things are absolutely unnecessary.

What does that mean? Imagine for a moment that our human organism were not properly structured into a nervous-sensory system, which is localized in the head, and a rhythmic and appendage system, which interact in a regular manner and thus function economically. Just imagine if we were a unified being that goes haywire everywhere, that produces useless things at a rapid rate: the amount of useless things that humans produce today would not even be enough. We must bear that in mind. We must realize that it is essential that this social organism be structured, that it be designed in accordance with inner laws; then it will also be economical. Then human labor will be in the right place everywhere, and, above all, no useless work will be done.

What follows from this? People will have time. And then, my dear audience, the basis will be given for free activities such as art and similar things. Time is part of this. And out of time will come that which must be there for art, and art will then work together with something else, it will work together with the free spiritual life. The aim of this free spiritual life is to develop the talents together with the time present in the threefold social organism, not in the perverse way it is done today, but in a way that is in keeping with nature. When the free spiritual organism is truly separated from the other organisms, the number of unrecognized geniuses will decrease considerably, because there will be a much more natural development. There will be much less pursuit of idle dreams of some kind or other. So the development of talent will simply be placed on a more natural footing by the development of the free spiritual life. And something else is necessary if art is to develop: an artistic sense, an artistic need, a natural human desire and aspiration for art is necessary. All this must arise out of the threefold social organism as something that comes into being when there is organized social life together, not chaotic social life as there is today. You see, above all, in recent times we have come into the chaos of artistic feeling. The original artistic feeling, which wells up with elemental power out of human knowledge, has completely disappeared under modern education. It would come again if we developed in the sense of the threefold social order. And so one must now think of the whole thing that is emerging.

If we speak from the point of view of the threefold social organism, we must speak only as practitioners and not as theorists. We must not ask about principles, but about facts, and then we must say that what I have now indicated can come much more quickly than one might think. And what happens then? Then associations arise for the most diverse things - partly from intellectual life, partly from economic life. And one should not imagine what these associations will do somehow boxed in paragraphs and principles. In these associations, there will again be people who will be able to make judgments out of the full warmth of human feeling and experience. People will emerge from the associations who, through what they otherwise do in life, will achieve a certain validity in life that is not guaranteed to them by the state, that is not guaranteed to them by a title. Whether people are privy councillors, works councillors, medical officers or the like, they will derive their worth from the threefold social organism, not from these abstract things, but from what they do, from what lives continually. It is not paragraphs that will live, but what the people who rightly hold sway in the associations negotiate with each other; it will result in what is now present in caricature as so-called public opinion. One must only imagine very concretely what can come about through the living interaction of the associations.

Associations also include those that come from free spiritual life. Yes, here again something will be given to the life experience in a person, which can establish things as justified judgment. And if you just take that in its full concrete meaning, the following will emerge: the artist will really be able to achieve something materially for his work of art out of this public judgment, but what will come into its own out of the associations. Out of these conditions, something will really be able to develop that will make it possible for an artist, even if it takes him thirty years to create a work of art, to still be able to receive enough for this work of art to satisfy his needs for the thirty years it takes him to create a new work of art – which, in any case, might no longer be an option if he is already sixty or seventy years old. That will work out. It will actually work out – if one does takes the whole thing in a philistine manner – that the artist can be compensated for his work of art from within such a tripartite social organism in the sense of the economic cell. He cannot be compensated today for the reason that there are such unnatural prices. In fact, people today cannot pay the artist what he would actually have to demand if he only thought about himself for a moment. But today he thinks: I have managed to create some picture or other, and yes, if I only get enough to last me for the next three months, then I'll take it – of course I won't be able to finish a decent work in three months, but people don't understand that either – and I'll just pump it up again in three months.

Now, I would like to say that these things will only arise as the highest extract; therefore, one cannot really discuss these things well from the outset. I always find it a little awkward to discuss these things. It is true that, according to the Pythagorean theorem, the square above the hypotenuse is always equal to the squares of the two legs, but once you have this theorem, it is impossible to talk in advance about all the possible degrees of application. It is the same with the threefold social organism. It is not possible to specify what will now develop as the highest flowering of social life. That is why a discussion of these matters is actually awkward, because they are too disparate areas – social life and artistic life. But if we now take things in detail, we have to say: something like this building in Dornach had to be built, it had to arise out of a certain cultural and civilizing task of the present, out of the recognition of this task. And I would like to say: if there were even fewer people who have a thorough knowledge of what has actually been built and sculpted and painted here, it would still have to be built in some way. Of course, this building could only come into being because the material means were there, but it will only be possible to complete it if further material means are provided. These questions cannot be discussed by saying, “Yes, something must be done,” because, when talking about these things, “must” has a fundamentally quite different meaning. And so I think: above all, it should be quite clear that the freedom of human movement necessary to give art its proper foundation will be brought about by the threefold social organism. And only when natural foundations for social life are in place will each person be able to take proper root in that social life. Ultimately, it is really more about the thing than the words.

You see, I remember, for example, the 1880s. We had just passed through that period in the external bourgeois development of art when the theater was dominated by the comedies of a Paul Lindau, a Blumenthal, in other words, by those who put all manner of farcical, tragic or dramatic straws on the stage. We had the last phase, hadn't we, of conventional painting and so on. At that time, a book was published by a boundlessly narrow-minded person - a person of whom, when you saw him, you really couldn't say anything other than: he can only be narrow-minded. - And this book, what did it demand? It demanded nothing more urgently than, yes, than this art that we have had, this theater art, this sculpture, this musical art, and so on. All of this has no social foundation; it is uprooted, and everything must be rebuilt from the social. They were terribly beautiful phrases, but it was actually terribly bleak stuff, because it was rooted nowhere in life. And so I would like to say: what matters today is not that we say the right things about such things, but that we feel in the right way out of the real necessity of life, and that means: we must feel the necessity of transformation, of the new formation of life. This makes it especially necessary in this area to draw attention to the fact that we must, above all, get away from the phrase. And so, when we speak of the threefold social order, it is important that we first understand this threefold social order ourselves; the other things will then follow.

I believe that basically one speaks about art incorrectly, if one speaks about it at all. In art one should paint, in art one should chisel, in art one should build, but one should actually talk about art as little as possible. Of course there are certain ways of talking about art, but that itself must then be something artistic. There is, of course, also a thought art. Something equally justified is constructed in works of thought art as in the other arts, the art of painting and so on. But when you look at the creative process, what is brought forth artistically is something that cannot be said to be produced in one way or another or to be received in one way or another. Rather, all the necessities of life must be transformed into a kind of matter-of-factness. It is necessary to familiarize oneself with the idea that if there is no genius, there can be no proper art. In this case, all the discussions about how the social organism should be organized in order to allow the artist to be properly appreciated are in vain. At best, one can say: in an otherwise well-functioning social organism, art will be present when there are as many geniuses as possible; then the right art will be there. But first these geniuses have to be there. And how they are to be realized – well, it is certainly true that the lives of many people of genius have been extraordinarily tragic. But for geniuses to be able to have a real effect on the world, for geniuses to be able to realize their potential in accordance with the gifts they have been given at birth, that can only happen in a free spiritual life, because only there will there be real spiritual life.

Then we will also go beyond what is most eminently inartistic today. No, something like the Renaissance and Gothic, these were categories that were basically taken from a fully living reality. It was life, and life is always universal. And so Mr. Uehli was absolutely right when he said that something like Gothic and Renaissance was born out of the whole social context of the time. The divisions that we have recently in the field of art have actually, I would say, arisen more and more purely artificially, and they have arisen because the principle of bourgeois life has continued into intellectual life. Isn't it true that bourgeois life has produced rentiers, that is, idlers who live on their property rents. I mean it like this: if they had just enough ambition, they became artists. But that's not the point, because the point is not to create something that is a kind of human necessity, but to create something out of human ambition, which, although it is usually denied, is still there. And that is where, as Mr. Uehli quite rightly said, the actual artistic endeavor becomes uprooted.

The inner artistic striving, which is completely honest and true, cannot be uprooted, but the artistic life can of course be uprooted from everything abstract in life – if life is uprooted at all. And in such an uprooted artistic life, things come that have their basis in the tendrils of life, not in life itself; the slogans 'Impressionism', 'Expressionism' and the like come. These are things that always have to be brought together again because they have been carved apart. When we talk about impressionism and expressionism, these are only templates, words. But when we talk about our eurythmy, then we have to — not because these things are there — but because these things are there, then we have to turn expressions into impressions and impressions into expressions again in eurythmy. It is extremely important to realize that such catchwords, such didactic abstractions as 'impressionism' and 'expressionism', always arise when the original life is not there. For such words can be applied to anything. What is not an expression? If someone writes a bad poem, that is also an expression; if someone sneezes, that is also an expression. And so, in the end, everything, even the Dornach building, can be called an expression. But that is not the point. The point is to characterize things out of a concrete life document. Then one will not resort to catchwords, but arrive at things that can somehow be seriously meant.

Let me make a comparison: in the Theosophical Society, people talk about the “equality of religions”. When someone starts talking in such abstract terms as the equality or unity of religions, then one also comes across such terrible abstractions in other areas, so that one might say, for example: Well, everything on the table is “food ingredient”. Just as you can find the same thing in Hinduism, in Persia, in Theosophy, in Judaism, so you can also find the same thing in pepper, salt, paprika and other things, namely “food ingredient”. But then you soon see that it depends on the specifics, otherwise you might add salt to coffee and sugar to soup. What is important is to have the will to go into the specifics. But then again, when it comes to the artistic, the categories that have emerged in recent times are basically perceived as something particularly tendril-like. I am certainly not of the opinion that everything that individuals who call themselves expressionists achieve should be condemned. On the contrary, I believe that I can have a very broad heart and that I can even have a heart for such expressionist achievements that other people see as something that has been stuck together. But the theorizing that is attached to such things really seems to me to lead people away from a healthy basis for life. And it is indeed the case today that many people actually only know life from the derived sources. There are people who do not know life but know Ibsen or know Tolstoy or know Rabindranath Tagore, who is now beginning to become a kind of fashion in circles that cannot acquire their own judgment. And when we look at all these things today, when we see how people are caught up in the tangles of life, then we feel it is indeed necessary to emphasize once again how, in a healthy social organism – and that should be the threefold social order – this sense of being uprooted must cease. From this point of view, many of Mr. Uehli's remarks seemed to me to be of particular importance.

Unfortunately, although I have spoken for long enough, I have not been able to add much in concrete terms, because anyone who talks about these things with artistic sensitivity - as was also evident from Mr. Baumann's speech - must talk in such a way that talking about all the questions that are floating around today about the position of the artist - for example, whether or not to exhibit or whether or not geniuses fail - is actually quite futile. I think people should realize this more; then it will lead to the right thing. If someone is an artist, then he can also starve, then he can also have a job that occupies him from morning to evening; he will still develop his artistic genius at night. This cannot be suppressed. If someone is an artist, then he will live his artistic life, even if he has to chop wood or shine boots for the rest of his days – he will live his artistic life, even if he only lives it for his own room, for his own closet. These are things that absolutely cannot be rationally treated, that should be treated, I would even say, a little artistically themselves. And being treated artistically basically precludes philistinism; it cannot be made to look sophisticated. And now it is actually the case, isn't it, that if you are to bring general humanity into a social order, then you cannot integrate that which depends only on personal genius into a paragraph or principle. Even when discussing the position of art in life, one must always have some artistic feeling, and then things will actually always flow into free speech, into free creation; one cannot circumscribe them. The things that are so necessary for life must not be circumscribed.

I would like to say that it is necessary to talk about art from an artistic point of view and that one should have at least a little philistinism in one's veins – one need not make it too bad – if one is to talk about what is universally human. Because, ladies and gentlemen, it would be a bad thing in life if there were only those who were artists, or if all those who believe that they should achieve recognition as artists actually did achieve it. I would like to know what would become of life then. What is necessary for life is genius, but what is also necessary for life is philistinism. And if there were no philistinism, there would probably soon be no more genius either. The categories of “good” and “bad” cannot be applied to life so easily, but life is multifaceted. You can talk a lot, but you should actually talk nothing but what is taken from life itself.

Paul Baumann introduces the evening of discussion with a lecture by “Social Illness and Socialism”. Following this lecture, Rudolf Steiner explains:

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to create a mood, but also something from which you can see how far shamelessness has already gone in relation to the fight against everything that comes from me, and how this shamelessness is already spilling over into smear sheets like the Lorcher Nachrichten. It is the paper published in Lorch, Württemberg, the 'Der Leuchtturm', which has published an article entitled 'The Stolen Threefold Order'. If such a paper were to reveal itself as shameless only through such an article, then it would characterize itself precisely as a shameless rag. I mention this so that some of what has been said often, especially in connection with our followers, can be illuminated, because this “beacon”, which, among other things, “leads the fight against Dr. Steiner and Theosophy”, is subscribed to by numerous of our anthroposophists. In a lecture in Stuttgart, I had to publicly call the editor of this journal, whose real name is Rohm, a “pig” in a kind of comparison. I would like to emphasize this here, but today we have no other means at our disposal against the lies that are being spread on the worst possible grounds than this kind of means.

And this Rohm writes in the “Leuchtturm” of June 1, 1920 under the heading “The Stolen Tripartite Division”:

Mrs. Elisabeth Mathilde Metzdorff-Teschner of Sooden an der Werra goes public with a small brochure (the booklet is titled: “3:5, 5:8 = 21:34. The secret of being able to pay off the debt in the foreseeable future”) that she self-published. This woman has something to say. The booklet deals with the divine proportion of the golden section and derives from it a morphological threefold structure, the practical effect of which is supposed to be the possibility of repaying the German people's war debts in the foreseeable future. The few pages of this writing contain a surprising wealth of ideas; one gets the impression that the woman has taken the best bits of her knowledge and presented them in extract form in order to be heard, to prove that she has the right to be heard.

The little booklet that I received through Mr. Uehli eight days ago gives the impression of absolute nonsense -— absolute nonsense! And if “threefolding” can be stolen by stealing the number “three”, then threefolding can of course be stolen in many ways. However, one type of threefold order is also in that little book, and it is called: state, cultural realm, church. That is the name of the threefold order there, and the thing about the golden ratio boils down to this – you know that the golden ratio consists in the whole being related to the large as the large is related to the small – that the state as the whole must be related to the cultural realm as the cultural realm is related to the church. So we have the unified state again in this completely nonsensical “threefold order”.

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The Lighthouse article continues:

We learn the following: there is an international order for ethics and culture, founded by Alfred Knapp, the son of a German pastor, and chaired today by Professor August Forel.

— the same Knapp, an individual who belongs to about the worst shades of the present-day parties and who, as far as I believe, is staying in Zurich. And further:

Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner worked in the Munich home of this order on the unveiling of the “morphological tripartite division” according to the law of the golden section. She approached various offices with the results of her research, which she felt were suitable for exploiting her discovery for the benefit of the German people; among others, the press office of the Ministry of War in Munich, the author of “Fürsten ohne Krone” (Princes without Crowns), the Freybund Nienkamp, and - a “philanthropic society” whose headquarters are in Stuttgart and which turned out to be the - Steiner Society. This famous “philanthropic society” received the manuscript from Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner on loan for eight days; then requested an extension of at least two weeks “because the head of the society was not always present”; “the request to give credit to the head of the society was denied with the urgent request for trust”; instead of the granted two weeks, the manuscript was kept for four weeks. And soon afterwards the head of the “philanthropic society” in question, Dr. Rudolf Steiner of the “Anthroposophical Society”, came forward with a brand new idea, the threefold social order, and kept it secret from the public.

In short, it is all a pack of lies, not a word of it is true.

It is all absolute nonsense. It may well be that some fanatic, who may even be a member of our Society, was shown the nonsense manuscript in Stuttgart; in any case, I never saw it and never bothered about it. And then this nonsense manuscript is said to have been transported to Hamburg by some sort of swarm spirit – or so Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner writes. Well, in Hamburg, all sorts of swarm spirit activity is not entirely foreign to the Anthroposophical Society either. But none of this concerns me, and it is also completely irrelevant.

So far you have heard that the threefold social order, as it is cultivated here, is said to have originated from Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner. The last section of the Leuchtturm article says the following:

So Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner accuses Dr. Steiner of stealing the idea of threefolding; her booklet is a polemic in favor of the priority of the threefolding idea, and the most remarkable thing about it is that Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner says, in essence: ” Not only did Dr. Steiner steal my idea of threefolding, he did not even grasp it correctly and botched it, he turned a useful idea into an unusable one, which is not suitable for helping our people out of their misery, but only for lining his and his society's pockets.

So you see, here the grandiose, ingenious idea is being recycled: he took my watch – but then he got hold of a completely different one. So you see, this is how they fight today. It is of course necessary that our friends know in the broadest sense what methods are used in the world today for fighting. It is not even so interesting that it is directed against us, but the interesting thing is, after all, in what a quagmire of lies we are stuck in the world today. And you see how necessary it is that this quagmire of lies be fought very seriously. For the time being, I have only been able to ascertain that there are a whole series of members of the Anthroposophical Society in Stuttgart who always subscribe to these kinds of leaflets when they throw mud at me.

I would now like to move on to answering the questions that have been asked. First of all, the question:

We keep hearing from the Socialist side that only violence can save humanity. — Does it not almost seem that this is true?

Dear attendees, I would like to say a few words about the point of violence, of mere display of power. It is perhaps not without significance to reflect today on the various human instincts that appeal to this means of violence to establish a humane condition. It is particularly interesting from a social-psychological point of view to pursue this quest for solutions to important questions through violence. It is a fruitful idea, which unfortunately is pursued far too little, to ask ourselves: where do the worst phenomena and excesses of the present day come from? These phenomena have lived right up to our catastrophic times, but below the surface, they were latent passions, they were restrained longings for violence. They were suppressed, and the social condition, the social state, was something like an enormous lie. This lie, which permeated the entire civilized world, which was suppressed in the underground, could no longer be held back in 1914. The whole system of lies, which existed under a thin layer, broke out. The sleeping people, I mean the spiritually sleeping people, they clung to this upper layer; they held it for the world, for human life, and they did not believe those who spoke of what was actually hidden beneath this layer. It is the same again today. Whenever anything needs to be discussed, the lying spirits come and cast their worst, filthiest webs over what would be truth. But it is of no use to humanity, which seriously wants to participate in anything that is to be created for the recovery of social conditions, must look with open eyes at what is actually coming to the surface today.

And here I would like to give you a small example from the very recent past, from which you can see what is happening now that the spirits have been released, so to speak, where the spirits are appealing to power wherever possible.

Rudolf Steiner reads a newspaper article which shows how General Lüttwitz and his troops used corporal punishment and other violent measures against their German fellow citizens. The article describes the case of a man who was called upon for walking on a path that had recently been closed. He was thrown to the ground, arrested and beaten. When the higher authorities were called upon to punish the brutal soldiers, the plaintiff was told that the soldiers had permission to act in this way against people who opposed them. This answer had been signed by the commander himself.

Rudolf Steiner: So you see, my esteemed audience, this is how far modern civilization has come. You know, of course, that corporal punishment has been introduced in Hungary, that Poland has introduced corporal punishment. So you see, corporal punishment is migrating from east to west. And if humanity continues to sleep and behave as it is currently behaving, then it will come as no surprise what we will still be able to experience.

But, my dear attendees, we also live in a time that engages in very strange discussions. I will share with you a small sample of this type of discussion in which we are immersed today. It is about how a publicist criticizes his government. You may know from those times, when sleeping was cultivated, how sharp expressions were used when an opposition member attacked the government. Not every opposition attacked the government in such a polite manner as, for example, the Austrian radical opposition did in certain times, signing with the signature “Your Majesty's most loyal opposition”. (Laughter!) But for several decades things have changed, and today, in an age in which so many people long for power, people in government are publicly referred to with the beautiful names: murderer, crook, racketeer, lawbreaker.

A newspaper cutting about Gustav Noske, Governor of Hanover, is read out by Rudolf Steiner.

These are the words of opposition used today to criticize the government in public newspapers, and nothing is stirred that those in government can do anything about. So we are familiarizing ourselves with the tone that is struck today when those in government are referred to as murderers, crooks, profiteers, and lawbreakers of all kinds.

I believe that the facts that occur here and there do not speak against what has often been said from this point of view, namely that we are heading towards decline at a rather rapid pace and that, basically, this is no time for souls to sleep. What the instincts that crave power bring about is expressed in these things, and it is expressed, for example, in the by no means isolated case of Hesterberg, which I read out earlier. And it is also expressed in many other things that are reported today from all parts of the “educated” world - I put “educated” in quotation marks - from all parts of the “educated” world. And I ask: Who dares to believe that anything could be painted too black, that speaks today of the decline, not only of our economic, but above all of our moral life. But these things show quite clearly how the rule of such forces leads to those unhealthy conditions, which Mr. Baumann has so aptly described to you today. For these unhealthy conditions express themselves, for example, in something like the survey conducted in a primary school in Berlin that is attended by 650 children. The following conditions were revealed: 161 of these 650 children have neither shoes nor sandals; 142 children have no warm clothes; 305 children have no underwear or only rags; 379 live in apartments where not a single room is heated; 106 come from families that do not even have the money to buy only the rationed food. 341 of 650 children have never had a drop of milk; 118 are tubercular; 48 are behind schedule due to malnutrition. Of the 650 children, 85 have died over the course of a year due to deprivation and malnutrition. There you have the influx of what is today's attitude, what is today's belief in physical health conditions, that is, in physical disease conditions. It is time to listen when someone says that a feeling is needed for what is healthy, for that which has within it the healthy breath of life in physical, mental and spiritual terms. And what matters is that we really engage in this feeling of health and do not chase after things like the longing for power, which is truly there where people who indulge their baser instincts, whether they are given free rein as thieves and muggers or as officials and ministers who crave power from the same source. And it is from these instincts for power that the unhealthy conditions have arisen. One must recognize what the human condition is today and how it is necessary not to call for power and such things, but merely for the conditions in which there is a real feeling for recovery according to the spirit.

Among those commenting on Rudolf Steiner's remarks are Roman Boos and Paul Baumann.

Rudolf Steiner: There is still the question:

What is the mission of the small intermediate peoples such as Livonians, Estonians, Lithuanians and so on?

When we speak today of the tasks that directly affect humanity, we must speak of tasks that concern all of humanity. For we are on the verge of looking beyond narrow national and ethnic borders to the great tasks of humanity. And when I have spoken of the various differentiations of people across the civilized earth and said that in the East, but what I sometimes mean to include Asia, there is above all the home of intellectual life - that intellectual life which, in its purity, emerged and and then went into decline and is still in decline today, but which also lives on as an inheritance in Central Europe and in the western regions. When I said that the Central European regions have primarily possessed the folk abilities of the legal and state spheres since ancient Greek times, and if I have said that in the western regions the talent for economic thinking has been predominant since the beginning of modern times, I mean that the particular aptitude for one or other of these talents arises out of the nature of the peoples spread over the respective areas.

Today, however, we have the task of appealing to the humanities, which then evoke the more universal abilities, the threefold abilities, to appeal to the humanities, so as not to cultivate things in this one-sidedness any longer. We must remember today what happens when the Oriental remains one-sided, we must remember what happens when the Central European remains one-sided, and we must remember what happens when the Westerner remains one-sided. Development cannot go forward if one-sidedness persists. Therefore, we should not really be asking what tasks the individual peoples will have in the future. It is not the peoples who will have tasks – it is humanity that will have tasks! Only in order to understand these tasks better, only to understand how these tasks have been prepared in the course of history and how what has emerged particularly strongly here or there must now be united with other human abilities, only to understand how what is happening today is to be shaped more universally out of the differentiated development of humanity, it is necessary to engage with the particular tasks of the individual peoples. It is of the utmost importance to engage with this, because it is precisely what is there and what must be overcome that must be thoroughly and precisely understood.

Now, what have remained are, I would say, “splinters of the people” with a multifaceted nature, from among those peoples who actually make up, so to speak, the basic nature of one of the three world territories.

It is not at all easy to speak of this basic nature in anthropological terms; only anthroposophical observation provides the right categories. Only through anthroposophical observation can we say correctly: what is developing in the East has these abilities; what is developing in the West has these abilities; what is developing in the middle has these abilities. If we proceed anthropologically, that is, we look more at the blood, then we immediately come across questions that are quite impractical and do not reveal anything of practical life with any particular clarity. If, for example, we wanted to replace the expression “European East” by saying “the Russian people”, then we would be saying something that has no practical significance in life. The point is that we have to start from completely different categories than from these purely anthropological or ethnographic categories.

The small splinters of the people now, of course, have the most diverse predispositions precisely because of the way they came into being. Consider, for example, a small people such as the Magyars, who have a kind of Turanian racial identity but who have undergone the most diverse experiences, who are pushed together like a geographical triangle on the Danube. Of course, one could come up with all kinds of nice missions if one wanted to address the mission of such a splinter of a people. But one would have to start from completely different points of view if one wanted to speak, for example, of the Bulgarians, who are related to the Magyars in a certain way. The Bulgarians have undergone a Slavicization metamorphosis; they are related to the Magyars by blood, but they are not related to the Magyars by language and ethnography, so that the Slavic element has, to a certain extent, been instilled into the Turanian blood, even in terms of language. Here, of course, we enter into realms that must be considered from completely different points of view if we are to deal with these non-anthroposophical, anthropological elements.

The only thing that arises from an anthroposophical point of view in the right way is something like this: quite apart from certain things that have not been brought about by history, which live more in such splinters of the people than in the great nations, something of an international element lives very strongly in such splinters of the people, at least in terms of its potential. And it can be said that if these individual peoples, these small peoples – many of them are peripheral peoples and the like – if they were to familiarize themselves with the great tasks of humanity, they would have the easiest time of it. For example, it would be an extraordinarily beautiful thing if the Baltic peoples were to devote themselves to developing the many abilities that lie within them, precisely as an international task. Instead, they have often preferred to cultivate the extreme reaction within themselves. And they have happily brought it to the point that, for example, in relatively recent times a motion was tabled in a Baltic parliament to reintroduce slavery in its entirety. But as I said, these marginal peoples have all the prerequisites for cosmopolitanism and for stripping away all forms of chauvinism if only they would develop these talents. But today we live in a time when people are terribly fond of being befogged, when people with a great longing, an unconscious, unhealthy longing, want to enter into a nebulous atmosphere and where they like to create all kinds of illusions for themselves. Then there is talk of this or that mission that this or that small nation should have. Well, it is certainly possible, if one proceeds anthropologically, to find much in the depths of the national soul. But it is precisely among the smaller nations that this talent should be expressed: to combine the talents that are present into a great cosmopolitan style, which we so urgently need.

I always think – perhaps I may say this here, it has been said by me many times since the beginning of the war catastrophe to the most diverse people – I always think what it would have meant if a great, international, cosmopolitan task had been taken up by the Swiss people in 1914. The taking hold of such a great task in a relatively small country could have stood in the spiritual evolution of the world much as a center around which many things revolve, just as today European currencies revolve around the Swiss currency. But today everything is covered with a fog, and people do not engage with things that have real value at the moment when a person engages with them. Unfortunately, however, there is still far too much of an attitude that says: What is the task that I have because I belong to this or that people, because I was born in Hamburg or in Breslau or in Berlin or in Vienna or in Rome? What mission has been given to me precisely because of this? — The other question is more important: What strengths does my birth here or there give me, what strengths does it give me for the common, international, cosmopolitan mission of all humanity, which is so necessary today? People would like to delude themselves and ask themselves something like: What is my mission? Then they wait. They wait somewhat like the man who opened his mouth and waited for the roast pigeons to fly in.

But today is not about waiting for our mission, but we must be clear: we are at a point in human development where the destiny of the world must be born out of the human being, where the old talk of the mission of that which is not directly born in the human being must cease. We are at a point in human development where the human being is called upon to give destiny a content out of himself. If we do not begin to abandon this passive talk about what our mission is, or if we do not stop appealing: Yes, but the gods must help, it cannot go that way, it is unjust, the gods must help, if we do not give up this, then we will not make any progress in the present moment of human development. Today it is important that we are clear about the fact that we have to seek the gods through the inner being of man – I do not say in the inner being of man, but through the inner being of man – and that the gods count on us to help determine their destiny.

Today we do not have to answer the questions from the observation of this or that rooted here or there, but today we have to answer the questions from the point of view of the will. The earlier contemplative questions are now questions of the will. In the past, one arrived at contemplation by immersing oneself in that which had surrendered to reflection; today, our occult task is to take up into our will that invisible and supersensible spirit, so that that may be born in humanity which goes beyond all individual limitations. The external structures of the state have been brought to such a state that it is almost impossible to cross borders today. If we keep talking about What is the task of this or that part of the people? - then we erect such boundaries in our minds and cannot go beyond these boundaries to grasp the overall task of humanity.

It is basically - although it is terrible - even less significant if these are the boundaries that are now so difficult to cross, the boundaries that have been fought over so bloodily in the external space. It is terrible, but it is worse for the development of humanity if we shape our minds in such a way that we ask: What is the mission of this splinter of the people? What is the mission of that splinter of the people? — We must go beyond the boundaries. We must erase them. We must find the common humanity. That is why we must, above all, deliberately place ourselves on this ground of the common humanity. Then we can say: Those who do not belong to a great nation have it better, because when they reflect on their deepest powers, they can contribute much to the internationalization and cosmopolitanization of humanity.

This is above all the task of those who can be called, so to speak, the small states or peripheral states or the like.

Ernst Schaller gives a lecture on “Economic Cycles and Crises.” Rudolf Steiner then addresses questions that have been raised in the discussion.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, my dear attendees, an extraordinarily important matter has been brought up here [by Dr. Schaller]. He has pointed out how economic life can be healed through the threefold social order, based on very specific economic issues. And I would like to say: I consider this general point of view of Dr. Schaller to be the most important thing for this evening. I have often said that if we look at the individual phenomena, whether in economic life or in any other area of social life, it will become clear what this threefold social order actually means for the recovery of human life. There are people today who, because of the education and habits of thought that have been fostered in recent years, have described The Core Problems as a utopian book. One can only say that it is merely the thoroughly amateurish, short-sighted, impractical thinking that is expressed in such a judgment. And that is why it would be of particular importance if people were to become more and more involved in this, especially with regard to economic issues - which really do require discussion for most people, because economic life is all too little known in broader sections of the population. Dr. Schaller has done today, if they allowed themselves to take things as they really are, and to show from an expert point of view how this threefold social order is conceived out of the full practice of life.

There is still a great deal that is not understood about this idea of the threefold social organism. This is shown to me, for example, by a question that has just been read out here and which I would like to mention in the introduction to what I actually want to say. For example, it has been asked:

Why should associations only form in the threefold social organism?

No one has ever claimed that associations, including economic associations, should or could only form in the threefold social organism. There have always been associations; of course there were also associations in the unified state. In the threefold social organism, however, the social organism is first divided into three parts and then economic life will take effect through associations. So what we know otherwise from associative life, especially in economic life, and also what Walther Rathenau says about associations, testifies to nothing other than that such economic things are only taken in the abstract. Above all, Rathenau is an abstract thinker of the most terrible kind, and one does not tend to [see things realistically] when one is such an abstract salon socialist as Rathenau – such abstract thinkers take everything abstractly, including social ideas – they only talk about associations. I could name other people who also talked about associations. For example, there is a 19th-century theologian named Anton Günther. And of course you could find people everywhere who talk about associations. Associations are ultimately the universities, for example in the field of science. This belief in words, this insistence on words, and this deduction from words, is what we must finally get beyond. We must grasp things in practical life, we must be clear about the fact that something else is needed. When someone shows clearly and sharply how the threefold social organism should be structured, and then shows that the associations are conditioned precisely by economic life, while the spiritual and legal life work for themselves, without such associations, then it is something different from speaking in the style of Walther Rathenau in abstractions of associations. How little these “key points of the social question” are meant in the abstract, how little they are abstract in every line, should be studied first. Then such theorizing, as expressed in this question, for example, appears as a complete impossibility.

Now, it would go far beyond what can be said in such a short time if I were to consider the question I have been asked in connection with Dr. Schaller's lecture. Above all, it should be mentioned that Dr. Schaller has very helpfully provided the various sets of figures that show how the economic curve he himself has drawn rises and falls, how crises follow booms and how favorable economic conditions can then follow depressions, and so on. Well, you can present the matter in a certain way, as if the crisis were to some extent to break away from the favorable economic conditions, and then the depressions would arise and then the matter would recover again – as Dr. Schaller has just explained. But if you follow this thread of causality too closely, you are suddenly torn away from what is actually the deeper, real basis of the matter. You see, it appears as if it is a matter of the crises growing out of the favorable economic conditions, and then the depression comes and then the ascending development again, and so on. It appears so because since the first third of the 19th century, since 1810, we have had a special economic metamorphosis in that money, that is, monetary transactions and money-lending and the credit associated with it, has become the economic ruler, whereas in the past, that is, before 1810, economic life in terms of its production was in fact the ruler. If one studies what happened in 1810 with regard to the circulation of money and the credit system, it becomes clear that the appearance of being able to derive such an automatically occurring curve from these figures actually only applies to this economic era since 1810. It would not be possible to sustain it for earlier economic eras. But even for this economic epoch, it is necessary to look more at the specific facts during a favorable economic period and during a crisis period than at this mere rise and fall in the numbers.

And here I refer above all to the crisis of 1907 - I could just as easily pick out another example -; it is extraordinarily interesting to study. This crisis is particularly interesting to study because it shows how crises are actually caused by human will. As I said, this would also apply to other such matters; financial events of this kind cannot be judged without studying the violent speculation of a few American capital magnates and its connection with the European money market. What comes into consideration is a rise in a very specific type of stock, and thus an enormous desire to acquire these stocks. As a result, the capital magnates who have created this boom have been able to draw the money to themselves and impoverish the people who actually needed the money. This is what caused the discount to skyrocket. Dr. Schaller mentioned the private discount – I believe that the German Reichsbank went up to 7% at the time. So, an American consortium of money magnates was working towards such an increase in the discount. Of course, all these things are then counterbalanced by others. But as soon as one gets down to practical matters, as soon as one looks facts in the face, then it is precisely these individual facts that come into consideration, and even the other facts would point in the same direction. One cannot work [like these capital magnates] when one is involved in pure economic life and money with credit is, so to speak, only the external expression of economic circulation as such. The way work was done in those years, 1906, 1907, 1908, can only be done if, on the one hand, economic life proceeds as it should and, on the other, the money market, as such, the processes within the circulation of money, is emancipated. This means that money and the corresponding loans, whether in stocks or bonds or anything else, can be used to create a separate circulation on the money and credit market, which to a certain extent [detached from the real economic processes].

You see, for this reason the appearance is gradually emerging that in our economic life partial favorable booms and partial crises are impossible; the appearance is emerging that only general booms and general crises can arise. The prerequisite for this is that, to a certain extent, there is a general medium [such as the money market as such] that does not care about the crises in [real] economic life. In [real] economic life, the crisis is regulated. It is one thing to bring boots onto the market and another to bring watches onto the market or to produce oil. When dealing with commodities, one is dealing with concrete things; economic cycles arise out of production. But when you are dealing only with money and credit, that is out of the question – in money and credit, you are only speculating. To create all kinds of artificial economic trends, it is necessary that the money market is emancipated from the rest of the economic market.

These are, of course, only individual things. I could go on speaking in this style all night long. But whenever you have crisis years on hand, you can always ask yourself: Where must I look for the direct economic will that asserts itself in this way on the capital market? In a sense, it is true that this whole story is related to capitalism, because such a crisis is only possible if you can speculate in money and credit, or throw money and credit on the market. You could just as well study the year 1912 and so on, and you would find very specific facts everywhere, facts that emanate from the will of those who have a say in economic life. But such general crises, or even just widespread crises, cannot be caused in any other way than by the emancipation of the money market.

I emphasize these points in particular because it is now time to be very clear about them: it is not a matter of theorizing; it is not a matter of forming ideas based on statistics in such a general way that one thing follows from the other. Basically, only looking at the facts is fruitful. And it is of much greater importance for the understanding of the crisis that emerged around 1907, it is much more important to study the machinations of certain capitalist magnates than to remain in general economic categories. I would also like to note that it is not entirely correct to think that partial cycles do not play a role in modern times. In actual economic life they do play a role, but the role they play is obscured by the capital economy or by the money and credit economy. All these questions are treated in my article on credit in the fourth number of Soziale Zukunft, from the general point of view, because it is not always possible to go into detail.

It is essential, especially in economics, to be clear about the fact that only a real engagement with the facts leads to knowledge, to knowledge that is socially fruitful, that can lead us can lead us out of the greatest crisis we are in – that is the social crisis – while in the last few decades, in particular, in economics as a science, theorizing has actually played a very bad role. Basically, there is not much to be gained from university economics for a real understanding of economic life. Today, however, it is really time to look at what follows from the will of the people. Certainly, it is true that the masses of people behave in the same way under certain typical circumstances. And so it happens that when the results of a favorable economic situation for people's lives have been achieved, then desires arise; and out of these desires people engage in something like commodity speculation, and then a crisis arises – but it arises out of human will. And again, when after a certain time this has led to money taking certain routes, then an upswing can occur – but this too always arises from the will of men.

These things, favorable economic conditions, crises, depressions and so on, they turn out, when you study the facts, not much different than, say, the things in the suicide statistics. If you take a sufficiently large territory, you can say that a certain number of suicides will occur in that territory in a certain number of years and that they will then repeat themselves in a certain period of time. Of course that doesn't prove that there is a law of nature that so-and-so many suicides must take place in so-and-so many years, but it only proves that in some years so-and-so many events occur in a certain territory, which, in their typical form, repeatedly and repeatedly tempt people to commit suicide. The simplest statistic that can be made is this: if a piece of meat is held out to a dog five times, he will snap at it five times; he does the same thing five times under the influence of the same facts. Under the influence of the same repeating facts, people naturally do the same thing. But that does not mean that you can leave the human being out of the whole; that is, you have to take into account what human will is. And if you look at “The Crux of the Social Question,” you will see that this most difficult-to-deal-with material, human will, is taken into account in economic life, that it is taken into account and that there is much to be found in the “Crux” from this point of view.

Now I would like to mention something quite different; I only want to include it because here too we always have more or less the same problem.

Last time, I had to mention that the stupid claim of the “stolen threefolding” was found in a public newspaper. Of course, the paper that printed the dirty articles by Pastor Kully - I mean the “Katholisches Volksblatt” - also made itself responsible for printing these filthy, thick, dirty lies. And that is why I advise as many people as possible to read the brochure by Mrs. Elisabeth Mathilde Metzdorff-Teschner, which was published in 1920. Mr. Rohm's filth in Lorch comes from this brochure, all the nonsense comes from this brochure. I would like to write down the title for you: “3:5, 5:8 = 21:34. The secret of being able to pay off the debts in the foreseeable future”. You will get a somewhat mystical impression from the title “3:5, 5:8 etc.”; the brochure as a whole is written no less mystically than this title; you can open it anywhere you want, for example:

"Haeckel concludes the fifth chapter of the solution of the world's riddles with the words: ‘I have given a detailed justification of the entire family tree and its application to the natural system of organisms in the three volumes of my ’Systematic Phylogeny'. The sharper critical distinction of the six lines and 30 main stages of our human tribal history is contained in my pamphlet on 'Our Line of Ancestors (Progonotopxis hominis)', Jena, July 30, 1908.

The attempts of the Frey-Bund, the anthroposophical threefold social order, to work their way up to the seventh level are presented in the same way as ours. Their kingdom of culture remains attached to mammon, which their prophets or princes cannot and will not do without.

And so it goes on. You feel as if you have stepped right into a madhouse and are listening to the incoherent ravings of a bunch of lunatics. The brochure states that the human brain should be divided in a ratio of so-called divine proportions, which have something to do with the ratio of 3:5, 5:8 = 21:34 – why, one cannot figure out, because the whole brochure is nonsense; this would make it possible to free the entire German people from the enormous debt burden. Then everything will be all right, then all the debts of the German Reich will have been paid off. It is therefore truly absolute madness. The “noble” lady claims of this madness:

"The press office of the Ministry of War in Munich knows the day and year when the morphological threefold division was born in 1917 (i.e. before Steiner's core point of the social question), through an event that had a profound impact on women's lives. Science can therefore rely on historical data. As early as January 16, 1918, the press office approved the lecture about it, which was entrusted to the anthroposophists on April 20 and was not returned until May 11."

Now, I don't know which anthroposophists were presented with the lecture about the “significant event in a woman's life” and all the cabbages back then; I don't know which anthroposophists were lucky enough to have that. Now look at this writing, this example of a “press event”; it appears in the world today. In Lorch sits a man - I called him a “pig” in a public lecture - sits a pig who can read print and uses it to fabricate the article “The Stolen Threefold Social Order”. And here in Switzerland there are actually people, under the aegis of the shepherds of souls, who reprint such things. These articles are read – that is the fact. People read them and have no idea of the madness behind them. But there are enough immoral people who do not abhor throwing dust in people's eyes to such an extent that they print such things for an audience that naturally cannot check it, that does not even know how idiotic it is. We have brought public life to this degree of idiocy; and the summit of idiocy stands under the aegis of spiritual shepherds. This is something that actually comes into consideration here. It is something that should be looked at.

And I ask you to familiarize yourself with the document. Among other things, it also mentions the fact that the lady in question has also shared her secret of divine proportions, of “threefold social order”, with other people. She says that she was convinced right up to the last phase that debt repayment would be possible in the foreseeable future through the “morphological cultural realm (state-cultural realm-church)”. She says she also sent the lecture to “other people”, but none of them took any interest in it. I can't imagine how anyone could have got involved in it, except as a psychiatrist. So only the anthroposophists responded to it, but they made something completely different out of it. And now this lady finds that these anthroposophists are somewhat better than the other people, because at least they talked about the “threefold social order” — she thinks. Now, at least in this way, publicity has been created for this lady, for Mrs. Elisabeth Metzdorff-Teschner; so the anthroposophists have at least condescended to create publicity for this lady in this way. Now only a small thing is needed, namely that the German people recognize the “morphological cultural realm” through a popular decision — the recognition through a popular decision is actually to be brought about by Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner. And it is necessary, she says, that the principle 3:5, 5:8 = 21:34, which she has found, be proclaimed publicly everywhere; she has thus brought a kind of social golden ratio into the world. Notabene, she also accuses those people who have written about the golden ratio of plagiarism, that is, of intellectual theft.

And now, through this brochure, a strange document has come to light that I would otherwise probably never have heard of. It seems that the lady – it is very difficult to find out – wrote to a doctor in Munich. This man then writes that he gave the lady's letter to a professor in Munich, and he then writes back to the lady:

"Professor Steiner handed over the material sent to him for my information and for answering your letter. However, I am one of those people who cannot accuse either the Jesuits or the Jews of being to blame for the German collapse without committing a sacrificrum intellectus. (We Germans broke our own neck in a truly German way).

And, moreover, I must honestly confess that I myself am a member of the Anthroposophical Society. (And I only became one recently, after reading everything available in writing against Steiner.) I was not unaware of the accusations against Steiner made by M. Seiling, whom I otherwise admire. Incidentally, I am the last person who would want to completely clear Steiner's name. He has a great deal of human inadequacy. And yet he is a teacher to whom I and better people than me owe a great debt. — This will not satisfy you, but I cannot say more."

So you see, very strange things come to light through this lady.

But you also see that the revered clergy, the Catholic clergy of the local area, does not miss any of these things. This is the situation we are in today. Just appreciate the moral squalor of this place, and then consider whether any word has been said too much by this or that person, which has often been said from this place.

So: Elisabeth Mathilde Metzdorff-Teschner, “3:5, 5:8 = 21:34. The secret of being able to pay off the debt in the foreseeable future.” I would also like to state that this brochure was published in 1920 in the “famous” self-publishing house in Sooden an der Werra.

on the occasion of the first anthroposophical university course

The two lectures by Arnold Ith on October 4 and 5, 1920, on “Banking and pricing in their current and future significance for the economy” serve as the basis for the evening. The discussion will be opened:

Rudolf Toepel starts from two passages in the “Key Points”. He comments on the problem of ascertaining needs and, linked to this, on the question of pricing.

Roman Boos: I must refute Dr. Toepel's view; the two passages from the “key points” are taken out of context. Dr. Toepel's presentation lacks an anthroposophical basis. This is not the way to move forward. The state cannot prescribe administrative measures for the economy; we will not advance in economic life if we cannot embrace other ways of thinking. People who live in such an economic system rebel against it, because statistics are used to determine people's needs.

And there is another danger to be considered. Perhaps new needs could arise the day after tomorrow that are not yet known today. As Dr. Steiner always emphasized, it is important that we do not interfere with needs as such. The state should not interfere, nor should statistics in the question of needs as such, otherwise we are still in the old way of thinking. It is precisely this old way of thinking that seems to me to be partly alive in Director Ich's remarks.

I would therefore like to refer once more explicitly to Dr. Steiner's basic idea of the economic primordium: the price set should enable the person who has produced a particular economic product to be able to produce the same again afterwards. Price policy as such is something that the state should not simply interfere with, otherwise it will destroy economic life altogether.

Werner Zimmermann speaks as a representative of the free money and free land theory of Silvio Gesell.

Roman Boos interrupts the speaker: What is important is not the goal, but the beginning. And there it is about creating associations; we must create associations.

Arnold Ith: There are several points on which I would like to have greater clarity and which need to be discussed in more detail. Firstly, what role does trade play in the threefold social organism? Secondly, how does capital arise in the threefold social organism? Thirdly, can factories and real estate also be sold? Is private capital even possible after the introduction of threefolding? Fourthly: Is there still money in the threefolded social organism? Money is then only an order for goods. And now to what the previous speakers said. What Mr. Zimmermann said about the free money theory cannot be understood or followed at all. Some objections must also be raised regarding the comments of Dr. Toepel; the same applies to Dr. Boos and his presentation of the economic primal cell. And in this context, returning to Dr. Boos' objection to my remarks, I would like to ask: to what extent should this relate to the remarks I have made here, and to what extent should something appear to be incorrect in them? That as a specific question.

Roman Boos: I would like to ask a counter-question: what role do you think the state should play in setting prices?

Arnold Ith: I only wanted to show with this breakdown of the price how some of the price goes to the laborers and the other part is distributed among the producers. In this respect, the state will have a say in prices by determining what the individual needs for his or her livelihood.

Interjection: Senseless.

Roman Boos: I actually just picked up on this point and felt compelled to object. I have always been of the opinion that in the tripartite social organism the state has something to determine only with regard to the type of work and the time, but does not have any kind of price to determine or needs to assess; the state should only create the facts from the outside, with which economic life has to reckon as with given facts.

Arnold Ith: It is not a matter of the state fixing the nominal price level, but of a proportionate, real distribution, a percentage allocation. Perhaps I may ask Dr. Steiner about this question.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear ladies and gentlemen! I would very much like to speak about some of the individual matters that have been touched on here. However, it is hardly possible to speak about them briefly, and it is especially difficult to do so when a number of people have already clashed with each other. This usually complicates even those things that are otherwise simple. I would therefore just like to make a few brief comments that answer some of the questions or at least attempt to point in the right direction.

I would like to point out that in economic life it really matters to think economically. But thinking economically means having ideas about production and consumption that have certain effects in one direction or the other in the course of their development; and we are part of this economic process with our physical well-being and woe. Favorite opinions are of no use here. Anyone who thinks, for example, that something can be achieved simply by reducing [or expanding] the money supply, depending on whether prices are rising or falling, shows that he has little real understanding of the economic process. Nothing is achieved by such a fixing of the value of money, by a reduction, as it were, of the money supply or by a very specific expansion or the like. Because the moment money can no longer be used for speculation, speculation shifts to commodities. You see, only now are we getting close to reality with our ideas. We have to be able to look at reality. And there is absolutely no need to change the money supply. , but it can very easily be brought about by all sorts of machinations that the prices of a particular type of product fall or rise, while other products need not give any cause for such a fall or rise. In any case, the whole idea of indexing money – apart from the fact that as long as there is a gold standard in any of the countries involved, there can be no question of it – the whole idea is a purely utopian one. I will only hint at this, it would have to be discussed in detail, but the whole of Gesell's idea is nothing but an idea born out of a complete ignorance of economic life as such. If you really want to intervene in economic life in a way that yields results, then you have to intervene not in money but in consumption and production in a living way. What is needed is the formation of associations that have the opportunity to exert a real effect on the economic process. Of course, if associations form here and there, they may be right in principle, but they will not be able to exert a favorable influence; they can only exert a favorable influence when the associative principle can really take effect through the threefold social order. But people keep asking: How do associations form?

Dear attendees, as long as people are still arguing about whether, on the one hand, producers should join together to form associations and, on the other hand, consumers should form cooperatives, and as long as they are stipulating something to each other, the idea of association will not be remotely realized. Of course, the idea of an association is not about some kind of commission getting together to form associations and the like, but about these associations emerging from economic life itself. I would like to give two examples that I have given before.

Some time before the war, there was a member of ours who was a kind of baker; he baked bread, so he produced bread, with all that that entails, of course. Now, it occurred to them to make something that could initially be a kind of model example. We had the Anthroposophical Society, Anthroposophists also eat bread, they were already united, and nothing was easier than to put the bread producer together with the Anthroposophists. This gave him consumers, and an association was ready. Of course, when such a thing stands alone, it can have all kinds of shortcomings. In this case, it had shortcomings because the producer also had quirks and eccentricities, and this put the whole thing on an uneven footing. But that is not what ultimately matters. An association arises by itself out of an organic connection between consumers and producers, whereby, of course, the producer usually has to take the initiative – and then this association will prove itself all by itself.

And then I often give the example of a different kind of work, that created by the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House in Berlin. It consists in this publishing house not working like other publishing houses. How do the other publishing houses work? They work by concluding contracts for books with as many authors as possible, good and bad. Right, then they set about printing these books. But when books are printed, paper has to be available, typesetters have to be employed, and so on. Now try to imagine how many books are printed each year, let's say just in Germany, that are not sold, for which there are no consumers at all. Just do the math, just add up how much poetry is printed in Germany and how much poetry is bought, and you will get an idea of how much human labor has to be expended to produce paper that is wasted, how many typesetters work for the corresponding books and so on – all work that is done for nothing. That is what matters: we have to enter economic life by thinking economically, that is, by thinking in such a way that we avoid unnecessary work, wasted labor. In the case of the association between the Anthroposophical Society and the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press, this is not possible because the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press does not print a single book that is not sold. There are consumers. Why? Because work is done so that consumers are there? On the contrary, the publishing house does not have the necessary means to produce enough for the consumers. But at least no work is wasted. We do not have paper produced in which wasted work is involved; we do not have typesetters employed who work for nothing, and so on.

And exactly the same thing that you have seen in these two examples can be done in all possible fields. That is what it is about, that the association is thought about correctly. If it is thought about correctly, then above all unnecessary labor is avoided. And that is what matters. The aim is to create the right relationship between production and consumption in all possible areas through real measures. Then this original cell of economic life comes about, then a price comes about that will be appropriate for the whole of life, so that the person who produces something, any product, let's say a pair of boots, gets as much for it as he needs for his needs, until he has manufactured an equally good pair of boots again. It is not a matter of somehow stipulating the price, of drawing up statistics and the like, but rather of working in such a way that consumption is commensurate with production. And that can only happen if consumption determines production. If examples are given, this can be seen quite clearly. What matters is not to talk in circles about wants and needs and the like, but to be grounded in needs. What matters is to be related to [consumption] on the one hand and on the other hand to be able to intervene in production in such a way that it leads directly to the satisfaction of needs. What is important is not creating so-and-so many numbers and moving them from one place to another, but having active people in the association who can see how they have to mediate between consumption and production.

We have caused such terrible damage to our economic life precisely because we have dumped everything on the value measure of money. But money has only the value that it has, depending on the nature of the economic process. Of course you cannot start with the most abstract thing of all, with money, and introduce any kind of reforms. You don't even need to discuss whether money should be an order for goods or something else. I would like to know what the money I have in my wallet is other than an order for goods. And if I didn't have it in my wallet, the payment for a job I did could also be written in a book somewhere; you could always look it up for my sake; but instead of just being written in there, it could also be written out to me. All these things must be thought of not as secondary and partial, but as primary, and it must be clear to oneself that money by itself becomes a kind of walking bookkeeping in economic life when one thinks economically — not theoretically, but economically — that is, when one is able to dynamically relate economic conditions to one another.

Interjection: Very rich!

That's it. But this practical thinking, which should be thrown into the cultural development of the present day by the “core issues”, this practical thinking, is terribly far removed from today's people. They immediately fall back into theorizing, they immediately have everything possible to schematize and theorize, while it is important to approach people in such a way that they are fully involved in life, that is, in economic life - then the right conditions will be able to develop in this economic life. Of course, we were not allowed to found other associations because we were not allowed to found any other associations than those with the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House. But please consider in an hour of quiet reflection, my dear attendees, what this means as an effect for the whole economic life, if there is anything that prevents unnecessary work from being done - that affects the whole economic life. The typesetters, whom we have spared by not keeping them unnecessarily busy, have done other work in the meantime, and the people who worked in paper production have done other work in the meantime. So we are involved in the whole economic process. You can't think so briefly that you only think of one company, but you have to be clear about the effect it has on the whole economy. That is what matters.

I just wanted to point out that we have to try to think in truly economic terms. And if questions are raised about how it will work with the economic associations, it is the case that everyone would find sufficient reason in their own position to form such economic associations if they wanted to, based on the matter at hand. Of course, you can't say to me or to Dr. Boos or to others: How should I form associations? – and then assume that an empire should be created for the purpose of forming associations.

What is important is not that, but that we finally try to think and reflect objectively – that is what is important. Of course, the old way of thinking sometimes still strikes you in the neck a little; and even though Mr. Ith undoubtedly understood the issues extremely well and presented them quite well in essence, we still had to hear, for example, that he had included wages among his accounting costs. Of course, there is no question of wages when drawing up balance sheets in line with the threefold order – there can be no question of wages, nor of any kind of valuation of raw materials; after all, it is merely a matter of somehow accounting for the difference between what are work products and what are raw materials, and the like. So it is not true that sometimes the old way of thinking comes through; but that does not matter if one only has the will to think one's way into positive economic life, then the right thing comes out.

It is also self-evident that such enterprises as Futurum or the Coming Day cannot be built in all respects according to the “core principles” in the same way; one is, after all, in the middle of a different economic life, which makes its waves everywhere. But in that such enterprises are established, in which, on the one hand, the one-sided banking principle is overcome, on the other hand, the one-sided commercial or industrial principle – that is, on the one hand, the principle of lending money from the bank, on the other hand, the principle of the bank lending – that is, the divergence of the bank and the industrial, commercial enterprise – these are combined into one, and in doing so, the path to the associative principle is taken. For the time being, it is only a path. The real associative principle would be achieved if you could implement it in reality as I have shown in the two examples. Of course it would be necessary for the producers alone, that is, people who understand how to create a particular article, to take the initiative to do so; that is, the initiative cannot of course come from the consumers if an association is to be formed. But on the other hand, whoever takes the initiative to establish an association will essentially depend on the needs of consumers to shape the association; after all, they can only address certain needs that no one has to regulate. If, for example, there are luxury needs and so on for my sake, they will take care of themselves.

Recently I was asked: It was said of me that one should take needs into account; but now there are strange needs; for example, one person has a need for particularly high riding boots, riding boots and so on; [how to behave towards them].- Yes, my dear audience, all this takes into account only a very small part in his thinking. What is needed is to really think our way into economic life; and when you think your way into it, you move away from these details, because a healthy economic life also regulates needs to a certain extent. We can wait and see what these needs will be when a healthy economic life comes about under the associative principle, when, above all, unnecessary employment, unnecessary work that goes nowhere, is prevented. That is what it is all about.

Of course, these few hints do not yet say anything very substantial; but I want to point out at least that one can only understand the “key points” correctly if one understands them in a practical sense, if one thinks about how to bring about such an association in concrete terms, in life, that is built on combining consumption and production in the most organic way possible. If we know how such an economic structure, which is economically based on the principle of association, has an economizing effect on the whole of economic life, then we can actually create economic foundations where some no longer have to do so much unnecessary work and where others can no longer satisfy so many needs. In the world, it is already the case – this could be explained in great detail and even presented as a kind of axiom – that in the life of the world, it is already the case that certain things, if one does not take away the possibility of following their own laws, regulate themselves in a very strange way.

Dear attendees, if tomorrow someone were to come up with a way of seriously influencing the birth of a boy or girl in embryonic development, then, I am firmly convinced, the most terrible chaos would result. The ratio between the number of girls and boys that are born would create a terrible, catastrophic situation; crises and catastrophes would occur in a truly horrific manner. Only by keeping this, so to speak, from people's rational judgment, only in this way does the strangely wonderful relationship arise – which is, of course, approximate, like everything in nature – that every woman can find her man and every man his woman. And if a man remains unmarried, then a woman must also remain unmarried for him. Of course, where human will comes into play, disastrous results occur; but if we have a social life, we must look with a certain interest at that which works to a certain extent through its own laws. And you can be quite sure that when associations with real understanding are able to shape economic entities in which consumption and production take place in such a way that only the necessary work is done in the most rational way, then, as far as possible, people's needs will also be able to be satisfied, because one thing leads to the other. Real thinking makes this clear.

I would also like to point out that when discussing such questions, one must think in real terms above all and get rid of abstractions. In the scientific field, it is also bad when people think up all kinds of theories. If, for example, someone in the scientific field were to develop a theory as Gesell does in the economic field, then facts would soon become too much for him; he would only have to belittle the value of theories a little. In the economic sphere, the aim is to intervene in real life and to think practically. Practical thinking is precisely what spiritual science demands. Spiritual science thinks practically in the spiritual realm; it teaches people to think practically. This does not result in complicated theories. It educates people, and it will also educate them to think practically in economic life. And this practical thinking is the task.

The seminar evening is based on the three previous lectures by Roman Boos on “Phenomenological Social Science” from October 4, 5 and 6, 1920. The discussion will be opened.

Hermann Eichenberger: I would like to ask the speaker a question. If we strive to transform public life in the spirit of threefolding, then we have to consider in which area we can begin. So I would like to ask: Can one start with the transformation of public life in the political and legal sphere? More precisely: Is it correct to think of the legal leadership in such a way that people place their trust in a certain leadership - or not? It concerns the way the legislative body is elected, the electoral system. In the “Key Points” this is described as a fundamental issue.

Eugen Kolisko is of the opinion that it is necessary to ensure that there is a base in parliament from which one can work for threefolding. For example, an appeal has been circulated by Dr. Thomastik calling for Austria to be combined into a single constituency, albeit without reference to the threefolding idea. But it is not possible to keep quiet about threefolding.

Roman Boos shares Dr. Kolisko's view. Above all, a national educational program is needed on a large scale; lectures must be given so that the idea of threefolding pervades people's minds. The matter that Dr. Thomastik has raised is only a surrogate, no matter how beautifully conceived and well-intentioned it may be.

Hermann Eichenberger emphasized that Mr. Thomastik had shown courage; he had also given lectures on the threefold social order.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I do not have much to say about this matter, after what I have heard about it. You can imagine from my previous work that at the moment I stood up for the threefold social organism, I considered it a necessity to introduce this threefold social organism into the public life of modern civilization first. And since then, I have repeatedly stated on a wide variety of occasions that, after a thorough examination of the conditions of modern life, the situation is as follows: either we manage to make the impulse of threefolding truly popular, so that it comes to life – it is not utopian, it must come to life – or we will not make any progress at all. You can read about this again in my collected essays on the threefold social order, which have just been published by the Stuttgart publishing house of Kommenden Tages; the book is called “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus”.

And so perhaps I may say that every such comment, that one should present the threefold order in a disguised way, reminds me of what I have experienced with anthroposophy for 20 years, namely that very clever people have come again and again and said: Yes, somehow presenting anthroposophy, we can't do that, we first have to somehow make it more palatable in some other way and the like. I myself have never chosen any other path than to present Anthroposophy to the world in an absolutely true and unadorned way, and I have always rejected everything that did not openly advocate for Anthroposophy, thereby incurring sufficient enmity, which is of no concern to me in essence. And so I can only say, my dear assembled guests, that when it comes to seeking the most direct and rapid way to work for the threefold social order, I am quite happy to speak wherever I am invited. If people want to come up with all kinds of secondary proposals, for example, with proposals for modifications to this or that electoral law, which would only be considered if we were in the process of implementing the threefold social order and had political-legal link had been crystallized out of the social organism. When people come up with such things, I have to say that they seem to me – and I say this entirely without emotion – like a renewal of old political wheeling and dealing, and I am not interested in that. I am not interested in it! Now the question is being asked:

I would like to ask Dr. Steiner about how one should imagine the organization of a free spiritual life. Experience shows that artists, scientists and other intellectual workers are the hardest to bring to reasonable cooperation. How can one think of such an organization? Can it even be an organization in the usual sense?

Dear attendees, I would like to start by emphasizing one thing in response to this question: The threefold order of the social organism, as presented in my Key Points of the Social Question and elsewhere, is very often spoken of as if it were some kind of utopia, whereas everything that is presented in it comes from a thoroughly practical way of thinking and also pursues the goal of being taken up in a practical way. On the other hand, however, the character of utopianism, of utopia, is being stamped on this threefold social order movement through numerous questions, even from well-meaning people. It really cannot be a matter of taking the fifth and sixth steps today if one wants to be a practical person without first taking the first step. Now, however, this question points to a difficulty in taking the first step. In the case of the life of the spirit, which in the direction of the impulse of threefolding must be a free life of the spirit, one can of course least of all expect that it can somehow be reorganized overnight. But one could realize threefolding overnight, realize it immediately. One can really do it. One would have to do nothing else but realize it in the same way as the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. And I must, if only to bring the whole discussion down from the abstract heights at which it has been conducted today, to something more concrete, point to this concrete manifestation of the Waldorf School, which has now been in existence for a year.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, when a number of people sit down to make decisions based on principle, for example, regulations for the school system with regard to curricula and teaching times, then – and I mean this quite seriously – these people are basically always very clever, of course. And if you put it together, paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 can be made in such a way that you say: the teacher should teach in a certain way, this or that subject must be taught according to these or those principles, and so on. And I am convinced that, in their abstract content, these dozens of paragraphs could contain something extraordinarily beautiful and powerful, but only in abstract form. Whether they can be applied depends entirely on whether the people are available to do so. Let us assume the most extreme case: let us assume that in a particular age and territory, due to some conditions, we only have people who cannot rise above a certain level of education because, in a particular territory and in a particular period of time, no geniuses are born, only 200 people of average intelligence. Now, one can be quite convinced – if one has real thinking, one sees this immediately – that even then these moderately clever people will elect their best representatives, and when these meet, that they will still make their best paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 and so on, for example, that teachers should teach in this or that subject in this or that way. But all that is not what matters in the world at all. If we really want to take account of the available forces, then it is first of all important to bring together those who are considered capable from among the people.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is what has been attempted, for example, at the Waldorf School. And no paragraphs have been drawn up; at most, I have given a lecture course and held seminars before we opened the school. We also had many discussions together during the school year. I have also held a short seminar course again before the opening of the second school year. But everything that is done in the Waldorf School is done by the community of those personalities who are there, that is, out of their abilities, out of their strengths; without any [paragraphs] being put in place, everyone does their best according to their abilities. And there we have a small circle of what you will now call it, an organization of the free spiritual life, there you have a small circle that is completely self-sufficient, that works entirely from its own abilities and intentions. At some point, something like a section had to be taken out of the other states. It was possible in Württemberg because there was still a gap in the school law, and this gap could be used to bring in this Waldorf school. Here in the canton of Solothurn, it could not be done, as is well known. The thing is, therefore, not to go to abstractions, but to people and let people do what they can really do. Now, however, a difficulty is indicated here. It would, of course, be possible if the impulse of threefolding were properly understood, that the representatives of intellectual life would simply find themselves in some territories, which have already been given from previous history, in a wide circle, wanting nothing more than to understand the to understand the self-sufficiency of intellectual life; that is to say, that these representatives of intellectual life – the majority will, after all, consist of the various teachers of the various institutions – that these various representatives of intellectual life would really find the courage to stand on their own.

We have begun in Stuttgart to found a so-called cultural council – I have already pointed this out here on another occasion – and of course we first had to approach those who are concerned. Now, my dear attendees, you cannot suddenly want to place other people in the cultural life than are already there. It is self-evident that anyone who thinks practically will first say to themselves: We want to realize the threefold social order, not create some utopia in a cloud cuckoo land. - So, of course, the first step is to take into account those workers in the spiritual life who are already there. And it is important to realize that this intellectual life is now on its own, that it has detached itself from the unified state. Just by doing that, something is really happening. But it was not very well received, because the university professors in particular said: Well, if the universities were to administer themselves, then my colleague would be the one to help administer it - no, I still prefer to have a minister on the outside. - Because no colleague actually trusts the other. Of course, this is something that must be overcome. But when it comes to real thinking, the situation is as follows: No matter how many artists, scientists and intellectual workers want to go their own way for my sake, the decisive thing is that the spiritual life is self-contained, so that in education and teaching, from the lowest school class to the university professor, nothing but the voice of those who are actively involved in this spiritual life is decisive. Whatever needs to be decided within the spiritual life must be decided on the grand scale, as it is decided in our Waldorf school, that is, only by those who are involved in this spiritual life, not by some parliament or the like or by some ministry that is outside, or at most by a consultant who, because he has grown too old for the teaching profession, has to take care of the department in the Ministry of Education afterwards.

What is important everywhere is that the idea of the threefold social order enters people's minds in its true form. Then it will be seen that it is not a matter of reflecting on these details, but of ensuring that spiritual life is truly externalized simply by the representatives of this spiritual life feeling that they are on their own, and of course being on their own, in that no state can do anything about it. When they feel they have to rely on themselves, a completely different kind of work will be done in this spiritual life. And then, out of this spiritual life, there will arise that which is progress in the sense of the threefold social order and of a true humanity. So it is a matter of not thinking that you have to line up and do something, like lining up lead soldiers in columns, but you have to take life as it is and just bring threefolding into it, and of course you have to take the people who are there now. But it is also a matter of nothing more than these people understanding what is really in the idea of threefolding. So this can be said in answer to such a question.

Yes, my dear audience, there is an organization in spiritual life, things are organized: primary schools are there, and secondary schools and universities are there; an organization, a certain fabric of spiritual life is there. It is not a matter of remelting it all, but of freeing the spiritual life and then letting things happen - and a great deal will certainly happen when the spiritual life is free and left to its own devices. Then those who are fools outside will not be heard. We have a great many complaints about our Waldorf School; we have a great many complaints, in all areas, including here in Dornach, that no one gives us money; but we really have no complaints that the Waldorf School is not heard. They are very gladly heard, one would like to hear the teachers everywhere, they cannot do enough and they are almost torn apart. Those who have something to say will be heard. But that is what it is about; I will also talk about it.

Now the second question:

How does the association present itself in comparison to corporate organizations?

Well, my dear attendees, I would like to tell you, again starting from something concrete: in economic life, too, it is important, as I said on another evening, to really think economically, that is to say, one can think economically in economic life and not think economically in the sense of legal or in the sense of how one has to think in the spiritual organism, but one can really think economically in economic life. Of course, difficulties still arise today; but that is not the point, because these difficulties could gradually be overcome in a very specific way, which I will indicate in a moment. But the point is not to see how the difficulties arise, but rather that one should first of all really take up the associative impulse.

Now, what did we do in Stuttgart after we started working there in April of last year? You see, we didn't just make some kind of abstract attempt and then declaim how the associations should be formed, for example among shoemakers. Instead, we took up a thought that was popular at the time. At the time we took it up, it was not only popular in the proletariat, but was even popular in the business world: the concept of works councils. But we wanted to have the concept of works councils, the institution of works councils, in the sense of threefolding. What did we do? We tried to make the following point to those people who were interested in it – and there were a great many of them at a certain point in time: if the institution of works councils is introduced in an economic area, then it is, of course, foolish to impose legislation in the factories, whereby works councils are introduced in the individual factories, which work there, supervise and the like – that is not the point. That this cannot be the case was most clearly demonstrated when the Soviet Republic was introduced in Hungary – please read the extremely interesting book by Varga, who, I might add, was at the cradle, where he was People's Commissar for Economic Affairs and President of the Supreme Economic Council.

The aim is not to introduce works councils in the way that has now been done in the completely absurd German laws, but to form a works council from the economic life and its individual situations itself. And the idea of allowing a council to emerge from the various branches of economic life, be they branches that are more oriented towards consumption or production, be they members of this or that class, in short, to allow the council members to emerge from economic life, this idea was also popularized among the proletarians. The electoral procedure would have been worked out, once it had been established that business personalities should emerge, who would then come together to form a kind of economic constituent assembly, which would have been a body to be formed across a closed economic area and which would have worked first of all. This was always my message at every discussion evening with the Stuttgart workers' committees, at which this matter was discussed – which had actually progressed quite a bit before it was made impossible. The next thing to be done is for the proletarian to stop talking out of habit in empty phrases and thinking he knows everything. This has been emphasized over and over again.

Now I will give an example, one I have always liked to give to proletarians: After the threefold social order had been discussed, a man stood up for discussion who spoke from a communist point of view and declared that he could say better than anyone else everything that was said about the threefold social order. And so he rattled off a few Communist phrases, and then he said that he was only a cobbler. Now, of course, there was no need to hold that against him, because it is truly not a matter of whether someone is a cobbler or something else. He meant that as a cobbler he could not be a civil servant, but he implied that he could very well be a minister, for example. Well, you see, above all, it was made clear to the people of us that it would be about working; and anyone who thinks practically knows that, through the community, if things are managed properly, a higher level can actually be achieved, at least a higher level than that which each individual, even the most ingenious in the community, has; more can be achieved in the community. The first task of this association of workers' councils as a community should be explained.

So what is the first step towards this association? Not asking all kinds of detailed questions before we have even taken the first step, before we have properly examined life and then, on the basis of this examination, formed an idea of how we can come to associations. But this is possible for everyone, at whatever point in life they are, if they are truly immersed in life, if life strikes them, they can in some way see how they can come together with those closest to them in an associative way – as long as they are not a mere rentier who is not immersed in real life, namely not in [real] economic life. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what must be considered the first step in economic life: that one must come to associations at all – just as in the spiritual realm, the main thing is that people understand what it means to become independent within the spiritual realm. That is what needs to be said about these two areas for the time being. And when these two areas now understand how to stand on the ground that must be recognized by their own essence as theirs, then the political and legal area remains in the end. Then this will already be found, because the first thing to do is to properly form these two wings: intellectual life and economic life. The other thing remains. That will only be found when order has been created in these two wings. That is what must be said about the political and legal life from the idea of threefolding.

Now to an objection:

In Mr. Ith's lecture, it was said that the relationship between the price of goods and the individual production costs should be regulated by the legal system.

Now, if that had really been said, it would of course be a mistake, because the legal field has nothing to do with the price of goods. The price of goods can essentially only arise from that which is determined by the associations as the mutual value according to the principle of the economic primal cell, which has already been mentioned here.

It has not been clearly stated that these relationships are not established in the legal sphere, but only in the economic sphere.

Now, the essential thing is this: that both the distribution of what is produced in the product of labor, which is of course a matter for the economic sphere, and the other thing, [prices], that is quite clear.

Another question:

Will the price of goods have to be fixed?

Dear attendees, if you think in real terms, then it cannot be a matter of setting the price of goods, and it is precisely the threefold social order that must be thought of in real terms and not in abstract terms. If you think in real terms, then you will come to the conclusion that the price of goods is something that arises simply in a particular territory due to the fact that a certain number of people within that territory need certain things in a certain quantity. And it will be necessary to know: only if this price cannot be maintained at a certain level, if the price becomes too high and if this is noticed, then it is necessary that the associations ensure that this product is not produced too little. After all, the aim is to organize economic life in such a way that a price that results from needs can really be maintained at its level. This cannot be achieved by setting a price, because it is clear that if the price of any product is too low, then too much of that product will be produced. And then it is a matter of regulating this production by redirecting the workers who work on it to another area. But if a price that is too high is paid for it, the opposite is the case.

It is not a matter of making laws. The associations will not have the power to make laws; the associations will have to work continuously to ensure that, firstly, unnecessary work is not actually done, with much being wasted, as I have already described here, and, secondly, that everyone is actually placed in the position where they can work best, but in the interest of the whole. These associations will have to work in just such a way as to give economic life its appropriate configuration. So it will be a matter of thinking about the first step first, about the formation of the associations, and then simply getting these associations started; they can simply start working as soon as they are in place. Then there is another question:

Is the distribution of the profit share determined only within the company?

This cannot be the issue at all. Rather, the question of the needs of the individual in an economic area will depend on the entire economic area. And this fact, which is being looked at here – the distribution of the profit share within the company – does not actually become a real fact at all, because it simply has to be brought out of the associative realm. Whoever works this or that must receive this or that for his product of labor. It cannot be a matter of determining one's share of the profits within the enterprise; rather, it is inherent in the whole structure of economic life that one must receive one's corresponding share of the profits.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to summarize, because it is already half past ten and we cannot go on talking until midnight. I would have liked to say a lot more; of course, one always arrives a little late at the actual specific questions. I would like to summarize by saying the following: You see, the impulse of the threefold social order has been brought into the world on condition that people are found to take it up.

What do we need today? We do not need quackery, such as how to best arrange this or that, for example, lesson plans. Oh, I am convinced that even people who are not very talented, when they sit down and work out beautiful lesson plans for themselves, the lesson plans will be very beautiful. I do not mean that humorously at all, but quite seriously. The point is to have an understanding of reality so that you know what you can do with reality.

Now, of course, you can say: You tackled the cultural council, you tackled the works council, nothing came of it. — But things failed precisely because people got carried away and asked: Yes, what will become of my sewing machine in the tripartite social organism? My dear ladies and gentlemen, that is only a detail, a detail that has actually occurred; I could give you thousands of such examples. It should be clear that one should first understand the threefold nature of the social organism in much the same way that one understands the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics. Do you think that someone understands the Pythagorean theorem by approaching all right-angled triangles and trying out whether the theorem is correct? No, he knows that once he has understood it, it is only a matter of applying it in the right way in practice in each individual case. And so it is also a matter of seeing through the things of the “key points of the social question” in themselves. One must know that they can be applied in reality if one only acquires the practical hand and the practical attitude. That is what matters. The fact that things were not carried out was due to something that I do not want to discuss now, my dear audience. But I am not afraid to say what I have tried to do, and it will be the same with another step: you just have to keep trying until the matter is understood. You will just have to try everything – I know that the matter is still subject to misunderstandings and ambiguities – you will just have to try everything as long as this matter is not understood. And it has not been understood so far.

When I saw that I could not make headway with the illustrious representatives of intellectual life, that I could not make headway with the proletariat, which is turning to a belief in authority that is much worse than was ever the belief in authority in the Catholic Church. When it became clear that nothing could be done with the representatives of intellectual life and the proletariat, the question was not to discuss it, but to do something real. And so I thought that one should at least see if, in the wide area of Central Europe, which is truly suffering enough from misery and hardship, fifty people could be found who could simply be summoned to Stuttgart and taught the real foundations for working in public life. For today, most people in public life speak without any basis, without knowing anything about what has happened and is still happening, otherwise there could never have been a National Assembly like the one that met in Weimar; they speak out of some emotions that they form from experiences that are not even the very latest, but which are the expression of old historical and old political views. That is the essential feature of our present-day parties: what is represented within a present-day party has no objectivity at all, it is only a shadow of what once existed. The point was to find these fifty people so that we could initially develop real public activity in this way. They did not find each other, my dear attendees, these fifty people did not find each other!

What we are dealing with today is not that we are discussing election laws in an abstract way and whether an association can be compared to a corporation and so on, but what we are dealing with today is that we get as many people as possible with initiative, because today it is not about how we vote, but about the right people getting into the right places. And today, too, those who are inwardly imbued with understanding, imbued with insight, imbued with the practical sense of the threefold social organism, will, if there are only a sufficient number of them (you can't do anything with a small number), these people with initiative, they will work. They will be elected to the right places, no matter what the electoral laws, and what is to be will come about. Therefore, it is of primary importance that we have a sufficient number of people with insight into the necessities of the time and with the necessary initiative. If we were able to follow those who have led the world into ruin because they at least developed some learned initiative, we will certainly also follow those who develop healthy initiative. That is why we need people with initiative and insight today. And if we succeed in winning people with initiative and insight, then the threefold social order will march forward, which it did not do before. But we must work towards this goal openly and honestly, without masks or embellishment.

Before the evening lecture on “Physiological Therapy on the Basis of Spiritual Science” at the first anthroposophical college

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It has been suggested that I should give another lecture of some kind on the threefold social order. And since we have so many events, there is no other way than for me to attempt to give this requested lecture on the threefold social order tomorrow evening. But since this wish, which has been expressed many times, has arisen from the dissatisfaction that remains from the various discussions that have taken place so far about this threefold order, I would like to ask you to formulate your wishes and questions in this regard, so that precisely what is felt to be unclear can be taken into account and discussed. This will enable me to organize tomorrow evening's lecture in such a way that it covers the points that various people wish to know about. Therefore, those honored attendees who would like to hear something in one direction or another about the threefold social order, namely about economic life in it, are asked to write their questions or requests on a piece of paper and hand them in tomorrow morning between 9 and 10 a.m. at the entrance to the west portal of the Goetheanum. Someone will be there to take these questions. So, I would ask those who have something to ask and who have a wish to include it in these questions.

Dear assembled guests! A wish has been expressed that I should say something here about more economic questions, that is, about the economic realm of the threefold social organism. Actually, my intention during this School of Spiritual Science course has been to devote my energies to showing how spiritual science can have a fertilizing effect on the most diverse scientific fields and on life in general. The field of economic life is precisely that which most urgently requires the insightful collaboration of those active within the anthroposophical movement. And above all, it is necessary that what these practitioners can gain from their practical experience be brought to the spiritual scientific field, just as the scientific knowledge from many different fields has been so beautifully brought to it from so many different sides. We shall be speaking about these matters in greater detail in a moment. Since the wish has been expressed that I should also say something about the third link of the social organism, I thought it best to put down on paper the wishes that have been expressed by the honored audiences themselves, so that I could, as it were, work them into today's lecture. Today, however, was so busy that this could not be done in the way I would have liked, because the most diverse wishes were formulated in 39 questions, which really could not be studied in the short time available to me today. But in addition, I have seen from the way in which these questions were asked how much still needs to be done in this area in particular, and so it will be necessary for me to discuss some of this today, which to a certain extent emerges from the general impression created by these questions. And I will then take the opportunity to continue today's reflections in more detail next Tuesday at 8 a.m., so that perhaps those asking the questions and others who would like to learn more about these questions will get their money's worth. Today, I would like to speak only preliminarily, so to speak, so that on Tuesday we can go into the details in a very practical way. But such preliminary speaking is necessary for a healthier mutual understanding. Then, perhaps, on Tuesday evening, a kind of general discussion, a kind of discussion, can be added to what I will have to say, and in this way we will perhaps be able to cope with the matter.

Dear attendees, although I have already done so here in the late evening hours, I would like to emphasize once again that my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” and, in connection with it, the other book , which has now been published by the Stuttgart publishing house “Der Kommende Tag”, “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” (The Threefold Order of the Social Organism), that these two books are intended to be read in a practical way and that those who take them theoretically misunderstand them. They are intended for those people who, as it were, have a vivid and lively sense of social life and are able to grasp it. It will hardly be possible to substantially advance what is today called the social question through other people as such. Above all, I have already emphasized that nothing utopian should be sought in these two books. But I have noticed that many people who approach these two books, basically translate the matter into utopianism out of a certain tendency of our time, that they form ideas according to their own taste, which then appear utopian. I would like to draw your attention to a remark that you will find on some page of my “Key Points”. There I say explicitly: In a matter that is conceived in practical terms, conceived as a challenge for our time, one can think differently about the details of the implementation. And that is why in the book “The Core Points of the Social Question” I only give examples of the details. What is said about one or the other detailed question concerns things that can be carried out in the most diverse ways in practical life. The fact that I also speak about these things in the sense that I present a [possible] realization [happens, therefore,] so that one can see vividly how the whole impulse of the threefold social organism is put into practice. Above all, it was my opinion that after this book was published, people who are practical in their lives would set about letting the results of their practical life enter into the stream of the social question, inspired by this book.

From the questions that have been put to me again today, I can see how much thoroughly impractical thinking lives in our time and how difficult it is for people in the present day to think practically. This is precisely the tragedy of our time, this is the great difficulty that does not really allow us to approach life, that on the one hand we are completely immersed in materialistic views and ideas that we have absorbed through the one-sided pursuit of natural science, that we have become accustomed to looking at all things as we necessarily have to look at external natural things - including things that have to be looked at differently from these external natural things, things that above all necessitate that one penetrates more deeply than one has to in relation to external natural things - that we have actually lost all feeling for the appropriate treatment of these things. And so, on the one hand, one thinks in a completely materialistic way and, on the other hand, in a completely abstract way, especially when it comes to social issues. Thoughts are expressed that have no prospect whatsoever of having any real impact on real life. Or one also finds that people who believe they are putting forward something quite real simply indulge in generalities. We are accustomed to hearing practitioners expound in generalities when discussing something as specific as the social question. It is simply the case that through centuries of education within Western civilization, we have not been brought closer to life, but have actually been alienated from life. And I would like to say: this realization leaps out of everything, how much one has actually been alienated from life, but how one misjudges the nature and character of this alienation. This is misjudged within the most diverse parties, and each party always blames the other. This was particularly evident to me from the questions that were asked.

There were questions that reminded me of some of the bitterness I have felt in dedicating myself to the study of modern, contemporary social conditions over the decades. For example, the question arises in several forms, which suggests the almost impossibility of an understanding that should play a role between the proletariat on the one hand and the other classes of humanity on the other. On the proletarian side, there is a question that is actually couched in the form of an accusation, a bitter accusation. I may, so that nothing remains in the background, but so that we face each other in full sincerity, honesty and truth, I may read this question, which actually involves an accusation, here:

The workers gathered here have found that it is not possible to work together with anthroposophists, with bourgeois circles; in particular, the student body seems to lack the impulse to be able to think its way into the cooperation of all people, otherwise it would be impossible to continue here as fellow students.

That, on the one hand, my dear attendees: no knowledge at all of how much there is a struggle within the student body to come to terms with the social demands of our time! A terrible mistrust has taken hold, especially in the circles of the proletariat. And anyone who is able to look at the social question with open eyes cannot ignore this mistrust, because it is one of the most real factors. But it actually concerns less the student body, which, it seems to me, is wrongly accused by the proletariat, at least it does not concern part of the student body. But, ladies and gentlemen, in general it must be said that in our time, especially in the circles of the bourgeoisie and those just above and below the bourgeoisie, there is little inclination to really look at the social question from its proletarian aspect, to really gain an understanding of how the proletarian question is intimately connected with the entire social question and thus with the fate of our modern civilization in general. As I said, I am only speaking preliminarily today, so that we can then understand each other better, because one can only present these things sympathetically if one knows the background to them.

You see, my dear audience, when we began last year to work from April onwards from Württemberg in the sense of the “Appeal” I had written and my “Key Points of the Social Question” for a recovery of our social life, there was the time, which in a was still, in a certain sense – let us say, overshadowed by the one or illuminated by the other – overshadowed or illuminated by what was like a kind of revolutionary wave sweeping over Europe; and at that time one met above all the big bourgeois and their followers, the entrepreneurial class, in the stage of fear. They were terribly afraid of what could arise from the depths of proletarian social existence, and in April and May one came into a social wave where socialism, or at least socialization, was dreamed of, or rather, dreamed up in wide circles. But then came different times. It turned out how little the proletariat is actually trained in the first place to arrive at any clear formulation of its demands in such a way that something socially positive could arise from it. Certainly, the broadest circles of the proletariat would be sympathetic to the impulse towards threefolding in particular if it were possible to overcome that which is the leadership of this proletariat. And we must not deceive ourselves about this, as can be clearly seen from the experience we have just had with our efforts: the proletariat will only come to a clear understanding when all the leaders are gone and when it can rely on its own instincts and reason. One will be able to speak to them. One can speak to the instincts of the proletarians, one can speak to the reason of the proletarians, but one cannot speak to the leaders, who combine two characteristics: firstly, a terrible parroting of what the bourgeois have thought out for them, and secondly, in all their behavior, an exaggeration of the most vulgar philistinism. But that, as I said, is directed only against the leadership.

But it must be recognized, as it is necessary in our time in general, to take it very seriously and radically into account that everything that stands out from the old times and would like to bring up what was before 1914, that it is not suitable for further development – that must be recognized. And as long as people in all parts of the civilized world think of nothing but how to get so-and-so back into this or that office because he was in such an office before, before 1914 or during the war, as long as people think like that, as long as they do, practically nothing can be worked out that can lead to progress. We absolutely need new people who emerge from a new way of thinking. We have no use for those who want to fall back on the old ways because they are too lazy to develop ideas that will lead to the appreciation of new people. I said that different times were coming. The proletariat proved that it could not come to any clarity on its own. The panic gradually turned into a kind of certainty, certainty to the extent that people said to themselves: Now we can try to continue along the old lines. I would like to say that at the time, from week to week, one could see how everything that was previously entrepreneurial fell back into the old ways of thinking; and now it is basically back on track, but just doesn't realize that it is dancing on a volcano. That was the first experience, that the complete uselessness of the leaders of the proletariat had emerged, so to speak, and that on the other hand the complete impotence of those who had previously held leading positions in the economic field had emerged. Yes, in these circles and in the entourage of these circles there is really no inclination to get to know what is actually pulsating in the present, what often wants to work its way to the surface from the proletariat in an unclear way. They simply do not want to get involved in what is important.

That is why so little of the first third of my “Key Points of the Social Question” has been understood, that first third, which is mainly concerned with presenting that “double bookkeeping”. I am not talking about the one Mr. Leinhas spoke about here in a historical context, but I am talking about another one that he even hinted at. It is that double bookkeeping that has gradually been consists in regarding the world, so to speak, only in terms of its material, mechanical context, in thinking only within this material, mechanical context, in, as I once put it, turning the practice of life into a routine, and then, on the other hand, wanting to develop all kinds of beautiful, all kinds of spiritual, all kinds of moral things.

We know how much the aim of practical people is to have their practice inside the factory, but then, when they have closed the door of the office in the evening, their aim is to be able to indulge themselves somewhere where thoughts can live freely, where the soul can develop, where one can become inwardly warm in thoughts that finally free one from what is behind the office door and so on; there should be a spiritual life outside of the factory – that will be such a motto [for these people], and my book actually wanted to reverse this motto. In this book I wanted to draw attention to the fact that it is not a matter of closing the factory behind you to find spiritual life outside, but that it is a matter of carrying your mind into the factory in the morning when you go into the factory so that reason, spirit and so on might permeate the material, mechanical life, so that the spirit does not develop alongside real life as a luxury, which it has gradually become through this double accounting. On the one hand, there is the business practice, which I don't need to describe to you further, as it is often found today; on the other hand, there is the church, there are the folded hands, there is the asking for a happy, eternal life, the interweaving of the two.

What is needed, this thinking together, is highly inconvenient for many people. On the one hand, they want a spiritless routine that they can adopt without really being present to it, and on the other hand, they want a mystical haziness through which they can satisfy the lust of their souls. How often have we experienced, especially at the time when the transition should be made from anthroposophical spiritual striving to practical striving, that people of practical life approached us who wanted to become successful in practical life from the practices that have arisen in recent decades. How do these people want to become successful? Discussions that have been held, when it came to recruiting people, say for the future or for the coming day - people who were supposed to work with the real spiritual, but who conquer the material - these discussions have shown: Such people are extremely difficult to find today for the simple reason that out of economic life, the practice has developed that the young person actually allows himself to be trained from the outside. He lets himself be brought into a business somewhere, and while his thoughts are actually somewhere else, on a spiritual level, sometimes on a very good one, he does not carry the spirit into his business. He is not there with his soul, he lets himself be trained from the outside, he lets himself be made business-savvy; then he lets himself be sent somewhere, to America or London, and there he is trained further. Afterwards he knows how to do it, and then he goes back, and then he does this or that.

Yes, my dear attendees, this leads to the social question, because we cannot make progress with such people; if we do not decide to shine a light into these things and work on them, nothing can be done. We need people who are educated, even through school, to intervene with their initiative when it comes to preparing themselves in the right way for practical life, so that, as it were, the initiative wants to come from within. To do this, however, it is necessary that the school does not stifle this initiative. I would like to say that, especially when viewed from the human side, this is the case.

A completely different spirit must enter into our economic life. Above all, this spirit will invigorate the connection that must exist between the human being and what he or she produces directly or indirectly in the world. For many branches of our lives, this connection no longer really exists. Many people are utterly indifferent to what they work on and how what they work on fits into the social context. They are only interested in how much they will acquire through their labor, that is, they reduce all interest they have in the outer material world to the interest they may have in the amount of money that can come to them from this outer world through their particular constellation in relation to this outer world. This reduction to the interest in acquiring, not in the thing that is being made, is what basically poisons our entire economic life. But here also lie the serious obstacles to understanding the impulse of the threefold social order.

As I said, I am speaking preliminarily, but I would like to refer to a few aphorisms today. It has been mentioned again and again – and rightly so – that we must work towards an economic life that is governed by the impulse of association. Associations – I have had a strange experience. I once spoke about associations in a circle of proletarians in Stuttgart. They said to me: We have heard of all kinds of things, of cooperatives, of trusts, of cartels, of syndicates, but we have not heard anything about associations. - One must be able to grasp the novelty of this concept quite practically, especially from the point of view of economic life, quite practically, I would say quite vividly, if one wants to find one's way around in these matters. Associations are not cooperatives, associations are not cartels, associations are not syndicates; above all, associations are unions, or rather, federations that work towards a specific goal. What can this goal be?

We will gradually approach a practical understanding of economic life: what can this goal be? My dear audience, this goal can be none other than working towards a very specific pricing of individual goods. It will not be possible to think correctly in terms of political economy until one is able to place the price problem at the center of this economic thinking, as the third third of my book “The Core of the Social Question” does, perhaps not always pedantically with theories, but certainly in the spirit of the whole.

What is important about the price problem? It is important to realize that each good can only have one specific price, at most there should be small fluctuations up and down. Each good corresponds to a specific price, because, dear attendees, the price of a good is – now let go of the money, I will also talk about that the day after tomorrow – the price of a good is nothing other than what represents its value in comparison to the value of the other goods that a person needs. The price expresses a ratio, for example the ratio between the value of a skirt and a loaf of bread or a boot and a hat. This proportionality is what ultimately leads to the price problem. But this proportionality cannot be solved by any ordinary arithmetic, nor can it be determined by law, by any body at all, but can only be achieved through associative work.

What is it in today's economic life that works against the healthy formation of prices, and what is it that has led us into such economic misery? It is that the price of commodities is not formed out of economic life, but that something intervenes between the commodities – the goods that correspond to needs – that cannot be a commodity, that can only serve as a means of equalization for the mutual value relationships of the commodity: money. As I said, we will discuss all of this in more detail, but I would like to touch on a few general points now. Money has been endowed with a commodity character, namely through the emergence of the real ambiguity between paper money and gold money, which is now at its culmination. Thus it has become possible not only to exchange commodities, with money serving merely as a means of facilitating exchange in a large area with a rich division of labor and employment, but also for money itself to become a commodity. And this is simply demonstrated by the fact that one can trade in money, that one can buy and sell money, that the value of money changes through speculation, changes through what one accomplishes on the money market. But now something is coming into play here that very clearly shows how the unitary state still holds together today what wants to become tripartite. Money as we have it today: its value is, so to speak, determined by the state in accordance with the law. It is the state that sets the impulse that essentially determines the value of this 'commodity'. And through this interaction of two things, the exchange of goods and the determination of the monetary value on the part of the state, our entire economic life is made confusing, so that it is no longer comprehensible to the person who is in it today.

If only the people who are involved in economic life would honestly admit to themselves that, on the one hand, any amount of money that is circulating is a complete economic abstraction – circulating like the most abstract concept in our thinking, and that on the other hand there is the production, exchange and consumption of goods, which is so closely connected with human weal and woe, and that, to a certain extent, the present monetary value, like a great forgery, drowns out everything that is supposed to be alive. These things, however, must not be viewed in an inflammatory way, but must be considered soberly and soberly, quite objectively, otherwise one cannot get to the bottom of them. It is ideal, in the first place, that every kind of commodity within economic life should be based, in a very real sense, on having a very definite value. Some kind of commodity X must have a definite relationship to the other kinds of commodities in terms of its value.

But for this value to emerge, various things are necessary. First, it is necessary that the knowledge be available, the real technical-universal knowledge, to be able to produce the relevant goods in the best possible condition and in a rational way, that is, with the least labor and without harming the human being, for any particular age. And secondly, it is necessary that no more people are employed in the [whole production process] than are necessary to ensure that this one commodity, in particular, receives the one specific price, the clearly defined price, based on its production costs and so on. If too many workers are employed in the direction leading to a particular type of goods, the goods will receive a price that is too low; if too few workers are employed, the goods will receive a price that is too high; and it is therefore necessary to understand how many people must be employed in a particular area of goods production in order to be successful in economic life.

This knowledge of the number of people employed in the production of a particular type of goods intended for consumption is necessary in order to arrive at the culmination of economic life, the price problem. This is done by working positively, by negotiating with people in economic life how they are to be placed in their jobs. Of course, this must not be understood in a pedantic or bureaucratic sense. You will notice that complete freedom, including economic freedom, is secured for the human being precisely through the means that The Core Problems of the Social Question propose. It is not a matter of a bureaucratic or mechanistic Leninization or Trotskyization, but of an association through which, on the one hand, industrial life in particular is considered in the right way and through which, on the other hand, the freedom of the individual is fully preserved. So you see what ultimately matters. But how money comes into it: we will see that the day after tomorrow.

What matters first, despite the intervention of money, is the mutual value of the goods, that is, the mutual value of the products of human labor. That is what matters, and the associations must work to extract this value through their actions in economic life, through their negotiations, through their mutual contracts, and so on. Yes, but how do such negotiations come about that deal with the mutual value of goods? Never through an organization of equals, through a corporation of equals, but only through associations. How are you supposed to figure out what the ratio of the price of a boot to the price of a hat should be if you don't let the hatmakers and cobblers work together associatively, if there is no association, if no associations are formed? Associations within a branch do not exist, because these are not associations, but associations go from branch to branch, and above all go from the producers to the consumers. Associations are the exact opposite of what leads to trusts, syndicates and the like. We shall then also see how certain connections between the entrepreneurs of a product category are necessary; but these then have a completely different function. But the process by which the right price comes into being – I do not say is fixed, but comes into being – can only develop through associative life, passing from branch to branch; only when the associations work together with their experiences can the right price be fixed on the basis of experience. It will not be more complicated than, for example, life in our police states or in our democracies; on the contrary, although it goes from industry to industry, it will be much simpler.

Now, it must be clear to everyone that life thinks quite differently, if I may put it this way, than the abstract thinkers, even if they are practitioners. These abstract thinkers will think above all: So, it depends either on the associations of the producers [with each other] or on the associations of the producers with the consumers. Yes, but, ladies and gentlemen, that is only a matter of time. Just imagine (it is drawn on the board) that you associate the producers of industry A with some number of consumers of B, these with the producers of industry C and these in turn somehow with some number of consumers of D – well, then an association arises.

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But it arises in such a way that initially one only looked at the producer or only looked at the consumer; but the consumer is, after all, a producer of another article, unless he is a rentier or a loafer. It is not at all important that you proceed according to [abstract] categories; if you think about the matter in a more universal way and make associations out of all the connections, then you also have the consumers in the connections. But the way things are today, you can't even start with the producers among themselves, because only trusts or cartels would arise that only want to have business interests, I don't even want to say, but can only have.

Today, the main task is to form these associations according to the model that I once mentioned as a very primitive model. We wanted to establish a consumer association for bread in the Anthroposophical Society and associate a bread manufacturer with it, so that a relationship would arise between all those who could pay a certain price the Anthroposophists, by producing something else at the same time; and for the value of what they produced, they received what the baker in question produced. So, it actually came down to influencing the price in mutual business transactions. That will be the essence of these associations, that they gradually, by actually functioning properly, strive towards the correct, economically justified price.

If you consider this carefully, you will see that it does not contradict practical experience, insofar as it can still be gained at all in today's perverse economic life. Because take the simplest economy: in the simplest economy, the person who knows how to manage ultimately also has to find the right prices, and he develops the right prices based on his conditions. He determines the right prices from two specific components: firstly, from what he would like to get for his products, and secondly, from what he gets; that is, even if it is still so vague, he enters into an association with the consumer. It is always there, even if it is not externally closed. It is just that our lives have become so complicated that we have to bring these things to full consciousness and external form. If you don't think your way into these things, then something utopian always comes out. But above all, it would be necessary to bring together the experiences that are related to production and consumption. And in those circles that work with us, we would need, above all, practitioners who could, so to speak, synthesize the experiences of life into a science of experience about economic life, so that - and this could well be - it would start from experience.

But today, my dear attendees, you can read about economists in the following style: For any given territory, let's say Germany, they calculate how much of the total wealth, or let's say of the total annual income generated in that territory, is made up of entrepreneurial profits, and how much is made up of the sums that have to be used for intermediate trade in the broadest sense. And those who talk about these things as economists usually reduce everything to the abstract monetary relationship. But that does not give any insight into the real course of economic conditions. One would only get an insight if one heard from those who are involved in economic life how they work in intermediate trade. One would have to be told, for example, how lives are ruined in intermediate trade. And one would also learn, for example, the interesting fact that in a closed economic area, approximately as much entrepreneurial profit is reaped as unnecessary stocks of goods are brought onto the market. Quite curiously, the number given for any territory as the sum of entrepreneurial profits roughly corresponds to the market price of those goods that are unnecessarily in stock on the market and are not sold. You see a connection there that you can see, look at together, but which would only be interestingly illuminated if the practitioners, who basically don't understand the real practice, if these practitioners would come and show you how things really work for them, so that it comes out exactly how the connections are between what is worked and not sold on the market and the entrepreneurial profit that now comes from surplus labor, I mean the pure capital profit. It is quite natural that people who have no idea of how such connections are in economic life are also not in a position today to talk about the actual composition of associations. For what is the task of these associations? Their task is to use the very knowledge that is still lacking in order to arrive at the economically justified price. When association and association exchange their experiences, when these experiences are exchanged in a lively way, instead of being calculated, the price problem can be solved simply and practically in the end. There is no theory to solve the price problem. It cannot be formulated, but only by starting with any given product and really experiencing in life which other products are exchanged with it. Only then can you practically determine how much this product should cost, but practically and with almost complete accuracy. This cannot be done with numbers, but by having a group of people who have experience in one industry, another group who have experience in a different industry, a third in a third industry, and so on, so that these groups can pool their experiences. The matter is not as complicated as one might imagine today; and you can be quite certain that the number of people needed to get the associations up and running in this way and solve the price problem is not as high as the number of people that certain states have used for their militarism and policing. And that is the most important thing in economic life. Then, in a sense, everyone has a standard; they can see from the price how much they need to work. There is no need to think about how to get people to work, because they can see from the price-determining factor how much they have to work; they will be able to act accordingly, and they will be able to negotiate on a completely different basis with other people, on a reciprocal basis, about the amount of work they do, the time they work, and so on.

I would just like to say this today: What is the most important thing in economic life? The price of goods. If you look beyond economic life, in the sense of the “key points of the social question”, you will also find what is most important in state life – but we must think of a living state life. In the life of the state, the most important thing is the rights and duties that can be established through democratic coexistence, which people set for each other. We must bear in mind how, in economic life, experiences are gathered through the activity of associations, in order to arrive at the price of goods that ultimately dominates economic life; we must bear in mind how everything that does not tend towards this price fixing must be removed from economic life. In the life of the state, democracy, or, when it comes to the life of the mind, the free integration of the spiritual element into the social organism; in the life of the mind it is trust that founds the constitution, in the life of the state it is the intuitive sense of rights and duties. The associative principle works towards the right price. Economic life needs trust as a force of spiritual life, needs a sense of right and duty. With this rhythm of right and duty, we have a duality, just as we have exhalation and inhalation in human life. This is what should pulsate in state life, and trust is what should pulsate in spiritual life.

Regarding the questions – as I said, today I have only taken the general impression from the various questions – there is, for example, something that comes into question in relation to such a general impression: it is the question of how this spiritual life should actually work on the other two limbs of the social organism, how it should be constituted in itself. But we will talk about that the day after tomorrow. But just let your soul be filled — intuitively and without prejudice, not influenced by what is already there and has been constantly brought into the spiritual life from the state side — let your soul be filled with what the self-contained spiritual life is. Now, my dear audience, I think you will all be able to understand me quite well in this: When spiritual life is free, then the first thing to take effect in it will be the steadfastness that is born of trust; this steadfastness will take effect to the same extent that this spiritual life is emancipated from the state. And with all those “pigtails” who wanted nothing to do with our cultural advice, it was quite clear – I have already hinted at this from a different angle – that if it came down to the efficiency borne by trust, not the efficiency stamped by the state, then they would very soon no longer be sitting on their curule chairs. That is why the people fled so quickly from our call for a cultural council on all sides that, figuratively speaking, the tails of the tails and coats flew far, far in the wind from the speed with which they fled when we called on them to join us in a free intellectual life.

Now, I wanted to speak today, my dear attendees, about some preliminary matters that may lead us to address individual issues in response to the questions raised. Above all, because I see that there is an urgent need for it, I would like to address the specific question regarding the organization of the individual members of the social organism and their interaction. But I want to be understood, and to do so I want to study and process the questions thoroughly for next Tuesday. But you will see from studying the “Key Points of the Social Question” as well as from everything else I have said in this regard, based on our spiritual scientific work, that it is truly not utopian. But perhaps this also gives me a certain right to say that what is meant by the “key points of the social question” should not be translated into utopianism. I hear this utopianism in many of the ways people talk to me, for example, when someone comes and asks: “If we have the threefold social organism, what will happen to this or that?” — That is precisely how the utopian thinks. The practical person, however, thinks above all about whether something positive will be established. It really does not matter what should happen to the banker A, the milliner F, the sewing machine owner C - all these questions are raised - but something else is essential. What is important is that steps be taken that are in line with one or other of the three impulses for the threefold social order.

It is important that some kind of start be made with associations. It must be shown how neither the productive cooperatives nor the consumer cooperatives can work well for the future. We must turn away from the productive cooperatives because they have shown in practice that people with real personal initiative do not devote themselves to them, nor could they. But we must also turn away from the consumer cooperatives, although they are still the best, especially when they start producing for themselves; but they cannot achieve the necessary goal for the future for the simple reason that they do not arise from the association of what is there, ation of what is already there, but because they are still rooted in the most ordinary capitalism – at least in one corner of it, in that they initially organize consumption only on one side and actually incorporate production only into the organization of consumption, if they incorporate it at all. Even less indicative of real progress are cooperatives such as the raw materials cooperative and so on; such cooperatives have no sense of associative life at all, but instead they actually only amount to doing something in a partial area of economic life, in any old corner, while the raw materials question is closely related to the consumption question. One might say, but this is a somewhat figurative way of putting it: within the whole of economic life, it is actually the smokers who should have the greatest interest in the work of processing tobacco raw materials in tobacco-producing areas. Now I would like to know how, in our decadent, perverse economy, the interest that the smoker has in the raw materials question, in the raw materials economy, is connected to the product that he finally vaporizes into the air; after all, he only considers the very outermost periphery. I have chosen only one example, which seems a bit strange because it is so far away; in other examples, the connection is much more noticeable. The necessary associative connection between the procurement of raw materials and consumption is not noticed at all today.

It is simply the case that this abstract thinking always translates what is actually meant in a practical way in the “key points” into a theoretical one. And I found the most theory, the most bare business mysticism, if I dare use the term, when today's practitioners translate the practical ideas of the “key points” into their language, because they usually think only from a very tiny corner; and everything that is outside of this corner, which they, as routiniers, dominate, becomes blurred for them in a nebulous business mysticism. But that is precisely against the associative principle. The associative principle must work towards the value of the goods being determined by their mutual relationship. However, this can only happen if the most diverse sectors associate, because the more sectors that are directly or indirectly associated, the more sectors tend to work out the economically appropriate price of the goods through their activity. You can't calculate the price, but you can combine economic sectors associatively, and if they combine in such a way that the result of this combination is the number of people who have to be employed in each individual sector in the economy as a whole, according to production and consumption, then it comes out all by itself: you give me your boots for so many hats, which I give you. - Money is then only the mediator. But behind what is mediated by money, however much money is inserted as an intermediate product, there is still the value of the boot that determines the value of the hat, the value of bread that determines the value of butter, and so on. But this only comes about as a result of branch rubbing against branch in associative life. To believe that associations can only be established between producers in one branch is to fail to recognize reality. We shall see what that means next time, the day after tomorrow. Association is the union, the uniting, so that this uniting can produce that common exponent which then lives in the price. That is the living development of economic life, and only in this way does this economic life come close to a proper satisfaction of human needs. This can only happen when people place themselves with full interest in economic life, not just asking: What are the interests of my industry? What do I acquire in my industry? How do I employ the people in my industry? - This can only happen when people care about: How my industry must relate to the other industries, so that the mutual values of goods are determined in the right way?

As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, it is not just a cliché when I say that it is a matter of changing the way we think. Anyone who believes that they can get ahead by continuing to bubble along in the old way of thinking is only leading people further into decadence. We must believe today that we really do need to relearn most of all in economic life.

So I'll talk about that the day after tomorrow.