The Rudolf Steiner Archive

at the end of a meeting of members of the Anthroposophical Society at the first Anthroposophical College

Rudolf Steiner: I just want to say a few words at this moment, my dear friends. Speaking too much at general meetings or general assemblies is not something I am particularly known for. There have been quite a number of general assemblies over the years, until the war made that impossible, and I have said many a thing at these general assemblies –– it has basically never been taken into account. And then a number of proposals were made as to how things should actually be done and the like. So basically there is not much reason for me to speak at general meetings, only to say things that are not actually heard. But here I would just like to say a few words about something positive. Because, you see, it won't do much good to have big plans; it's all well and good to have big plans, but you should consider the immediate first. We are here together now, and it seems to me that this is the best opportunity to do something so that we don't go our separate ways again without having done necessary, positive things, things that can be done here and now. Let us talk about something positive for a change.

Above all, I would like to draw your attention to the fact, my dear friends, that when the threefold social order movement emerged quite organically from the anthroposophical movement, it was expected that those who were to work in this or that field would really do so, because a practical impulse had been given with the threefold social order question. Now, from a certain quarter,

A lot of work has been put into creating these Anthroposophical College courses here in Dornach, and the success of these college courses will essentially depend on us as Anthroposophists leaning a little on what these college courses have brought and carrying it out into the world in the future – that will take some work. But perhaps – we still have eight days left for these college courses – perhaps something can be done here to remedy the situation, which has brought us, especially in a certain direction, at least for those who really want to work, a nasty disappointment. That is the following.

You see, my dear friends, it was really meant very seriously that the time should finally come to an end when what was supposed to work together with practice was constantly rejected by so-called practice, so that we could finally make progress; it was calculated that we - in contrast to the routiniers - would find real practitioners precisely in the anthroposophical movement. We have been together for a fortnight now, and it might have been possible for something to have happened, especially in relation to economic thinking, to correct economic thinking on the part of the practitioners among us. We have, however, had various seminar papers. The fact that there have of course been some minor lapses is of no interest to us, because it is simply absolutely necessary. But, my dear friends, what has happened through a co-worker and practitioner, in order to achieve something favorable for the world in the sense of the work of our college courses, has unfortunately so far only resulted in the fact that this morning another envelope arrived with this pack of questions, all of which relate solely to the threefold order. I do not know whether these questions can be formed into at least one lecture by this evening, given the day's other commitments, which will then deal with real economic thinking. I have been told that a few

A Mr. Male at 7 o'clock in the morning, or at some other hour that was perhaps even more impossible - I don't know - meetings were held under the motto that only the practitioners, to the exclusion of the theorists, would come together for once, so that something more sensible would be said - I am only referring to it as a rumor, but it has been said to me. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it would be important that when the student body comes here, they do not leave with the impression that they are all beating each other up because they all have different opinions and cannot express what an association is and the like. It would be much more important to ensure that practitioners really work together in an anthroposophical sense, so that we can present ourselves to the outside world as a real force. You see, this is a positive task that can perhaps be solved in the next eight days: that the practitioners do not isolate themselves because each person says something that the other does not understand. We must therefore try to present ourselves to the world as a society and to build up such a force that the practitioners will actually come together to present something of practical economic thinking. Only in this way can the people who have come here today to learn something really learn something. What will become of our economic endeavors if the students leave with the feeling that they themselves don't know anything? So we need a thorough change in this direction in the next eight days to fulfill our task.

I just wanted to try to bring something positive into the debate for a change.

Roman Boos would like to discuss how, in the opinion of those in the economic world, we can arrive at a point in economic terms where the work done here during the college course can have fruitful consequences.

Carl Unger: I would like to suggest that people with economic experience, skills and knowledge try to reach out from the various centers, so that the experiences can penetrate to where there is a possibility of establishing real economic relationships. A list has already been set up at “Futurum” where economists can sign up so that economic issues can be addressed in real terms.

I would like to cite certain typical phenomena from economic life itself, taking a small company in the machine industry as an example. The company was founded by me in 1906 to manufacture certain machine parts that were in high demand at the time. After opening, there was a major crisis in 1907, when sales slowed. Then large amounts of capital had to be invested to create the technical basis to meet demand. 1914 was initially a high point; with the outbreak of the war, everything came to a complete standstill; the war itself then led to a kind of stormy demand; raw material difficulties arose, and premises had to be created. And so large capital entered the scene, in particular large bank capital interest had to be created. With the end of the war, a seemingly favorable economic situation set in; there was an abnormally high level of economic activity. It was necessary to seek new ways of working with the labor force, to incorporate new points of view; the threefold social order proved itself in practice. I can only hint at all this. There was a great need for capital. The demand set in without it being possible to counteract it on the other side. In this situation, it became apparent that the industrial plant was a capital guzzler, and one had to ask oneself: Is such a plant viable in the sense of a self-organizing economic life in the future or not? One was faced with various alternatives: either one had to seek affiliation with some neighboring plants in order to have something to offer the economy instead of the overwhelming need for capital, which had to be covered from elsewhere, something that would give hope for the future. Or, in order to avoid being crushed by capitalism, one had to sell to industrial collectives. Or, thirdly, there was the possibility of tearing the business out of the whole economy and tearing it down, letting the plow go over the land. But this was not feasible because of the people working in it.

Out of this situation developed the necessity for an associative enterprise; the real connection to an association proved to be absolutely necessary, so that the enterprise is now affiliated to the Coming Day. Naturally, this is only the beginning of what is to be developed out of the Coming Day. But at least it is possible to keep such a business going in an economically sound way and, by joining forces with the Coming Day and forming a center, to survive the impending crises. In this way, the experiences of individuals can be exchanged with the operating results and so on, which will certainly lead to real economic relationships arising between people who come together from different sides. This is an example from real economic life as it presents itself today.

Roman Boos gives the floor to the banker Adolf Koch.

Adolf Koch: Dear Sirs and Madams! After Dr. Steiner's impressive presentation yesterday, there is no need to dwell on the how and the possibility of associations spreading. The question is, firstly, what can we put into such an associative economy today? For example, the artificial flower industry? It is also forced to take on capital and so on. For us it is necessary to recognize what needs of the German people are to be satisfied at all. When we look at life in a practical way and see that on the one hand we have to eat rotten bread and on the other hand the luxury industry is flourishing and enormous amounts of raw materials are being used for it, then we, who want to rebuild, have to ask ourselves everywhere: What do we include in our association economy first? If the coming day is able to incorporate farms, that is certainly desirable; but we must see to it that we can incorporate machine or other industries as well. This is the foundation on which all of humanity can build. Today in Germany, we are dependent on ourselves, and we have to get back on our feet; food, clothing, coal, and so on are necessary. Secondly: The Coming Day as such. I speak here as a banking expert and, as I said, without any real connection to the Coming Day; I speak here in fact quite objectively from my experiences. If we want to free ourselves from the corrupt state of affairs in Germany, then an enterprise like the Coming Day, as it is conceived, is the given to free us from all the rotten stuff that now has the upper hand in Germany. Everyone who has to do with capital must get out of the old and into the threefold order.

German paper money is ultimately nothing more than a claim on the great corrupt state itself. If we withdraw from it, we free ourselves from this paper money, which annoys everyone because of its dirtiness, not only on the outside but also on the inside. The big banks in Berlin have about 40 billion foreign savings; they sit there like a big spider and suck out what free money is available. Of these 40 billion, about 60% are invested in government treasury bonds, to which municipalities and cities contribute a further 15%, so that theoretically every person is 'married' to the state to the tune of 750 marks. How do we get out of this? – It is passed on to the next day, on the condition that the next day will invest it in productive enterprises. This provides the possibility that in the event of an overall collapse, people can say to themselves: then I have the connection to productive enterprises. So the egoism of capitalism helps; with capitalism, you also have a means of educating people. It is not at all reprehensible, as the situation stands today. I speak as a banking expert. I have no connections with either side that would lead me to speak in favor of one or the other. If you put people in charge who actually want what is beneficial, then this is the nucleus for reconstruction, the original cell for reconstruction. I speak as a practitioner to people from whom I assume that they want to hear about banking practice.

I would ask the gentlemen with whom I sat in Stuttgart in January of this year and with whom I negotiated to remain at the end. I have a few personal remarks to make.

Rudolf Steiner: You have now heard in a very clear and appropriate way what can be said about a certain problem from the point of view of economic thinking. And I would also like to contribute something to this.

Today, as time teaches us, we have to approach every economic problem from two sides. One side has been very appropriately presented here, and the other side is the social side. Even enterprises such as the Kommende Tag or the Futurum, even if they are managed skillfully and appropriately, depend on being supported by the social side when the situation increasingly prepares the ground for a time when we will no longer be able to work. Because, of course, no matter how much money we can put into productive enterprises, if we cannot work more, we will not be able to overcome the economic crisis. What can be done on one side must also be supported on the other by social action. At the very least, they must go hand in hand. You only have to hint at what could happen today. Let us assume that a factory owner is as philanthropic as possible and does as much as possible for his workers. But when it comes to a general strike, the workers either go on strike or not?

Interjection: Yes!

And as long as we do not get beyond this question, it is not possible to have any prospect of a real recovery of economic life. Here the social question must be brought in without fail.

Now, that is precisely the mistake that has always been made; one has thought economically in such a way that one has actually thought only within production and not to the actual manual laborer. In our present economic system, the manual laborer actually receives deductions from capital, not wages. You just have to think about it, it's true. That is the real state of affairs, but it is something we cannot make progress with. And that is why it is necessary to tackle the associative principle energetically and objectively, immediately, after we have gained the experience that we have been able to gain since April last year. It is necessary that we finally abandon the old fallacy that, on the one hand, there is big business, which at most acts in a patriarchal sense, and that, on the other hand, there is the working class, tightly organized in trade unions, so that the individual worker is under terrible pressure. This gap must first be bridged, and that cannot happen otherwise than if you prepare real associations. Real associations, which consist of an association of people from one side – from the business side, the leadership side, the side of intellectual workers – and on the other side, people from the workforce. Initially, an economic, a truly social economic association, which must inherently bear the character of [a collaboration between] consumers and producers, will not be able to be formed. Well, the associations must have this goal, and this goal must be pursued with rigorous agitation. Otherwise we will not make any progress. And this goal must consist of dissolving the trade unions and the current one-sided proletarian and labor associations in order to allow the associations to emerge between the one and the other side, so that in the economic crisis we have companies in which we workers can maintain ourselves. You may say: This is not possible, if the economic life is not to collapse altogether. But it must be tried. Without setting ourselves the goal of breaking up the unions and keeping it in mind, we will not make any progress in economic life. And organizations must be founded. And this practical approach could be discussed much more usefully than by drawing up utopian plans about how associations could be formed in the state of the future. It is always a matter of seizing the next task. The next task is the dissolution, the breaking up of the entire trade union life.

Oskar Schmiedel: It is very difficult to speak after Dr. Steiner, because he has already expressed the best thoughts.

It is quite true that we will not move forward unless the trade union organizations are broken up. But how do we achieve that? That is the question. The coming day should be the sponge to absorb the 40 billion savings. I am convinced of the excellence of Mr. Koch's idea to support and consolidate our efforts in a capitalist way. But for outsiders, the coming day is nothing more than a capitalist, a capitalist who needs capital and needs profit to further his endeavors. I can't be fooled. I have already spoken about this with people who are far removed from the endeavors here, and they say: the end justifies the means.

Of course, the Coming Day wants to make a profit, but it wants to use the profit for something quite different from what capitalists use it for; it wants to use it for the common good. Even before I knew Dr. Steiner's book on the threefold social organism, I had asked myself the question: How can we escape from the horror of socialism and capitalism? After reading the book, I breathed a sigh of relief and wondered: How does this work for others? That the material is extremely dry when it comes to passing it on to others is certain. And it cannot be any different. The question is: How do you teach it to others in a way that they understand? I have had little success with it so far, and that is why I have to ask those gathered here, who have probably known and spread the ideas much longer than I have, to share their thoughts. I think it is most important that new people are won over to the idea of threefolding, that new people are always won over.

Interjection: Absolutely!

You come up against a brick wall when you meet the workers. Even if the individual workers are approachable and reasonable, you immediately meet with resistance when you want to introduce the ideas into a factory; you come up against a closed wall of shop stewards and the workers' leaders themselves. For the head of the industry, if he is to be responsible, this is all the more difficult if he is not the owner himself. In the past, people were supported with food and clothing; that is no longer the case. The labor leaders, who usually have a very limited horizon, only want to be in charge. The worker is an egoist; he asks himself: What do I get materially out of it? In the threefold order, nothing is offered for the present, only for the future at best. Then, often out of selfishness, they say: Of course I will voluntarily give up none of the rights that my father and I have acquired.

The material is, as I said, extremely dry. In Württemberg you undoubtedly have a much more enlightened situation than in Upper Austria; they are half farmers and half industrial workers — not open to spiritual inspiration. But there must be a way. And that is what interests me. The whole question of the threefold social order is actually also a question of power; force is needed to teach even the best thoughts to humanity; even for the good, for the best, one must force them. If I had some regiments of cavalry, it might be possible, or money, a lot of money is needed. There is almost no coverage in the press. We have no time to lose. The question is how to approach this practically in order to make progress through the strength of thought.

Wilhelm von Blume: I am not an economist and would perhaps not be speaking here today at all if it were not for the words of the last speaker. I would like to explain one thing right away: I do believe that the question of threefolding is ultimately not a question of power, but a question of trust, and it will depend above all on winning the trust of those who are concerned.

Now, for my part, I have tried to make a personal impact on business people and also on those who mean something today; especially in the Rhineland and in Westphalia, and I have learned a great deal. From a very specific point of view, a thought quickly occurs to the gentlemen, and that is the thought of self-management of the economy. Contact was immediately established. However, the thinking was still capitalist; they thought that they could use their power to push aside this state, which is a nuisance to them in every way, and create their own economic state, with Hugo Stinnes at its head. After all, when a clean divorce between state and economy is demanded, they still allow the matter to be filled with the necessary spirit. But they also see the social side of the whole matter, which Dr. Steiner emphasized so strongly, very clearly. However, they have worked out the following: they want to further expand the “working community” — this keyword is used — they want an economic community between the capitalists and the workers. And the workers go along with this here and there. I need only remind you of the coal industry, which the workers themselves basically think of in very capitalist terms – in many ways the workers think more capitalistically than the capitalists – and they are very aware of the profit they make from it. But the economy as a whole is moving further and further into the abyss. Only those sectors of the economy, such as the coal industry, are on the rise, as is the entire banking sector, because credit is constantly needed to operate companies. The other sectors of the economy are gradually perishing. This is where we have to start, we have to make it clear to the workers that they are not just producers, but also consumers, that working communities are being created in the way that Dr. Steiner described yesterday. The first and greatest danger is that people are merely pointed out to it: entrepreneurs and workers should agree with each other. You have to pursue producer and consumer policies under all circumstances and pursue production from consumption.

In this way, the right ideas can be introduced to the working class. The trade unions are indeed a serious obstacle today because they are imbued with an old spirit. But this evil Works Council Constitution Act will ruin the trade unions. In the not too distant future, the trade unions will be completely destroyed by this law, which was not meant that way at all, which was meant quite differently.

Interjection: Very true!

so that perhaps we do not need to do much to help in this direction, so that we only need to point out the positive, the constructive. Perhaps one can hope that it will be the same in the other questions. We must be aware of the dangers and under no circumstances tolerate the matter being pushed to the end in the wrong direction.

Hans Schwedes: I can tell you a few things about the trade unions. I was led there as a teacher to educate people about threefolding and the idea of associations. The union leaders, in conjunction with the party leaders, are fighting tooth and nail against new ideas, and the union leaders fear that their union positions and posts will be lost as a result of new ideas. The workers themselves, who generally think little about these things, allow themselves to be led completely without will. If we educate and organize in the right way, it would be possible to reach the working class. We must arrive at such an associative economy in the shortest possible time because circumstances demand it. Under no circumstances can we afford to wait a few more years for some event to help us. Such action must be closely linked to social action, to generous social action that introduces the idea of the threefold social organism into public opinion. Consumer groups are also becoming increasingly restless and are demanding more and more of a say in shaping conditions, especially in pricing. It is precisely in order to take up this mood and to bring something into this soil that a generous action for the threefolding of the social organism should be set up.

We have heard from Dr. Steiner that a bridge must be created between the workers on the one hand and the entrepreneurs on the other. How about if we, perhaps here, I mean those of you who are here as entrepreneurs, who are practitioners in economic life, if we were to found an association here that would set itself the goal of bringing about associations, that is, to do everything possible to lead to such a formation of associations. Perhaps someone of you could come to Darmstadt, someone who knows exactly what is going on, and give a lecture there to invited entrepreneurs and discuss the idea of associations in detail. There are bound to be some here who would take up this idea and discuss with these entrepreneurs how to educate the workers. If the employers were to take on the various educational endeavors desired by the workers, for example, higher education endeavors, if the employers were to cooperate so that lectures could be organized, for example - of course, these would have to deal with precisely what is covered by the associations - then a way to act can be found through mutual trust, and it would also be possible to influence public opinion.

So, to find a practical starting point, I propose founding an independent association of entrepreneurs that aims to promote the idea of association in every way, through events in Darmstadt, in order to gain a foothold that can be connected.

Roman Boos: It seems to me that a different approach is needed to promote the idea of association. With associations, it is only important to establish them in some practical way, not to propagate the idea itself. And to found a specific employers' association purely for the purpose of propaganda would not be the right thing either; Futurum and Künftiger Tag have to be practically involved, so that these very diverse organizations work together, that what is being worked on in the Waldorf School and by the Federation for School of Spiritual Science and what is being advocated by the Threefolding Association is represented with the greatest intensity, but by all these groups together. Not that the threefold order as such might be compromised by appearing merely as a matter for employers' circles!

It has been repeatedly shown that contact with members of these various circles has torn workers away from the world of ideas of their trade unions and parties. For example, an event was held at the Basel Youth Organization here, where it was discussed how this kind of thinking requires a different kind of thought formation. Similarly, a few weeks later, a meeting was held with members of the Protestant Workers' Association. In both cases, the way people wrote in the newspapers afterwards showed that they were torn out of their usual circles of thought.

And now the question of Director Schmiedel: How do you actually get the idea of threefolding into people's heads? It makes a tremendous impression on a worker when he is told: “Scientific results and insights into medicine come from these thoughts” - because he lives in these things, albeit in a popular way. That makes an extremely strong impression on him. And precisely because he puts everything on the scientific edge, even if only in word, one must try to make progress on a broad front, if possible to work on the broadest front.

Emil Leinhas: Professor von Blume has already referred to the power that he says “always intends evil but always creates good”. I believe that no one can deny that this power is active in an extraordinarily strong way. I do not believe that it is enough just to help a little, but as things stand today, it will take the most intensive work and effort to ensure that good comes out and not evil. We have the ideas of the threefold social order for this, and if we are properly grounded in them, we can also pass these ideas on. And here I must say, in answer to Mr. Schmiedel's remark that the material we have before us is “brittle”: I am of exactly the opposite opinion; we ourselves are brittle at first, in that we do not really understand the subject. That is the actual brittleness, and it is not the “Key Points” and not the threefold social order that are brittle. In the last few weeks I have had to deal with rather brittle material, with the history of capitalism. I then sat down late at night and read a few pages in the “Key Points”. Fresh air suddenly flowed in from all sides; you realize that you are immersed in real life. Don't worry: the material we have in the “key points” is not dry; the dryness lies elsewhere.

But we must not forget one thing: there should be many more people here, then things could move forward. Dr. Unger and Dr. Koch have already given some hints: This appeal to those who want to join their business because it can no longer exist on its own is certainly necessary in the general interest. It is also necessary to call on those who have capital not to give it to the banks, where it only serves to destroy. It is necessary not only to tie in with this in a one-sided economic way, but to work in a comprehensive way to educate economically and socially. Very little has been done in this regard, and an enormous amount remains to be done in the near future. Therefore, we who are involved in economic life must begin with concrete facts and educate humanity. It would be necessary to be able to provide answers to questions such as the connection between overproduction and entrepreneurship, or the original cell of economic life, or how much social work would actually be necessary at all if work were distributed in the right way, or the whole question of pricing – these are just a few of the many questions to which no answers have yet been given.

I would like to make a specific request to those present. I would ask those who believe they are able to work on this topic to help by giving lectures and the like, but above all to write about the specific aspects of economic life, which would have to take into account not only the economic but also the social. I would like to ask you to contact me for economic or economic contributions.

Roman Boos: I would like to second Mr. Leinhas' suggestion and ask whether it would not be possible to establish a permanent economic department at the coming day, which would then have its organs in the federation for threefolding, a kind of center that would have the task of connecting what is economic practice with economic science.

Emil Leinhas: The form in which people work together will find itself.

Rudolf Steiner: Just a few words. It is always unfortunate when an important thought is thrown into the discussion and then not followed up. Dr. Schmiedel threw out an important thought regarding the question: How do we actually get the threefold social order into people's heads and into their actions? I believe I have understood the idea correctly. And above all, I would like to draw attention to something that has hardly ever been thoroughly considered.

You see, basically we have not developed any skill, any real rational skill in agitation. We simply cannot agitate. Firstly, we have no practice; we also have no inclination to acquire practice in agitation. Secondly, with most personalities, we also have no inclination to really decide to do what is necessary on their part: to develop personal effectiveness. Of course we must also work through the printed word, and we have shown, by founding the Threefolding Newspaper, that we also take into account the fact that we must do this. But all this remains ineffective if we cannot move on to real personal agitation. Dr. Schmiedel will probably agree with me when I say: I know exactly how to approach the oak trunks from the Horn region (I know the people there); I know roughly, if I were to limit myself to this area, how I would have to present the threefold order to the local farmers if only I could be there and work. But that is just it: today, we are at a point in human development, especially in Central and Western Europe, where we are not understood at all if we do not speak in the language of the people. Just think about it: it is impossible today to speak in a workers' meeting the way you would speak in a meeting of entrepreneurs – not because you want to tell people what to do, but simply because you want to be understood. And in this regard, it must be said that a large number of our friends really need to acquire a certain skill, a certain technique. You see, I gave the Daimler speech, didn't I? The first fortnight of our work in Stuttgart showed that if we had continued in this direction, our following would have grown considerably. Instead of that, the Daimler lecture was printed and, well, then you got the echo of the Daimler lecture from some rustic pastor; yes, that he cannot understand what was said for the Daimler workers on his own initiative, that is quite natural. So above all, get to know life, that is what it is about.

We have always made the most important mistakes ourselves. In the threefolding agitation, we made them by not carrying out a technique of agitation, but only having a certain preference for this or that direction of agitation, and always believing that people would follow this direction, that they would think in this direction and that it would then be right. Well, then you go into a meeting of ironworkers and say the same thing to them [as you said to the other people]. Of course you can do that, but you have to say it in the language of each group. We have not adopted this, and I find a certain opposition to it within the threefolding movement itself. The majority is such that they do not want to get out of it, above all they do not want to get out of this, I would say monism of agitation, they do not want to admit that they need to create the possibility of really finding access to people. This inner opposition is what must be overcome, we must get beyond it. It is a kind of practical opposition that is being waged within wide circles of the threefolding movement. People want to agitate as they please, and not as the world requires. I have pointed out again and again: What matters is not that we like the thing, but that we do it as the facts require. And I showed this in practice by trying to do something in a new way. I wanted to have an agitator community; I wanted fifty people to be selected in Central Europe to undergo an agitator course in Stuttgart, so that it could then be determined personally how things should be handled. It simply does not work with the printed word, where the same thing is presented to the worker as to the entrepreneur. An agitators' course should have been organized, but this very important undertaking came to nothing simply because no people could be found who could be brought to spread the art of personal agitation in this way. Until we have really tackled this work of personal agitation, the question raised by Dr. Schmiedel remains valid. But it cannot be answered by discussion, but only by such activity

A participant in the discussion: Dr. Steiner says that the workers themselves do not know what they want. And if I now try to formulate what the workers want, it does not come out systematically, but rather in fits and starts. When workers agitate, they have a certain sense of solidarity among themselves; this comes from the fact that people have worked together. Dr. Steiner said that it depends on breaking up the unions. I was in Berlin for a few weeks and saw how rotten things are and that people are searching everywhere. Why not show people the way through a practical deed? Won't it be possible for the worker, who has nothing to offer but his labor, to have a place where he can say, It is good when I can take my labor somewhere, when I [in the coming day] can work, have a position as a laborer there, then I am already prepared to think my way into spiritual science. If someone thinks about his work, he can do twice as much. And we can help each other, intervene here and there, we can say: leave that for once, I will help you. - If we could say: If you want to break away from the union, then you can find a place somewhere, even if it is in agriculture. — If only we had the opportunity to work in the coming day! Isn't it possible for the coming day to create this opportunity, so that workers can be employed there? I know that people will object that not everyone should move to Stuttgart; we also need workers elsewhere. But we have to start there. We need people who, when the time comes, will not go on strike but will continue the work out of their consciousness. The way forward is shown by The Coming Day. The task at hand is to find the manual laborers, and once we have them, the project will develop from this nucleus.

Roman Boos: We are not competent to vote for the coming day. Furthermore, it depends, of course, on the circumstances of the coming day whether what is ideal can be realized in practice. I ask that you be as brief as possible. We still have four speakers scheduled.

Another participant: I would like to share that I have been active in labor unions for many years as one of the agitators of the old school. And I would like to suggest that we continue the conversation so that I can share some of my experiences with these people. I assumed that today's participants were only economists, so to speak, employers among themselves.

Roman Boos: Perhaps another event can be organized in the next few days.

Franz Dreidax: If we were to satisfy the workers' need for housing by having them start building the houses themselves and obtaining all the materials from the factories of the Coming Day, this would seem to me to be a way of drawing ever wider circles on a completely natural basis. Of course, the Coming Day would have to launch this.

Roman Boos: We are now getting a little too involved in building policy, which is a problem in itself; a great deal of literature and practice has been written about it. Whether we should be talking here about the possibilities of building cooperatives is a different matter.

Franz Dreidax: The intention is to blow up the trade unions. But anyone who is not in a union today will no longer find work anywhere; he will starve with his wife and children. The other workers will kill him if they catch him. The workers must be given the opportunity, the security and the confidence that he can continue to work. And if we now start building houses, at the same time also building on agricultural land and so on, then perhaps a trade could gradually develop with the surrounding villages. The factory workers in the city can be supplied with agricultural products. And vice versa. I don't yet know how it can be done on a large scale, but I see a possibility of how we can achieve mutual interest and how trust can take hold, real trust. It is also already stated in the Key Points that trust is necessary. I don't know of any other way out. I don't want to talk about breaking up the unions if there is no certainty that the workers will be able to survive afterwards.

Roman Boos: I would like to remind you that all these enterprises must also be financed by the Coming Day. If the financing operation succeeds as it should objectively succeed, it would of course be very valuable to create such economic entities. As soon as these economic enterprises flourish here...

A speaker from Breslau: We should discuss again the question of breaking up the trade unions and training agitators. I would ask the gentlemen to speak directly at the next meeting about finding ways to ensure that this action can actually be carried out. We have already missed one opportunity.

Rudolf Steiner: I would just like to note that one should not turn something I have said here into a slogan that can easily be turned into dogma. If, in connection with what I have said, something is said to the effect that only by breaking up the trade unions will the workers be helped on their way, then that is not right. For a not very far-reaching consideration would immediately show that only by following the path I have indicated, namely by bringing about the associations of employers and employees, can the unions be undermined and something else be put in their place. The unions will never be thrown out on the street just by repeating a socialist, Marxist slogan when you speak of “breaking up the unions”. It is not that that matters, but positive thinking; it is a matter of being able to think concretely in such matters.

A senior government official, who is in a kind of ministry of a German state and who wanted to discuss with me the measures that would have to be taken, was with me just recently. I said to him: That's all very well what you say; but you will achieve practically nothing if you sit in your office and concoct all sorts of things that always look different from reality. But you will achieve nothing even if you invite party and trade union leaders to your office. Go to the workers' meetings; speak there! There you will have the opportunity to become the people's confidant. Then you can achieve something. Today there is only one such agitation.

But what have we experienced in Württemberg? When we have been promised ten times, I would say, when some higher-level worker in the labor ministry or even a minister from the Socialist Party has promised ten times that he would come to something – at the moment he was expected, it was always said, especially at the beginning: Yes, it's just another ministerial meeting. The gentlemen always sit together in meetings, it does not even occur to them to come. And those who have outgrown the Socialist Party have tried least of all.

Of course, you shouldn't think that just because you're talking to trade unionists, you could come up with the same program. It does grow out of that, but it's about how it grows out of it. And the main point is that the slogan, “the worker is thrown out onto the street by the breaking up of the trade unions,” no longer applies.

A participant in the discussion: On the one hand you have all the entrepreneurs and on the other all the workers who are dependent on them, and the two groups should sit together in the organically structured tripartite organism.

Roman Boos: We cannot elevate economic group selfishness to the principle of organization; that is not possible!

Roman Boos: It should be noted that today's lecture will be followed by a discussion, and that it will also be necessary to have a further discussion on specific economic questions after this lecture in a smaller group.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! It has already been said that these two lectures or discussions, Sunday and today, are essentially taking place at the request of individual circles and that the main purpose is to say a few words in response to certain questions and requests that have been expressed. Today, after I mentioned a few preliminary remarks on Sunday, I will therefore address the specific questions and requests that have been put forward. First of all, the problem of associations in economic life seems to be causing a few headaches for many people. I would like to say something about this in general terms.

You see, my dear attendees, when you think practically, it is always a matter of considering the very nearest circumstances and taking the point of application for your actions from these very nearest circumstances. Just consider how little fruitfulness there is in imagining all kinds of beautiful, theoretical images of the situations we are facing today, of this or that association and of everything that should or should not be done in such associations. Once you have discussed such matters at length and have formulated all kinds of fine utopian ideas, you can confidently go home and believe that you have done a great deal to solve the social question; but you have not actually done much. What is needed is to intervene in what is immediately at hand. We are, after all, dealing with specific economic conditions, and we have to ask ourselves: what are the most urgent things to be done? And then we have to try to bring about the possibility of intervening in these most important things. Then it will be much better to move forward – which, given the circumstances, really must be very rapid if it is not to be too late – than to come up with all kinds of utopian schemes or to raise questions that are no less utopian. However, we also have to recognize to a certain extent the underlying causes of the great damage of the present. And then, with a certain overview of how these problems have arisen, we may be more likely to muster enthusiasm for the next necessary step than we are for all kinds of utopian phrases. And here I am now in a position to tie in with one of the questions that, incidentally, recurs among the 39 questions – it is the question:

How can we not only carry the impulse of threefolding into the rural population, but how can we specifically think about agriculture as such in terms of the threefolding of the social organism?

Now, no one will come to terms with this thinking who does not see the radical difference in the whole way of production, in all economic contexts, between agriculture and industry. It is necessary to see this because, before the world war catastrophe struck, we were stuck in a completely materialistic, completely capitalist way of thinking - it was, so to speak, international capitalist thinking and and because, precisely, a departure in the direction conditioned by capitalism and which capitalism will continue to pursue, because precisely in that an ever-widening divergence of the agricultural and industrial enterprises must emerge. Agriculture, by the very nature of its being, is incapable of fully participating in the capitalist economic order. Don't misunderstand me; I am not saying that if capitalist thinking became general, agriculture would not also participate in capitalist thinking; we have seen to what a high degree agriculture has participated in capitalist thinking and action. But it would be destroyed in its essence, and it would no longer be able to intervene in the appropriate way in the whole economic process. That which is most eminently suited in economic life, not only to develop in a capitalist way, but which tends to lead to outright over-capitalism – please allow me to use this word, people today will understand it – that is, to assume a complete indifference to the way it works, even to the product of labor, and to be concerned only with acquiring something: that is industry; industry carries quite different forces within it than agriculture. This can only be understood by someone who has really taken a long, hard look at how it is quite impossible to transition to large-scale capitalist agriculture as it is the case in industry. If agriculture is really to be properly integrated into the economy as a whole, then – simply because of what has to happen in agriculture – a certain connection between the human being and the whole of production, the nature of production, and thus all that is to be produced in agriculture, is necessary. And a large part of what is needed for production, if it is to be produced in a truly rational way, requires the most intense interest of those who work in agriculture. It is quite impossible for something like that absurdity to arise within agriculture – it is an absurdity that I will describe in a moment – that absurdity, for example, that has always been held up when you have had to discuss with the proletariat in recent decades. You see, the absurdity I mean is the following.

As I have often related, I was a teacher at a workers' training school for many years. This brought me into contact with the people of the proletariat, and I had the opportunity to discuss a lot with them, and also to get to know everything that was there in terms of psychological forces. But certain things, brought forth by the whole development of modern times, simply lived as an absurdity precisely within the proletarian endeavors. Suppose that, as a rule, the proletarians' deputies rejected the military budget. But in the moment when, in the discussion, the proletarians were reproached: Yes, you are against the military budget, but you still let yourselves be employed or hired by the cannon manufacturers as workers; you still fabricate with the same state of mind as anywhere else – they did not understand that, because that was none of their business. The quality of what they produced was none of their business; they were only interested in the amount of their wages. And so the absurdity arose that on the one hand they manufactured cannons, that they never went on strike anywhere because of the quality of what they produced, but at most because of wages or something else, but on the other hand, out of an abstract party line, they fought the military budget. Combating the military budget should have led to the production of no cannons, according to the laws of the triangle. And if they had done that, for example, at the beginning of the century, much of what happened from 1914 onwards could have been avoided. Then you have, regardless of whether they are capitalists or proletarians who participate in any kind of production, absolute indifference to the quality of what they are working on; but the whole organization of industry depends on that. This is not possible in agriculture; it would simply not work in agriculture if there were such indifference towards what is being worked on. And where this indifference has occurred, where agriculture has been infected, I would say, by the industrial way of thinking, it withers away. It withers away in such a way that it gradually takes on the wrong position in the whole of economic life.

What is actually happening there? The following is actually happening to what I have called the original cell of economic life: with agriculture on the one hand and industry on the other, and with agriculture by its very nature constantly resisting capitalization, while industry, on the other hand, strives towards over-capitalization, a complete falsification is taking place, a real falsification of the original economic cell. But because the products have to be exchanged – because, of course, the industrial workers have to eat and the agricultural workers have to clothe themselves or have to be consumers of industry in some other way – because the products have to be exchanged, a counterfeit arises quite radically in the exchange of agricultural products and industrial products. This economic unit cell, which in a healthy economy simply consists of everyone having to receive as much for a product they have produced – if you include everything else they have to receive, which is, so to speak, the expenses and so on – as they need to satisfy their needs to produce an equivalent product. I have often hinted at this by saying, in a trivial way, that a pair of boots must be worth as much as all the other products - be they physical or intellectual - that the shoemaker needs, that he needs in order to make another pair of boots. An economic life that does not determine the price of boots by some kind of calculation, but that tends to the fact that this price emerges by itself, such an economic life is healthy. And then, when economic life is really healthy through its associations, through its mergers, as I characterized them the day before yesterday, then money can also be inserted in between, then no other means of exchange is needed, then money can be inserted as a matter of course, because money then quite naturally becomes the right representative between the individual products. But in recent times, on the one hand, agriculture, by its very nature, increasingly resisted capitalization – it was, of course, capitalized, but it resisted it, and that was precisely the corrupting factor – and, on the other hand, other hand, industry was striving towards over-capitalism, it was never possible for any agricultural product to be priced in such a way that it would have corresponded to an industrial product in the way I have just characterized the economic primordium. On the contrary, it became more and more apparent that the price level for the industrial product was different from what it should have been. As a result of this price level of the industrial product, money, which had now become independent, became too cheap, thereby disrupting the whole relationship between what should have come from agriculture to the industrial worker and from the industrial worker to agriculture.

Therefore, the first thing that is opposed is associations that are formed precisely between agriculture and various branches of industry. Certainly, this is the first, I would say most abstract principle, that the associations consist of different sectors. These associations will work best when they are formed between agriculture and industry, and in such a way that the creation of such associations actually leads to efforts being made towards a corresponding price structure. But now you cannot do much in associations that would first have to be created, of course – this would soon become apparent. If associations could be created in such a way that industrial enterprises were linked together with agricultural enterprises, and if the matter were handled so cleverly that they could supply each other, then some things would immediately become apparent – I will mention the conditions under which this can happen in a moment; some things can of course be done immediately.

But what is necessary first? Yes, my dear attendees, it is first necessary to be able to establish something like this in a truly rational and meaningful way. Let me give you a concrete example. In Stuttgart, the “Der Kommende Tag” has been founded. The “Der Kommende Tag” naturally proceeds from its idea, which is to be given by the principles, by the impulses of the threefold social order. It would therefore have the primary task of introducing the associative principle between agriculture and industry, to the extent that the association of mutual purchasers would actually [influence prices] by turning those who are consumers in some areas into producers in others. In this way, a great deal could be achieved in a relatively short time in establishing a truly correct price. But take the coming day in Stuttgart: it is quite impossible to appear reasonable now, for the simple reason that you cannot purchase all goods independently because they would come up against today's corrupted state legislation everywhere. Nowhere is it possible to produce what is economically necessary because the state is opposed to it everywhere. Therefore, the first thing to do is to realize that strong associations must first be created that are as popular as possible and that can thoroughly prevent state intervention in all areas of economic life in the broadest circles. Above all, every economic action must be able to be based on purely economic considerations.

Now, state thinking is so strongly ingrained in our present humanity that people do not even notice how they basically long for the state everywhere. For decades I have repeatedly characterized this by saying: The greatest longing of modern man is actually to go through the world with a police officer on the right and a doctor on the left. That is actually the ideal of the modern human being, that the state provides both for him. To stand on one's own two feet is not the ideal of the modern human being. But above all, we must be able to do without the police and the doctor provided by the state. And until we take this attitude on board, we will not make any progress.

Now, however, all those institutions are in place that do not allow us to get close to the people who come into consideration for such an education of associations. Take one of the last great products of capitalism, take the one out of which the strongest obstacles for our threefolding movement have arisen, apart from the lethargy and corruption of the big bourgeoisie: that is the trade union movement of the proletarians. This trade union movement of the proletarians, ladies and gentlemen, is the last decisive product of capitalism, because here people join together purely out of the principles, purely out of the impulses of capitalism, even if it is supposedly to fight capitalism. People join together without regard to any concrete organization of economic life; they join together in industries, metalworkers' associations, book printers' associations, and so on, merely to bring about collective bargaining and wage struggles. What do such associations do? They play at being the state in the economic sphere. They completely introduce the state principle into the economic sphere. Just as the production cooperatives – the associations formed by the producers among themselves – are opposed to the principle of association, so too are the trade unions. And anyone who really wants to study the development of the present-day revolutions, which are so sterile, so barren, so corrupt, without prejudice, should take a closer look at trade union life and its connection with capitalism. By this I do not just mean the capitalist affectations that have already been drawn into trade union life, but I mean the whole intergrowth of the union principle with capitalism.

This brings me to what is now certainly necessary in a certain sense. The day before yesterday I characterized the associations: they go from sector to sector, they go from consumer to producer. This is how the connections between the individual sectors arise, because it is always the case that whoever is the consumer of something is also a producer at the same time; it all goes hand in hand. It is only a matter of beginning to associate. As I mentioned the day before yesterday, it is best to start by bringing together consumers and producers in the most diverse fields and then, as we have seen today, begin to form associations primarily with what is close to agriculture and what is pure industry. I do not mean an industry that still extracts its own raw materials; that is closer to agriculture than an industry that is already a complete parasite and only works with industrial products and semi-finished products and so on. One can get quite practical there. If one is willing and has sufficient initiative, one can start forming these associations. But above all, we need to recognize that the associative principle is the real economic principle, because the associative principle works towards prices and is independent of the outside world in determining them. If the associations extend over a sufficiently large territory and over related economic areas, over areas related to some economic branch, then a great deal can be achieved. You see, the only thing that hinders progress is that when you start forming an associative life today, you immediately encounter people's displeasure at associative formations in the outside world; you can notice this in the most diverse fields. People just don't realize what things are actually based on. Therefore, allow me to come back to an example that we have already practiced ourselves. It is, of course, an example where one has to work economically with intellectual products, so to speak, but in other areas we were not allowed to work.

Now, you see, that is the peculiarity of our Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, as I have already mentioned. At least at first it works in complete harmony with the associative principle, because of course it has to connect with printers and so on in many ways, and so it enters into other economic areas. This makes it difficult to achieve anything drastic, but it can serve as a prime example. All that is needed is for what is being carried out in it to be extended to other sectors, and for the associative principle to be further expanded. And the first step is to gather together those who are interested. For example, if someone were to set about gathering a thousand people who would agree to buy their bread from a particular baker, I would specify a certain number. So it was that in the Anthroposophical Society — which of course was not founded merely for this purpose, but everything also has its economic side — so it was that in the Anthroposophical Society the people came together who were the consumers of these books, and so we never had to produce with competition in mind, but we only produced those books that we knew for sure would be sold. So we did not needlessly employ printers and paper makers and so on, but we only employed as many workers as were necessary to produce the quantity of books that we knew would be consumed. Thus, goods were not unnecessarily thrown onto the market. This really does establish an economic rationality within the limits of book production and book sales, because unnecessary work is avoided. I have already pointed out that otherwise you print editions, throw them onto the market, and then they come back again - so much unnecessary paper production work is done, so many unnecessary typesetters are employed and so on. The fact that so much unnecessary work is done is what destroys our economic life, because there is no sense of working together rationally through associations, so that production actually knows where it is selling its products.

Now, do you know what will disappear? You have to think this through: what will disappear is competition. If you can determine the price in this way, if you can really determine the price by combining the industries, then competition ceases. It is only necessary to support this cessation of competition in a certain way. And it can be supported by [the various industries forming associations]. Of course, there has always been a need for people in the same industries to join forces; but this joining together of people in the same industry actually loses its economic value because, by not having to compete in the free market, it no longer has the necessity to undercut prices and the like. Then, however, the associations, which are essentially based from industry to industry, will be permeated by those associations, which we could then call cooperatives again. These associations, however, need no longer have any real economic significance; they will increasingly drop out of actual economic life. If those who manufacture the same product join forces, that will be all well and good, but it will be a good opportunity for more intellectual interests to develop, for people who work from common lines of thought to get to know each other, for them to have a certain moral connection. Those who think realistically can see how quickly this could be done: the associations of the same industry would be relieved of the burden of setting prices, which would be determined solely by the associations of the unequal industries. I would like to say that the moral aspect would be incorporated into the associations of the same goods, and this would be the best way to create a bridge to the spiritual organization of the three-pronged social organism. But such associations, which have arisen purely out of the capitalist economic system, such as the trade unions, must above all disappear as quickly as possible.

I was recently asked by someone who is involved in economic life what should actually be done now, because it is really very difficult to think of anything to somehow have a favorable effect on the rapidly declining economic life. I said: Yes, if they continue in this way at the relevant government agencies, which are of course still decisive for economic life – and today are more decisive than ever – if they continue in this way, then it will certainly continue into ruin. – Because what would be necessary today? What would be necessary is that those who should gradually work their way out of citizenship to become members of economic associations would be less concerned with the direction that could be seen in Württemberg, for example, where there was a socialist ministry. Yes, especially at the time when we were particularly active, these people sometimes promised that they would come. They did not come. Why? Yes, they were always excused because they had cabinet meetings. You could only ever say to these people: If you sit down together, you can plot whatever you want, but you will not help social life. Ministers and all those who now held lower positions, from ministers downwards, would not have belonged in the cabinets at that time, but everywhere in the people's assemblies, in order to find the masses in this way and work among them; those who had something to teach and do would have belonged among the workers every evening. In this way, we could win the people over, and the trade unions would gradually disappear in a reasonable way. And they must disappear, because only when the trade unions, which are purely workers' associations, disappear will association be able to take place, and it does not matter whether someone today tends towards the direction of the trade union or the employees' association or even the capitalist association of a particular branch - they all belong together, they belong in associations. That is what matters: that we work above all to eliminate the things that tear people apart.

You see, that is the greatest harm we have today. It is quite impossible today to somehow introduce into the rest of the world what is reasonable, especially in economic life. I told you that the Coming Day simply comes up against the laws of the state at every turn; they do not let it do what it is supposed to do. And you see, the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press, how could it work in a sensible way? It was able to work in a charitable way by not employing unnecessary workers, unnecessary typesetters, and so on. It was able to work by turning its nose up at the whole organization of the rest of the book trade, trivially — turned up his nose at all these people who act like a state, turned up his nose, didn't care about that, but only cared about the association between book production and book consumption. Of course, all those who constantly and forcefully demanded that the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press should be different did not consider this. Certainly, today we are faced with something quite different from when the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press could work in this way. It needs to have a broader impact. But it is not possible to shape the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House with its production and its prosperity directly in such a way as to shape something that leads into the ordinary, senseless market economy of book production and distribution; if you found an ordinary publishing house, it cannot be any different. Because the point is that things must first be done differently, what is reasonably pursued cannot be incorporated into today's ordinary economic practice.

What does all this teach us? That it is necessary, above all, to form associations in such a way that they aim to make the world as aware as possible of the need to combat unnecessary work and to establish a rational relationship between consumers and producers. At the moment when it is necessary to step out of a closed circle into the public sphere, that is when the great difficulty arises. For example: it was a matter of course that we had to found our newspaper “Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” (Threefold Order of the Social Organism). Yes, but what could this newspaper be if it could stand on the ground that it works economically and is distributed in the same way as the books of the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, that is, that nothing unnecessary would have to be produced! Of course, the corresponding number of subscribers is needed, just the small matter of the corresponding number of subscribers. But as things stand now, all of us who work for the threefold social order newspaper have done unnecessary work, for example in our spiritual production. The distribution of the newspaper today is not enough to prevent this work from being considered wasted in some way. And so I could present it to you in the most diverse fields.

What, then, do we need first of all? And here I come to another class of questions, which also keep coming up: What, then, do we need first of all? Above all, we need the movement for the threefold social order to become strong and effective itself and, above all, to be understood. You see, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed due to the circumstances of the time and the inner essence of the matter, and it is not a coincidence, not some quirk of mine or a few others, that this threefolding movement has grown out of the Anthroposophical Society. If it had grown out of it in the right way, if I could say that the Anthroposophical Society was the right one out of which the threefold social order movement grew, then it would already have developed into something different today. Well, what did not happen can be made up for later. But it must be emphasized that one must first recognize that it would have been possible to work in the right way on the basis of anthroposophy in the field of threefolding. Above all, it would have been necessary to realize how necessary human commitment is for such far-reaching principles - which are practical in the most eminent sense, as described in my “Key Points” - and how human commitment is necessary, a right human commitment. Something like this could have been learned on the soil of the anthroposophical movement. Of course, people resented it when, for example, certain cycles were given only to a prepared number of people, but there were good reasons for this. And if people did not constantly say out of silly vanity that this person may receive a cycle and that person may not, and so on, if all these things were not confused in silly vanity but were understood inwardly, then one would arrive at the right thing. But then one would also have seen at the right time, where it is necessary, how much and how little printing ink can do. It would be good if the threefolding newspaper had 40,000 subscribers today for my sake. But how could it get them? It could only get them if it were helped not by what is the printing ink, but if it were helped by personal intervention, by real personal intervention in the matter, according to the demands of the situation. But that is what has been understood least of all.

You see, I have to touch on this point, but today these points have to be touched on because they are vital questions of threefolding; for example, I gave the lecture to the workers of the Daimler-Werke in Stuttgart. Now, my dear audience, the point was to speak to a very specific group of people who, in their thinking about social conditions, had very specific thoughts and spoke in a very specific language. This lecture was given to these workers and similar workers. It would have been necessary to see this, to understand it and to do it in such a way that one would have spoken to the people from their circumstances. Instead, people today strive to have something that only needs to be said in a certain way to certain people - not, of course, to say one thing to one person and another to another, but to be understood by people - printed as quickly as possible, entrusted to the printing press. And then this printed matter is handed over to quite different people, who now become angry because they do not understand it. This is something that could not be learned from the anthroposophical movement; instead, the opposite was done. One should have learned to recognize the situation and to work from a human point of view. Therefore, it would have been important - and it will continue to be important if things are to move forward and not backward - that as many people as possible would have realized that the time is past when one generally expresses one's opinion as one according to one's own class, social, university-teacher or high-school teacher consciousness, or whatever, that one holds this view, regardless of the audience one speaks to. No, one holds this view regardless of whether one is invited to address an assembly of proletarians and one's lecture, prepared page by page, is placed on the highest possible lectern and one reads or recites it page by page, depending on whether one has memorized it or whether one is invited to address a meeting of Protestant pastors and one speaks the same lecture. This is how we destroy our social life. This is not how we move forward. We do not want to learn the language of the people we are speaking to. But it is precisely important that we learn the language of the people we are speaking to. And that could have been learned in the Anthroposophical Society, where it has always been cultivated, where it was really about achieving just what could be achieved at that moment.

Sometimes it was so grotesque that one could not go further in what had been achieved. For example, let me give you an illustration of what I mean. I was once invited to give an anthroposophical lecture at a spiritualist society in Berlin. Well, of course I did not talk to the people about spiritualism, but about anthroposophy. They listened to it. They listened to it in their own way, of course. I did not speak to the people as I would have spoken to natural scientists, because they would have understood little of me, the spiritists, who had large beer glasses in front of us. What happened then? The audience liked the lecture so much – I am telling you a fact – that they elected me president afterwards. Some Theosophists went with me at the time, they were there and they were terribly afraid, because I could not become president of the Spiritualists' Association. What should happen now? they asked me. I will not go there anymore, I replied. That way the presidency was automatically annulled. But you could talk to these people and they did get something out of it, even if it was only a little at first.

So it is a matter of bringing the real out of the situations if we want to win people over to economic things, economic cooperation today. And we will not get anywhere if such things cannot be realized. We must look at such questions as were raised in a smaller meeting yesterday, where a gentleman who is very much involved in economic life said: Yes, threefolding really is the only way out of the calamities, but it must be understood. Above all, we need the technique of personal agitation to make it understood. We can and must, of course, also have newspapers such as the “Threefolding of the Social Organism”, which must be transformed into a daily newspaper as soon as possible. We must have it, but it means nothing more than yet another amount of wasted labor, if it is not backed by energetic personal action. Such conscious personal action, however, really dares to say that in the future people want something other than police officers and state-stamped doctors, so that they are neither robbed nor sick. There are other ways to ensure that you are neither robbed nor sick than this. So it is mainly a matter of bringing together the leaders of companies and the manual workers, especially in the event of a dissolution of the trade unions, because, after all, the manual workers are in their trade unions on the one hand and the managers are in their associations on the other, and they speak different languages and do not understand each other. You wouldn't believe how different the language is. I can assure you that anyone who does not study the language of the proletarian with an honest intention will only create prejudices against himself if he speaks as a bourgeois to proletarians today, no matter how radical his language may be. On the contrary, he makes things worse if he has no honest desire to really go into the state of mind, into what is in the soul of today's proletarian population. It is not the radical phrases that make the difference, but being inside the matter.

And that brings me to another type of question. For example, I am asked:

Who should be considered when the threefold social order is to be propagated? The wealthy cannot be considered because they have no other aspirations than to preserve their wealth undisturbed.

They do not think of adopting different ideas from those by which they have gained their wealth. Furthermore, they all sleep through the important events of the present; they know nothing about them. At most, they know that the Poles have the upper hand again; they made their plans earlier when the Russians had the upper hand and so on. The fact that what is emerging in the East is not defeated with some Polish victory, the dear bourgeois of Western and Central Europe do not notice that either. And if that which lives in the East cannot be fought from those impulses that lie in the direction of threefolding, it goes into another head; if it is defeated and killed in one form, it will arise again in a different, new form. So the question is, in a sense, rightly posed; it is true that the propertied classes are hardly being considered, and the proletariat, the proletarians, as it has been shown, do not want to know anything about it at first. But, ladies and gentlemen, we do not need to raise this question at all; instead, we need only try to do the right thing in the direction I have just indicated and really get to know what is there, not sleepwalk past the present. What do the bourgeois as a rule know about what goes on in the trade unions? They know nothing about it. Yes, the most ordinary phenomenon of today is this: as a bourgeois you pass a worker on the street, and actually you pass him in such a way that you have no idea of the context in which you stand with him. The point is that we have done our duty in the direction of progress, as I have now indicated, then the essentials will be found. And the point is, of course, that today, when we are already able to develop concrete efforts, we call the associative principle into life wherever we can, and that we do everything we can to dissolve trade union life and create associative federations between company managers and workers, the employees. If we can work towards the dissolution of trade union life, we can do many other things. Above all, we can strengthen the Federation for the Tripartite Order of the Social Organism on our own initiative. Of course, by “us” I mean all those sitting here, not just the members of the Anthroposophical Society — among whom there are those who still say today: “The real anthroposophist must be aloof from political life; he can only deal with political life if his profession makes it necessary. This does happen, there are such egotists, and they still call themselves Anthroposophists, believing that they are developing an especially esoteric life by meeting with a small number of people in a sect-like manner and satisfying their soul lust by indulging in all kinds of mysticism.

(Applause)

Dear attendees, this is nothing more than unkindness organized in a sect-like way; it is merely talk of human love, while the former has emerged precisely from human love, that is, from the innermost principle of anthroposophical work. What is to be expressed in the threefold social order is what matters, and to understand these things today is infinitely more important than poring over every detail. Because, my dear attendees, these questions, which will be very specific questions, will arise the day after tomorrow in a completely different way than we could ever have imagined, once we have helped some institution or other to get off the ground that really contributes something real to the emancipation of economic life from state life. Only then will the tasks arise.

We do not need to ask questions based on today's views, for example, how the people from the spiritual organization will arrange the transfer of capital. Just let something happen to bring about the threefold order, just let something energetic come into being, then you will see what significance something like this will have, as compared to what can be asked as a question today. Today, of course, when you look at the spiritual organism, that is, the sum of the lower and higher schools, and ask questions about individual issues, you are asking the questions in relation to a state-corrupted institution. You must first wait to see what questions can be asked when the emancipation of spiritual life has taken place. Then things will turn out quite differently than they do today. And so it is also in economic life. The questions that need to be asked are only just emerging. Therefore, it is not very fruitful to talk in general terms about associations and so on today, and it does not lead to much if you want to get an idea of how one association should really be linked to another. Just let those economic associations arise within which one must then work without state aid, I also mean in the spiritual without state aid, because then the right questions will arise, because then one must work on one's own, then one must think economically so that things can work at all. And that will be of the utmost importance for economic progress.

Just think what would have happened if these things had been understood at an important moment in modern economic life; at the point where transport grew as a result of the railways growing more and more, modern people declared themselves economically impotent and handed over the railways to the state. If the railways had been administered by the economic body, something different would have come of it than what has come of it under the interests of the state, with the greater part of it coming under its fiscal interests. The most important things for economic life have been neglected; they must not be neglected any longer; the concrete questions will arise by themselves. People have forgotten how to think economically because they believed that if something is missing in economic life, then they should elect the appropriate representatives, who will then bring it up in parliament and the ministers will make a law. But people are involved. They will complain, however, if the state does not take care of it – apparently, of course, only then.

From such backward-looking views of progress, I would say, everything that lives in the following question also emerges:

If intellectual life becomes free, will not the Catholic Church occupy a particularly favorable position? Is it not better to tame it with the state?

So far, the greatest damage has been done from the other side, from the favoring of the Catholic Church by the state. In short, these things look quite different when one is really inside what is being brought about by the three-part social organism, which we must first work towards, so that we do not take the third step before the first.

Now, questions arise that are very interesting, of course, because they are obvious, but, my dear attendees, they take on a different aspect than one might think when faced with the impulse of threefolding. For example, someone asked how, in the threefolded social organism, anthroposophy would acquire the money for the Goetheanum, because they believe that capital would not be available. Well, my dear audience, I am quite reassured about this, because the moment we have a free spiritual life, the situation with Anthroposophy will be quite different altogether, simply because of the nature of this free spiritual life, and we can do without the beggar principle on which we unfortunately depend today and to which we have to appeal in the strongest terms. But within a truly free, that is, healthy spiritual life, I would not be at all worried about building a Goetheanum.

Nor has it ever caused me any headaches when the question arises again and again, and that is this:

If the threefold social organism were already in existence, there would also be people in the spiritual organization who would decide in the right way: is this a brilliant artist, whose pictures must be distributed and sold?

If the threefold social organism were already in existence, I can only say that something would have to be created first to get it off the ground. But people think: if it were only there – there are so many artists who, in their opinion, are so terribly talented, so terribly gifted, so terribly ingenious – will there not be a great danger that the number of unrecognized geniuses will increase more and more? As I said, this matter has never really troubled me, because a free spiritual life will be the very best basis for bringing these talents to bear. And above all, you only have to bear in mind that no unnecessary work is done in the threefold social organism. You see, people do not even consider what we will gain in free time when unnecessary work is no longer done; in comparison, the ample unoccupied time of our rentiers and our idlers is a trifle; only with them it extends to the whole of life. But for that which basically cannot flourish if it is paid for, there would be plenty of time in the tripartite social organism to develop it. You can take what I am about to say as an abstraction, but I can only say that you should first try to help the tripartite social organism to get on its feet and you will then see that art will also be able to develop within it in a way that is entirely appropriate to people's abilities.

Dear attendees, I had to divide the questions more by category, because after all, it is not possible to answer all 39 questions in detail. Some questions are only of interest to people because they basically cannot imagine that certain things look quite different, for example, in a free spiritual life. So the question is raised whether the immoral outbursts of the cinema should be allowed to flourish in the threefold social organism, or whether the State should not intervene to prevent people from seeing such immoral films. Those who ask such questions do not know a certain deeply social law. Every time you believe that you can fight something, let's say the immorality of the movies, through state power, you fail to take into account that by such an abolition of immoral cinema plays – if people's instincts to watch such plays exist at all – you divert these instincts to another area, perhaps a more harmful one. And the call for legislation against immoral art – even if it is only in the cinema – expresses nothing other than the powerlessness of the intellectual life to take control of these things. In a free intellectual life, the intellectual life will have such power that people will not go to the cinema out of conviction. Then it will also be unnecessary to prohibit immoral films by the state, because they will be too stupid for people. But with what we bring into the world today as science, we naturally do not cultivate those instincts that flee from immoral films.

You would find many questions answered if you were to look more closely at the literature on the threefold social order. I have tried to pick out at least the most important questions. I will mention just one more, the twenty-eighth:

Would it not be possible to contribute to the popularization of both anthroposophy and the threefold social order by not using terms that are not understood by the broadest sections of society.

I can only say: do it as much as you can, and you will see that you can do it to a high degree. But I think you have to take more what the whole tendency of such a discussion is today, rather than the details; and this tendency is to point out that this impulse for threefolding is a thoroughly practical one. And so we should not just chat and discuss what the details will look like in this or that aspect of the threefolded social organism, but above all we should understand this threefold social organism and really spread this understanding, carry it into everything, because we need people who have an understanding for it. And then, when we have these people, we only need to call on them for the details. But we must have them first. We must first gain a healthy following – but as quickly as possible, otherwise it will be too late.

Well, this is what I have wanted to say for a long time, because more than a year ago I tried to write an appeal “To the German People and to the Cultural World”. It was certainly understood, as shown by the large number of signatures. But those who work for its realization remain a small number. The Appeal should have become better known, and the core points should have become known quite differently, namely through the work of individuals. You don't make a movement, as we would need to today, by just sending out writings, by just sending out brochures, by just sending out principles; you make it in a completely different way. The Federation for the Threefold Order of the Social Organism must have life in it; above all, it must be a union of people. It does not matter whether we send this or that, if it is just sending. Above all, care must be taken to ensure that within the Federation for the Threefold Order, no bureaucratic principle or the like is allowed to arise. It is necessary to distribute our literature and our newspapers, but at the same time, work must be done humanely. It must be understood that we are working towards transforming the newspaper “Threefolding of the Social Organism” into a daily newspaper as soon as possible. But above all, it is necessary to realize that our institutions must flourish.

Dear attendees, if things continue as they are, with us constantly stuck in the difficulties we are in today, where we don't really know how to continue the Waldorf school, how we should found more schools like this and how we should actually complete this Goetheanum, if we do not take hold of what people can really muster in terms of understanding for such things on all sides — then of course it will not continue. We need understanding, but not an understanding that only sees idealism, that only admires the ideas and puts its hands firmly on its pockets because the ideas are too great, too spiritual, for it to want to let dirty money near them. Money is kept in one's pocket and ideas are admired, but ideas are too pure to be defiled by spending dirty money on them. I meant what I said figuratively, but here it is a matter of learning to think practically and then also to bring it to practical deeds.

I said when the Waldorf School was founded: It's nice, the Waldorf School is nice; but just because we founded the Waldorf School, we have not done enough in this area. At most, we have made a very first start, just the beginning of a beginning. We have only really founded the Waldorf School when we have laid the foundations for ten new such Waldorf Schools in the next quarter. Only then does the Waldorf School make sense. — In the face of the current social situation in Europe, it simply makes no sense to found a single Waldorf School with four or five hundred or, for that matter, a thousand children. Only if the founding of Waldorf Schools is followed by more, if it is followed everywhere, does it make sense – only what arises out of the right practical attitude makes sense. If those who are enthusiastic about the ideas of Waldorf education cannot even develop enough understanding to realize that it is necessary to fight for independence from the state, to do everything in their power to ensure that the state releases the school, you do not also have the courage to strive for the school's independence from the state, then the whole Waldorf school movement is a waste of time, because it only makes sense if it grows into a free spiritual life.

In addition to this, we need what I would call an international effort for all school systems, but an international effort that does not just go around the world spreading principles about how schools should be run – that is already happening as funding is being provided for such schools. What we need is a world school association in all civilized countries, so that the largest possible sum of funds can be raised as quickly as possible. Then it will be possible to create, on the basis of these funds, the beginnings of a free spiritual life. Therefore, wherever you go in the world, try to work to ensure that the work is not done merely through all kinds of idealistic efforts, but that it is done through such an understanding of the freedom of the spiritual life that money is really raised on the broadest scale for the establishment of free schools and colleges in the world. What will be the flowering of the spirit in the future must grow out of the fertilizer of the old culture. Just as the fields yield the food that men must consume, so must that which is ripe for transformation into fertilizer be gathered from the old culture, so that one day the fruits of the future's spiritual, political and economic life may flourish from this fertilizer.

Roman Boos: The aim of this evening is to strengthen the awareness of those present and to clarify the idea of what concrete effects of what is intended at the Goetheanum can be expected in the near or distant future. The task should be such that the course should give the participants something to take away, so that everyone has the opportunity to say or know where they can help, where they can actively participate in the work.

The first thing to be discussed is the idea that in the very near future, the spiritual life must be detached with the greatest intensity from the entanglement in the powers of the state. The political states, in the West as well as in the East, are no longer even able to economically maintain the usurped school supervision rights. Schools are to be established over those areas that were not involved in the economic collapse and want to emerge from the spiritual collapse. The idea of a world school association on an international basis was indeed expressed and carried out in a large number of meetings in Holland a few weeks ago. And so today, Dutch friends have promised to share more information about this World School Association. And I would also like to point out in this regard that those gathered here can be trusted to help the World School Association become a reality.

The enterprises founded under Futurum AG and Der Kommende Tag AG were also set up to grow into what are currently unlimited expanses. What grew up as a Stinnes group, for example, has joined forces with the worst of existences; if such a monster were to receive international credit, it would be to the detriment of healthy development. It is therefore necessary to gain a foothold in economic life, to bring into being economic associations that do justice to the international dimension; it is necessary to seek the way forward in international discussions. In order to say something internationally significant, it will be necessary to speak across the divides created by the currency situation, of the future and of the day to come.

We are being accosted from all sides. And so it is an absolute necessity for the continuation of our work in Switzerland and beyond that we are given the opportunity to regularly publish a journal here at the Goetheanum, at least a weekly publication, in which we do not have to continually polemicize and discussions — although this will sometimes be necessary — but in which brief sketches and suggestions could be used to outline what is actually at stake here, and in which the international idea of a world school association or a world economic association, in particular, would have to be expressed again and again. In a sense, here in Switzerland we still have a foundation that we can speak of more clearly and impressively than anywhere else. Otherwise the Goetheanum would have to remain silent if it cannot make itself known in this way. Actually, very few people have come to this course. The Goetheanum itself, as a work of art, as a building, as a physical reality, has not yet been permeated with sufficient intensity. It is becoming necessary to carry out what is to be achieved for the whole world from the Goetheanum.

All those who have the opportunity to help us find the economic basis for such a newspaper are warmly invited to do so. We have to calculate 50,000 francs for one year; we cannot start before then. The reason we cannot start before then is that otherwise we might have to stop the project again after a while. If any of you could help to ensure that the newspaper can be published, you would be doing a great service that could hardly be achieved in any other way under the present circumstances.

Elisabeth Vreede: I would like to say a few words about the 'World School Association'. It is actually more of an appeal than a concrete foundation. The first steps towards the founding of a World School Association have been taken in the Netherlands, in order to get a world-wide response to what would now have to be done, and that is to liberate spiritual life, especially education, and make it independent. The hope has been expressed that this can be done in Holland. On February 27, Dr. Steiner gave a captivating lecture in The Hague on “Educational, Teaching and Practical Life Issues from the Perspective of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science” and drew attention to the necessity of a free spiritual life and of the school's detachment from state authority, which was met with strong applause from the audience. Afterwards, our member, Mr. de Haan, addressed an appeal to those present. As a result, a number of things have happened; people with good reputations have become interested in working for independent schools. Representatives from Switzerland, Germany and England expressed their conviction of the necessity of a world school association and promised to work for the cause in their own countries. A similar thing happened the next day in Amsterdam. But the World School Association was not yet founded, because such a foundation is only of value if it arises from within, so to speak. But we must not draw the conclusion that nothing should be done; rather, the most intensive work is needed to bring about a concrete foundation.

The first thing to be done now is to approach all educated people with a kind of prospectus - they are, after all, fundamentally interested in a free spiritual life; Dr. Steiner has given the guidelines for this. An appeal is to be made to all educated people to join us in providing our movement with the breeding ground and the air it needs to thrive. Since the whole thing started in Holland, I would like to draw attention to the address of Mr. de Haan, Utrecht; he is willing to provide information. From the events of the past few years, enough has emerged to show how important and significant it is, but also how much work will be needed if something like this is to be undertaken. So let us make an appeal that will find an echo throughout the educated world, so to speak.

(Applause)

Josef van Leer: Dear attendees, a few weeks ago the World School Association was discussed for the first time in The Hague and in Amsterdam. However, nothing will come of it if we do not take action immediately. We did have about 150 names that evening in The Hague, but you can't do anything with just names. Our friends in the Netherlands have the good will, but they are too weak.

A little less than ten years ago, similar discussions were held in Berlin, when Baron von Walleen spoke about his experiences on lecture tours in Scandinavia and England and said that it was so difficult to present Dr. Steiner's ideas there; what is today the Anthroposophical Society emerged from these discussions.

If you talk about an independent spiritual life in England today, everyone will say: We don't need one, we have one. That is an abstraction, of course, but that is how it is; as far as the people in England belong to the bourgeoisie, they can educate their children as they wish, they do not need certified teachers. If you have to propagate the World School Association in England, you are dealing with something quite different than in Germany or in Holland or in Switzerland. I believe that Scandinavia, Holland, England — even if it is not neutral, but it does not matter — all the countries that do not belong to the medium-sized states, should join together. In Holland, one has gained plenty of confidence, but the 25 sounding names do not help much. Dr. Steiner gave about ten lectures in Holland, but of the thousands who were there, not three voted in favor of it. It will be difficult to get only these three.

The question was raised: How do we propagate? — It is necessary to work differently for each country. Our friends in Stuttgart know best what to do because they are in the work. I would therefore like to suggest that we people from different countries — America, England, France, Switzerland, Italy — that we sit down together and say this evening: we will do it this way! I would like to propose this right now. Who from all the countries represented here is willing to participate? Let's start with America: Mr. Monges? Mr. Wheeler from England? Miss Wilson from England? Norway, Sweden: Mrs. Ljungquist? Denmark: Mr. Hohlenberg? Finland: Mr. Donner? Russia? From the Netherlands: Mr. Ledebour, Mr. Zagwijn, Mr. Deventer? From France: Mademoiselle Rihouet? Italy: Miss Schwarz? Czechoslovakia and Poland? I would therefore like to suggest that the various people sit down together and consider what is right for their countries, how it should be done, which people should be approached, which people can be given which material. It is possible that the representatives of a particular country are not in a position to make the right decision, but then perhaps together we will be able to find something better.

I would like to put up for discussion whether what I have suggested would be the right starting point.

Roman Boos: It could be very valuable to speak in smaller groups for each area this evening. But I would just like to ask very sincerely that when personalities are chosen, the matter should not be considered in the same way as parliaments or other associations: as a mandate to work like a commission. We should not put off until the evening what should be done during the day: to promote the idea of the World School Association in each individual group. We just have to try to see how what we have to say can be expressed in the other countries.

Johannes Hohlenberg: I would like to report on the work in Denmark regarding the World School Association. Unfortunately, in terms of results, it is not very much, but it may serve as an example for others. In the last fall course, particular emphasis was placed on the fact that everyone who goes back to their country should talk to as many people as possible and spread the idea of the World School Association. All those who were here have probably done what they could.

Now, to my personal experiences: I gave various lectures in Copenhagen, but unfortunately the timing was bad, because a few years ago the state took over almost all schools from the communities. This is a new fact, two or three years old, not yet fully implemented everywhere. Teachers are generally satisfied because their economic and financial situation has improved a lot and, as civil servants, they have the prospect of a pension. The teaching staff is therefore very reluctant to make any changes to these conditions. But on the other hand, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction among parents with the school system that exists in Denmark today; parents would be willing to try something new. The main difficulty, however, is financial. It should not be forgotten that state schools are completely free of charge; school lessons, materials and books are free.

The only possible way to establish independent schools would be as in Stuttgart, namely a large factory that takes it all in hand. In Denmark, it is just mainly a financial issue, quite simply! If a way could be found to establish such schools that would not cost more than the state schools, then the children would come and the parents would be very satisfied. I have collected a list of names – there are perhaps no more than 200 of them, so it is still nothing – and I am convinced that if you really do the propaganda, you can find real understanding.

Elisabeth Vreede: You have to do the right thing. As Dr. Steiner explained in Holland, it is not primarily a matter of founding individual schools that can only exist on the side and that can only gain their right to exist by stealth; it is about something much bigger: to really implement a free spiritual life! Today, we have a spiritual life that needs fresh air above all and that will wither without it. In this mood, the demand must arise in public: spiritual life must be liberated!

This does not mean that individual schools, such as the Waldorf School, cannot be founded. But it is not enough to found a school or institute here and there. Legally, they all have a meager existence. They always have a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, whether they are legal or not. Schools that depend on the mercy of the state should not be established.

Our Goetheanum is also a school, a free university. First and foremost, a world school association should be created that would feel the need to support or maintain such institutions as the Waldorf School and the Goetheanum. It is necessary that something concrete is already there. There are also teachers' associations, artists' associations; for them it would be a positive goal to work towards the need for a free spiritual life. The goal must be set higher than just setting up individual schools; everything must be seen on a larger scale so that the larger context is also recognized.

We have heard that in Denmark the teachers are very satisfied because they have become “state teachers” and are better paid. We cannot turn to the teaching profession in general; those who are involved in the matter are often the most dried up and do not have the broad view. This public opinion and mood must arise from a broader base than the teaching profession is or can be. Then the national differences will not carry as much weight as they would otherwise, because that would act as a unifying force. The points of view must be taken from the big picture, so that one encompasses everything that one can experience as a human being in our intellectual life, and elevates it to a different level; otherwise we get stuck in the details too much.

Roman Boos: It would be good if, in the discussion, a position could be taken on the recently asserted claim that Switzerland is a country in which a free

spiritual life can develop fully. Mademoiselle Rihouet has the floor first.

Simone Rihouet: I would just like to express a wish for France, that here at the Goetheanum this international purpose may be fully expressed and that the national may not again triumph over the international. It is striking to see that in France we have exactly the same situation as in Germany regarding the schools. But Swiss teachers, for example, who feel so little compulsion from the state, are not in the same situation as teachers in France and Germany, where the state's influence is so strong that there is already a great need among teachers for liberation and independence in their profession. In France, it will be particularly the student body that will show an understanding for the free spiritual impulses that have been given here. And so, as far as France is concerned – I cannot speak for Germany – I would like to express the wish that a student body should emerge from France that could create an alliance with its colleagues from other countries, an alliance of brotherhood.

Roman Boos: These words from France are all the more warmly welcomed to us because a certain kind of intense fraternization has already arisen on the opposing side. At about the same time that in Germany there was talk of “treason of the fatherland” by Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophists, a similar claim was circulating in the French newspapers, namely that Dr. Steiner's circles were working towards a war of revenge that would last for three years. And in the face of this “League of Nations” of the opposing clans, it will be necessary for an association of people from different nations to form here and work from the Goetheanum.

A German student talks about the attitudes of young people at the universities and the possibility of winning them over to the anthroposophical cause.

Fritz Wullschleger: I would like to speak briefly as a Swiss citizen. It is indeed the case in our country that teachers themselves can exercise a great deal of freedom, for example, in relation to the cantonal government; but they can also exert a great deal of influence on the authorities. If you want to introduce changes in your school, you can request them and they will usually be granted.

Now, I believe that these college courses have a tremendous impact on us. And under this tremendous impact, we can now try to approach our colleagues in conferences and so on and try to create an understanding for the fertilization of the school, at least to make a start in shaping the spiritual life freely. I heard Dr. Steiner's lectures in Basel this spring and – I speak as a teacher – I have so far had the impression that our task is to reshape our teaching as much as possible in the way that anthroposophy demands. Does that mean that we should transfer all our manpower into our schools? No, we should also direct our time and energy and work outwards. We must try to inform the Swiss, perhaps with lectures; we must try to win over the Swiss teacher magazine and, above all, the cantonal teacher magazine. This could perhaps be a start in making a difference in this direction.

Roman Boos: We thank Mr. Wullsch and I would like to take the liberty of adding just a few words to what has been said. In recent years, teacher newspapers in Switzerland have reprinted various articles and reports from our circles, including the excellent essays in the education booklet. But since then, there has not been much interest in the work; there are not many Swiss teachers present at these courses. Imagine if it said in the invitation: “Cantonal Department of Education” – don't you think the hall would be full? These are the small criteria by which one can see whether intellectual life among teachers in Switzerland is truly freely developed.

About a year and a half ago, the teachers of Basel-Stadt were invited by the cantonal education department, and the lectures on educational issues were received with great enthusiasm; a number of school people spoke very enthusiastically about them. Subsequently, a course was set up by the Goetheanum – not by the education department – but there were considerably fewer people there than at the course organized by the education department. And what has grown out of these courses today is, so to speak, nothing. Individual teachers may have taken very great and valuable things from the course, but in social terms, virtually nothing has happened. Why? Because nothing can happen! Because people everywhere are bound by the state. As the student says: we can win every ground, but not the state ground. This can be seen more or less clearly in Switzerland too; because if it were not the case here, we would be making more intensive progress. A long time ago there was a lecture in St. Gallen; and a Swiss teacher came who said: It is quite different for us in Switzerland; we do not have this subservience towards the authorities. We have not been accustomed to censorship and official decrees and so on. And when it was pointed out to him that this was not entirely true, the man replied: Yes, there is a big difference, because we did it voluntarily!

Friedrich Husemann talks about medical education in Germany.

Roman Boos: In order to provide the necessary economic basis for the entire spiritual movement, the two joint-stock companies Futurum AG and Der Kommende Tag AG have been founded in Dornach and Stuttgart. It was intended to say more about these two companies this evening and to give the opportunity to ask questions. But I think it will now be too late to go into it.

Futurum brochures are available in German, French and English, so that everyone has the opportunity to support the cause by subscribing to shares in the manner indicated. You can also contact Mr. Ith at Futurum A. G., who can personally provide you with all the necessary information. It is absolutely necessary in this day and age that we support these economic enterprises with all the strength at our disposal to help them move forward.

Time is getting very late, so that not much more can be debated on the other questions that may still be outstanding. Perhaps someone has something significant to contribute? I would now like to give Dr. Steiner the floor for the final remarks.

Rudolf Steiner: I do not wish to keep you much longer, but I would like to make a few comments, first in connection with what our friend van Leer has proposed here, which is certainly quite commendable and will be, if it leads to the promised goal. I would just like to note that it would be a questionable basis if the matter were to be built on the same foundation as the “covenant” to which [Mr. van Leer] has referred. At that time, work was indeed carried out with a certain zeal in the way Mr. van Leer has roughly outlined today: people sat together in small committees, discussed all sorts of things, what should be done and so on – but then Mr. van Leer made a statement, which is of course a small mistake at first, but which, if it were to continue to have an effect, could lead to a big mistake. It was said, in fact, that the Anthroposophical Society emerged from the work that was so tirelessly carried out that night. No, that is not the case at all: nothing emerged from that night and from that founding of the society! I would like to protect the “restless work of this night” that is intended today from this fate. There was a lot of talk back then about what needed to be done, but nothing came of it. And the mistake that could arise is based on the fact that one might think that something must now be done in the direction indicated by that “covenant”. What was done at that time was that those who were already involved in our anthroposophical work, who were already with us, founded the Anthroposophical Society, quite separately from this covenant. This then developed further, while the “covenant” gradually passed from a gentle sleep into social death, let us say. So, it would be a small mistake! And this must be emphasized, so that the mistakes of that night committee are not repeated in its second edition. That is one thing.

The other point I would like to make, and which Miss Vreede has already mentioned, is that what should be aimed at with the world school association should now really be put on a broad footing and tackled from the outset with a certain courage and a comprehensive view. Our friend Mr. van Leer quite rightly emphasized that the approach to be taken to the free life of the spirit in connection with the threefold social order must be different for the most diverse fields. But this must really be done in such a way that the approach is appropriate for the territories concerned. I myself will always point out that, for example, in England it will be necessary to present things in a way that is appropriate to the English civilization. But one must not overlook the fact that one must thoroughly understand what is imagination in relation to the great human questions of the present and what is reality. One must not, therefore, put the case in such a way as to create the belief that English intellectual life is freer than other countries. And you will see, if you really go through the “key points”, that there is less emphasis on the negative aspect – the liberation of intellectual life from the state – and much less emphasis on it than on the establishment of a free intellectual life in general. And here it will always remain a good word: that it depends on the human being, that it really depends on the spiritual foundations from which the human being emerges, which spiritual foundations are created for his education. It is not so much a matter of emphasizing the negative, but rather of emphasizing the positive. And I need only say this: if intellectual life were formally freed from state control, but everything else remained the same, then this liberation from the state would not be of much use.

The point is that positive spirit, as it has been advocated here this week, as it has been tried to advocate it, that this free spirit be introduced into intellectual life internationally. And then things will happen as they are meant to happen. For example, it is not just the case that a Waldorf school is a truly independent school, that it does not even have a head teacher, but that the teaching body is truly a representative community. The point is not that all measures are taken in such a way that “nothing else” speaks except what comes from the teaching staff itself, that one really has “an independent spiritual community” here, but the point is also that in all countries the spiritual life that has been talked about here all week is missing. And when one hears it emphasized somewhere that “the spiritual life is free in this country” – I am not talking about Switzerland now, I am talking about England – that is another matter. And it is this positive aspect, above all, that is important. It must then be emphasized that this will only exist, of course, if one tries to actually respond to the specific circumstances in the individual countries and territories.

But one must have a heart and mind for what unfree intellectual life has ultimately done in our time. Not in order to respond to what was said here yesterday, but to show the blossoms of human thinking in our present intellectual, moral, and cozy life, I would like to read you a sentence. I do not wish to detain you for long, and I do not wish to speak from the standpoint from which there was such virulent opposition to anthroposophy and the threefold social order here yesterday; but I would like to read a sentence from the brochure that had to be discussed here yesterday. General von Gleich writes about me: “Around the turn of the century, which also marks a turning point in the supersensible world of Anthroposophy, Mr. Steiner, then almost forty years old, was gradually led to Theosophy through Winter's lectures on mysticism.” Now you may ask who this “Herr Winter” is, whom Herr von Gleich cites here as the person through whose lectures I was “converted” to Anthroposophy in Berlin. One can only put forward the following hypothesis: in the preface to those lectures that I gave in Berlin in the winter of 1900/1901, there is a sentence in which I say: “What I present in this writing previously formed the content of lectures that I gave last winter at the Theosophical Library in Berlin.” That 'Mr. Winter' who converted me to Theosophy in 1901/1902 became the 'winter' during which I gave my lectures. You see, I do not want to use the expression that applies to the intellectual disposition of a person who is now called upon to lead the opponents of the anthroposophical movement with it; I do not want to use the expression; but you will certainly be able to use it sufficiently. Today, spiritual life leads to such blossoms of human intellectual activity, through which one could pass in the present day up to the point where one could become a major general.

So one must look at the matter from a somewhat greater depth. Only then will one develop a heart and a mind for what is necessary. And just because the spiritual life must be tackled first of all from the school system, it would be so desirable to found this World School Association, which would not be so difficult to found if the will for it exists. But it must not be a smaller or larger committee, but it must be founded in such a way that its membership is unmanageable. Only then will it have value. It must not – I do not want to give any advice on this, because I have said enough on the subject – it must not, of course, impose any special sacrifices on any individual. It must be there to create the mood for what urgently needs a mood today! – That is something of what I still had to tie in with what has come to light today.

Finally, I must say something that I would rather not say, but which I must say, since otherwise it would not have been touched upon this evening and it might be too late for the next few days, when the pain of departure will probably already be setting in. I must point this out myself. The point is that it is a matter of course that everything that has been said today should be put into practice. But this work only makes sense if we can maintain the Goetheanum as it stands and, above all, can complete it.

Even if things go well with 'Futurum AG' and even if things go well with 'Kommenden Tag' – they will certainly not be any economic support for this Goetheanum for a long time to come, they certainly will not. And the greatest concern — despite all the other concerns that weigh on me today, allow me to speak personally for once — the greatest concern is this: that in the not too distant future it could be the case that we have no economic inflows for this Goetheanum. And that is why it is above all necessary to emphasize that everyone should work towards this, that everyone who can contribute something should do so, so that this building can be completed! That is what is needed above all: that we may be put in a position, through the friends of our cause, to be able to maintain this Goetheanum, to be able above all to finish building this Goetheanum. And that, as I said, is my great concern. I must say so here, because after all, what would it help if we could do as much propaganda as we like and we might have to close this Goetheanum in three months from now? This, too, is one of the social concerns that, in my opinion, are connected with the general social life of the present day. And I had to emphasize this concern because the facts on which it is based should not be forgotten; only this makes it possible to strengthen the movement that emanates from this Goetheanum.

We can see the intellectual foundations on which those who are now taking up their posts against us are fighting. That will be a beginning. We must be vigilant, very vigilant, because these people are clever. They know how to organize themselves. What happened in Stuttgart is a beginning, it is intended as a beginning. And only then will we be able to stand up to them if we spark such idealism – I would like to say it again this time – that does not say: Oh, ideals are so terribly high, they are so lofty, and my pocket is something so small that I do not reach into it when it comes to lofty ideals. – It must be said: Only idealism is true that also digs into its pockets for the ideals!

I am of the opinion, that, in this course we are now starting, it is [a question of] a discussion of what is necessary in order really to connect one's self responsibly with the movement of Anthroposophy and the Threefold Idea. The course will therefore not be arranged for lecturers in general, but as a kind of orientation course for the personalities, who have made it their task to work in the direction indicated.

Personalities who receive what can come from Anthroposophy simply as a kind of information will not get much from this course.

Indeed, at present, we definitely need activity within our movement. It seems to be difficult to kindle this activity. It seems difficult to spread the insight that this activity is really necessary in our time.

Hence, it will not be a matter of a formal course in lecturing, but rather, of just those things which are necessary for someone who would like to accomplish a quite definite task, I mean the one just indicated.

On the whole, the Anthroposophical Movement has no use for general talk. Indeed, this is exactly the mark of our present culture and civilization that there is general talk around things—that people do not pick up concrete tasks—that they have, by preference, interest for talking in general terms.

Hence, I do not intend to treat the things in this course, (which I shall discuss as regards content), in such a way that they might serve as information. But I shall try to treat these things so—and this must indeed be the case in such an orientation course because it is intended as the very basis for a definite task—so that they can then link up directly with the spoken word. And I shall treat this spoken word so as to take into consideration, that he who sets himself the task of delivering a lecture for Anthroposophy is perhaps not working under conditions in which interest is already present, but is working to awaken interest by the first few lectures. Thus, I should like to shape this course in this quite concrete sense.

And, even the large points of view which I shall discuss today are to be meant entirely in this quite concrete sense. One would be reporting what is incorrect if—as is so popular nowadays—one set down what I shall say both today and in the next days as abstract sentences.

Today I intend to speak of certain set of rules.

Whenever through a lecture one sets out upon the task of bringing something near to one's fellow man, a responseful interchange will naturally take place between the person who has something to communicate, something to work for, something to be enthusiastic about, and the persons who listen to him. An interplay of soul-forces occurs. And to this interplay of soul-forces we propose at first to turn our attention.

These soul-forces live, as you know, in thinking, feeling and willing. And never is just a single soul-force in abstract form active by itself. But, into each soul-force the other soul-forces play, so that when we think, there are also feeling and willing always active in our thinking, likewise in our feeling, thinking and willing, and again in willing, thinking and feeling.

But still, one cannot consider the soul life—both by itself and in its responseful interchange between people—save from the point of view of this tending on the one side to thinking, and on the other to willing. And so, in the sense of our task today, we must know the following:

What we think interests nobody else, and whoever believes that his thoughts—insofar as they are thoughts—interest any other person, will not be able to put himself to the task of lecturing. (We intend to speak more precisely about these things.) The willing to which we would like to fire a gathering, or even one other person, this willing that we wish to put into our lecture, this annoys people, this they instinctively reject.

When one approaches people as a lecturer, then one has to do chiefly with the workings of various instincts: The thinking which one kindles in one's self does not interest people, willing annoys them. This, if some one were called upon for this or that act of will, we would find that we had called up, not his willing, but his annoyance. And if we were to sketch our most beautiful and ingenious ideas in a monologue before people, they would walk out. That must be the fundamental guiding line for the lecturer.

I do not say that this is so when we consider a general conversation among people, a gossip session or the like. For I am not speaking here about how these two are to be treated. Rather am I speaking of what should fill our souls, of what should live in us as proper impulse for lecturing, if the lecture is to have a purpose precisely in the direction I now mean. I am speaking of the guiding line one needs to set one's self: Our thoughts do not interest an audience—our will annoys every audience.

Now, we must take a further matter into consideration: When someone lectures, the fact is that he lectures for the most part not only out of his own being, but out of all kinds of situations. For instance, he lectures on some affair that has perhaps for weeks been discussed by, or described to many of the people who will be listening to him. He then naturally meets with quite a different interest than he does if his first sentences touch on something that, until now, had not occupied his hearers in the slightest. When someone lectures here in the Goetheanum, it is naturally something quite different from what it is when one lecturesat a hotel in Kalamazoo. I mean, even setting aside the fact, that in the Goetheanum one is likely to lecture to people who have for some time occupied themselves with the material, have read or heard about it, whereas this is probably not the case in Kalamazoo. I mean the whole surroundings: The fact that one comes to a building such as the Goetheanum makes it possible to turn to the public in quite another manner than is possible when one lectures at a hotel in Kalamazoo. And so there are countless circumstances out of which one lectures which must always be considered.

This however, establishes the necessity, especially in our time, to take one's lead somewhat from what should not be to what should be. Let us take an extreme case. A typical, average professor was supposed to give a lecture. At first he deals with his thoughts about the object, and, if he is a typical, average professor, he also deals with the conviction, that these thoughts which he thinks, are on the whole, the very best in the world on the subject in question. Everything else has at first no interest for him.—He writes these thoughts down.—And of course, when he commits these thoughts to paper, then they become fixed. He then sticks this manuscript into his left side pocket, goes off, unconcerned as to whether it is to the Goetheanum or to the hotel in Kalamazoo, finds a lecturer's desk that is set up in a suitable way, at the right distance for his eyes, lays his manuscript thereon and reads. I do not say that every one does it in this way. But it is a frequent occurrence and a characteristic procedure in our time. And it points to the horror one can have towards lecturing today. It is the type of lecturing for which one should have the greatest aversion.

And, since I have said that our thoughts interest nobody else, and our will annoys everybody, then it seems that it is the feelings upon which lecturing depends,—that an especially significant cultivation of feeling must be basic for lecturing. Hence it becomes of significance, of perhaps remote, yet fundamental significance, that we have acquired this proper aversion for the extreme type of lecture-reading just mentioned.

Once I heard a lecture by the renowned Helmholtz at a rather large meeting that was certainly given in this manner: The manuscript, taken out of the left side pocket and read off. Afterwards a journalist came to me and said: “Why wasn't this lecture printed, a copy slipped into the hand of each one there? And then Helmholtz could have gone about and extended his hand to each one!” The latter would have been more valuable perhaps to the hearers, than the terrible experience of sitting on the hard chairs to which they were condemned in order to have read to them the manuscript, which required more time than it would have taken them to read it themselves. (Most of them would have needed a very long time indeed if they wanted to understand it, but listening for a short time didn't help them at all.)

One must by all means reflect on all these concrete things if one wishes to understand how the art of lecturing can, in all truth and honesty, be striven for.

At the Philosophers' Congress in Bologna the most significant lecture was delivered in the following way: It lay on each chair, three copies, one in each of three languages. One had first to pick them up in order to be able to sit down on the empty chair. And then the lecture was read aloud from the printed copy, requiring somewhat more than an hour. Through such procedure even the most beautiful lecture is no longer a lecture, for understanding gained through reading is something essentially different from the understanding gained through listening. And these things must be considered if one wants to familiarize one's self in a vivid way with such tasks.

Certainly, even a novel can so move us that we shed tears at definite passages. I mean of course, that a good novel can do this only at definite passages, not from the beginning to the end. But what then is really present during reading so that we are carried away by what we read? Whenever we are carried away by what we read, we have to accomplish a certain work that coincides, that is connected very strongly, with the inner side of our humanity. This inner work which we accomplish when we read consists in this, that while we turn our glance to the single letters, we actually carry out what we have learned in the putting together of the letters. Through this activity of looking at the letters, putting them together and thinking about them, we draw forth a meaning. That is a process of receiving which occurs in our ether body and yet strongly engages the physical body in the perceiving.

But all this simply falls away when only listening. This whole activity does not occur when simply listening. Nevertheless, this listening activity is bound up in a definite way with the grasping of a thing. The person is in need of this activity whenever he wishes to grasp a thing. He needs the cooperation of his ether body and in part, even of his physical body. Not only of the sense organ of the ear! Moreover, when listening, he needs a soul life so active that it is not exhausted in the astral body, but brings the ether body to pulsation, and then this ether body also brings the physical body to swing along with it.

That which must take place as activity during reading, must also be developed while listening to a lecture, but—should like to say—in quite another form when listening, because that activity cannot be there in the same way it is for reading. What is called up in reading is transformed feeling, feeling that has been pressed into the ether body and the physical body. This feeling becomes a force. As lecturers we must be in a position to bring up feeling as feeling content, even in the most abstract of lectures.

It is really a fact that our thoughts as such do not interest people, our will impulses annoy everybody, and only our feelings determine the impression, the effect—in a justified sense, of course—of a lecture.

Hence, there arises the most important question. How shall we be able to have something in our lecture which in a sufficiently strong way, will enable the listener to bring forth the needed shade of feeling, the needed permeation with feeling—and yet not press him, lest we hypnotize or suggest.

There cannot be abstract rules by which one learns how to speak with feeling. For, in the person who has hunted in all sorts of manuals for the rules for speaking with feeling, one will notice that his lecturing most surely does not come from his heart, that it stems from quite another place than his heart. And truly, all lectures should come from the heart. Even the most abstract lecture should come from the heart. And that it can! And it is precisely this which we must discuss, how even the most abstract lecture can come from the heart.

We must understand quite clearly what is really stirring in the soul of the listener when he gives us his ear, not perhaps when we tell him something he is eager to hear, but when we expect him to want to listen to our words. Essentially it is indeed always a kind of attack on our fellow men when we fire a lecture at them. And that too is something of which we must be thoroughly aware, that it is an attack on the listeners, when we fire a lecture at them.

Everything which I say—I must ever and again add parenthetically—is to be considered as guide for the lecturer, not as characteristic for social intercourse or the like. Were I to speak in reference to social intercourse, I could naturally not formulate the same sentences. They would be so much foolishness. For, when one speaks concretely, such a sentence as “Our thoughts interest no one” can be either something very clever or very stupid. Everything we say may be foolishness or good sense according to its whole human connection. It depends solely upon the way it is placed into the context. Hence, the lecturer needs quite other things than instructions in the formal art of lecturing.

Thus, it is a matter of recognizing what is really active in the listener. Sympathy and antipathy are active in the listener. These assert themselves more or less unconsciously when we attack the listener with a lecture. Sympathy or antipathy! For our thoughts however, he surely has no sympathy at first. Also not for our will impulses, for that which we, so to speak, want of him, for that to which we want to exhort him.

If we want somehow to approach the art of lecturing, we must have a certain understanding for the listener's sympathy and antipathy toward what we say. Sympathy and antipathy have in reality to do neither with thinking nor with the will, but operate here in the physical world exclusively for the feelings, for what has to do with feeling. A conscious awareness in the listener of sympathy and antipathy has the effect of obstructing the lecturer's approach to him—our awareness of sympathy and antipathy must be of such a kind that it never comes to the consciousness of the listener, especially during the lecture. Working to rouse sympathy and antipathy has the effect of making it seem that we fall over ourselves. Such, approximately, is the effect of a lecture when we want to arouse sympathy and antipathy.

We must have the finest understanding for sympathy and antipathy in the listener. During the lecture however, his sympathy or antipathy should not concern us in the least. All that has an effect upon the sympathy and antipathy, if I may say so, we must bring into the lecture indirectly, beforehand, during the preparation.

Just as little as there can be instructions of an abstract kind for painting or sculpting, just so little can there be rules of an abstract kind for lecturing. But, just as one can stimulate the art of painting, so too it is possible to stimulate the art of lecturing. And it is chiefly a matter of taking in full earnestness the things that can be pointed out in this direction.

***

Guidelines for the preparation of a talk.—The thought content must be thoroughly settled in advance. Verbal formulation of the first and the last sentences. Our thought preparation affects the will; our enthusiasm the thinking of the listeners.

In order to start from an example, let us first take the teacher speaking to children. As far as his speaking is concerned, actually the very least depends upon his genius and wisdom. As to whether we can teach mathematics or geography well, the very, very least will depend upon whether we ourselves are good mathematicians, or good geographers. We can be outstanding geographers, but poor teachers of geography. The intrinsic worth of the teacher, which surely rests in large measure upon his speaking, depends upon what he has previously felt and experienced about the things to be presented, and the kinds of feelings which are again stirred up by the fact that he has a child before him.

Thus it is for example, that Waldorf School pedagogy amounts to knowledge of man, that is of the child—not to a knowledge of the child resulting from abstract psychology, but one that rests upon a fully human comprehension of the child. So far does this comprehension go that through feeling intensified to loving devotion, the teacher manages to experience with the child. Then there results—from this experiencing with the child and from what one has previously felt and experienced in the field in which one has to express something—from all this, there results quite instinctively the manner in which one has to speak and handle the class.

It doesn't serve at all, for instance, in instructing a slow child, to use the wisdom of the world which one has. Wisdom helps one in the case of a dull child, if one acquired the wisdom yesterday and used it in one's preparation. At the moment of instruction of the dull child, one must have the genius to be as slow as the child himself, and just have the presence of mind to remember the way in which one was wise yesterday, during the preparation. One must be able to be slow with the slow child, naughty, at least in feeling, with the naughty child, good with the good child, and so forth. As teacher one must be—I hope that this word will not arouse too great antipathy because it is directed too strongly towards thoughts or will impulses—one must really be a kind of chameleon, if one wishes to instruct rightly.

What many Waldorf teachers have, out of their genius, been able to do to increase discipline has pleased me very much. For example, a teacher is speaking about Jean Paul. The children start writing notes and passing them to each other. This teacher doesn't start reprimanding them; instead, he moves into the situation, and with great patience finds out what it's all about. He then dissolves the threatened disturbance with some instruction on postal affairs. That is more effective than any reminder. The note-writing stops. This result rests naturally upon a concrete grasping of the moment. But of course, one must have the presence of mind. One must know that sympathy and antipathy which one wishes to stir, sit more deeply in the human being than one is accustomed to think.

And so it is extraordinarily important, whenever the teacher has to deal with some chapter in class, that he first of all call up vividly into consciousness during the preparation how he himself approached this chapter when he was the same age as his children are, how he felt then,—not in order to become pedantic, of course, not in order when he treats it on the next day to succeed in feeling again as he once did! No, it is enough when this feeling is brought up during the preparation, when it is experienced in the preparation, and then it is a matter of working on the very next day with the knowledge of man just described.

Thus, also here, in teaching, it is a question of finding within ourselves the possibility of shaping the lecture-material which is part of one's teaching material, out of feeling.

How these things can work we can best become aware of, if we bring also the following before our soul's eye: whenever something of a feeling character is to work into what pulses through our lecture, then naturally we may not speak thoughtlessly, although thoughts do not really interest our listeners, and we may not lecture without will, albeit our will annoys them. We shall very often even want to speak in such a way that what we say goes into the will impulses of the people, that in consequences of our lecture our fellow-men want to do something. But we must not under any circumstances so organize the lecture that we bore the listeners through our thought content and arouse their antipathy through the will impetus we seek to give.

So it is a matter of establishing the thinking for the lecture, completely establishing it, as long as possible before we lecture; that we have beforehand absolutely settled the thought element within ourselves. This has nothing to do with whether we then speak fluently, or whether we speak haltingly. The latter, as we shall see, depends upon quite other circumstances. But what must, to a degree, work unconsciously in the lecture, is connected with our having settled the thought content within ourselves much, much earlier. The thought monologue which should be as lively as possible we must have rehearsed earlier, letting it take form out of the arguments for and against, which we ourselves bring forward during this preparation, anticipating all objections as much as possible.

Through this manner of experiencing our lecture in thoughts beforehand, we take from it the sting it otherwise has for the audience. We are, to a degree, bound to sweeten our lecture by having gone through the sourness of the logical development of the train of thought beforehand,—but, as much as possible in such a way that we do not formulate the lecture word for word. Of course, matters cannot be taken literally,—namely, that we have no idea of how we shall formulate the sentences when we begin to lecture. But the thought content must be settled. To have the verbal formulation ready for the whole lecture is something which can never lead to a really good lecture. For that already comes very near to having written the lecture down, and we need but to imagine that a phonograph instead of us stood there and gave it out automatically. When the lecture is given word for word, from memory, then is the difference between this and a machine that turns it out automatically even smaller than it is between a lecture read from a manuscript and the machine that turns it out automatically. Moreover, if we have formulated a lecture beforehand, so that it is worked out in such a way that it can be spoken by us verbatim, then we are indeed not differentiating ourselves very strongly from a machine by which we have recorded the lecture and then let it be played back. There is not much difference between listening to a lecture that is spoken word for word as it was worked out and reading it oneself,—aside from the fact that in reading one is not continually disturbed by the lecturer, as one is continually when listening to him deliver a lecture that he has memorized.

The thought preparation is experienced in the correct manner when it is carried to the point at which the thoughts have become absolutely part of oneself, and this all well before the lecture. One must be finished with what one would present.

To be sure, there are some exceptions for ordinary lectures which one delivers to an audience until then unknown to one. Whenever, before such an audience, one begins immediately with what one has to a degree worked out meditatively in thoughts, and speaks from the first sentence on under direct inspiration, if I may say so, then one does not do something really good for the listeners. At the beginning of a lecture one must make one's personality somewhat active. At the beginning of a lecture one should not immediately entirely extinguish one's personality, because the vibration of feeling must first be stirred.

Now, it is not necessary to proceed as did, for example, Michael Bernays, Professor of History of German Literature, at one time very famous in certain circles. He once came to Weimar to give a lecture on Goethe's Color Theory, and wanted to form his first sentences in such a way that certainly the feeling of the listeners would be engaged very, very intensively—but, to be sure, it happened quite otherwise than he had intended. He arrived in Weimar several days before the lecture. Weimar is a small city where one can go about among the people, (some of whom will be in the hall), and make propaganda for one's lecture. Those who hear about the lecture directly, tell others about it, and the whole hall is really “tuned up” when one delivers one's lecture. Now Prof. Michael Bernays actually went about in Weimar for several days and said: “Oh, I have not been able to prepare myself for this lecture, my genius will surely prompt me correctly at the right moment.” He was to deliver this lecture in the Recreation Hall in Weimar. It was a hot summer day. The windows had to be opened. And, directly in front of this Recreation Hall there was a poultry yard. Michael Bernays took his place and waited for his genius to begin suggesting something to him. For indeed, all Weimar knew that his genius must come and suggest his lecture to him. And then, at this moment, while Bernays was waiting for his genius, the cock outside began: cock-a-doodle-doo! Now every one knew: Michael Bernays' genius has spoken for him!—Feelings were strongly stirred. To be sure, in a different way from what he wanted. But there was a certain atmosphere in the hall.

I do not recount this in order to tell you a neat anecdote, but because I must call your attention to the following: the body of a lecture must have been so formed that it is well worked through meditatively in thoughts, and later formulated freely,—but the introduction is really there for the purpose of making oneself a bit ridiculous. That inclines the listeners to listen to one more willingly. If one does not make oneself a wee bit, ridiculous—to be sure, so that its not too obvious, so that it flows down only into the unconscious—one is unable to hold the attention in the right way when delivering a single lecture. Of course, it should not be exaggerated, but it will surely work sufficiently in the unconscious.

What one should really have for every lecture is this—that one has verbally formulated the first, second, third, fourth, and at most, the fifth sentences. Then one proceeds to the development of the material that has been worked out in the way I have just indicated. And one should have verbally formulated the closing sentences. For, in winding up a lecture, if one is a genuine lecturer, one should really always have some stage fright, a secret anxiety that one will not find one's last sentence. This stage fright is necessary for the coloring of the lecture; one needs this in order to captivate the hearts of the listeners at the end:—that one is anxious about finding the last sentence. Now, if one is to meet this anxiety in the right way, after one has perspiringly completed one's lecture, let one add this to all the rest of the preparation, that one bear in mind the exact formulation of the last one, two, three, four—at most, five—sentences. Thus, a lecture should really have a frame: The formulation of the first and last sentences. And, in between, the lecture should be free. As mentioned, I give this as a guiding principle.

And now perhaps, many of you will say: yes, but if one is not able to lecture just that way? One need not therefore immediately say that it would be so difficult, that one should not lecture at all. It is indeed quite natural that one can lecture a bit better or a bit worse, just so long as one does not let oneself be deterred from lecturing because of all these requirements: but one should make an effort to fulfill these requirements, at the same time as one makes such guiding principles as we develop here pervade all that he strives to do.

And there is indeed a very good means for becoming at least a bearable lecturer, even if at first one is no lecturer, even the opposite of a lecturer. I can assure you that when the lecturer has made himself ridiculous fifty times, that his lecture will come out right the fifty-first time. Just because he made himself ridiculous fifty times. And he for whom fifty times do not suffice, can undertake to lecture a hundred times. For one day it comes right, if one does not shy away from public exposure. One's last lecture before dying will naturally never be good if one has previously shied away from public exposure. But, at least the last lecture before one's death will be good if one has previously, during life, made oneself ridiculous an x number of times. This is also something about which one should really always think. And one will thus surely, without doubt, train oneself to be a lecturer! To be a lecturer requires only that people listen to one, and that one come not too close to them, so to speak; that one really avoid anything that comes too close to the people.

The manner in which one is accustomed to talk in social life when conversing with other people, that one will not find fitting to use when delivering a lecture in public, or generally speaking, to an audience. At most, one will be able to insert sentences such as one speaks in ordinary life only now and then. It is well to be aware that what one has as formulation of one's speaking in ordinary life, is, as a rule, somewhat too subtle or too blunt for a lecture to an audience. It just does not set quite right. The way in which one formulates one's words in the usual speaking, when addressing another person, varies; it always swings between being somewhat crude and, on the other hand, somewhat untruthful or impolite. Both must be entirely avoided in a lecture delivered to an audience, and, if used, then only in parenthesis, so to speak. Otherwise the listener has the secret feeling: while the lecturer begins to speak as one does in a lecture, suddenly he starts declaiming, or speaking dialogue-wise,—he must intend either to offend us a bit or to flatter us.

We must also bring the will element into the lecture in the right way. And this can only be accomplished by the preparation, but by such preparation as uses one's own enthusiasm in thinking through the material, enthusiasm which to a certain extent lives with the material.

Now consider the following: first one has completed the thought content, made it one's own. The next part of the preparation would be to listen, so to speak, to oneself inwardly lecturing on this thought content. One begins to listen attentively to these thoughts. They need not be formulated verbatim, as I have already said, but one begins to listen to them. It is this which puts the will element into the right position, this listening to oneself. For while we listen to ourselves inwardly, we develop enthusiasm or aversion, sympathy or antipathy at the right places, as these responses follow what we wish to impart. What we prepare in this will-like way also goes into our wills, and appears during our lecturing in tone variation. Whether we speak intensively or more softly, whether we accentuate brightly or darkly, this we do solely as the result of the feeling-through and willing-through of our thought content in the meditative preparation.

All the thought content we must gradually lead over into the forming of a picture of the composition of our lecture. Then will the thinking be embedded in the lecture,—not in the words, but between the words: in the way in which the words are shaped, the sentences are shaped, and the arrangement is shaped. The more we are in a position to think about ‘the how’ of our lecture, the more strongly do we work into the will of the others. What people will accept depends upon what we put into the formulation, into the composition of the lecture.

Were we to come to them and say: “When all is said, every one of you who does not do his utmost in order to realize the Threefold Order tomorrow is a bad fellow”—that would annoy people. However, when we present the sense of the Threefold Order in a lecture that is composed in accordance with the nature of its content, that it is inwardly organized so that it is itself even a kind of intimate 'threefolding', and especially even if it is so fashioned that we ourselves are convinced of the necessity for the Threefold Order, convinced with all our feeling and all our will impulses—then this works upon the people, works upon the will of the people.

What we have done in the way of developing our thoughts, in order to make our lecture into a work of art, this affects the will of the people. What springs from our own will, what we ourselves want, what fills us with enthusiasm, what enraptures us, this affects more the thinking of the listeners, this stimulates them more easily in their thoughts.

Thus it is that a lecturer who is enthusiastic about his subject is easily understood. A lecturer who composes artistically will more easily stir the will of his listeners. But the main principle, the chief guide line must still be this: That we deliver no lecture that is not well prepared.

Yes, but when we are compelled to deliver a lecture on the so-called spur of the moment: when, for example, we are challenged and have to answer immediately; then we certainly cannot turn back in time to the preceding day when we brought the argument to mind, in order to meditate on its counter-argument—that cannot be done! And yet, it can be done! It can be done in just such a moment by being absolutely truthful. Or we are attacked by a person who accosts us in a terribly rude manner, so that we must answer him immediately. Here we have a strong feeling-fact at the outset! Thus, the feeling is already stirred in a corresponding way. Here is a substitute for what we otherwise use in order to experience with enthusiasm what we first represent to ourselves in thought. But then, if we say nothing else in such a moment except that we as whole man can say at each moment when we are attacked in this manner, then we are nevertheless prepared in a similar way in this situation too.

Just in such things it is a question of the unwavering decision to be only, only, only truthful and when the attack is not such that we are challenged to a discussion, then there are present, as a rule, all the conditions for understanding. ( About this I shall speak later.) It is then actually a question not of delivering mere lectures, but of doing something quite different, which will be particularly important for us if we wish to complete this course rightly. For indeed, in order to be active in the sense that I indicated today at the beginning, we shall have not merely to deliver lectures, but every man of us, and of course every woman, will also have to stand his ground in the discussion period, come what may. And about this, much will have to be said, in fact, very much.

Now I beg you above all, to look at what I have said today from the point of view that it indicates perhaps a bit the difficulty of acquiring the art of lecturing. But it is quite especially difficult when it is necessary not only to lecture, but even to have to lecture about lecturing. Just think if one were to paint painting, and sculpture sculpturing!

Thus, the task is not altogether easy. But we shall nevertheless try in some way to complete it within the next days.

When we set out today to speak about Anthroposophy and the Threefold Movement with its various consequences—which indeed arise out of Anthroposophy, and must really be thought of as arising out of it,—then we must first of all hold before our souls that it is difficult to make oneself understood. And, without this feeling—that it is difficult to make oneself understood—we shall hardly be able to succeed as lecturers for anthroposophical Spiritual Science and all that is connected with it, in a way satisfying to ourselves. For if there is to be speaking about Anthroposophy which is appropriate, then this speaking must be entirely different from what one is accustomed to in accordance with the traditions of speaking. One has often fallen into the habit of speaking also about anthroposophical matters in the way one has become used to speaking in the age of materialism; but one is more apt thereby to obstruct the understanding for Anthroposophy, rather than to open up an approach to it.

We shall first of all have to make quite clear to ourselves what the content of the matter is that comes towards us in Anthroposophy and its consequences. And in these lectures I shall deal as I said yesterday, with the practice of lecturing, but only for anthroposophical and related matters, so that what I have to say applies only to these.

We must now make clear to ourselves that primarily it is the feeling for the central issue of the threefold order that must at first be stirred in our present humanity. It must after all be assumed that an audience of today does not begin to know what to do with the concept of the threefold order. Our speaking must slowly lead to the imparting first of a feeling for this threefold order in the audience.

During the time in which materialism has held sway, one has become accustomed to give expression to the things of the outer world through description. In this one had a kind of guidance in the outer world itself. Moreover, objects in the outer world are, I would say, too fixed for one to believe that, in the end, it makes much difference how one speaks about the things of the outer world; one need only give people some guidance on the way for perceiving this outer world. Then, in the end it comes to this: if, let us say, one delivers somewhere a popular lecture with experiments, and thereby demonstrates to people how this or that substance reacts in a retort, then they see how the substance reacts in the retort. And whether one then lectures this way or that way—a bit better, a bit less well, a hit more relevantly, a hit less relevantly—in the end makes no difference. And gradually it has tended to come to the point that such lectures and such talks are attended in order to see the experimenting, and what is spoken is just taken along as a kind of more or less agreeable or disagreeable side noise. One must express these things somewhat radically, just in order to show the exact direction in which civilization is moving in regard to these things.

When it is a matter of what to stimulate in people for doing, for willing, one is of the opinion that one must just “set up ideals”. People would have to accustom themselves to “apprehend ideals”, and thus one gradually glides more and more over into the utopian, when it is a matter of such things as the threefold order of the social organism.

So it has also happened in many an instance that many people who lecture about the threefold idea today absolutely call forth the opinion, through the manner in which they speak, that it is some utopia or other that should be striven for. And, since one is always of the opinion that what should be striven for in most cases cannot be expected to come in less than fifty or a hundred years—or many extend the time even further—so one also allows oneself, quite unconsciously, to approach speaking about things as if they would first ripen in fifty or a hundred years. One glides away from the reality very soon, and then talks about it thus: How will a small shop be set up in the threefold social organism? What will be the relation of the single person to the sewing machine in the threefold social organism?—and so on. Such questions are really put in abundance to any endeavor such as the threefolding of the social organism. As regards such an endeavor, which with all of its roots comes out of reality, one should not at all speak in this utopian fashion. For one should always evoke at least this feeling: the threefold order of the social organism is nothing which can be "made" in the sense that state constitutions can be made in a parliament—of the kind for example, that the Weimar National Assembly was. These are made! But one cannot speak in the same sense of making the threefold social organism.

Just as little can one speak of "organizing" in order to produce the threefold order. That which is an organism, this one does not organize; this grows. It is just in the nature of an organism that one does not have to organize it, that it organizes itself. That which can be organized is no organism. We must approach things from the start with these feelings, otherwise we shall not have the possibility of finding the appropriate expression.

The threefold order is something which indeed simply follows from the natural living together of people. One can falsify this natural living together of people—as has been the case, for example, in recent history—by extending the characteristic features of one member, the states-rights member, to both others. Then these two other members will simply become corrupted because they cannot prosper, just as someone cannot get on well in an unsuitable garment, that is too heavy, or the like.

It is in the natural relation of people that the threefold order of the social organism lives, that the independent spiritual life lives, that the rights or states life, regulated by the people's majority, lives, that the economic life, shaped solely out of itself, also lives. One can put strait jackets on the spiritual life, on the economic life, although one does not need them; but then its own life asserts itself continually nevertheless, and what we then experience outwardly is just this self-assertion. It is hence necessary to show that the threefolding of the social organism is implicit in the very nature of both the human being and the social life.

We see that the spiritual life in Europe was entirely independent and free until the 13th or 14th centuries, when, what was the free, independent spiritual life was first pushed into the universities. In this time you find the founding of the universities, and the universities then in turn slip by and by into the life of state. So that one can say: From about the 13th to the 16th or 17th century, the universities slip into the states-life, and with the universities, also the remaining educational institutions, without people really noticing it. These other institutions simply followed. This we have on the one hand.

On the other hand, until about the same period, we have free economic rule that found its true, middle-European expression in the free economic village communities. As the free spiritual life slipped into the universities, which are localized at first, and which later find shelter in the state, so does that which is the economic organization first receive a certain administration in the “rights” sense, when the cities emerge more and more. Then the cities, in the first place, organize this economic life, while earlier, when the village communities were setting the pace, it had grown freely. And then we see how increasingly, that which was centralized in the cities seeks protection in the larger territories of the states. Thus we see how the tendency of modern times ends in letting the spiritual life on the one hand, the economic life on the other, seek the protection of states which increasingly take on the character of domains constituted according to Roman law. This was actually the development in modern times.

We have reached that point in historical development where things can go no further like this, where a sense and a feeling for free spiritual life must once again be developed. When in a strait jacket, the spirit simply does not advance; because it only apparently advances, but in truth still remains behind—can never celebrate real births, but at most renaissances. It is just the same with the economic life.

Today we simply stand in the age in which we must absolutely reverse the movement which has developed in the civilized world of Europe with its American annex, the age in which the opposite direction must set in. For what has gone on developing for a time must reach a point at which something new must set in. Otherwise one runs into the danger of doing as one would when, with a growing plant, one were to say it should not be allowed to come to fruition, it should grow further, it should keep blooming on and on.—Then it would grow thus: bring forth a flower; then no seed, but again a flower, again a flower, and so on. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to familiarize oneself inwardly with these things, and to develop a feeling for the historical turning point at which we stand today.

But, just as in an organism every detail is necessarily formed as it is, so is everything in the world in which we live and which we help to shape, to be formed as it must be in its place in the sense of the whole. You cannot imagine, if you think realistically, that your ear lobe could be formed the very least bit differently from what it is, in conformity with your whole organism. Were your ear lobe only the least bit differently formed, then you would also have to have quite a different nose, different fingertips, and so forth. And just as the ear lobe is formed in the sense of the whole human being, so must also the lecture in which something flows be given—in the sense of the whole subject—that lecturing which is truly taking on new forms.

Such a lecture cannot be delivered in the manner which one could perhaps learn from the sermon-lecture. For the sermon-lecture as we still have it today, rests on the tradition which really goes back to the old Orient,—on a special attitude which the whole human being in the old Orient had toward speech. This characteristic was continued, so that it lived in a certain free way in Greece, lived in Rome, and shows its last spark most clearly in the particular relationship which the Frenchman has to his language. Not that I want to imply that every Frenchman preaches when he speaks; but a similar relationship, such as had to develop out of the oriental relationship to language still continues to live on in a definite way in the French handling of speech, only entirely in a declining movement.

This element which we can observe here in regard to language came to expression when one still learned speaking from the professors, as one could later, but now in the declining phase—professors who really continued to live on as mummies of ancient times and bore the title, “professor of elocution”. In former times, at almost every university, in every school, also in seminaries and so on there was such a professor of elocution, of rhetoric. The renowned Curtius [Note 1] of Berlin actually still bore the title “professor of elocution” officially. But the whole affair became too dull for him, and he did not lecture on elocution, but only demonstrated himself as a professor of elocution through being sent out by the faculty council on ceremonial occasions, since that was always the task of the professor of elocution. Nevertheless, in this Curtius made it his business to discharge his duties at such ceremonial occasions by paying as little regard as possible to the ancient rules of eloquence. For the rest, it was too dull for him to be a professor of elocution in times in which professors of elocution did not fit in any more, and he lectured on art history, on the history of Greek art. But in the university catalog he was listed as “professor of elocution”. This refers us back to an element that was present everywhere in speech in olden times.

Now, when we consider what is quite especially characteristic in the training of speech for the middle European languages, for German, for example, then indeed everything denoted in the original sense by the word “elocution” has not the least meaning. For something flowed into these languages that is entirely different from that which was peculiar to speaking in the times when elocution had to be taken seriously. In the Greek and Latin languages there is elocution. In the German language elocution is something quite impossible, when one looks inwardly at the essential.

Today, however, we are living definitely in a time of transition. That which was the speech element of the German language cannot continue to be used. Every attempt must be made to come out of this speech element and to come into a different speech element. This also is the task, in a certain sense, to be solved by him who would speak productively about Anthroposophy or the threefold idea. For only when a fairly large number of people are able to speak in this way, will Anthroposophy and the threefold idea be rightly understood in public, even in single lectures. Meanwhile, there are not a few who develop only a pseudo-understanding and pseudo-avowal for these.

If we look back on the special element in regard to speaking which was present in the times out of which the handling of elocution was preserved, we must say: then it was as if language grew out of the human being in quite a naive way, as his fingers grow, as his second teeth grow. From the imitation process speaking resulted, and language with its whole organization. And only after one had language did one come to the use of thinking.

And now it transpired that the human being when speaking to others about any problem had to see that the inner experience, the thought experience, to a certain extent clicked [einschnappte] into the language. The sentence structure was there. It was in a certain way elastic and flexible. And, more inward than the language was the thought element. One experienced the thought element as something more inward than the language, and let it click into the language, so that it fitted into it just as one fits the idea of a statue or the like into marble. It was entirely an artistic treatment of the language. Even the way in which one was meant to speak in prose had something similar to the way in which one was to express oneself in poetry. Rhetoric and elocution had rules which were not at all unlike the rules of poetic expression. (So as not to be misunderstood, I should like to insert here that the development of language does not exclude poetry. What I now say, I say for older arts of expression, and I beg you not to interpret it as if I wanted to assert that there can be no more poetry at all today. We need but treat the language differently in poetry. But that does not belong here; I wanted to insert this only in parenthesis, that I might not be misunderstood.)

And when we now ask: How was one then supposed to speak in the time in which the thought and feeling content clicked into the language? One was supposed to speak beautifully! That was the first task: to speak beautifully. Hence, one can really only learn to speak beautifully today when one immerses oneself in the old way of speaking. There was beautiful speaking. And speaking beautifully is definitely a gift which comes to man from the Orient. It might be said: There was speaking beautifully to the point that one really regarded singing, the singing of language, as the ideal of speaking. Preaching is only a form of beautiful speaking stripped of much of the beautiful speaking. For, wholly beautiful speaking is cultic speaking. When cultic speaking pours itself into a sermon, then much is lost. But still, the sermon is a daughter of the beautiful speaking found in the cult.

The second form which has come into evidence, especially in German and in similar languages, is that in which it is no longer possible to distinguish properly between the word and the grasping of the thought conveyed—the word and the thought experience; the word has become abstract, so that it exempts itself, like a kind of thought. It is the element where the understanding for language itself is stripped off. It can no longer have something click into it, because one feels at the very outset that what is to be clicked in and the word vehicle into which something is to click are one.

For who today is clear, for example in German, when he writes down “Begriff” [concept], that this is the noun form of begreifen [to grasp; to comprehend] be-greifen (greifen with a prefix) is thus das Greifen an etwas ausfuehren [the carrying out of the grasping of something]—that “Begriff” is thus nothing other than the noun form for objective perceiving? The concept “Begriff” was formed at a time when there was still a living perception of the ether body, which grasps things. Therefore one could then truly form the concept of Begriff, because grasping with the physical body is merely an image of grasping with the ether body.

But, in order to hear Begreifen in the word Begriff it is necessary to feel speech as an organism of one's own. In the element of speaking which I am now giving an account of, language and concept always swim through one another. There is not at all that sharp separation which was once present in the Orient, where the language was an organism, was more external, and that which declared itself lived inwardly. What lived inwardly had to click into the linguistic form in speaking; that is, click in so that what lives inwardly is the content, and that into which it clicked was the outer form. And this clicking-in had to happen in the sense of the beautiful, so that one was thus a true speech artist when one wanted to speak.

This is no longer the case when, for example, one has no feeling any more for differentiating between Gehen [to go] and Laufen [to run] in relation to language as such. Gehen: two e's—one walks thither without straining oneself thereby; e is always the feeling expression for the slight participation one has in one's own activity. If there is an au in the word, this participation is enhanced. From running (Laufen) comes panting (Schnaufen) which has the same vowel sound in it. With this one's insides come into tumult. There must be a sound there that intimates this modification of the inner being. But all this is indeed no longer there today; language has become abstract. It is like our onward-flowing thoughts themselves—for the whole middle region, and especially also for the western region of civilization.

It is possible to behold a picture, an imagination in every single word; and one can live in this picture as in something relatively objective. He who faced language in earlier times considered it as something objective into which the subjective was poured. He would as little not have regarded it so, as he would have lost sight of the fact that his coat is something objective, and is not grown together with his body as another skin.

As against this, the second stage of language takes the whole organism of language as another son' skin, whereas formerly language was much more loosely there, I should like to say, like a garment. I am speaking now of the stage of language in which speaking beautifully is no longer taken into first consideration, but rather speaking correctly. In this it is not a question of rhetoric and elocution, but of logic. With this stage, which has come up slowly since Aristotle's time, grammar itself became logical to the point that the logical forms were simply developed out of the grammatical forms—one abstracted the logical from the grammatical. Here all has swum together: thought and word. The sentence is that out of which one evolves the judgment. But the judgment is in truth so laid into the sentence that one no longer experiences it as inherently independent. Correct speaking, this has become the criterion.

Further, we see a new element in speaking arising, only used everywhere at the wrong point—carried over to a quite wrong domain. Beautiful speaking humanity owes to the Orient. Correct speaking lies in the middle region of civilization. And we must look to the West when seeking the third element.

But in the West it arises first of all quite corrupted. How does it arise? Well, in the first place, language has become abstract. That which is the word organism is already almost thought-organism. And this has gradually increased so much in the West, that there it would perhaps even be regarded as facetious to discuss such things. But, in a completely wrong domain, the advance already exists.

***

Humanism and pragmatism. The need for developing a true ethics of speaking.

You see, in America, just in the last third of the 19th century, a philosophical trend called “pragmatism” has appeared. In England it has been called “humanism.” James [Note 2] is its representative in America, Schiller [Note 3] in England. Then there are personalities who have already gone about extending these things somewhat. The merit of extending this concept of humanism in a very beautiful sense is due to Professor MacKenzie [Note 4] who was recently here.

To what do these endeavors lead?—I mean now, American pragmatism and English humanism. They arise from a complete skepticism about cognition: Truth is something that really doesn't exist! When we make two assertions, we actually make them fundamentally in order to have guide-points in life. To speak about an “atom”—one cannot raise any particular ground of truth for it; but it is useful to take the atom theory as a basis in chemistry; thus we set up the atom concept! It is serviceable, it is useful. There is no truth other than that which lives in useful, life-serviceable concepts. “God,” if he exists or not, this is not the question. Truth, that is something or other which is of no concern to us. But it is hard to live pleasantly if one does not set up the concept of God; it is really good to live, if one lives as if there were a God. So, let us set it up, because it's a serviceable, useful concept for life. Whether the earth began according to the Kant-Laplace theory and will end according to the mechanical warmth theory, from the standpoint of truth, no human being knows anything about this—I am now just simply reporting—, but it is useful for our thinking to represent the beginning and end of the earth in this way. This is the pragmatic teaching of James, and also in essence,the humanistic teaching of Schiller. Finally, it is also not known at all whether the human being now, proceeding from the standpoint of truth, really has a soul. That could be discussed to the end of the world, whether there is a soul or not, but it is useful to assume a soul if one wants to comprehend all that the human being carries out in life.

Of course, everything that appears today in our civilization in one place spreads to other places. For such things which arose instinctively in the West, the German had to find something more conceptual, that permits of being more easily seen through conceptually; and from this the “As If” philosophy originated: whether there is an atom or not is not the question; we consider the phenomena in such a way “as if” there was an atom. Whether the good can realize itself or not, cannot be decided; we consider life in such a way “as if” the good could realize itself. One could indeed quarrel to the end of the world about whether or not there is a God: but we consider life in such a way that we act “as if” there were a God. There you have the “As If” philosophy.

One pays little attention to these things because one imagines: there in America James sits with his pupils, there in England Schiller sits with his pupils; there is Vaihinger, who wrote the “As If” philosophy: there are a few owls who live in a kind of cloud-castle, and of what concern is it to other people!

Whoever has the ear for it, however, already hears the “As If” philosophy sounding everywhere today. Almost all human beings talk in the sense of the “As If” philosophy. The philosophers are only quite funny fellows. They always blab out what other people do unconsciously. If one is sufficiently unprejudiced for it, then one only seldom hears a human being today who still uses his words differently, in connection with his heart and with his whole soul, with his whole human being, who speaks differently than as though the matter were as he expresses it. One only does not usually have the ear to hear within the sound and the tone-color of the speaking that this “As If” lives in it,—that fundamentally people over the whole of civilization are seized by this “As If.”

Whereas things usually come to be corrupted at the end, here something shows itself to be corrupted at the beginning, something that in a higher sense must be developed for handling of speech in Anthroposophy, in the threefold order and so on. These things are so earnest, so important, that we really should speak specially about them. For it will be a question of elevating the triviality, “We need concepts because they are useful for life,” this triviality of a materialistic, utilitarian theory, of raising it up to the ethical, and perhaps through the ethical to the religious. For, if we want to work in the sense of Anthroposophy and the threefold order, we have before us the task of learning good speaking, in addition to the beautiful speaking and the correct speaking which we can acquire from history. We must maintain an ear for good speaking.

Until now, I have seen little sign that it has been noticed, when, in the course of my lectures I have called attention to this good speaking—I have done it very frequently. In referring to this good speaking I have always said that it is not only a question today that what is said be correct in the logical-abstract sense, but it is a matter of saying something in a certain connection or omitting it, not saying it in this connection. It is a question of developing a feeling that something should not only be correct, but that it is justified within its connection—that it can be either good in a certain connection or bad in a certain connection. Beyond rhetoric, beyond logic, we must learn a true ethics of speaking. We must know how we may allow ourselves things in a certain connection that would not be at all permitted in another connection.

Here I may now use an example close to hand, that could perhaps have already struck some of you who were present lately at the lectures: I spoke in a certain connection of the fact that, in reality, Goethe was not born at all. I said that Goethe for a long time endeavored to express himself through painting, through drawing, but that nothing came about from it. It then flowed over into his poetic works, and then again in the poetic works, as for example Iphigenia, or especially in Naturliche Tochter [“Daughters of Nature”], we have indeed poetic works not at all in the sentimental sense. People called these poems of Goethe's “marble smooth and marble cold,” because they are almost sculptural, because they are three-dimensional. Goethe had genuine capacities which really did not become human at all; he was actually not born.—You see, in that connection in which I spoke lately, one could quite certainly say it. But imagine, if someone were to represent it as a thesis in itself in the absolute sense! It would be not only illogical, it would be of course quite crazy.

To speak out of an awareness of a life connection is something different from finding the adequate or correct use of a word association for the thought and feeling involved. To let a pronouncement or the like arise at a particular place out of a living relationship, that is what leads over from beauty, from correctness, to the ethos of language—at which one feels, when a sentence is uttered, whether one may or may not say it in the whole context. But now, there is again an inward growing together, not with language, but with speaking. This is what I should like to call good speaking or had speaking; the third form. Aside from beautiful or ugly speaking, aside from correct or incorrect speaking, comes good or bad speaking, in the sense in which I have just presented it.

Today the view is still widespread that there can be sentences which one forms and which can then be spoken on any occasion, because they have absolute validity. In reality, for our life in the present, there are no longer such sentences. Every sentence that is possible in a certain connection, is today impossible in another connection. That means, we have entered upon an epoch of humanity's development in which we need to direct our view to this many-sidedness of living situations.

The Oriental who with his whole thinking lived within a small territory, also the Greek still, who with his spiritual life, with his rights life, with his economic life, lived on a small territory, poured something into his language that appears as a linguistic work of art must appear. How is it though in a work of art? It is such that a single finite object really appears infinite in a certain realm. In this way beauty was even defined, though one-sidedly, by Haeckel, Darwin and others: It is the appearance of the idea in a self-contained picture.—The first thing which I had to oppose in my Vienna lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetics,” was that the beautiful is “the appearance of the idea in outer form.” I showed then that one must mean just the reverse: that the beautiful arises when one gives to form the appearance of the infinite.

And so it is with language, which in a certain way also acts as a limited territory—as a territory which encloses the possible meaning within boundaries. If that which is actually infinite in the inner soul- and spirit-life is to click into this language, it must there come to expression in beautiful form.

In correct speaking the language must be adequate; the sentence must fit the judgment, the concept, the word. The Romans were compelled to this, especially as their territory became ever larger and larger; their language transformed itself from the beautiful into the logical. Hence the custom has been retained, of conveying logic to people precisely in the Latin language. (You have indeed learned logic quite well by it.)

But we are now once again beyond this stage. Now, it is necessary that we learn to experience language with ethos—that, to a certain extent we gain a kind of morality of speaking in our lecturing, while we know that we have in a certain context to allow ourselves something or to deny ourselves something. There, things do not click-in, in the way I described earlier, but here we make use of the word to characterize. All defining ceases; here we use the word to characterize. The word is so handled that one really feels each word as something insufficient, every sentence as something insufficient, and has the urge to characterize that which one wishes to place before humanity from the most varied aspects—to go around the matter to a certain extent, and to characterize it from the most varied aspects.

You see, for free spiritual life—that is to say spiritual life that exists out of its own laws—there is as yet not very much understanding in present-day humanity. For, mostly what is understood by free spiritual life is a structure in which people live, where each one crows his own cock-a-doodle-doo from his own dung heap—excuse the somewhat remarkable picture—and in which the most incredible consonances come about from the crowing. In reality, in free spiritual life, harmony comes about through and through, because the spirit, not the single egoists, lives—because the spirit can really lead its own life over and above the single egoists.

There is, for example,—one must already say these things today—a Waldorf School spirit definitely there for our Waldorf School in Stuttgart that is independent of the body of teachers,—into which the body of teachers grows, and in which it becomes ever more and more clear that possibly the one can be more capable or less capable, but the spirit has a life of its own.

It is an abstraction, which people today still represent to themselves, when they speak of “free spirit.” This is no reality at all. The free spirit is something that really lives among people—one must only let it come into existence; and what works among people—one must only let it come into existence.

What I have said to you today I have also said only so that what we are meant to gain here may proceed from fundamental feelings, from the feeling for the earnestness of the matter. I cannot, of course, suppose that every one will now go right out and, as those in olden times spoke beautifully, in the middle period correctly, now all will speak well! But you may not for this reason object: of what help, then, are all our lectures, if we are not at once able to speak in the sense of good speaking?—It is rather a matter of our really getting the feeling of the earnestness of the situation, which we are thus to live into, so that we know: what is wanted here is something in itself so organically whole, that a necessity of form must gradually express itself even in speech, just as a necessity of form expresses itself in the ear-lobe, such as cannot be otherwise depending on how the whole human being is.

Thus I shall try to bring still closer together what is for us the content of Anthroposophy and the threefold order with the way in which it should be presented to people. And, from the consideration of principles I shall come more and more into the concrete, and to that which should underlie the practice of lecturing.

I have often emphasized that this must be Anthroposophy's manner of presenting things. I have often emphasized that one should not indeed believe that one is able to find the adequate word, the adequate sentence; one can only conduct oneself as does a photographer who, in order to show a tree, takes at least four views.

Thus a conception that lives itself out in an abstract trivial philosophy such as pragmatism or humanism, must be raised up into the realm of the ethical. And then it must first of all live in the ethos of language. We must learn good speaking. That means that we must experience as regards speaking something of all that we otherwise experience in relation to ethics, moral philosophy.

After all, the matter has become quite clear in modern times. In the speaking of theosophists we have an archaism simply conditioned through the language—archaic, namely as regards the materialistic coloration of the last centuries: “physical body”—well, it is thick; “ether body”—it is thinner, more nebulous; “astral body”—once again thinner, but still only thinner; “I”—still thinner. Now, new members of the human being keep on coming up: they become even thinner. At last one no longer knows at all how one can reach this thinness, but in any case, it only becomes ever thinner and thinner. One does not escape the materialism. This is indeed also the hallmark of this theosophical literature. And it is always the hallmark that appears, when these things are to be spoken about, from theoretical speaking, to that which I once experienced within the Theosophical Society in Paris, (I believe it was in 1906). A lady there who was a real rock-solid theosophist, wanted to express how well she liked particular lectures which had been given in the hall in which we were; and she said: “There are such good vibrations here!” And one perceived from her that this was really thought of as something which one might sniff. Thus, the scents of the lectures which were left behind and which one could sniff out somehow, these were really meant.

We must learn to tear language away from adequacy. For it can be adequate only for the material. If we wish to use it for the spiritual, in the sense of the present epoch of development of humanity, then we must free it. Freedom must then come into the handling of language. If one does not take these things abstractly, but livingly, then the first thing into which the philosophy of freedom [spiritual activity] must come is in speaking, in the handling of language. For this is necessary; otherwise the transition will not be found, for example, to the characterization of the free spiritual life.

Notes:

Note 1.Ernst Curtius, 1814–1896, archeologist and historian.

Note 2.William James. 1842–1910, American philosopher.

Note 3.F. C. S. Schiller. 1864–1937. Representative of pragmatism in England which he combined with humanism.

Note 4.S. MacKenzie, born 1860. Professor in Cardiff.

Along with the tasks which one can set oneself in a certain realm as a speaker it will be a question at first of entering in the appropriate way into the material itself which is to be dealt with. There is a twofold entering into the material, in so far as the message about this material is concerned in speaking. The first is to convert to one's own use the material for a lecture so that it can be divided up—so that one is as it were placed in the position of giving the lecture a composition. Without composition a talk cannot really be understood. This or that may appeal to the listener about a lecture which is not composed: but in reality a non-composed lecture will not be assimilated. As far as the preparation is concerned, it must therefore be a matter of realizing: every talk will inevitably be poor as regards its reception by the listeners which has merely originated in one's conceiving one statement after the other, one sentence after the other, and going through them to a certain extent, one after the other, in the preparation. If one is not in the position, at least at some stage of the preparation, of surveying the whole lecture as a totality, then one cannot really count on being understood. Allowing the whole lecture to spring, as it were, from a comprehensive thought, which one subdivides, and letting the composition arise by starting out from such a comprehensive thought comprising the total lecture,—this is the first consideration.

The other is the consulting of all experiences which one has available out of immediate life for the subject of the lecture,—that is, calling to mind as much as possible everything one has experienced first-hand about the matter in question,—and, after one has before one a kind of composition of the lecture, endeavoring to let the experiences flow here or there into this composition.

That will in general be the rough draft in preparing. Thus one has during the preparation the whole of the lecture before one as in a tableau. So exactly does one have this tableau before one, that, as will indeed naturally be the case, one can incorporate the single experiences one remembers in the desired way here or there, as though one had written on paper: a, b, c, d.—There is now an experience one knows belongs under d, another under f, another belongs under a,—so that one is to a certain extent independent of the sequence of the thoughts as they are afterwards to be presented, as regards this collecting of the experiences. Whether such a thing is done by putting it onto paper, or whether it is done by a free process without having recourse to the paper, will determine only that he who is dependent upon the paper will speak worse, and he who is not dependent upon the paper will speak somewhat better. But one can of course by all means do both.

But now it is a matter of fulfilling a third requirement, which is: after one has the whole on the one hand—I never say the ‘skeleton’—and on the other hand the single experiences, one has need of elaborating the ideas which ensue to the point that these things can stand before the soul in the most complete inner satisfaction.

Let us take as an example, that we want to hold a lecture on the threefold order. Here we shall say to ourselves: After an introduction—we shall speak further about this—and before a conclusion—about which we shall also speak—the composition of such a lecture is really given through the subject itself. The unifying thought is given through the subject itself. I say that for this example. If one lives properly, mentally, then this is valid actually for every single case, it is valid equally for everything. But let us take this example near at hand of the threefolding of the social organism, about which we want to speak. There, at the outset, is given that which yields us three members in the treatment of our theme. To deal with, we shall have the nature of the spiritual life, the nature of the juridical-state life, and the nature of the economic life.

Then, certainly, it will be a question of our calling forth in the listeners, by means of a suitable introduction,—about which, as mentioned, we shall speak further—a feeling that it makes sense to speak about these things at all, about a change in these things, in the present. But then it will be a matter of not immediately starting out with explanations of what is to be understood by a free spiritual life, by a juridical-states life founded on equality, by an economic life founded on associations, but rather of having to lead up to these things. And here one will have to lead up through connecting to that which is to hand in the greatest measure as regards the three members of the social organism in the present—what can therefore be observed the most intensively by people of today. Indeed, only by this means will one connect with what is known.

Let us suppose we have an audience, and an audience will be most agreeable and sympathetic which is a mixture of middle-class people, working-class people—in turn with all possible nuances—, and, if there are then of course also a few of the nobility—even Swiss nobility,—it doesn't hurt at all. Let us therefore assume we have such a chequered, jumbled-up audience, made up of all social classes. I stress this for the reason that as a lecturer one should really always sense to whom one has to speak, before one sets about speaking. One ought already to transpose oneself actively into the situation in this way.

Now, what will one have to say to oneself to begin with about that which one can connect with in a present-day audience, as regards the threefold social organism? One will say to oneself: it is extraordinarily difficult in the first place to connect onto concepts of an audience of the bourgeois, because in recent times the bourgeoisie have formed extraordinarily few concepts about social relationships, since they have vegetated thoughtlessly to some extent as regards the social life. It would always make an academic impression, if one wanted to speak about these things today out of the circle of ideas of a middle-class audience. On the other hand, however, one can be clear about the fact that exceptionally distinct concepts exist concerning all three domains of the social organism within the working-class population,—also distinct feelings, and a distinct social volition. And it means that it is nothing short of the sign of our present time, that precisely within the proletariat these qualified concepts are there.

These concepts are to be handled by us, though, with great caution, since we shall very easily call forth the prejudice that we want to be partisan in the proletarian direction. This prejudice we should really combat through the whole manner of our bearing. We shall indeed see that we immediately arouse for ourselves serious misunderstandings if we proceed from proletarian concepts. These misunderstandings have revealed themselves in point of fact constantly in the time when an effect could still be brought about in middle-Europe, from about April 1919 on, for the threefolding of the social organism. A middle-class population hears only that which it, has sensed for decades from the fomenting behavior of the working- class, out of certain concepts. How one views the matter oneself is then hardly comprehended at all.

One must be clear that being active in the world at all in the sense, I should like to say, of the world-order has to be grasped. The world-order is such—you have only to look at the fish in the sea—, that very, very many fish eggs are laid, and only a few become fish. That has to be so. But with this tendency of nature you have also to approach the tasks which are to be solved by you as speakers; even if only very few, and these little stimulated, are to be found to begin with at the first lecture, then actually a maximum is attained as regards what can be attained. It is a matter of things that one stands so within in life, as for instance the threefolding of the social organism, that what can be accomplished by means of lecturing may never be abandoned, but must be taken up and perfected in some way, be it through further lectures, be it in some other way. It can be said: no lecture is really in vain which is given in this sense and to which is joined all that is required.

But one has to be absolutely clear about the fact that one will actually also be completely misunderstood by the proletarian population, if one speaks directly out of that which they think today in the sense of their theories, as these have persisted for decades. One cannot ask oneself the question for instance: How does one do it so as not to be misunderstood?—One must only do it right! But for this reason it cannot be a matter of putting forward the question: Then how does one do it so as not to be misunderstood?—One tells people what they have already thought anyhow! One preaches to them, in some way, Marxism, or some such thing. Then one will, of course, be understood.

But there is nothing of interest in being understood in this way. Otherwise one will indeed very soon have the following experience—concerning this experience one must be quite clear—: if one speaks today to a proletarian gathering so that they can at least understand the terminology—and that must be striven for—, then one will notice particularly in the discussion, that those who discuss have understood nothing. The others one usually doesn't get to know, since they do not participate in the discussions. Those who have understood nothing usually participate after such lectures in the discussions. And with them one will notice something along the following lines.—I have given countless lectures myself on the threefolding of the social organism to, as they are called in Germany, “surplus-value social democrats,” independent “social democrats,” communists and so on.—Now, one will notice: if someone places himself in the discussions and believes himself able to speak then it is usually the case that he answers one as though one had really not spoken at all, but as though someone or other had spoken more or less as one would have spoken as a social-democratic agitator thirty years ago in popular meetings. One feels oneself suddenly quite transformed. One says to oneself roughly the following: Well, can it then be that the misfortune has befallen you, that you were possessed in this moment by old Rebel? [Note 1] That is really how you are confronted! The persons concerned hear even physically nothing else than what they have been used to hearing for decades. Even physically—not merely with the soul—even physically they hear nothing other than what they are long used to. And then they say: Well, the lecturer really told us nothing new!—Since they have, because one was obliged to use the terminology, translated the whole connection of the terminology right-away in the ear—not first in the soul—into that which they have been used to for a long time. And then they talk on and on in the sense of what they have been used to for a long time.

***

Speaking cannot be learned by means of external instructions. Speaking must be learned to a certain extent by means of understanding how to bring to the lecture the thinking which lies behind it, and the experience which lies before it, in a proper relationship.

Now, I have, today tried to show you how the material first has to be dealt with. I have connected with what is known, in order to show you how the material may not be created out of some theory or other, how it must be drawn out of life, how it must be prepared so as to be dealt with in speaking. What I have said today everyone should now actually do in his own fashion as preparation for lecturing. Through such preparation the lecture gains forcefulness. Through thought preparation—preparing the organization of the lecture, as I have said at the beginning of today's remarks: from a thought which is then formed into a composition—, by this means the lecture becomes lucid, so that the listener can also receive it as a unity. What the lecturer brings along as thinking he should not weave into his own thoughts.—Since, if he gives his own thoughts, they are, as I have already said, such that they interest not a single person. Only through use of one's own thinking in organizing the lecture does it become lucid, and through lucidity, comprehensible.

By means of the experiences which the lecturer should gather from everywhere (the worst experiences are still always better than none at all!) the lecture becomes forceful. If, for example, you tell someone what happened to you, for all it matters, as you were going through a village where someone nearly gave you a box on the ear, then it is still always better if you judge life out of such an experience, than if you merely theorize.—Fetch things out of experience, through which the lecture acquires blood, since through thinking it only has nerves. It acquires blood through experience, and through this blood, which comes out of experience, the lecture becomes forceful. Through the composition you speak to the understanding of the listener; through your experience you speak to the heart of the listener. It is this which should be looked upon as a golden rule. Now, we can proceed step by step. Today I wanted more to show first of all in rough outline how the material can be transformed by degrees into what it afterwards has to be in the lecture. Tomorrow, then, we resume again at three o'clock.

Notes:

Note 1.August Bebel, 1840–1913. Founder in 1869 with Wilhelm Liebknecht of the Social-Democratic Party.

Pedantic lecturers upset the listeners' stomachs. Learn lecturing by listening: watch how others do it, good or bad. Reluctance to speak is the virtue, not eagerness to hear one's own voice. A debater turns his opponent's image and word against him. Jokers create too much acidity in the listeners' stomachs. Words precede deeds.

One has to accustom oneself to speak differently on every soil, if one intends to be active as a lecturer ... Thus, a talk is to be formulated differently, depending on whether it is delivered here in Switzerland, in Germany, or whether at this or that time.

One would, of course, have to speak again quite differently in England or in America. What can be done from here, in Europe, in regard to these two countries, can only be a sort of substitute. It is good, for example, if Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage [The Threefold Social Order] is translated, it is good if it is widely distributed; but, as I have said from the beginning, the really proper thing finally would be if the Kernpunkte were written quite differently for America and for England. For both Switzerland and Central Europe, it can be taken quite literally, word for word, the way it stands. But for England and America it would really have to be composed quite differently, because in those countries one addresses people who, first of all, have the opposite attitude of what existed, for instance, in Germany in April of 1919. In Germany the opinion prevailed that something new would have to come, and to begin with it would suffice if one knew what this were. There wasn't the strength to comprehend it, but there was the feeling that what this rational innovation might be, ought to be known. Naturally, in all of England and America not the slightest sense of this exists anywhere. The only concern there is how to secure and save the old. The question is how properly to secure the old. The old values are good! One must not shake the traditional foundations. I am aware, of course, that when anything like this is said, it can be replied: Yes, but there are so many progressive movements in the Western hemisphere!—Still, all these progressive movements, regardless of whether their content is new, are reactionary and conservative in so far as their management is concerned. There, the feeling that things cannot continue the way they have gone until now, must first be called forth.

***

Things must everywhere be sought out in the concrete.

... I would like to show how an elasticity of concepts for these things [rights relationships] has to be acquired—how one has to point out both sides of a question,—and how one must be able to dispose oneself first, in order to have the necessary fluency to speak in front of people.

There is another reason why a lecturer of today must be aware of such things. Most of the time, he is condemned to speak in the evening, when he wants to present something concerning the future. This means that he has to make use of the time when people really prefer to be either in the concert hall or in the theater. Thus, the lecturer must be absolutely clear that he is speaking to an audience that, according to the mood of the hour, would be better off in the concert hall, the theater, or some other place,—but not in fact down there, where it is supposed to listen, while above, a lecturer talks about things vouchsafed for the future. One must he aware of what one is really doing, down to the last detail.

For, what does one in fact do when addressing an audience such as one is mostly condemned to speak in front of nowadays? Quite literally, one upsets the listener's stomach! A serious speech has the peculiarity of adversely affecting the pepsin, of not allowing the stomach juices to take effect. A serious lecture causes stomach acidity. And only if one is oneself in such a mood that one can present a serious talk, at least inwardly, with the necessary humor, can the stomach juices be assisted again. A lecture has to be presented with a certain inner lightness,—with a certain modulation, with a certain enthusiasm; then one aids the stomach juices. Then one neutralizes what one inflicts on the stomach in the time when we normally have to lecture today. The threefold social order is not being served, but rather stomach specialists, when people speak in all gravity, with heavy expressive manner, pedantically, on three-folding. It must be done with a light touch and matter-of-factness or else one does not further the threefold social order but the stomach specialists. It is just that there are no statistics available on the number of people who have to go to stomach specialists after they have listened to pedantic lectures! If there were statistics on these things, one would be astonished at the percentage among patients of stomach specialists who are eager lecture-goers nowadays.

I must call attention to these things, because the time is drawing near when it must be known how the human being actually lives.—How seriousness affects his stomach, how humor affects his stomach juices; how, let us say for example, wine is like a kind of cynic who doesn't take the whole human organism seriously, but plays with it. If the human organism were approached with human concepts rather than with the wishy-washy concepts of today's science, it would be observed all over how every word and every world-relation calls forth an organic, almost chemical effect in the human being.

Knowing such things makes lecturing easier too. Whereas there is otherwise a barrier between speaker and audience, this barrier ceases to exist if it is to some extent perceived how the stomach juices curdle, and eventually become sour in the stomach and impair the stomach walls, in the case of a pedantic talk. Occasionally there is the opportunity of seeing it: though less in lecture-halls of universities,—there, the students protect themselves by not listening!

From all this, you can see how much depends on the mood in lecturing,—how much more important—preparing the atmosphere, having it in hand, is, than to get the lecture ready word for word. He who has prepared himself often for the correct mood need not concern himself with the verbal details to a point where, at a given moment, the latter would make him the upsetter of stomach juices.

Various things—if I may so express it—go to make up a duly equipped speaker. I should like to present them at this particular point because an explanation of “rights concepts” requires much that has to be characterized in this direction. [In another part of this lecture, Rudolf Steiner had already discussed aspects of justice not having to do with the art of lecturing.—Note by translator.] I would like to present this now, before talking tomorrow about the interweaving of the “economic elements” in speaking.

An anthroposophist once brought the well-known philosopher, Max Dessoir (1867–1947)—whom you also perhaps know—along one evening, to the Architektenhaus in Berlin, when I was to hold a lecture there. This one-time friend of Max Dessoir said afterwards, “Oh, that Dessoir didn't respond after all!—I asked him how he had liked the lecture and he replied: ‘Well, you know, I'm a lecturer myself, and anyone who is himself a speaker can't listen properly; he has no opinion on what another lecturer says!’ ”—Now, I did not need to form a judgement about Dessoir after this declaration; I had other opportunities for that, indeed I wouldn't have done so based on this utterance, since I could not know at all whether it was really true, or whether, as usual, Dessoir had lied this time also. But assuming it were true: what would it be a proof of?—That at any rate the one who holds such a view can never become an adequate speaker. A person can never become a good speaker who likes to speak, who likes to hear himself talk, and attaches special importance to his own speaking. A good speaker really always has to endure a certain reluctance when he is to speak. He must clearly feel this reluctance. Above all, he should much prefer listening to another speaker, even the worst, to speaking himself.

I know very well what I say with this statement, and I well realize how difficult it is for some of you to believe me in this. But it is so. Of course, I concede that there are other pleasures in the world than listening to poor speakers. But at all events, speaking oneself ought not to belong to these other greater pleasures. One must even feel a certain urge to hear others; even enjoy listening to others. For it is really through listening that one becomes a speaker, not through love of speaking oneself. A certain fluency is acquired through speaking, but this has to proceed instinctively. What makes one a speaker is actually listening, developing an ear for the distinctive traits of other speakers, even if they are poor ones. Therefore, I shall answer everyone who asks me how best to prepare himself to become a good speaker: he should hear and especially read—I have explained the difference between hearing and reading—he should hear and read the lectures of others! (That can after all be done, since the nuisance prevails of printing lectures.) In this way one acquires a strong feeling of distaste for one's own speaking. And this distaste for one's own speaking is actually what enables one in fact to speak adequately. This is extraordinarily important. And for those people who don't yet manage to view their own speaking with antipathy, it is good at least to retain their stage-fright.—To stand up and lecture without stage-fright and with sympathy for one's own speaking is something that ought to be refrained from, since under all circumstances, the results thus achieved would be negative. It leads to lecturing becoming sclerotic, to ossification, and to capsulated talk, and belongs to the elements that ruin the sermon for people.

I would truly not be speaking about lecturing in the sense of the task of this course if I were to enumerate rules of speaking to you, taken from some old book on rhetoric, or from copied, old rhetorical speeches. Rather, I would like to enjoin upon you, out of living experience, what one should really always have at heart when one wants to affect one's fellow-men by means of lecturing.

Things certainly alter somewhat if one is forced into a debate—if, I should like to say, a certain rights-relationship between person and person arises in the discussion. But in the discussion, through which rights-relationships could be learnt most beautifully, this projecting in of general rights-concepts into the relationship which prevails between two people hardly plays a role today. There, it is really a matter of not being in love with one's own way of thinking and feeling, but rather of feeling averse toward what one would like to say on the topic, and what one actually brings up. This can be done if one understands how to hold back one's own opinion, one's own annoyance or excitability, and can get across into the other person's mind. Then this will be fruitful even in the debate when a statement must be rejected. Of course, one can not simply reiterate what the other person says, but one can appropriate from him what is needed for an effective debate.

A striking example is the following: ( It is retold in the latest issue of Dreigliederung; I experienced it more than twenty years ago.) The delegate Rickert delivered a speech in the German Reichstag, in which he reproached Bismarck for changing his political alignment. He pointed out that Bismarck had gone along with the Liberals for a time, turning afterwards to the Conservatives. He gave an impressive speech, which he summarized in the metaphor, that Bismarck's politics amounted to trimming one's sails to the wind. Now, you can imagine what an effect it has inwardly, in terms of feeling, when such an image is used in a hall of parliament [—the proper German translation for parliament is really Schwatzanstalt.—] Bismarck, however, rose and with a certain air of superiority, to begin with, turned the things he had to say against delegate Rickert. And then he projected himself into the other as he always did in similar cases, and said, “Rickert has reproached me for trimming my sails to the wind. But pursuing politics is somewhat like navigating. I would like to know how one can steer properly if one does not want to adjust to the wind! A real sailor, like a real politician, must obviously adjust according to the wind in steering his course,—unless, possibly, he wants to make wind himself!”

You can see, the image is picked up and used, so that the arrow in fact hits back at the archer. In a debate it is a matter of taking things up, of getting things from the other speaker. Where a frivolous illustration is concerned, the matter is comprehensible. But one will also be able to do it in seriousness; seeking out from the opponent himself what unravels the matter! As a rule it will not be much use merely setting one's own reasons against those of the opponent.

In a debate one should be able to attune oneself as follows: The moment the debate gets going one should be in a position to dispose of everything one has known hitherto, drive it all down into the unconscious, and actually only know what the speaker whom one has to reply to, has just said. Then one should squarely exercise one's talent for setting aright what the speaker has said! Exercise the talent for setting aright! In debate it is a matter of taking up immediately what the speaker says, and not simply pitting against it what one already knew long ago. If that is done, as happens in most debates, the debate actually ends inconsequentially, in fact it comes to nothing. One has to be aware that in a debate one can never refute someone. It can only be demonstrated that a speaker either contradicts himself or reality. One can only go into what he has set forth. And that will be of immense importance if it is made use of as the basic principle for debates or discussions. If a person only wants to say in the debate what he has known before, then certainly it will be of no significance at all when he puts it forward after the speaker.

This once stared me in the face in a particularly instructive way. In Holland I was invited on my last trip also to give a lecture on Anthroposophy before the Philosophical Society of the University of Amsterdam. The chairman there was, naturally, already of a different opinion than I. There was no doubt at all that, if he were to engage in the debate, he would say something quite different than I would. But it was equally clear that what he said would ultimately make no difference as regards my lecture, and that my lecture would have no particular influence on what he would say, based on what he knew anyhow. Hence, I considered he did things quite cleverly. He raised what he had to say not subsequently in the debate, but in advance! What he did add later in the debate to his preliminary words he could equally have presented beforehand, at the start—it would not have changed matters a bit.

One must not cherish any illusions about such things. Above all a lecturer should familiarize himself very, very thoroughly with human relationships. But, if things are to have an effect, one cannot allow oneself any illusions about human relationships. Above all—I should like to tell you this today, since it will provide a certain basis for the next lectures—above all, one should not surrender to illusions about the effectiveness of talks!

Inwardly, I always have to get into a terribly humorous frame of mind when well-meaning contemporaries say again and again: It's not a matter of words, it's a matter of deeds! I have heard it declaimed again and again at the most inopportune points, not only in dialogues, but also from various podiums: Words don't count; actions count! As far as what happens in the world in the way of actions, everything depends on words! For those able to get to the bottom of the matter, no actions take place at all that have not been prepared in advance by someone or other through words.

But you will realize that the preparation is something quite subtle! For, if it is true—and it is true!—that through pedantic, theoretical, abstract, Marxist speaking one actually upsets people's stomach juices—whereby the stomach juices infect the rest of the organism—then outside actions, which very much depend on the stomach juices, are the consequence of such bad speeches. The stomach juices flow into the rest of the organism, when dispersed. On the other hand again, when people only act as jokers, stomach juices are produced incessantly, which really works like vinegar,—and vinegar is a frightful hypochondriac. But people will keep on being entertained, and what flows nowadays in public is a continuous whirl of fun-making. The joking-around of yesterday is still not digested, when the fun-making of today makes its appearance. With that, the digestive juices of yesterday go sour and become like vinegar. The human being will in turn be entertained today. He can make merry. But by the way he takes his place in public life, it is really the hypochondriacal vinegar which operates there. And this hypochondriacal vinegar is then to be met with!

In fact, in saloons it is the Marxist speakers who ruin people's stomachs. And if people then read the Vorwaerts [—apparently a comic paper], then this is the means by which the upset stomach must be put in order again. That is a very real process!

... It must be known how the realm of speaking takes its place within the realm of actions. The untruest utterance—because from false sentimentality (and everything stemming from false sentimentality is untrue!)—the untruest utterance vis-a-vis speaking is: “Der Worte sind genug gewechselt, lasst mich auch endlich Taten sehen!” [“The words you've bandied are sufficient: 'tis deeds that I prefer to see.”—Faust, Prelude on Stage.]

That can certainly stand in a passage of a drama. And where it stands it is even justified. But when it is torn out of context and made out to be a general dictum, then it may be “correct,” but good it is quite certainly not! And we should learn not merely beautiful, not merely correct, but also goodspeaking. Otherwise we lead people into the abyss, and can in any case not confer with them about anything worthy of the future.

Notes:

Note 1.Mainly the second part of a lecture given in Dornach on 14 October 1921. The lecture is the fourth of the Speakers' Course, published in German under the title: Anthroposophie. soziale Oreigliederung und Redekunst. (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach 1971.) Translated by Maria St. Goar. Revised.

Lyrical speaking for spiritual life; dramatic speaking for rights-relationships; epic speaking for economic conditions. About economic life within the social organism. The formulation of key sentences. Speech exercises.

I have tried to characterize how one can formulate a lecture on the threefold order from out of one thought, and then arrange it in sections. What one can generally say concerning the whole social organism, as well as references to what can occur in the first two realms—namely that of the spiritual life and that of the judicial, the body politic was contained in what I said. [Note 1] You will have understood from that, how preparing oneself for the content of such a lecture, one can proceed.

Now, one can also prepare oneself for the form of delivery by immersing oneself into the thoughts and feelings. We shall perhaps understand each other best if I say that the preparation should be such that we try hard first to sense and then to utter what is related to the spiritual life in a more lyrical language (without, of course, resorting to singing, recitation, or some such thing),—in a lyrical manner of speech, with quiet enthusiasm, so that one demonstrates through the way of delivering the matters that everything one has to say concerning the spiritual life comes from out of oneself. One should by all means call forth the impression that one is enthusiastic about what one envisions for the spiritual part of the social organism. Naturally, it must not be false, mystical, sentimental enthusiasm; a made-up enthusiasm. We achieve the right impression if we prepare ourselves first in imagination, in inner experience—even so far as to modulation—how, approximately, something like that could be said. I say specifically, “how, approximately, something like that could be said,” for the reason that we should never commit ourselves word for word; rather what we prepare is, in a sense, a speech taking its course only in inward thoughts; and we are certainly ready to re-formulate what we finally come out and say.

But when we speak about rights-relationships, we should make the attempt to speak dramatically. That implies: when we lecture about the equality of men, discussing it by means of examples, we should try as much as possible to put ourselves into the other person's position with our thinking. For instance, we should call to mind the image of how a person who seeks work, asserts his right to work in the sense of Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage (the threefold social order). By making it evident that on one hand we are speaking from the other person's position, from out of his assertion of rights, we should then make it evident how through a slight change in the tone of voice we pass on to the topic of how one ought to meet such an assertion out of general humanitarian reasons. So it is dramatic speaking, very strongly modulated, dramatic lecturing, that calls forth the impression in listeners that one could think one's way into the souls of other persons; that is the manner we should employ in speaking about the rights-relationships.

When lecturing on economic conditions, the main point is that we speak directly from experience. If, in the spirit of the threefold social organism, one speaks about economic relationships, one should not permit the belief to arise that there even could be such a thing as a theoretical political economy. Instead, one should limit the main discussion to describing cases taken from the economic life itself; either cases that one repeats, or cases that one construes as to how they should be or could be. But with the latter cases—saying how they should or could be—one must never neglect to speak out of economic experience. Actually, when lecturing on the economic life, one should speak in an epic style. Particularly, when presenting what is written in the Kernpunkte, one should speak as if one had no preconceived ideas at all concerning the economic life, and had no notions that this should be thus and so; instead, one should speak as if one were informed on all and everything by the facts themselves.

One can evoke a certain feeling, for example, that it is correct to permit the transfer of the administration of monetary funds from one who is not involved in it himself anymore, to somebody who once again can participate in it. But one can only speak about something like that if one presents it to people by means of descriptions of what takes place if there are legacies merely due to blood-relationships, or what can take place when such a transfer is occasioned in the way it is described in the Kernpunkte. Only by placing such a matter before people in a living way, as if one were copying reality, can one speak in such a way that the speech truly stands within the economic life. And just in this way, one can make the idea of “associations” [Note 2] comprehensible and plausible. One will make it plausible that an individual person really knows nothing about the economic life; that if he wants to arrive at a judgement as to what must be done in the life of the economy, he is basically completely dependent on communicating with others. A sound economic view can only emerge from groups of people and one is therefore dependent on associations.

Then, one will perhaps meet with comprehension if one calls attention to the fact that much of what exists today actually came out of ancient, instinctive associations. Just consider for a moment how today's abstract market brings things together, whose combination and redistribution to the consumer cannot be surveyed at all. But how has one arrived at this market-relationship in the first place? Basically, from the instinctive association of a number of villages located around a larger township, at a distance that one could travel back and forth on foot in one day, where people exchanged their products. One did not call that an association. One did not coin any word for it, but in reality it was an instinctive association. Those people who here came together for the market were associated with all of those who lived in the surrounding villages. They could count on a set circulation of goods that resulted from experience. Therefore they could regulate production according to consumption in truly alive relationships. There certainly existed such associative conditions in such primitive economies; they just didn't call themselves that.

All this has become impossible to over-see, with the enlargement of the economic territories. In particular, it has become senseless in regard to the world economy. The world economy which has come into being only in the last third of the 19th century, has reduced everything into an abstract realm; that is, it has reduced everything in the economic life to the turn-over of money or its monetary value, until this reduction has proven its own absurdity.

Indeed, when Japan fought a war with China and Japan won the war, one could very simply pay the war reparations by way of the Chinese Minister's handing a check to the Japanese Delegate, which the latter then deposited in a bank in Japan. This is an actual course of events. There were values contained in this check, which is money and has monetary value. It represented values. If you imagine how at that time everything should have been transported from one territory into the other this would have been a difficult process under modern-day conditions. But owing to the manner in which Japan and China were placed within the whole world economy, it could be done this way. However, all this has led itself to a point of absurdity. In the dealings between Germany and France, it has proven itself to be impossible. [Note 3] I am therefore of the opinion that the state of affairs can best be explained out of the economic relationships themselves, and then one can explain the necessity for the associative principle.

Once again, one should have to divide this subject matter regarding the economic life in a certain way, and one would have to pass on to several concluding sentences of which I have already said that they again should be conceived verbatim or at least almost word for word.

So, how will the preparation for a speech appear, in fact? Well, one should try one's best to get into the situation or the subject that the audience is prepared for, by formulating the opening sentences in a way one considers necessary. One will have greater difficulty in the case of completely unprepared listeners; less difficulty, if one addresses a group that one finds already involved in the matter, at least possessing the corresponding feelings concerning the assertions one makes. Then, one will neither write down the rest of the speech nor jot down mere catch-words. Experience shows that neither the verbatim composition nor the mere noting down of catch-words leads to a good speech. The reason for not writing down the speech is because it ties one down and easily causes embarrassment when the memory falters; this is most frequently the case when the speech is written down word for word. Catch-words easily mislead one to formulate the whole preparation too abstractly. On the other hand, if one needs to have such a support, what one should best write down and bring along as notes are a number of correctly formulated sentences that serve as catch-phrases. They do not make the claim that one delivers them in the same way as a part of the speech; instead, they indicate: first, second, third, fourth, and so on; they are extracts, so to speak, so that from one sentence perhaps ten or eight or twelve will result. But one should write such sentences down. One should therefore not write down, “spiritual life conceived as independent”; instead, “the spiritual life can only thrive if it freely works independently out of itself.” (Catch-phrases, with other words.) If you do something like this, you will then have the experience yourself that owing to such catch-phrases, you can in a relatively short time most readily attain to a certain facility of speaking freely, a speaking that only contains the ladder of catch-phrases.

Concerning the conclusion, it is often very good if, in a certain sense, at least gently, one leads back to the beginning; if therefore the end, in a sense, contains something that, as a theme, was also contained in the beginning.

And then, such catch-phrases readily give one the opportunity to really prepare oneself in the way indicated above by having noted these sentences down on one's piece of paper. So, let us say, one ponders the following: what you have to say for the spiritual life must have a sort of lyrical nature within you; what you have to say concerning the rights-relationships must have a kind of dramatic character in your mind; and what concerns the economic life must live in your mind in a narrative, epic form; a quiet, narrative, epic character. Then, the desire, as well as the skill, to word the catch- phrases in the formulation that I have indicated, will indeed begin to arise instinctively. The preparation will result quite instinctively in such a way that the manner in which one speaks merges indeed into what one has to say concerning the subject. For this it is, however, necessary to have brought one's command of language to the level of instinct, so that one indeed experiences the speech-organs the way one would, for instance, feel the hammer, if one wanted to use the hammer for something. That can be achieved, if one practices a little speech-gymnastics.

It's true, isn't it, when one practices gymnastics, those are not movements that are later executed in real life; but they are movements that make one flexible and dextrous. Similarly, one should make the speech-organs pliable and adroit; but making the latter pliable and dextrous is something that must be accomplished so that it goes together with the inner soul life, and so that one learns to be aware of the sound in speaking. In the seminar courses that I held over two years ago in Stuttgart for the Waldorf school teachers, I put together a number of such speech exercises that I now want to pass on to you. They are mostly of a kind that, by their content, does not prevent one from learning to merge oneself purely into the element of speech; they are only designed for practicing speech-gymnastics. If one tries again and again to say these sentences aloud, but in such a way that one always probes: how does one best use his tongue, how does one best use his lips so as to produce this particular sequence of sounds?—then one makes oneself independent of speaking and, instead, places that much more value on mental preparation for lecturing.

I shall now read you a number of such sentences whose content is often senseless, but they are designed to make the speech-organs pliable and fit for public speaking. [Note 4]

Dass er dir log, uns darf es nicht loben.

(That he told lies, 't'is not to be lauded.)

is the easiest one.

Something a bit more complicated:

Nimm nicht Nonnen in nimmermuede Muehlen.

(Take not nuns in never-tired mills.)

One should increasingly try, along with the sequence of sounds, to make the organs of speech pliable; to bend, to hollow, to take possession of them [Note 5]

Another example:

Rate mir mehrere Raetsel nur richtig.

It is naturally not enough to say something like this once, or ten times; but again and again and again, because even if the speech-organs are already pliable, they can become still more so.

An example that I consider to be particularly useful is the following:

Redlich ratsam
Ruestet ruehmlich
Riesig raechend
Ruhig rollend
Reuige Rosse

With this, one has the opportunity to regulate the breath in the pauses, something one has to pay attention to and that can be particularly well done through such an exercise.

In a similar way, not all the letters, nor all the sounds, have the same value for this practicing. You make progress if you take the following, for example:

Protzig preist
Baeder bruenstig
Polternd putzig
Bieder bastelnd
Puder patzend
Bergig bruestend

If you succeed in finding your way into this sequence of sounds, you gain much from it.

When one has done such exercises, then one can also try to do those exercises that cannot but result in bringing a mood into the speaking of the sounds. I have tried to give an example of how the sounds can pour into the mood in the following:

and now it passes more into the sounds, through which, here in particular, the mood in the sound itself is held fast:

You will always discover, when you do these exercises in particular, how you are able, without letting the breath disturb you, to regulate the breathing by simply holding yourself onto the sounds. In recent times, one has thought up all kinds of more or less clever methods for breathing and for all kinds of accompanying aspects of speaking and singing, but actually, all of those are no good, because speech with everything that belongs with it, with the breath, too, should by all means be learned through actual speaking. This implies that one should learn to speak in such a way that, within the boundaries that result from the sound sequence and the word relationships, the breath also regulates itself as a matter of course. In other words, one should only learn breathing during speech—in speaking itself. Therefore, the exercises of speech should be so designed that, in correctly feeling them regarding their sounds, one is obliged—not by the content but by the sounds—to formulate the breath correctly because he experiences the sound correctly.

What the verse below represents, points once again to the content of the mood. It has four lines; these four lines are arranged so that they are an ascent, as it were. Each line causes an expectation, and the fifth line is the conclusion and brings fulfilment. Now one should really make an effort to execute this speech movement that I have just characterized. The verse goes like this:

In den unermesslich weiten Raeumen,
In den endenlosen Zeiten,
In der Menschenseele Tiefen,
In der Weltenoffenbarung:
Suche des grossen Raetsels Loesung.

(In the immeasurably wide realms,
in the never-ending ages,
in the human soul's depths
in the world's revelation:
seek the great riddle's answer.)

There you have the fifth line representing the fulfillment of that escalating expectation that is evoked in the first four lines.

***

Speech exercises and speech gymnastics; the effect of coffee and tea upon the speaker; respect for the audience through proper preparation.

One can also attempt to, well, let me say, bring the mood of the situation into the sounds, into the mode of speaking, the how of speech. And for that I have formulated the following exercise. One should picture a sizable green frog that sits in front of him with its mouth open. In other words, one should imagine that one confronts a giant frog with an open mouth. And now, one should picture what sort of reactions, effects, one can have regarding this frog. There will be humor in the emotion as well as all that should be evoked in the soul in a lively manner. Then, one should address this frog in the following way:

Lalle Lieder lieblich
Lipplicher Laffe
Lappiger lumpiger
Laichiger Lurch

Picture to yourself: that a horse is walking across a field. The content does not matter. Naturally, you must now imagine that horses whistle! Now you express the fact that you have here in the following manner:

Pfiffig pfeifen
Pfaeffische Pferde
Pflegend Pfluege
Pferchend Pfirsiche

and then you vary that by saying it this way:

Pfiffig pfeifen aus Naepfen
Pfaeffische Pferde schluepfend
Pflegend Pfluege huepfend
Pferchend Pfirsiche knuepfend

And then—but please, do learn it by heart, so that you can fluently repeat the one version after the other—there is a third version. Learn all three by heart, and try to say them so fluently that during the speaking of one version you will not be confused by the other. That is what counts. Take as the third form:

Kopfpfiffig pfeifen aus Naepfen
Napfpfaeffische Pferde schluepfend
Wipfend pflegend Pfluege huepfend
Tipfend pferchend Pfirsiche knuepfend

Learn one after the other, so that you can do the three versions by heart, and that one never interferes when you say the other.

Something similar can be done with the following two verses:

Ketzer petzten jetzt klaeglich
Letztlich leicht skeptisch

and now the other version:

Ketzerkraechzer petzten jetzt klaeglich
Letztlich ploetzlich leicht skeptisch

Again, learn it by heart and say one after the other!

One can achieve smooth speech if one practices something like the following:

Nur renn nimmer reuig
Gierig grinsend
Knoten knipsend
Pfaender knuepfend

One has to accustom oneself to say this sound sequence, ‘Nur renn ...’. You will see what you gain for your tongue, your organs of speech, if you do such exercises.

Now, such an exercise that lasts a bit longer, through which this flexibility of speech can be attained—I believe actors have already discovered afterwards that this was the best way to make their speech pliable:

Zuwider zwingen zwar
Zweizweckige Zwacker zu wenig
Zwanzig Zwerge
Die sehnige Krebse
Maher suchend schmausen
Dass schmatzende Schrnachter
Schmiegsam schnellstens
Schnurrig schnalzen

And then: one occasionally requires presence of mind in direct speech. One can acquire it by something like the following:

Klipp plapp plick glick
Klingt Klapperrichtig
Knatternd trappend
Rossegetrippel

Then, for further acquisition of presence of mind in speaking, the following two examples can be placed together:

Schlinge Schlange geschwinde
Gewundene Fundewecken weg

The ‘Wecken weg’ is in there, too, but as a sound-motif, thus:

Gewundene Fundewecken
Geschwinde schlinge Schlange weg

The following example is useful for putting some muscle into speech, so that one is in a position, in speaking, to slap somebody down in a discussion sometimes (something that is quite necessary in speaking!):

Marsch schmachtender
Klappriger Racker
Krackle plappernd linkisch
Kink von vorne fort

Then, for somebody who stutters a little, the following two examples should still be mentioned:

Nimm mir nimmer
Was sich waesserig
Mit Teilen mitteilt

For everyone who stutters, this example is good. When stuttering, one can also say it in the way below:

Nimmer nimm mir
Waesserige Wickel
Was sich schlecht mitteilt
Mit Teilen deiner Rede

The point is, of course, that the person who stutters must make a real effort.

One should by no means believe that what I want to call speech-gymnastics, can or should only be practiced with sentences that are meaningful for the intellect. Because in those sentences that contain sense for the intellect, the attentiveness for the meaning instinctively outweighs anything else too much, so that we do not rely correctly on the sounds, the saying. And it is really necessary that, in a certain sense, we tear speaking loose from ourselves, actually manage to separate it from ourselves. In the same way as one can separate writing from one's self, one can also tear speaking loose from oneself.

There are two ways to write for the human being. One way consists of man's writing egotistically; he has the forms of the letters in his limbs, as it were, and lets them flow out of his limbs. One emphasized such a style of writing for a certain length of time—it is probably still the same today—when one gave lessons in penmanship for those who were to be employed in business offices or people like that. I have, for example, observed at one time how such a lesson in writing was conducted for employees of commercial establishments so that the persons in question had to develop every letter out of a kind of curve. They had to learn swinging motions with the hand; then they had to put these motions down on paper; this way, everything is in the hand, in the limbs; and one is not really present with anything but the hand in writing. Another form of writing is the one that is not egotistical; it is the unselfish style of writing. It consists of not really writing with the hand, as it were, but with the eye; one always looks at it and basically draws the letter. Thus, what is in the formation of the hand is of importance to a lesser degree: one really acts like one does when sketching, where one is not the slave of a handwriting. Instead, after a while, one has difficulty in even writing one's name the same way one has written it just the time before. For most people it is so terribly easy to write their name the way they have always written it. It flows out of their hand. But those persons who place something artistic into the script, they write with the eye. They follow the style of the lines with the eye. And there, the script indeed separates itself from the person. Then—while it is in a certain respect not desirable to practice that—a person can imitate scripts, vary scripts in different ways. I do not say that one should practice that especially, but I mean that it results as an extreme when one paints one's script, as it were. This is the more unselfish writing. Writing out of the limbs, on the other hand, is the more selfish, the egotistic way.

Speech is also selfish, in most people. It simply emerges out of the speech-organs. But you can gradually accustom yourselves to experience your speech in such a way that it seems as if it floated around you, as if the words flew around you. You can really have a sort of experience of your words. Then, speaking separates itself from the person. It becomes objective. Man hears himself speak quite instinctively. In speaking, his head becomes enlarged, as it were, and one feels the weaving of sounds and the words in one's surroundings. One gradually learns to listen to the sounds, the words. And one can achieve that particularly through such exercises. That way, there is in fact not just yelling into a room anymore—by yelling, I do not mean shouting out loud only; one can yell in whispering, too, if one actually speaks only for one's own sake, the way it emerges out of the speech-organs—instead one really lives, in speaking, with space. One feels the resonance in space, as it were. This has become a fumbling mischief in certain speech-theories—theories of speech-teaching or speech-study, if you will—of recent times. One has made people speak with body-resonance, with abdominal resonances, with nasal resonances, and so forth. But all these inner resonances are a vice. A true resonance can only be an experienced one. One experiences such a resonance not by the impact of the sound against the interior of the nose; instead one feels it only in front of the nose, outside. Thus, language in fact attains to abundance. And of course, the language of a speaker should be abundant. A speaker should swallow as little as possible.

Do not believe that this is unimportant for the speaker; it is rather of great significance for the speaker. Whether we present something in a correct way to people depends most certainly on what position we are able to take in regard to speech itself. One doesn't have to go quite so far as a certain actor who was acquainted with me, who never said “Freundrl” [Austrian dialect for “Friend”—note by translator] but always “Freunderl”, because he wanted to place himself into every syllable. He did that to the extreme. But one should develop the instinctive talent not to swallow syllables, syllable-forms, and syllable-formations. One can accomplish that if one tries to find one's way into rhythmic speech in such a way that, placing one's self into the whole sound-modulation, one recites to oneself:

Und es wallet und siedet und brauset und zischt,
Wie wenn Wasser mit Feuer sich mengt ...
(Quote from Schiller's The Diver)

So: it is a matter of placing one's self not only into the sound as such but into the sound-modulation, into this “growing round” and the angularity of sound.

If somebody believes that he could become a speaker without putting any value on this, then he labors under the same misconception as a human soul that has arrived at the point between death and a new birth, when it once again will descend to the earth, and does not want to embody itself because it does not want to enter into the moulding of the stomach, the lungs, the kidney, and so forth. It is really a matter of having to draw on everything that makes a speech complete.

One should at least put some value on the organism of speech and the genius of language as well. One should not forget that valuing the organism of speech, the genius of language, is creative, in the sense of creating imagination. He who cannot occupy himself with language, listening inwardly, will not receive images, will not be the recipient of thoughts; he will remain clumsy in thinking, he will become one who is abstract in speaking, if not a pedant. Particularly, in experiencing the sounds, the imagery in speech-formation, in this itself lies something that entices the thoughts out of our souls that we need to carry before the listeners. In experiencing the word, something creative is implied in regard to the inner organization of the human being. This should never be forgotten. It is extremely important. In all cases, the feeling should pervade us how the word, the sequence of words, the word-formation, the sentence-construction, how these are related to our whole organism. Just as one can figure out a person from the physiognomy, one can even more readily—I don't mean from what he says but from the how of the speech—one can figure out the whole human being from his manner of speech.

But this how of his speech emerges out of the whole human being. And it is by all means a matter of focusing—delicately of course, not by treating ourselves like we were the patient—on the physical body. It is, for example, beneficial for somebody who, through education or perhaps even heredity, is predisposed to speaking pedantically; to try, with stimulating tea that he partakes of every so often, to wean himself from pedantry. As I have said, these things must be done with care. For one person, this tea is right; for another, the other tea is good. Ordinary tea, as I have repeatedly mentioned, is a very good diet for diplomats: diplomats have to be witty, which means having to chat at random about one thing after another, none of which must be pedantic, but instead has to exhibit the ease of switching from one sentence to another. This is why tea is indeed the drink of diplomats. Coffee, on the other hand, makes one logical. This is why, normally not being very logical by nature, reporters write their articles most frequently in coffee-houses. Now, since the advent of the typewriter, matters are a little different, but in earlier days, one could meet whole groups of journalists in coffee-houses, chewing on their pen and drinking coffee so that at last, one thought could align itself with the next one. Therefore, if one discovers that one has too much of what is of the tea-quality, then coffee is something that can have an equalizing effect. But, as was mentioned before, all this is not altogether meant, as a prescription, but pointing in that direction. And if somebody, for example, is predisposed to mix some annoying sound into his speech—let's say if somebody says, “he,” after every third syllable, or something like that—then I advise him to drink some weak senna-leaf-tea twice a week in the evening, and he will see what a beneficial effect that will have.

It is indeed so: since the matters that come to expression in a lecture, in a speech, must come out of the whole person, diet must by no means be overlooked. This is not only the case in an obvious sense. Of course, one can hear by the speech whether it comes from a person who has let endless amounts of beer flow down his gullet, or something like that. This is an obvious case. He who has an ear for speech knows very well whether a given speaker is a tea-drinker or a coffee-drinker, whether he suffers from constipation or its opposite. In speech, everything is expressed with absolute certainty, and all of that has to be taken into consideration. One will gradually develop an instinct for these matters if one becomes sensitive to language in one's surroundings the way I have described it.

However, the various languages lend themselves in different ways, and in varying degrees, to being heard in the surroundings. A language such as the Latin tongue is particularly suitable for the above purpose. The same with the Italian. I mean by this, to be heard objectively by the one who is speaking himself. The English language, for example, is little suited for this, because this language is very similar to the script that flows out of the limbs. The more abstract the languages are, the less suitable they are to be heard inwardly and to become objective. Oh, how in former times the German Nibelungen-song sounded:

Uns ist in alten maeren von heleden lobebaeren, von freude unt hôchgezîten, von küener recken strîten		Wunders vil geseit von grôzer arebeit; von weinen unde klagen, müget ir nu wunder hoeren sagen.
Ez wuohs in Buregonden daz in allen landen Kriemhilt geheizen; Dar umbe muosen degene		ein vil edel magedîn, niht schoeners mohte sîn, diu wart ein schoene wîp, vil Verliesen dën lîp.

That hears itself while one is speaking! Through such things one must learn to experience language. Naturally, languages become abstract in the course of their development. Then one must bring the concrete substance into it from within, permeate it with the obvious. Abstractly placed side by side, what a difference:

Uns ist in alten maeren Uns wird in alten Märchen

wunders vil geseit Wunderbares viel erzählt

and so forth!

But if one becomes accustomed to listening, this can certainly also be brought into the more modern language, and there, much can be done in speech towards the latter's becoming something that has its own genius. But for that, such exercises are required, so that listening in the spirit and speaking out of the spirit fit into one another. And so, I want to repeat the verse one more time:

Erfuellung geht
Durch Hoffnung
Geht durch Sehnen
Durch Wollen
Wollen weht
Im Webenden
Weht im Bebenden
Webend bindend
Im Finden
Findend windend
Kuendend.

Only by placing the sound into various relationships, does one arrive at an experiencing of the sound, the metamorphosis of the sound, and the looking at the word, the seeing of the word.

Then, when something like what I have described today as creating a disposition through catch-sentences, as our inner soul-preparation, is united with what we can in the above way gain out of the language, then it all works toward public speaking.

One more thing is required besides all the others I have already mentioned: responsibility! This implies that one should be aware that one does not have the right to set all of one's ill-mannered speech-habits before an audience. One should learn to feel that for a public appearance one does require education of speech, a going-out of one's self, and plasticity in regard to speech. Responsibility towards speech! It is very comfortable to remain standing and to speak the way one normally does, and to swallow as much as one is used to swallow; to swallow (verschlucken), to squeeze (quetschen), and to bend (biegen) and break (brechen), and to pull (dehnen) at the words just the way it suits one. But one may not remain with this squeezing (Quetschen) and pushing (Druecken) and pulling (Dehnen) and cornering (Ecken) and similar speech-mannerisms. Instead, one must try to come to the aid of one's speaking even in regard to the form. If one supports one's speaking in this manner, one is quite simply also led to the point where one addresses an audience with a certain respect. One approaches public speaking with a certain reserve and speaks to an audience with respect. And this is absolutely necessary. One can accomplish this if, on the one side, one perfects the soul-aspect; and, on the other side, formulates the physical in the way I have demonstrated in the second part of the lecture. Even if one only has to give occasional talks, such matters still play an important part.

Say, for example, that one has to give discussions on the building, the Goetheanum. Since one naturally cannot make a separate preparation for each discussion, one should basically, in that case, properly prepare oneself, the way I have explained it, at least twice a week for the talk in question. One should actually only extemporize, if one practices the preparation, as it were, as a constant exercise.

Then one will also discover how, I should like to say, the outer form unites itself with the substance. And we shall have to speak about this point in particular one more time tomorrow: about the union of the form-technique with the soul-technique.

The course is brief, unfortunately; one can barely get past the introduction. But I would find it irresponsible not to have said what I did say in particular in the course of these lectures.

Notes:

Note 1.The threefold social organism, as depicted by Rudolf Steiner, is composed of three parts: the two mentioned above and the economic realm.

Note 2.(See The Threefold Social Order for details on “Associations.”)

Note 3.Rudolf Steiner refers here to the war-reparations demanded of Germany by France.

Note 4.The speech-exercises are rendered in the original German, since the emphasis is on their sound, primarily; a translation is often useless as well as extremely difficult.

Note 5.In trying to illustrate how one must take hold of one's speech-organs via the exercises. Rudolf Steiner modifies the four words in a manner that is highly original and unusual, and untranslatable as well. But they thus indicate a living working, an active doing. “Gesehmeithgen,” to make pliable; “zu biegen,” to bend; “zu hohlen,” to make hollow; “zu erhabenen,” to have or possess by effort.

Repetition in very formulations helps the listener to comprehend. The use of questions gives the audience a moment to breathe in. Logical trains of thought put the audience to sleep. Unusual formulations and word order keep the listeners attentive. Illustrations and pictures convince and are remembered.

Since today must be our last session, we will be concerned with filling out and expanding upon what has been said; so you must consider this rather like a final clearance at a rummage sale, where what has been left is finally brought out.

First, I would like most of all to say one must keep in mind that the speaker is in an essentially different position than he who gives something he has written to a reader. The speaker must be very aware that he does not have a reader before him, but rather a listener. The listener is not in a position to go back and re-read a sentence he has not understood. The reader, of course, can do this, and this must be kept in mind. This situation can be met by presenting through repetition what is considered important, even indispensable, for a grasp of the whole. Naturally, care must be taken that such repetitions are varied, that the most important things are put forth in varied formulations while, at the same time, this variety of re-phrasings does not bore the listener who has a gift for comprehension. The speaker will have to see to it that the different ways he phrases one and the same thing have, as it were, a sort of artistic character.

The artistic aspect of speaking is, in general, something that must be kept clearly in mind, the more the subject matter is concerned with logic, life-experience, and other powers of understanding. The more the speaker is appealing to the understanding through strenuous thinking, the more he must proceed artistically—through repetition, composition, and many other things which will be mentioned today. You must remember that the artistic has its own means of facilitating understanding. Take, for example, repetition, which can work in such a way that it forms a sort of facilitation for the listener. Differently phrased repetitions give the listener occasion to give up rigidly holding himself to one or another phrase and to hear what lies between them. In this way his comprehension is freed, giving him the feeling of release, and that aids understanding to an extraordinary degree.

However, not only should different means of artistically structuring the speech be applied, but also different ways of executing it. For example, take the speaker who, in seeking the right word for something, brings in a question in such a way that he actually speaks the question amidst the usual flow of statements. What does it mean to address one's listeners with a question? Questions which are listened to actually work mainly on the listener's inhalation. The listener lives during his listening in a breathing-in, breathing-out, breathing-in, breathing-out. That is not only important for speaking, it is also most important for listening. If the lecturer brings up a question the listener's exhalation can, as it were, remain unused. Listening is diverted into inhalation on hearing a question. This is not contradicted by a situation when the listener may be breathing out on hearing a question. Listening takes place not only directly but indirectly, so that a sentence which falls during an exhalation—if it is a question—is really only rightly perceived, rightly taken in, during the subsequent inhalation. In short, inhalation is essentially connected with hearing a content in question form. However, because of the fact that inhalation is engaged by a question being thrown out, the whole process of listening is internalized. What is said goes somewhat more deeply into the soul than if one listens merely to an assertion.

When a person hears a straight assertion his actual tendency is to engage neither his inhalation nor his exhalation. The assertion may sink in a little, but it doesn't actually even engage the sense organs much.

Lengthy assertions concerning logical matters are, on the whole, unfortunate within the spoken lecture. Whoever would lecture as if he were merely giving a reasoned argument has gotten hold of a great instrument—to put his listeners to sleep; for such a logical development has the disadvantage that it removes the understanding from the organ of hearing. One doesn't listen properly to logic. Furthermore, it doesn't really form the breath; it doesn't set it going in varied waves. The breath remains essentially in its most neutral state when a logical assertion is listened to, thus one goes to sleep with it. This is a wholly organic process. Logical assertions are perforce impersonal—but that takes its toll.

Thus, one who wants to develop into a speaker must take care whenever possible not to speak in logical formulae but in figures of speech, while remaining logical. To these figures of speech belongs the question. Also belonging to figures of speech is the ploy of occasionally saying the opposite of what one really wants to say. This has to be said in such a way that the listener knows he is to understand the opposite. Thus, let us say, the speaker says straight out, and even in an assertive tone: Kully is stupid. Under certain circumstances that could prove to be not a very good turn of phrase. But it could be a good formulation if someone said: I don't believe there is anyone sitting here who presumes that Kully is clever! There you have spoken a phrase that is opposite of the truth. But, naturally, you have added something so that you could formulate the opposite to the assertive statement. Thus, by proceeding in this way, and with inner feeling, the speech will be able to stand on its own two feet.

I have just said that the speech will be able to stand on its own feet. This is an image. Philistines can say that a speech has no feet. But a speech does have feet!As an example one need only recall that Goethe, in advanced age, when he had to speak while fatigued, liked to walk around the room. Speech is basically the expression of the whole man—thus it has feet! And to surprise the listener with something about which he is unfamiliar and which, if he is to grasp it, he must go counter to what he is familiar with—that is extremely important in a lecture.

Also belonging to the feeling-logic of the speech is the fact that one does not talk continually in the same tone of voice. To go on in the same tone, you know, puts the listener to sleep. Each heightening of the tone is actually a gentle nightmare; thus the listener is somewhat shaken by it. Every relative sinking of tone is really a gentle fainting, so that it is necessary for the listener to fight against it. Through modulating the tone of speech one gives occasion for the listener to participate, and that is extraordinarily important for the speaker.

But it is also especially important now and then to appeal somewhat to the ear of the listener. If he is too immersed in himself while listening, at times he won't follow certain passages. He begins to reflect within himself. It is a great misfortune for the lecturer when his listeners begin to ponder within themselves. They miss something that is being said, and when—after a time—they again begin to hear, they just can't keep up. Thus at times you must take the listener by the ear, and you do that by applying unusual syntax and sequences of phrasing. The question, of course, gives a different placing of subject and predicate than one is used to, but you ought to have on hand a variety of other ways of changing the word order. You should speak some sentences in such a way that what you have at the beginning is a verb or some other part of speech which is not usually there. Where something unusual happens, the listener again pays attention, and what is most noteworthy is that he not only pays attention to the sentence concerned but also to the one that follows. And if you have to do with listeners who are unusually docile, you will find that they will even listen to the second sentence if you interlace your word-order a bit. As a lecturer, you must pay attention to this inner lawfulness. You will learn these things best if, in your listening, you will direct your attention to how really good speakers use such things. Such techniques are what lead essentially to the pictorial quality of a speech.

In connection with the formal aspect of speaking, you could learn a great deal from the Jesuits. They are very well trained. First, they use the components of a speech well. They work not only on intensification and relaxation but, above all, on the image. I must continually refer to a striking Jesuit speech I once heard in Vienna, where I had been led by someone to the Jesuit church and where one of the most famous Jesuit Fathers was preaching. He preached on the Easter Confessional, and I will share the essential part of his sermon with you. He said: "Dear Christians! There are apostates from God who assert that the Easter Confessional was instituted by the Pope, by the Roman Pope; that it does not derive from God but rather from the Roman Pope. Dear Christians! Whoever would believe that can learn something from what I am going to say: Imagine in front of you, dear Christians, there stands a cannon. Beside the cannon there stands a cannonier. The cannonier has a match in his hand ready to light the fuse. The cannon is loaded. Behind the cannonier is the commanding officer. When the officer commands, 'Fire,' the cannonier lights the fuse. The cannon goes off. Would any of you now say that this cannonier, who obeyed the command of his superior, invented the powder? None of you, dear Christians, would say that! Look now, such a cannonier was the Roman Pope, who waited for the command from above before ordering the Easter Confessional. Thus, no one will say the Pope invented the Easter Confessional; as little as the cannonier invented the gunpowder. He only carries out the commandments from above." All the listeners were crushed, convinced!

Obviously, the man knew the situation and the state of mind of the people. But that is something that is an indispensable precondition for a good speech and has already been characterized in this study. He said something which, as an image, fell completely outside the train of thought, and yet the listeners completed the course of the argument without feeling that the man spoke subjectively. I have also called to your attention the dictum by Bismarck about politicians steering by the wind, an image he took from those with whom he was debating, but which nevertheless frees one from the strictness of the chain of thought under discussion.

These sorts of things, if they are rightly felt, are those artistic means which completely replace what a lecture does not need, namely, sheer logic. Logic is for thought, not for speaking; I mean for the form of speech, not the way of expression. Naturally, the illogical may not be in it. But a speech cannot be put together as one combines a train of thought. You will find that something may be most acute and appropriate in a debate and yet really have no lasting effect. What does have a lasting effect in a speech is an image which grabs, that is, which stands at some distance from the meaning, so that the speaker who uses the image has become free from slavish dependence on the pure thought-sense.

Such things lead to the recognition of how far a speech can be enhanced through humor. A deeply serious speech can be elevated by a humor which, so to say, has barbs. It is just as I have said: if you wish to forcibly pour will into the listeners, they get angry. The right way to apply the will is for the speech itself to develop images which are, so to speak, inner realities. The speech itself should be the reality. You can perhaps grasp what I want to say if I tell you of two debates. The second is not a pure debate, but it still can be instructive for the use of images in a speech which wishes to characterize something.

Notice that those orations that are intended to be witty often acquire a completely subjective coloring. The German Parliament had for some time, in one of its members by the name of Meyer, just such a witty debater. For example, at one time the famous—or infamous—“Lex Heinze” was advocated in this particular Parliament. I believe that the man who gave the speech for the defense was the minister; and he always spoke, as the defender and as one belonging to the Conservative Party, of “das Lex Heinze.” He always said “das Lex Heinze.” Now, no doubt, such a thing can pass. But it was in the nature of the Liberal Party, of which the joker, Representative Meyer, was a member, that it took just such matters seriously. So later on in the debate Meyer asked leave to speak and said somewhat as follows: “The Lord Minister has defended die Lex Heinze [Note 1] and has constantly said ‘das Lex Heinze.’ I didn't know what he was really talking about. I have gone all around asking what ‘das Lex’ is. No one has been able to enlighten me. I took the dictionary and looked—and found nothing. I was about to come here and ask the Minister, when it suddenly struck me to consult a Latin Grammar. There I found it, there stood the statement: 'What one cannot decline must be considered a neuter!”

To be sure, for an immediate laugh it is very good, this coarse wit. But it still has no barbs, it doesn't ignite deeply, because with such a ploy there is aroused subtly and unconsciously in the listener a pity for the afflicted one. This kind of wit is too subjective, it comes more out of a love of sarcasm than out of the thing itself.

Over against this I have always found the following to be a striking image: He who was later to become Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV was, as Crown Prince, a very witty man. His father, King Friedrich Wilhelm III, had a minister who was very special to him, whose name was von Klewiz. [Note 2] Now the Crown Prince could not bear von Klewiz. Once, at a court ball, the Crown Prince spoke to Klewiz and said: Your Excellency, I would like to put to you a riddle today:

The first is the fruit from the field
The second is something which,
when one hears it, one gets a light shock;
And the whole is a public calamity!

Von Klewiz turned red from ear to ear, bowed, and handed in his resignation after the ball. The King called him and said: What happened to you? I can't spare you, my dear Klewiz!—Yes, but, Your Royal Highness, the Crown Prince said something to me yesterday which made it impossible for me to remain in office.—But that is not possible! The dear Crown Prince would not say such a thing, that I can't believe!—Yes, but it is so, Your Majesty.—What has the Crown Prince said?—He said to me: The first is a fruit from the field; the second is something which, if one hears it, one gets something like a light shock; the whole is a public calamity! There is no doubt, Royal Highness, that the Crown Prince meant me.—Indeed, remarkable thing, dear Klewiz. But we will have the Crown Prince come and we will hear how the matter stands.

The Crown Prince was called.—Dear One, yesterday evening you are supposed to have said something very offensive to my indispensible minister, His Excellency, von Klewiz.—The Crown Prince said: Your Majesty, I am unable to remember. If it had been something serious I would surely be able to remember it.—It does seem to have been something serious, though.—Oh! Yes, yes, I remember. I said to His Excellency that I wished to put a riddle to him: The first syllable is a fruit of the field, the second syllable indicates something which, if one perceives it, one gets something like a slight shock; the whole is a public calamity. I don't think that it is a matter of my having offended His Excellency so much as that His Excellency could not solve the riddle. I recall that His Excellency simply could not solve the riddle!—The King said: Indeed, what is the riddle's solution?—Here, then: The first syllable is a fruit of the field: hay (Heu); the second syllable, where one gets a light shock, is “fear” (Schreck); the whole is: grasshopper (Heu-schreck), that is, a public calamity (or nuisance), Your Majesty.

Now why do I say that? I say it on the grounds that no one who tells such a thing, no one who moulds his phrases or figures of speech in such a form, has need of following the matter through to its end; for no person expects in telling it that he has to explain the tableau further, but rather expects each to draw for himself the pictorial idea. And it is good in a speech to occasionally work it so that something is left over for the listener. There is nothing left over when one ridicules someone; the gap is perfectly filled up.

It is a matter of heightening the vividness so that the listener can really get the feeling that he can act on something, can take it further.

***

The audience listens with the speech organs. The speaker must be fully immersed in his topic. He must have thorough knowledge of the events of the time. The movement for the threefold social order cannot be separated from Anthroposophy.

Naturally, it is necessary that one leaves the needed pauses in his speech. These pauses must be there.

Now along this line we could say an extraordinary amount about the form, about the structure, of a speech. For usually it is believed that men listen with their ears alone; but the fact that some, when they especially want to grasp something, open their mouths while listening, already speaks against this. They would not do this if they listened with their ears alone. We listen with our speech organs much more than is usually thought. We always, as it were, snap up the speech of the speaker with our speech organ; and the etheric body always speaks along with, even makes eurythmy along with, the listening—and, in fact, the movements correspond exactly to eurythmy movements. Only people don't usually know them unless they have studied eurythmy.

It is true that everything we hear from inanimate bodies is heard more from outside with the ear, but the speech of men is really heard in such a way that one heeds what beats on the ear from within. That is a fact which very few people know. Very few know what a great difference exists between hearing, say, the sound of church bells or a symphony, and listening to human speech. With human speech, it is really the innermost part of the speaking that is heard. The rest is much more merely an accompanying phenomenon than is the case with the hearing of something inanimate. Thus, I have said all that I did about one's own listening so that the speaker will actually formulate his speech as he would criticize it if he were listening to it. I mean that the formulation comes from the same power, out of the same impulse, as does the criticism if one is doing the listening.

It is of some importance that the persons who make it their task to do something directly for the threefolding of the social organism—or something similar to this—take care that what they have to say to an audience is done, in a certain way, artistically. For basically, one speaks today—I have already indicated this—to rather deaf ears, if one speaks before the usual public about the threefolding of the social organism. And, I would like to say, that in a sense one will have to be fully immersed in the topic, especially with feeling and sensitivity, if one wants to have any success at all. That is not to suggest that it is necessary to study the secrets of success—that is certainly not necessary—and to adapt oneself in trivial ways to what the listener wants to hear. That is certainly not what should be striven for. What one must strive for is a genuine knowledge of the events of the time. And, you see, such a firm grounding in the events of the time, an arousal of the really deeper interest for the events of the time, can only be evoked today by Anthroposophy. For these and other reasons, whoever wants to speak effectively about threefolding must be at least inwardly permeated with the conviction that for the world to understand threefold, it is also necessary to bring Anthroposophy to the world.

Admittedly, since the very first efforts toward the realization of the threefold social order, there have been, on the one hand, those who are apparently interested in the threefold social order but not in Anthroposophy; while on the other hand, those interested in Anthroposophy but caring little for the threefold social order. In the long run, however, such a separation is not feasible if anything of consequence is to be brought about.

This is especially true in Switzerland, some of the reasons for which having already been mentioned. The speaker must have a strong underlying conviction that a threefold social order cannot exist without Anthroposophy as its foundation. Of course, one can make use of the fact that some persons want to accept threefolding and reject Anthroposophy; but one should absolutely know—and he who knows will be able to find the right words, for he will know that without the knowledge of at least the fundamentals of Anthroposophy there can be no threefold organization.

For what are we attempting to organize in a threefold way? Imagine a country where the govern ment has complete control of the schools on the one hand and the economy on the other, so that the area of human rights falls between the two. In such a country it would be very unlikely that a threefold organization could be achieved. If the school system were made independent of the government, the election of a school monarch or school minister would probably shortly follow, transforming within the shortest time the independent cultural life into a form of government!

Such matters cannot be manipulated by formulas; they must be rooted in the whole of human life. First we must actually have an independent cultural life and participate in it before we can assign it its own sphere of activity within society. Only when that life is carried on in the spirit of Anthroposophy—as exemplified by the Waldorf school in Stuttgart—can one speak of the beginnings of an independent cultural sector. The Waldorf school has no head, no lesson plans, nor anything else of the kind; but life is there, and life dictates what is to be done.

I am entirely convinced that on this topic of the ideal independent school system any number of persons, be it three, seven, 12, 13 or 15, could get together and think up the most beautiful thoughts to formulate a program: firstly, secondly, thirdly—many points. These programs could be such that nothing more beautiful could be imagined. The people who figured out these programs need not be of superior intelligence. They could, for example, be average politicians, not even that, they could be barroom politicians. They could discover 30, 40 points, fulfilling all the highest ideals for the most perfect schools, but they wouldn't be able to do anything with it! It is superfluous to set up programs and statutes no one can work with. One can work with a group of teachers only on the basis of what one has at hand—not on the basis of statutes—doing the best one can in the most living way.

An independent cultural life must be a real life of the spirit. Today, when people speak of the spiritual life, they mean ideas; they speak only of ideas.

Consequently, since Anthroposophy exists for the purpose of calling forth in people the feeling for a genuine life of the spirit, it is indispensable when the demand arises for a threefold social organism. Accordingly, the two should go together: furtherance of Anthroposophy and furtherance of the threefold social order.

But people, especially today, are tired in mind and soul. They actually want to avoid coming to original thoughts and feelings, interested only in maintaining traditions. They want to be sheltered. They don't want to turn to Anthroposophy, because they don't want to stir their souls into activity; instead, they flock in great numbers—especially the intellectuals—to the Roman Catholic Church, where no effort is required of them. The work is on the part of the bishop or priest, who guides the soul through death. Just think how deep-rooted it is in today's humanity: parents have a son whom they love; therefore they want his life to be secure. Let him work for the government: then he is bound to be well looked after; then he doesn't have to face the battle of life by himself. He will work as long as he can, then go on to pensioned retirement—secure even beyond his working days. How grateful we should be to the government for taking such good care of our children!

Neither are people so fond of an independently striving soul. The soul is to be taken care of until death by the church, just as work is provided by the government. And just as the power of the government provides the physical man with a pension, so the church is expected to provide the soul with a pension when a man dies, is expected to provide for it after death—that is something that lies deeply in present-day man, in everyone today. Just to be polite I will add that this is true for the daughters as well as the sons, for they would rather be married to those who are thus “secure,” who are provided for in this way. Such seems to be the obsession of humanity: not to build upon oneself, but to have some mystical power somewhere upon which to build. The government, as it exists today, is an example of such a mystical power. Or is there not much obscurity in the government? I suspect much more obscurity than in even the worst mystic.

We must have a sense for these things as we commit ourselves to the tasks to which these lectures are addressed. This course was primarily confined to the formalities of the art of lecturing, but the important thing is the enthusiasm that lives in your hearts, the devotion to the necessity of that effectiveness which can emanate from the Goetheanum in Dornach. And to the degree that this inner conviction grows in you, it will become a convincing power not only for you but for others as well. For what do we need today? Not a mere doctrine; however good it could be, it could just get moldy in libraries, it could be formulated—here or there—by a "preacher in the desert," unless we see to it that the impulse for a threefold social order finds entrance, with minimal delay, to as many minds as possible. Then practical application of that impulse will follow by itself.

But we need to broaden the range of our efforts. A weekly publication such as the Goetheanum will have to be distributed as widely as possible in Switzerland. That is only one of many requirements, in view of the fact that the basic essentials of Anthroposophy must be acquired ever anew; but a weekly of this type will have to find its place on the world scene and work in widespread areas for the introduction and application of the threefold social order. The experience of the way in which the Goetheanum publication thus works will be essential to anyone attempting to assist in the realization of such an order in the social organism.

What we need above all is energy, courage, insight, and interest in world events on a broader scale! Let us not isolate ourselves from the world, not get entangled in narrow interests, but be interested in everything that goes on all over the world. That will give wings to our words and make us true coworkers in the field we have chosen.

In this light were these lectures given; and when you go out to continue your work, you can be assured that the thoughts of the lecturer will accompany you. May such cooperation strengthen the impulse that should inspire our work, if that work, especially in Switzerland, is to be carried on in the right way.

And so I wish you luck, sending you out not into darkness but into where light and open air can enter into the development of humanity—from which you will doubly benefit, as you yourselves are the ones who are to bring this light and openness into the world.

Notes:

Note 1.The proper form was apparently “die,” implying feminine gender. “Das” implies neuter gender.

Note 2.The two syllables of the name are identical in sound with Klee (clover) and Witz (joke).