The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have already presented some of the answers to the question: Why is spiritual research misunderstood? — in the lecture I gave here a few weeks ago on “Healthy Soul Life and Spiritual Research”. Today I would like to consider other points of view which may provide a more comprehensive answer to the question posed. Naturally, in view of the attitude of the esteemed audience, who are accustomed to finding it in these lectures, it cannot be my intention today to go into individual attacks here and there on what is called spiritual research here. If out of wounded ambition or other motives, here and there perhaps even from the ranks of those who previously believed themselves to be quite good exponents of this spiritual science, then these are matters which, when examined more closely, show just how insignificant such objections actually are in the face of the great tasks that spiritual research has to fulfill. Therefore, the necessity to deal with one or other of them can only arise here and there for external reasons. As I said, it is not my intention. My intention is to show how one can really have difficulties in understanding the spiritual science meant here, how it can be difficult for the soul to bring understanding to spiritual science, from the education of the times, from what one can acquire in terms of habits of thought, of feelings, of feelings of world view from our present time, how it can be difficult for the soul to understand spiritual science. In a sense, I do not want to explain the unjustified objections in their reasons, but rather the objections that arise from the times to a certain extent, one might say, completely justified objections, those objections that are understandable for a soul of the present.

Spiritual science is not only confronted with objections that arise from other currents of thought in the present day; spiritual science, it can be said, still has almost all other currents of thought opposed to it in a certain way, precisely from the point of view that has just been mentioned. When materialistic or mechanistic world-views arise, or, as one would like to express it today in a more educated way, monistic world-views, opponents arise who start from a certain spiritual idealism. The reasons such spiritual idealists have to put forward for their world view against materialism are, as a rule, extraordinarily weighty and significant. These are objections, the significance of which can certainly be shared by the spiritual researcher, who can certainly understand them and grasp them in the same way as someone who proceeds merely from a certain spiritual idealism. The spiritual researcher, however, does not speak about the spiritual world merely in the way, for example, that spiritual idealists of the ilk of Ulrici, Wirth, Immanuel Hermann Fichte — who, however, as we saw yesterday, does go into it more deeply — and others do. He does not speak merely in abstract terms, hinting that there must be a spiritual world behind the sensual world; he cannot leave this spiritual world undefined, cannot grasp it in mere concepts, he must move on to a real description of the spiritual world. He cannot merely content himself with a conceptual allusion to an unknown spiritual world, as the spiritual idealists would have it. Rather, he must provide a concrete description of a spiritual world that is revealed in individual entities that have not physical but purely spiritual existence ; in short, he must present a spiritual world that is as diverse and as full of content as the physical world is, and should actually be much, much fuller of content if it were described in reality. And when he not only speaks of the fact that there is a spiritual world in general that can be proven by concepts, but when he speaks specifically of a spiritual world as something credible, as something that can be perceived just as the sensory world , then he has as his opponents not only the materialists, but also those who only want to speak about the spiritual world in abstract terms from the standpoint of a certain spiritual-conceptual idealism. Finally, he has opponents among those who believe that spiritual science can affect any kind of religious sentiment, who believe that religion is endangered, that their religion is endangered when a science of the spiritual world appears. And there are many other individual currents that could be mentioned, which basically the spiritual scientist has to oppose in the manner indicated, and still understandably so today. So these are important objections, justified to a certain extent from a certain point of view, and I would like to discuss them by name.

And there is the first objection to the aspirations of spiritual science, which is particularly significant in our time, and which comes from the natural scientific world view, the world view that seeks to create a world view based on the progress of modern natural science, which is justifiably seen as the greatest triumph of humanity. And it must be said again and again that it is difficult to realize that the true spiritual researcher, after all, denies absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing at all, of what legitimately follows from the results of modern science for a world view; on the contrary, he stands in the fullest sense of the word on the ground of this newer natural science itself, insofar as it is a legitimate basis for a world view.

Let us look at this newer direction in natural science from a certain point of view. We can only emphasize individual points of view. In this way we are confronted with all those people who justifiably cause difficulties for spiritual science, because they say: Does not modern natural science show us, through the marvel of the human nervous system, and in particular the human brain, how what the human being experiences spiritually is dependent on the structure and functions of this nervous system and this brain? And it is easy to believe that the spiritual researcher wants to deny what the natural scientist has to say from his field of research. Only the amateur spiritual researcher and those who want to be spiritual researchers, but basically can hardly claim the dignity of an amateur, do much harm, because true spiritual research is always confused with its charlatan or amateurish activities. It is difficult to believe that, for example, with regard to the significance of the physical brain and nervous system, the humanist actually has more in common with the natural scientist than the natural scientist himself.

Let us take an example. I deliberately do not choose a more recent example, although with the rapid pace of modern science, many things change quickly and older research is easily overtaken by later research. I deliberately choose not to choose a more recent example, which could also be done; instead, I choose the distinguished brain researcher and psychiatrist Meynert, because I would like to take as my starting point what he had to say about the relationship between the brain and the life of the soul based on his brain research. Meynert is very knowledgeable about the human brain and the human nervous system in both healthy and diseased states. His writings, which set the tone in his field at the end of the nineteenth century, must command the greatest respect from anyone who becomes familiar with them. Not only for the purely positive research, but also for what such a man has to say on the subject. And this must be emphasized: when people who have easily acquired some kind of spiritual-scientific world view, without knowing anything, without ever having looked through a microscope or a telescope or without having done something that would even remotely give them the opportunity to get an idea of this miraculous structure of the human brain, for example, when such people speak of the baseness of materialism, then one can understand, on the other hand, with the conscientiousness of the research and the care of the methods, that one does not want to get involved at all with what is being said from the apparent spiritual-scientific side. When someone like Meynert studies the brain, he first finds that the outer layer of the brain consists of a billion cells in a highly complex way — Meynert estimates that there are about a billion of them —, all working together work into each other, sending their extensions to the most diverse parts of the human body, sending their extensions into the sensory organs, where they become sensory nerves, sending their extensions to the organs of movement, and so on. To such a brain researcher it then becomes apparent how connecting fibers lead from one fiber system to the other, and he then comes to the conclusion that what the human being experiences as a world of ideas, what separates and connects in concepts, in ideas, is separated and connected when the external world makes an impression through his sense organs, is absorbed and processed by the brain, and that it produces what are called soul phenomena from the way it is processed. When even philosophers come and say: Yes, but the phenomena of the soul are something quite different from movements of the brain, from some processes in the brain, — when even philosophers come and speak like that, then it must be said against it that what arises out of the brain as the life of the soul for such a researcher does not arise in a more marvelous way than, let us say, a clock, for example, in which one does not assume that a special soul-being lives inside it and gives the time; or, let us say, a magnet that attracts a body out of its purely physical powers. What there proves to be active as a magnetic field around the physical body – why, if we understand it in terms of greater complications, should that not be born out of the brain, the human soul life? In short, we must on no account belittle what comes from this side. Under no circumstances may we deny its justification without going into the matter in greater detail. One can scoff at the idea that this brain, by unwinding its processes, is supposed to produce the most complicated mental life, but one can equally find in nature an abundance of such processes, where one will not a priori speak of an underlying mental life. Not by starting from preconceived opinions, but by also engaging with what is justified in the minds of those who have difficulty in approaching spiritual research. Only in this way, I would say, can order and harmony be created in the confused minds of worldviews.

Thus there is no reason why that which is understood in the ordinary sense of life as the life of the soul should not be produced by a mere mechanical process, in so far as it takes place in the mechanics of the brain and nervous system. The nervous system and the brain can be so intricately arranged that the unrolling of its processes results in the soul life of man. Therefore, no one who merely has a naturalistic way of looking at things will be able to dispute the legitimacy of a scientific, materialistic world view. And it must be said that precisely because natural science has achieved such perfection and such a justified ideal in its field, it is actually difficult for spiritual science today to confront natural science, for the simple reason that the spiritual scientist must have the ability and capacity to fully recognize the justified things that come from this side. But for that reason it must be emphasized again and again that a mere composition of what is derived from the observation of nature, even if it extends to our own human life, can never, never be used to create a spiritual world view. If we want to get to the life of the soul, then this life of the soul must be experienced in itself, then this life of the soul must not flow from external processes, then one must not say that the brain cannot produce the soul processes of its own accord, but one must experience the soul processes.

In a certain area, everyone can experience the soul independently of the brain processes. This is in the moral area, in the area of the moral life. And here it is clear from the outset that what shines forth to man as moral impulses cannot result from any unwinding of mere brain processes. But I say explicitly: what can arise in man as moral impulses, insofar as the will, insofar as feeling is at work in them, insofar as the moral is experienced. So in this area, where the soul must grasp itself in its immediacy, everyone can come to realize that the soul has a life of its own, independent of the body. However, not everyone has the ability to add to this inner grasping, to this inner strengthening of the soul in the moral life, what Goethe, for example, added in the essay on 'Contemplative Judgment' mentioned yesterday, but also in many other places in his works. Not everyone can say, as Goethe did from the depths of his inner experience: If, in the moral world, we can rise to impulses that work independently of the body, then why should this soul not be able, with regard to other spiritual things, as Goethe says in contrast to Kant, to “bravely endure the adventure of reason” — as Kant called all going beyond sensory perceptions? That means not only to proceed to a spiritual-soul life by inwardly experiencing how moral impulses arise from the depths of the soul, and not from the life of the brain, but also to have other spiritual experiences that testify to the soul's spiritual perception with spiritual organs, just as we perceive the sensual with sensual organs. But for this to happen, the ordinary life in the world, to which one passively devotes oneself, must be supplemented by another, a life of inner activity. And this is what is lost today for many who have become accustomed to having the truth dictated to them from somewhere. They want something that appears from outside, something that can be based on solid ground, rather than inner experience. What is experienced in the soul itself seems to them to be something that is arbitrarily formed within, not firmly supported by anything. What should be true should be firmly based on what is externally established, to whose existence one has contributed nothing oneself.

This is indeed the right way to think in the field of natural science. Into the study of nature one will only bring all kinds of useless stuff if one adds all kinds of fantasy products to what the external senses offer and what one can get from the observed external sense material through the experiment or through the method. On the ground of natural science, this is fully justified. But we will see shortly how little it is justified on the ground of spiritual research. But even if one engages with the justified aspects of the scientific world view, one can see how it becomes weak through this unaccustomed effort of inner self-exploration, how it becomes weak when it is supposed to perform an activity that is indispensable if one wants to make even a little progress in spiritual science. To advance in spiritual science, it is not necessary to do all kinds of nebulous things, to train oneself to have certain clairvoyant experiences in the ordinary sense of the word, through hallucinations, through visions and so on — that is not the first thing, nor is it the last; that has already been discussed in the lecture on 'Healthy Soul Life and Spirit Research'. But what is indispensable if one is to arrive at a deeper understanding — I do not want to say, at becoming a justified follower — of spiritual science, that is a thinking that has been worked through, a really worked through thinking. And the cultivation of thinking suffers to a great extent from the fact that one has become accustomed to observing only the form of appearance. Outwardly, in the sensual world, in external observation or in experiment, one abandons oneself to what external nature expresses, and in this field one represents what experiment says. One does not dare — and yet one is right in this area — to say anything as a summarizing law that is not dictated from outside. But the inner activity of the soul suffers from this. Man gets used to becoming passive; man gets used to trusting only what is, as it were, interpreted and revealed to him from outside. And seeking truth through an inner effort, through an inner activity, that falls completely out of his soul habit. But it is necessary above all when one enters spiritual science that thinking is worked out, that thinking is so worked out that nothing escapes one of certain lightly-donned objections that can be made, that above all, that one foresees what objections can be made; that one makes these objections oneself in order to gain a higher point of view, which, taking the objections into account, would find the truth. I would like to draw your attention to one example, as an example among hundreds and thousands that could almost be suggested by Meynert. The reason I do this is because I was just allowed to mention to you that I consider Meynert to be an excellent researcher, so that it cannot be said that I am somehow belittling people here. When it comes to refutation, I do not choose people whom I hold in low esteem, but precisely people whom I hold in the highest esteem.

In this way, we encounter Meynert, for example, in how he conceives of the formation of the perception of space and time in man. Meynert says: Let us suppose – and this example is particularly relevant to us now – that I listen to a speaker. I will gain the idea that his words are spoken little by little, in time. How does this idea arise, Meynert asks, that one has the notion that words are spoken little by little, in time? Well, you can imagine that Meynert is talking about all of you who understand my words in such a way that they appear to you bit by bit, in time. Then he says: Yes, this time only arises through the brain's perception; that we think of one word after the other, that only arises through the brain's perception. The words come to us, they come to our sense organs, they go from these sense organs in a further effect to the brain. The brain has certain internal organs through which it processes the sensory impressions. And there arises - internally - through certain organs the conception of time. The conception of time is thus created there. And so all perceptions are created from the brain.

That Meynert does not just mean something subordinate can be seen from a certain remark in his lecture “On the Mechanics of the Brain Structure,” where he talks about the relationship between the outside world and the human being. He says that the ordinary, naive person assumes that the outside world is as he creates it in his brain. Meynert says: “The daring hypothesis of realism is that the world that appears to the brain would also exist before or after the existence of brains.” However, the structure of the brain, which is capable of consciousness, which allows the same to be considered responsible for shaping the world, leads to the negation of this hypothesis. That is to say: the brain constructs the world. The world as man imagines it, as he has it before him as his sensory world, is created by processes of the brain, from within. And so man not only creates the images, but he also creates space, time, infinity. For all this, Meynert says, certain mechanisms of the brain exist. From this, man creates, for example, time.

It is a pity that in such lectures, which of course have to be short, one cannot always go into all the individual transitions of these thoughts. That is why some things may appear opaque. But the actual crux of such a way of thinking will be apparent. It must be said that as soon as one is on the way to regarding the brain as the creator of the soul-life as it is found in man in the beginning, then what Meynert says is entirely justified. It lies on this path; one must arrive at it. And one can only avoid such a conclusion if one has a thinking process so well developed that the often very simple counter-arguments immediately come to mind. Just think what the conclusion would be if Meynert's argument were correct: you are all sitting there, listening to what I am saying. Your brain organizes what I say in time. Not only does your auditory nerve convert it into auditory images, but what I say is organized in time. So you all have a kind of dream image of what is being spoken here, including, of course, the person standing in front of you. As for what is behind it, naive realism, says Meynert, assumes that there stands a man like yourselves who speaks all this. But there is no compulsion here; for this man with his words, you create him in your brain; there may be something quite different behind it.

The simple thought that must impose itself, that it also depends on the fact that, for example, I now arrange my ideas in time myself, so that time does not just live in your brain with you, but that time already lives in it, as I place one word after the other – this easily attainable thought does not come at all if you drill in a certain direction. That time has an object, that it lives out there, can be easily seen in the case I have mentioned. But once you are in a certain direction of thought, you do not see left or right, but continue in your direction and arrive at extremely sharp and highly remarkable results. But that is not the point. All the ingenious results that may arise in the course of such a train of thought can be strictly proved, the proofs may strictly interlock. You will never find a mistake in Meynert's thinking if you go on in his stream. But what matters is that thinking is so thoroughly worked through that the counter-arguments can be dealt with, that thinking finds out of itself what throws the whole stream out of its bed. And this, to make thinking so mobile, so active, is precisely what prevents the very justified immersion in the external world, as science must strive for. Therefore, as you can see, this is not a subjective difficulty, but a very objective one, due to the times. This can be experienced in all possible fields.

For more than a hundred years, philosophers have been gnawing away at the old Kantian word with which he wants to unhinge the concept of God. If you merely think of a hundred dollars, they are not a single dollar less than a hundred real dollars. A hundred thought, a hundred possible dollars are exactly the same as a hundred real dollars! On this, that conceptually, mentally, a hundred possible dollars contain everything that a hundred real dollars contain, Kant builds his entire refutation of the so-called ontological proof of God's existence. Now, anyone with agile thought will immediately come up with the most definite objection: for someone with agile thought, with developed thought, a hundred imaginary thalers are, in fact, exactly one hundred thalers less than a hundred real thalers! They are exactly one hundred thalers less. The point is to be made aware of how one has to think, not just that what one thinks can be logically proved. Of course, Kant's fabric of ideas is so firmly supported that only with the utmost acumen can logical errors be detected in it. But what matters is not just to have in mind what arises within certain habitual currents of thought, but to have thought worked out so that one's thinking is truly within the objective world, so that one's thinking is not just within oneself but within the objective world, so that the counter-instances flow to one from the objective world itself. Only a mature thinking can achieve such counter-instances, and only through this does one's thinking acquire a certain affinity with the thinking that objectively pulses and permeates the world.

I said that it is important to grasp the soul in action, so to speak. What is really at issue is that when man wants to grasp the soul, he does not merely draw conclusions based on the fact that it is impossible to develop soul life from the brain and its processes; rather, this soul life must be experienced directly, independently of brain life. Then one can speak of soul life. Today, people look at this inner active experience as if something were being built up inwardly only in the imagination, whereas the true soul researcher knows exactly where imagination ends and where, through the development of one's own soul life, where he does not spin out of fantasy, but where he has connected with the spiritual world and draws from the spiritual world itself that which he then expresses in words or concepts or ideas or images. Only in this way will the soul be able to gain knowledge of itself.

I will now have to develop what appears to be a rather paradoxical view, but a view that must be expressed because it can really shed light on the nature of spiritual research. From what I have said before, you can already see that the spiritual researcher is not at all averse to the idea that the brain produces certain ideas from within itself, so that the soul life that can arise without inner participation can really only be a product of the brain. And a certain habit, which has arisen precisely through the formation of the present, consists in the following: For the reasons indicated, a person becomes averse to seeking anything that he is to consider true through inner activity. He condemns all of this as fantasy or reverie, and then he brings it not only theoretically in his views, but practically to the point that he really excludes what the soul works out in itself, that he excludes it as much as possible in his work towards a world view. When one excludes the life of the soul in this way, the ideal that emerges is the picture of the materialistic world view. What does one actually do when one excludes this inner life? Yes, when one excludes this inner life, it is roughly the same as when one releases one's bodily-physical life from the life of the soul. Just as the watchmaker who has worked on the watch, who has worked his thoughts into it, leaves the watch to itself when it is finished and the watch itself then produces the phenomena that were first placed into it by the watchmaker's thoughts, so the life of the soul can indeed continue, continue in the brain, without the soul being present. And with the present system of education, people are becoming accustomed to this. They not only become accustomed to denying the soul, but actually to eliminating the soul; in short, not to respond to it through inner activity, but to rest on the laurels of what is merely produced by the brain. And the paradox that I want to say is that the purely materialistic world view, as it appears, is in fact a brain product, that it is in fact automatically generated by the self-movement of the brain. The external world is reflected in the brain, which passively sets the brain in motion, and this materialist world view arises. The strange thing is that the materialist is quite right for himself if he has first eliminated the soul life. Because he has taken pure brain-life as his basis, nothing else can appear to him but pure brain-life, which then produces soul-life out of itself, as roughly formulated by the naturalist Carl Vogt: the brain sweats out thoughts, just as the liver sweats out bile. Those thoughts that arise in the field of materialism are indeed sweated out. The image is crude, but they do indeed arise from the brain, just as bile comes out of the liver. This is how errors arise. Errors do not arise simply from saying something wrong, but from saying something right that is valid in a limited field, that is even valid in the only field one wants to have.

The materialistic world view comes not from a logical error, but from the tendency of the mind not to exert itself intellectually, not to deepen its thinking, as has been explained here in the last lectures, not to stir up its inner soul life, but to abandon itself to what the body can do. The materialistic world view does not come from a logical error, but from the tendency of the mind not to be inwardly active at all, but to abandon itself to what the body says. This is the secret of the difficulty in refuting materialism. If someone who does not want to engage his soul life excludes activity from the outset and basically finds it more comfortable to produce only what a brain produces, then it is not surprising that he gets stuck in the realm of materialism. He cannot accept, however, that this brain itself — thank God he has it, because he would not be able to create it with all his materialistic world view! — that this brain itself is created out of the wisdom of the world and that it, because it is created, built up out of the wisdom of the world, is so arranged that it in turn can work like a clock; so that it can be entirely material and produce through itself. This wisdom is a kind of phosphorescence, a phosphorescence that is in the brain itself; it brings out what has already been put into it spiritually. But the materialist does not need to concern himself with this, but simply leaves to what has condensed out of the spiritual, I might say into matter, and which now, as with the work of the clock, produces spiritual products.

You see, the spiritual researcher is so grounded in the justified view of nature that he is compelled to utter something that might seem as paradoxical to some people as what has just been said. But you can see from this that one must already go into the nerve of spiritual science if one wants to judge this spiritual science. And it is also understandable to find, because what can be said again is so well founded, - it is also understandable that so many objections and misunderstandings arise. Spiritual research that is taken seriously is all too easily confused with all that is done in a dilettante manner and which can very easily be mistaken for true, thorough spiritual research. I have often been reproached for the fact that the writings I have written on spiritual science are not popular enough, as they say; that the lectures I give here are not popular enough. Well, I neither write my writings nor give my lectures in order to please anyone, to speak to anyone's heart as they want it to be; but I write my writings and give my lectures as I believe they should be written and given so that spiritual science can be presented to the world in the right way. In older times there was also spiritual science - I have mentioned this often - although spiritual science had to change through the progress of humanity and at that time came from different sources than the spiritual science of today. From the outset, only those who were considered mature were admitted to the places where spiritual science was presented. Today, such an approach would be quite nonsensical. Today we live in public life, and it is taken for granted that what is being investigated is carried into public life, that all secrecy and the like would be foolish. This secrecy cannot be any more than what is otherwise present in public life today: that those who have already studied something are then offered the opportunity to hear something further in more detailed lectures. But that is also done at universities, and in the whole of external life. And when people talk about some kind of secretive behavior, it is just as unjustified and unfounded as when people talk about secretive behavior in university lectures. But so that not everyone who does not want to make an effort to penetrate the subject can penetrate it in so-called popular writings that are so easy on the eye, or rather believe they can penetrate it, the writings are written and the lectures are held in such a way that some effort is necessary and some thought must be applied on the way into the secret science. I am fully aware of how prickly and scientific some of the things I present are for those who do not want such prickly science. But it must be so, if spiritual science is to be properly integrated into the spiritual culture of the present time. It is not surprising that when people here and there, in small or large groups, devote themselves to spiritual science without having any knowledge of the progress of science in our time and with a desire to speak with a certain authority, they are denounced by scientists. Something special, something significant must be seen in the form in which the messages are given. This must be seen in that inner activity, activity of the soul, is necessary in order to see how the soul itself lives as something that uses the body as an instrument, but that is not the same as the physical.

Now, if we look at all this correctly, where do the misunderstandings come from? When the soul develops, when it develops the forces slumbering within it, as has been explained here several times, then the first of these slumbering forces is the power of thought, which must be developed in the way that has just been indicated again. If the soul wants to develop the forces lying dormant in it, it needs a certain inner strength, a certain inner power. It must exert itself inwardly. This is not what people like under the influence of the present time, this inward exertion. Artists are the ones who like it most. But even in the field of art, people have now progressed so far that they would rather just copy nature, having no idea that the soul must first strengthen itself inwardly, must first work inwardly to add something special and new to mere nature. So the power of thinking is the first thing that must be strengthened. Then, as the lectures of the last few weeks have shown, feeling and will must also be energized. And this energizing, that is what it is actually called, that one says: Yes, everything in this spiritual science arises only in an inward way. People shy away from the idea of acquiring strength through something inward, and they do not even consider the considerable difference that must exist between the perception of external nature and the perception of the spiritual world.

Let us take a good, hard look at this difference. What difference arises? With regard to external nature, our organs are already given to us. The eye is given to us. But Goethe has now spoken the beautiful word: “If the eye were not solar, how could we see the light?” As true as it is that you would not hear me if I did not speak, that you must first come to me with your listening in order to understand what is being said, so true is it for Goethe that the eye arose from sunlight itself, light itself, albeit indirectly through all kinds of hereditary and complicated natural processes, the eye has arisen, that the eye not only creates light in the Schopenhauerian sense, but that it itself is created by light. That is to be firmly held. But one could say: thank God for those who want to be materialistic: they no longer need to create their eyes, because these eyes are created out of the spiritual; they already have them, and by perceiving the world, they use these already finished eyes. They direct these eyes towards external impressions, and the external impressions are reflected; with the whole soul they are reflected in the sense organs. Let us assume that a human being could only experience the development of the eye with his present consciousness. Let us assume that. Let us assume that a human being enters nature as a child, with only the predisposition for the eyes. The eyes would have to arise through the influence of sunlight. What would take place in the growth of the human being? The result would be that through the sunbeams, which are not yet visible themselves, the eyes would be brought out of the organization, and by sensing: I have eyes, he senses light in the eye. By knowing the eye as his, as his organization, he senses the eye living in the light. In this way, it is basically the same with sense perception today: the human being experiences himself by experiencing in the light. With his eye in the light, he experiences what has been developed through sense perception, where, as I said, thank God, we already have our eyes.

But this must also be the case with spiritual research. There must really be brought out of the still unformed soul the organic, there must first be brought out spiritual hearing, spiritual seeing. The organic, the spiritual eye, the spiritual ear, as it were, must first be brought out of the inner being, to use these expressions of Goethe's again and again. There one must really feel one's way in the spiritual world by developing one's soul, and then, by feeling one's way in it, one forms the organs, and in the organs one experiences the spiritual world just as one experiences the physical-sensual world in the organs of the physical body. So first of all that which man already has here for sense perception must be created. He must have the power to create the organs first in order to experience himself in the spiritual world through these organs.

What stands in the way of this is what can truly be called nothing more than the inner weakness of the human being that has been produced by today's education. Weakness, that is what holds man back from taking hold of his inner being in the same way that one takes hold of something with one's hands. It is a foolish expression to say, but let us say it, to take hold of one's inner being in such a way that it is really active inwardly, as it would be if one first created hands to touch the table. So he creates his inner being to touch what is spiritual, and with the spiritual he touches spiritual. It is weakness, then, that keeps men from penetrating to real spiritual research. And it is weakness that gives rise to the misunderstandings that stand in the way of spiritual research: inward weakness of soul, an inability to see the possibility of reshaping the inwardly material into inwardly spiritual organs in order to grasp the spiritual world (because we still have traces of Faustism). That is one thing.

And there is a second point, which can be understood if one is willing to do so: Man always has a strange feeling about the unknown; above all, he has a feeling of fear about the unknown. Now, in the beginning, everything that can be experienced in the world of the senses is a complete unknown, which cannot only be explored in the spiritual world, but about which one must also speak when speaking of the spiritual world. One has a fear of the spiritual world, but a fear of a very special kind, namely a fear that does not come to consciousness. And how does the materialistic, the mechanistic, the, as one says today, “educated” — materialistic it is, after all! — monistic world view arise? It arises from the fact that there is fear in the soul of that breakthrough of sensuality, because one is afraid precisely of the fact that if one breaks through to the spiritual through sensuality, one comes into the unknown, into nothingness, as Mephistopheles says to Faust. And Faust says: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” Fear of what can only be sensed as the nothing, but a masked fear, fear that wears a mask! It is necessary to realize that there are subconscious or unconscious soul processes, soul processes that proliferate down there in the soul life. It is remarkable how people deceive themselves about many things. For example, it is a very common delusion to believe that one does not really want something out of a very thick selfishness, but one wants it out of selfishness. Instead, one invents all sorts of excuses about how selflessly, how lovingly one wants to do this or that. In this way, a mask is placed over the egoism. This occurs particularly often, for example, in societies that come together to cultivate love. Yes, one can even make studies about such masking of egoism quite often. I knew a man who repeatedly stated that what he was doing, he was doing entirely against his actual intention and against what he loves; he was only doing it because he considered it necessary for the good of humanity. I kept saying: Don't fool yourself! You are doing it out of your own selfishness, because you like it, and then it is better to admit the truth. Then you are on the ground of truth when you admit that you like the things you want to do and do not keep any such mask.

Fear is what leads to the rejection of spiritual science today. But this fear is not admitted. They have it in their soul, but they do not let it up into their consciousness and invent reasons, reasons against spiritual science, proofs that man must immediately begin to fantasize when he leaves the solid ground of sensual observation and so on. Yes, they invent very complicated proofs. They set up entire philosophies, which in turn can be logically incontestable. They invent entire philosophical worldviews that actually mean nothing more to those who have insight into such things than that everything they invent – be it transcendental realism, empiricist realism, be it more or less speculative realism, metaphysical realism, and whatever these “isms” are called – arises from fear. These “isms” are invented and worked out from very strict lines of thought. But at bottom they are nothing more than the fear of setting the soul on the path that leads to experiencing in its concreteness what one feels to be the unknown. These are the two main reasons for the misunderstanding of spiritual science: weakness of the soul life, fear of the supposed unknown. And anyone who understands the human soul can analyze today's worldviews in terms of it. On the one hand, they arise from the impossibility of strengthening thinking itself in such a way that the counter-instances immediately reach it, and on the other hand, there is the fear of the unknown. Sometimes, because of the fear of penetrating into the so-called unknown, one even lets the unknown be unknown, and many say: Yes, we admit: behind the world of the senses there is still a spiritual world, but man – we can prove this strictly – cannot penetrate into it. Most people then start, when they want to prove something, with the words, “Kant already said,” because they always assume that the person to whom they say, “Kant already said,” does not understand anything about Kant. So people invent proofs that the human mind cannot penetrate into the world that lies behind sensuality. These are only excuses, however ingenious they may be, excuses for fear. But they do assume that there is something behind sensuality. They call this the unknown and prefer to found an agnosticism in Spencer's sense or in some other sense, rather than find the courage to really lead their soul into the spiritual world. |

Recently, a strange Weltanschhauung has come into being, the so-called Weltanschhauung of the “as if.” It has even been transplanted into Germany. Hans Vaihinger has written a thick book about the Weltanschhauung of the “as if.” In this philosophy of life, one says: Man cannot say that such concepts as the unity of his consciousness really correspond to reality, but man must look at the phenomena of the world as if there were a unified soul, as if there were something at the basis of it all that is conceived as a unified soul. Atoms – the as-if philosophers cannot deny that no one has ever seen an atom and that one must think of the atom in such a way that it cannot be seen, because even light is only supposed to arise through the vibrations of the atom. At least the as-if philosophers do not speak of the fable of the atomic world that still haunts this or that corner. But they say: Well, it just makes it easier to understand the sensory world if we think of the sensory world as if atoms existed.

Those who have an active soul life will notice the difference between moving with their active soul life in a spiritual reality, in the unified soul weaving, or merely asserting a concept in external, intellectual realism, as if the phenomena of human activity were summarized by a soul being. At least if one really stands on the practical ground of world-views, one will not be able to apply the as-if philosophy well. For example, a philosopher who is highly esteemed today is Fritz Mauthner, who is regarded as a great authority because he has finally transcended Kantianism. Whereas Kant still conceived of concepts as something with which reality is summarized, Mauthner sees language merely as that in which the world view is actually concluded. And so he has now happily brought about his “Critique of Language” and written a thick “Philosophical Dictionary” from this point of view, and above all acquired a following that regards him as a great man. Well, I do not want to go into Fritz Mauthner today, I just want to say: one could now try to apply the as-if philosophy to this Fritz Mauthner. One could say: let's leave it open whether the man has spirit, has genius, but let's look at what he is spiritually as if he had spirit. You will see, if you go about it sincerely, that you will not succeed. The 'as if' cannot be applied where the thing does not exist.

In short, it is necessary, to say it once more, to get to the root of spiritual science itself and that one knows precisely in spiritual science what this spiritual science must recognize as justified on the ground on which misunderstandings can arise. For, however much these misunderstandings are misunderstandings on the one hand, it is equally true on the other hand that these misunderstandings are nevertheless justified if the spiritual scientist is not fully able to think along with what the natural scientist is thinking. The spiritual researcher must be able to think along with the natural scientist. Indeed, he must even be able to test the natural scientist at times, especially those who always emphasize standing on the firm ground of natural science. Admittedly, even if one only tests it superficially, as it stands with an apparently purely positivistic world view, which rejects everything spiritual, then the following becomes apparent. As you know, I do not underestimate Ernst Haeckel where the esteem is justified; I fully recognize him. But when he speaks of Weltanschauung, it is precisely in this that his weakness of soul reveals itself, which is not capable of pursuing anything but the one path he has taken. And here we come upon an example that must be emphasized again and again when one is seriously concerned with the present time. We come upon the infinitely widespread superficiality of thinking and the general dishonesty of life. For example, we see how Ernst Haeckel points out that one of the greatest authorities to which he himself refers is Karl Ernst von Baer. And again and again we find Karl Ernst von Baer cited as a man who is supposed to prove the purely materialistic world view that Haeckel derives from his research. How many people go to gain insight into what is actually behind today's scientific endeavor? How many people go and touch something like this? How many people stop to consider that Haeckel writes: Karl Ernst von Baer can be seen as someone who speaks in the way that Haeckel derives from it! So one naturally believes that Baer speaks in the way that Haeckel can derive from it. Well, I will read you a few passages from Karl Ernst von Baer: “The earth is only the seedbed on which the spiritual heritage of man proliferates, and the history of nature is not only the history of progressive victories of the spiritual over matter. That is the fundamental idea of Creation, to the end of which, no, for its accomplishment, it causes individuals and generations to fade away and builds the future on the scaffolding of an immeasurable past.

Haeckel constantly cites this wonderful, spiritual view of the world! We must pursue scientific development. If only this were the case to some extent today with those who want to be called to it, one would not have to struggle so terribly against the superficiality that produces the countless prejudices and errors that then stand in the way of such a pursuit as spiritual science as misunderstandings.

Or let us take a look at an honorable man in the nineteenth-century quest for a worldview: David Friedrich Strauß, an honorable man – they are all honorable, after all! Starting from other views, he ultimately wants to place himself entirely on the ground: The soul is only a product of the material. Man has emerged entirely from what today's materialism wants to call nature. When one speaks of will, there is no real will, but rather brain molecules somehow revolve, and then the will arises as a haze. In this context, David Friedrich Strauss says: “In man, nature has not only wanted upwards in general, it has wanted beyond itself.” That is: nature wills! One has arrived at the point where one can be a materialist without even taking his words seriously. Man is denied the will because man is supposed to be like nature, and then one says: that nature has willed. One can easily pass over such a matter. But anyone who is serious about striving for a worldview will realize that such things are the source of countless aberrations and that these things are instilled into the public consciousness. And from what then arises from this instillation, misunderstandings arise regarding true spiritual science and true spiritual research.

And from the other side come the objections of those who profess this or that religious creed and believe that their religion is endangered by the coming of a spiritual science. I must emphasize again and again: it is the very same people who opposed Copernicus, Galileo and so on, who objected that religion would be endangered if it were to be proposed that the earth moves around the sun. One can only say to these people: how timid you actually are within your religions! How little you have grasped your religion if you are immediately afraid that your religion could be endangered if anything is researched! I always have to mention that theologian, who remained a good theologian and a devout follower of his church, who was a friend of mine, who was then elected rector of the University of Vienna in the 1990s and who, in his speech, which he gave about Galileo, said: “There were once people – we know that within a certain religious community these people existed until 1822, when it was allowed to believe in the Copernican world view! – there were once people who believed that something like the Copernican or Galilean world view could endanger religions. Today we have to be so far, said this theologian, this devout priest and follower of his church until his deathbed, that we find religion in particular to be deepened, strengthened by the fact that we look into the glory of the works of the Divine, that we learn to recognize them more and more. That was Christian talk!

But more and more people will emerge who say: Yes, this spiritual science says this or that about Christ; one should not say that. We imagine the Christ to be like this or like that. One can even come and tell these people: We do indeed accept what you say about the Christ, exactly as you say it. We just see a little more. We do not see this Christ as just a being, as you do, but as a Being, even as a cosmic Being, who gives the earth meaning and significance in the whole universe. But you are not allowed to do that. You are not allowed to go beyond what certain people see as the right thing. Spiritual science provides insights. Through the realization of the truth, one can never want to somehow justify something that is called a religious creation, even though there will always be fools who say of spiritual science that it wants to found a new religion. Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion. Religions are founded in a completely different way. Christianity was founded by its founder through the Christ Jesus living on earth. And just as little as any science will explain the Thirty Years War when it recognizes it, so it will explain just as little anything else that was there in reality. Religions are based on facts, on facts that have happened. Spiritual science can only claim to understand these facts differently, or perhaps not even differently, but only in a higher sense than one can without spiritual science. But it is equally true that, whether from a high or a low point of view, by understanding the Thirty Years' War, one does not somehow establish something in the world that is connected with the Thirty Years' War. It is always the superficiality that sometimes also feels limited in its perceptions and does not want to engage with the things that are actually at stake. If one were to engage with spiritual science, one would recognize that although the materialistic worldview may easily lead people away from religious feeling and religious contemplation, spiritual science establishes precisely that in man which can be a deeper religious experience, but only because it lays bare the deeper roots of the soul and thus leads man in a deeper way to an experience of that which has emerged externally and historically as religion. Spiritual science will not found a new religion. It knows only too well that Christianity once gave meaning to the earth. It will only try to deepen this Christianity more than others who do not stand on the ground of spiritual science can deepen it. From materialism, however, something like this has been achieved, as, for example, David Friedrich Strauß concluded, who calls the belief in resurrection a humbug and then says: The resurrection had to be put forward, because Christ Jesus said many noble things, said many truths. But if you say truths, says David Friedrich Strauß, you do not make a special impression on people; you have to embellish it with a great miracle, the miracle of the resurrection. But then all Christian development would be a result of humbug! That, indeed, is what materialism has brought. Spiritual science will not do that! Spiritual science will try to understand from its very foundations that which lives in the mystery of resurrection, in order to present to mankind, which has now advanced and can no longer understand it in the old way, that which materialism has called a humbug, in the right way. But the aim here is not to engage in religious propaganda, but only to draw attention to the significance of spiritual science and to the misunderstandings that stand in its way and that stem from an assumed religious life.

Today, people have not yet reached the point where materialism would have a bad moral result on a large scale, but it would soon have it if people could not penetrate the spiritual self-active foundations of the soul life through spiritual science. Spiritual science will also mean something for what humanity needs as a moral life, which can give people a rebirth at a higher level of this moral life.

These things can only be characterized in general terms. Time does not permit a detailed description. I have tried to at least characterize some of the misunderstandings that are repeatedly found when spiritual science is judged. I would never want to engage with what arises from the general superficiality of our time, at least not in the sense of refuting anything. Sometimes one could at most engage with it in the sense of providing a little material to make people smile or perhaps even laugh.

As I said, one cannot engage with the kind of superficiality that is spreading today and that is, in a sense, setting the tone because printing ink on white paper still has a great magical effect. But insofar as the objections that are made, even if they say nothing at all, are instilled into the public, one must speak of them. And the misunderstandings that arise from what comes out of such instilling are what one has to struggle with at every turn today if one takes something like spiritual science seriously. Again and again one encounters objections that do not arise from some activity of the soul, but are instilled by the general superficiality that reigns and lives in our time. But anyone who is familiar with spiritual science knows, as I have often explained here, that this spiritual science must and will develop in the same way as everything that, in a sense, must incorporate something new into the spiritual development of humanity. From a certain point of view, such an encounter was granted to the newer natural scientific world view until it became powerful and could work through external power factors and no longer needed to work merely through its own power. Then the time comes when, even without the soul being activated, world views can be built on such factors that have power. Is there a big difference between two things? Those who today base their monistic world-views on many grounds consider themselves wonderfully exalted, sublimely above those who may stand on the ground of a religious-theological world-view and, in the opinion of the former, are quite dogmatically limited, swearing only by authority. For anyone who looks into the way in which misunderstandings arise, it is of no great merit in terms of what the human soul really works for, whether one swears by the church fathers Gregory, Tertullian , Irenaeus or Augustine, and also look upon them as authorities, or whether one looks upon the church fathers Darwin, Haeckel, Helmholtz, insofar as they are really church fathers, and swears by them. What matters first is not whether one swears by one or the other, but what matters is how one stands in the process of acquiring a world view. And in a higher sense, in a much higher sense than mere abstract idealism could, the following will apply to spiritual science: at first it will be met with misunderstanding and error everywhere; but then what at first appeared as fantasy, as reverie, will become a matter of course. This is how it was with Copernicanism and Keplerism, and how it is with everything that is to be incorporated into the spiritual development of mankind. At first it is nonsense, then it becomes a matter of course. This is also the fate of spiritual science.

But this spiritual science has something important to say to humanity, as can be seen from everything I have said in other lectures and will probably also emerge from today's lecture. It has something to say to humanity that points to the living entity that makes a human being a human being in the first place: it does not present itself to him for passive contemplation, does not reveal itself to him from the outside, but he must grasp it himself in a living way, he can only recognize its existence through his own activity. We must overcome the weakness that regards everything as fantasy whose existence cannot be grasped in passive surrender, but only in active inner cooperation with the whole of the world. Only when he realizes that knowledge of it can only become his if it becomes active knowledge will man know what he is and what his destiny is. The spirit already has the strength to struggle through, and it will struggle through against all misunderstandings that are justified in the sense intended today, and all the more so against those that arise from the superficiality of the time. For it is a beautiful saying, which Goethe claims is in harmony, as he himself says, with an ancient sage:

If the eye were not solar,
How could we behold the light?
If the god-own power were not in us,
How could we delight in the divine?

The divine spiritual essence that weaves and lives through the world is that from which we originated, emerged. Our material world is also born of the spiritual. And only because it is already born and man does not need to produce it in his own activity, does man, if he is a materialist, believe in it one-sidedly today. The spiritual must be grasped in living activity. The divine spiritual must first weave itself into the human being, the spiritual sun must first create its organs in the human being. Thus one could modify Goethe's saying by saying: If the inner eye does not become spirit-like, it can never behold the light that is the essence of the human being. If the human soul cannot unite with that from which it has come from eternity to eternity, with the Divine-Spiritual, which is one being with its own being, then she will be unable to grasp the glimpse of light into the spiritual, then the spiritual eye will not be able to arise in her, then she will never be able to delight in the Divine in the spiritual sense, then the world will be empty and barren for human knowledge. For we can only find that in the world for which we create the organs for.

If the outer physical eye were not sun-like, how could we behold the light? If the inner eye does not become spirit-sun-like, we can never behold the spiritual light of the human entity. If man's own inner activity does not become truly spiritual and divine itself, then never can that which makes him a true human being, the spirit of the world, which lives, weaves and works through the world and comes to human consciousness in him, even if he does not come to God-consciousness, never can that come through his soul's pulsations.

On March 23 and 24, I will speak here again, tying in with Nietzsche's tragic world view with Wagner and about some more intimate, more precise truths that can lead the human soul to truly break through the world of the senses and enter into the living spiritual life. I will then speak in more detail about this path of the human soul into the spiritual world than has been possible so far.

On the development of the German world view in the present day

As one of the greatest tragedies of the soul, Nietzsche's intellectual life presents itself in the development of humanity in terms of intellectual culture in the last third of the nineteenth century and shines not only through the nature of its course, but above all through its very special relation to much that lives spiritually in the present, shining over into the immediate present.

In the lectures I had the honor of giving during the winter, I tried to characterize German intellectual life from various points of view in the period that can be called the great age of German idealism, the period in which a Fichte, a Schelling, and a Hegel, among others, emerged from the depths of the human soul, and perhaps one can say, even more from the depths of the soul's strong forces, to world picture that is really a kind of background to that tremendous flowering of modern intellectual life that is revealed in Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and the others who belong to them. In one of the last lectures, I then tried to show how the tone of German intellectual life, struck by these great minds, has lived on to our days, but one can say: it has lived on more under the surface of the popularized intellectual life, so that in many ways it has appeared to us as a sound that has faded away, as a forgotten striving within the German intellectual development of the nineteenth century and into the present.

And indeed, anyone who looks at the huge break that occurred around the middle of the nineteenth century in Central European cultural life can easily understand why the character of the time more or less just faded away unnoticed. It was out of an intellectual and intellectually related power of mind that German intellectual life at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the first third of the nineteenth century, sought to penetrate into the depths of the secrets of the world through the aforementioned minds. And we shall not be doing Hegel an injustice if we take a little time to consider what was in his consciousness: that he had succeeded in driving the development of human thought so far that a supreme goal had been achieved within this development of human thought. And the turning point just mentioned shows us how, after the first third of the nineteenth century, thinking, the intellectual life in particular, was brought to the point where, one might say, a kind of rest, a kind of breathing space, became necessary. Only minds that could approach their intellectual work with the same energy as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel could occupy themselves with the innermost and, if the word is not misunderstood, one can say, most abstract powers of the soul so intensely and powerfully. And one could not sustain the long breath that was necessary for that breadth of an idealistic worldview. The consequence of this was that a paralysis set in which, with regard to all that these very minds sought in the highest, testifies to a certain lack of understanding, one might say, to a certain paralysis, even today. As high as thinking, feeling and the purely spiritual will, which is directed not towards the external but towards the life of the soul itself, rose with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, it was not possible to rise in the culture as a whole. The reality value in this striving could not be felt consistently. But it was felt that reality should be sought through this striving. And, as a continuation of this striving, a thirst arose for reality, a thirst for that on which man can stand firmly. This was expressed in the fact that one initially entered into a sharp opposition to all that the above-mentioned spirits had created. In their abstract trains of thought one could not find the reality for which one thirsted. And so it came about that the thirst for reality wanted above all to be satisfied by what the outer senses offered, that the human spirit wanted to penetrate first into all that the strict, safe natural science could establish, which was limited to the senses and the mind bound to the human brain, as a world view.

The leading spirit, by whose contemplation one can almost see what was at stake in this turning-point in modern spiritual life, is Feuerbach. One need only characterize a few thoughts of his world-view to see what is at stake. Feuerbach started precisely from Hegel. He started from the idealistic conception of the world which the German mind has created. But the living soul of Feuerbach was confronted with the question: What is all that a Hegel has been striving for? What can be found on the path that runs in such abstracted thought movements? There is nothing to be found that leads to the spirit itself. Everything that can be found on this path about the spiritual world is nothing more than what the soul creates out of itself, what the human soul finds within itself on the basis of the reality of the body, what it penetrates to. All that it has created, it projects out into the world, so to speak; that becomes its spiritual world. And so, out of the thirst for reality, a placing of the human being in the world-view picture arises, just as he is directly in the sense world. One wanted to take the human being as a whole human being, but precisely for that reason one had to omit from what one saw as reality what arose on the path of this spiritual life. And so man's attention was directed to how he presents himself within the realm that could now be called reality, the realm of the senses and what the brain-bound mind could make of this realm of the senses.

How did man stand before himself with such a world view? Man stood before himself in such a way that he could know: A spiritual world is opening up in you, a world is opening up in you that you must not miss if you want to partake of true human dignity. Something lives in you that must go far, far beyond nature. But how could man come to terms with what he had to bring forth within himself, to create within himself, and what could not appear to him as reality in the sense of the natural existence? This question, translated into the realm of feeling, forms, one might say, a crucial nerve of the entire world-view striving in the second half of the nineteenth century, indeed, into our own days. The human being who cannot justify himself to himself with what he produces spiritually: that became the great question, that became the anxious riddle of life, not so much in this formulation in which I express it, but in the sensations and feelings in which it pushed its way up from the depths of precisely the most striving souls.

And the spirits that emerged in the nineteenth century, which had to raise questions of world view and could not bring themselves to that faded tone in German intellectual life, as mentioned a few weeks ago, initially faced this very characterization of the life-question, world-view question in this way. It is as if for a time the strong forces could not be found among the leading exponents of the world view, in order to find anything at all that could provide an answer to the questions that have just been described. A remarkable fact presents itself here. Those who are philosophers, leading philosophers, who attempt to construct a Weltanschhauung out of natural science, all of them feel, as it were, this powerlessness just described. And this powerlessness fundamentally permeates nineteenth-century philosophy.

In a strange way, the Feuerbach worldview, and with it everything that now set the tone, was confronted by a musician, a personality in whom abstract thinking did not live so much, who initially did not want to follow the usual path of abstract thinking in matters of worldview, in order to arrive at the solution of the world's riddles. A personality was confronted with Feuerbach's question who, in his deepest inner being, lived and worked musically and wanted to work in this way: Richard Wagner. It was in the forties when Richard Wagner grappled with Feuerbach's world view in his soul. Before Richard Wagner's soul, in which everything was alive musically, not in concepts, ideas and thoughts, stood the man whom one had placed at the center of the world view and who, for the reasons characterized earlier, was first and foremost a mere sensual man. But this man was confronted by a soul that was musically active. The musical element lives and moves in the sensual realm. But it cannot live and weave only in the sensual, unless it is grasped as in the soul of Richard Wagner. Here in the musical, the sensual itself works as a spiritual, it must work as a spiritual. For if we turn our senses to nature, wherever we want, what is in the truest sense of the word musical content cannot come to us directly from nature. Goethe says: Music is the purest form and content, for it has no actual model in nature, as the other arts do. And yet, it makes a complete impression on the mind; and everything that makes an impression on the mind is spiritual. Thus in music there is an element that cannot be attained by following the paths of mere observation of nature, that cannot be seen by the human being that Feuerbach placed in the image of nature. And yet, in the realm of music, there is an element that, to an extraordinary degree, accommodated the urge of the time for sensory perception and sensory comprehension. And since Richard Wagner's soul lived in the remarkable (one cannot say discord, but rather consonance), being entirely musical, but not as a philosopher's soul, but rather as a musical soul, a soul seeking knowledge, it could not be otherwise than that in Wagner's musical ideas, in Wagner's musical feelings, the questions mentioned played a role in a completely different way than they could have done in a philosopher's soul.

And another element was added. It would be fascinating to characterize in detail how this second element came to be in Richard Wagner's soul. But there is no time for that. I will only hint at what this second element is and how it was added to the first. A second element is added: the contemplation of what had been created out of the Germanic spirit and soul within Central Europe in the way of myths and of the permeation of life with the mythical. Gradually, a wonderful contrast emerged in Wagner's soul, which, as it appeared in Central Europe, is nowhere else present in the spiritual development of mankind. And recently it appeared in Richard Wagner's soul like a renewal of Germanic myth. There we have an intimate coexistence and interweaving of the human soul with all that is elemental in nature, a loving engagement precisely with the sensually alive. It is to the Teutonic view of nature that we are appealing in these words, to that view of nature which can only live in souls that feel no direct discord between the soul and the physical in human life, because they sense the soul in such a way that this soul not only lives within the human being, but is one with that which blows in the wind, works in the storm, in everything that lives and pulsates in nature as soul and, I would say, the human being himself, who can be experienced inwardly, experienced again outwardly. And in addition to this feeling, this recognizing feeling and feeling-recognizing of nature, which is contained as a basic drive in all the abilities of the Germanic people, there is also a looking up to a world of gods that is well known, that can of course be interpreted in a naturalistic way, but this interpretation is at least one-sided. This upward gaze to Wotan, this upward gaze to Donar, this upward gaze to Baldur, to the other Germanic gods and to all that is connected with these Germanic gods in Germanic myth, this upward is really what the spiritual man finds when he does not merely direct himself towards nature, but when he abandons himself to his own productivity, his creative power. This world of Germanic gods and heroes and heroic geniuses is full of life. But it is not exhausted if it is seen as mere symbolism of nature.

Now Richard Wagner had taken up the view that the human being initially appears to be an end of nature's creation. What the human being forms in terms of ideas about a higher world arises in the human being. According to the newer world view, as it has just emerged, no such reality can be ascribed to it as to sensory things. The anxious question arose in him: How can one even come to a creative process in human life? Nature creates. It creates through its various stages of being up to and including the human being. The human being becomes aware of himself. The human being experiences what he produces. It appears merely as something created by the human being, which has no value in terms of reality. How can we have confidence in what the human being creates within himself? How can one trust it so that it forms a basis for man not merely to place himself in nature as it has created him, but so that he can place himself in the creation with something valid?

A figure, a central figure, had to arise in Wagner's soul, who would place himself in nature in this way, but also, with all the powers that nature itself has given him, give himself strength, security, and the ability to develop beyond the natural existence. But Richard Wagner had to assume that when man creates from his inner being, he is in fact only projecting the images that his imagination has produced, adding a non-real realm to the real realm. What right does the human soul have to create something beyond nature? This question of feeling and emotion arose. What right is there, already in the existence of nature itself, in the blowing wind, in lightning and thunder, to sense spirituality and even more: to create a spiritual being above all of nature, as in Germanic mythology? How can one find a link between the two? Philosophy could not do it in those days, insofar as it was the prevailing philosophy. Richard Wagner's musical soul undertook it. It actually undertook it out of an urge that was at the same time a deeply characteristic trait of the newer Central European essence in general. How so? Yes, if you compare what Germanic myth, the Germanic way of penetrating into the natural world, is with what Greek myth, Greek penetration into natural life, was, then only an external observer can believe that the two are in the same field. Because that is not the case. Here too it would be interesting to probe into the deeper psychological underpinnings, but again, one can only characterize them with a few sketchy strokes.

The whole of Greek intellectual life is geared towards looking outwards and creating myths from the plastic forms that the soul undertakes with what is presented by the outside world, bringing the myth to life in forms, in plastic forms. The way the Greek feels and senses is how his feeling and sensing passes from his own being into the external world, flows fully into external existence. And so the wonderfully rounded plastic forms come into being, which live within Greek myth and then out of Greek myth in Greek art.

The same is not true of Germanic myth. Only with great difficulty can one dream such complete forms, such as the forms that live in Greek myth, the figures of gods and heroes of Greek myth, into Germanic myth. If one does this, then fundamentally Germanic myth becomes something quite different. If one wants to understand Germanic myth, one must be able to let that sense of humanity lovingly enter into the nature of things without bringing it to plastic form; one must let this essence rise up to the figures of the gods Wotan, Donar, Baldur and so on. And one must also refrain from creating fixed, rounded figures up there. If one really wants to live oneself into this myth, then everything must remain mobile, so only mobile sculpture can express plastic movement, which was actually alive in the Germanic souls. But how can one, then, when one enters into the essence of the matter itself, find a bond between what is felt in nature, what directly confronts one in the sensory world, and what is seen above as the world of the gods? One can only do it – and one only knows that one can do it when one has absorbed the basic nerve of Germanic myth in the right way – one can only do it through musical feeling. There is no way to find those currents that the soul must follow from Wotan down into the existence of nature, and again up from the existence of nature into the life and weaving of the gods in Valhalla – there is no other possibility than musical intuition, that musical intuition which in what it has before it has immediately an inwardness, has a spiritual element that is completely sensually realized.

And that is the fundamental difference between that great epoch of human development that we feel as Greek and that which we feel as Germanic. In Greek intellectual life, the I was not yet so alive, human self-awareness was not yet so developed as it was to develop within Germanic intellectual life and up into German intellectual life. The Greek lived with his entire soul life more outwardly. What is significant in the progress of humanity is that in addition to this Greek life outwardly, there is the inner grasping, the inner strengthening. But the inner life cannot be grasped in a formative way. If it is to be felt artistically, it must be felt in music, just as the Greek life must be felt in sculpture. And just as there is a transition from the more self-free way of the Greek world view to the ego-permeated way of the newer world view, there is a transition from sculptural creation to musical feeling in the progress of humanity.

That is the tremendously significant thing, that Richard Wagner was the personality who, not out of the arbitrariness of the soul, but out of the experience of what pulsated in time itself, could have as his personal experience precisely that which was the experience of time. The musical element, which therefore had to be in the world view, was felt by the thoroughly musical soul of Richard Wagner. And so it came about that Richard Wagner, entirely out of the need of the time, out of the deepest nerve of the spiritual life of the time, was able to connect the myth with the musical element. And what the ongoing philosophy could not be, could not express in words, concepts and ideas, was expressed in the musical element. There it is. And when we have to experience the philosophical, when we have to experience the purely intellectual like a fading sound, one is tempted to say: the musical enters through Richard Wagner in the second half of the nineteenth century, and this musical becomes a substitute for the path of knowledge, which is otherwise sought in a completely different way.

And now, as events of this kind are bound to occur in the life of man as an inner destiny, something else occurred for Richard Wagner. His acquaintance with Feuerbach remained somewhat unsatisfactory for Richard Wagner. On the one hand, his passion for music was strong enough to enable him to find what could not be found by pure reasoning, but on the other hand, as is inevitable in our modern times, he was also driven to consciously absorb what he was doing, to consciously create enlightenment for himself about the relationship between his artistic work, which he perceived as completely new, and the deepest world secrets of existence. And here Schopenhauer's philosophy came to his aid. It is not so important to consider this philosophy as it must be taken objectively, but rather to consider it as it affected Richard Wagner. This Schopenhauerian philosophy showed him that man, when he clings to his intellectuality, to his mere imagination, can never penetrate the secrets of existence. He must draw much deeper forces from the depths of his being if he wants to live together with the secrets of the world. Therefore, for Schopenhauer, everything that was merely intellectual, everything that lived only in thoughts, in concepts, in ideas, was something that not only produced mere images of existence, but that had to produce such mere images that actually only give a dream of existence. But if the soul really wants to grow together with reality, it must not merely think, it must draw deeper forces from its depths. And Schopenhauer found that if man really wants to recognize the forces of existence, he cannot grasp them in thought, in imagination, but that he must grasp them in the living will, in the weaving of the will, not in intellectuality. And further, Schopenhauer was able to show how all that is valuable in the individual human being comes out of this element of will: all that is ingenious, all that is devotion and willingness to sacrifice for the world, yes, even compassion itself, which permeates everything moral. All this is connected with deeper forces than mere intellectuality. In short, man must go beyond the merely pictorial, the life of imagination, and connect himself with that in which the thirst for reality, of which we have spoken, can be more fully satisfied than in mere intellectuality, which is bound up with the physical life of the brain. But in what the will experiences, Schopenhauer not only found the center of the human personality, but in it he also found the center of all real art. All other arts, Schopenhauer imagines, must take the representations out of the will, must shape the images. There is only one art that does not become an image, but that is able to reveal the will directly to the outside world, as it reveals itself within man, and that is music. For Schopenhauer, musical art thus takes center stage in the whole of modern artistic life, and through this, one can also say that Schopenhauer senses something of the primal musical character of all true world-view striving. And even if one does not want to or perhaps cannot accept Schopenhauer's ideas, one must recognize in what Schopenhauer unconsciously felt about human will and its connection with the musical, something that in turn is most intimately connected with the lifeblood of intellectual life in modern times.

How must Richard Wagner, with his profoundly musical soul, have felt about a world view like Schopenhauer's, which showed him what music actually means in the overall world life? Did he not basically have before him in music that of which he had to say: however the scientific world view may shape itself, the fact of music will never be made clear or explainable in human nature by the scientific world view. Where man becomes musical, the spirit reigns in man, and yet there is no need to go into an abstract intellectuality, into abstract concepts, into a mere world of ideas, but one remains within the realm of the obvious. And the urge arose in Richard Wagner to now shape the music itself in such a way that he could feel it to be fulfilling, so to speak, such an ideal, which Schopenhauer tried to achieve in relation to his view of music. A performing, productive artist like Richard Wagner was in a different position from Schopenhauer, the philosopher, when it came to such truth. Schopenhauer, the philosopher, could only look at music as it presented itself to him. It appeared to him as an object, so to speak, and in it he sensed the rule and pulsation of the will. In Richard Wagner, the productive man, something different arose. He now really felt the urge to develop the musical element to such an extent that something would take effect in the musical element that he expressed, which would show exactly how the spiritual and the sensual can, one might say, consciously merge in music.

And from this point of view, “Tristan”, “Tristan and Isolde”, does indeed appear as the one work of art by Richard Wagner – after all, it was composed only after “Tannhäuser”, “Lohengrin” and so on – in which he consciously wanted to reshape the musical element in such a way that everything that was musically given as a means of expressing the weaving and working of the most sensual element was at the same time a metaphysical, a supersensible working in the most sensual element. Thus, in Richard Wagner, his ideal of the further development of the musical was truly something like an ideal of knowledge of modern times. And again, this ideal of knowledge of modern times is most consciously striven for by Richard Wagner in Tristan.

Tristan is the work that first kindled Friedrich Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Richard Wagner. The young Nietzsche sought to penetrate the music of Tristan. And this penetration into an element that was only sensual to the extent that a spiritual element pulsates everywhere in everything merely sensual — this penetration into Tristan became the occasion for Nietzsche's experience with Richard Wagner, with Richard Wagner's art, with Richard Wagner's philosophy; it was the occasion of the experience that Nietzsche had with Schopenhauer and with all that can now be linked to the interaction of the three souls, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Wagner. And for Nietzsche, who actually started out in philology but, with his ingeniously comprehensive mind, absorbed everything he could from philology, something special now begins, something with which, I would say, the introduction, the exposition is given to his life tragedy, which now actually unfolds with a wonderful inner necessity, despite its apparent contradictions. These apparent contradictions in Nietzsche's mental life are nothing other than the contradictions within a deeply moving, harrowing life drama, a life tragedy; they are the way contradictions in a tragedy must be, because life itself, when it flows in its depths, cannot exist without contradictions. What then is this deepest peculiarity of Nietzsche's soul life? Other minds that have striven in modern times, when they feel the need, form a certain world and life view, a sum of concepts and ideas, perhaps also another element of the soul that is supposed to lead into the secret depths of existence. when such minds, such souls, can come to find a certain lack of contradictions in the individual parts of the world view, they take up this world view, reject other things that contradict their world view, and thus live with their world view developed within them.

Nietzsche's soul was not at all suited to live like that. There is a fundamental difference between Nietzsche and all other people of world views. Nietzsche is not a productive spirit when compared to other people of conviction. Nietzsche would never allow himself to be compared, if one does not want to proceed externally, with productive minds or philosophers like Fichte, like Schelling, like Hegel, even with Feuerbach, even with Schopenhauer himself. Nietzsche is not a soul in whom thoughts arise directly, which seem credible to him, which are the basis for a certain opinion about the world. In this sense, Nietzsche's soul is not creative at all, even if it does not appear so at first glance to those who look at it superficially. Nietzsche's soul seems to be called to something else. While other men of world-views develop world-views, so to speak, strive to grasp the logical side of these world-views, it becomes necessary for Nietzsche to let what the most important world-views in the second half of the nineteenth century offer him affect his soul in such a way that the question of feeling arises in the soul: How can one live with these world-views? What do they give to the soul? How can the soul progress by allowing these world views to affect it? The world views of others become the vital questions, the world views that emerge as the most important world views in the second half of the nineteenth century. Can the soul become happily aware of its own value? Can it develop healthily under the influence of these or those world views? For Nietzsche, this is not the formulated question, but it is the question of his feelings, the inner urge that comes to life in his soul. Therefore, one can say: it was Nietzsche's destiny to experience the most important and prevailing worldviews of the second half of the nineteenth century in his own soul, to experience them inwardly, in terms of their value and fruitfulness.

And so it ignited, which had come to him from philology while he was still in his full youth – he even became a professor at the University of Basel before he had completed his doctorate, at the age of only twenty-four – so it ignited in him, first of all, what actually had to ignite in a mind that kept pace with its time. We have already characterized what lived and breathed and presented itself particularly in a spirit like Feuerbach, and in a spirit like Schopenhauer. And now it approached Nietzsche through the personality of Richard Wagner. What did Wagner become for Nietzsche in the 1860s? As strange as it may sound, Wagner basically became a problem of knowledge for Nietzsche. How can one live with what had become of the musician Richard Wagner in the sense of the newer development of the spirit, of the newer world-view, how can one live with that in a human soul that wants to experience the fertilizing forces of life within itself? That becomes the fundamental question for Nietzsche. And he must relate this fundamental question, which becomes a way of experiencing life for him, to his philology, to that which had come to life for him from the Greek, which was, after all, the most important subject of his studies. At first, the musical element in Tristan made such an overwhelming impression on Nietzsche that he felt: something truly new is entering into the development of the modern spirit, there is life that must bear fruit. But what are the more intimate connections through which this life can bear fruit for humanity as a whole?

In seeking an answer to this question, Nietzsche looked back to the Greeks. And through his perception of Richard Wagner's music and art, Greek culture presented itself to Nietzsche in a completely different light from the one that had been presented to him earlier. Nietzsche, at least, viewed what had been said about Greek culture before him as something one-sided. After all, Nietzsche believed that people had repeatedly and repeatedly wanted to draw attention to the cheerful element of the Greeks, to the element of the Greeks that was directly full of the joy of life, as if the Greeks were basically only the playing children of humanity. Nietzsche could not admit this from his view of Greek culture. Rather, it came to his mind how the best minds of ancient Greece felt the inner tragedy, the sorrowful nature of all physical-sensual existence, how they felt that a person who lives only within physical-sensual existence, when he has higher needs in his soul, must nevertheless remain completely unsatisfied. Only the soul can be satisfied within physical-sensual existence. And according to Friedrich Nietzsche, the Greeks were not dull and obtuse. On the contrary, as he saw it from a closer examination of this Greek character, the Greeks sensed the tragic, the sorrowful in their immediate existence, and they created art for themselves, in Nietzsche's opinion, everything they could produce from their spirit, precisely in order to overcome the disharmonies of sensual existence. They created art in their minds as an element that would lift them above the ambiguity of external sensual existence. For Nietzsche, Greek art became the harmonization of sensual existence. And it was clear to him that this striving for a spiritual content that transcends sensual content was intimately connected with the fact that the Greeks, even in their best period, had something within them that Schopenhauer directly called the will and that worked in man in the depths of the soul, which in the intellect, in understanding, in imagination only leads to images.

And in particular, Nietzsche liked to look back to the oldest Greek thought. Yes, in the oldest Greek philosophers, in Thales, Anaxagoras, in Heraclitus in particular, in Anaximenes and so on, Nietzsche found everywhere that they did not create as newer philosophers do through thinking, thinking and but by the fact that deep in their souls they still carried something of what worked in the subconscious element of the will, which could not be resolved in mere conception and which they incorporated into their world view. Nietzsche endeavored to present all the great lines in the beautiful treatises he wrote on philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks. But in Socrates he recognized the man who, through mere intellectuality, had to some extent rejected the originally healthy, deeper forces of the will. Therefore, for Nietzsche, Socrates was the actual bringer of the intellectual element, but also the slayer of all original great potentialities for the spiritual development of mankind. And by introducing the Socratic era, which lasted until modern times and found its expression in world views, humanity replaced the mere dream of intellectuality with an elementary standing within that which is more than mere image, which is inner reality. Nietzsche now saw this in effect in Schopenhauer's assertion: that the idea is a mere image, but that the reality for which one thirsted lives in the depths, below the surface of mere idea, in the human element of will. In this Schopenhauerian assertion, Nietzsche found something that in turn went back to the age that had been replaced by the age of intellectuality. And Richard Wagner's art seemed to Nietzsche to be a renewal of the original art of humanity itself, something truly new compared to what humanity had cultivated as art before and what could not completely become art because it did not go down to the very elements of the human soul.

Thus, for Friedrich Nietzsche — from his view of Greek culture and from his view of the decline of the deeper human element in later Greek culture — Richard Wagner became a completely new phenomenon in the course of human development, a recovery of deeper artistic elements than had been present since the Socratic age. For that which can become a truly human world view and way of life must arise from these deeper foundations. In what art can it then live? In the musical alone can it live in the sense of Nietzsche. Therefore, that which otherwise appears as art must, in the sense of Nietzsche, be born out of the musical, out of a primal musicality. For him, Richard Wagner really became the figure Nietzsche was looking for, and who, I would like to say, solved the great doubts of his world view for him. For Richard Wagner was the one for him who did not philosophize about the deepest secrets of the world, but made music. And in the musical element lives the will element. But if one wants to find in the development of mankind itself that from which all art must have sprung, including poetry, one must go back to an age in which the musical element lived, albeit in a naive, more primitive way than in Richard Wagner, but still as music.

From such sentiments, Nietzsche's idea for his first work emerged: “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.” For that which otherwise lived artistically had to have emerged from the element of musicality. And so Nietzsche's first work, I would like to say, was transferred to art the world view of Schopenhauer from the effect of will as a real element compared to mere imagination. And Richard Wagner was the fulfillment of what was necessary for Nietzsche. One must imagine these things as they must have lived as the inner experience of a soul as thirsty for knowledge as Nietzsche's was. All the happiness that Nietzsche could experience, all the fulfillment of longings and hopes that could come to him, were given to him by the fact that he could say to himself: What has been destroyed by Socratism, by intellectualism, in the development of mankind, can be revived. For all art will arise from the musical element, as Greek tragedy arose from the musical element. And Richard Wagner is already showing the dawn. So it will arise.

Nietzsche's relationship with Richard Wagner is both a very personal matter and a question of insight. What is significant about Nietzsche's own spiritual life is that he does not present what he strives for as his ideals, that he does not say: this or that must happen. Thus, what he considers necessary to realize does not initially arise from his own soul, but he always looks to Richard Wagner's soul, and in the way Richard Wagner lives as an artist, he also finds the answers to the questions he must ask as his own insights. That is the significant thing in Nietzsche's life.

And now Nietzsche becomes a critic of his time, a critic, I might say, above all of what presents itself to him in German intellectual life in the last third of the nineteenth century. And as such a critic, Nietzsche writes his four “Untimely Reflections.” There should have been many more. But for reasons that will become apparent in our reflections, there remained only four. In the living experience of Richard Wagner's work, in grasping what was at work in Wagner's music, Nietzsche saw the effect of man and his soul reaching out beyond mere nature, the possibility of finding something, even if one stops at the sensual element, of finding something that carries man beyond mere nature. And now Nietzsche faced the world with this conviction that man, if he understands himself deeply enough below the mere intellectual element, can truly come to the spiritual. In this conviction, Nietzsche turned to what the time had now produced. One must ask: What did Nietzsche find first? He found that the age had been overwhelmed by Feuerbachianism, by this focus on the mere sensual and on the intellect bound to the brain, in the strict sense, if not in the broader sense, by all that had now developed into the prevailing world view.

Of course, I know very well that there may be all kinds of philosophers who say: Oh, philosophy has long since gone beyond materialism. — But even if one supposes that in the whole way of thinking, in the habits of thinking, one is still deeply immersed in it even today. And Nietzsche saw around him how deeply his time was steeped in it. And he now chose a characteristic personality: David Friedrich Strauß — Strauß, who had also started out from Hegelianism, who had come from Hegelianism to a world view that he then expressed in his “Old and New Belief”, who had gone completely from Hegelianism to the materialistic coloring of Darwinism , who saw nothing in the external world, including now also the world of man, but only natural development, who believed that man, if he stood firmly on the ground of newer knowledge, could basically no longer be a Christian, because he should not accept the spiritual ideas that Christianity demands of one. Nietzsche took on this David Friedrich Strauß, so to speak. But Nietzsche did not proceed as a philosopher usually does, but differently. For Nietzsche, it was not the image of nature that was there first, not some scientific habit of thought, but for Nietzsche there was the feeling: if the development of world view continues in direct spiritual life, then it will continue as it begins with what emerges from the music and from the whole art of Richard Wagner.

What then is the position with regard to the world-view of David Friedrich Strauss, which is regarded by many as the only valid modern philosophical system, in the light of the spiritual development that may be achieved through the permeation of spiritual evolution by the art of Richard Wagner? This is the question Nietzsche had to ask himself. He did not ask himself: Is this or that in Strauss's system false? Can this or that be refuted? That was not the issue for Nietzsche at all; rather, the issue for Nietzsche was to show what kind of soul and spiritual element of humanity lives in a worldview like Strauss's, what kind of person is needed to produce such a worldview, a worldview that clings only to the gross material and the sensual. What sort of person must one be who produces such materialism, what sort of person must one be who is a mere Philistine, in contrast to the spiritual man, in contrast to the man who allows the spirit to work in everything that lives and moves in him, in contrast to Richard Wagner? He must be a Philistine! That the world-view of modern times has become so materialistic because the Philistine element has poured itself out in it, that is what Friedrich Nietzsche wanted to show in his untimely consideration “David Friedrich Strauß, the Philistine and Writer”. Later he changed the title to “... Confessor and Writer”.

And so he shows everywhere how a certain trivial way of thinking, how trivial habits of thought, how philistine a nature prevent David Friedrich Strauß from seeing the spiritual in the sensual. And Friedrich Nietzsche continued to compare what he experienced as a living sensation in the personality of Richard Wagner with what is present in the current education under the influence of the materialistic way of thinking. And further, he asks himself: What is the relationship between a productive person like Richard Wagner, who brings the inner forces of the human soul to the surface of his work, and what lives in the ongoing highly respected and admired time formation? And there Nietzsche finds: This time formation has become such that it now gasps and breathes heavily under its abundance of external knowledge, under its abundance of history. To a certain extent, one knows everything or at least seeks to know everything, seeks to relate everything to history. One can give a historical answer to any question. But to bring to life in oneself what one knows, to give birth to something human out of the soul, is paralyzed by the abundance of the historical. And so man gnaws at what he absorbs historically – whether he absorbs it historically from history or from science is no longer important – man gnaws and suffocates on the historical. And by gobbling up the historical, what should come out of him, what man should freely bring out of himself as spirit, gets stuck in the depths of his being. “The Use and Abuse of History for Life” is the second ‘Untimely Reflection’.

And then Nietzsche turns his gaze to Schopenhauer himself, to a mind — as Schopenhauer was in Nietzsche's sense — who had managed to see everything that lives externally as mere ‘dream’, to regard everything that lives externally as mere 'dream', so far as to regard history itself as nothing more than a sum of repetitive life sequences that only acquire value if one is able to take into account that which lives itself out in them and behind them. Nietzsche regards a mind like Schopenhauer's, which must see the greatness of man entirely in terms of productivity, as the ideal of a human being. Again, he compares the time with what such an ideal of humanity represents. It becomes clear to him: if we look at this or that person, if we look at the third or fourth person – what are they all, compared to what could appear from Schopenhauer's philosophy as the full human being? As I said, one may have whatever opinions one likes, be a follower or an opponent, it does not matter, but what does matter is how Schopenhauer influenced Nietzsche. What are individual people, even the most learned and knowledgeable, compared to such a human personality, who sought to shape from the soul that which lived humanly in its universality? They are the patchwork of life, and therefore the whole of culture is patchwork. That a renewal, a revitalization of the whole of culture can take place under the influence of that which now lives in Schopenhauer's philosophy of complete humanity, and that this is urgently necessary, is shown by Nietzsche in the third of his “Untimely Meditations”: “Schopenhauer as Educator”.

But then, as the Bayreuth festival approached, he wanted to describe the positive side first. Like the other two “Untimely Meditations,” “Schopenhauer as Educator” is also dedicated to the critique of the time. But what can be given by the productive man of the time, how the time is to be renewed, how out of what lives in the depths of man's soul, something new must flow into the time, that appeared to Nietzsche in the art of Richard Wagner. It now really understood how to grasp the sensual directly so that it presented itself as a supersensual. “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” - the fourth ‘Untimely Consideration’, 1876, was intended to show what Wagner could become for the world.

Now, for Nietzsche's soul life, this writing ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’ was at the same time, in a certain respect, a farewell to his friendship with Richard Wagner. From then on, the friendship quickly began to cool and basically soon ceased.

And now let us again take the whole inwardness of Nietzsche's soul, the whole weight that weighed on it from questions of world view, and let us add to this that Richard Wagner has become something like the content of Nietzsche's soul, like that towards which he has focused all his thinking and feeling and perceiving. And he must separate from Richard Wagner! And the separation becomes complete when Richard Wagner writes his “Parsifal”. We have a number of things in the Nietzsche publications that are intended to point to the real reason why Nietzsche separated from Wagner. Not even the words that Nietzsche himself communicates about his separation from Richard Wagner seem to me to be convincing. For a personality as artistic as Friedrich Nietzsche was, a personality that must also have felt all of the life of the world view permeated by the artistic, such a personality cannot possibly view “Parsifal” as an entirely unappealing because he believed that Richard Wagner had previously depicted the pagan world of the gods, Siegfried and the others, and now, as a kind of counter-reformer, had swung back to Christianity. What Nietzsche describes as falling down before the cross, and what he is said to have found distasteful, does not appear convincing when one looks at the full range of both Wagner's and Nietzsche's intellectual lives. For ultimately it would come down to the trivial view that Friedrich Nietzsche could not have walked with the work of art that is Parsifal because of the content of Parsifal; he would have fallen away because of a disagreement with the theory. It would be a terrible thing if we had to think in these terms about Friedrich Nietzsche's falling away from Richard Wagner. There was something quite different here, something that, I believe, can only be found if we attempt to use a more profound psychology to uncover the actual underlying reasons. In this short lecture, however, we can only sketch out these ideas.

What did Richard Wagner actually achieve? We have seen that in his basic soul feeling, he started from Feuerbachian materialism, passed over to a feeling of the Schopenhauerian world view, but was actually always imbued with the life element of musicality. Everything he has written, even in theory, is only parallel to this musicality. And in music – if I may express myself trivially – he pointed out the way in which the transcendental, the spiritual, can be found by penetrating into the sensual. But he also started from the assumption that one cannot find the real, the thing for which the sense of reality thirsts, by the path of the intellectual, I might say in that rarefied human spiritual life that was played out in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. One had to put the whole, full human being into it, and basically only the sensual man emerged. We have seen how only music gave the sensual and the supersensual at the same time. For Richard Wagner, then, man was at the center of his world view. But one had to penetrate into all depths of man, and according to the whole nature of Richard Wagner's soul, Wagner could only penetrate into these depths of man musically. Musically he sought to penetrate – I say intentionally: musically he sought to penetrate – the depths of the human soul in Parsifal. In the music of Parsifal, we have before us a musical work that shows how man can be conceived, felt and sensed at the center of an anthroposophically effective world view, so that the sensual, the musical, becomes so spiritual that it seizes the finest, most intimate sides of the human soul. For that is what happens in the resolution of the Grail problem in Parsifal.

Richard Wagner could only achieve this because in his life of feeling, which was completely permeated by the musical element, he had progressed from Feuerbach through Schopenhauer to the direct grasp of that which lives in humanity that exists beneath the purely intellectual and abstract soul element. Richard Wagner, in his own way and principally as a musician, had reached the spiritual man in his “Parsifal”.

Richard Wagner was Nietzsche's object of study. Up until 1876, Nietzsche actually lived much more in Richard Wagner than in himself. He saw in Richard Wagner what he hoped for and strove for in the development of the modern spirit. He did not draw it from his own soul as an ideal. Nietzsche was young and enthusiastic, young and ingenious when he encountered Richard Wagner. In Richard Wagner, a world-view and philosophy of life that was already fully developed in a later stage of development confronted him. What Wagner had gone through to bring his soul into such a feeling, which could come to 'Parsifal' through 'Siegfried', what Richard Wagner experienced in his soul, the harrowing thing that had to be lived through, it had already been lived through when Nietzsche approached Wagner. What was already balanced, already filled with harmony, already promising the future, was what Friedrich Nietzsche encountered when he met Richard Wagner and, I would like to say, made him his object of knowledge. Nietzsche was able to fully absorb what Richard Wagner had gone through in the 1850s, for example, when he wrote down words like the one he wrote to Röckel in 1854 about his deeply suffering feeling about the essence of the world. This deeply suffering feeling about the essence of the world had to be transformed into inner soul strength, into activity. And when Nietzsche came closer to Richard Wagner in the 1860s, he was able to experience in Wagner what the suffering of the soul had become. He, Nietzsche, was able to experience it already in the radiance of a light that shone with hope. Words such as those written to Uhlig in 1852 also show how Richard Wagner knew suffering, which Nietzsche sensed in the Greeks, but which Nietzsche only looked at and observed in its balance in Richard Wagner. Words such as those Wagner wrote to Uhlig show how Richard Wagner came to know this suffering. Before he had come to sense the power in the human soul that can lead to the Temple of the Grail, that can lead to the Siegfried energy, he had come to know doubt of all that is small and human, doubt that is the very foundation on which the great and human must build. Thus Richard Wagner writes: “In general, my views on the human race are growing ever darker, my dear friend; more often than not I feel I must express the conviction that this species is bound to perish completely.”

You only have to take this context to hear the most intimate strings of the human soul resonate: before the hero who “through compassion, knowing” penetrates to the temple of the Grail, lies all that one can experience in human doubt and human suffering when one looks at what is around one, especially in a materialistic time. Richard Wagner has gone through the ascent from suffering to the exercise of creativity. And he basically stood radiant as a victor before Nietzsche when he first met him. But Nietzsche, as a young man, knew how to look sympathetically, sensitively at this victorious nature.

But for Nietzsche it was the case that the youthful power living in him was able to rise to meet that which confronted him in Richard Wagner, but not later the matured power, which had cast off youthful enthusiasm and the breadth of feeling and now wanted to shape out of itself. Richard Wagner had gone through Feuerbachianism. Nietzsche did not go through it, Nietzsche did not suffer from Feuerbachianism, Nietzsche did not first get to know the all-too-human before he allowed the high and ideal and spiritual-human in Richard Wagner to have an effect on him. And that seems to me to be the psychological reason why the soul of Friedrich Nietzsche now fell back into Feuerbachianism, if we take it in the broader sense, was overwhelmed.

Now, when Friedrich Nietzsche could no longer keep up, everything that stemmed only from enthusiasm and should have come from the power of deeper understanding fell away from him. He had to let go and undergo for himself what Richard Wagner had already mastered. Then the second period in Nietzsche's life began, which begins with the publication of the collection of aphorisms “Human-All Too Human,” which then continues with “The Wanderer and His Shadow” to “Dawn” and “The Gay Science , where Nietzsche attempts to come to terms with the scientific worldview, with everything within the scientific worldview that, in the modern era, must be the basis for any higher philosophical worldview.

And that is the tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche's soul, the terrible tragedy, that he had previously experienced the greatest thing in youthful enthusiasm and now, when he came to himself, he had to descend, so to speak, consciously descend, in order to recognize the all-too-human in its connections with natural facts, after the highest human. But Nietzsche had the courage within him to go through this difficult path of knowledge. He had the courage to ask himself: What does this soul life look like when we look at it in the light of science? When we look at it in the light of science, man has passions. They seem to arise from the depths of his will, but if we look more closely, we find all sorts of purely physiological reasons, reasons of this bodily life. We find that man lives out concepts and ideas. But we find the mechanical causes for these ideas and concepts everywhere. Finally, we find ideals in human life. Man says to himself that these ideals are something divine. But when we investigate what man actually is, we see how he gives birth to his ideals out of his physiological element, out of his bodily element, and how he only dreams them into something that is said to have been given to him by the gods. What man perceives in everyday life as his longings born out of the body, what is born out of the flesh, out of the blood, what presents itself to him as ideals, but what does not come from higher spiritual worlds, but is just like the foam that rises from the bodily life, is not the highest human – humanly all-too-human. |

Nietzsche, after having lived through all that the nineteenth century in its second half could give him through Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, had to form his own view of his soul, which science could give him, and he had to undergo, in particular, — his writing, with which he begins this period of his life was dedicated to Voltaire. He had to undergo what one might call a plunge into that dead science, the science of mechanism, of the dead in contrast to the living, which Fichte claimed was the truly German world view. In the second period of his life, Nietzsche was overwhelmed by a Western world view. He completely immersed himself in this Western world view. But it did not become for him a mere sensation of thought; he could not absorb it like a Western mind. He absorbed it after having stood for so long in the primeval Germanic, German world-view. It became for him, for example, that all the perspectives which the soul-materialists later drove out of these world-views lay within it. With a keen mind, Nietzsche was able to show how everything that was called an ideal and that which one believes to have received as a gift from God could arise out of the needs of human nature, which are connected with flesh and blood. Nietzsche himself expressed it thus: all his ideals seemed to him to have been frozen, to have become cold, because they appeared to him to have arisen out of the humanly-all-too-human. Indeed, what small minds and dull minds have produced by developing this process of Nietzsche's world view development to excess is already present in Nietzsche, but in such a way that, while it is ingenious in Nietzsche, in those who then built on it it is the opposite of ingenious. One could even say that the whole dullness of modern psychoanalysis is already contained in Nietzsche's second period of development, with all that was tried to be derived from human nature in a materialistic-spiritualistic way. Small minds say to themselves: Well, we can investigate that, and the truth must be accepted. — So small minds can even accept, for example, deriving from Schopenhauer that all striving for a worldview, all striving for spiritual connection with the world, that goes beyond mere factual science — yes, it is not a fairy tale that I am telling — is a consequence of human sexuality. So that all philosophy for certain minds of the present has its basis in human sexuality, for all spiritual striving is rooted in human sexuality. Of course, Nietzsche, who saw the original basis, the justified original basis for the soul in the physiological, in the purely natural, was too ingenious and, I might say, too tactful to go beyond the cognitive. But he did not merely have to develop a world view. Smaller minds simply say to themselves: This is truth, one must accept it. So one must also accept as truth that philosophy is only a consequence of sexuality. But Nietzsche had to experience above all to look at the fruitful in human nature, which can be influenced by a truth. Knowledge as destiny of life, that is the characteristic in Nietzsche's psychological tragedy. And so something began to live in Nietzsche's soul in this second epoch of his psychological life. Nietzsche was too great to let it go far, but it continued to work as a background of disgust for a merely naturalistic psychology, for a merely naturalistic explanation of everything moral, as he had attempted it, the disgust for what can arise when one continues in this field, which seems so justified, which seems so justified, in a materialistic psychology, — the disgust. Now imagine the tragedy in such a development of the soul, which first experiences all of humanity's fruitful happiness in Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner and then, through the necessary development and the connection with this necessary development of time, as Nietzsche himself had , to develop a world view in which the experience begins to be met with disgust at the point of the soul life, and the necessity to save himself from the disgust of life.

We are now close to and in the eighties of the nineteenth century with regard to Friedrich Nietzsche's soul life. From the natural scientific world view, he had gained something for his soul life that showed him the beginning of disgust with all the bitterness with which disgust can thus prevail in the soul, deep within. And what Nietzsche tried to express in The Gay Science is basically nothing other than an intoxicated way of leading us away from the disgust that does not come to consciousness. For of course, one suffers from this disgust, but such things remain in the subconscious. It is not expressed. Something is expressed in the soul that veils the disgust, that covers it up: “Happy Science” – in the sentences, in the expressed content. That which I had to characterize as lying in the depths of the soul then forms the transition to another kind of world view, which Nietzsche now had to experience further from a certain deepening of the natural scientific life of the nineteenth century, as he also carried it into the understanding of the soul life.

And now something developed in Nietzsche's soul – of which one can say: it absorbed, like a continuous drive, this primeval Germanic that lived in Richard Wagner, in Schopenhauer – now something strange lived itself out in Nietzsche. Now comes the last period of his life, which then leads to the catastrophe. And in this catastrophe, without one realizing it if one does not go deeper into the foundations of his soul life, what he had taken from Western philosophy, namely from French moral philosophy, , from Guyau, from Stendhal, but also from others in whom he had completely immersed himself, and what he had gained from these in connection with a deeper understanding of Darwinism, that worked together with the Eastern European element. One cannot understand the last period in Friedrich Nietzsche without considering how, in all his feelings, in everything he felt and thought, the same element was shining forth that, for example, permeates Dostoyevsky's art as a psychological element in Dostoyevsky. This peculiarity of the Russian East, that in the directly natural the whole human being is grasped, but in such a way that this directly natural is also seen and felt as the living out of the spiritual, that the instincts are felt spiritually at the same time, that what is not felt physiologically, as in the West and in Central Europe, but is felt spiritually — that now pushed its way into Nietzsche, into the soul on which that which I have just characterized had settled in a shattering way. Into this soul flowed all the riddles of worldviews from the West and the East. In mere scientific and physiological soul-contemplation, he could see the all-too-human. But it would have become repulsive if he had pursued it further. Now he drew a deepening from the contemplation of human life itself. Only now did he actually approach human life, where this contemplation was stimulated in him, namely through the influence of Dostoyevsky.

And now an urge arose in him, a longing for a spiritual deepening of what is merely presented in the sensual world. And this urge, this longing, could only be expressed lyrically in this last period of his life, because of his talents. And that is connected with the uncreative in Nietzsche. He needed what had an effect on him; that he could experience. For him, creative spirits could become objects, like Richard Wagner. Whatever created the world view of his time could become an object for him. What flashed and lit up in the second period of his life, the period of Human-All-Too-Human and so on, as a future soul-creation, now entered the sphere of Nietzsche's third period. Man became for him such that Nietzsche said to himself: This man must be placed at the center of the world view — but not in the sense in which anthroposophy appears in Troxler in the sense of the lecture that I was able to give here a few weeks ago. He would have been able to find him had Nietzsche been what one might call an epic-dramatic nature. If someone is of an epic-dramatic nature, they can go out of themselves to the contemplation of the spirit, then they develop the spiritual world, then they create it. Nietzsche was not like that; Nietzsche was of a lyrical nature. In order for that which was yearning in him, that which was urge and drive in him, to come to life, Nietzsche needed something to meet him in the outside world. A spiritual world did not arise from his soul. And so, when he sought the higher man in man, this man could only arise, I would say, in his lyricism, because lyricism, the lyrical element, is the basic element of the work Also sprach Zarathustra , where Nietzsche wanted to show how nature emerges from its merely natural state to become human, but also how man can go beyond nature to become a superhuman, how man can become a superhuman by continuing the development of nature. But because Nietzsche was only lyrical in his entire soul, this superhuman arose in him as a longing. And basically, in all that confronts you in the lyrically so great, so powerful work “Also sprach Zarathustra”, nowhere can you grasp the superhuman. Where does he live then? Where do we encounter him in some form? Where do we encounter something that could live as a higher human being in man and lead man beyond nature? Where do we find something that would describe him? Everywhere we encounter lyrically shaped longings, everywhere we encounter great, powerful lyricism, but nowhere do we find anything that can be grasped intellectually, so to speak. Nietzsche could now encounter as much as an indefinite, foggy image of a superhuman in the third period of his life.

And another nebulous one. Nietzsche could say to himself: When I look at this human life, it presents itself to me in such a way that I have to experience it as formed out of certain preconditions. But it must carry within itself preconditions that correspond to all real forms of nature and spirit. And the thought was already alive in Nietzsche: the plant develops from the root to the flower and fruit, and in the fruit the germ; and the germ is again the starting point for the root, and from the root the plant comes again. A cycle, a becoming that takes place rhythmically, that returns to itself: eternal return of human existence is the idea that arises in Nietzsche. But where is that contained – which again could arise from an epic-dramatic nature – that in present human life really shows the spiritual-soul as a core or germ, as something that would repeat itself in a later life on earth? Abstract eternal return occurs in Nietzsche, but not a concrete grasp of the real spiritual-soul in man. Longing for that which can take shape beyond the sensual human being, longing for the rhythm of life that occurs in recurring earthly lives, but an inability to see into these great mysteries of existence: the third period of Nietzsche's work.

The first period gives him a person for his longings and hopes, for his thirst for knowledge, whom he can put before him. This person ultimately becomes, I would say, like the mysteries of nature can become for the observer. One penetrates as far as one oneself has the predispositions of what one wants to seek within oneself. One cannot go further. Thus Nietzsche was able to penetrate Richard Wagner as far as Nietzsche himself carried the potential for Richard Wagner's world and life view. A person in the first period of their life, the science of the present in the second period of their life, which is now supposed to fulfill their hopes and desires. What is ready for the future in the present as spiritual germs, in a spiritual science as we are thinking of it today, must develop out of the general realization that the higher spiritual man lies in the sensual man, that in one earth life lies the sequence of earlier earth lives and the starting point of later earth lives, of that which is not yet there, which can therefore only work as something indeterminate, as nebulous. Nietzsche must also live through this: a man of the present who confronts him as a complete human being; natural science, which satisfies the thirst for reality of modern times; the indeterminate longings of the times themselves, which he is not yet able to shape.

These are the successive external facts that confronted, that had to confront, Friedrich Nietzsche in an age that, so to speak, wanted to draw breath within the development of German thought after the intellectual development had reached a climax, a point where thoughts really mystically enter the spiritual world. For it is a Schopenhauerian delusion, it is a Nietzschean delusion, it is a delusion of all those who in the second half of the nineteenth century surrendered to the delusion that Hegel's thoughts were only intellectualistic. But this belief had to arise because people did not have the breadth of breathing to carry themselves up to the height and energy of Hegel's world view. But this breathing had to arise for the simple reason that Hegel and the other minds that belong to him had indeed ascended to supersensible concepts, but in these supersensible concepts there is nothing supersensible in them. Look at the whole of Hegel's philosophy: it is decidedly based on supersensible concepts. It consists of three parts: a logic that consists of supersensible concepts, a natural philosophy, and a philosophy of spirit that only encompasses the human soul between birth and death, that which is realized in the material world and so on. In short, spiritual knowledge is only applied to what is around us in the material world. Supersensible knowledge is there. But supersensible knowledge does not recognize anything supersensible. Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, this supersensible knowledge, which does not recognize anything supersensible, had to lead to it being described as completely unsatisfactory, so to speak, and to people turning to the material world itself. the musical element could enter, could create the bridge over to the time when people tried to grasp the path directly from the spiritual, through spiritual knowledge itself, which we will talk about in more detail tomorrow. This is what was significant for spiritual life in the second half of the nineteenth century and up to the present day. Nietzsche's harrowing psychological experiences arose from the perishing of supersensible knowledge and the overwhelming of the human soul by mere sensory knowledge, from clinging to that which now entered as a substitute from a completely different world.

How a deep soul had to suffer tragically in an age that had no depth in the prevailing currents of thought can be seen in Nietzsche's soul, and that is basically the tragedy that took place in Nietzsche's soul : the striving for depth, for an experience in the depths, which should have been there if Nietzsche was to have come to satisfaction, which was not there and which finally plunged Nietzsche's spirit into utter despair. I need not go into the physiological and medical background of his illness, but what took place in his soul is at least characterized in its main lines in what I have tried to characterize. And so we see how this life of world-view, which is so overwhelmed by the current of materialism, affects a soul that, by its very nature, strives beyond materialism; how, when the human soul has a deeper need, mere materialism or mere positivism, or in general what the second half of the nineteenth century was able to bring such a soul, must have a tragic effect. That is why it seems so tragic when we see how Nietzsche, at the beginning of his literary career, when he wrote his Birth of Tragedy, tying in with the great personality of Richard Wagner, entered in the copy that he sent to Richard Wagner himself: “Create the day's work of my hands, great spirit, that I may complete it!” In the intimate dedication that he addresses to Richard Wagner, Nietzsche implores the great spirit of the world to deliver to him a day's work in which he can experience what his soul wants to experience, and through which he can describe to humanity how one experiences the spirit in sensual earthly life, how man leads his soul beyond the merely natural, so that he too can find the way into the spiritual. The tragedy was bound to be fulfilled because the nineteenth century could not give Nietzsche what he had implored of the great spirit. The spirit could not supply the daily bread of his hands. The spirit of the nineteenth century could not supply it, and so it could not be completed by it either.

So it is that in what Nietzsche later created, especially at the end of his conscious life on earth, before his life passed into derangement, we have scraps, individual statements, aphorisms, drafts, notes from and about questions of world view. But basically, we have everywhere rudiments, questions, riddles that peer like the sphinx into the spiritual future of mankind. This may be said in the face of the fact that Nietzsche is also among those minds that are now so denounced by the enemies of Central Europe: In Friedrich Nietzsche's soul there lived questions, there lived world-view riddles in an immediately personal way, which will shine forth—whether in connection with the personality of Friedrich Nietzsche or separated from it, because Friedrich Nietzsche, after all, also only took them from the faithfully co-experienced world-view life of the nineteenth , but in the entire spiritual development of mankind, in a perhaps still distant future, and which will find satisfactory answers, but only when one—which Nietzsche could not yet fully do—will fully understand, with feeling, the deepest meaning of what Goethe meant when he quoted the saying of an old spiritual researcher, in which it is pointed out that man can indeed penetrate into the depths of the world, but that he must first find this depth within himself through self-knowledge, yes, must create it within himself. Nietzsche was on this path in his consideration of Richard Wagner, but could not go this path to the end. This path will prove again and again the truth of this saying attributed by Goethe to an ancient spiritual researcher, by which Goethe wants to express that we can find every depth, every infinite depth in the things of the world, if we have first gained the deepening in our own self-knowledge. Goethe expresses it in the words with which we want to conclude this reflection today:

If the eye were not sunlike,
How could we behold the light?
If the divine power of God were not within us,

Yes, a person only sees as much light in the world as they are able to ignite within themselves. A person only finds as much divinity in the world as they are able to shape within themselves through self-knowledge.

The situation of someone who wants to say something about the nature of the soul on a spiritual scientific basis, insofar as it can be described as immortal, is perhaps characterized for a very long time by the fact that I am talking about the publication of a book as an introduction. This book is entitled “Athanasia or the Reasons for the Immortality of the Soul”.

I would like to make it clear, so as not to be misunderstood, that today's spiritual research cannot consider this book as written in the spirit of this spiritual research. Spiritual research in the modern sense did not yet exist at that time, as I was able to sufficiently demonstrate in many lectures that I have given here. However, I would like to say that, in view of the fate that has befallen all those long-standing disputes that push towards what today wants to develop into spiritual science, I believe that what happened with the publication of this book is not without significance. So in 1827 a book entitled 'Athanasia or the Reasons for the Immortality of the Soul' was published. The person who published this book wrote a remarkable introduction to it, a remarkable preface, as they say. He writes that he was with a dying person and found the manuscript of this book at his bedside, that he then took over this manuscript with the consent of the dying man, that it could no longer be said to him exactly how the dying man came by this book, which apparently had a great, profound significance for his soul in the last days of his life. Then the person who publishes the book waited because the content seemed so significant to him, seemed to contain such important information about the soul's life after the detachment of the physical body that he could not imagine that this book would not be destined to make its content accessible to wider circles. But since he had waited long enough and had not seen the content published anywhere, he decided to publish the book himself.

What can legitimate research into the origin of this book tell us? There is the strange fact that the person who published this book, with this preface in which he recounts the book's remarkable fate, wrote this book himself, from beginning to end and published it without his name; that he only found it necessary, if one may say so – it is meant in the very best sense of the word – to invent a fairy tale about the book, as it has just been mentioned. It becomes somewhat more understandable why the writer of this book resorted to this fairy tale when one knows that he was a well-known personality in the broadest philosophical circles of his time, a philosopher who dealt with the most profound questions of philosophical thought : the Prague philosopher Bernard Bolzano, who had a large number of students, students who worked for many decades at Austrian universities, who always confessed what a profound influence they had drawn from Bolzano's teachings. So, a famous, influential philosopher, Bernard Bolzano, publishes a book in which he discusses the reasons for the immortality of the human soul, and in this book he has to present himself to the public in the manner described. Why did he do this? Well, the reasons are very obvious. In this book it is not merely stated, as it is so often the case in philosophical writings, that the human soul is immortal for these or those reasons that are derived from human logic. Rather, this book speaks of how man finds within himself a being that can perfect itself between birth and death, perfecting itself in terms of its thinking, perfecting itself in terms of its feeling , perfects itself in relation to its volitions; how this being, when it is rightly grasped by man, shows, however, that it not only bears within itself the powers that lead to its perfection up to death, but that it bears within itself powers that further perfect this soul-being, further develop it, that can be further filled with content even after the human being has passed through the gate of death. This book then explains how one must imagine, when one grasps the human soul, that the human soul must live in a certain environment when it has passed through the gate of death. It also indicates how this human soul, after its death, associates with other spiritual entities, which cannot be perceived as long as the human being dwells in the body. It is hinted at what relationship the human soul, after passing through the gate of death, can have with the relatives and friends left behind, with the souls attached to it in love. As already mentioned, all these details of the soul that has passed through the gate of death are not spoken of from the standpoint of today's spiritual science, but with fine, delicate reasons that a philosopher has developed who not only philosophizes with abstract concepts, but who is involved with his whole soul, with his whole human being, when he develops thoughts, especially the thoughts about that weaving and being in the human being himself, which we call the soul. But Bolzano knew only too well that as long as one remains a logician and discusses how one concept is linked to another, what logical reasons there are for the truth or probability of a judgment, as long as one discusses how attention in the human soul, possibly even the reasons for memory and for the will; in short, as long as one expresses everything that the soul performs while it dwells in the body, one can have the reputation of a scientific philosopher. But if one speaks about the human soul as Bolzano did in his Athanasia, then one's reputation as a philosopher is ruined. Then one is an unscientific person. Then you are a person who talks nonsense and can no longer be taken seriously by those who understand how to think scientifically. Even those who have not learned to think scientifically but swear by the authority of those whom they have heard of or of whom it has been publicly stated that they can think scientifically believe that they can thoroughly dispute the scientific value of such a personality. If Bolzano wanted to save his reputation as a philosopher, he had to resort to the maneuver described above, and then leave it to later researchers to recognize that the book was written by him. And no Bolzano expert today doubts, for the very best reasons that can be proven scientifically and historically, that the book in question is by Bolzano himself. This shows something that was true then and is true today: if you want to openly and frankly advocate something that does not belong to the physical-sensory world or cannot be said about the physical-sensory world, you have to expose yourself to being seen as a completely unscientific person. And as a rule, the 'fact' does not apply either, that one could recognize from the way such things are spoken about, that the person speaking is not an unscientific person.

And yet, just as spiritual science has to speak about the question of immortality today, so this speaking, as I have often emphasized here, is in the fullest sense a continuation of that human spiritual work which, especially in the field of natural science, has led to such great results of human life and striving, which are fully recognized by spiritual science.

Therefore, today I would like to begin by hinting at some of the things that can show how the study of immortality is approached from the point of view of spiritual research, so that everything that can be called spiritual research in this sense today is in fact the direct, immediate continuation of what scientific thinking has contributed to a world view in the course of the nineteenth century and up to the present.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” you will find a chapter entitled “The World as Illusion”. This chapter is not intended to show that the world as it presents itself to the outer senses and to human thinking, which is connected to the brain, should be seen as an illusion, but it does show how many thinkers of the nineteenth century have come to the conclusion that everything perceived by the senses, and also what thinking has to say about the perceptions of the senses, does not flow into the human soul from the outside, but is, as it were, first constructed within the human soul. As far as it can be done in a popular way, I would like to touch on these thoughts in my introduction, even though they may be far removed from many of the esteemed listeners.

We see with our eyes, we hear with our ears, we perceive the world with our sense organs in general. Now, someone who is grounded in the latest natural science and physiological research says that what the senses perceive actually arises only through an interaction of the senses with something completely unknown in the external world. The researcher says: When the eye perceives a color, when the eye receives some impression of light, one must consider that what acts on the eye from the outside remains completely unknown to perception. With his soul, the human being experiences only the effect that the external world has on his soul. That is why, when we go through the world in our ordinary lives, we see things in color, as an expression of their light effects. But if, for example, we strike the eye, we may also have an impression of light in the eye, even if it is vague. Or if we can somehow otherwise evoke that which can occur internally in the eye, say, somehow with an electrical device, then we also get a light impression. That is to say, the eye responds to everything that acts on it from the outside with a light impression. So whatever happens out there, if it somehow acts on the eye, a light impression arises in the eye. The eye creates the impression of light from the effect of a completely unknown external world. It is the same with the ear. It is the same with the other senses. Therefore, for example, the philosopher Lotze, an outstanding philosopher of the nineteenth century, is in complete agreement with Schopenhauer when he says: Everything that we perceive as the effect of light, as color, has actually only come into being in our eye through the effect of an unknown world. What we hear as sounds is created by the effect of an unknown world in the ear. If there were no people with eyes and ears, the world would be dark and silent, and one could never say that something similar to what eyes see and ears hear prevails in this dark and silent, unknown world.

In other words: In the nineteenth century, under the influence of Kant's philosophy, it was concluded that in order for man to gain knowledge and perceptions of this environment, he must engage in an inner activity, and that only through this inner activity does that which he calls his environment come into being in his mind. In reality, one can say that for these people, who are genuine thinkers grounded in natural science, the world is like an illusion. For if out there, where we see pillars and all kinds of pictures on the walls, there is something completely unknown that affects the eye and from which the eye creates colors and shapes, then one can only say that what appears to us as our environment is an image created out of man's own being. And what is behind it can only be constructed by hypothesis, as modern physics does, which assumes all kinds of vibrations in the ether and the like behind our perceptions. So that man, as he goes through the world, in interaction with an unknown external world, simply by the nature of his being, builds up what he calls his world.

Taken as it has just been explained, there is absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing to be said against this line of thought. This train of thought is completely in line with everything that scientific research has delivered in the nineteenth century. One can say: Such a statement as that made by Hermann Helmholtz, the famous physiologist and physicist, is perfectly understandable: by perceiving an external world, man does not perceive what is, what is really happening, but only perceives signs. Not even images, says Helmholtz, are perceived of what really is, but only signs. For what our eyes and ears create of the external world are only signs for the external world. As I said, there is nothing to be said against the seriousness and logic of this line of thought. Taken directly, as they present themselves, that is so.

You have to go much, much deeper into the nature of man if you want to know what is actually behind this train of thought. I have tried to show the philosophical world what is behind this train of thought and how it offers the possibility of finding one's way with it in relation to the human concept of reality. I have attempted to show the way to do this in a lecture I gave at the last philosophers' congress. But these arguments today only lead to general misunderstandings, if not to something much worse. The one who has the task of finding his way in the train of thought just outlined must indeed advance to spiritual science. And then it certainly becomes apparent that one can truly say: The human soul creates by perceiving through the senses that which it must initially call its world. It creates this. It really does create it. But why does it create it, despite the fact that creation prevails in the real? Well, it creates it for the reason that the human soul, that which is the human soul, is not connected to the human being in such a way that one can say: There is the human body, and in this human body the immortal soul dwells within, just as any person dwells in his dwelling and influences the outside world in some way from his dwelling or looks at the outside world through windows. The connection of the human soul with the human body must be imagined quite differently. It must be imagined in such a way that the body itself, as it were, holds the soul in itself through a process of knowledge. In the sense that colors and light, like sounds, are outside of us, in the same sense the human soul itself is outside of the body, and in that the reality carries colors and sounds in through the senses, in the same sense the contents of the soul live, as it were, on the wings of sensory perception. The soul must not be imagined as just a finer physical being that dwells in the coarser outer body, but as a being that is so connected to the body that the body exercises the same activity that we otherwise exercise in cognition when holding on to the soul. Only when we understand how, in a certain sense, that which we call our ego, the bearer of our self-awareness, is outside the body in the same way as sound or color, only then do we understand the relationship between the human soul and the human body. By pronouncing “I”, the human being, as a bodily human being, perceives this “I” from the same side of reality from which it perceives colors and sounds. And the nature of the body consists in being able to perceive precisely this I, that is, the soul's own nature. In order to fully experience the reality of what has just been said, it is necessary for the human being to carry out the exercises that have often been discussed here, that is, to perform inner acts with his soul.

Today, too, I will not repeat what I have said so often, since everyone can read it in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” “Occult Science,” or in the brief sketch at the end of “Theosophy.” Today, too, I shall not describe these inner soul-searchings in detail, but rather I should like to give again certain points of view which can show what man arrives at when he, in the sense often described here and in the books concerned, undertakes inner work with his soul , so that what otherwise takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing develops further through inner impulses given by the soul in the meditative life; that it becomes something other than what is in the ordinary life of the body.

When a person undertakes the mental processes – this too has already been discussed in the last lectures – that lead thinking beyond the kind of thought life that one has to have in ordinary life and also in ordinary science, then one comes to think, that is, to perform the inner activity of thinking, but no longer to have a specific thought. Meditation consists in the fact that, while one otherwise thinks, as it were, under the influence of the external world and reflects on things, one evokes thinking as an inner arbitrary activity of the soul, that one does not direct one's attention to what is being thought, but to the activity of thinking, to that fine activity of the will that is exercised in thinking. I have already described this in the last lecture. In a sense, one thinks with a thought-content that one has moved into one's consciousness, into one's soul, through one's own will. One thinks so intensely, so strongly, so powerfully inwardly that one really achieves what one does not want to achieve at first, but what is achieved under the influence of such inner thought-work: thoughts fall away and one lives only in the inner weaving and working of an - well, let the expression be used - an ethereal world. The word “ethereal” is used here in a different way than modern physics uses the term. One lives in a weaving, in a pulsating, and one knows, if one has pursued this experience long enough: What one has discovered in one's thinking, what one has detached from one's thinking, just as the chemist separates hydrogen from water so that he can show the properties of hydrogen that cannot be shown while the hydrogen is still in the water, - one knows, when one has detached the activity of thinking from thinking, that one is now really in an experience outside the body. By continuing such inner soul work, one must then become clearer and clearer about what the experience actually is that one has evoked in this way in the soul. When we perceive colors and sounds in our ordinary life — as I said, this can already be considered a result of natural science — then we know through natural science: an unconscious activity is carried out in our human being; because the fact that the world of color and sound is evoked through the eye and the ear is an unconscious activity. An unconscious activity is carried out through which something that is outside speaks into the soul and reveals itself to the soul. What one experiences in the inner grasping of thinking when one does the corresponding soul exercises is not experienced in the same way as if it were rising up from our muscles, from our blood, but it is experienced as if it were coming in from the whole surrounding cosmic space , as if it were a spirit-being entering us and having a certain attraction to our body, so that it recognizes our body as the vehicle through which it wants to reveal itself to the sensory world. By meditating as described, one steps into the external world itself. One immerses oneself in this external world, from which colors and sounds come to us. That is to say, one frees one's experience from the body. This freedom of experience from the body must be inwardly experienced, must be lived. Through soul exercises, the human being must come to know that he is living and pulsating in an element that is not bound to his body as an instrument. But will, inner arbitrariness, is now present in everything, which thus leads the human being to freedom from the body – inner activity, but inner activity on a higher level. Let us just consider for a moment what it would mean for the human being: suppose – assuming the truth of what I have presented to you as a result of more recent physiology, of more recent natural science – the human being were aware: there must be something unknown, a silent, dark world. I stand in it, I open my eyes. Through my eyes I create color, through my ears I create sound. I place the sounds and the colors into the world. What would a person have to say? He would say: Well, then the whole world is a dream, of course it is a dream. Then nothing of what I see and hear is real. Only because this inner activity, which is there, remains unconscious, because one does not know that one does it — evoke colors through the eye, evoke sounds through the ear — only because of that, one is at all undisturbed in one's outer experience. For if human beings were always aware that they do what recent natural science ascribes to them, then they would certainly speak about the whole world of the senses in exactly the same way as they now speak about what way, and what human thinking, trained in this way, experiences through a world that is just as real as the sense world, but which must be voluntarily placed before ourselves through the effort of free will born of thinking. One might say that it is good for most people that they are blessed with not knowing how they create colors and sounds for themselves, otherwise they would already be able to speak about this colored and sounding world exactly as they speak about the world that the spiritual researcher presents to them. For that is indeed the characteristic of the world that the spiritual researcher presents to the soul: that one now exercises the activity, which one otherwise performs unconsciously for the sensual world, consciously, fully consciously, on this higher level of the act of will, which is detached from thinking. Otherwise, however, there is no difference at all in relation to the sense world. But people are not strong enough to hold to that, to have confidence in that which they must first call into existence inwardly. One would like to say that it is good that a kind God has withheld from people the knowledge that they create the light of the sun for themselves, otherwise they would deny it, as they deny the essence of the spiritual world. People depend on the outside world, on the authority of the outside world, to dictate what is, what is inherent in being. If they are to do something to allow this being to come to the fore, then they are not strong enough, not trusting enough in this inner activity of theirs to allow what they now have to co-create themselves to be recognized as a reality, as a truth.

When, through the indicated exercises of thinking, one has truly grasped the will in thinking, that reality which does not express itself in thoughts of a sense world, then at first – and this too has often been hinted at from a different point of view – — one does not have a spiritual reality before one, but one has only an experience that consists of a weaving and being and becoming; one has, so to speak, an expanded self before one, a self that now knows itself connected to the whole world, from which sounds and colors otherwise reveal themselves to it. But one weaves and lives in this becoming. One only knows that the way one lives in this becoming is reality, spiritual reality, spiritual reality free from the body.

One cannot be careful enough in describing such things, because it can, of course, be objected lightly by someone who believes they are allowed to think they are very scientific: So the spiritual researcher claims that he is immersed in the world through the result of this one exercise; he must actually know everything when he lives in that weaving element. Now, what works from within instead of approaching the person from the outside does not have to reveal all the secrets it contains. One can say that it can be compared to the fact that a person also eats and drinks and yet truly does not know the processes that take place in his body. One gets to know another world in its nature and essence, but naturally one does not get to know all the secrets of that world, which in turn must first be explored in detail, a research that requires exactly the same care and seriousness as the exploration of the physical-sensual world, yes, more. But this experience of living in a weaving world can be compared to when a physical person in the body has acquired the ability to grasp all kinds of things, but cannot grasp anything when he reaches out. In that case, one would know that one has organs to grasp, to make grasping movements, but one does not grasp anything. One would be in this situation if one only had the practice results that have just been described. One would live and weave inwardly in the spiritual element, but one would feel as if one were stretching out the spiritual organs in all directions, and it would be certain: you have grasped yourself in the spirit — but one would still perceive nothing of a spiritual environment. It would only be a general living and weaving and becoming of one's own self in the spirit. A tremendous loneliness, even a sense of apprehension, could seize a person if he only came to these conclusions. Therefore, the exercises that the soul performs when they are taken from true spiritual research are designed not only to develop the life of the mind, leading to such experiences as have been described, but also to develop the life of the will. And this training of the life of the will is something that arises in the most natural way from the ordinary life of the will in man. You can find more details in the books mentioned. But I will again characterize the effect, the results of the exercises of the will, which are already interwoven into meditation in proper meditation, from a certain point of view. Exercises of the will lead a person to the point where he can observe his own volition. Ordinary self-observation, even that which is called self-observation in trivial mysticism, does not yet lead to the point where one really observes the content of one's own volition as one otherwise observes external natural phenomena. It certainly does not lead to the point where one could, as it were, become one's own spectator. But the real exercises that spiritual research can indicate allow the human being to see what otherwise takes place as will in his life and flows into actions or even just lives in desires as otherwise things and processes around us can be observed; that man can truly put himself outside of himself, that he observes himself by wanting this or that, by setting goals in life. One only acquires this ability – and this, of course, cannot fill the whole life, but only claim very short, snatched moments of meditation on life – by so directing one's volition – and every true meditator already directs the volition by doing the right meditations – by so directing one's volition that one does not merely will as one wills in ordinary life. In ordinary life some desire arises. It is prompted by some inner bodily disposition, or it is prompted by an external impression, or the will performs this or that action, and thereby something is brought about in the external world. This volition that lives there can indeed be observed, but observation is made easier if one tries to will that – and as I said, it is willed in meditation – which advances the soul itself; if one makes oneself, so to speak, the object of one's volition, if one want something so that, through what one does in the soul, one gradually becomes a different person; that the soul is organized more finely, that the soul becomes more receptive when one carries out acts of will in such a way that one develops, that one consciously advances in life. Anyone who does meditation exercises knows how, after years of doing meditation exercises, the whole way he thinks about the world becomes different from what it used to be. He knows how he connects passion with desires, and these in turn with thoughts, and so on. He knows that he has become a different being, albeit in a more subtle way, and that this must be perceived. Otherwise, the I is always the center of will. The rays of will emanate from the I, as it were, and pour into the feelings and into the actions. In this kind of willing, the person effectively places himself outside of his ego and advances the ego itself through willing. Therefore, true meditation is particularly suitable for becoming the spectator of one's own willing, for knowing how to place oneself outside of one's own will and, just as one learns to observe natural processes, to observe one's own willing with composure. Otherwise, one is completely absorbed in one's desires, with all one's passions, all one's wishes, all one's emotions. One overcomes this for certain moments in life, and one learns to become a spectator of one's desires.

Let us just consider: when we want something else, we are present in what we want, we are so immersed in it that we instinctively defend it, at least inwardly, as our own. In any case, we do not look at wanting in the same way as we look at, say, the formation of a rainbow. But this is the path that the soul can follow: to observe the activity of the will, as one observes the formation of a rainbow or the rising of the sun; to become so objective, so calm. At first, one strives out of oneself in thought – for at first it is a mental striving out of oneself – in order to become a spectator.

But then one makes a discovery that one must take into account if one wants to become immersed in the reality of these things. One makes the remarkable discovery that although one must strive for what one strives for, one achieves something completely different. And with that I characterize an essential aspect of the spiritual research path in general. On the path of spiritual research, one must, if I may say so, set out on the path. One sets out on the path with the first exercises that I have described by meditating, by putting thoughts into the soul. But if one were to believe that holding on to these thoughts, drilling oneself into these thoughts, is also the goal, then that would be wrong. For the goal consists precisely in overcoming what one has initially undertaken: that thoughts cease to be thoughts in the strict sense, that the activity of thinking, free of the thought, now takes hold of us in becoming and weaving. That is the characteristic of the spiritual research path: that something must be undertaken and something else comes out. And precisely because something is undertaken, something else comes out.

And so it is with this second one I have to describe. You make an effort in the way described—but as I said, you can find details in the books mentioned—you make an effort to become your own spectator, that is, to step out of yourself in your imagination and watch your own volition as you would watch external natural phenomena. But the result of these exercises is different from what it would be if you were to follow a straight line. One might think that one would now become such a being by making a being out of oneself that looks at its currents of will. This is not the case. Rather, the result is that the more one goes out of oneself in this way, the more that which goes out disappears within oneself. In the development of thinking, one becomes more and more inwardly absorbed. The self expands, becomes more intense, more powerful. In the process I have just described, one does not enter into oneself, but one's own self is, in a sense, laid aside. Instead, however, a will remains in the spiritual field of vision, an act of the will. And as it were, out of the plane of these acts of the will, rising up from below, through the acts of the will, there rises a real being, which is a higher human being in the human being. That which one has always carried within oneself through one's whole life, but has not carried in consciousness, that rises through the will, that breaks through it. Just as the depths of the sea would appear if they were to break over the surface, so now a being appears, a conscious being, a being of higher consciousness, which is an objective spectator of all our acts of will, a real being that always lives in us and that breaks through the will in this way. And this being, which one discovers in the currents of will, this being connects with what one has made out of thinking. These two beings, which one has found in oneself, unite with each other. And through this one is now not only in a working and weaving, but in a real spiritual world with real spiritual entities and facts. In it now stands one's own being, which is also born out of the will - but in the company of other spiritual beings - and which goes through birth and death. The human being who, through birth or conception, has connected himself with what materially descends from father and mother, the human being who sustains himself when he steps through the portal of death, is discovered in such a way that what lives and works in us is brought to life in himself from two sides.

In the thinking that one gradually develops, the main thing is that in this thinking we really develop something different from what lives in our ordinary soul, and that is precisely what is difficult. Man is so attached to the habits that he has acquired in his soul through his dealings with the sensual world. Therefore, all these qualities that he acquires through this spiritual path, as it has been described, actually initially unsettle him. A sense of apprehension, loneliness, and restlessness can come over him. If everything is done correctly, as indicated by true spiritual science, this does not happen. I spoke about this a few weeks ago in the lecture I mentioned, 'A Healthy Soul Life and Spirit Research'. But everyone knows that when you enter into the spiritual world in the way I have described, a certain restlessness can arise, a certain inner anxiety, and even distinct feelings of fear towards the spiritual world that want to overwhelm you. And to avoid this, there are already enough clues in true meditation. But if someone expects that what his soul then does in these newly evoked abilities is directly similar to what the soul does in relation to the external physical world, which it must have around it all day, then he is subject to the most severe deceptions and also disappointments. Then he becomes restless because he says to himself: “I am living in something indefinite and unfamiliar. I have always thought in a different way. My thinking was so secure in the other way; it clung to a certain being that was given to me. Now my thinking is supposed to live in a becoming and not, so to speak, forget itself.

But in the true spiritual path this is avoided by the fact that this true spiritual path brings with it — it brings it with it quite naturally when it is followed in the right way — that what we can call interest, inner soul interest, manifests itself for the human being in a completely different way than the soul interest usually manifests itself in the physical world. It is really true: one acquires a new interest, a quite new kind of interest, when one leads a meditative life. It must be emphasized again and again: one does not want success for the inner life alone. Those spiritual exercises are of no value from the start and must be decidedly rejected, which make man unfit for the outer life. A person who practises true spiritual exercises remains as firmly rooted in the outer life as he was before. No, he will become even more firmly rooted in this outer life. If he has to pursue a particular occupation wherever fate has placed him, he will fulfil this occupation no worse than before if he has true spiritual science. And one can be sure – forgive the trivial expression – that the person who gets all kinds of raisins into his head by going through spiritual exercises, and then thinks he is too good for what he was before, is most certainly on the wrong track. But through that in the soul which is the actual spiritual research activity, one acquires new interests, which take the soul in a different direction, in addition to the old interests, which become even more intense for the outer world.

I will give an example of what it is like for someone who is a philosopher. Perhaps it is useful to give this example for the very reason that most philosophers believe from the outset – well, that they can judge everything from spiritual science much better than the spiritual researcher himself. But those who are not philosophers themselves become restless when faced with the many philosophies that exist. Isn't it true that one should just take a look at all the “ians” (Kantian, Hegelian, Schopenhauerian, Hartmannian) just once, all of them, and then one will see, even if one adds others to that, that one should not allow oneself to be unsettled: Well, everyone thought differently, but I want something certain in my thinking! This tendency will then take on a different expression in the philosopher. The philosopher who wants to be a “ianer” himself now develops a certain train of thought; he then swears by it, and the others are of course all fools, whom he can refute, or at least people who are going astray. But the person who has developed his thinking in the way described, who has included the process of thinking in thinking, reads Hartmann with the same interest as Schopenhauer, as Hegel, as Schelling, as Heraclitus. He does not even get around to refuting one and becoming a follower of the other, because he takes a certain interest in the movement of thinking, in being inside thinking itself, because he takes a certain joy, a certain pleasure simply in the act of thinking and because he knows that this thinking does not lead to reality in such a way as is usually believed — that thoughts can simply be reflections of reality — but that one only comes into a life and weaving in the work of thinking. Yes, when one can do this, then one can take the standpoint: Certainly, the one philosopher has viewed the world from one point of view, the other from another! And the philosophical world view that one then gets cannot be seen any differently than a tree that has been photographed from different sides, where one also does not say: I declare the one photograph to be wrong, that is not at all true with the other, that is a completely different tree! Because it is only a different tree because it has been photographed from a different side. If you look at the activity of photographing, and not at the abstract reproduction, then you will see for yourself what is right. And so it is with thinking. You become interested in the mobility of thinking, and you know that you live in spiritual reality when you live and move in thinking itself. And there is something else that is introduced into your development through the exercises of the will, and this goes much deeper. It can disturb many people, and would even appear very disturbing if you were not sufficiently prepared, as is the case in every true schooling of the spirit. I would like to say again: for ordinary life, people are familiar with the fact that what lies within their will actually only appears to them in such a way that when they have done something they call good, they rub their hands together; then they are very satisfied with themselves. If they have done something they call bad in some way, they reproach themselves. But it remains with these inner soul processes. Man oscillates back and forth between rubbing his hands together out of satisfaction with what he has done and blaming himself. But when the volition is trained in such a way that the inner spectator emerges, then a greater seriousness permeates the matter. Then it is no longer just reproaches or inner satisfaction that arise, but you get to know a very real being in what permeates the will as a spectator and shoots up through its surface. You get to know: That which otherwise appears to you as reproach and as inner satisfaction is a real power. This real power is there in the world, it will continue to have an effect. In the further course one learns to recognize how this power develops into a further destiny and influences the next life on earth as a fact, after one has passed through the life between birth and death. What one experiences there as will, would follow the one who is not well prepared like a shadow, like something one always drags along, like one's shadow, like a real being. Everything depends on whether one also learns to understand the full significance of these things; that one learns, for example, to recognize: what follows one around as a shadow need not lead one to hypochondria, but one must look at it calmly. For it is not at all what has significance for the present life, but what passes through the gate of death with us, what is among the forces that will help determine the configuration, the nature, of our next life.

In short, the interests associated with these developed inner soul activities are different from the interests of the outer life, but they do not detract from these interests of the outer life at all. They merely put everything in its proper place, so to speak. When someone comes to an awareness of what goes through birth and death, what is immortal about the soul, as I have described it, then he will not become less interested in the external physical facts that directly surround him, but rather he will come to the conclusion that there is a spiritual world. In this spiritual world there are just as many concrete spiritual processes and entities as there are in the physical world, and he can see them. But that which exists as a physical world can only be seen in the physical world. What surrounds us as a physical world naturally ceases to exist after death. Only because we carry an immortal being within us, which is a reality in itself and belongs to a reality that goes beyond the physical, do we carry something through the gate of death, enter into a spiritual world, into a world that we live through between death and a new birth, and then enter into yet another earthly life.

Especially when one knows, not in the abstract but in a living sense – and it is only through spiritual research that one really gets to know this – that one can only get to know this sensual world in its full inner essence through one's senses and through the mind that is connected to the brain – then, under this life-filled self-development — not through some theory, but through what life absorbs, under the influence of the exercises that awaken our lively interest in everything that is obvious; the interest for the smallest details in the world is increased. Only one particular interest, and this we must take with us, grows ever smaller and smaller: the interest in that which is already able to appear in the sense world as so-called 'spiritual' and to reveal spiritual reality in and out of the phenomenon itself. It is known that spiritual things can be grasped when the organs, the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, are developed first, to use Goethe's expression. It is known that one must rise to the spiritual world, and it is known that in the world of the senses, this world of the senses must be grasped out of itself, that it stands as that which must be grasped through the world of the senses. Therefore one loses interest in all those events that seek the spiritual out of the world of the senses itself. And while interest in everything that takes place in the spiritual world increases, especially in true spiritual research, interest in the sense in which it exists for many in the spiritual world is purely sensational and all kinds of superstitions and belief in miracles disappears completely. Interest, let us say, in spiritualistic events, in mediumistic performances, completely fades away. The spiritual researcher is not interested because he knows that only something abnormal can come to light in these things, which is indeed based in the sense world, but which cannot lead beyond the sense world into the true spiritual world. Of course, he can take an interest in it, as one takes an interest in some theatrical performance, in some experiment that otherwise appears in the world. Nothing should be said against such events, provided, of course, that they are not frauds, in that they allow a variety of otherwise inexpressible natural connections to be expressed. But they are natural phenomena, and we know that we do not live in these things in any other way than we live and move with our ordinary senses, however abnormal it may seem. For everything that belongs to this area, which I have just touched upon, interest wanes, as I said. It becomes a mere witnessing — well, of all sorts of events. And it is the duty of every true spiritual researcher not to allow superstition to grow in him, but to uproot superstition completely.

It would be very easy to believe – and because it is possible, it must be emphasized – that a person who experiences spiritually what I have indicated, and who basically experiences nothing less than what he can call his immortal soul, and that he is actually experiencing life after death; that he is already experiencing what will be experienced after death. In this abstract form it is not the case, and one must think very carefully about these things if one wants to get an idea of them. What the soul experiences after death, or let us say, from death until birth, is experienced in much the same way as a plant would consciously experience everything that is in its germ, which represents all the forces for the new plant. One experiences everything that must necessarily be gone through in the spiritual world after death in order to prepare one's entire life with the new body and the new experiences as a new destiny in the coming earthly existence. It is the germinal being in us that is suited to experience in the spiritual world between death and new birth that which then prepares a new life on earth, so that we then have the body that we need to have the abilities that we have previously prepared within us, so that we put ourselves in the position in which we need to be when our destiny is to be fulfilled according to our previous life on earth. That this potential lies within us, we experience that. But to have this experience before us, to have the spiritual world before our own soul, for that it is necessary, of course, to go through the experiences ourselves between death and a new birth, which one can at most look at and develop in knowledge, but in a living knowledge that is an inner reality, while the knowledge of the external world, of the physical external world, is only mental images.

You see, I would of course need a great deal of time to discuss in more detail what I have only touched upon. This will be possible in the coming lectures. But, as you can see, there is a certain path that can be described as the path of spiritual research, which leads to the development of a life that is inwardly different from the life of the soul in the external, sensual reality. And in this experience, the soul takes hold of itself in such a way that it lives and breathes in the inner power that passes through the gate of death.

Fichte only sensed the truth when he said: Immortality is not only there when we have passed through the gate of death, but it is there when we are still living in the body. For the being that passes through death can be attained by human knowledge while it is still alive in the body. How is it attained? In a remarkable way, we have to form ideas ourselves from spiritual science as to how it is attained.

You may well ask how can a person achieve all that has been described as a result of soul exercises? How can soul exercises lead to something like this? You see, people very often complain – especially when they have a keen cognitive drive – that you can't really see through reality, that there are limits to knowledge. How often have I pointed out in these lectures the famous Ignorabimus of Da Bois-Reymond, where it is said that man can indeed come to an observation of the processes of the world and their limits, but cannot penetrate into the interior of matter; that he cannot, as it were, submerge himself in the interior of matter with his thinking. It is said of all knowledge that all these powers of knowledge are actually insufficient to fully penetrate nature.

When one begins to strengthen the soul inwardly as it has been described, one notices something very definite. One notices how tremendously good it is that there are such limits to external knowledge. For if the powers that one has for external knowledge were to make one see through all nature through themselves, these powers would prevent one from attaining spiritual knowledge. Only because one cannot use everything that is in the soul for external knowledge is something left that can be developed in the way I have explained it. Only because the full, immortal soul does not enter into bodily life, but still retains something, whereby not everything is transparent in the outer bodily life, are inner forces preserved, which can then be developed in the way described. By connecting ourselves with the physical material given by our ancestors through birth or, let us say, through conception, we retain so much of the immortal soul that, on the one hand, we are prevented from seeing through the full nature in the bodily life, and have to make hypotheses and all sorts of things about what lives in nature. But as a result we have in the background of our being forces that we can develop within us and that allow us to enter into a spiritual world in a spiritual way. The immortal soul lives in man. In order for it to live, some things must be taken away from man in a sensual way. This, in turn, is such an important connection that one must look at it.

There is therefore a spiritual research that introduces us directly to the immortal being of man. This spiritual research is different from the external research. In the external research, one can remain as one is. That is exactly what suits people. The same abilities that they have acquired once, they retain when they go into the laboratory, when they do experiments, and can learn something about the external nature. And then these people also demand that the spirit should be explored in the same way, by retaining the same abilities. One cannot approach the spirit without first making oneself spiritual, that is, seeking out that which is in every human soul but which must first be raised to consciousness in the manner described. But there is much, much that, I might say, still thwarts people's paths to spiritual science in the present time. That is why the chapter 'immortality question and spiritual research' is still so little recognized today, one that people are so reluctant to get involved in.

You can already see from what I have said that it is necessary for man to learn to think and live in a subtle inner way. That is to say, when he becomes a spiritual researcher, he must not become a lesser thinker than those who believe, let us say, that they have mastered thinking, who claim that they stand on the firm ground of external natural science, which is not to be challenged in the slightest. They do not love that in the present. In the present, one loves to develop, I might say, that very tangible thinking that does not even broach the subject of the finer things that live and move in the world.

I do not like to do this: to make personal references. Those of you who have been to these lectures often will know that I actually avoid going into all the opposition from the outside world and all the misunderstandings regarding what I am presenting here as spiritual science. I would prefer to ignore it and not talk about it at all. But when things keep coming up that do have an effect and are believed, they do harm to the cause. Personally I would prefer not to talk about these things at all, but harm is done to the cause because printed paper still has tremendous authority today, because it still has a tremendous effect. And so, for the sake of the cause, one must sometimes, when occasion is offered by some topic, go into what stands in opposition to spiritual science. If coarse thinking is opposed to it, which, because it cannot engage in the finer weaving in the life of thought, can see nothing but fantasy, nothing but a form of madness in what spiritual science indicates as the right path for spiritual research. Let me give you an example. And, as I said, please excuse me if it is a personal example, but I only mention it in so far as it is opposed to spiritual science, which is expressed in it as a typical phenomenon.

I gave a lecture in a certain city about the relationships that prevail in the nature of the individual European peoples, relationships that, as many listeners know, I had already presented long before this war gave rise to talk about them; insights that were found quite independently of this war, but which, as they are presented, should actually be obvious. For when it is said in the course of the lectures, which are now often combined with the lectures on spiritual science, that the peoples of the West, the peoples of the European center, the peoples of the East differ in this or that, one should believe that no reasonable person could actually be led to say anything other than: Well, yes, he may be mistaken about individual characteristics, but there really are differences. There really are different character traits, different ones in the Germans, different ones in the Russians. To deny this can only arise from the crudest thinking. And yet, as I said, I also gave a lecture on this in a certain city. In a daily paper of the town in question, this was discussed and said in the most derogatory way, that these differences were constructed only out of the war, as it were. But one could ignore that, following the example I gave recently, for what is being achieved in this area. But now think, that was not enough for one man, but the man even turned to a magazine, and in a magazine what appeared in the newspaper at the time was printed, and the following nice comment was attached to it: “The accusation of the speaker” - that is, the critic of the Tagblatt of the city in question - “of having reconstructed opposing cultures from the current constellation of powers, rightly applies to Steiner. With the best will in the world, I am unable to perceive, as Steiner does, a difference in essence between Central European and Western and Eastern European culture. In my opinion, European culture is completely the same in essence.” And so it continues. This appeared in a Central European journal. You can see from it what a crude thinking is confronted with spiritual science as such. For what I have read to you here is further developed in a detailed article that extends over several issues. The thought — well, I need only hint at it, then you will see how crude such a person's thinking is: “Intellectual life, too, has developed in this direction and is absorbed in this pursuit. The wild greed of the European cultured man for the possession of earthly goods would degenerate into a predatory struggle of all against all, were individuals not forced into iron state forms.” So this crude thinking does not even notice how these ‘iron state forms’ are initially more involved in what is happening in this war. It is thinking like this that one has to deal with. Such thinking is in contrast to what must be demanded in the light of an understanding of such a question, and so also of the question of the immortality of the soul. And such a thing does not appear in a materialistic magazine, but in a magazine - it even bears the heading “42nd year” - that calls itself “Psychical Studies”. That I am not speaking out of personal resentment, I can prove to you from the magazine itself. You know, or at least many people know, that I have dealt with the main ideas which this gentleman here attacks in such a way in a small pamphlet. This pamphlet is called “Thoughts During the Time of War”. In this pamphlet, though perhaps in a popular way, are exactly the same thoughts, written at least from the same spirit, from the same attitude. In the same issue as the article from which I have just read the characteristic passages, there is a review of this work, “Thoughts During the Time of War”. In this review, the work is highly praised and it is shown how meritorious it is to express such thoughts. It goes without saying that I am just as indifferent to being praised as I am to being criticized. But I must characterize what already lives in the formation of the times, so that it is not believed again and again when diatribes appear here and there, simply through the suggestive power of what is daubed with printing ink on dirty paper, since that always forms a kind of obstacle for those who might otherwise find their way to spiritual research. One must point out the grotesque nature of the experience that can be had in our time in such a way. And it is only for this reason that spiritual science must be kept free, so to speak, in the context in which it is found, in the light in which it must appear as true, genuine, honest spiritual science. In order to keep it free in this light, I must also touch on other matters.

I have already pointed out in the lecture before last, where I spoke about misunderstandings regarding spiritual science, also in the lecture “Healthy Soul Life and Spiritual Research”, that spiritual research is not only opposed by what comes from the more or less materialistically minded side. On this side it is extremely difficult to achieve something for the reason that the things that are put forward from this side are so terribly plausible. When I have to characterize something, such as this magazine, I do it reluctantly. When I seriously oppose something, I turn to those whom I actually hold in high esteem. So I also hold in high esteem the actual father, I might say, of modern materialism, Lamettrie. He is an astute man, and his reasons are plausible. But one can acknowledge the plausibility of these reasons, one can assert them and one should still, when the spiritual research path is asserted alongside them, acknowledge the significance and essence of this spiritual research path alongside the validity of what comes from the materialistic side. Lamettrie is, as I said, an astute man, and in his book 'Man a Machine' he has put together everything that can prove how man is dependent on his physicality. Now it might seem as if spiritual science would have every reason to contradict such things. No, it agrees with everything, as I even proved in my last lecture, in a more forceful sense than materialism itself. For it is indeed easy to understand and irrefutable when Lamettrie points out how man's mental state depends on what he is. Of course it is very easy to prove, because it is so terribly obvious that man depends on whether he likes something or whether something agrees with him. Think of the mood of the soul that results from it. Lamettrie describes all this, and in doing so, he basically anticipated everything that can be said about this matter. Isn't it extremely interesting – especially in this day and age – to read what Lamettrie said in his book 'Man a Machine', because if you read it somewhere else, it would not make a good impression. But here in Central Europe, this passage can perhaps be read with greater composure than in Western Europe. Lamettrie wants to prove what man actually is - really prove how man, in terms of his mental state, indeed in terms of his character, in terms of what lives in him in terms of soul, depends on what he eats, what his food is. And there Lamettrie says – but as I said, it was more than a century ago since it was said – in his book 'Man a Machine', Lamettrie says: 'Raw meat makes animals wild; humans would become wild from the same food. How true this is,” says Lamettrie, the Frenchman, ”can be seen from the fact that the English nation, who eat meat less cooked than we do, eat it entirely raw and bloody, and show a wildness that is partly brought about by these foods, but partly also by other causes, which only education can suppress. This savagery engenders in the soul arrogance, hatred, contempt for other nations, unruliness and other feelings that corrupt the character, just as coarse food produces a heavy and clumsy mind, whose main characteristics are laziness and dullness.” It is perhaps not uninteresting, especially in Central Europe, to hear the judgment of a Frenchman, even if it is more than a hundred years old, about the English, so that one can see how circumstances change and how people have not always felt and thought in the same way from one place to another and from there to there. This same Lamettrie also says other things that are quite natural, for example, he says - and he believes that this is enough to refute everything that can be said from the spirit about the spirit - he says, for example: “A small fiber would have made two fools out of Erasmus and Fontenelle.” One can, of course, admit this and still stand on the ground of spiritual science, as it has been characterized today. For there is much more that can be admitted and that will not shake spiritual research. Let us assume, for example, that if only a small fiber were different in the case of Erasmus, then, from the point of view of pure materialism, this would mean that his life would perhaps have become that of a drip instead of that of a genius. But now, if it had happened that the mother, before he was born, had been murdered by a bandit and Erasmus had been killed before he was born, what would have become of Erasmus' soul? Only a true spiritual researcher is able to see through such things. For it seems even more compelling that man is dependent on matter; for it would only have been necessary for him to have died as a small boy, then he would not have been there.

That spiritual research has anything to deny that comes from this side should not be believed by those who, with their blunt considerations, want to stand in the way of spiritual research. But even today, on this ground, one still sees much that is unclear and imprecise. The characterized coarse thinking is primarily to blame for this; but there is more to it than that: spiritual science has to suffer not only from those who oppose it, but it also has to suffer from those who often want to be seen as adherents of a certain spiritual-scientific direction and who, in turn, are connected with all kinds of strange social elements of the present day. And as a result, spiritual science is lumped together with all kinds of stuff by those who do not know how to distinguish — I have already pointed this out, but I have to go into it in more detail today with reference to something else. Spiritual science does not build — as you can see from a characteristic of my lectures, which is often criticized, namely that they are too difficult — spiritual science does not build on the gullible crowd, does not build on those who, in a comfortable frame of mind, want to gain some kind of conviction, does not build on those people who, as if in a 'dream, go through life and believe everything that is conveyed to them through their certainly subjective power of persuasion. Spiritual science does not build on that which lives in the world of superstition, and because certain things are rightly discussed in public on the materialistic side as nonsense, a sharp line must also be drawn in spiritual science itself between honest, true spiritual research, which follows only the truth, and that which so often likes to its coattails and what comes from a side where one counts on the superstition of mankind, which is present as well as insisting on one's own judgment; where one pretends to people all sorts of things, because even today one finds enough people who believe everything possible, if it is only proclaimed to them from an alleged spiritual world - unknown whence. What can be confused with spiritual science from this side – as I said, it must be pointed out in order to shake it off – true science, and that is spiritual science, has little to do with it.

I will only point out a few things, because these things are now being discussed publicly on the materialistic side and, certainly under the influence of the serious and serious events of the times, there will be more and more discussion. I want to show how wrong those are who associate spiritual science with some form of ordinary or higher superstition, that higher superstition that pursues all kinds of goals in the world and actually only works in such a way that it first puts people into the world who are said to have higher abilities, a clairvoyant gift. True clairvoyance consists in what has often been described and is again described today. But what people call clairvoyance today is actually subconscious, but is often also just a fraud. But we are not reckoning with what is in the subconscious, but with the effect. Therefore, one must reckon with what the fraudulent clairvoyance is able to do with superstition. And there it is possible that all kinds of dishonest endeavors and currents arise, where one wants to achieve something completely different from what lies in the realm of truth. What people need to know, what is achieved by this, is that first of all — allow me to use a harsh expression — people are made stupid, befogged, by showing them all kinds of occultism, which has an effect on their superstition, and then, with the people made stupid, all kinds of things are carried out that do not belong in the realm of sincerity and honesty. Spiritual science has the same duty and necessity to point out these excesses of modern life as materialism does. And if it proves materialism right in its field in such cases, as I have shown with Lamettrie, then it may also prove it right when it turns against all excesses of an apparent spiritual experience, which is nothing more than life in blind superstition.

In 1912, an almanac was published, a yearbook, edited by a personality who is revered in a city in the West as a higher clairvoyant by many who are clouded in the way just described. This yearbook appeared in 1912 for 1913, in advance. In it, the following note appears about Austria: “The one who is destined to govern in Austria will not govern. A young man who has not yet been appointed to the government will govern.”

And with even greater clarity, the almanac for 1914, which was published in 1913, returns to this matter. There may be gullible people who believe nothing more and nothing less than that a great prophecy has been fulfilled, and it is impossible to make clear to them in their blind faith that dishonest currents living in the European world have been at work here, using superstition and all kinds of dark occultism to bring something into the world. How this is connected with all kinds of underground currents can be seen by considering that a Parisian newspaper, “Paris at Noon,” long, long before the current turmoil and at about the same time as the appearance of the aforementioned note in the aforementioned almanac of an alleged clairvoyant in – a Parisian newspaper that makes no claim to be occult in any way, but can be compared to other newspapers that appear at noon – that this newspaper also expressed its wish long months before that the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be murdered. One can see certain underground connections. And this same paper wrote at the time of the three-year anniversary of his term of office: “Among the very first to be murdered if mobilization occurs will be Jaurès.

The same personality who publishes this almanac travelled to Rome in the first days of August 1914 to influence certain people who are open to such influence, in a direction that I will not say is linked to the main causes of Italy's position, but which had already taken effect in this matter.

I only discuss these things because they are discussed by others, from a materialistic point of view. But they must be discussed so that it can be seen that true spiritual science has nothing to do with such things, with superstition in general that relies on the credulity of the masses, and with what is done under the guise of superstition, both in large and small matters. Spiritual science will only appear as a real science that can be placed alongside other sciences when it is kept free from everything that can still be easily confused with it today and that is often confused with it, not only under the influence of limited judgment, which simply cannot distinguish, but also out of ill will. And in the literature that is thrown at spiritual science, a lot of work is done precisely with the fact that what one has to lie about when one wants to characterize spiritual science is so lied about that spiritual science is thereby put on the same ground as those things that spiritual science must of course fight as fiercely as they are fought by materialistic science.

But just as we recognize such things, spiritual science will emerge ever more clearly in its purity in what it can be for the human soul. Does not the latest book by Ernst Haeckel, that is, by a serious researcher, “Thoughts on Eternity”, shows how utterly at a loss mere natural science is in the face of such great events that have such a profound impact on the development of humanity, since it knows of nothing better to say than this:

Not that such a time would provide the reasons for spiritual science, but one must recognize what spiritual science can become for human life in the spiritual realm: that which sustains the human being, which holds the human being, because it makes him acquainted with that with which no natural science makes him acquainted. Natural science can only make man acquainted with that through which his body is connected with the sensual universe. Spiritual science makes man familiar with this through the fact that it shows him, by means of research, that he has an immortal soul, so that one can know: This soul of man is connected with eternal becoming. Man is anchored in eternity through his soul and spirit, as he is anchored in temporality through his body.

If one asks whether man needs something like this, it must be said that there can be no proof for it, any more than there can be for the fact that he needs to eat and drink. But just as man experiences through hunger and thirst that he must eat and drink, so he experiences over and over again in his soul that he must know. And the more one demands knowledge and not mere belief, one will recognize that he must know about the immortality of his soul. One can deny that man demands this knowledge, but the denial is only a theoretical one. The time will come more and more – and we are already at its beginning – when, just as hunger asserts itself in the healthy human body, the thirst for knowledge of the spiritual world, for knowledge of the immortal character of the soul itself, will assert itself in the human being who lives beyond himself into the time that begins with the present. And it will be an unquenched thirst if there is no spiritual science. This will show in the effects. Theoretically it will be possible to deny it – but it will show in the effects. It will show in the fact that people will find themselves desolate in their souls, will not know what to do with their lives, that they will perform their external tasks but will not know what the meaning of life is, and that they will thirst for this unraveling of the meaning of life. Little by little it will extend to the intellect; little by little it will show how man's thinking becomes coarser and coarser. We have already found enough coarseness in one example today. In short, the development of man would experience a descent if it could not be fertilized by spiritual science.

May the times we are living through today, which call upon man to be earnest in so many fields, also be a sign that the time is beginning when people must have knowledge of immortality and that spiritual research is the way to achieve it. The spiritual researcher himself knows that he is in harmony with all those who, even if they have not yet done spiritual research, have nevertheless been living and breathing in the spiritual world through the very nature of their soul activity. The spiritual researcher knows himself to be in harmony with those who simply knew what it means to live in the spiritual world. When Goethe was asked why he wanted to recognize the plant through ideas, since ideas are something abstract, he said: “Then my ideas, which I believe I experience within myself, are direct reality, because I do see my ideas within reality.” Therefore it was Goethe who, even when he had not yet spiritual science, knew what to say in a poetic but accurate way about the character of the spiritual world, where he was spiritually and soulfully transported by the poetic genius.

Today we have to say: the person who, through the development of his thinking, lives into the spiritual world, lives and moves in the emerging soul entities. And when man is freed from the body, he is also a spiritual-soul entity that lives in the becoming. That which has become, that which is solid, exists only in the outer sensual world in which man lives as long as he is in the body and then only when he perceives through the body. As soon as man ascends to the spiritual being, he is seized by the becoming. Goethe knows this. He also knows that just as man, through his own feeling, lives into his inner well-being, he can also live into a feeling that may well be called love. That is the surprising thing and always will be when one comes to spiritual people, that they even know how to say the right thing with the right word from their life in the spiritual world. That is why Goethe also says: one lives in the becoming. And when one develops oneself into this becoming, then the thoughts live in this becoming itself. Not the ordinary thoughts — these must first be overcome, they can only be incorporated into the world of becoming as something lasting, something enduring. Only when that which can be grasped in the process of becoming is held fast in thought, can the thought become fixed and we can carry it with our immortal soul through the portal of death. That is why, towards the end of his prologue in Heaven, written at the height of his life, Goethe speaks the beautiful words with which I want to conclude these reflections today, because in them, in a time that lies before the development of spiritual research as we understand it today , a poet speaks of the spiritual world out of poetic genius in a way that one must speak of it out of realization, by first pointing, or having the Lord point, to that which man needs as long as he lives in the sensual body. So that he does not degenerate into comfort and convenience, the Lord points out to Mephisto those who are spirit beings. And when free of the body, the human being is such a spiritual being. Goethe points out the peculiarity of the spiritual world with words that are sure to hit the mark. For you will recognize in these words what I myself had to recognize in them. After I had developed everything that I have presented today, I was surprised by the wonderful correspondence of these Goethean words, which I had not recognized before, the wonderful correspondence of these few Goethean words with the fundamental character the world to which the immortal human soul belongs: “But you, the true sons of the gods” - spiritual beings are meant, just as man is a spiritual being as an immortal soul -,

“But you, the true sons of the gods,
Rejoice in the living, rich beauty!
Embrace with love's sweet barriers what is becoming, what lives and works eternally,
And what floats in a wavering appearance,
Secure with lasting thoughts.”

Attention is drawn to that which lives in the pure spirit as its very own, but which is recognized in the human soul as its immortal part. In these words, which are directly a characteristic of that which can be grasped in the human soul, even when it is still living in the body, as the immortal, and of which one can know that it passes through the gate of death, when it enters the realm of the developing and takes with it to the pure realm of the spirit that which it has experienced here in a fluctuating appearance, in order to transform it into thoughts that can then become permanent and be taken through the gate of death. And what lives in fluctuating appearance affirms the soul, which passes through the gate of death, as an immortal, as an eternal being, in lasting thoughts, which henceforth make up its life in the same way that the body makes up the soul's life in the physical world.

It is understandable that in these days of the most difficult and consequential decisions, one can only, dare I say it, speak with a certain deep sense of oppression. But at the same time, the idea arises in the human soul that what has been predetermined for the development of Central Europe for centuries, even millennia, must be achieved from completely different foundations, which lie in the depths and must ultimately be successful, even if the most significant and serious external material means are used to lead Central Europe economically to its end. These underlying factors have indeed been discussed in the whole series of lectures that I have had the honor of giving here, and which should also be discussed today in these difficult days. For only from these underlying factors can a light shine on the question that weighs so heavily on our hearts today: Can we still hope?

There are seemingly small, seemingly insignificant events in human life, but they leave a deep impression on the soul of anyone who feels they are immersed in this life with all their human powers as external symptoms of what is happening deep within the development of humanity. I had such an experience when I spoke in Basel a few months ago about the same subject that I have now repeatedly had the opportunity to speak to you about. At that time, in Basel, I spoke at the invitation of the Basel student body about what actually underlies the call for socialization of human institutions in the present day. And in the discussion, the strange word sounded out to me that no salvation could come from the external institutions that had become fragile and needed to be rebuilt before Lenin would be the ruler of the world!

Now, from these words one could indeed hear, on the one hand, humanity's call for socialization, and on the other hand, the most unsocial views about this socialization prevailing in wide circles. The person who had made this statement was obviously a supporter of the dogmas of today's popular communism, and I could only reply that it was highly significant for our time that people could talk about the socialization of humanity in such an unsocial way. For if one speaks out of the spirit of what is necessary for humanity today, one must at least recognize that the first step in socialization is the socialization of the conditions of domination, and that true socialization cannot begin with the oldest form of monarchism over the whole earth in the form of an economic papacy.

There is much, much to think about, that in our time, precisely those who believe that they are talking most intelligently about what should happen talk about it most incomprehensibly. To me, such an absurd assertion, as I heard at the time, was only, I might say, a distant call, uttered by a single person, to be thoroughly recognized by all who are reasonable and practical, as what must be done to meet the call for socialization that is sounding throughout the world today. For what must happen must happen very differently for the sake of those calling than these callers imagine, or actually do not imagine, but rather outwardly paint in front of their soul in dark phrases arising from their emotions.

Two things that shine out from the more recent development of humanity will have to be properly observed if one is to grasp what is currently striving to be realized. From the most diverse things that emerge here and there, in an understandable or misunderstood way, two demands of the present always emerge. These two demands are often expressed in a misleading way, but one must get to the bottom of them in their true form if one wants to be able to cope with what is striving for reality in our present time, which is putting humanity to such a difficult test. These two mottos of the latest time are, firstly, democracy and, secondly, socialism. Those who raise their voices more for a reorganization today out of general human sentiments clothe their call in the word democracy; those who think and feel more out of real life and its needs, in turn, clothe the call for a reorganization in the word socialism.

In this, one thing has been completely and strangely thrown out of the heraldry of public life in recent times. A party has drawn together the two impulses of recent times, democracy and socialism, in its name 'social democracy', and it has already left out in its name what I would like to prove today should be the basis for any real, serious and practical reconstruction of our society.

What has been left out of account in these two calls is the actual intellectual life, the intellectual life in the most comprehensive sense, in the sense in which it extends not only to what one absorbs in the way of higher concepts and ideas, in the way of all kinds of scientific and ideological questions, in the way of all kinds of artistic and religious, but in the sense in which it also extends to knowledge and insights with regard to both state and economic life, and in the sense in which it extends not only to theoretical but also to practical human capacities.

It can be said that in recent centuries, modern humanity has developed in such a way that, with regard to public life, it had a strong sense of trust in institutions that it wanted to make ever more democratic. And in these endeavors, based on the experience of modern economic conditions, demands have been made for a social organization of this economic life. Therefore, today one can have the feeling that, even if the confusing and chaotic conditions of the present cover up much of what is striving in the underground, the striving for a socialization of human institutions in a democratic sense, for a socially shaped democratic organization of our public life, is still present. But it is strange that trust in the forces of human spiritual life has been lost. People believe that democracy can help, people continue to believe that socialism can help, but they do not believe that there are forces in the spiritual life itself which, if they were grasped in the right way, could release from the human being what must be released from the human being for the good of the present and the near future.

If you take a little time to look around in today's world, where so many are pushing towards socialism, you will make a curious discovery. You might almost say that the call for socialization has grown stronger and stronger to the extent that human drives have become more and more anti-social, to the extent that human soul life has become more and more anti-social. And one might even say that man perceives from his own antisocial inner life how little he has been able to shape external institutions in a social sense, and because he is so antisocial within, he calls for a social shaping of external conditions. But anyone who knows human nature also knows that without a certain transformation of the human inner life, the social shaping of external institutions is an impossibility. The great error from which humanity has long since proceeded in its leading minds is — and I have already touched on this the day before yesterday — that man by nature has certain qualities that can be directly reckoned with in human society. Although one always believes in the opposite, but what I have just said is nevertheless the result of the experience of human life itself.

What I tried to draw attention to in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the 1890s was that a human being can only come to their full existence if they really develop this full existence in their becoming between birth and death, when he develops, in particular, that which a soul must have if it strives for a dignified human existence — when he first releases the consciousness of his free human nature through the development of the powers inherent in his inner being. One can only become free and can only be free if one is educated, or educates oneself, in freedom. Anyone who sees through this will look at what is presented today as a call for socialism in a deeper way than is usually the case. He will ask, is it not perhaps the case that we do not find our way to social and democratic values as human beings because our educational life does not develop in the right way that which is in us that is predisposed to democracy and socialism? One needs very specific inner impulses of human nature if one is to place oneself in a democratic community or if one wants to establish a social economic community. And one could almost say, if one did not shock too many people of the present time with an admittedly true truth: just as a person is born - the development of the child shows it clearly - so he initially has neither the impulses for democracy nor for socialism. These must first be instilled into his soul. They are present in the soul, but they do not come out by themselves. And until our education system is based on a thorough and realistic understanding of human nature, we will not see people being able to place themselves in a social or democratic community with democratic and social attitudes. Even if they are not aware of it, they will always try to destroy democracy and socialism out of subconscious impulses. And if no efforts are made to educate people in a democratic and social sense, then in the long run they will live together in such a way that the democratic element will develop into some form of tyranny, and the social element will develop into something anti-social. This is certainly what has happened to the social element that is being striven for in the eastern part of Europe, and it is bound to become the most anti-social element in a relatively short time, and it already is so!

This draws the attention of anyone who is sincere about the development of humanity today to the spiritual life and education above all. And it has become necessary to place, before all else, a truly objective knowledge of the human being, spiritual life and its most important component, education and teaching. Sometimes we instinctively take into account what is at stake here, but this instinctive observation is not enough. We must imbue what underlies it with a thorough pedagogical insight. Far too little attention is paid to the fact that the growing human being shows three very different developmental stages in three successive epochsof life. The first epoch of life is that which concludes with the change of teeth, around the age of seven. The second is that which extends from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, and the third is that which then extends from sexual maturity to the end of the second human decade of life. That these three human life epochs are essentially different from each other, that education and instruction must be built upon this difference, is something that must become as clear to humanity as the laws of nature, if the social and democratic impulses are to shine forth in humanity that are necessary for a new formation of human developmental conditions.

Those who have the ability to observe the child inwardly in that important epoch of life, from birth to the change of teeth, know that all activity, all somehow directed action of the child in this completely unconscious, instinctive childhood is dominated by the principle of imitation. During this time, the child definitely strives to speak, to make faces, to move its hands, to do as those around it do, speak, make faces, move their hands. There is something of the utmost significance for human life in the child's striving to imitate, which must be met with a truly practical education. It is in this that human nature unconsciously and instinctively attempts what it can never consciously achieve in later life: to come together with other people as an individual. Through imitative action and endeavor, a sense of belonging in human society should develop, and a truly human coexistence of people should develop, through bonds from person to person.

Let us assume that humanity could decide in the present to take a radical look at this principle of imitation in the first years of childhood. If we paid attention to this, we would develop something for later life that can only be developed consciously if imitation is properly fostered in the unconscious childhood years. This imitation is not always seen in the right form. Parents come to you and say: Oh, I am very worried, my child has committed a theft, it has taken money out of the drawer! — You ask: How old is the child? — Five years. - One must then say: If all other educational conditions are in order, there is no need to be particularly concerned about this, because the child is an imitator, it does what is done in its environment. It has seen how mother so-and-so takes money out of the drawer often every day, and it imitates this. At this age, words expressing moral commandments have no influence on the child's development, only what is done in the child's own environment.

If we bear this in mind, we can lay the foundation for a suitably structured education, so that when a person is brought up in the right way, with a focus on the natural tendency to imitate, age, what can be called the right respect, the right assessment of the other person, the endeavor to respect the other person as he deserves to be respected, simply because he bears the human face. And this is the first condition for the proper development of a democracy! Democracies can only develop in the right way on the basis of the law if people in democratic parliaments shape laws that govern the relationship between people as equals. This will happen if these people have such impulses within themselves that lead to respect for human beings and can only arise if they have been educated in the right way in childhood according to the principle of imitation.

And if we now look at economic life; modern times demand a reorganization of this economic life in the sense that profit, the acquisition of capital and wages are no longer the decisive factors, but rather that consumption, the consideration of human needs is established on the basis of free associations, cooperatives, and corporations, which must proceed from the needs of human economic life, from the needs that are always present in a living way and according to which trade and production must first be established. What is based today on the blind supply and demand of the market will have to be based on insight into human interrelationships and insight into human consumption needs. Practical experience, which must be able to respond to human needs, can only develop if people have been educated in childhood according to the principle of imitation, if they have learned unconsciously to adapt to people. If they have developed respect for human life in the public legal life of the state, then they can develop understanding for human needs in the field of economic life.

Today, we must demand that in the field of economic life, coalitions, let us say, for example, cooperatives, be set up by works councils. These works councils will have a difficult time if, in the future, after understanding production and consumption, they have to take care of what is currently left to the mercy of supply and demand. But no works councils, no councils of any kind in the field of economic life will ever be beneficial if the education of the human being is not organized in such a way that the talents for these councils, that is to say for human adaptation, for this is also expressed in the understanding of human needs, that the development of these councils is not prepared by the right education in the tender childhood after the principle of imitation.

The second phase of the adolescent's life begins with the change of teeth, which means a much greater intervention in the entire organism than today's anthropology and physiology can yet foresee, because they start from external appearances, until sexual maturity. This is the age at which human nature tends towards the trust that expresses itself in the sense of authority, from the adolescent to the adult. Today, when we basically want to extend to other areas of life in an abstract way what applies to a life-giving force, today we do not even want to speak of the necessity of authority for this childhood. But if we were to disregard the orientation of this education towards a healthy sense of authority, in which unconscious inner soul drives develop that are necessary for later life, then nothing else would be able to emerge in the conscious and understanding life that can make human beings into social beings as well as democratic beings. In the first years of life, the human being orients himself to other people through imitation, so to speak. In the second age, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, he wants to adapt even more to the inner life of the other person. He wants to learn to understand the other person, wants to learn to believe in what the other person passes on to him. He wants to experience within himself, as his experience, what the other person expresses to him as an experience, he wants to look to a person who can already do what strives for existence in him. Then the human being wants to fit together socially with the other human being instinctively. When the human being has grown up, full consciousness sets in, then the blossoming of what has been experienced in childhood in response to authority will arise again.

Thus one cannot live in the right social way in the human community of democracy if one has not first found that adaptation to the human interior, which is realized in the child's sense of authority. No one will be able to stand on the ground of legal democracy in the right way today who has not learned, between the change of his teeth and sexual maturity, to look up to the other person who is ahead of him. For only when he has learned this will the true, healthy feeling arise in him: We are all equal as human beings, we must live together as human beings in such a way that equality among human beings becomes a legal reality. In the final analysis, nothing can come into being in a legal or constitutional parliament on the soil of democracy that is truly democratic, that is, that establishes what makes all people equal, if those people who make such laws have not, by their own efforts, brought up from their inmost being what has been created in the soul, when they had that feeling, so beneficial in youth, of looking up to another human being as their authority. One will never learn to recognize the other person as a truly equal one in later conscious life if one has not first felt the human value in this looking up to the other person. That equality may prevail, that democracy may become possible, depends on our learning to educate human nature according to its inner essence. For only out of the sense of authority in the child, which during the school years expresses itself in the most diverse forms, can the right sense of the equality of human beings flourish in later life.

If in economic life, on the basis of economic life, as the call for socialization also suggested, in place of the distribution of goods, which is currently dominated by capital gains and wage gains, if that distribution of goods is to be replaced by a distribution of goods that is reasonable, a system of councils, then the force that brings about this just distribution of goods must flourish – like the sense of equality in democracy – from that attraction between person and person, which in childhood can only grow out of the sense of authority. If we set up works councils and transport councils to deal with the distribution of goods, which is currently dominated by the needs of capital and wages, and if we set up such councils to , then those who carry out such distribution of goods must be imbued with that understanding of the innermost human nature that can only come from a healthy sense of authority during the child's school years. Never again must we forget what must be the human and spiritual basis for all democratic and social life.

The third age, in which most of our young people already believe themselves to be full people – they even write feature articles at this age – is that from sexual maturity to about the end of the second decade of life, into the twenties. Not only is sexual love born at this time, but what was previously a sense of authority is transformed into what is now truly active, a sense of universal human love. Through the transformation of adaptation to imitation and adaptation to authority, what actually gives us truly social instincts descends into the human soul, what makes us capable of presenting ourselves as human beings alongside one another in brotherly love. The sexual love relationship is only a special case of what occurs in this age as general human love. During this period of life, all young people, whether manual laborers or intellectual workers, must be given the opportunity, in addition to training for their practical occupation, to acquire such ideas, such concepts about the world and life, in other words, such a worldview, such knowledge about the life of nature and the spirit, that understanding arises for everything that lives, above all love, brotherhood to other people. The fact that today we still have not managed to give the apprentice, who is to hasten to a practical life, the opportunity to also receive a general world view education that does not shut him off in a class from the privileged classes, but that instead places him as a human being on an equal footing with other human beings, is what still generates anti-social impulses in our time.

And what blossoms forth in our time, when properly educated and trained in universal love of one's fellow men and brotherhood, on the soil of right and on the soil of democracy, that is what may be called true active devotion to the welfare of mankind and to the human condition. For democracy will only be able to develop by also developing, alongside the feeling for the equality of all people, what can be characterized as follows: Every human being is regarded as something to which one should devote oneself, to which one wants to serve. And on the ground of economic life it will be necessary that - I say this again - if the coincidence of supply and demand, which is based on capital and wage acquisition and on the market, is to be replaced by reasonable human cooperative and coalition institutions, then it will be necessary on this ground of economic life that the council, let us call it that, which arises there, will have to look to see whether any article here or there is too expensive or too cheap according to the general human conditions of the economic area. This council will then have to approach the people who produce an article too cheaply and tell them through their council – it should be councils that work not through tyranny and violence, but through advice – this business is unnecessary, it must therefore be shut down. You must turn to another occupation, so that only so much is produced in a closed economic area that no article is too expensive or too cheap! In this way the right mutual price relationships can exist.

This will be an important institution in the economic life of the future, that people, their insight and their understanding will be approached in such a way that they will be guided away from mere production for profit by their own inner impulses, which can be awakened, and guided towards a kind of production that serves necessary consumption, the necessary needs of the community. But what is necessary to advise in the right way here, to place people in the economic life in such a reasonable way that the mutual price conditions come about, that no surplus of labor on the one hand and no under-work on the other side is possible, which is necessary for this, can only arise in those who are to advise in economic life if, in their youth, people have developed a sense of human brotherhood, of love for their fellow human beings. For if we are to found our human development on the inner community of men, if we are to base our new development on this, not on external institutions, which would be useless, then in the future, out of democratic philanthropy, we will have to feel from those who advise us: There is brotherhood! There life is organized in such a way that the individual does not just earn capital or wages, but people work so that everyone can receive the appropriate satisfaction of needs for their life and work.

This shows how, basically, I would say, 'in between' has fallen by raising the calls for democracy and socialism, how intellectual life, in particular, must be tackled. Only by passing through imitation, authority and love in the youthful mind does the human being become a fully human being, so that what sits in his soul can be lived out democratically and socially in the human community. But only through this can people achieve what I mentioned the day before yesterday: true human freedom, which is cultivated by passing through imitation, a sense of authority and love. Therefore, one cannot say that one simply demands freedom, but one must admit: our education system must be permeated by those forces that place the human being as a free human being in democracy and in social economic life. The fact that we have neglected this principle of educating people to become free human beings out of objective knowledge within European civilization and its American offshoot is basically what has brought us to our present situation. Man is not fulfilled by the content of his soul; he only looks at external reality. He does not want to mean in life only what he has become through the content of his soul; he wants to mean what the state employs him as in a certain position. He wants to signify what makes it possible for him to gain, whether in a capitalist or wage-earning sense. As a result, we have slipped into something that is indeed given too little attention, but which has led to the worst resistance in our human culture, which is so in need of progress. We have slipped into a life that has actually lost out due to the unliving development of intellectual life: the living idea, the living inner impulse of the idea. We have descended into the world of empty phrases. Our intellectual life has become full of empty phrases, and our public life is developing under the empty phrases. This empty phrase, which is devoid of ideas, separates us from reality.

And in the area where democracy should be developing, we have slipped back into something else. Instead of increasingly equipping ourselves – this is not meant to be a historical critique, but merely a statement of fact – with the one thing that can lead to democratic laws, respect for human beings, faith in human beings as equals, and devotion to human beings – instead of that, we have developed obedience to laws and the striving to make ourselves suitable for some position in the state. In the age in which universal human love should develop, from puberty into the twenties, what has become more important than this development of a soul fund that lives entirely in the atmosphere of universal human love is what one might call the system of entitlement. Instead of making man a complete human being, he is to become some kind of official in some state, he is to become the one who can make his way in a capitalist or wage-earning manner, as in a pure commercial partnership. Obedience to the law and outward conformity — that has become man's lot because the spiritual life has been absorbed by the state, because the state has become the driving force of the spiritual life.

If we want to grasp inwardly that which can lead to real democratic equality for all people in a true constitutional state, then it is necessary to enter into the inner nature and essence of the human being. This endeavor to base the spiritual life, especially the education and school system, on the human being alone, and not to let it be shaped in such a way that the state imposes an external stamp on it, should be the endeavor of the widest circles in the present day who have an interest in the real progress of our culture and enthusiasm for it. That is why the “Federation for the Threefold Social Organism” has set itself the task of calling together those people who have such an interest to form a cultural council, or whatever it wants to be called, so that the liberation of our intellectual life, especially our education and school system, can arise from it, that the de-nationalization and de-economization of the school and education system can arise. It is understandable that those who are involved in this intellectual life as teachers or educators have a certain fear if the state no longer pays their wages. What would they do then? Yes, that is one of those experiences that unfortunately one has so often in the present, the experience that people do realize from time to time that it is necessary for a reorganization of our social conditions to take place – but that they cannot bring themselves to really want what could lead to such a reorganization. If one has spoken a lot with people about the necessary reorganization in recent times, even with those who are generally quite convinced that such a reorganization must come, then they ask one: Yes, but you must say in a certain way what will happen to the individual person, what will happen to the individual profession in the future! — Postal workers ask one, when socialization is mentioned: How does one socialize the postal worker, what will his situation be? These discussions are based on something very peculiar. People do not look at present life, they still have illusions today about the durability of the present conditions, they do not want to rise to the level of ideas of a real reorganization, and then they ask you: Yes, tell me, how will what I am accustomed to as the old be in the new order?

Such a question actually implies nothing less than the demand: How do we revolutionize the world so that everything remains the same? And if one does not answer the question: How will the old be excluded in the new order? then people say: What you are saying is completely incomprehensible to me! — That is more or less how it is when those who work in education and teaching are concerned about how their economic position will be shaped. Insofar as people in the spiritual life are involved in teaching or education, the spiritual life will be able to be organized from within, independently of state and economic life, according to purely pedagogical-didactic aspects and inward spiritual ideas; otherwise, since they also have to live, they are a economic community in the economic organism within the threefold social organism. And just as a factory naturally knows from the factory workers what it needs to satisfy its needs from economic life, so the council of economic life will also have to ensure that there is the right economic relationship between the economic body, which is independent in the three-tiered social organism, and the other economic body, which is responsible for spiritual life. And what remains between the inside as the third link of the social organism, the constitutional state, will have to ensure that what is concluded in the free economic contract between the economic body and the spiritual body is actually carried out. Those who truly want to understand inwardly and have the courage to understand that spiritual life must become free, that what is spiritual in it must be placed on its own spiritual foundation, will also be able to summon themselves to understand how the economic aspect of this spiritual part of the threefold social organism will take shape in the future.

Thus it is seen that freedom must reign in spiritual life. For this freedom in spiritual life is the foundation for the equality of the legal life, and it is also the foundation for the fraternity of the economic life. This foundation must be taken into account above all when socialization is discussed. Otherwise, yes, otherwise, one might perhaps be able to make external arrangements of all kinds, but if these external arrangements go a little further, one will end up as one has in Russia under Leninism, where one has equal rights for all – in the phrase! But today we have already reached the point where some workers have six times higher wages than others, and where certain intellectual workers already earn up to 200,000 rubles, and where there is already a strong tendency towards the old capitalism.

If you want to socialize, then you have to address the real living conditions of a healthy social organism, not just shout party phrases and Marxist papal dogmas as the only practical thing in the world. Brotherhood and true socialism will only be able to flourish if, on the basis of a genuine social education of the people, there can be those who replace anti-social instincts with social instincts, because external institutions will not create socialism. Particularly in the field of economic life it will soon become evident that socialism cannot be brought about by external institutions alone, if the people who are involved in this economic life do not understand how to organize it according to reason and fraternity, which has so far been done on this basis according to the abstract principles of capital and wage generation, supply and demand. For from the confused ideas that the relations of production develop by themselves in such a way that people can live socially in them, from these confused ideas, it is already clear enough today that social life must be brought about by man himself, the social man. It will be the organizations of people working together socially that will produce what I have described in my book, The Necessities of Life Today and in the Future, as the replacement of capital.

When we see how capital has worked, we must be clear about the fact that capital has detached people from the real, material interest in production. Instead of devoting oneself to what one produces, producing it in such a way that one imbues it with one's own attitude: In the way I make you, you serve the other people, my fellow human beings, whom I consider as brothers and sisters. Instead of giving this to the human products, today one looks at what can be written in the ledger as the selling price of the product. The actual harm of the capital and wage relationship lies in this detachment of the human being from the interest in human value. This is also the only reason why capital has come to be regarded as something that can be completely detached from real work, from directly active participation in the human community, from human endeavors, and that capital is something that multiplies by itself, that also multiplies in the hands of those who do not earn it themselves through their labor.

The damage caused by the radical capital system can be expressed in the simplest terms. In principle, all capital is brought about in a just way, in that some spiritual labor produces something that serves one's fellow human beings, as the production of goods. But in place of this connection between the spiritual powers of man and capital, something else has come into being: the personal, private ownership of land and soil, the personal, private ownership of the means of production. There can never be a right to private ownership of land and soil in a true constitutional state. The distribution of land and soil must take place in a democracy, and the utilization of capital – as I have described in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' – can only take place in the right sense if the finished means of production is no longer for sale, but is a free good. Then what is given to capital today will be given back to spiritual work.

This is what we must strive for, but we can only strive for it if we educate people in such a way that they know how to place themselves in relation to their fellow human beings with a free spirit, that they place themselves in the place themselves in the human community, and that they create organizations for economic life, which should be based only on production and consumption, that are structured into free associations, corporations, and cooperatives built on the principle of true brotherhood with an understanding of the needs of human consumption. Anyone who wants interest paid on capital without being connected to any kind of intellectual work can only have inherited the capital or otherwise received it from someone who was connected to the capital through their intellectual work. But the connection between capital and people is only justified as long as the abilities, the spiritual work of the person, justify the connection with the means of production, which are actually the capital. Socially, the possession of capital by someone who does not produce it himself is like wanting to be paid for a ship that has sunk into the ocean. A ship that has sunk into the ocean can no longer bring anything to people. It is gone, and another ship must take its place. He who draws interest on capital without working is like he who seeks to be repaid for something that comes from a sunken ship. With the loss of human abilities and with the death of the human being, the connection between him and the means of production, that is, capital, must be allowed to die.

These things are not yet clear to people today only because they run counter to present-day customs and institutions. It is only because we are accustomed to the old conditions that we do not understand them, not because the matter itself cannot be understood.

Now one can say: You claim that the things you are saying are practical, while they are actually idealistic! Yes, anyone who does not realize today that the idealistic must become practical, and that we have come to today's conditions precisely because we have always only believed that the practical consists in the routine of being together with external institutions, anyone who does not realize that this belief was deceptive and that ideas are now the practical, cannot really participate in what is necessary for the new building of our human development. We live in a time when idealism - if one wants to call it that, what is brought forward here from the practice of life - is the most practical of all.

The day before yesterday, I pointed out the great difference that exists in the human soul-disposition of the Orient and the Occident. We here in Central Europe are placed between this soul-disposition of the Orient and that of the Occident. If we recognize that we, as the middle people, have the task of bringing about a balance between the Orient and the Occident through an even, independent development of spiritual life, of the legal, political and economic life, and of economic life, we also bring about the harmonization between Orient and Occident. Then we stand on the ground from which the future must emerge for us, even if people on all sides today want to pull the ground from under our feet. They can do this to a certain extent because we, as a people of Central Europe, have neglected for decades to stand on the ground from which our true strength as a Central European people springs. But we must not forget the connections with those forces of our national character from which the great idealistic and at the same time greatest achievements of humanity have blossomed, the achievements of Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and so on. Nor must we forget the Central European impulses from which, in another harsh period, Johann Gottlieb Fichte poured fire into the hearts of the Central European peoples. What this fact is actually based on is sensed by the other nations. But we should not merely sense it, we should recognize it. We should say to ourselves, if others hate us, and compete with us and want to destroy us by something, then it is what we have developed in recent decades, not as our very own nature, but as what is too much the same as the others, what we have imitated as un-German industrialism. If we then recognize where the true roots of our strength are, then there is still hope for us! We Germans must not place ourselves on the ground on which the merely external capitalist life of the last decades has placed us in competition with the others. We must place ourselves on spiritual ground. We must understand that that patriotism which consisted in devoting ourselves only to the hope that Germany, victorious, would bring even more capital to entrepreneurship, that patriotism, which has now been replaced by the other: Let us go over to the others, let us now be patriots there, because that is where capital can bring interest, - we must understand that this patriotism is not German patriotism!

We must be able to place ourselves on this ground. We must be able to understand ourselves as the people who are placed between Orient and Occident for a new construction out of freedom for the spirit, out of equality for the law, out of brotherhood for the economy. Over there in the East, the strongest spiritual light once arose; in the West, the fuel for this spiritual life is produced. The spiritual light of the East is dying down, has expired into nirvana. The fuel of the West will not be able to shine if it is merely placed in the darkness of the capital and wage relationships between people. We in Central Europe must draw our hope solely from the fact that we can awaken the fuel of the West into a fire that can fuel humanity through the light of the East.

This is our idealistic but highly practical task. This is what one would most like to think about in these days, which are so terribly oppressive for hearts and souls, where the fuel of the West wants to take away what we still have a little of, where we are to be plunged into material need and material misery. Many still do not understand it today, but it is so. These days proclaim it loudly: it is a matter of being or not being! And what should arise from this realization that it is a matter of being or not being is that we are called to ignite the fuel of the West with the light of the East. Today, when we are weighed down by the bitterest adversity, we may remember a saying of Spohr's, who, speaking of Germans to Germans, said: If you do not recognize yourselves, if you do not find yourselves within yourselves, then the world will lose what it can only have through you! — We may, despite all the oppression, if we have faith in the spirit, despite all the hardship and misery that await us, raise our heads to those who want to destroy us and call out to them: If you destroy us, you will destroy something that you need, that you cannot get from anywhere else but from this Central Europe that you now want to trample underfoot. You have learned to shout “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” but we want to give content to what has long since become a mere phrase in these three words, to give content from the mind by saying wholeheartedly, not half-heartedly: Liberty for the mind! We want to give it substance from the heart, by saying wholeheartedly, not half-heartedly: Equality for the law! And we want to give it substance from the whole, from the full human being, grasping this spiritually and physically, by saying not half-heartedly, but wholeheartedly: Fraternity for the economy! Fraternity for all human coexistence!

Lecture for the “Association of Younger Teachers”

It gives me great satisfaction to be able to speak to teachers for a change. For although my destiny has immersed me in the most diverse professions, and although I try to understand what is happening in the various professions and classes, especially in today's times of confusion and chaos, I also feel particularly at home, I might say, with the teaching profession, to which I myself belonged for many years of my life, albeit in a private way, but therefore under not exactly easy circumstances. But perhaps that is precisely why I feel called to specialize in what is to be said now with regard to the reorganization of conditions within human development for this profession.

One can say, especially when one surveys what is alive in the present day, alive with demands, alive with insights, more or less bright or dark insights, regarding what has to happen — one can say: If the teacher were not heard in what today, as the demand of the time, resounds throughout the world, the whole civilized world, then it would be the greatest conceivable loss for the reorganization of our lives. And if one could imagine that teachers would not turn their attention to working on this reorganization of human affairs, then this reorganization of human institutions would certainly produce something that would very soon be in need of improvement and that, on the other hand, could truly not in any way benefit humanity.

You may assume from my following remarks that I will have many objections to today's school institutions; but I ask you not to take this as if it were somehow directed against today's teachers themselves. For I fully recognize how today's teachers – even if they do not always fully realize it in the pressures of life – suffer deeply, sometimes even groan, especially under today's school conditions. But it is precisely for this reason that it may be possible to discuss what is now called the social question most profoundly and most meaningfully in the circle of teachers. After all, the teacher is also personally and to the highest degree interested in what should happen in the present and in the near future as a result of the call for socialization of human society, even if this is less important. For one may have various objections to the party programs that are floating around in the world today, more or less radically; but from these radical or less radical socialist party programs, all kinds of programs about the so-called “socialization of the school system” are also emerging. If the school system were to be socialized in line with these socialist programs, then not only would the result be what many anxious minds today fear from a transformation of human conditions in line with party socialism, but it would most likely, even if this is not yet sufficiently understood today, result in the realization of the socialist party program for the school of the purest pedagogical madness. If this is again a somewhat radical statement, please excuse it by the fact that I am not inclined to develop anything other than a factual idea, a practical factual idea, in any direction at all, and certainly not something party-related.

After this introduction, you will find it understandable that the question is raised precisely in relation to our current school system: How are the fruits of this school system manifested in practical life, in that practical life from which the call for transformation is emerging everywhere today? |

If we are not just superficially theoretical, but if we are attached with heart and mind to the school system, as the most important factor in the development of humanity, then we must say the following to ourselves. We see how today, in sometimes quite a disturbing way, people who cannot see life in its real demands and possibilities draw up party programs. We see how the belief is nurtured that people want to reform or revolutionize life, when all they can do is reform or revolutionize the worst out of it. We must ask the question, after all, haven't basically the souls of all those who now frighten so many, haven't these souls gone through our schools? We look anxiously at the proletariat today, and it must even be admitted that this anxiety is not entirely unjustified, not at all unjustified. But this proletariat has gone through our schools, and we must admit, if we are not short-sighted, that our schools have educated this proletariat as well. And in what the proletariat wants, as well as in what it is mistaken about, we must recognize something of what is expressed by the saying, “You shall know them by their fruits.” This is not meant to be a superficial, agitational phrase; it is only intended to draw attention to the cultural-historical problem of today's education and teaching. We must be clear about the following.

With the proletarian, a new human being has emerged in the last three to four centuries, but particularly in the nineteenth century: a human being who, in the previous centuries, did not yet exist with this physical and mental and spiritual constitution. What characterizes the proletarian of today is that, in contrast to other members of human society, he is, to a much greater extent than was previously the case, to a certain extent, suspended in the air with his entire human existence. And this must interest us particularly from the pedagogical point of view, that the proletarian in the present is the person who, with regard to his life, must say to himself: If he himself is induced, or if others induce him to give up his position, then he faces nothing. Then, to a certain extent, he no longer feels connected to what holds human society together. On the other hand, it must be said that the education provided by the school, especially in the period during which the proletariat developed in this way, was such that it could not make people into fully-fledged human beings. This was certainly not through the fault of the teaching staff, but through the fault of the school's dependence on the state and on economic powers! In the recent past, it would have been possible to deal with the growing child in the most appropriate way, based on real knowledge of the human becoming. However, as a teacher, one was sandwiched between two powers that basically did not always work in the sense of what the teacher had to consider his task with regard to the education of the human being through the school. Today, with the advent of the school as it has developed out of earlier conditions, the teacher is caught between the parental home and the state. Of course there are exceptions in all fields, and naturally a word that seeks to characterize something cannot always be applied to all individual cases, but on the whole it is true, even if it is radically expressed: Today the teacher has to take over the children from the parents , and when he has to hand them over to the State at the end of their schooldays, the State soon draws out of their souls what the teacher has tried to instil in them. The teacher today is actually stuck between these two extremes, which do not at all work in the sense of education through the school. And when he becomes fully aware of his profession, then he actually groans between these two distortions of his pupil, the distortion by the parental home and the distortion by the state. That is, as I said, a radical way of putting it. But do we not ultimately get different children from the parental home than those who have initially grown up with the parents themselves, who have grown up with the parents in such a way that they enter school with all the prejudices of their parents, that everything that the parents themselves carry in their minds and in their state of mind has rubbed off on them – from the class in which they find themselves? And on the other hand, we release children from school and let them go out into human life, and we have to send them out into the community. What that means for the present time is shown by the terrible situation of humanity in this era.

Of course, we have experienced great misfortune, and we will experience many more misfortunes. But have we not seen in misfortune what we could have seen in happiness if only we had had a sufficient eye for it? Have we not seen as a fundamental characteristic of the present human being that he has not actually developed the inner strength of soul during childhood that would enable him to face life in such a way that the fate of life cannot bend his thinking, his feeling, his will? Today, more than one would imagine, we find broken characters and broken natures in all walks of life. This can be seen in the dark, gloomy thoughts and ideas that people throughout the civilized world are entertaining today about the terrible events that have befallen them. Can anyone today actually imagine how this came about? Can they still see anything at all in life? Do they still feel strong enough to really fit into life energetically? More people than you would think are actually broken human natures in our time! And we also have to ask why school could not work to create a firm hold in people for life, so that they could not be broken by life and their fate?

If it had been left to schools alone for a long time to educate people in such a way that they would have to enter life through what schools had to give them, then today's conditions would be different. But that was not the case. School was able to give people something. But those people who belonged to the privileged, the leading, leading circles of people, they did not place the person in life through school, but through family, through kinship, through patronage and the like. They made sure that the young person got into this or that position in life, precisely through the connections in which they themselves stood in life. The only person for whom this does not apply is the proletarian. That is why he is the only 'modern' person for the school. The proletarian's child cannot be spoiled so much – of course by other things, but not by the parents – because the parents have no time to do so. And the child of the proletarian, when he leaves school, is not introduced into the human community by family connections, by patronage and the like, but must find his place in life by virtue of his own inner soul-life. The proletarian, the human being let loose on humanity, who can only rely on himself, is therefore in a completely different position in relation to this point than the people in the leading, guiding circles. This is what has shaped our school, given it its character; this is what needs to be considered in the present. And this is also what raises the questions from which the teaching staff in particular must take part in the great social problems of this time.

The question arises in a completely new way: How should we forge the human being for life? How should we educate through school so that the human being, in the time in which he goes through school, develops those forces that are inherent in his inner being – the forces of thinking, feeling, willing, and doing – so that they are present in later life in such strength that the vicissitudes of life cannot break them? This question, along with the fundamental questions of the proletariat, is arising with unprecedented intensity. How one must educate, educate through the school, this question takes on a new face today. And that is precisely why it is necessary, above all, for the teacher to have an opinion on how the people who are to be placed in life must be developed in a scholastic way.

What is actually being demanded now, but of whose form one has truly quite dark ideas in the various party programs and party opinions, and how such questions are actually viewed today, is shown precisely by such socialist school programs and school ideas that are being put forward. One need only look at a few of the main points of these socialist school ideas and programs. For example, certain socialist personalities emphasize the unified school. This should not be uniformed; it should be differentiated as much as possible, so that the individual human abilities and talents are taken into account. The socialists express this demand by saying: We demand the differentiation of the curriculum for the unified school, but we demand the unity of the “organization”. That is, the unified school should be organized in a uniform manner. The organizational structure should not take into account the individualities of human beings, but these should be introduced later – but how? It is very strange that such a school program could arise from socialist circles, for the simple reason that socialists, based on their materialistic view of history, always emphasize that the human being is entirely the product of external circumstances, that he is not at all the product of moral, legal, aesthetic, or religious views. All this, law, custom, religious and aesthetic views, even science, is called by socialism in its Marxist papacy a mere “ideological superstructure”. Reality for it is the way in which economic conditions are organized. That actually makes man, everything else evaporates in the human soul as an ideological superstructure. And now socialism draws up a school program in which it demands uniformity of organization and specialization of the curriculum. The curriculum would then provide something that is supposed to be more or less the ideological superstructure, and the organization provides the existing conditions in which the child is to be placed, through which the person is to be formed and shaped.

If you demand a uniformity of organization, then you are actually demanding, according to the basic ideas of socialism, the uniformity of the whole of human nature, because the differentiation in the curriculum will not make it so that the object of this differentiation is not merely the “ideological superstructure”. From this program you can see the contradictions that abound in today's demands, and what is to become of them if we imagine that these contradictions should somehow become reality from today's demands! |

But the demands of the time themselves – can we do anything against them? We cannot really do anything against the demands of the time. They are there. Humanity has at some point reached a certain level of consciousness at its present stage of development, has at some point reached a certain state of mind, which is expressed in particular in proletarian demands, which can only be the signal for a new development that takes place in a completely different way than the proletarian imagines. But a certain inner impulse has taken hold of humanity in its ongoing development, and this impulse has long been expressed in two words – in our time they have become very much a cliché and a catchphrase – democracy and socialism. These two words are emerging with ever-greater force from the depths of human development. And in our time, even though much foolishness is said about democracy and socialism, it must be said that in our time both resound with increased power from these depths of humanity. There is a demand for a greater degree of democratization of the state, and there is also a demand for a greater degree of socialization of economic life. Nothing can be done against these demands; they are certainly elementary demands of the development of humanity. But the task we face in the face of these demands is to take a reasonable position on them. What do these two demands, “democracy” and “socialism,” mean?

They basically mean that much more than has been the case so far, what happens in the state and economic community is placed in the will of the individual. In a democracy, the individual wants to have a greater measure of participation in the institutions of the state, even in the very downtrodden proletarian classes, than he has had up to now. In socialization, the individual wants to have personal influence again, a far-reaching influence on economic life. One need only recall superficially what conditions were like in earlier times, and one will have to say that human society was much more cohesive. The individual was much more inclined to conform to traditions, customs, and conventions, to what was imposed on him by the authorities, by whatever authorities. It is from this sense of authority, from this sense of authority, that man wants to extricate himself through democracy and socialization. And by wanting to take these demands into account, especially on the socialist side, what is actually being demanded for the school? Socialization is also demanded for schools. It is imagined that what is to take place among adults in public and economic life, perhaps in a somewhat weakened form, should also take place to a certain extent in schools. In a program written by a socialist thinker, it is also stated that in the future the authority of the headmaster or principal is to be abolished. They also want to limit the authority of the teacher himself to a certain extent, and they speak of school communities with a certain self-administration of the students, where the teacher is to place himself in a comradely way in the school community. And by eliminating the principal's office and the directorate, the aim is to cultivate people who are particularly suited to democracy and socialism. This means that what appears to be a developmental requirement for humanity is actually being established for children, based on the conditions of the adult community. But something is being forgotten in the process. And the fact that this is being forgotten shows how poor our present-day psychology, our present-day study of the human soul actually is. For good psychologists would never think: If the bonds between adults become weaker, then the bonds between growing children should also become weaker. Good psychologists would say exactly the opposite. They would say, well, if the demand has been made that the bonds of human community should become weaker among adults, so that there may be more democracy and socialism, then all the more reason for the children to be educated in such a way that they become capable of democracy and socialism in later life. For if they are educated as children in such a way that democracy and socialism prevail among them in the organization of the school, then they will certainly be good for democracy and socialism in later life.

That is what, I am convinced, good psychologists would have to say, who are sincere about socialism and democracy for the rising generation. They would have to say: So all the more reason to implant the seeds in the minds of children that cannot be driven out again by democracy and socialism in adulthood! But this leads us to the fundamental question of the methodology of schooling, to the fundamental questions of education, for in future this education will have to take on a different form from that of the past. In future it will have to be based, above all, on a deep consideration of the human being, of human nature itself. One will have to study human nature itself much more deeply than one can at present in order to be able to work as a teacher among children. Our natural science has celebrated the greatest triumphs in the last four hundred years. Those who are familiar with the methods and conscientious nature of scientific research also know what humanity owes to this scientific direction and scientific research ethos in the last four hundred years. But it is impossible, precisely when natural science fulfills its ideal, to recognize the human being with this natural science. One can never recognize the human being with natural science! For, with all the concepts that arise from the observation of nature, the human being can never recognize that in himself which, in him, rises above all nature, which is soul-spiritual in him. It is therefore understandable that in the age in which natural science has risen to its highest level, knowledge of human nature, especially in our Western civilization (the Orientals reproach us for this in sufficient strength), has declined more and more. Anyone who has acquired a knowledge of natural science in the modern sense knows how the actual human existence falls apart under one's hands, especially when one is a good natural scientist. But it is not the case that only natural science makes the human existence fall apart under one's hands; rather, what has become of the natural scientific way of thinking, of imagining, has taken possession of the whole consciousness of the time. It lives in every newspaper editorial, and it dominates the widest circles that today participate in the demands of the day in the latest sense. And that shows us a very significant dichotomy. I could give you many examples that could be proof of this. I will give just one.

There is a very important natural scientist today, Oscar Hertwig, who is an excellent person in his field, biology, perhaps one of the greatest, most important biologists of the present day. He wrote a book several years ago: “The Becoming of Organisms, a Refutation of the Darwinian Theory of Chance”, a very beautiful, meaningful book from a scientific point of view. Now this unfortunate man has decided that he must write a book on social issues. And this book is pure nonsense, it is worthless. This is a characteristic phenomenon. Today, one can think in a scientifically penetrating way, one can conscientiously master scientific methods, and one can know nothing at all about everything social and legal and about that through which man rises above nature. Precisely because our pedagogical thinking has also been influenced by scientific thinking, it has lost sight of the actual process of becoming and development in the human being. However, this becoming and developing human being will be the greatest problem for future pedagogy. I am well aware that some people will say that what I am about to explain in the following sentences is self-evident. But such obviousness is all too often ignored in the present day. There is a saying – as there are many sayings that are correct when applied correctly and that are totally wrong when applied incorrectly – that is: nature does not make leaps. Yes, nature makes leaps everywhere. When it transitions from a green leaf to a colorful flower, it takes a leap, and when it transitions from a colorful flower to a pistil, it takes another leap. Nature takes nothing but leaps. It is the same in human life, if you only look at it deeply enough.

We have three strictly separate life epochs for the youth of humans. The first includes childhood up to the change of teeth. This change of teeth is accompanied by a much, much more intense intervention in the human organism than current physiology in any way suspects. The whole being of the human being, as it develops from birth to the change of teeth, becomes something quite different, spiritually and mentally and to a certain extent also physically, when it has gone through the change of teeth. The second phase of life is that which extends from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. The third begins with sexual maturity and extends to the end of the second and the beginning of the third decade of life, into the twenties. A more precise study, based on the inner qualities of the human being, of the developing human being, must become the basis of a true pedagogy in future anthropology.

In the first period of life, there is a certain moment of growth for the growing child that dominates everything else: the child is an imitator. The child is so predisposed that, as an imitative being, it adopts the nature of the people around it, right down to the gestures it makes, the actions it performs, and the skills it acquires. But this goes much further than one might think. What works from person to person is actually much deeper than one usually suspects. If we are a good person in the environment of a child, then our kindness, our ability to love, our goodwill goes over to the child along with our outward gestures. And especially when we begin to learn language from our environment, then there is an overflow into the growing child of what parents and the environment otherwise keep in their souls. The child adapts completely to its environment; it becomes like its environment, because the principle of imitation prevails in human nature until the time of the change of teeth. This can be observed in individual cases.

Then parents come to you and say: Oh, we have experienced a great misfortune with our child, our boy has stolen from us! — You have to say, look, maybe what the child did does not mean theft at all, how old is the child? — Five years. — You ask further: How did the incident happen? Well, it opened the drawer, took out a coin – I am talking about a specific, concrete case – and even shared with other children what it had bought as a treat. You can then tell the parents: Of course you don't have to let something like that happen, but it happened out of nothing other than what the child has seen so often every day: the mother goes to the drawer, takes out a coin to buy something. The child imitates, does the same, not as a wrong, but as something that must happen as a matter of course out of the principle of imitation. Therefore, until the child changes teeth, parents need to be less concerned with trying to influence the child through all kinds of preaching and good teaching, which has no meaning at all, because during this time, teachings are actually only a sound that penetrates the child's ear. Instead, parents need to be concerned with being such that the child can imitate everything. This would be the best educational principle during this time.

If we reflect a little on the present situation, we will not find it so radical to say that schools very often get children who are not very well brought up. For this principle of doing nothing, saying nothing, indeed, thinking nothing, that the child might not spoil by imitation, this principle is truly still little known. But what lies in this principle of imitation? Yes, when this principle of imitation is taken into account in the first years of childhood, when the soul forces are particularly strengthened by what can be strengthened by a properly observed principle of imitation, then something arises in the child that later — because the flowering of what has been sown often occurs quite late in life — enables it to be a truly free human being. Someone who has never had such people in their environment, to whom they can give themselves so completely that they can imitate them, that they absorb into themselves what they do, is not prepared for a democratic life and will never be able to enjoy freedom in life. This is what must be considered in the context of life. As I said, we must only be clear about the fact that the blossoms and fruits of what has been sown into human life sometimes arise much later than one might think. What is sown in the first seven years of life through a correct principle of imitation is then deeply imprinted in the soul of the child and only comes to fruition in the twenties and throughout the whole of the following life. As is generally the case in life: no one acquires the ability to bless with their hand for their later life who has not been educated in their childhood to ask with their hand. What is educated in childhood often transforms into the opposite in life, asking transforms into blessing and the like.

Then the time begins, which is particularly significant for school, the time from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. This time has an underlying characteristic developmental principle in the developing human being. This is - if you really study people, you will come across it - the sense of authority. There is no way to develop certain powers of thinking, feeling and willing in the growing human being between the ages of six or seven and fourteen or fifteen that must be developed if you want to raise the child in these years without the sense of authority. One must go through it in these years, to look at one or more other people in such a way that one can say to oneself – even if one does not say it out loud as a child – but that one says to oneself inwardly: What this person says is the truth. You never learn to seek the truth in life if you have not first sought it in a person who was an authority for us. There is no way to develop certain abilities in human nature if we do not put the child in a position to be the absolute authority for the child through what we are as teachers and educators. In this respect, a kind of sacred sense of authority must prevail in the school. And if you believe that anything other than this sacred sense of authority will educate towards democracy and socialism, if you believe that a democratic-socialist school community will educate towards this, then you are very much on the wrong track. If we want adults to have an inner maturity, if one may say so, in relation to democratic and socialist life, then children must have learned to look up to teachers as authorities. Above all, we must create this atmosphere in the school if we want to educate in the right way for our time. Only when a person grows up between the ages of seven and fourteen in such a way that he or she, so to speak, climbs up to the other person who is his or her authority, will the fully developed human being develop. And this fully developed human being can only develop if we approach many things in a very thorough pedagogical way during this time. It must be said that, especially for this time, one thing in particular is characteristic when it comes to authority.

You all know Jean Paul's saying that in our first three years we actually learn more for life from our nurse than we do later in three academic years. That was still the case in Jean Paul's time. This saying is absolutely correct, there is no objection to it. But you know that much is determined by the physiology of the child. The child does not need to be maltreated in terms of his memory. He remembers so much, retains so much in his memory, than he needs to retain at this age until the change of teeth. But with the change of teeth, it becomes necessary to take careful consideration of the child's memory. Above all, we must not overload the memory during this period, that is, we must not force something into the memory that will then fall out by itself. It is hard to believe that this is not known. This, too, is a consequence of today's poor psychology. It is hard for a person when his memory is so mistreated during this time that he has to incorporate things into his memory that then fall out by themselves. Therefore, one has to ensure that one works as much as possible through repetition and the like – repetition must form the basis for the period between the seventh and fourteenth, fifteenth year – that one lays the things that one first presented in more detail, if possible in short, summarized sentences, for the memory, so that one really has certain things within oneself, at least to a certain degree, and retains certain things from these years of life within oneself, as a Christian does the Lord's Prayer, albeit to a lesser degree, so that it comes up again and again and again, and forms part of the inner life of the soul. During this time, one must not forget to focus on the development of the soul's powers. But in this respect much is sinned, for in this time more attention is paid to the school subjects that are required by life and the state than to the growing human being himself. The situation is such that everything that is as conventional for life as reading and writing is not something that is as internally based as, for example, geometry or arithmetic. The fact that we have this language, in particular, is something that is less fundamentally connected to the outside world, and also to the generality of the world. That we have these letters of the alphabet has less to do with general world conditions than, for example, a triangle having three sides or its angle sum being 180 degrees or the like. Everything that is as conventional as reading and writing can be used primarily to develop intellectuality, which particularly forms the mind. It would be going too far if I were to now expand on this sentence of a true psychology in a broader way, but anyone who looks at life from all sides will find this sentence to be true.

On the other hand, everything that is more closely related to general world conditions or that appeals to human memory, such as history or geography, is more closely related, though it may seem paradoxical, to the forces of feeling and shapes the life of feeling. And everything we teach the young child artistically shapes the life of will, and we should actually organize the individual school subjects in such a way that we have the developing human being in mind and always know: with this we shape thinking, with this we shape feeling, and with that we shape the will. It is the developing human being that matters, not a certain amount of knowledge.

Once we have these principles, children will learn something that is very rarely taught today. Nowadays, children learn a great deal: geography, arithmetic, drawing, and so on. I do not want to talk about that. But they should learn in the way I have just described; however, there is little teaching about learning. But life itself is the great school of life, and you only get out of school properly if you bring with you the ability to learn from life throughout your entire life. But you can't do that if you are grafted onto knowledge during these years. You can only do that if the school is used to develop these powers of thinking, feeling and willing in the human being in his soul. Then one learns how to learn from life. If we want democracy and socialism, then we must not be so arrogant as to think that we can determine everything and already know everything. We must get beyond megalomania. One only has to be a twenty-one-year-old reasonable, mature person to be elected into all state parliaments, to speak in a way that those people who have experience in life speak. But then one must be educated to the innermost human modesty, that we are not absolutely perfect human beings for a moment, but developing human beings from birth to death. That every day of life has a certain value, and that we do not live into our thirties in vain after going through our twenties, but that every new day and every new year always brings new revelations.

But this must be imparted as a real impulse for life through the things I have just mentioned. In the age of natural science, these things could not always be properly appreciated. In the age of natural science, for example, a principle has crept into schools that is extremely correct when viewed from one side, but highly questionable when viewed from the other: that is, the principle of visualization. I always feel a little horror when I enter a classroom and see the calculating machine there, with which the children are supposed to learn counting and adding “vividly”. In arithmetic, it is still possible. But if we radically extend the principle of vividness, it must be said that the principle of vividness in education is only justified if everything in the world is really vivid. But do you believe that everything in the world is really vivid? There are many things in the world that cannot be vivid, namely all emotional and volitional values, sympathy, antipathy, and so on. These cannot be made clear at all, they must pass from the teacher to the pupil precisely according to the principle of authority, through indeterminate fluids, if I may use this expression. This has a very great significance in terms of cultural history.

We see how people today are intellectually over-educated, especially in our Western civilization, and how they always express everything they demand of life in intellectual principles. That which is now the most intellectual, which is entirely only intellect, is the Marxist program. That is precisely the fundamental characteristic of the Marxist program, that it only received its structure from the intellect. One really only understands what is in the Marxist program when one knows that everything in it is dictated only by the intellect, often by a very sharp intellect, by an extremely sharp, ingenious intellect – but only by the intellect. In human nature, in the human soul, the individual soul powers are interrelated. If one power is developed too strongly, the others are left behind; some powers develop more, others are left behind. If the powers of the intellect are developed too strongly, the emotions are left behind at a lower level. They may become strong, but they become elementary, they become wild. And so we see that in our time of intelligence, the most desolate emotions and the most terrible instincts arise as “historical demands”. For that is what comes from Eastern Europe, what is beginning to flood Central Europe: elementary instinctive demands, which are the opposite pole to intellectuality. One would like people to start thinking about the actual connections in this regard.

For example, there are two truly bourgeois philosophers. One is more of a naturalist in the world of the nineteenth century, Avenarius, the other is Mach. One is in Zurich, where he also taught, the other in Vienna. These two people, Avenarius and Mach, had developed the scientific mentality to the highest degree. They had made this mentality into a philosophical system. Why? Because the principle of bringing only the most vivid aspects of natural science to bear on human science was everything to them.

These people were really very good, good citizens, highly respectable people, I can assure you of that. And now Avenarius' philosophy and Mach's philosophy have become the state philosophy of the Bolsheviks in Russia! This connection might seem inexplicable. On the surface, one might perhaps want to justify it by saying that many Bolsheviks studied in Zurich. But that is not the point, because no philosopher likes to be associated with someone to whom he is not inwardly related. Rather, the inner connection is that what has been expressed in such purely natural-scientific thinking is so one-sided that, on the other hand, through the mysteriousness of human nature, it evokes those emotions, those elementary instincts, which are then given full expression in Bolshevism. This is no coincidence; there is an inner lawfulness behind it. And no one has more to reflect on such things than the teaching profession, because these things belong most intensely in cultural education.

We simply have to ask ourselves how we should educate the child. We cannot just rely on formalistic methodology, pedagogy and didactics in our time, when everything is in turmoil; we have to draw on cultural history to build a healthy pedagogy. Therefore, we have to counter the principle of vividness with something that builds character. We have tried in our circle – one can have objections to some of it, but it is along the lines I have just indicated – we have tried to replace mere physiological gymnastics, where only limb movements in relation to physiology come into consideration, with e which is the soul-inspired art of movement for human beings. It will be seen that, just as it is an art, it is also, on the other hand, inspired gymnastics, and that it is precisely through this that it can achieve something significant for the education of the will. And so we must reshape many things in which we now firmly believe if we really want to count on an education of the human being through which the human being can grow into democracy and socialism in the right way. Otherwise, democracy and socialism will become the most terrible scourge for civilized humanity in the future. What must be taken into account most of all is that in an age when people want to participate, firstly in state life, secondly in economic life through all kinds of “councils”, where even what has been achieved by capital is to be replaced by the reason of the various works councils, transport councils, economic councils – that in this time, precisely in terms of their education, people must undergo what will enable them to practise what democracy and socialism demand. For democracy and socialism should not be a mere human demand; they should also represent a system of human duties and obligations.

That is how seriously we must take things today, and we must in particular bring what lies in the demands of democracy and socialism into pedagogy and education. And if a person is to develop true insight into the needs and abilities of others, if socialization is to take place, then the human being must have developed within himself that capacity for love through the principle of imitation, through the principle of authority, which brings him to true brotherhood in life. Socialism without people inclined towards brotherhood is a wooden iron! Therefore, one may say: It would be a pity not to ask the teachers first and foremost when it comes to dealing with new developments in our social future, because only from this quarter can the wind blow that will really have a healing effect with regard to the characterized demands of the time.

I can easily believe that today, and also for the transitional period, the teaching staff in particular might have serious concerns about what needs to be done to make such a school and such an education possible, as characterized here, through the efforts of the “Federation for the Threefold Social Organism”. This Federation for Threefold Order sees in the dependence of the school on the state, in the permeation of the school with the state principle, that which will make it impossible for the future to cultivate in the school what has been discussed here today. The socialists could reflect on this a little. They want to nationalize or socialize everything in a certain way. The class of people that preceded them nationalized the school. The school is completely nationalized; it is a good place to learn what nationalization is. And today, with the call for socialization, anyone who takes things seriously, anyone who is capable of seeing the big cultural and historical picture, must say: what is needed is denationalization of the school. Therefore, the “Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” has the principle of placing the school system entirely in its own hands, of giving the school system self-government, so that not even supervision remains with the state, but what is achieved in the school through self-government should grow purely out of the needs of spiritual life itself. Much will arise from this. I will give you just one example, because it may be easier for us to communicate through an example on this broad topic.

Today we distinguish between primary schools, secondary schools and universities. At the universities, education is also taught. This education is now to be given a slightly better position at the universities, but it is actually still always taught as a “minor subject”. Until now, it was like this: some philosopher was appointed to teach philosophy, and then he was also given education as a minor subject. This was usually a burden for him, he did not like doing it at all. In the future, things must be different. For in the future, everything that is spiritual life must be connected with general human life. In the future, if such an ideal as I have outlined before you today can really be fulfilled, in the future the teacher will definitely be a psychologist. He will educate the growing human being based on his in-depth knowledge of human nature, and he will know best what pedagogical truth is. Then the teacher, who otherwise teaches children, will be called to the university to teach pedagogy there. And after teaching there for a while, he will go back to school to teach children again, gain new experience, and then teach pedagogy again later. This will become a true 'Republic of Letters', as Klopstock once dreamed of. Only by taking things so thoroughly and so deeply can we make any progress at all. The present time is destined to communicate these things to the outer life.

But to accomplish all this, every sphere of the spirit must be a kingdom unto itself. At most, it could give rise to the following concern: If the state, through its regulatory measures, no longer contributes to the teacher's income, then the situation of teachers will be very dire. Well, the teacher will belong to an economic corporation, just as there are other economic corporations. Besides being a teacher, he will be part of the economic body, the third limb of the threefold social organism, and will receive his income from this independent economic entity. For the threefold social organism will have an independent economic entity, just as it has an independent state entity, where the right to cultivate on a democratic basis and as it will have its own free spiritual realm. And what today goes indirectly into the teacher's bank account through taxation will then come directly from economic life. Furthermore, it is only through the independent spiritual life that the right atmosphere for school and teaching will be created.

A healthy social organism also requires a correct evaluation of the various goods and achievements of life, one that comes from the whole human being. This evaluation of goods and achievements must be there. But in a healthy social organism, the view must not prevail that what the teacher actually achieves for the growing generation can be “paid for”. That is a gift that the teacher will impart from the spiritual world to humanity! This attitude must take hold in the healthy social organism, so that the teacher is the medium through which the abilities of the human being, the individual qualities of the human being, are brought up from their dark backgrounds, as they are predisposed in human nature. It is merely the megalomania of philistinism to believe that what can actually be achieved in the school must be paid for. What the economic body of the healthy threefold social organism will have to provide is only the opportunity for the teacher to live as all other people live. In the consciousness of this offering of the possibility of life and the evaluation of teaching, which will be the healthy impulse, without which there can be no democracy, one must completely separate. For that democracy which levels everything, which can no longer evaluate things, will only destroy things, and that socialism which believes it can pay for everything will also destroy life. Not only must the teacher himself be the one factor that is heard when the call for democracy and socialization can be followed, but the evaluation of the teaching profession itself must arise again from the constitution of the healthy social organism. The aim of the Federation for the Tripartite Social Order is to achieve independence in each of the three areas of life. Therefore, it wants to place what has so far been mixed into an inorganic, chaotic unity – economic life, spiritual life and state life – on its healthy three foundations: an independent spiritual life, an independent democratic state or legal life and an independent social economic life. And the human being forms the higher unity in the three. He will participate in all three areas. There is no need to fear that unity will be lost. Anyone who thinks that the idea of threefolding is about dividing the horse into three parts has a poor understanding of what it is about. We do not want to divide the horse into three parts; we just do not want it to be said that the horse is only a real horse when it stands on one leg. A healthy social organism stands on its healthy three legs. This is, firstly, an independent spiritual life, to which education and the school system belong; secondly, an independent legal life, to which the democratic state belongs; and thirdly, an independent economic life, which alone can be socialized. If you want to co-socialize legal life and even intellectual life, then you end up with nothing more than a socialism of economic life, which pushes everything into the uniformity of economic life, which is supposed to clothe and feed people, and which gradually drains everything that can only develop independently: state or legal life and intellectual life.

This is a serious question, especially as a pedagogical question, as a cultural pedagogical question, which in the broadest sense is the fundamental question of our time. As far as I have been able to do so in these already long considerations, I have tried to show an understanding of what the impulse of the threefold social organism really wants and what it particularly wants for the liberation and redemption of spiritual life and of the school and education system from some of the bonds in which they are bound. It would give me great satisfaction if the aims that arise from such considerations were to a certain extent taken into account by teachers and educators.

Final words after the discussion

In the lively discussion that followed, it was objected that the proletarian children had been spoiled by bad role models and were not suitable for educating “new people”. Authority would be better replaced by leadership and following, as the school communities strive for. Education is determined by the personality of the teacher, regardless of the political context. Only a new teacher training program must educate the teacher to be independent; today the teacher needs the authority of the state. The state has given the teacher authority and has not disturbed him further; he is not to be dispensed with.

Dr. STEINER: First of all I would ask to be allowed to deal with the individual questions that have been put to me. First of all the Chairman's question regarding the children of the proletariat.

If I said, or if it can be inferred from my words, that I have described the proletarian as the “type of the new man,” then I ask you not to take this to mean that the “new man” is a kind of angel. It is a very common mistake to assume that when one speaks of the new, especially in the development of humanity, one also has the view that the new is always also the better. That is the effect of a capital error of the stereotyped parties. For them, the new was always the better. In this sense, I did not want to describe the proletarian as the “type of the better man”, but only to say that he is the type of man who has developed in the last times, in the last three to four centuries, especially in the nineteenth century. When I said that the bourgeois child is pampered by its parents, I also said that the proletarian child is pampered too – I ask you to please remember that I added this subordinate clause – but it is not pampered by parents who have no time for it. The fact of the matter is that the proletarian child today is usually a bigger rascal than the bourgeois child. One can fully agree with that. And I imagine that the honored chairman, who is a teacher of proletarian children, experiences it perhaps just as horribly as he describes it. I could think that precisely because the proletarian is the type of the new man, the proletarian child is the bigger rascal. But it is so in a different way. It is not because it imitates its parents, who are in a certain class, and thus imitates the class characteristics, but because it is educated on the street and left alone, imitates everything possible. It is generally worse off. It has outgrown humanity, to which there is simply nothing particularly good to imitate today. It has grown out of a general humanity, so that in this respect it stands in life as the proletarian stands in life later on. It has more outgrown life. The bourgeois child, on the other hand, is more placed in a certain hothouse. That is the difference. There is no question that the proletarian child imitates all sorts of things and comes to school with the success of this imitation, with things that are not very desirable. But my aim was to show how new tasks arise for the proletarian child, firstly, because it does not come from its parents with very specific class peculiarities and is then not released into life that father, mother, brother, sister, uncles, aunts and others who support it, but that it needs to rely only on what has been brought up in its soul, in the whole person. One has often repeated a saying of a man who has not exactly distinguished himself favorably in his post, the saying “Free rein to the most capable.” But things have now become a cliché. Because it is easy to say “free rein for the most capable” when you really mean only your own nephew or your sister's child. So these are things that must be taken literally, not by the letter but by the spirit. We live in such a phrase-ridden world precisely because we can take things literally so little. I ask you to bear this in mind. That, then, with regard to imitation.

As for the sense of authority, it is natural that the children of the proletariat may have little to go by in this respect. But here we must strive, above all, by training our pedagogical staff, to really develop this sense of authority in the children of the proletariat.

Then it was said that it does not matter whether the personality takes care of the development of thinking, feeling and will within or outside the state. I could not really understand the question, even though it came up twice. What matters is that the personality is not deprived of its strength by being crammed into state regulations. One must simply take into account what it means when what comes from the free personality of the teacher himself cannot be passed on, but only what is introduced into what he is supposed to teach through the decrees, curricula and objectives of the state; when the aim is not to educate people to become full human beings, but to train people who will then have to serve the state in the right way at this or that point in the state.

Then the objection was raised – and this always comes up when this question is discussed – that educational interests and needs are not all that great in today's world, and that most parents would be happy if they didn't have to send their children to school. It has even been said that no one would send their children to school anymore. But what I said did not touch on the superficial question of whether or not to send children to school. In my book The Essentials of the Social Question, I speak of a child's right to education, and of the need for a corresponding contribution to education from the future economy, even in the future state. So, I am not talking about the fact that “compulsory schooling” is perceived as a nuisance by those parents who do not want to send their children to school, but rather to the fields, but I am talking about the fact that in a healthy social organism, the child has a right to an education. Now one could say: if this right exists, the state – why the state should have been hammered today, as one speaker said, I don't know – will still be there as the legal institution – but I only had to speak about the spiritual institution today. And here the objection could be raised that if this right to educate the child is asserted, then parents will have to send their children to school, and then, for all I care, compulsory schooling can be abandoned. But that has nothing to do with the self-sufficiency of spiritual life, nothing to do with what is done in schools, with the administration of the school system. I recently answered the question as follows: If there is no compulsion to attend school, if there is a right to education, you can even threaten to appoint a guardian for the child of those parents who do not want to send their children to school, who will represent the child's right to an education with the parents; then they will happily send their children to school. All these secondary questions can be answered if there is the goodwill to truly understand the main question: everything depends on the spiritual life being freely left to its own devices.

Then the conflict that arises when the state or some other force later fails to tolerate what the teacher has planted in the children as an authority has been hinted at. But it is precisely from the realization of this conflict that the demand for the separation of the school system from the state arises. It is precisely in order to avoid the impossibility of a state later not tolerating what has been placed in the soul of the child through authority at school, that the school and education system should be placed on its own ground. If the state is not at the same time the authority for the teacher, then when later in life a person is forced to do something else, he will not think back to his teacher in such a way that the teacher is now worthless to him when the state says otherwise, but he will think back in such a way that he will feel it as a difficult fate that he cannot carry out what the authority of the teacher has planted in his soul. If you think about it in detail, you will see that the solution to this conflict has already been very successful. But precisely because this conflict weighed heavily on the soul for a long time, the demand for the spiritual independence of the school and educational system has been established from an observation of life. All similar things – and there are many similar things to the conflict that has been very successfully mentioned here – are only possible if the school system is placed in what is based on democracy, in the legal life of the state.

What Mrs. B. said about authority sounded so abstract and theoretical to me that I do not believe such things can have any real significance for life, for practical life. No one could tell from what I said that I assumed that the child could form a “judgment” about the fact that the teacher is an authority. These are things that arise naturally in the atmosphere of life.

Regarding the question of teachers, it will arise from all kinds of prerequisites that in the future it will be important that there is a selection process for the teaching profession and that people are not admitted to the teaching profession merely by passing exams or acquiring a certain amount of knowledge. Knowledge can, under certain circumstances, be acquired later in a few hours, it can be caught up on from the various manuals. What matters is the whole personality, the innermost gift of the teacher. Of course, I do not mean that if one has not been immersed in this knowledge before, one can easily acquire it later in a few hours. Rather, if one needs it – one must of course have been in it before – then one can easily acquire it again later, where it is needed. What is important is that a certain guarantee be created for what should determine the teacher to teach, a guarantee that through his whole personality he is so immersed in human culture that something can pass from him to the pupil, which can then work in an authoritative way. These are things that must be considered much more deeply and thoroughly than is often attempted today, when such abstract things as “leadership” and “followership” or “school community” are put forward. I would also ask you to consider the fact that I spoke of “school communities.” What matters is that we take things as they are said, and not that we first translate them into an abstract program that we have made up ourselves.

Then there would be much talk about the question of the separation of church and state. Historically, it is the case that for a long time it simply could not be otherwise than that the school was in a certain way an appendage of the church. The state has done a good job in modern times of detaching the education system from the church and putting it on its own ground. But now we are once again faced with the necessity of improving the things that are attached to the school by making it dependent on the state, by placing the school on its own ground. The fact that these things can very easily be viewed one-sidedly and in an agitative way should not be underestimated today. In much of what is said about these things today, I hear something that is not entirely objective. We must be clear about one thing: we must not in any way arrive at a standardization of the human soul through any kind of future pedagogy or future school constitution. We must not consider something to be the only valid view of the soul and demand that it be taught to children. We must also be able to put ourselves in the shoes of people who think and feel differently. It is important not to be afraid of this when, for example, Catholic parents demand that their children also receive Catholic religious education. There is no need to be afraid of this if you yourself stand strong on your own ground. Just as you need not be afraid of any other world view if you have your own enthusiasm and strength for your own world view. These things should be allowed to develop in the free competition of ideas, but in no case by the law-making power of the state. Just as it is harmful when a church is made a state church by the law-making power of the state and thereby receives the favor of the state, it is equally harmful when a church is persecuted. No kind of religious belief should be persecuted or supported by the law-making power of the state. And anyone who starts with this thought and thinks it through to a sufficient extent will find that it is indeed necessary to put the spiritual life and especially the school and teaching system on its own ground.

What has been said about the authority exercised by the teacher not being intended to remain for life, but for the young person to break free from it, is either a matter of course or something has been misunderstood. For it is of course quite natural that one cannot be placed under the authority of a teacher for one's entire life. This authority should work towards one being able to say: What would it be like to become a teacher? Then, through what the teacher's authority has placed in one's soul, one would be able to become an authority oneself. But one must grasp things much more thoroughly and deeply, because a teacher's authority can indeed be maintained throughout one's entire life. I have already said that what the teacher gives in education cannot really be 'paid for'. Payment means something quite different. But what education can do is to shape the mutual relationship between teacher and student in such a way that the teacher can remain an authority for a person throughout their life. And I would like to ask what could be more beautiful than to remember a teacher later on, when one has reached the age of sixty and can look back to one's youth, and then say to oneself: This teacher was an authority for me, I still feel the greatest gratitude towards him today, I have become what I am partly through him! This authority can be retained and can live on in a lifelong gratitude towards the teacher. These are the things that a psychology that is equal to today's tasks must take into account.

If it has been said that the state is necessary after all, or that it can be replaced by a spiritual senate or the like, then it has already been said: Those who have not felt state coercion have simply not seen it. And you see, the fact of the matter is that it really is the case that being a teacher of the state has become second nature to many people. And when it has become their second nature, they no longer realize that their free personality does not actually teach from the sources of spiritual life, but they have become accustomed to the state, have become accustomed to continuing in teaching what the state offers them. They feel “free”. But this feeling of freedom is no proof that one is really free, especially in the mentality of present-day humanity.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that a person who is the “great world teacher” for a large number of people, Woodrow Wilson, gives such a strange definition of what he understands by freedom in his writing “On Freedom” that one could climb up on the walls. He says something like: You can call a mechanism that has no inhibition and runs as the various events cause it to; or you can call a ship that moves in the same way according to the same principle free. But this mechanical freedom is not the real one we mean: you have to feel it.

Then, too, many things have been said that I have not said at all. In particular, the gentleman who defended the state spoke of all sorts of such things. I did not speak at all about the present state, but anyone who understood me correctly will know that I said: From what is being striven for by today's socialists, this and that threatens to become reality, and what must not come about would come about, so things must be arranged in a certain way. — Now, my dear audience, I really cannot go into things that are only constructed from my words and then polemicized against. But there is one thing I would like to address: An authority will also be necessary for the teacher again. I did not say anything about the authority that will be necessary for the teacher, but I did say that the teacher should be an authority for the child! Whether an authority is necessary for the teacher is a completely different question, which will be answered by the fact that ultimately life itself will take care of it. Pay attention only to life as it is, that is far too little observed today. Pay attention only to life and reality, and you will say to yourself: Yes, people are so different from each other that ultimately someone who can be an authority in the most diverse ways will still find an authority above himself. It will be taken care that someone can always find an authority above himself. Well, this does not have to lead to a supreme pinnacle. A person can be an authority simply by being superior in other respects.

When I spoke of Klopstock's “Republic of Letters”, it does not mean that everyone will now do as they please. Rather, they will not simply do as they please, but out of the needs of intellectual life, in order to make it as fruitful as possible, there will again be a voluntary leaning towards those who are to be an authority in the future. A “constitution” that is not based on rigid laws, on bony, state decrees, a constitution can be conceived in the free spiritual life; only it will relate to the real, living conditions of the people who participate in this spiritual life. The “law”, however, must first be replaced on this ground by the free human relationships, which are, after all, individual and can always change from week to week, and which cannot be bound by rigid laws and immortalized in some rigid form. What is important, therefore, is that spiritual life be given the opportunity to live in the form that is possible for it out of its own strength, so that the teacher of the school is not dependent in any way on a state official, but that he in a human, objective and appropriate way, as follows from the spiritual life, by another person who is also directly involved in the spiritual life and works with him in the same spiritual life. That is what matters. We can see that even today there is a certain fear of independence in spiritual life, and that many feel comfortable under the protection of the state. But that is precisely the point: so many feel comfortable under this state protection. However, this state protection is being sought even more by those who now want to succeed.

The development of the last few centuries was such that the state had power from earlier conquests and similar circumstances, and then little by little individuals wanted to get hold of this power in order to be protected by it. For a time it was the church. It preferred not only the living word, flowing from the spirit and convincing people, but also a little help from the police. Then came the schools. They preferred not the living word flowing from the spirit to reach the child, but state compulsion behind it. Then, in the end, the various economic classes and corporations also came, until we finally got that economic corporation – in Germany, of course, the industrialists and heavy industrialists in particular were keen on this – which also wanted a share of the power of the state. And then behind them were the Social Democrats, who in turn wanted to take the state for themselves. So the state power was the gathering place for everyone. What the future must strive for is that state power should not be a gathering place for everything that wants to creep under this power, but that it should be placed on democratic ground. But what matters is that on this state ground that which the mature human being has to agree with every other mature human being should be realized; there we are dealing with what the mere constitutional state is. It is remarkable that people still do not want to understand this today, although it was very close to understanding this constitutional state when someone who was once Prussia's Minister of Culture came to a correct understanding of these conditions. In Humboldt's essay “On the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State” you will find beautiful approaches to what the state should actually be. But if it is to be “democratic”, then only that which every mature person has to do with every other mature person may prevail in it. Then that which can be discerned in spiritual life must be taken out of the actual life of the state, and then the state must not include economic life, where what matters is economic experience, credit, and so on. That is to say, if anyone seriously wants democracy, then he cannot want socialism and intellectual life in the state, but must say to himself: If democracy is to be carried out, the only healthy thing to do is to place the intellectual life on the one hand and the economic cycle on the other in free territory. The fact that this is not understood – in Russia it has not been understood! has the effect that today something highly undemocratic, even anti-democratic, is being striven for in economic life: the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat. I encountered this in its most blatant form a few months ago in Basel, when after a lecture someone stood up, obviously a communist, and said: If the salvation of the future is to come about, Lenin must become world ruler! — You call for 'socialization' with these people and you don't even understand the very beginning of socialization, namely that you first have to socialize the relationships of domination; that socialization does not consist of monarchizing the relationship of domination and imperializing socialism. They think they want to socialize, but they don't even want to start with the socialization of the power relations, but instead they appoint an “economic pope” over the whole world. That is how they think.

These are the contradictions that arise today. That is why one would like to have a sense that the things that come to light in the threefold social organism are based on something deeper. We did not arrive at the idea of threefolding by being able to say, out of arbitrary, abstract principles and out of habits of life: I believe or I do not believe in these things. Of course, many things have to be placed in their proper context. But the impulse for the threefold social order comes from a truly hard observation of life and from a felt seriousness about the great cultural tasks of the present time. If one honestly wants socialism and democracy, then one must not simply want what many people say when they put it together: “social democracy.” Because in that way, spiritual life is not properly taken into account. On the contrary, anyone who honestly wants democracy and socialism needs above all a truly free spiritual life, which cannot be an arbitrary spiritual life. The impulse for threefolding has arisen out of an understanding of reality and out of a sense of the seriousness of present-day conditions. In these days we in Central Europe should feel here very particularly how serious the times are. We should in this time, when we have to say to ourselves: the question is one of life or death! — we should feel that we need to rethink and relearn about many old things, and that for the future it cannot be a matter of small changes to some institutions, but of a real rethinking, re-feeling and re-learning of the whole human being. Only in this way will we understand our time and only in this way will we be able to truly move forward!

Study evening on “The key points of the social question in the necessities of life today and in the future”

Stuttgart, July 30, 1919

This evening I do not want to anticipate what these study evenings, based on the book 'The Key Points of the Social Question', are actually supposed to be; instead, I will try to give you a kind of introduction to this evening. I would like to use this introduction to give you a sense of the perspective from which this book was written. Above all, it was written from the immediate present, from the conviction that the social question has also taken on a new form through the events of the present, and that it is necessary to talk about the social question today in a completely different way than it was talked about from any side before the world war catastrophe. With this book, an attempt has been made at a time in the development of humanity when the social question is becoming particularly urgent and when every person who is consciously living today, who is not sleepily and sleepily living the life of humanity, should know something about what has to happen in the sense of what is usually called the social question. Perhaps it would be a good idea to look back a little today. I may mention things that you are partly aware of, but we will then put them in a slightly different light. You probably know that what is being said today about the social question has been said for a relatively long time. And today the names Proudhon, Fourier, and Louis Blanc are mentioned as the first to have dealt with the social question in the mid-nineteenth century. You know, of course, that the way in which this social question was treated until the middle of the nineteenth century is called by today's representatives, at least by many of today's representatives of the social question, “the age of social utopias.” It is good to be clear about what is actually meant when one says: In its first stage, the social question arose in such a way that it lived in this age of utopias. But one cannot talk about this matter in the absolute sense, but one can actually only talk about the feelings of the representatives of the social question in the present. They feel the way I am about to describe it. They feel that all social questions that arose in the age of which I want to speak first were in the stage of utopia. And what do people mean when they say that the social question was in the stage of utopia at that time? By this they understand the following: Saint-Simon and Fourier observed that even after the French Revolution there were people in a certain social minority who were in possession of the means of production and other human goods, and that there were a large number, even the majority, of other people who do not have such property and can only work with the means of production by entering the service of those who own the means of production and the land, people who basically have nothing but themselves and their labor. It has been observed that the life of this great mass of humanity is one of oppression, and that it lives in poverty to a large extent in relation to those who are in the minority. And attention has been drawn to the situation of the minority and to the situation of the majority.

Those who, like Saint-Simon and Fourier, and even Proudhon, have written about the social situation of humanity, have started from a certain premise. They started from the premise that it is necessary to point out to people: Look, the great mass lives in misery, in bondage, in economic dependency, this is not a decent existence for the great mass. This must be changed. And then all kinds of means were devised by which this inequality among people could be changed. But there was always one specific prerequisite, and that prerequisite was that one said to oneself: If one knows the reasons for this inequality, if one has enough words of warning, if one has enough moral awareness oneself to strongly pointing out that the vast majority of people live in economic and legal dependence and are poor, this speech will touch the hearts and souls of the minority, the wealthy, the more favored minority. And it will be through this that this minority realizes: it cannot remain so, changes must be made, a different social order must come, a different social order must be brought about. The prerequisite was that people would be willing to act on their innermost spiritual impulses to liberate the masses of humanity. And then they suggested what should be done. And it was believed that if the minority, if the people who are the guiding, leading people, realize that what one wants to do is good, then there will be a general improvement in the situation of humanity.

A great deal of extraordinarily clever things have been said from this side, but all that has been undertaken in this direction is felt today by most representatives of the social question to be utopian. That is to say, today one no longer counts on the fact that one only needs to say: This is how one could set up the world – then the economic and political and legal inequality of people would end. Today, it is of no use appealing to the understanding and insight of those who are favored, who have the privilege, who are in possession of the means of production and the like. If I am to express what has been lost in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, I have to say that faith in the insight and goodwill of people has been lost. Therefore, the representatives of the social question, as I now understand it, say: it is all very well to come up with grandiose plans for how to organize the human world, but nothing comes of it; because no matter how beautiful the plans are, no matter how touching the words of appeal to the hearts and souls of the ruling minorities, nothing will happen. All these are worthless ideas, and worthless ideas, which paint the future, are in reality, to put it popularly, utopias. It is therefore useless, so they say, to imagine anything that should happen in the future, because there will be no one who lets go of his interests, who can be moved in terms of his conscience, in terms of his moral insight and so on. Faith in conscience and moral insight has been lost in the broadest circles, especially among the representatives of the social question. People say to themselves, people do not act according to their insight when they make social arrangements or when they live their social lives, they act according to their interests. And the haves naturally have an interest in keeping their possessions. The socially privileged have an interest in maintaining social privileges. It is therefore an illusion to count on the fact that you just need to say that people should do this or that. They just don't do it because they don't act out of their insight, but out of their interest.

In the broadest sense, it can be said that Karl Marx gradually, but really only gradually, came to accept this view. One can describe a whole series of epochs in the life of Karl Marx. In his youth, Marx was also an idealistic thinker and still thought in terms of the realizability of utopias, in the sense that I have just characterized it. But it was precisely he, and after him his friend Engels, who in the most radical way possible abandoned this calculation of people's insight. And when I characterize something in general that is actually a great story, I can say the following: Karl Marx finally came to the conclusion that the world could not get better in any other way than by calling on those people who have no interest in keeping their goods and privileges. These people cannot be seen at all, they must be left out of the calculation altogether, because they will never deign to respond in any way, no matter how beautifully they are preached to. — On the other hand, there is the great mass of proletarian laborers, and Karl Marx himself came to believe this during the period when what is now called the proletariat was basically only emerging in Central Europe. He saw the proletariat emerging from the different economic conditions in Central Europe. When he then lived in England, it was of course different. But at the time when Karl Marx developed from an idealist into an economic materialist, the modern proletariat was only just emerging in Central Europe.

And now he said to himself: this modern proletariat has completely different interests than the ruling minority, because it consists of people who own nothing but their labor, of people who cannot live in any other way than by putting their labor at the service of the propertied, namely at the service of those who own the means of production. If these workers leave their jobs, they are, and this was particularly true in those days in the most radical sense, thrown out onto the street. They have no other prospect before them than the possibility of serfdom for those who own the means of production. These people have a completely different interest from the others. It is in their interest that the entire previous social order should come to an end, that this social order should be transformed. You don't need to preach to them in order to be seized by their insight, but only by their selfishness, by their interests. You can rely on that. To preach to those on whose insight one should count, nothing comes of it, because people do not act on insight, they act only out of interest. So one cannot appeal to those to whom one should appeal to insight, but to those to whose interest one must appeal. They cannot help but advocate for the newer times out of inner compulsion. That is the egoism that Karl Marx has developed into. Therefore, he no longer believed that the progress of humanity to newer social conditions could come from any other human work than from the work of the proletariat itself. The proletariat can only, according to Karl Marx, strive for a renewal of human social conditions out of interest, out of its own selfish interests. And in so doing, the proletariat will liberate all of humanity, not out of philanthropy, but out of self-interest, because there can be nothing left but what people can achieve, people who are not attached to old goods and have nothing to lose by transforming the old goods.

So one says to oneself: On the one hand, there are the leading, guiding circles, who have certain rights that were granted to them in earlier times or that were enforced by them in earlier times, which they have inherited in their families, and they hold on to them. These leading, guiding circles are in possession of this or that, which they in turn inherit within their circles, their family, and so on. These circles, as the leading, guiding circles, always have something to lose in a transformation. Because, of course, if they lost nothing, no transformation would happen. The point is that those who have nothing should get something, those who have something could only lose. So one could only appeal to reason if this reason would give the possessing, leading class the impulse to want to lose something. They won't go for that. That was Karl Marx's view. So you have to appeal to those who have nothing to lose. That's why the Communist Manifesto ends with the words: Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, but they have everything to gain. Proletarians of all countries, unite!

Now you see, since the publication of the Communist Manifesto, this has become a conviction, so to speak, and today, when certain sentiments that are already influenced by this view are alive precisely in the majority of the proletariat, today one can no longer properly imagine what a tremendous turnaround in socialist thought took place around the mid-nineteenth century. But it would be good if you would take something like The Gospel of a Poor Sinner by Weitling, a journeyman tailor who wrote it not so long before the Communist Manifesto, and compare it with everything that was written after the Manifesto appeared! In this “Gospel of a Poor Sinner,” truly inspired by genuine proletarian sentiment, there is a language that is, one might say, in a certain sense even poetic, glowing language, but it is certainly a language that seeks to appeal to people's good will, to their insight. Weitling is convinced that something can be done with people's good will. And this conviction only disappeared around the middle of the nineteenth century. And the event that caused it to disappear is precisely the publication of the Communist Manifesto. And since that time, since 1848, we can actually trace what we call the social question today. For if we wanted to talk today like Saint-Simon, like Fourier, like Weitling – yes, we would really be preaching to the deaf. Because to a certain extent it is absolutely true that you can't achieve anything on the social issue if you appeal to the insight of the leading and guiding circles who have something. That is quite right. The leading and ruling circles have never admitted this, and they are hardly likely to do so today. They are not even aware that they do it, because unconscious forces in the human soul play an extraordinarily important role here.

You see, in the course of the nineteenth century, our intellectual culture has almost entirely become a cliché. It is a much more important social fact that we live in cliché with regard to intellectual culture, it is a much more important social fact than is usually thought. And so, of course, the members of the leading and ruling circles also talk about all kinds of nice things when it comes to the social question, and they themselves are often convinced that they already have the good will. But in reality they only believe that, it is only their illusion. The moment anything real is attacked in this regard, it immediately comes out that it is an illusion. We will talk about that later. But as I said, we can no longer talk as we did in the age of utopias. That is the real achievement that came through Karl Marx: he showed how humanity today is so enmeshed in illusionism that it is nonsense to count on anything but egoism. It must be counted with one day. Therefore, nothing can be achieved if we want to somehow count on selflessness, on goodwill, on the moral principles of people - I always say: with regard to the social question. And this change, which has led to our having to speak quite differently today than was possible in the first half of the nineteenth century, for example, with regard to the social question, this change has come with the Communist Manifesto. But it did not all come at once. Even after the Communist Manifesto, it was still possible, as you all know – some younger socialists have already forgotten the time – for a very different kind of social thinking, the kind of Ferdinand Lassalle, to capture hearts and souls well into the 1860s. And even after the death of Lassalle, which occurred in 1864, what was Lassallean socialism continued. Lassalle is one of those people who, despite the fact that the other way of thinking had already emerged, still counted on the power of ideas. Lassalle still wanted to reach people as such in their insight, in their social will above all. But this Lassallean tendency gradually diminished, while the Marxist tendency gained the upper hand, which only wanted to take into account the interests of that part of the human population that only had itself and its labor power. But it did not happen so quickly. Such a way of thinking only develops gradually in humanity.

In the 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s, it was certainly the case that people who belonged to the proletariat, or who were politically or socially dependent even if they were not proletarians, viewed their dependency in moral terms and morally condemned the non-dependent sections of the human population. In their minds, it was the maliciousness of the leading and guiding circles of the human population that they left the great mass of the proletariat in a state of dependency, that they paid them poorly and so on. If I may put it trivially, I can say that in the 1960s and 1970s, and well into the 1980s, a great deal of social indignation was manufactured and, from the point of view of social indignation, spoken. Then, in the mid-1980s, the strange turnaround actually only really occurred. The more leading personalities of the social movement then stopped talking about the social question out of moral indignation in the 1980s. That was the time when the great leaders, who were more or less still glowing with youthful zeal, were those whom you, who are younger, only saw die: Adler, Pernerstorfer, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Auer, Bebel, Singer and so on. It was precisely in the 1880s that these older leaders increasingly stopped preaching this indignant socialism. And now I would like to express it to you as if these leaders of socialism were expressing their innermost convictions when they transitioned from the old indignant socialism to their newer socialist worldview. You will find that what I am about to tell you is not in any of the books on the history of socialism. But anyone who lived through those times knows that if you left people to their own devices, that is how they would have spoken. So let us assume that in the 1880s, leading proponents of socialism were in discussion with others who were still bourgeois in their attitudes, and let us assume that there was a third group: bourgeois who were idealists, who wished everyone well and who would have agreed that everyone should be made happy. Then it could happen that the bourgeois declared that there would always have to be people who are poor and people who are rich and so on, because only that could maintain human society. Then perhaps the voice of one of those who were idealists would be heard, who were indignant that so many people had to live in poverty and dependence. Such a person might say: Yes, it must be achieved that it is made clear to these propertied people, the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, that they must let go of their possessions, that they must make arrangements by which the great masses come into a different position, and the like. Very fine speeches were made on these lines. But then someone who was just becoming interested in socialism and its development at the time raised his voice and said: What are you talking about, you're a child! It's all childishness, all nonsense. The people who are capitalists, who are entrepreneurs, they are all poor wretches who know nothing but what has been drummed into them by generations. If they were to hear that they should do it differently, they wouldn't even be able to do it, because they wouldn't come up with how they should do it. It doesn't even occur to them that something can be done differently. You must not accuse people, you must not morally condemn people, they cannot be morally condemned; the guys have grown into this, these poor darlings, into this whole environment, and that inspires them with the ideas they have. To morally accuse them is to misunderstand the laws of human development, to have illusions. These people can never want the world to take a different form. To speak of them with indignation is pure childishness. It has all become necessary in this way, and it can only become necessary again in another way. You see, you can't do anything with such childish fellows who believe that they can preach to the propertied, to the capitalists, that a new world order should be established, you can't do anything with such childish fellows. A new world order cannot be brought about with them. They only indulge in the belief that one can accuse these poor capitalists of making a different world.

I have to make the matter somewhat clear, so some things are said in sharp contours, but in such a way that you could hear the speeches I am talking about absolutely everywhere. When they were written, they were retouched a bit, written a bit differently, but that was the basis.

Then they continued: “With those guys – they are idealists who imagine the world in terms of an ideology – we can't do anything. We have to rely on those who have nothing, who therefore want something different from those who are connected with capitalist interests. And they will not strive for a change in their circumstances out of some moral principle either, but only out of covetousness, to have more than they have, to have an independent existence. In the 1980s, this way of thinking increasingly came to be seen as the development of humanity, no longer in the sense that the individual is particularly responsible for what he does, but that he does what he has to do out of his economic situation. The capitalist, the entrepreneur, exploits the others in the utmost innocence. The proletarian, on the other hand, will not revolutionize out of a moral principle, but in all innocence out of a human necessity, and will take the means of production, the capital, out of the hands of those who have it. This must take place as an historical necessity.

Now, you see, it was actually only in 1891 at the Erfurt Party Congress that all Lassallianism, which was still based on the insight of the people, was replaced by belief in the so-called “Erfurt Program”, which was intended to make Marxism the official view of the proletariat. Read the programs of the Gotha and Eisenach party conferences, and you will find two demands that are genuinely proletarian demands of the time, still connected to Lassallianism. The first demand was the abolition of the wage relationship, the second demand was the political equality of all people, the abolition of all political privileges. All proletarian demands up to the 1890s, up to the Erfurt Party Congress, which brought about the great turnaround, were based on these two demands. Take a close look at these two demands and compare them with the main demands of the Erfurt Party Congress.

What, then, were the main demands of the Erfurt Party Congress? They were: the transfer of private ownership of the means of production into common ownership, the administration of all production by a kind of large cooperative, into which the existing state must be transformed. If you compare the former program, which was the proletarian program of the 1880s, with what emerged from the Erfurt Party Program and has existed since the 1890s, you will say that the old Gotha and Eisenach programs still contain purely human demands, the demands of socialism: political equality of all people, abolition of the degrading wage relationship. In the early 1890s, the attitude that had emerged during the 1880s was already having an effect. What is more a demand of humanity has been transformed into a purely economic demand. You no longer read about the ideal of abolishing the wage relationship, you only read about economic demands.

Now you see, these things are connected with the gradual development of the idea that one had of externally bringing about a better social condition for humanity. It has often been said by people who still had ideals: what harm does it do to smash everything to smithereens, a different order must be brought about, so a revolution must come. Everything must be smashed to smithereens, the great Kladderadatsch must come, because only a better social order can arise from it, many people still said that in the 1880s, who were good, idealistic socialists. To which the others replied, who were in touch with the times, who had become the leaders, those who, as I said, are now buried, they said: It's all pointless, such sudden revolutions are senseless. The only thing that makes sense is to leave capitalism to its own devices. We see that in the beginning there were only small capitalists, then there were big ones, they joined forces with others, became capitalist groups. Capital has become more and more concentrated. We are in the process of capital becoming more and more concentrated. Then the time will come when there will actually only be a few large capitalist trusts and consortia. Then it will only be necessary for the proletariat, as the non-possessing class, to peacefully transfer the capitalists' property, the means of production, into community property one fine day, through parliamentary channels. This can be done quite well, but we must wait and see. Until then, things must develop. Capitalism, which is an innocent child anyway, it is not its fault that it is exploitative, that is brought about by historical necessity. But it also works in advance, it concentrates capital. They are then nicely together, then they only need to be taken over into the public domain. Nothing of rapid revolution, but slow development!

You see, the secret of the view, the public secret of the view, which underlies this, was discussed beautifully by Engels in the 1890s. He said: Why fast revolutions? What happens slowly under the development of modern capitalism, this massing of capitals, this concentration of capitals, it all works for us. We don't need to establish a common ground first, the capitalists are already doing that. We just need to transfer it into proletarian ownership. Therefore, Engels says, the roles have actually been reversed. We, who represent the proletariat, have no complaints about the way things have developed; it is the others who have complaints. Because the guys who are in the circles of the propertied people today have to say to themselves: We accumulate capital, but we accumulate it for others. You see, the guys actually have to worry about losing their capital. They get hollow cheeks, they get scrawny from these worries about what will become of it. We socialists are doing very well in this development. We will, says Engels, get bulging muscles and full cheeks and look like eternal life. Engels says this in an introduction he wrote in the 1890s, characterizing what is developing, and how one need only wait for the development, which is actually being taken care of by capitalism itself, ism itself, which then leads to what I have presented to you: the transfer of what capitalism has concentrated into the common ownership of those who have had nothing so far. That was also actually the mood with which the twentieth century was entered by the leading circles of the proletariat. And so it was thought, especially since the time when Marxism was no longer taken as it was in the 1890s, but when, as it was said, it had been subjected to revision, when the revisionists appeared, when those who are still alive but are old people, such as Bernstein, for example. Then the revisionists came. They said that the whole development could be advanced somewhat, because if the workers only work until the capitalists have gathered everything together, they will suffer hardship before then, they will have nothing in their old age. So assurances were made and so on. That's all well and good, but above all, they saw to it that the institutions that the leading classes had in political life were also appropriated. As you know, this is how trade union life in particular came about. And within the Socialist Party, there were two strongly divergent directions: the declared trade union party and the actual, as they said at the time, political party. The political party was more down-to-earth, a sudden revolution would be of no use, the development had to take place as I have just described. Therefore, it is important to prepare everything for the one point in time when capitalism is sufficiently concentrated and the proletariat has a majority in parliament. Everything must be pursued through parliamentarism, the acquisition of the majority, so that at the point in time when the means of production are taken over into public ownership, the majority is also there for this transfer. In this group of people, who thought very highly of the political party, at the end of the nineteenth century, not much was thought of the trade union movement. At that time, the latter was committed to establishing a kind of competition between itself and the entrepreneurs in order to obtain wage increases and similar things from the companies from time to time. In short, they set out to imitate the system of mutual negotiations that exists among the leading and managing circles themselves, and to extend it to the relationship between the leading circles and the proletariat. You know, of course, that those who were most accused by the representatives of the actual political socialist system were those who became most bourgeois under the trade union movement. And at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, you could see everywhere among those who were more attuned to the political system a great contempt for those people who had become completely absorbed in trade union life, such as the printers, for example, who had developed a completely different system after union life, again to the extreme.

These were two very strictly separate directions in social life: the trade unionists and those who were more inclined towards the political party, as they said. And within the trade unions, the printers in the printers' association were almost the model boys; the model boys who had earned the full recognition of the bourgeoisie. And I believe that just as there was a certain fear, a certain concern about the political socialist party, so little by little we saw the emergence of such good people as the people in the printers' association, and we were very pleased about that. One said to oneself: They are becoming bourgeois, you can always negotiate with them, it works quite well. When they strike with their wages, then we strike with our prices, which we demand. It works. And, right, it worked for the next few years, and people don't think beyond that. So one was very satisfied with this exemplary development of the trade union movement. Well, if I omit some of the more subtle nuances, one can say that these two directions more or less emerged until the times that were then surprised by the world war catastrophe. But unfortunately people did not learn everything from this world war catastrophe that should have been learned with regard to the social question.

As soon as one considers the conditions in Eastern Europe, in Central Europe, if one disregards the Anglo-American world and also partly the Romance world, if one limits oneself to Central and Eastern Europe, then we can say that history has not really turned out as one would have liked. History has always been defined as follows: capital is concentrated, then the majority is in parliaments, then capital is transferred into the ownership of the community, and so on. The catastrophe of the world wars has ensured that this cannot be expected to happen so smoothly today. Those who expected some kind of revolution have often been portrayed as childish. But basically, what has happened in the last four to five years? Let us keep clearly and distinctly in mind what has happened. You have often heard what happened in the last four or five years: in July 1914, the governments went a little bit mad or went mad in the head and rushed the people into a world war. The people believed that it was a world war, battles took place, although with the modern means of warfare, with the machine means, something completely different was there than in previous wars. There was no possibility of anyone becoming a particularly famous general, because ultimately it only came down to whether one side had a larger quantity of ammunition and other means of warfare, whether one side was better at producing the mechanical means of war than the other, or discovered a gas and the like that the others did not have. First one side won, then the other side discovered something, then the first side again; the whole thing was a terribly mechanical warfare. And all the talk about what happened here and there on the part of people was influenced by the phrase, it was nothing but a phrase. And little by little modern humanity will also realize in Central Europe what was put into it as a phrase when one or the other, who was actually nothing more than a somewhat twisted average soldier, was made a great commander in Central Europe. These things have only become possible under the influence of the phrase.

But what really happened? People did not realize this before the external events: in reality, while people believed that a world war was being waged – which was actually only a mask – a revolution was actually taking place. In reality, the revolution happened in these four to five years. People still do not know this today, they still do not pay attention to the fact that in reality the revolution has taken place. War is the external aspect, the mask; the truth is that the revolution has taken place. And because the revolution has taken place, the society of Central and Eastern Europe is in a completely different condition today, and one cannot start with what people had in mind for earlier situations. Today it is necessary that all the thoughts that were formed earlier be completely reorganized, that one think about things in a completely new way. And that is what has been attempted in the book 'The Essential Points of the Social Question', to calculate quite correctly with the situation in which we have ended up as a result of the very latest events. It is therefore no wonder that people, who cannot keep up fast enough in the socialist parties, encounter misunderstanding after misunderstanding in this book. If people would just take the trouble to examine their own thoughts a little, to examine what they say they want, they would see how they live under the influence of the ideas they formed up to 1914. That is the old habit.

These ideas that were held until 1914 have become so engrained in people's minds that they cannot be shaken off now. And what is the consequence? The consequence is that, although a new approach is needed today, although the revolution has taken place in Eastern and Central Europe, although we now need to build up not according to old ideas but according to new ideas, people nevertheless preach the old ideas. And what are the parties today, including the socialist parties? The socialist parties are also those who continue to preach this or that socialist gospel in the old way, as they preached until July 1914; for there is no difference in these party programs from the earlier ones, except at most the difference that comes from outside. For those who know the issues, there is terribly little that is new, indeed nothing at all that is new, said in the individual party groupings. The old party ideas are being trotted out again. Of course, there is a slight difference: if you have a copper kettle and tap it, it makes one sound; if you tap a wooden barrel in exactly the same way, it makes a different sound. But the tapping can be exactly the same. It is the fact that it sounds different that depends on what you tap. That is how it is when people come up with their party programs today; what is contained in these old party programs is actually the old party storekeeper. It just sounds a little different today because the social conditions are different, just as it would with a copper kettle and a wooden barrel. When the Independent Socialist Party or the Majority Socialists or the Communists speak, they speak the old party phrases, and it sounds different because there is a copper kettle and a wooden barrel. In reality, many have learned absolutely nothing. But what matters is that one learns something, that one is aware of this terrible world war, as it is called, but which is actually a world revolution.

And here one can truly say: in the broad masses, people are prepared to hear something new. But with the broad masses it is like this: they listen to what the leaders say. There is a good understanding, a good, healthy human understanding in the broad, uneducated masses, and one could actually always count on understanding when one presents something timely, something correct, in the best sense of the word timely. This is partly due to the fact that the masses are uneducated. But as soon as people enter the kind of education that has been available for the last three to four centuries, this godly quality of being unspoiled ceases to exist. If you look at what today's bourgeois school education is, from elementary school up to university – and it will be at its worst if the socialist unified school is founded now, because then everything that has been done wrong by the bourgeois elementary school will be present to the greatest extent – what is taught in schools distorts minds and alienates them from life. And you have to get out of all that stuff, you really have to stand on your own two feet in the spiritual life if you want to get out of this education. But you see, it is through this education that the great and small proletarian leaders have become. They had to acquire it through this education; this education is in our schools and in popular writings, it is everywhere. And then you start to get a dried-up brain, no longer accessible to facts. Instead, you stop at party programs and opinions that you have grafted and hammered into yourself. Then even the world revolution can come, you always whistle the old programs at it.

You see, this is essentially what the book “The Essentials of the Social Question” and the lectures intended in many respects. For once, real account was taken of what the proletariat absolutely needs today, what is necessary in the present situation. This was understood at the beginning, but then it was not understood by those who are the leaders of the proletariat in the various party groupings. That is, I do not want to be too unjust, and I do not want to press the truth; I do not want to claim, for example, that these leaders do not understand this book; because I cannot assume that they have read it, that they know it. I would not claim something correct if I said: they cannot understand the book. But they cannot bring themselves to understand that something else should be necessary than what they have been thinking for decades. Their brains have become too dry and too rigid for that. And so they stop at what they have thought for a long time and find that what is the opposite of all utopia is that utopia. For you see, the book fully anticipates that today one can no longer operate in utopia in the sense of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon and so on; but also that one can never again take the standpoint: development will happen by itself. For what Marx and Engels saw, what developed, and from which they drew their conclusions, cannot be drawn from today, because the world war has swept it away in its true form, it is no longer there. Anyone who says the same thing today as Marx and Engels says something that Marx would never have said, because he has become afraid of his followers: As far as I am concerned, I am not a Marxist. — And today he would say: At that time the facts were still different; I drew my conclusions from facts that had not yet been modified and changed as much as the world war has changed everything.

But you see, those people who cannot learn from events, who today are of an attitude as the old Catholics were towards their bishops and popes, they cannot even imagine that something like that must also be further developed in the sense of the facts, as Marxism is. Therefore, the facts are taking place, and people are still whistling and hissing the same things that they whistled and hissed before the world war. The bourgeois do it, but so do the socialists. The broadest circles do it. The bourgeoisie do it, of course, quite sleepily, with completely sleepy souls; the others do it in such a way that they are indeed in the thick of it and see the collapse, but they do not want to reckon with the facts that it reveals. We simply have to have something new among people today. And that is why it is necessary to understand something that is not utopian, but that actually takes the facts into account. If those who are so concerned with the facts call it a cross-current, then one could actually be quite satisfied. Because if people go straight ahead with what they are doing, if they call it a straight line, then, in order to do something sensible, you have to shoot in a cross-current to take the sensible thing in a different direction.

But you see, those who do see the rational should delve into what is presented here. And these evenings can be used for that.

What has been derived from the facts has long been tried in practice, and so we have been meeting for weeks – I do not need to repeat all these things, you can still ask questions or discuss the pros and cons after this lecture – to get what we call the works council up and running. We have tried to create this council out of the facts that are currently necessary, to create it in such a way that it comes from the economic sphere, and not from the political sphere, which cannot provide the basis for economic life. For if we look the facts in the eye today, we have to stand firmly on the ground that is represented here as that of the threefold social organism. And anyone who does not want this threefold structure today is acting against the historical necessity of human development. Today, as I have often explained, the spiritual life must be placed on its own, the economic life on its own, and the legal or political life must be administered democratically. And in the economic life, the first step towards a truly social organization is to be taken with works councils. But how can this be done? Only by first asking the question: Well, there is the impulse of the threefold social organism, which is new compared to all previous party mummies; is there anything else? Today, fools claim that ideas are just buzzing through the air. If you listen to the discussions, they bring up all sorts of negative things, but they don't bring up anything that could be compared to the threefold order of the social organism. What comes from the socialist side is all wishy-washy. As was said in a newly founded magazine in a review of the threefold order, ideas are just hanging in the air. The point is, first of all, to raise this question and be clear about it: is there nothing else? Then one adheres to the threefold social order until one can refute it in an objective way, so that one can put something objectively equivalent alongside.

The old party programs can no longer be discussed; the world war has discussed them. Those who really understand know that these old party mummies have been refuted by the world war catastrophe. But then, if one cannot answer this question by putting something else alongside it, then one can honestly say to oneself, if one wants to go further: So let us work in the sense of the threefold order of the social organism. Let us be honest: the old party contexts have lost their meaning. We must work in terms of threefolding. When I spoke in Mannheim the day before yesterday, a gentleman came forward at the end and said: What Steiner said is nice, but it is not what we want. We do not want a new party in addition to all the old parties. The people who want that should join the old parties and work within them. I could only say in response: I have been following political life very closely for a long time, when the gentleman who spoke was far from being born. And although I have become acquainted with everything that has somehow functioned as a social force throughout my life, I have never been able to work within any party or be a member of one, and it does not occur to me, now at the end of my sixth decade, to somehow become a party person. I do not want to have anything to do with any party, not even one I founded myself. No one need fear that a new party will be founded by me, because I have learned that every party becomes foolish after some time through the necessities of nature, precisely because I have never got involved with any party. And I have learned to regret the people who do not see through this. Therefore, no one need fear that a new party will be added to the old ones. That is why a new party has not been founded either, but the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism has come together to represent the ideas of the threefold organism – the non-utopian but realistic nature of which is, after all, understood by a number of people. But those people who understand this should also honestly and sincerely profess it.

For this must not happen either: there is a play in which a cock crows in the morning, and every time the cock crows, the sun rises. Now, the cock cannot see the connection at once, so it believes that when it crows, the sun follows its call, coming because it has crowed, it has caused the sun to rise. If someone in a non-social life, like this cockerel crowing on the dung heap and wanting to make the sun rise, finally succumbs to such a delusion, it does not matter. But if, under certain circumstances, the idea of the works councils, which are truly economic on the basis of the threefold social order, were to flourish here and those people who cultivate it because the impulse of the threefold organism has brought this idea into fl but then wanted to deny the origin and believe because it was said that the works councils would come, that would be the same error, and a very disastrous one. But that must not happen. What is happening in this direction, what has been tackled here, must not be detached; it must remain in the context of the correctly understood impulse of the threefold social order.

Those who want to realize the works council in the sense of this impulse can never allow themselves to be drawn into the one-sided idea that only the works council would be founded and that there would always be crowing about “works councils, works councils”. That is not enough. It only makes sense if, at the same time, one strives for everything that is to be achieved through the impulse of the tripartite social organism. That is what matters. Because if you really want to understand what is in this book, then you have to take the point of view that can be learned from the facts that the last four to five years have offered. If you see through these facts, they will have the same effect on you as if you had lived through centuries, and the party programs will have the same effect on you as if their supporters had slept for centuries. Today this must be clearly and unreservedly faced.

What I have told you now, I could just as easily have written as a preface to this book. But in the last few months we have seen how rigid and unfruitful the party programs currently are. But it would be useful if that were the preface to this book. Much of what is not in it, I have told you today, because you have, it seems to me, decided to come together here to study the serious social issues of the present day in a proper way, taking up where this book leaves off. But before doing so, it must be clearly understood that we cannot continue in the old style of party programs and party patterns, but that we must decide to approach the facts realistically today and put an end to everything that does not take into account these new facts. Only in this way will you grasp in the right way what is to be achieved with this impulse of the threefold social organism. And you will grasp it in the right way when you find that every sentence is designed to be put into action, to be transformed into immediate reality. And most of those who say they do not understand it or that it is utopian and the like, they simply lack the courage to think so strongly today that their thoughts can intervene in reality. Those who always crow: “dictatorship of the proletariat, conquest of power, socialism,” they usually think little of it. Therefore, reality cannot be intervened with these word templates. But then they come and say that something is being offered that is utopian. A utopia only comes into being in the minds of people who understand nothing about it. Therefore, one should make clear to these people, in a somewhat modified form, what Goethe once said with reference to something else, laughing at the physiologist Haller, who was an ossified naturalist.

Haller had coined the phrase:

No creative spirit
No creative spirit can penetrate.
Happy the man to whom she
The outer shell!

Goethe resisted this, saying:

Into the heart of nature.
Oh, you philistines!
No created spirit can penetrate
---
Happy the man to whom she The outer shell!
I have heard this repeated for sixty years;
I curse it, but furtively,
---
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
All at once it is everything.
Just test yourself most of all
Whether you are the kernel or the shell.

To those who speak of the threefold social organism as a utopia, one would also like to say: Examine yourself most of all to see whether what haunts your brain is utopia or reality. You will find that all the crowers mostly have utopias in them and that is why the reality in their own heads also becomes a utopia or an ideology, or whatever they call it. That is why it is so difficult to get through with reality today, because people have blocked their access to reality so much.

But we have to realize that we have to work seriously, otherwise we will not be able to translate our will into action. And it is essential that we translate our will into action. And if we had to say goodbye to everything because we recognize it as an error, then, in order to be able to move from will to action, we would have to turn to the truth, which we want to see through as such. Because nothing else can lead from volition to action but the ruthless, courageous pursuit of truth. This should actually be written as a motto, as a motto, in front of the studies of this evening.

I wanted to give you a preface to these study evenings tonight. I hope that this preface will not deter you from attending these study evenings so that, before it is too late, thoughts that contain the seeds of action can be fruitfully introduced into the world. The book “The Essentials of the Social Question” is written in a special way in two directions. Firstly, it is written in such a way that it is actually based entirely on reality. This is something that some people do not consider when reading the book. I can also understand that it is not fully considered today. I have already spoken here in this circle, but not everyone who was there today was present, about how people really think today. I referred in particular to the example of the professor of economics, Lujo Brentano, who delivered it so nicely in the previous issue of the “Yellow Sheet”. — I will briefly repeat it because I want to tie something to it. This luminary of today's economics at the university – he is, so to speak, the first – has developed the concept of the entrepreneur and has tried to characterize the features of the entrepreneur based on his enlightened thinking. Well, I don't need to list the first and second features; as a third feature, he states that the entrepreneur is the one who puts his means of production at his own risk and expense in the service of the social order. Now he has this concept of the entrepreneur, and he applies it. He comes to the strange conclusion that the proletarian worker of today is actually also an entrepreneur, because he corresponds to this concept of the entrepreneur in terms of the first, second and third characteristics. This is because the worker has his own labor power as a means of production, and he has control over it. In relation to this, he turns to the social process at his own risk and expense. Thus this luminary of political economy very aptly incorporates the concept of the proletarian laborer into his concept of the entrepreneur. You see, that is precisely how people who form concepts think, who have no sense at all when it comes to demanding that concepts should be truly applicable to reality. But however little you may be inclined to accept this today, it is safe to say that well over ninety percent of everything that is taught or printed today operates with such concepts. If you want to apply them to reality, it is just as impossible as with Lujo Brentano's concept of the entrepreneur. This is the case in science, in social science, everywhere. That is why people have forgotten how to understand anything that works with realistic concepts.

Take the basis of the threefold social order. No, you can't lay these foundations in the most diverse ways, because life needs many foundations. But one thing is clear: in modern times, what might be called the impulse of democracy has emerged. Democracy must consist of every person who has come of age being able to establish their legal relationship, directly or indirectly, with every other person who has come of age in democratic parliaments. But if we honestly and sincerely want to bring this democracy into the world, then we cannot manage spiritual matters in the sense of this democracy, because then every person who has come of age would have to decide on matters they do not understand. Spiritual matters must be regulated on the basis of understanding. This means that they must be left to their own devices. They cannot be administered at all in a democratic parliament, but must have their own administration, which cannot be democratic, but must be based on the matter itself. The same applies to economic life. Here, too, economic experience and inner life must be the basis for administration. Therefore, economic life, on the one hand, and spiritual life, on the other, must be excluded from the democratic parliament. Thus arises the threefolded social organism.

In Tübingen, as I have already mentioned, there is Professor Heck, who said that there is absolutely no need to admit that there is something degrading for the proletarian in the normal wage relationship, where one is paid for one's work, because Caruso is also in a wage relationship and there is no difference in principle. Caruso sings and gets paid, and the ordinary proletarian works and also gets paid; and he, as a professor, also gets paid when he lectures. The only difference between Caruso and the proletarian is that Caruso gets thirty to forty thousand marks for one evening and the proletarian gets a little less. But that is not a fundamental difference, only a difference in the amount of the wage. And so, this witty professor says, there is absolutely no reason to feel that the wage is degrading. He does not feel that way either. — That is just by the way. But now this clever professor has also written a long article against the threefold social order. He starts from the premise that if we organize in three, then we will end up with three parliaments. And now he shows that this does not work with three parliaments. Because he says: In the economic parliament, the small craftsman will not understand the points of view of the big industrialist and so on. — There the good professor has formed his ideas about the threefold order, and he attacks these ideas, which I find much more stupid than Professor Heck finds them — I would also criticize them to the ground —, but he has made them himself. The point is not to have three parliaments running alongside each other, but to take out what does not belong in any parliament. He makes three parliaments and says: That does not work. — So one lives in unrealistic terms and judges the rest accordingly.

Now, almost the only thing that has been introduced into political economy, into economics, are unreal concepts. But you see, I couldn't write a whole library listing all the economic terms at a time when time is of the essence. Therefore, of course, this book contains a multitude of terms that need to be discussed appropriately. For example, I need only draw attention to the following:

In a time that we have outgrown, social conditions arose basically only through conquest. Some territory was occupied by one people or race; another people burst in and conquered the area. Those races or peoples who were there earlier were pushed down to do the work. The conquering people took possession of the land, and that is how a certain relationship between conquerors and conquered arose. The conquerors had possession of the land because they were conquerors. Thus they were the economically strong, the conquered were the economically weak. This is how what became a legal relationship developed. Therefore, in almost all older epochs in historical development, legal relationships based on conquest were established, that is to say, privileges and rights of disadvantage. Now the times came when conquests could not be made freely. You can study the difference in free and bound conquest. If you look, for example, at the early Middle Ages, how certain peoples, the Goths, had pushed over to the south, but into fully occupied areas, they were led to do different things in terms of the social order than when the Franks moved to the west and did not find fully occupied areas there. This resulted in different conqueror rights. In more recent times, not only the rights arising from conquests and dependent on land and soil have been in force; the rights of people who had property have been added to these, and who, through economic power, were now able to appropriate the means of production. To what is meant by land law in the modern sense was added the ownership of the means of production, that is, the private ownership of capital. This then gave rise to legal relationships based on economic relationships. You see, the legal relationships arose entirely from the economic relationships.

Now people come along and want to have the concepts of economic power, of the economic significance of land, they want to have the concepts of operating resources, of means of production, of capitals, and so on. Yes, but they have no real insight into the way things work. They take the superficial facts and do not realize what is actually behind the land rights, behind the power relations in relation to the means of production. All these things are, of course, taken into account in my book. That is the right way of thinking. When the word “rights” is used, it is used out of an awareness of how rights have developed over the centuries; when the word “capital” is used, it is used out of an awareness of how capital has come about. Care is taken to avoid using a term that is not fully understood in terms of its origin. That is why these terms are used differently than in the usual textbooks today. But something else is also taken into account.

Let us take a specific fact. It is true that Protestantism arose at some point. In history books, it is often told that Tetzel went around Central Europe and that people were outraged by the sale of indulgences and the like. But that was not the only reason; that is only the surface view. The main thing behind it was the fact that there was a banking house in Genoa, on behalf of which, not on behalf of the Pope, this seller of indulgences went around in Germany, because this banking house had granted the Pope a loan for his other needs. The whole story was a capitalist enterprise. In this example of a capitalist undertaking of the sale of indulgences, where even spiritual things were traded, you can study, or rather, when you start to study, you gradually come to the conclusion that ultimately all capital power goes back to the superiority of the spiritual. And so it is. Study how capital actually came to its power, and you will find the superiority of the spiritual everywhere. It is true that the clever and resourceful have more power than those who are not clever or resourceful. And in this way, much of the accumulation of capital comes about justifiably, but also unjustifiably. This must be taken into account when considering the concept of capital. From such real studies one comes to understand that capital is based on the development of spiritual power, and that to the land rights, to the rights of the conquerors, from another side has been added the power of the old theocratic spirit. Much of what was then transferred to modern capitalism originated from the old church. There is a secret connection between modern capitalist power and the power of the old church. And all this has become mixed up in the modern power state. In it you find the remnants of the old theocracy, the remnants of the old conquests. And finally the modern conquests were added, and the most modern conquest is now supposed to be the conquest of the state by socialism. But in reality it must not be done that way. Something new must be created that completely does away with these old concepts and impulses. Therefore, it will be important that in these studies we also deal with the concepts that underlie them. Today, anyone who wants to talk about social issues must give us a precise explanation of what is right, what is power, and what is actually a good, a good in the form of goods and the like. It is in this area that the greatest mistakes are made. I will point out one mistake, for example. If you do not pay attention to it, you will misunderstand much of my book.

Today, there is a widespread belief that goods are stored labor, that capital is also stored labor. — You may say that it is harmless to have such concepts. It is not harmless, because such concepts poison all social thinking. — What exactly is the situation with labor, labor as the expenditure of labor power? Yes, it is the case that there is a big difference between, for example, wearing out my physical muscle strength by doing sports and chopping wood. When I do sports, I wear out my physical muscle strength, and I can get just as tired and need to replace my muscle strength as someone who chops wood. I can apply the same amount of work to sports as to chopping wood. The difference is not that it has to be replaced; labor power must naturally be replaced, but the difference is that the one labor power is used only for me, in the selfish sense, the other in the social sense for society. It is the social function that distinguishes these things. If I say that something is stored-up labor, I do not take into account that labor actually ceases to be in something the moment work is no longer done. I cannot say that capital is stored-up labor, but rather that labor is only there as long as it is being performed.

But in our present social order, capital retains the power to summon labor again at any time. The disastrous thing is not in what Marx means, that capital is accumulated labor, but in the institution that capital gives the power to summon new labor, not accumulated labor, but new labor always again into its service. Much depends on this. Much depends on this, that clear concepts based on reality are developed. And this book of mine is based on such concepts, which are now fully embedded in reality. It does not rely on such concepts, which were quite useful for the education of the proletariat. Today, when we are supposed to build something, these concepts no longer make sense.

You see, when I say: capital is accumulated labor - that is good for the education of the proletariat. It got the feelings it was supposed to get. It didn't matter that the concept was fundamentally wrong. You can educate with fundamentally wrong concepts. But you can only build something with the right concepts. Therefore, we need correct concepts in all areas of the economy today and cannot continue to work with false concepts. I am not saying this out of frivolity, that you can also educate with false concepts, but rather out of general educational principles. When you tell fairy tales to children, you do not want to build something with the ideas that you develop. In education, something else comes into consideration than in the construction of physical reality. There one must work with real concepts. Something like: “Capital is stored labor,” that is not a concept. Capital is power and gives power to put newly emerging labor into its service. That is a real concept with factual logic. One must work with true concepts in these areas. That is attempted with these things. Therefore, I believe that much of what is not in there in terms of definitions of the terms, in terms of characterization of the terms, must be worked out. And anyone who can then contribute to the work of understanding what is needed to understand the way of thinking, the basis of this book, will make a very good contribution to these study evenings.

So it is particularly important that what — well, it wouldn't be true to say that you would have to write an encyclopedia if you wanted to clarify all the terms — but what is now “capital” can be done on such a study evening. Because without a clear understanding today of what capital actually is, what a commodity is, what labor is, what law is—without these concepts we will make no headway. And these concepts are completely confused in the broadest circles; above all, they must be set straight.

In this lecture, Rudolf Steiner indicates the magnitude of the questions at stake and suggests that a mechanisation of the spirit, vegetation of the soul, and animalisation of the body will take place unless humanity is able to find a new relationship to the spirit. It is lecture 13 of 14 from the lecture series: Reorganization of the Social Organism.

Every individual has the feeling that part of his being is super-sensible, whatever function it has within his soul. And anthroposophical spiritual science—the name applying to what I have been presenting for many years—has something it wants to say about this feeling becoming an inner scientific certainty in the consciousness of present-day mankind. However, there are still all manner of prejudices against the anthroposophical approach to knowledge of man's super-sensible being and to knowledge of the super-sensible world altogether. But anthroposophy cannot speak about the super-sensible being of man in the kind of way people would still like to hear it spoken of in many circles today. For we should imagine, in fact, we should be certain that speaking about it in that way would not satisfy people's present-day aspirations for knowledge, which are none the less intense although they may still be unconscious. Nowadays when people pass judgment on one or another aspect of anthroposophy you constantly hear the remark that anthroposophy is difficult to understand. They say that anthroposophy obtains its knowledge from regions one does not need to go to in order to reach the super-sensible. They emphasise the difference between anthroposophy's search for knowledge and ‘simple faith’ based on the creed and the Bible, and they keep on stressing that anyone who has found the inner strength of this ‘simple faith’ does not need anthroposophical spiritual science.

If anthroposophy were to speak along the lines that people nowadays call ‘simple faith,’ it would certainly consider it was failing to do justice to the deepest aspirations of the times. It would have to admit, in that case, that although it was presenting a point of view still popular with many people who find it less difficult to understand than anthroposophy, this point of view is nevertheless no longer appropriate for the real soul needs of present-day mankind. I wanted this to be said because it is just from this direction that objections are continually being raised against the views which arise from a valid consideration of man's present-day needs, views which are held by the kind of spiritual science that will be spoken of here. This kind of spiritual science is convinced that certain inter-relationships exist about which many people nowadays have the most detrimental illusions. Today, however, we are living in an age that has a long way to go before confusion and chaos are over. We are entering a difficult period of human evolution. Anyone able to look more deeply into the evolution of mankind and seeing the amount of elemental unrest felt today throughout the whole of the civilised world, of which everything of the nature of inner tensions is only the ripples on the surface, knows that this has a mysterious connection with that obstinate attitude of ‘simple faith’ that wants to rely solely on the creed and the Bible. The parts of man's being that are attracted by this so-called ‘faith’ shut him off from those very forces that could bring order into chaos and confusion at the present stage of human evolution. If those people who speak in the way I have indicated would now deepen their knowledge somewhat, they would have to see all that is bringing mankind into such terrible conflict and chaos. Then they would have to admit that they now lack certain forces that they failed to develop because of their determination not to go beyond their so-called ‘simple faith,’ which they and others find so convenient. They would also have to admit that there is an inner relationship between the unrest of today and this harping on ‘simple faith.’ A causal connection there certainly is, today's elemental restlessness being the result of this obdurate harping.

I am not speaking out of subjective feelings but out of the very kind of knowledge I would like to tell you more about today, namely an inner scientific perception. It is this that has moved anthroposophy to bring knowledge of the super-sensible down from spirit heights. Insofar as the so-called believers in a simple faith point to the super-sensible, their knowledge has also come to them from spirit heights. But they have no wish at all to ascend to these heights.

This had to be said first of all, because today, in particular, what I will have to say concerning the super-sensible being of man will need to be brought into connection with a number of those spiritual scientific facts that people on the one hand find really incomprehensible—though if they were to go into them more thoroughly they would find they absolutely accorded with common sense; and that people on the other hand consider unnecessary, because they do not find they accord with the ‘simple faith’ they think they ought to advocate. I attempted the day before yesterday to characterise the paths by which the kind of spiritual science we mean attains to knowledge. On that occasion I began by saying that on the whole men of present times have very little desire to know about what is taking place unconsciously in the depths of their being. On the one hand people think the body is something external to themselves, and that they can gain knowledge of it either by observing it with sense perception or by considering it according to the outlook laid down by natural science. On the other hand they think that their thinking, sense perception, feeling and willing comprise the whole of their inner being. However, the path of knowledge I indicated the day before yesterday shows that the life of the external body, on the one hand, and the soul experiences of thinking, feeling and willing we have in ordinary consciousness, on the other, do not comprise the whole of man's being. The essential point is that man as spiritual investigator does not stop at the level of ordinary consciousness but takes the development of his soul into his own hands, as it were. In the realm of thought, in particular, he raises thinking consciously onto a higher level than in ordinary life, and in the other direction makes his will nature consciously into an object of self-education. Thus the development of soul forces beyond the level of ordinary life is the only thing that can lead in an anthroposophical sense to knowledge of the super-sensible world.

Now what is this development of thinking? It consists of making human thinking or human visualising stronger than it is in ordinary life, and doing so in a completely systematic way based on the experiences of man's inner soul nature. In ordinary life our thinking or visualising is merely a spectator. And man is conscious of the fact that he actually thinks best in ordinary life when he allows his experiences of life or of external nature to work on him in such a way that he forms his mental pictures as a passive spectator. With the methods described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you can bring activity into the world of thought. You will bring such activity into the world of thought that you will be conscious that you are not passive whilst you think, but are as active as you are when you use your limbs, even though this is an inner activity. Will must be brought into thinking, the kind of will, however, that does not make the thinking arbitrary, but adapts it to the phenomena of the world. So it is a particularly good preparation for the spiritual investigator if he precedes his spiritual scientific endeavours with a thoroughly disciplined study in the natural scientific method, thus training himself not to think arbitrarily but according to the phenomena of nature itself. But he also has to free himself from this mere looking at nature. His newly acquired capacity of systematic thinking and of observing natural phenomena must now be developed as a thought activity independent of physical phenomena. A spiritual scientific training of thinking is an activating of thinking. This is a fact that many people still disbelieve today—we are only at the beginning of spiritual scientific knowledge—namely the fact that man's thinking and whole activity of mental picturing really takes on quite a different character than it has in everyday life.

If we think back to the dreamlike mental images of early childhood and compare these with the clear thinking of adulthood, we find that man's inner life of soul has undergone a change. A similar change takes place in anyone who develops his thinking in the way we have described and progresses from ordinary thinking to active thinking. He feels as though he has awakened from the normal condition of existence, and, provided we do not use the word in a dubious mystical sense, we can certainly say that this activated thinking ‘awakens’ man.

By learning to use this active thinking man acquires an entirely new way of ‘seeing’ things, a new way of seeing the qualities of the human body, to begin with. Active thinking ascends to the kind of seeing in which the human body appears in quite a new way. Above all, a tremendous difference is to be seen between the form of man's head organisation and the organisation that comes to expression in man's mobile limbs and everything that is connected with these. By means of the kind of seeing that active thinking opens up we come to realise that the human head is of an entirely different character, even in its bodily nature, from the rest of the body, particularly the limb organisation. Inner perception shows us how thinking, especially this activated thinking, is related to the whole nature of the human head. We learn to know in a new way what the human body really is. For as our soul development progresses by means of this active thinking there enters consciously into this active thinking the kind of life experience that is not solely of the type that enters ordinary thinking or visualising.

Life experiences that enter ordinary thinking or visualising have a certain peculiarity. We experience the world within this ordinary visualising. We experience it through our sense perceptions and the thoughts that come to meet them. But we keep a bit of this experience back for ourselves, too. We would not have our whole human nature within ourselves if each external impression did not leave behind it the possibility of our remembering it. It is just this memory that keeps our whole human personality intact, and we only have to think of the devastation wrought in the human personality by any kind of loss of memory to realise what the power of memory means for the cohesion of the human personality in ordinary life. But the force that enables us to keep memories alive, those memories acquired by opening ourselves to the outer world and forming mental images of it via our sense perception, this force remains unconscious. This is something that man carries out unconsciously. But when it comes to the experiences of active, super-sensible thinking, it is different. It would be quite impossible to bring what is acquired in a really super-sensible way, through active thinking, into any sort of connection with the human personality if we were dependent on the activity that works unconsciously within us. Something we have to learn about the acquisition of super-sensible knowledge is that we are not taking something unconsciously into the body by means of which we can later on awake a memory, on the contrary the imprinting of something in the physical body, the taking in of it, that normally takes place as an unconscious activity and works on as memory, has to be carried out consciously by the spiritual investigator. The higher, super-sensible experience gained by activated thinking would never come in place of an absolutely dreamy experience if we could not acquire the capacity to introduce this super-sensible experience to the body consciously.

We can only introduce it, however, to the head organisation. But then this head organisation teaches us something that eludes ordinary science, but which sheds great light on the mystery of man's being. We discover that when we make a conscious imprint of what we experience in active thinking we are constantly bringing about a process in the human head that is not an intensification of life but a breaking down of life, a partial dying. This is a significant and moving experience acquired through spiritual science: In order to remember super-sensible knowledge, we have to imprint it into our head organisation, and it is immediately evident that this imprinting does not bring about an enlivening process but a process of partial dying, a breaking down of the head organisation's life processes. This teaches us how the bodily head organisation actually functions in man. We discover something that is normally not known because it remains unconscious, namely that our whole thinking activity or mental imagery is not something that comes from forces of life, as materialists believe, but something that comes from the damping down of the life of the head. It arises because whilst our soul is active our head is constantly in a state of partial dying. We also discover a fact that strikes a man of today as being absurd: if the thinking activity of the head were to spread into the rest of man's body, he would immediately die.

Thus spiritual science teaches us that the death-bringing principle is constantly at work in part of man's bodily nature. We learn that because our head is organised that way, death is at work in us throughout our life. You see, this approach, that people in many circles today imagine has nothing useful to offer, leads to the kind of conceptions that completely contradict the usual views. We find that this imprinting that I have just described as a conscious process which must be carried out by active thinking, cannot actually directly imprint into man's physical organisation the super-sensible world where the experiences have been undergone. We find out the real fact that eludes external sense observation. We discover that incorporated into the ordinary life of the senses is what I took the liberty, in my books on spiritual science, to call the etheric body or body of formative forces. We discover a delicate body of light between the activity of active thinking and man's physical body, particularly in the head organisation. This finer body is the formative force—a thing that modern natural science makes fun of—underlying the physical body, and it is discovered in this way by super-sensible sight, which at this stage we can call an Imagination. We discover a higher, super-sensible member of man's being. At this point we experience an extraordinarily shattering phenomenon. When we imprint our super-sensible experiences into our etheric body and on into our physical body, we feel as though we were no longer master of our ego. We thought our ego filled our soul being through and through, but now it feels as though it were being sucked into the body.

The way to overcome this phenomenon is to have other soul exercises going parallel with the activating of thinking. These outer exercises are to do with disciplining the will. Although I characterised them the day before yesterday, I want to refer to them again briefly. I described how man changes from one week to the next, from one hour to the next, from one year to the next. We know we are becoming a different person. Our experiences are not the kind of thing we have, but the kind of thing that is perpetually making us into a different person. But nowadays an unconscious activity is also at work here. Present-day man gives himself up to external experiences. If he goes so far as to observe his inner being to any extent, he may notice that on the whole he is becoming a different person from week to week, year to year, and decade to decade; that his soul constitution is changing. But he does not take this development of his soul constitution in hand. This, however, the spiritual investigator has to do. He has to work on himself in such a way that his own will controls the progress he makes from one year to the next and from one decade to the next, and this also has to be systematic. He has to practise self-discipline and self-education systematically and fully consciously, not merely arbitrarily or according to the pattern of ordinary more or less unconscious existence. He has to bring under the control of his own will what otherwise takes place in us involuntarily.

This calls forth another experience of a kind that is very far removed from present-day consciousness; we realise that we have to put aside a scientific prejudice that prevails nowadays in a particular realm of science and has taken general hold of people's minds. This scientific view—which I want to mention because it could be the very thing that might make my present argument intelligible—is that man has two kinds of nerves: the so-called sensory nerves and the motor nerves. The sensory nerves run from our sense organs (so people believe) or from the surface of the skin to the nerve centre and convey perceptions in the same way as telegraph wires. The so-called motor nerves, the will nerves, go out from the nerve centre. A kind of demonic being is imagined as residing in the central nervous system, although of course present-day science will not admit this, and he is supposed to change what comes in through the telegraph wire nerves from the senses to the telegraph exchange into will through the motor nerves, the will nerves. People have thought out such beautiful theories that are really extremely clever, especially those derived from the terrible illness tabes, to explain this theory of the two kinds of nerves. Nevertheless this theory is nothing else than the result of a lack of knowledge of super-sensible man. It would lead too far for me to go into it now—although tabes proves it if we observe it correctly—but there is no difference between the sensory and the motor nerves. The same as with the so-called sensory nerves, the function of which is to convey external perceptions, the only function of the so-called motor nerves is to convey internal perceptions when we walk or move our arms. The motor nerves are sensory nerves too, only their function is to perceive our movements.

The reason why people believe the motor nerves to be the bearer of the will is only because they have no idea what is the real bearer of the will. We only discover what this is when we really practise the kind of self-discipline of the will I was speaking about: become actively engaged in self-education and become at the same time independent of what the body does with us, so to speak. Then we discover that it is not the motor nerves that create will, for they only perceive its movements, but that it is created by a third member of man's being, a super-sensible member that we could actually call the soul. I have called it the astral body in my books, though people do not like the term yet. Again it is by means of direct vision, acquired through this self-disciplining of the will, that we get to know this super-sensible member of man's being; and we discover that it is this ‘soul body,’ if I may call it that, that is the soul and spirit entity underlying all the bodily movements arising out of will. Nerves are there only to convey the perception of movement. If we take this disciplining of the will to further stages, however, we must then ascend from the level of imaginative knowledge, to which I have just referred, to those of Inspiration and Intuition, as I call them in the book just mentioned. We then discover this soul body to be a higher member of man's being than the etheric body or body of formative forces. We find, however, that we cannot experience this soul body in ourselves but only when we are outwardly active and when we become conscious of our will impulses.

When we have reached the point where we discover this actual soul body in ourselves, this second super-sensible part of man's being, the will, grows stronger and stronger, and we recognise it as our sentient body, as the force that works into our limbs and sets our body in motion, as an organisation totally different from our head organisation. In contrast to this head organisation, which I characterised as being constantly in the state of partial dying, we discover that this organisation is constantly in the process of spiritual birth, in which life is increasing and developing all the time. Thus through the head organisation on the one hand, we experience a perpetual dying, and in the will organisation, the second super-sensible member of man's being, we experience a perpetual continuation of the birth process. Out of this continuation of the birth process, out of this increase of life which has to come out of our whole being, there then rays back to us the true, super-sensible nature of our ego, and enters into what we have imprinted into our body. Our ego arises again and again out of the grave of our partially dying head. This perpetual interplay of dying and being born is what we experience within ourselves when we develop our soul life in this way. So we discover that birth and death take place not only at the beginning and end of our lives but that dying and becoming are the expression of forces working in our organisation throughout our lives.

Only when we have thus encountered man's super-sensible forces through Intuition and Inspiration are we in a position to recognise the evolutionary path of mankind; for in developing this kind of vision, the forces we acquire from our head organisation and the organisation of the rest of our body combine to illuminate for us the inner forces at work in the historical development of mankind. How does historical development appear, as a rule, to the ordinary consciousness of present times? If we ignore what men believed in early stages of human evolution out of a primitive conception of mankind and which is now considered childish, namely that there is spirit working in history; if we ignore this, we can say that people nowadays regard history, or rather the evolution of mankind, as a collection of facts gleaned from documents, archives and tradition which, at the most, they link together with the intellect. Not until we perceive the super-sensible being of man, as I have just described it, does the ability to see the progression of higher super-sensible beings through the course of history associate itself with the historical facts which even a spiritual investigator has to take from external history. He gets to know human evolution from the inside, whereas it is usually only looked at from the outside.

So as not just to talk round the subject in the abstract, I will speak of one fact in particular, to show you the evolution of human history from the point of view of symptoms. As man's outlook is restricted solely to the material world, what is presented as history today is just an external picture, and is largely a fable convenue. Anyone who is able to look with inner vision at the connecting link between the facts, discovers that the first thing he sees on looking backwards into our historical evolution is, strange to say, a nodal point in the evolution of modern humanity around the middle of the fifteenth century. We see in a number of spheres something like a forward leap taking place in human development. We know of course that leaps like this take place in nature, too. If we look at the evolving plant, and see first the green leaves developing, then the calyx, and then the transformation into petals, we see a leap from the green leaf to the coloured petal, even though there is a steady development. There is a similar leap in the evolution of humanity in the middle of the fifteenth century, only it passes unnoticed when historical facts are looked at solely from the outside. Something then begins to make itself felt in human evolution that lifts men's souls onto quite a different level of development from the one preceding it. Earlier epochs of human evolution, it is true, also attained considerable heights from time to time, but human souls were quite differently constituted before and after the middle of the fifteenth century. Looking at history from the inside, the middle of the fifteenth century was the end of an epoch of human evolution that actually began in the eighth century B.C., roughly with the founding of the Roman Empire.

Anyone observing history from a spiritual scientific point of view sees a continuous line of development running through the centuries from 800 B.C. until the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. And anyone looking from inside at the Greek or the Roman era will find what is said here thoroughly substantiated. The kind of soul constitution that was developing in man during that epoch was of a kind that nurtured feeling (Gemüt) and intelligence. The surprising thing is that when observing history from the inside, we find that prior to the eighth century B.C. the power of feeling and intelligence was not yet actively at work in the human soul. In those days man was still to a great extent united with nature; he did not step back and reflect on the things he had seen, for his life of feeling was still a part of nature. Not until the eighth century did he free himself from nature and develop forces of intelligence and feeling independently within himself. By and large the whole of historical development from the eighth century B.C. to the fourteenth century A.D. is a gradual unfolding of those particular forces of soul in mankind that produce a flowering of the qualities of feeling and intelligence from out of man's inner being.

This development of the forces of feeling and intelligence, however, still had an instinctive quality about it during this epoch, intelligence and feeling still working in an instinctive way. In the middle of the fifteenth century, however, these forces previously working instinctively in the intelligence and feeling took on a fully conscious quality. Men felt more strongly isolated from outer nature than they had felt before, because in order to think about things consciously and experience their instinctive feelings of sympathy and antipathy consciously, they had to draw back from external nature, so to speak. Everything became conscious. Therefore we can say, from a spiritual scientific point of view, that whilst in earlier epochs the instinctive life of thought and feeling was being developed, from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards what we can call the consciousness soul has been developing, and this stage of development is something that will continue for a very long period of human evolution. Relatively speaking, we human beings are still at the beginning of this evolution of the consciousness soul, which is already responsible for the great progress made in natural scientific thinking. However great Plato and Aristotle were, they did not possess natural scientific thinking, which requires the kind of withdrawal of man's inner being from nature that did not take place until the consciousness soul appeared in human evolution. Thus our development of natural science is part and parcel of one epoch of human evolution. Lessing described this very beautifully, whichever way you interpret his words, by saying that the whole of human evolution is “a kind of Education of Mankind.” Since the middle of the fifteenth century the education of mankind consists of the education of the consciousness soul, and this it is that has actually brought with it the natural scientific outlook. Looked at from inside this is a section of human evolution.

We only understand fully what belongs to the era from the eighth century B.C. till the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. when we look at it from the inside, from the point of view of man's soul development. For the founding of Christianity falls in the first third of this era, and the spiritual scientist sees this as the greatest event that has ever occurred in earthly evolution. With his ability to look down the centuries from inside at man's soul development, the spiritual scientist recognises better than anyone else that in the first third of the epoch I described as the era of the evolution of intelligence and feeling, something was still present that had existed in the highest degree in the days of early humanity, namely something that made man feel a part of the natural world around him; but in those times this feeling arose out of the subconscious depths of the soul. Then there broke upon human evolution the Event of Golgotha, the nature of which can never be understood if people try to understand it merely out of a material conglomeration of historical facts. There broke in upon human evolution a fructification of man's evolution, in that a super-sensible element united with this evolution from out of cosmic heights, preparing the way for man's being to become conscious and inwardly strong to an ever greater and greater degree.

Initially the Event of Golgotha, the Incarnation of Christ as Man, met with a way of thinking and feeling that was still of an instinctive nature. It took the next two-thirds of this epoch for these forces emanating from the Event of Golgotha to flow into man's more or less unconscious instinctive forces of intelligence and feeling. Then from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards came the conscious soul evolution of man and, with it, the epoch of natural science, when men turned their attention to external processes of natural phenomena. The beginning of this epoch was the time in which the earlier connection with the spirit, with the super-sensible element in the world, tended to withdraw in favour of conscious existence. This spiritual element, which in earlier times man perceived as though by instinct in the very phenomena of the world, now sprang to life in his inner being by virtue of the fact that the Being of Christ had united Himself with human evolution. But this new life within man came at the point in his evolution when, as I said, man was becoming increasingly conscious and therefore increasingly external. Thus it happened that just at the beginning of the age of the consciousness soul, the age of the conscious development of intelligence and feeling, although the Christ Impulse was at work in human souls, men's consciousness was of a kind that made them lose sight of their spiritual and super-sensible being. Therefore it also happened that people had less and less understanding for the Event that had united itself with human evolution in a super-sensible way—the Event of Golgotha. In the nineteenth century there was a climax in this respect. Now the point had been reached when the Event of Golgotha was divested of its super-sensible character even in the eyes of most of the faithful. Even for these the Event of Golgotha was, in the nineteenth century, relegated to the world of external facts, so to speak. Jesus the Christ Bearer became the ‘simple man of Nazareth,’ a person no greater than a somewhat more highly developed human being. And this happened solely because, while they were developing the consciousness soul, men also lost the understanding for the super-sensible element in history. The conception of Jesus as the simple man of Nazareth brought materialism into Christianity. And nowadays there is not only a materialistic science, there is also a widespread materialistic faith.

Now, however, we have come to the time—in this epoch of human evolution that began in the middle of the fifteenth century—when we face the necessity of ascending once more to the spirit. And the path I described to you today and the day before yesterday is the path that coming humanity will have to tread to ascend to the spirit again and to find its way once more to super-sensible knowledge and to the super-sensible phenomena lying behind the sense world and behind external historical facts. It is this which will also lead it to the super-sensible nature of the Event of Golgotha. Then this unique Event will appear as the kind of turning point in the whole evolution of mankind that everybody can understand and accept. With the coming of this new super-sensible knowledge the Event of Golgotha will be divested of all its sectarianism, and, rising above separate denominations, even above the religious differences existing in different parts of the world, an understanding of it will become the general possession of mankind. Then the Mystery of Golgotha will be seen to be the most important super-sensible fact of all human evolution. The narrow view of Christ that prevents people from seeing the true mystery—and which still inhibits a number of denominations, because materialism has even found its way into faith—this narrow point of view will be superseded; people will find a new understanding of this Impulse, which is the greatest and most powerful Impulse in the whole of mankind's evolution.

This should show you that spiritual science does not deprive people of what they believe to be the results of ‘simple faith.’ On the contrary, spiritual science reaches up to the highest level of knowledge in order to show mankind the greatest Event of human evolution. This is something modern man longs for if he is honest enough with himself and admits that he is more and more disenchanted with ‘simple faith.’ It had to be stated here as belonging to spiritual science. And as we are in the age of consciousness, in which mankind is dividing and becoming disharmonious to an ever greater degree—because the individual is thrown back on his own personality and his personal loneliness—it is essential to point to what men, the whole world over, need to re-unite them once again.

What is needed today is a new understanding of the central Event of human evolution. Spiritual science does not take anything away from man. On the contrary it gives him just what his present-day consciousness needs. And if people, out of their healthy human understanding, want to complain of the views and teachings of anthroposophical spiritual science, we shall have to tell them that their thinking is not healthy enough and that they must throw off the illusions with which the purely external, material theories of natural science have befogged them; they should think about their own thinking, and then they will make a remarkable discovery about the particular nature of man's present-day life of soul. They will hear what natural science tells them from reliable, strictly methodical sources about the evolution of the physical body. But, when their minds are healthy, they will not be able to agree that there is no more to life as they know it than natural science tells them. They will find that when they listen to spiritual science in a really healthy way, and draw comparisons with life, the contradictions arising out of the illusions produced by materialism are enough to make them ill, and that they will only rediscover life if they refer, with the help of spiritual science, to the super-sensible nature of man and the super-sensible world in which the evolution of man and mankind are embedded.

If you have acquired the possibility in this way of seeing historical life supersensibly, the present world epoch, or epoch of human evolution, will appear before you—it is not the right occasion today to include a description of the whole of earthly evolution; you can read that up in my Occult Science and you will be far enough advanced to aspire to the kind of perception Lessing spoke of in his Education of the Human Race, which he had attained out of his much admired healthy human understanding within the German spiritual stream of development. Then you will be capable of perceiving that in the course of spiritual evolution human life runs its course in repeated earth lives. For the whole span of man's life consists of an altenation between the kind of lives he spends in a physical body and another form of existence between death and a new birth, spent in the super-sensible worlds which are connected with our world through the spirit that is also at work in historical evolution. We discover then, as Lessing also did, that in coming back for repeated lives on earth, man himself carries evolution forward from one epoch to the next. This knowledge of repeated earth lives cannot become a theory in the accepted sense, for when you are capable of penetrating into the spirit of human evolution in the way I have described, you can find this knowledge for yourself, but you have then acquired it as a fact of man's higher super-sensible nature.

A new perception of spiritual life, a perception which will help us find the spirit again in our materialistic world, is about to enter present civilisation. The materialistic outlook prevailing today is largely responsible for estranging man's inner life from a real perception of the spirit, and depriving him of the courage to plunge into this spiritual perception, making him believe that the only way to the spirit is the way of ‘simple creed’ based on a literal acceptance of the Bible. This ‘simple creed’ and the materialism of our time are closely related, for before such a thing as materialism existed, there was not this perpetual harping on a simple creed. After all, at the time when Christianity arose, the teachings about Christ Jesus came out of highly developed spiritual vision, though of course it was atavistic. This old spiritual vision cannot be the way of modern man. Modern man must work for spiritual vision in the way I have tried to describe. If you become aware of what is living deep down in people's souls nowadays and colouring their whole outlook, although they are not fully conscious of it—this mood that unconsciously flashes into consciousness, sometimes in a pathological way, so that people feel it as inner unrest, as a psychopathic tendency, even though they cannot explain it—this mood is the striving for a new spirituality. I certainly do not wish to be so immodest as to suggest or maintain that the spiritual science or anthroposophy I give lectures on is the only thing that has to happen on the path to the spirit. What I have given here is just a humble attempt. And anyone who makes a humble attempt like this, yet is aware that it comes out of the deepest longings of the present time, is also aware that there will be more and more people coming along and attempting to tread the paths to spiritual vision and to proclaim the possibility of ascending to life on a super-sensible level.

But you can see too, that when I lecture on anthroposophy I cannot spare anybody's feelings, at the first encounter, that these things are rather difficult to understand. You will also see that what leads to these spiritual worlds is neither a damping down of clear thinking nor a damping down of the will that works in practical life, but is an intensification of both thought and will. Many people of the present day cannot muster sufficient inner courage for this as yet. So they look at anthroposophy and say: They mean well, these people, but with their anthroposophy they tell us all kinds of things about mankind's evolution, even about cosmic facts of a spiritual nature. Looking at anthroposophy from a safe distance, people like this call it ‘crazy stuff’, etc., terms used here recently in Stuttgart, to apply to the world of physical facts. Yet, ladies and gentlemen, people will never get beyond a nonsensical, merely hazy presentiment of the spiritual world if clear, mathematical thinking and a light-irradiated, self-disciplined will are not applied to bring down real facts from the super-sensible world to replace mere phrases. Modern man needs these facts.

I have spoken to you about what mankind is longing for. And it was this very longing that caused such a caricature of super-sensible striving to arise in the nineteenth century. People only know how to strive in a materialistic way. But alongside this materialistic striving they acquired a yearning for the spirit. So they investigated the spirit on the pattern of their research in the material world and carried out a caricature of spiritual research, namely spiritualism, which is nothing else but a material search for something that can never be matter, namely spirit. What comes out in a pathological way in spiritualism as a caricature of spiritual striving, is the same thing that is being sought for by anthroposophical spiritual science, but in the latter case it is healthy and is based on a further development in clear consciousness of forces already inherent in man.

Anthroposophical spiritual science therefore appears, in the best sense of the word, as an attempt (we mean this modestly) to bring perceptions of the spiritual world, super-sensible man and his evolution into the age of great and outstanding perceptions of an external, scientific nature. Not until these scientific perceptions have been supplemented by the perceptions of spiritual vision will modern man understand his being in the way he longs to. Therefore spiritual science as we pursue it must shake off all the reproaches it encounters, even those from well-meaning people.

To conclude I should like to draw your attention to the fact that even the kind of people who have no intention of rejecting spiritual science are offended when we speak to large audiences about ‘spiritual secrets’, as they call them, instead of keeping these in intimate sectarian circles. Oh, they know very well that it is a sacred duty of the times to stand up and speak to large audiences. Therefore I must not pay attention to the kind of reproach that was made recently:—That it is just not done to speak about cosmic things to a large city audience, like Dr. Steiner does. What is needed is a master of the art of divine gesture who can inexorably drive everyone from his presence who does not know when to be silent. What we need is an approach that can distinguish in more than mere words between what is profane and what is holy.—In answer to this reproach we have to say that we have also entered the age of democracy in the spiritual sphere, and that it is a sin against mankind to wish to distinguish between what is profane and what is holy. Anyone whose destiny allows him to penetrate into the spiritual worlds has the obligation to speak as widely as possible to people's healthy human understanding, so that this healthy human understanding can find the way to the spiritual worlds again.

Although this is an absolutely general task of the times—an obligation to the whole of mankind—we have a special obligation to the middle European region in which we live. If anyone has been deeply interested for decades, as I have, in the beginning made in German spiritual life in the direction of a new spiritual perception by Lessing (who I have mentioned today), Herder, Goethe, Schiller and the German philosophers, then he knows—through the interest he takes in this spiritual life, if he does so in such a way that he makes those forces his own which motivated Goethe, Schiller and the rest—that this spiritual life leads straight into what I have been speaking about today and the day before yesterday. In order to overcome the terrible materialistic development of recent times, we in middle Europe can begin by bringing to mind again that which had its beginnings in the Great Age of Germany. Then what is called anthroposophical spiritual science will follow on naturally. That is why, just at this time when the German spirit is so little appreciated anywhere, we chose to call the building conceived as a High School for Spiritual Science the ‘Goetheanum.’ ‘Goetheanum’ as a sign that from the spiritual point of view, the Goetheanistic German spirit has the courage to face the world.

I know, too, that we are not sinning against Goethe if, in order to link on to something historical, we use the term Goetheanism for the new way of thought and vision we have spoken of today and the day before yesterday. However much is taken away from us in external ways, and however much power the world has today to make things as difficult as possible for us in external matters, it can never take away from us our connection with the best of German qualities, if we ourselves intend having this connection. If we have this intention, however, then even in these dark and sad times we shall not lose hope—the hope of a re-awakening, in a new form, of the spiritual life of mankind, that we are perhaps destined to have just in this time of greatest need.

If we continue with the kind of thing the materialistic age has brought into human evolution in recent times, we shall get further and further removed from the spirit and more and more attached to matter. But if we turn our minds to our super-sensible nature and develop this in ourselves, we shall add the results of spirit vision to the dazzling achievements of the materialistic natural scientific outlook. This spirit vision will then be like the soul of the world conception of outer nature. These two ways are open to human evolution today: either to keep to a perception of the material world and drag mankind further into chaos and distress, or to give birth to our higher inner being from out of our super-sensible nature and the super-sensible world. One of these directions, the materialistic way, can already be seen in the ripples it sends to the surface.

With its external logic of the intellect and its inability to find its way to the inner logic of facts, external science actually sees things very inexactly. I will give you one example of what I mean: There is a philosophical view prevalent at the present time that is a genuine product of materialistic thought. It was advocated by Avenarius and Mach, and it is to the effect that man's field of experience is limited to what he takes in through ordinary sense perception and ordinary consciousness. These two particular men expressed the materialistic outlook by means of some very clever philosophy, and if we inquire into what they expressed with such dedication we shall acquire great respect for their intellectual achievements. If we remain within the ordinary outlook, we shall accept philosophers like Avenarius and Mach as individual philosophical phenomena. But if we go beyond the ordinary outlook, and recognise the inner impulses behind world conceptions such as these, our eyes will be opened, and we shall see the mysterious way these world conceptions work in life. We shall then hit upon the remarkable connection existing between these world conceptions and the decline that threatens European civilisation today, and comes from the East, from Russia, from bolshevism. We shall realise that the practice of bolshevism is the end result of world conceptions like these. This is further confirmed by the fact that the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach is the state philosophy of bolshevism. This connection is known today only to those who penetrate into the spirit of things and who can rise above the noise of party opinion. Party opinion rides roughshod over everything that has to be said right now for the salvation of mankind. This kind of factual logic I have shown you is more important for the man of today than all the logic of sophistry, which would certainly never lead over from Avenarius and Mach to bolshevism. But the facts do. If you want to understand the origins of the things happening today to destroy civilisation within the civilised world, look at the philosophies of the past few decades, the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and you will find further confirmation of the fact that two ways are open to us today: One way continues with the materialistic approach, despite the fact that its logic is as subtle as that of Avenarius and Mach; and the other, that has been characterised here, wants to participate in the spirit. If we carry on in the first direction, the effect on European spiritual life will be that man's spirit will become mechanised, man's soul vegetative and man's body animalised. This is the fate that actually threatens us today. If men become addicted to this western mechanisation of the spirit, this state of being will combine with eastern animalisation, which means that social demands will be on a level of animal instinct and blind impulse. Western mechanisation and eastern animalisation are connected one with another. In between these is the vegetative or drowsy nature of soul that does not want to be woken up by a treading of the path to the spirit. This is the one perspective. Mankind will have to choose between becoming mechanised in spirit, vegetative in soul and animalised in body or going the other way. Hardship and distress will no doubt eventually drive us into going the other way. And although it will be the other people who have the power, they will not be able to bar us from going this other way, the way leading to the spirit. We shall have to want to go this way. We shall have to want to keep our spirit free, even if our bodies are in bondage. Out of the feelings and experience which can come to us out of a consciousness of super-sensible man and the super-sensible world, we shall have to resolve to have inner self-reliance. Then the others will not be able to harm us. And I should like to describe in the following words what might then come about after all:

In the course of the nineteenth century we middle Europeans were foolish enough to copy the western nations, even though there were no grounds for this in western civilisation. Through hardship and distress, through the very power these have over us, we shall perhaps find the way to stop imitating all that we were foolish enough to imitate when we chose them for a model.

Now, when they want to use their power to give us the lead in the mechanisation of the spirit, may we find the strength, in this old middle Europe of ours that has such a great heritage, to tread the path to the spirit from out of ourselves. We shall then avoid the materialistic mechanisation of the spirit and attain the freedom I attempted to characterise as early as the beginning of the 1890s in my Philosophy of Freedom. The liberated spirit will bring us to a real vision of the spiritual world. The spirit will also help us find the way to the equality of man. For human equality can never exist in the external economic order only. As soon as man understands the super-sensible nature of his own ensouled spirit being, however, he will be able to find the law that makes him an equal among equals. He will also deepen science; for with spiritual vision, as I have indicated here today, medicine, law, and the art of education will find their real source. Science will then lead neither to the mechanisation of the spirit as it has hitherto, nor to the inequality of man, for complete freedom of the spirit will come to man when the spirit seeks it on spirit paths; human equality will come to human souls when the spirit seeks it on paths of the soul; and finally, when the human being who knows himself to be a super-sensible spirit being approaches another person lovingly, then—because human beings will be associating with one another as conscious spirit beings in a loving way—in addition to having a liberated spirit and a soul that is equal with its neighbours, man will have, both in his human nature and in social life, a true, spiritualised, ensouled, thoroughly human brotherliness!

Introductory words by Rudolf Steiner

Dear attendees! In light of what the chairman has told you, I imagine that our evening could preferably unfold in such a way that the esteemed attendees ask specific questions. In this way we shall best achieve our purpose, which has just been explained to you. So it will perhaps be best if I say just a few words in advance to give you a little background for the discussion that follows, which, I believe, should be the main thing today.

You will, as the chairman assumed, have taken note of what I, based on a lifetime of experience, had to do for a truly practical way to socialization, which only came to a conclusion under the loudly speaking facts of the present. Just briefly, I would like to characterize some things.

The point is that in the future we must strive radically for what I have called the threefold social order in an Appeal and in my book. This can be achieved much more quickly than many people think. This threefold social order would lead to the existence in the future of an independent spiritual organism that would govern itself and would have the task of caring for the natural foundations of the human being, that is, his or her individual abilities, in the same way that the natural foundations must otherwise be cared for in economic life. The second would be the organization that has to take the place of the present state, the actual legal organization. In the first place, it would have to regulate all the present conditions of ownership and property, which are the main thing in the actual socialization of property. On the one hand, there would be the question of what should take the place of the State. The present conditions of violence, property and ownership would have to be transferred into conditions based on the law in which all men are equal. And on the other hand, everything that comprises the entire field of labor law would be regulated in this intermediate link of the social organism that replaces the state.

I see labor law as being endangered whenever it is to be regulated within the cycle of economic life itself. The damage that occurs in today's economy, in particular, is usually misjudged. I have made a great effort to form a corresponding picture not from what has been written about the things – because in truth very little can be learned from that – but directly from life. I would like to briefly discuss these matters today so that we can move on to specific questions. I have explained it in detail in my book: as long as there is a belief that the question of what constitutes working hours, and the extent and type of work, should be regulated within the economic body itself, the worker cannot obtain his rights. The worker must already have his labor law fully regulated when he comes face to face with the labor manager. Only then will he be in a position to draw up a real contract in place of today's sham contracts, the wage contract, or whatever you want to call it, which is not a free contract because the worker does not have the labor law behind him, which is what enables him to conclude a truly free contract. In this economic system, the worker cannot obtain justice, but only through the separation of the entire legal system from economic life and its transfer to what should take the place of the state.

The third possibility is the independent economic organism. In this case, we shall no longer have to deal with any dependence of labor law on any kind of economic situation, price formation, and so on, but all economic consequences, especially all economic price formations, will arise not as a cause but as an effect of what is already established in labor law, or rather, in labor law itself. Labor law will be to economic life what natural conditions are to the natural world. Through this alone you will create a sound basis for the socialization of the economic cycle.

You see, this view is truly not an ideological one, not a utopian one, but one that has emerged from my involvement – and that is almost as old or quite as old as my life – in the proletarian movement. Of course, one then looks back at how the social movement has developed. The social movement is truly not of today. It is something, even in the form in which it lives today, quite old. One might think that if one wants to understand the social movement today, one only has to go back to the Communist Manifesto. But anyone who wants to get a proper grip on things today, when we are at such a tremendous turning point, when we are not facing a small reckoning but a great reckoning, and not just wants to understand them, must actually trace back economic life and the ideas that people have formed about it to earlier times.

Because, you see, it is truly not a matter of indifference that, for example, in 1826, at a time when most people in Europe had not yet thought of anything like a social question, a person like Thünen already predicted in a certain way what then occurred as a consequence of our world catastrophe. Thünen was a person who worked the land himself, but not in the usual way. He did so with full understanding and with a relationship to economic life that was based on reality. As early as 1826, this Thünen said: If people do not decide to do what is necessary in social terms, then Europe is heading for terrible devastation and barbarism. — So people already knew this, but there were only a few who spoke like this. This was said in 1826.

Now, in the course of the 19th century, honest and sincere people repeatedly struggled with what is called the social question, and I would like to emphasize once again – this was not decisive for me but nevertheless something that throws back a light – that the one who objectively deals with what has emerged on the part of some as the demand of socialism – yesterday was indeed spoken about in more detail – could only say to himself: socialism must come one day. Socialism is a necessity. It must come, it will come. And then he also had to realize that the arguments put forward by people who are sincere about socialism are important. And, if you have gone through all the nonsense of the economists who thought they had to refute Marx, you can say: the most important claims of Karl Marx cannot be refuted, are quite impossible to refute. But if you turn to the other side, not to the mercenaries and servants of the capitalists, of course, but to those who had social understanding, you will also find among them those who, out of the reality of practical life, raised objections to socialism that could make one stop and think. It is not uninteresting that in the same year that the Communist Manifesto went out into the world, a book was published by Bruno Hildebrand, an honest person who has put forward weighty arguments against socialism. And especially if you are an honest socialist, you may have some strange thoughts when you read such things. I do not want to attach any importance to what this or that other person from bourgeois circles has said, that is mostly nonsense, but when you have something like Bruno Hildebrand's account in front of you, you do end up saying to yourself: On the one hand, you can't object to socialism, it's bound to come. However, the concerns that people like Hildebrand have are extremely difficult to refute. For Hildebrand does not raise his objections out of any dislike of socialism, but rather, in view of socialism as he knew it in 1848 – and the same would apply to Hildebrand today, at least until 1914 – he has merely expressed his concerns. He imagined that if socialism were introduced in the old style, it would not be the middle classes who would somehow suffer, but those who wanted socialism would ultimately achieve nothing. In a sense, people like Hildebrand already foresaw what could happen when precisely such people from the circles of the Socialist Party come to the top, because the desires of the broad masses of the proletariat cannot arise from that background.

You see, there are of course many different views on this. And if we are completely honest about it, we have to say: Yes, it is a general defect of our current human thinking that we are not able to find something that is not just made up, because, despite what is said, socialist programs are often just made up. Today we need something that is not made up.

What I have just told you now sheds some light on what has emerged for me from practical life. If I look at the development of socialist thought in the 19th century and also take into account Hildebrand and revisionist thought in the 19th century, then I come to the following conclusion: If socialism is to be implemented in such a way that economic activity continues under the hypnosis of the unified state, that is, if the unified state is merely extended to cover economic matters, then the broad masses will suffer all the harms that Hildebrand foresaw. That means that we need a socialism that is realized in such a way that these things do not occur. Therefore, the social organism, the economic organism, must not contain anything that could lead to such concerns. And then I said to myself: this is precisely where this threefold division applies, because I take out spiritual life on the one hand and legal life on the other, thereby creating an economic organism that can no longer give rise to concerns because generous socialization can be carried out in the threefold organism. You will see this in all the specific questions, especially when we then go into the most concrete questions.

Let us take the question of works councils as an example of a question that is becoming topical today, which I hope we will discuss in more detail later. You see, my proposals are based on reality and are therefore not a finished program, but something that is to be tackled and that is to be developed bit by bit, not slowly, but perhaps also quickly bit by bit, as the circumstances of the time will require. The possibility of really making progress arises from what I have tried to present as a three-pronged impulse for real socialization.

The question of works councils – I hope that it will be discussed in detail later – is a real one today, and practically speaking, we can start from any point in reality today to realize what is set out in my book. Those who think in the old socialist way, for example, imagine these works councils primarily – I have been told this – as being more or less introduced by law, that is, they think of the works councils as a state institution. Now, once again, I am of the opinion that if they are introduced in this way, they will most certainly be a fifth wheel on the wagon. It is only possible to create the works councils out of economic life itself.

I recently said: Let the works councils arise, and do not interfere in their creation by passing laws about them! They should come into being first, they should arise first in the individual companies, but they must create a position for themselves, especially during the transition period, that makes them completely independent of the previous bosses and plant managers. They must, of course, have an independent position.

Then the next step will be to ensure that the companies that are set up today form their own corporate body across the economic territories in question. For anyone today who still understands socialization as merely wanting to socialize individual companies would very soon see the strange position we would be in in five years if we only socialized individual companies. If we were to socialize only individual enterprises, we would end up with the wildest individualism of the individual enterprises, and the most dissatisfied would be the workers. There would be such inequality among workers in terms of income that it would be unbearable. You can only socialize if you socialize the entire economic entity, of a certain size, as such.

So, first of all, it is a matter of establishing works councils for certain similar businesses in a certain area. A very important act of overall socialization emanates from the works councils, so that not only is a bond created between the works councils of similar businesses, but across all businesses. Then a real socialization of economic life can gradually occur. Only then will things be a blessing. If, therefore, we begin to develop an understanding of the extraordinarily important appointment of works councils, we will see that we are on the right track with the idea of tripartism. We shall only achieve something if we do not tolerate the intervention of that which replaces the state in the functions of the works councils in any way other than merely with reference to the fact that the state has to ensure that the works councils can function, just as it naturally has to ensure that I can walk down a street without being attacked. But otherwise than the state otherwise relates to the personal rights of the individual, it should also not relate to the works councils with some kind of limitations of functions and so on. The functions must arise from the self-constitution of the works council within the economic body. That alone leads to success. With this example I wanted to show you how threefolding is actually meant. It is meant to be practical, that is, everything we have to do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow can only lead somewhere if it is handled from the point of view of threefold division. Then things will interact in the right way.

You see, my suggestion assumes that socialism, now that it is here, cannot be taken off the agenda. Anyone who is familiar with the conditions in both economic and political life, and thus in legal and intellectual life, can no longer imagine, because that is an unrealistic notion, that socialism can be introduced today and then it will be here tomorrow. No, once socialism is in place, it will have to be continuously worked on. Socialism will always have to be handled in a new way. It is something very much alive. We must have precisely those organizations that work again and again in the spirit of socialism. People do not yet come up with their thoughts in line with what is actually happening in this area.

A long time ago, a strange sentence emerged from a school of economics. It is considered overcome today, but it still haunts people's minds. It was the Physiocrats who said that there was no need to prescribe laws for economic life, because either it develops by itself in line with these laws, in which case they are not needed, or you prescribe different laws that do not correspond to the development. But then you would harm the economy. It seems that, when stated in this way, it is absolutely right and yet is totally wrong, namely for the reason that economic life is not something that remains stationary, that is, remains as it once was. It is an organism, and just as a natural organism grows older and older and changes, and one must recognize its change as a condition of life, so it must be with economic life. That means that laws must be there, but they must arise from economic life itself. Thus, the impulses must always be there to counteract the damage to economic life that it must inflict on itself. Anyone who believes that he can introduce socialism once and for all is like a person who says: I ate yesterday, and that was enough to fill me up. Now I don't need to eat anymore. You have to eat continuously because the organism is constantly undergoing certain changes and because it is a living thing. And so it is with what socialist measures are. You have to continually socialize because the social organism is a living thing. And that is also what leads to the necessity for us to create something like works councils and much more right from the start.

You see, the greatest mistake that has been made so far is that people have believed that social life is something like a reproduction of an organism made of papier-mâché. So they imagined it was a mechanism; it is not alive. But it is alive, only people have given the social organism such laws that should apply to something that is dead. But the organism went further, and now people are surprised when revolutions come. That which must be continually improved upon accumulates when it is not improved upon and breaks out in revolutions. Revolutions have been made by those who were short-sighted enough not to recognize the liveliness of social life. I do not mean those who are pushed to do one thing or another, but those who are the leaders and do not understand how to exercise leadership. That is why it is so important today that, if sooner or later the call is really made again to take matters into our own hands, we do not approach the matter with empty heads again, but come up with constructive proposals. It is not enough to say that power must be acquired. That is certainly true, but then, what can we do with that power once we have it? I wanted to say that first. Now I hope that the discussion can become a very lively one through your questions.

Discussion

Debater Beierat explains, among other things: When it comes to socialization, the entrepreneurs must also be asked, because the workers cannot solve all the questions on their own. In order to have a handle so that the previous owners help to create the works councils, it is necessary that a legal basis is created that is the same for the whole Reich.¹

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say a few words about this, because perhaps we can best move forward by addressing the individual questions.

You see, what the previous speaker just said is not fundamentally inconsistent with what I have put forward. I just tried to approach the matter not theoretically, but in such a practical way that it really leads somewhere. If you want to achieve something practical, you should not let yourself be discouraged by not wanting to make a definite start somewhere. The beginning of something practical must always be made somewhere, and after all, before we came here, there was a meeting down in a small room where all the works councils that already exist were gathered. So at least a start has been made. The only thing that matters is that something practical comes out of such a beginning. Of course, you can think of this beginning as you like, you can make another one. In this connection I would remind you that I spoke about this yesterday: that for the practical implementation of the threefold order, it is of course necessary first of all to set up a kind of liquidation government. I certainly do not think that we can decide today to implement the threefold order by tomorrow!

Since we are living in a time when people can only think in terms of a unitary state, we must, under all circumstances, not because we love any particular government, but because people have lived together in the state until now, have a government for a wide range of different things. Contrary to what the previous speaker said, I must say: Whether it is one government or the other is not important to me. So it is very important to me that it is a government that makes proposals in the sense of real socialization. So I do not feel that is a correct statement: “It does not matter to me whether it is one government or the other.” Because precisely when there is a government, it will have to be clear that in the future it will have to stand only on the legal ground and liquidate, on the one hand, intellectual life and, on the other, economic life. Then, in the form of such a liquidation government, the right authority will be there to create that transitional period, and to do so with reasonable measures. These would then form the basis on which the works councils can be built up, which, instead of some of the other things that various governments are doing today, could in fact use their power to somehow persuade the recalcitrant employers - forgive the expression - to take up reasonable socialization ideas. That would be the task of a reasonable government during the transition period.

These foundations, which still have to be laid today by the liquidation government, could already be in place. But in doing so, this liquidation government in particular would have to be thoroughly imbued with the realization that government laws must never interfere with the development of a healthy economic life, so that this economic life can truly build itself up from the ground up. Therefore, it is necessary that the liquidation government ensures that works councils can emerge. However, it must not interfere in their entire formation. This must happen from within the works council itself.

The government has no other task than to ensure that the works councils can constitute themselves beyond their economic territories, that is, out of economic necessity. This will be the best foundation if the government ensures that the works councils can work properly. The works councils can constitute themselves if the government creates a basis and does not want to rule over them.

Today, the actual difference between ruling and governing is not known, and one can actually be very surprised that, as a result of the November events, people have learned so little about this distinction. There is – this distinction is not mine, but Karl Marx's – a very considerable difference between governing and ruling. And when a government learns to govern and no longer believes that it is only a government when it can rule, then even what the broad masses can imagine under socialization will be possible. For in the future it is not a government that must rule, but the whole broad mass of the people. The government must govern and learn how to govern when the whole broad mass of the people actually rules. The people have not yet got out of the habit of associating the term 'ruler' with a single personality or body. This is something that must be thoroughly eradicated from the people's way of thinking. When a body is set up with socialization in mind – and it must be set up in the same way as works councils – the difference between governing and ruling must be understood above all. Everything that belongs to the powers of the works councils must be formed from the broad masses of the workers. Governance will only consist of creating a real basis, not a legal basis, so that the works council can form freely, purely out of economic necessity, out of knowledge and insight.

You see, the peculiar thing about my proposals for threefolding is that I do not draw up programs, but rather that I try to give such suggestions based on reality so that something reasonable can arise. I say openly: in this way my impulses for threefolding differ from all the rest. Yesterday it was said here that they contain nothing new. They contain something fundamentally new. People who spoke of socialization and other reforms in the past were clever and knew exactly what should be done. I do not claim to be cleverer than the others, but I firmly believe that conditions can be brought about in which those who know something about the matter can come into their own. I do not want to show the way to what the works councils should do, but how they can educate themselves. Then they will recognize for themselves what they have to do. I want to put the right people in the right place. I do not claim to know anything new, but I want the new to come into being.

Various participants in the discussion take the floor.

Rudolf Steiner: With reference to the two esteemed previous speakers, it gives me a certain satisfaction to note that I myself have little left to say, because the discussion between these two speakers has progressed in such a gratifying way that one has completely complemented the other and what actually needs to be said has already been said. I would just like to add the following.

When it is said that there is a difference between focusing all thoughts on the path: How do we gain the power of domination? – and the other way of thinking: What do we do when we have gained power? I must say that I am always reminded of what played such a strong role in the discussions of the 1880s. In those years I had occasion to discuss many questions that were already being dealt with on socialist ground at the time, for example with Adler in Vienna, who recently passed away, and also with Pernerstorfer, who also died last year. And of course, these socialist thinkers of the past were even closer to the great socialist impulses that came from Marx and Engels. It was not yet the time of so-called revisionism, which I believe has done a lot of harm to the development of socialism. I don't want to be misunderstood, but I have always thought that this gentle transition of real socialism into a somewhat unclear, bourgeois way of thinking, which was called revisionism, has actually done a great deal of harm, for the simple reason that some people are so terribly satisfied when they can say: We want what is practical and achievable for tomorrow. These people do not consider that what is achieved for tomorrow can, under certain circumstances, undermine all ground for the day after tomorrow. I often had to object to Adler and Pernerstorfer that I recognize everything that they mention as criticism of the present social order, but one must also have something that one would do when what these socialist leaders themselves assumed finally occurred. These socialist leaders always predicted: This present social order will dismantle itself, it will destroy itself. That was an absolutely correct view. And that is why these socialist leaders always waved away any suggestion that something should be done to forcibly replace the current order with another. They were, in the most eminent sense, developmental socialists, and they said: the dismantling will be taken care of, then it will be the proletariat's turn. — I have always been of the opinion that if you assume what will happen, then you should know.

Are we not actually in a different situation today? We have the November events behind us, and you can be quite sure that those people who were leaders at the time had already imagined something like the November events, but now there was nothing that could be done positively. This shows that it is of some importance not just to keep asking the question, 'How do we gain power?' like a hypnotized chicken, but to ask ourselves, 'What do we do with power?' I keep asking this: How do we act?

The previous speaker said that economic collapse is coming. I don't actually share this view. I believe that it has long since arrived, and that what is being done by the ruling circles is just a continuous covering up and concealment of the economic collapse that has long since occurred. The economic collapse has been there since the time when it was officially declared that it was best for the German Reich to no longer produce for the needs of the people, but for what is blown up into the air. Thus, the economic collapse has actually taken place. And it was always inexplicable to me how little the

people have actually realized that with a measure such as the Auxiliary Service Act, which corresponds well to the subjective needs of the old rulers, a terrible blow has been dealt to economic life that cannot really be cured by anything. They have only ever thought of other things, but had no sense of the economic consequences of such a measure.

So, I believe that economic collapse is here, and we are facing events that will only be delayed as long as it is still possible to disguise or conceal certain things through this or that. But then we will have to know how to set up the new structure. I therefore have nothing against what the previous speaker, Mr. Schreiber, said, but I say to you: It will come about of itself that the leadership must turn from the circles that have been leading up to now to the circles that the previous speaker had in mind. But all the more must these circles feel the sense of responsibility, so that when they come to power they are able to do the right thing. So that is what I want to emphasize again and again and what is of very special importance to me.

It has been said, not as a reproach, but in agreement with me, that I first want the institution of the works councils and then it will become clear what their functions will be. But then we must not have any illusions, because what the new structure will demand will not be very easy, and it will not be possible without real factual knowledge of the economic body. The previous speaker has just given us a number of useful examples. We must not fall back on amateurism; we must be properly prepared when we make the observation, for example, that the work of the works council is not completed when individual businesses are socialized. What the previous speaker said about the right of co-determination, about profit, which must take on a completely different form, and what he said about the right of co-determination in relation to price, shows us that as soon as these concrete things come up, we have a great deal of work to do in the factual field. For it is precisely with these things, which are peculiar to capitalist, private capitalist ownership, that it has not dealt with, but has simply left humanity to a wild competition of interests, of income and so on.

We must not continue in this direction, otherwise we will soon revert to the old conditions. Whether those who then manage the means of production are called capitalists or something else is irrelevant. There is also the possibility that people will come to the top from the ranks – I don't want to say necessarily from the proletariat, but from those who lead the proletariat – who then, under certain circumstances, are in no way inferior to the practices of old capitalists; well, that is something that can only be avoided if we are firmly in the saddle.

You will not hold it against me if I mention something that seems theoretical, but is in fact practical. When it comes to the right of co-determination in pricing, two things come into particular consideration. In a random economic system that is not socialized, the price is regulated from two sides, because it is a kind of law of nature that the price is not based on one force, but on two forces. For example, suppose a certain amount of butter is produced in an economic context. Let us assume that more butter is produced than is necessary for human needs. Then, under certain circumstances, it may well happen that the rest of the butter that people do not need, say, for example, is used to make cart grease. This causes the butter to become much cheaper than it is, for example, when less butter is produced than the total number of people needs. Such things are included in the formation of prices in the most eminent sense. That is one direction from which pricing is determined. The other direction, namely that pricing is based on production costs, is quite separate from the above-mentioned direction in economic life; what is taken into account is what production costs. A completely different price system is formed there, and this price system intersects with the random economic system, that is, with the other. And as a result, we get mutual competition not only of prices but also of price systems, and that is where we are today.

Now just think about this: if the regulation of a worker's income is based on only one price system, then you may find that the worker gets higher and higher wages, but never a better standard of living, because the prices of housing and all the other things rise to the same extent. You can close one hole, but another one opens up by itself. We can only create order here if we are properly equipped.

In the future, one thing must be taken into account, namely how the causes converge from the most diverse sides. This will be necessary if socialization is to really live, not as a mere heartfelt demand, but in a practical way as an impulse. And if the works councils are to have a say in pricing, they will have to be prepared for these things. They will have to work at it, and not say, “Oh, the speeches, the idealistically conceived speeches, they achieve nothing.” No, these are not idealistically conceived speeches, but practical instructions for what has to be done. People cannot simply take on a task without first agreeing on how to do it. Things, including in economic life, must really be learned. And today there is not much knowledge available. We must make a great effort in this regard, must have the good will to come to institutions, and then try to relearn in the most diverse circles. I consider it terribly necessary that the works councils set up cooperatives as quickly as possible, in which people work together with good will, so that we can achieve a real, economically appropriate reconstruction.

We will have to do a great deal of intellectual work if we want to make progress. I ask you to bear this in mind. It was therefore very satisfying that the previous speakers drew attention to this matter. It will be a matter of really putting ourselves in their shoes, of not wanting to be clever and know something alone, so that attention is drawn to the fact that we must bring people to the point where they can share with each other the life experiences that individuals have gained while working. Then, precisely through this collaboration of people in the right positions, socialization will take place.

Further contributions to the discussion follow, and a motion is put forward that Dr. Steiner would like to give further lectures to discuss the important questions further. Dr. Steiner agrees.

Final words from Rudolf Steiner: Yes, my dear attendees, the motion has been accepted that this discussion may continue. So there will be an opportunity to talk about some of the questions that have arisen in the course of the discussion, perhaps later in a more favorable way than today, when time is already too far advanced for me to say anything significant or to expect you to understand. I will therefore only very briefly address a few points that arose during the last part of the discussion.

First there was the question of how I envision further development when workers' councils exist but mean nothing, that is, when the workers' councils are merely a kind of decoration until the political upheaval. - Well, I do believe that in such matters one does harm with all too much pessimism. I believe that in practical life, in such a serious situation as the one we find ourselves in, it is eminently important that we help each other. This does not at all preclude the works councils, when they bring to the surface of the social movement what they have learned and experienced in the factories – and there will be a wealth of social insight in this – essentially also contributing to bringing about the time when the necessary upheavals can bring us. We should not be content with saying: We have to wait until the revolution has occurred. Instead, we have to recognize that if the works councils remain in their posts, we will have a very important means of moving forward.

I believe you should not think too little of what the works councils can be. They will not be a decoration if they stand their ground. Much will arise precisely as a task for the works councils, in which even the most malicious employers will not be able to interfere. They will not be able to somehow eliminate the matter. I believe, therefore, that we should start in practice at some point — and this is an important point. We should not hold back, being overly cautious or even fearing that the works councils might be merely decorative, but we should take action. This is also what the “call” and the impulse of threefolding contain. We should not just carry on talking, but the words should be the seeds of deeds, and that is the essence of the whole series of lectures that I have given, and that will be the essence if I really have the honor of speaking to you in more detail about these things. And another thing: there has been a lot of talk about intellectual workers, especially in the last part of the discussion. Well, I can claim some experience in this field. It is based on what I have lived through over many years. The intellectual workers have ended up in an actually dreadful situation due to the circumstances that I am describing in my lectures. It is almost impossible, even after these terrible experiences of world war catastrophe, to talk to the great mass of those who call themselves intellectual workers about political issues. I am not flattering you when I say – as I have already said in my lecture – that, in terms of political training and education, the manual laboring proletariat is far ahead of the intellectual workers, and that the intellectual workers' political education is almost non-existent. This must be taken into account. In this context, something else must be considered.

I am of the opinion that it will not have a fundamentally favorable effect if a council of intellectual workers develops separately alongside the actual workers' councils. Perhaps this will have to be an important point in the discussion when it comes to the lectures that were requested of me. I believe that nothing can come of the segregation of intellectual workers as special “intellectual workers” from the other workers. The workers who work in a particular area of a company belong, even if they are intellectual workers, to the workers of that branch of the company. There must be a sense of belonging between all the workers in the individual branches of the company. We will not make progress if the intellectual workers of the various branches of the company isolate themselves and act as if they are something special, because the category, the term “intellectual workers” has no justification. One should awaken understanding for the fact that the intellectual workers of the individual branches of industry should join the other workers. Only then will something sensible come of it.

I do not agree with what has been said, namely that intellectual workers and manual workers are on the same ground when they jointly recognize the program of threefolding. This is, after all, a general social policy program, and they are not yet on solid ground! One can jointly recognize many programs, but one only stands on solid ground when this ground is a living ground, when one does not, in turn, form an aristocratic class out of what belongs together. I see an aristocratic class formation in this separation of the spiritual workers, and this should be understood. And if what I actually mean were implemented, then the intellectual worker would gain an enormous amount, above all in political education, which I would generally emphasize in the near future, so that each person learns from the other.

I would therefore not wish to be as pessimistic as the previous speaker, who said: Yes, it is above all important that a certain specialized education and training is the absolute basis for the works councils. – It is indeed the case today that anyone familiar with the situation knows that not much can be gained from the usual specialized training, which today is, after all, a thoroughly bourgeois product. I expect more from practical collaboration, from what arises when everyone contributes what they can from their life experiences. We will train each other, and something completely new will arise. I could imagine that the best results will be achieved when the workers' councils work together in the right way and without maintaining the philistine prejudice that one should first go to school, and when there is a sincere will to learn from each other and to learn from both mistakes. Above all, we will need to socialize in this way, from person to person. Socialization means working together, helping each other, developing brotherhood, and that is precisely what we need in the spiritual realm. In recent years, I have often said to my audiences that the world believes that those who are to learn can only learn from those who have so many diplomas. Those who really want to learn – they may have already learned a great deal – can learn an awful lot from a child of two or three years old, or even younger. This is learning from life, and we will have to cultivate it especially. We must get beyond the Philistinism of the old technical school system, then the works councils will be able to achieve something tremendously important for the new structure. The matter should not be viewed pessimistically, but with trust. From trust will grow efficiency. Then the works councils will not be a decoration, if they do not want to be a decoration themselves.

However, I fully agree that the works councils will be a buffer on two sides. I do not believe that the time we are heading for, if we want to work seriously, will be one in which we let ourselves be carried by the waves of life, possibly even lying down on a soft bed of rest from time to time. We shall have to work very hard and we must not shrink from being storm-troops in all directions. It will not be easy to create something new out of the collapse. We need only remember that the old economic system, especially in Germany, led us into sheer nonsense. We are not only in a state of collapse, but also in a state of nonsense. Just consider what it means if, in the next few years, only the interest is to be paid on everything that has accumulated as a result of the devastation of the war! It is much more than Dernburg calculated. It will be at least 30 billion marks a year; where will it come from? 30 billion marks, which of course will not be available! If we think of continuing anything from the past, then we are not only heading for impossible conditions, but also for sheer nonsense. It will be difficult, very difficult, but I think that anyone who has a slight understanding of the spirit of the times must say to himself: we just have to work, we have to work seriously. Only in this way can we get out of this situation.

Now I would just like to point out that I do not want to go into Mr. Remmele's reply, and that is because it is not yet clear to me what the main point of his objections is. What has been said makes the whole matter seem strange to me, because, you see, you can call anything a false doctrine. I was immediately suspicious when it was said that it was a heresy like the teaching of Dühring, who taught the same thing decades ago. I know Dühring and suspect that the speaker knows him little, because I can safely recommend to you: read him, then you will see that he did not want the same thing, but something completely different from what I consider necessary. I consider Dühring's teachings to be the outburst of a man who was somewhat angry with human society and who did not know much about reality. It is sometimes witty, but it is not something that can be applied in reality. Such objections are then fleeting. I believe it is perhaps not advisable to go into these things at length, because in time it will become apparent from the way in which the words, which can initially be spoken out of reality, can also be transformed into deeds and become part of reality. I am reassured when reality tests what I say. I believe it will know how to take in what I have to say.

Mr. Molt has already spoken to you about what was said against the signatures of the appeal, and I believe that in this respect, through your consent to Mr. Molt, you have truly shown your fundamental understanding of something that is absolutely necessary. You can be quite sure that not many entrepreneurs will act out of the kind of attitude shown by those who signed this “appeal”. But those who do act in this way are fully aware that, on the one hand, this “appeal” and these impulses were certainly not created for the sake of the factory owners, but if the factory owners are to have anything to do with them, then they must commit to them for the freest of human reasons. At the most, the factory owners can profess their support for the “appeal”, but the “appeal” has no consideration for them and will not do so. That is one thing. On the other hand, it must be seen that it will be necessary to work precisely with those people who, out of the most earnest will, profess the cause of socialization, of social progress in the objective sense at all, because otherwise you only have the choice – since, after all, those who have some expertise will still be needed – either to occupy the top positions and leave everything else as it was, as we have seen in some examples, or you run the risk of everything being sabotaged by those on the inside.

It is therefore not only a matter of our being able to appreciate the right attitude in a feeling-based way, but we must also be able to see what is necessary, to see that we are not working towards the sabotage of those who, out of the old way of thinking, do not want to develop the new. We must realize that we are compelled to work together with those who have joined the “call” not out of selfish interest but for the sake of the cause. This has happened with the signatories, otherwise they would not be on it. For I have not yet found that anyone has placed themselves behind me in order to satisfy their selfish interests. That is an experience I have had all my life. They will not make any too bad experiences. Forgive this personal remark, but we will be able to discuss many a factual question in detail, just as the seriousness of the times demands. In this brief closing address, I could only hint at a few things, but I hope that the discussions will be able to continue.

• 1. The wording of the votes of individual participants in the discussion was not always recorded by the stenographer – and then sometimes only in fragments. Sometimes the texts that have been handed down are also summaries of the meaning of the comments.

Introductory words by Rudolf Steiner

Dear attendees,
You have just heard how this evening is to proceed. We will make the best progress in the whole movement, which is to serve the social reconstruction, if we try to communicate on this path of questioning and free discussion about what should happen. Since I will have to inform myself through your later contributions to the discussion about what is to be discussed this evening, I will only take a few words to draw attention to a few things, since it may be good to put them forward in advance of our disputations. Above all, I would like to emphasize once more that this 'Federation for the Threefold Social Organism' differs in some respects from other, party-like movements, without these party-like movements being in any way disturbed or impaired by this 'Federation for Threefold Social Organism'. If the “Federation for the Threefold Order of the Social Organism” believes it must take action today, it is for a very specific reason.

You are all well aware of how long the call for socialization has been going around in a more emotional way. You all also know that this call for socialization has taken on a particularly urgent form today. They know that we cannot escape confusion and chaos if we do not take into account what is contained in the demand for socialization, if we do not seriously strive through action for what can really be called socialization.

On the other hand, we see that precisely since the beginning of the German Revolution, it has become clear in so many ways that although the call for socialization is there, at the same time there is a lack of ideas about what should actually be done, how what is demanded as socialization should actually be implemented. Right now, every day brings new evidence of how little people are clear about what needs to be done to bring about socialization. And so we see that the call for socialization is becoming clearer and clearer, more and more justified, but that the government is not doing anything significant, or even insignificant, to achieve true socialization. Yes, we can even say – perhaps you will want to elaborate on this question or provide more precise information later in the course of the disputation – that it can be clearly seen from what is happening that there is no concept of real socialization.

You may have read the draft law that is supposed to initiate – so they say in bureaucratic language – the institution of the so-called works councils. Of course, the first thing one thinks of is the places where they want to initiate such things today, making laws about what works councils should do, what their rights will be, and so on. But if you take the whole thing, what has now been launched as a draft, you will have to say to yourself: Yes, this does not bear the stamp of true socialization in the slightest. It is even called “socialization of the companies,” as if one could actually socialize the individual companies! What this draft contains for the constitution of the works councils is nothing more than, I would say, the introduction of a certain democratic principle of the parliamentarism with which we are all too familiar into the individual companies. In fact, the matter is already often referred to as the “democratization of the companies”. The parliamentary principle should extend certain offshoots, such gulfs, into the companies, where further parliamentarization should then take place. Yes, just as the previous parliamentarism, in that it was practiced in isolation in all kinds of “houses”, was unable to contribute anything to socialization, so this extension of the parliamentary gulfs will be unable to bring anything of socialization to the factories. You see it best from the fact that in this draft, everywhere the old language of “employer” and “employee” is used. Even if it is not openly stated, it is still the case that the old capitalism continues to lurk behind all of this. Everything is conceived in the old capitalist form. Basically, everything should remain the same, and the employees should be reassured by the fact that works councils can now somehow be elected that have all sorts of theoretical negotiations with the employers. But when it comes to the actual social structure, ultimately everything should remain the same. This can be clearly seen from such a draft by anyone who has a sense of reading something like this at all. Not even the slightest attempt has been made to really dismantle capitalism. And so we see that the very first demand for socialization, the dismantling of capitalism, is not tackled by what is now so often called socialization.

What is left for us to think about in the face of such a government? Truly, today we can no longer arrive at any other conclusion than that the only salvation lies in the fact that the great mass of workers are now truly informed about the damage that the social order has caused so far, and that they are informed about what can really bring about improvement. It is, above all, enlightenment that is needed. In this context, it is important that we should no longer listen to those who keep saying, “But enlightenment takes a long time.” It need not take long if we are willing to make a little effort to see things without masks and illusions, if we try to see things as they are and as they must happen. We no longer have the time to wait years for socialization. Something must happen immediately. But something can only happen if a united mass of people carry what is to be done. People keep asking: Yes, where is the practical instruction for what is written in my book, for example, 'The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future'? The most practical thing is to have as many people as possible demanding what is in my book, so that it becomes quite impossible to continue to govern against these demands. The future power will consist in the fact that it will enforce what it is all about. Otherwise a power will never know how to use that power, what it should do. It really depends on knowing what to do. Therefore, proper education must take place in the broadest circles, and one must be able to form an idea of how something like the dismantling of private capital and the abolition of the wage system can take place.

Above all, one must be able to form a thorough idea of the following. You see, the actual economic question, where does it arise? You have to be able to see it in the right place. You must not let gray theories obscure the facts. You have to see the economic question where it is, and start from there. Where is it? Where is it as a fact? Well, it is there where I have to take my wallet out of my pocket and have the money in it for which I am to get something in a store to satisfy my needs. And there must be enough in my wallet for me to be able to get the things I need to live. That is the basic fact of all economic life. Today, everything else is basically only there to obscure this fact.

Why does the tripartite social organism demand a separation of economic life from legal and spiritual life? It demands this separation for the reason that economic life can be truly socialized in itself, so that it is finally presented in its true form, the true form that takes place between the goods in the shop and the contents of the wallet. Only when we extract from the whole remaining social process that which must take place between the purse and the shop, do we put ourselves in a position to think in a truly socialist way. But what does that mean? It means a great deal. But if one does not start from the right fact, then one cannot arrive at correct views with regard to all the other things.

I will educate myself from your disputation about what is to be said about the details. But before that, I would like to give some necessary guidelines, starting from the basic economic fact I have just described. You see, when I go into a shop and there is something in it that I need to satisfy my vital needs, and I come with my purse and spend the money for the goods from this purse, then you have to be clear about the fact that there is a process involved in this that somewhat obscures the true facts. I get goods, I spend money. Is money a commodity? Can money ever be a commodity? You really don't need to do any in-depth studies, but the in-depth studies prove exactly what I am going to say now.

You just need to have a real sense of what a piece of paper is, and you will say to yourself: a piece of paper can never be a commodity in the same way as, for example, a loaf of bread that you buy in a shop. I think that is something that the simplest mind can understand, and no science can claim anything else. What you take out of your wallet as money cannot be a commodity, but only an instruction to receive a commodity, nothing else. But that is why it must come from the commodity. A commodity must have been produced at some point, so something must have been provided. In this sense, services are also goods. This piece of paper must have been created by such a process that produces goods, and so the piece of paper only forms the bridge between the goods that you buy in the store and those goods that must be produced once so that you can receive the paper instruction for those goods. That, to put it simply, is the economic process. Any other element in the economic process is unhealthy. If it is to be healthy, nothing can be exchanged in the economic process except commodity for commodity.

Now, however, we ask: Is only commodity exchanged for commodity in the economic process today? No, and as soon as you think about it properly, you come to the point. Today, in the economic process, not only goods are exchanged for goods, but today, in the economic process, goods, even if perhaps represented by money, are exchanged for labor. In the economic process, labor power is paid just like goods. But this is how labor power is introduced into the economic process.

You see, there is a very simple consideration that can show you that labor does not belong in the economic process at all, because it can never be compared to any commodity in its nature. You just have to correct people's very convoluted ideas about such things today. You have to understand how people have learned to think about these things incorrectly.

You see, it is still associated with a certain amount of effort on the part of the human organism. Now, even if a person has no need to chop wood, for example, he may still feel the need to work. Then he does sports, for example. And the amount of labor that one devotes to sports could, under certain circumstances, wear out the body just as much as the work of someone chopping wood wears out the body – if he exerts himself particularly during sports. Labor has nothing to do with the economic process, but labor has something to do with the economic process only in that it is applied to something economically valuable. Sport is economically worthless, it exists only for human egoism. Chopping wood is valuable. Because labor is economically valuable, it becomes part of the economic process. But the essential thing about work is that I must be a free person with regard to the use of my labor, that I cannot be compelled by economic coercion to put my labor at the service of capitalism in any old way. When it comes to the use of labor, freedom and bondage and coercion intervene. Just as labor as such must be a matter of law and not of economics, so too, what must be made clear in the simplest possible way, is that in economics only what is produced, created by labor, has any significance.

In economic life, only that which is produced and created by labor has any significance; it must be paid for. But there must be an entrepreneur who pays a worker for his labor. How the labor manager and the worker relate to each other must be determined on a completely different basis, namely that of law. In the economic sphere, when true right exists, the laborer and the labor manager can only be partners who distribute the proceeds of the labor among themselves in a just manner. In the future, there must be no more payment for labor, that is to say, the wage relationship must be eliminated, and furthermore, the wage relationship must not exist.

A state must be brought about, and that is then a social state in which the labor manager and the worker jointly produce the goods and share with each other in a just way according to the contract of goods, not according to the contract of employment, what they produce together as free associates. Only when such a transformation of the production relations has been brought about can one speak of socialization. But then one also stops using all the old terms that are still based on capitalism in a socialization program. You have to rethink things very thoroughly. You really have to throw out the old ideas, not just because they are ideas, but because they are embedded in life.

But now something else must be considered. If the labor force is to be placed in a relationship of compulsion within the economic process, then something must be there. What is that? You see, I have to go back to the original fact of the economic process, to the purse and the shop. If the note that I have in my purse is really nothing more than an order for a commodity, then basically no compulsion to work can prevail, because then this note must always lead back in some way to something that has been put into the world as a service. And it is only a matter of this service then circulating in the appropriate way, circulating in such a way that consumption regulates production at all times. But that is not the case today. What I carry in my wallet has become something quite different from an instruction for the goods as a result of the economic process of recent times. It has become a commodity in its own right, something that has an independent value in the social order. But it has only become so because a type of commodity – which, basically, could be eliminated altogether if only the leading trading state, England, would also eliminate it, then it could be eliminated entirely from the economic process; it can always be eliminated from an internal economic process, it can always be eliminated; one would then only need to take another consideration into account with respect to foreign countries –– that this token, which I carry in my wallet, has a different meaning than being a mere order for goods. This is due to the fact that a commodity has been created by the state, which is not really a commodity, namely gold or silver. In reality, neither is a commodity, but they are represented by the note. This separates the monetary process from the economic process, withdraws it from the economic process, thereby turning money itself into a commodity, and thereby allowing money, which in reality should not be a commodity, to become completely independent in economic life. But this is the basis of capitalism.

[If you can trade money independently, what happens? Since money can never be created other than by producing goods, but goods can never be produced other than through labor in an economy based on the division of labor, power over labor arises through capital. Capital is nothing more than power over human labor. You get the opportunity to obtain human labor by detaching money as an independent commodity from the economic process, while money should actually be just a worthless bill in the sense of an order for what you exchange as a commodity through money. But through this detachment of money, labor has become the servant of the power of “capital.” As a result, something in the economic process, such as the formation of prices, is constantly distorted. For while I should only pay for the goods, I also have to pay for the labor. But because power dominates labor, labor is paid as cheaply as possible, because, of course, a power that dominates tends to buy as cheaply as possible. If labor power is included in the economic process itself, then capitalism cheapens it.

What is important now is that labor must be removed from the economic process. Only goods may be in the economic process. However, because the economic process is so distorted, other things can also be in it. You see, for many decades the socialists have repeatedly called for the socialization of the means of production. But today it is necessary to know how this socialization of the means of production must be effected. It is not enough to merely call for socialization in the abstract; instead, one must know how it can be carried out. Today we have reached the point where we can already realize such things if we really want to, if we really have the courage to.

Before we inform ourselves in detail about the peculiar position of the means of production in today's economic life – essentially, they are capital – it is good if we first look at something else.

Today, not only goods can be bought, that is, what is produced by human labor in the social organism through the division of labor, but one can also buy something quite different, which no human being produces, but which is there by nature, that is, land. But this buying of land or taking out a mortgage on land is only a process of falsifying the economic order. It is something quite different from what people actually imagine. You cannot really buy land, because land only has value when it is worked on. What you buy, that is, what you acquire through the so-called purchase, is the exclusive right to use the land. That is what it comes down to, this exclusive right to use the land.

So you are not buying a commodity when you buy land, but a right. And that is the cancer of today's social order, that within the economic process you can not only buy goods, but you can also buy labor and rights. By buying labor, you acquire the ability to draw that labor into the economic process, that is, to rape it. And by buying the right to use land, you acquire power.

It must be clear that this calamity cannot be overcome unless we tackle the matter radically. The finished means of production, or rather, the finished means of production that are used to produce further products, have exactly the same value in the economic process as land, or rather, the same importance. In reality, you can't buy these finished means of production either. But if you buy them, you are actually acquiring the right to use them exclusively. So, you buy a right again. And now you can see best of all from these means of production that when they are finished, they simply must not be for sale, that the means of production must cease to have a value on the economic market. When they are finished, they are just like land. Now the question arises that really contains a social demand: How do we manage that the means of production no longer have an economic value when they are finished? We can only manage this – as I said earlier – by allowing everything that does not belong in the economic process to be transformed into independent members of the social organism.

What is necessary for production? Is capital really necessary? No! It is nonsense that capital is necessary. In order for the means of production to be operated, it is necessary that intellectual work is there. Of course, every worker understands that intellectual leadership and intellectual work must be present. And he also understands that he would soon have to stop working if there were no intellectual leadership or intellectual work. But today it is not about spiritual leadership, but about private ownership of the means of production and about profitability, about the ability to reinvest the capital invested in the means of production. Therefore, it is necessary to separate the means of production from the economic process so that they can always reach the person with the appropriate abilities and in whom the workers have confidence, through the social order itself. Therefore, the threefold social organism requires an independent spiritual organism. It is simply nonsense to say that this would create new ownership structures... In this spiritual life, which is of course closely connected with the other branches of life, it is then ensured that the means of production make their way through the world differently than through purchase. And in what I call the constitutional state – it really has nothing to do with the old state – it will be ensured that labor can get its rights. In the economic life itself, only the production, distribution and consumption of goods then remain.

Then, when we have such an economic process before us, we will be able to demand that there must be a liquidation government. This government then says to itself: Well, I have to exist for a while because the old order must continue. But I must at most retain only something like a Ministry of Police, a Ministry of the Interior, and also a Ministry of Justice, which will establish the legal conditions through the corresponding democratic representation.

It is again a calumny when it is said that then only the legal scholars will prevail on the legal basis. No, the people will rule; there will be a real democracy that will expand. The government to the left and to the right must be a liquidation government that, on the one hand, transfers spiritual life to its own administration and, on the other hand, transfers economic life to its own administration. The liquidation government will have to take the initiative in such a way that it creates the free space for economic life, so that in the economic sphere, out of the forces that regulate the respective values of goods, that is, the prices necessary for the healthy maintenance of life, a real socialization can occur.

You see, I know, of course, that when I explain something like this, people always say from the most diverse points of view: Yes, he expresses himself so vaguely. — I would just like to know how someone should express themselves definitively about something that is an infinite area. One can only point out what actually underlies things. But I always have the hope that precisely those who, out of their life's struggles, have acquired a certain inner sense of the truth of this matter, would like to see that what is presented here is based on a really thorough insight into the entire process of production and consumption. And only from such an insight can one proceed to action. That alone is therefore the truly practical thing, while those who always make the laws or design institutions in such a way that one hole is closed and another is opened as a result are not practical people.

You can set up an economic enterprise quite nicely if you leave it capitalist, that is, leave the whole economy capitalist. Then it may be possible in the individual economic enterprises that even what is so beautifully called a full labor yield comes about for the worker, but that no more surplus value is generated. Walther Rathenau will come and say: the surplus value is there for nothing other than for the reserve, that is, for the continuous improvement of the means of production and the expansion of the business. Everything that is generated in surplus value goes back into the business. I would just like to know how those who do not work but receive royalties or the like live when everything goes back into the business. Well, you can let such people talk. But something else is much more important.

Let us assume that the entire surplus value is simply distributed among the workers. Do you think that if the old capitalist order remained and if the surplus value were distributed among the workers in a company, that there would be no need to work for surplus value? You can still make a profit if you do not socialize the economy. In that case, it is not subtracted from the workers' wages, but the consumer has to pay it. It is not important that no surplus value is generated, but that the producer does not pay for it... the consumer has to pay for it. But who is that? The worker again. So if you add the surplus value to your wages, you in turn have to pay for what you have earned as a consumer. You plug one hole, but open another.

You can never escape this unnatural economic cycle unless you eliminate the fifth wheel, which is only there to enable people who have not worked to make a profit. This fifth wheel is called capital. And you cannot get out of this cycle if you do not establish a direct relationship between the means of production and the intellectual worker on the one hand and the physical worker on the other. If you do not want this, if you do not throw out this fifth wheel on the wagon, which only serves those who do not work, then you will not achieve socialization.

As you will find, the main thing described in my book is that it really strives to eliminate what capital is from economic life and what is a forced relationship of work. This cannot be done otherwise than by creating a legal basis on which labor is regulated independently of economic life, and by creating a spiritual basis on which human individual abilities are regulated independently of economic life. Then they will flow into economic life in the right way.

Those who understand this will not be very impressed when people come and say: Yes, you want to destroy the unity of social life by dividing it into three parts. No, I want to establish precisely this unity, and those people who speak of dividing this unity, like the foolish writer of an article in yesterday's Süddeutsche Zeitung, believe that I want to cut up a horse. I don't want to cut up the horse, but they believe that if I don't put it on a single foot, I will cut it up. What matters to people is that the horse is only a unit when it stands on one leg. But the horse must stand on four legs. I do not want to cut up the social organism, but to place it on its three healthy legs. In doing so, I want to shape it straight into a whole. That is what matters.

Now I have again told you something about how things are to be understood, but from a different angle than I have usually said in lectures. I just wanted to introduce this evening, and I hope that now many of you will say something that can help us move forward this evening. We must move forward, especially with regard to a real dismantling of capitalism and a real dismantling of forced labor.

Discussion

Mr. Biel asks two questions: 1. Is democracy a necessity for the implementation of such a new form of economic life, or is it right, under certain circumstances, to use force if such a state of affairs cannot be brought about through democracy? Can violence in this case also be a right? — 2. Is this threefold division or socialization possible without taking into account international conditions, that is, without all culturally developed peoples coming onto the scene at the same time with the same ideas and demands?

Rudolf Steiner: Regarding the question of whether democracy is a necessity for the implementation of real socialization, I would like to say the following: In a sense, it is true that so far a majority of people have not been able to warm to new ideas, but, as the previous speaker has already said, only small groups have done so. But on this point in particular, we must realize that today we are not on the threshold of a small reckoning of world history, but of a great one. Many things must change, and they will only change if we are willing to strive for something different, especially with regard to the most important issues, from what has existed so far. Those who today not only look back at the practices of earlier times, but can see today what people want, will take into account the most diverse real factors.

For example, the previous speaker said that a small group of people drove humanity into the world war. Well, I will be publishing a small brochure in the next few days about the outbreak of the First World War, which will show how small the number of those was who, for example, were behind it on the German side. This small group worked in a way that was completely out of touch with the circumstances of the time. They simply carried the old conditions into the present. In terms of attitude, not with the technical means, it would not have been possible to govern in Berlin as it was done if, for example, the art of printing had not existed, through which education and the ability to judge were carried into the broadest masses. But did not this catastrophe of the world wars really bring about the downfall of that which had simply continued to be managed? |

Today we are on a different footing, and today people are not so that they want to let small groups dictate to them what they have to do, and that they just want to exchange one small group for another. Today everyone wants to be involved. Today is the time to learn the difference between ruling and governing. It seems, however, that this difference has not yet been thoroughly enough recognized. The people must rule today; a government may only govern. That is what matters. And that is why democracy is necessary today in a healthy sense. That is why I have no hope that one can achieve anything with the most beautiful ideas if one wants to realize them through small groups and if one is not supported by the knowledge and insight of the real majority of the population. The most important task today is to win over the vast majority of the population for what has been recognized as a possibility for change. Thus, today we are faced with the necessity of having the majority of the population on our side in a democratic way for what will ultimately be truly achieved in terms of socialization.

Of course, there could be transitional periods in which a small group would implement something that is not recognized by the majority. But that would only be short-lived. On this point in particular, it must be made clear that even today the time has come when, through democratization, people are to be regarded as equals, and therefore we must create the conditions in which all people can be equal in their judgment, which we must detach from that in which people cannot be equal in their judgment. Just imagine if some child at school is particularly talented at learning arithmetic and you want to make a musician out of him, then by training the child wrongly you are depriving the social life of a very special strength. The healthy development of individuality must be nurtured precisely in the social organism. You cannot democratize there, you can only apply the insight into the real knowledge of human nature. Something completely new must be introduced into the field of education and teaching.

And in economic life, do you want to make democratic decisions? For example, how to make boots or valves? Here, based on factual knowledge, corporations must be formed in relation to production and consumption; here, objective interests must be decisive. The purely factual interests must be separated to the left and to the right, and then the ground of democracy remains in the middle, on which nothing else comes into consideration than what every mature, fully developed person has to demand from every mature, fully developed person as an equal, and from where law then radiates into the spiritual and economic life. Precisely because the call for democracy is so justified today, we must recognize how democracy can be carried out. That was not necessary in capitalist society. There, too, people called themselves democrats, but it was not yet necessary to approach the concept of democracy as thoroughly as it is today. Today we have reached the point where we have to ask ourselves: Because democracy must come, how can we realize it in practice? The answer must be: only by basing it on its own foundations, and what cannot be administered democratically, what cannot be judged by all people, that is separated factually to the left and right.

It is so easy to understand why this tripartite social organism is necessary that one must actually always be surprised that people have so much against it. If they ask who is open and honest about democracy, for example, it is precisely the tripartite social organism, because it seeks to find out how to realize democracy and does not want to mix and confuse everything, so that there can be no democracy in the unitary state. Of course, those who always shout “For throne and altar!” have not made democracy. But, my dear attendees, they will not make democracy either, who put the office in place of the throne and the cash register in place of the altar. Democracy will only be made by those who are sincere about human society and do not want to carry the democratic to where expertise can be the only thing that matters. Therefore, people will have to come to terms with the fact that, as reasonable socialists have always said, there must be factual administrations in the future and no sham administrations through elections and the like. Of course, there must be elections, but beyond the technique of voting, one will have to learn other things than one already knows today. I just want to point out: Democracy must come, but we must have a social organism of such a kind that it thoroughly makes democracy possible.

As for international relations, I will just say that, while this world war was raging, it was precisely because of the internationality of this threefold order that I established it, because I saw only in the threefold order a remedy for somehow emerging from the terrible devastation and devastation of this world war. For if you have been an attentive observer for decades, you clearly recognized that this modern catastrophe, the greatest in world history, which, by the way, is far from over, was bound to happen as a result of the mixing up of everything possible.

Let us illustrate the story with a single phenomenon, the Baghdad Railway question. You may know that the Baghdad Railway question played a major role in the events that led to the First World War. Anyone who studies the negotiations in connection with the Baghdad Railway question knows how intertwined the economic interests of capitalist imperialism or capitalisms and national, chauvinistic, state, and legal prejudices are. For example, a certain German financial consortium thought it had the matter in the bag because it had attracted certain people in England, also financial consortia, that is to say people steeped in capital-economic interests. Then the state dimension emerged and confused everything so much that the English dropped out again. Then the French dropped out for the same reasons. Then again it was against German national interests, and so it went through the whole negotiations. Those who know real life know that in modern life the three spheres of life, intellectual life, to which national life also belongs, economic life and state or legal life, have become increasingly intertwined.

You see, when I came to Vienna during this world war – people judged this world war and their fate in it from the most diverse points of view – some people told me: This whole war is a pig war. – Not condemning, but characterizing, they wanted to express that one of the most important causes was that Hungary refused to let the Serbian pigs be imported. Thus it was a purely economic matter that became entangled with national, that is, spiritual issues. Thus various cauldrons were formed in which what then became a world war was brewed: all kinds of legal, extra-legal, class-legal and similar issues. Therefore, anyone who looks at the international situation must point out that the only hope for the future is to separate the three areas of life so that a three-part social organism is formed. Then the individual areas will support each other, then one will point to the other.

Sometimes people are so stubborn that it is amazing. You see, I once spoke to a person who is a legal scholar and even a ministerial director, and I pointed out to him that if the social organism is tripartite, conflicts can no longer arise at the borders because one does not interfere with the other. I said that state conflicts do not arise so quickly from economic conflicts if everything is not mixed up. Good economic relations, for example, will help with state conflicts and the like. Yes, he said, but if you implement that, then you are going against something that has always been in history, namely that the most important wars in history are actually wars over raw materials. If you want to introduce that, you are eliminating the raw material conflicts from the world, and it is our experience that these raw material conflicts have always been there. I had to answer: Yes, if you had wanted to give me confirmation that I am right, then it would make sense to me. That you tell me it as a refutation, I cannot understand. That is how people are today. When they think straight and naturally, they cannot bring themselves to accept it, because people's ideas have already been distorted.

So, with regard to the international as such, it was precisely the threefold order that was thought of first. It is the basis for a real socialization of international life as well. But it has another special feature. It does no harm at all if one social organism becomes threefold and the others do not yet want to become threefold. If the others are not yet ready, those who have introduced the threefold structure can enjoy the benefits of the threefold organism. Outwardly, if it should hinder them, they can of course act as one. If there are three parliaments, they can join together in negotiations with foreign countries because the others will not yet allow it otherwise. But they will still be ahead of the others because they are realizing the threefold order in their own area. That is precisely the important thing: not to think that you want to revolutionize the whole world, but to start in a particular area. Then it will be - and I am quite sure of this - very contagious when truly salutary conditions arise in an area. That will have a very contagious effect. And that is precisely what will contribute to internationalization. We just have to think practically. The only thing that could happen now is that the Entente would prevent us from introducing these blessings so that we cannot set an example. But we must show courage and drive in what we are able to create. Perhaps it is precisely through something like this that we will be able to fight against the strong capitalist-imperialist powers.

Discussion participant Mittwich asks: 1. How will it be possible to tax people in the socialist economy in the future? - 2. How will we socialize?

Rudolf Steiner: By pointing out the importance of democratization in the transition period, I do not think that the two previous speakers have really presented anything different from what I have said. Of course, misunderstandings could arise in one circle or another, but nothing really different from what I have said has actually been presented.

You see, you have to see this as a basis for the whole impulse of threefolding, namely that it aims at reality everywhere, that it does not theorize at all. In fact, if I may express myself somewhat paradoxically, what is written in my book about the social question is not so important as what happens when one sets about realizing what is written there. There people will notice that all kinds of things come out that they had no idea of before, precisely the things that are unconsciously demanded today by the truly working and productive people. And in a special case this is the case with democracy. Of course, for the transition period a very important question will be this: If we now really get a sufficient majority, and I consider that the only healthy one, because nothing can be maintained in the long run with small groups, if we get a sufficient majority for something that can really be carried out practically, then of course the question arises from the actual circumstances in question, it can only come from them: How do you then, more or less clearly, compliment — you know what I mean by that — those whom you wish were no longer in power? This is, of course, a significant transitional question, and I believe that if there is a real relative majority – I would even say a sufficient majority, it just depends on there being a number of people who can tip the scales and carry the matter, who are there out of conviction, out of insight and not out of following, not out of authority – then there will also be a way in which the new can be achieved.

But, you see, the question, which Mr. Mittwich has discussed very nicely here, does not seem to me to have been dealt with in a completely practical way, especially when I imagine that things are supposed to happen in space and not in our heads, not in our thoughts. Mr. Mittwich was right to say: when it comes to the fateful questions of Germany, when it comes to the big, serious questions of the present, only those who are productive workers, who are in some way truly productively active, should have a say. I fully agree. But you see, human society would be in a bad way if the majority of people were not productive, if they were inactive. The majority are already productively active. And if we only had all those who were productively active, if they really formed a majority, then we would be fine. Then those who are productively inactive would be in a strong minority: the parasites of society.

Now the thing about the tripartite organism is that only the productive workers, that is, those who really produce something and mean something to society, will certainly appropriate what is in its impulses. When they appropriate it, we can rely on these people, and the minority who do not appropriate it do not come into consideration. By accepting what is really reasonable, we will in practice get a majority that can be relied on. So I think that if it is accepted, the matter itself will ensure that the majority of those who are productively active will assert themselves. But how you want to push something through without being able to rely on the majority of those who are productively active, I don't see that in practice yet. It is not enough to demand that only the productive workers should share in the fate of Germany. The question only becomes practical when one considers how the productive workers alone can form a majority. The parasites will be weeded out if we can adhere to the tripartite social organism. Because that will bring about a real socialization, and those who are unproductive social parasites – you can be quite sure of that – will not be able to find any taste in this socialization. They will have to fall back into inactivity – well, they are already in there – but also into inactivity in terms of their vote and so on.

It is true that, economically, capitalism can be used to exert pressure, as I have sufficiently explained. But this compulsion ceases to exist when we render it harmless by ensuring the dismantling of capitalism. That is why I actually cannot understand how people constantly mix up what is appropriate for the present and what is appropriate for the time to come, which must really be just around the corner, because we do not have much time. For the present, one can indeed speak of the fact that the capitalists can strangle us, but we want to prevent them from doing that. So we cannot imagine conditions that we want to eliminate. Therefore, it is not correct to object that the capitalists will have the power. They will not have it if we move forward as the three-part social organism indicates. It will be taken from them. And finally, for those who take a closer look today, the question arises like this: Is capital, as such, really so extraordinarily powerful today, mainly as economic power over wide areas?

You see, I'll try to make something clear to you with a comparison. I once knew a family that had a really big dog. And suddenly, after the woman of the family had looked at this dog very thoughtfully for a long time, she came up with a strange idea. She said that if this dog were suddenly to become aware of its strength and were to use it, then it could tear us all apart. But it is so tame, and we are only saved because it has become accustomed to tameness. — You see, a great deal of the power of old capitalism has already been undermined. People just don't think about how much has already been undermined, how much is only maintained in appearance today by the fact that the old conditions are being propagated. Yes, you see, if after the German Revolution – don't get me wrong, comparisons are always misleading, the comparison is only meant to express the balance of power – those who came up afterwards had produced within themselves the awareness of the power that lies in the bulldog, if they had not allowed themselves to be hypnotized by muddling through in old ways, then we would have come further today.

Now, it is not always easy to answer specific questions, especially when it comes to practical people. I will tell you why. The specific questions are to be answered differently depending on the circumstances. Things can be handled in very different ways, and it is not always necessary to do them in the same way. The programmatic person, the theorist, is usually so clever that he thinks up a socialist program down to the last detail. There have always been such people. But that is not the point, but rather to show how the ground must be shaped so that people can socialize themselves, so that they come together in socializing.

I must always emphasize: I do not feel smarter than others with regard to the details, but I am trying to give suggestions as to how each person can bring out what can contribute to socialization. Therefore, I want people to place themselves on three levels. After all, people will not be divided into classes, but they will all be within each area. And it is people who will form the unity. Therefore, I would like to join the community of ideas in such a way that socialization can really be brought about by the people. Then, under the new conditions, we will also find a fair system of taxation. We must not forget: we cannot find a just principle for taxation from today's wealth statistics, since we are working to place them on a completely different footing. All these things, such as income tax, consumption tax and so on, will be placed on a completely different footing in the future. Read my writing on the social question. There you will see that many things will indeed be quite different in the future. For example, the family man is in the social organism in a completely different way than the single person, and that is because, if the constitutional state really develops as I assume, then every child has the right to an education. Then the situation is not that the family man has to distribute his meager wages among a large family, while the single person can use it all for himself. The circumstances will be quite different. [Interjection: And the other consumer goods?] The right to consumer goods is a matter of course. This is ensured by the fact that the economic process is a real one. Everyone who produces something will, simply through the economic process, have the opportunity to procure the consumer goods, which is much more certain than an abstract right. The aim of the emancipation of economic life is to have enough. Needs are better met if you have a right to consumer goods and thus enough in your wallet. That is the aspect concerning the right to consumer goods. In reality, it is not really important if one is really thinking about realizing the threefold social organism. Then, in fact, what is produced is what really equates one person with another from a certain age onwards.

Isn't it true that, in a truly socialized community, income as such need not be the determining factor for what one can consume. For it is quite possible that a person, by performing some kind of, well, let's call it quality work, may appear to earn more than another in a socialist community; but that does not mean that he has more for his consumption than another; he must spend it in the appropriate way. It is not a matter of keeping this concept of income and consumption in mind in the future, but rather of ensuring that - because one person will be economically fair in relation to another - it will be possible in the future to even eliminate the state as a tax collector from the economic process.

You see, one concept will have to disappear completely in the future: the concept of legal personality, including economic-legal personality. What is to be paid in taxes will actually be paid by individual people, because in the state, in the democratic state, on the ground on which the law is to live, the individual human being faces the individual human being. Human beings can only be equal when one human being is face to face with another. In the sphere of economic life and in the sphere of intellectual life there must be corporations. In the sphere of the state there can only be law, which is the same for all human beings, and which every adult can understand. The corollary of this, however, is that every private person, every individual, is only the bearer of the tax. This can be proportioned so that injustice never occurs, but this proportionality will not be necessary if there is real equality among people. The tax issue will then be something completely different. Therefore, the things that are at stake and that can be asked about today apply more to the transitional stage. Often, things have to be done that are not permanent. Of course, the aim is to gradually create the conditions for taxing the individual, not for taxing complexes [...] Of course, a consumption tax must also be created, by which I do not mean indirect taxes, which are unfair. So, a consumption tax must be created, that is, those who consume a lot of money must, of course, be taxed more than those who do not consume much, because if someone puts the money in the straw bag, it has no significance for social life. It only acquires significance when it is spent.

These are, of course, very specific questions, which today, because they are very specific practical questions, can basically only be answered insufficiently, because the institutions in the transition stage cannot yet be good either. If we can find a way of thinking that makes it possible to distribute fairly what is due to the state, we will also find a way to tax those who today still have a large income more than those who have less. And what Mr. Mittwich said about the future can only be realized when everything that can be created through the threefold social order is in place.

A very real question is how to think about implementing socialization. Some say it can only be achieved by increasing production. Yes, but there are many other things to be considered. In this regard, there is still a lack of clarity in contemporary humanity. You see, I once said in a lecture – I think to Daimler workers – that the peculiar thing about the more recent development of humanity is that, due to machines, the number of workers on the whole earth does not correspond to the number of people given in the encyclopedia as the population of the earth. It says there are about 1500 million people, but in reality, if we count the working population, there are 2000 million, so 500 million more. That is a curious fact. Of course, I am not saying that ghosts are walking around, who would not work even if they were walking around, but that is so because we have machines and can compare what is produced economically using machines, for example, in contrast to the Orient, where there are not yet so many machines, where man does more by hand. This makes it possible to calculate that the increased output resulting from the use of machines throughout the world is equivalent to 500 million people. Imagine how much labor and productive power could be saved if this were actually utilized in a sensible way. But strangely enough, I was met with the following response: Yes, I had said quite correctly that through the machine there are 500 million imaginary people, so 500 million more than in reality, so that the work is done by 2,000 million people, but on the other hand, people's needs have increased during the machine age and the same is true as before. That is an objection that one hears very often, that simply when the productive power is increased, needs also increase. One hole is closed, another opens. But in reality it is different. It is the case that everything must be taken into account that can lead to rationalization, to the proper design of the production process. Those who only think that the production process must be increased will not get it right – and that is: a proper balance between consumption and production, not the greatest possible increase in production. That does not lead to what must be striven for, that is, to a pricing system that really creates decent living conditions for all people.

What is necessary, in particular, is that in production, the kind of mistakes that have been made, let's say, in Germany, are not made. One of them – and there have been many – is that in the years long before the outbreak of the World War, twice as much coal was used for German industry as would have been necessary. So many resources were wasted, which could have been used for something completely different. What matters most is that we have people in the economic process who are up to the current situation. But we don't have them. People may be able to think very advanced on a large scale, but we don't have any real economic leaders. The economic process is not really organized at all in the way it should be, because people have no idea how important it is not to squander productive forces unnecessarily.

I have often used a grotesque example in these lectures. It is not uncommon today for a young badger to have to write his doctoral thesis after graduating from university. I will give you a concrete example. A young person was given the task by his professor to write his doctoral thesis on the commas in Homer - which, by the way, do not exist. This is, of course, a thesis that does not contribute the slightest thing to the social process. People who are hypnotized by scientific thinking take offense when you say something like that. But this matter must be viewed in an economic light. From an economic point of view, it is taken into account that this young man needs a year and a half for the work. During this time, he must eat, drink and dress. The fact that he can do this means that so-and-so many people have to work to provide him with food and drink, but he squanders his productive power and does nothing for society. Through what people call “free independent science,” he becomes a parasite on social life. This is just one example. But there are many such things in our production process, in our whole social life, where one can be very hardworking but ultimately unproductive. This raises the question: how do we find this out? We cannot find out without placing the spiritual life on its own ground. Is it on its own ground today? Wherever it is attacked, you can feel the unhealthy ground. Where do the numerous people come from who are let loose on the working population and who are supposed to lead or govern those who work?

In my lectures, I have often used the example of a certain government councilor Kolb. This Mr. Kolb did not do as many others do, who retire after a certain time, but went to America and worked there among the workers, first in a bicycle factory, then in a brewery. Then he wrote a book: “As a Worker in America”. In this book you can read the following beautiful sentence: “Earlier, when I saw a person on the street who was not working, I thought: Why isn't this bum working?” Today I see the matter quite differently. Today I know that the uncomfortable things in life look quite comfortable in the study. — Well, you see, this person has made it to the level of a senior government official. He has certainly studied in our present-day intellectual workshops, but he had no idea of life, no idea of work. And today, life is run by people like that! One has no idea how much our living conditions depend on such things! But must not these conditions be unhealthy? Yes, I only ask you to consider that man really depends on his thoughts. What is in the mind is not indifferent, it is contagious, it infects the whole person, especially when it comes to people during the developmental years. And now I want to tell you something: Do today's teaching institutions ensure that people are educated who then understand something about life, on the ground of which the work takes place? No, the circumstances are quite different. And in the minds of those who are released from our teaching institutions today, what kind of thoughts live in them? The thoughts that people absorb through the Greek language, for example, live in them. But a language is the clearest mirror of external life. Grammar, word formation, even intonation and everything else is taken from life. The Greek language, when I immerse myself in it, makes me able to find my way into Greek life. In those days, only those who pursued politics or art or science or perhaps managed agriculture could be free. All the rest were unfree. Everything is geared to this when one takes in Greek. People who come out of the teaching institutions today come out with thoughts that can only be applied to a social order in which only a few people are free and most are unfree. People do not notice what is happening unconsciously, what is flowing into them. That is why intellectual life must be freed, so that we do not have capitalists and their servants as intellectual leaders, but so that intellectual leadership is in line with economic life. Isn't it absurd – we are talking about the 'great reckoning' here – isn't it absurd that our intellectual leaders do not do things the way the Greeks did? The Greeks learned for their lives in their educational institutions. You can criticize that today as you like, but that was life back then. Today, life must not be that! But we do not learn what is necessary for our lives; instead, we let our youth learn what was for ancient Greece.

Yes, you see, people today still do not think about these basics for healthy socialization. But this is necessary, especially when we are talking about the proper organization of production, which is quite complicated today. So today we have to learn to understand, for example, how large a production plant can be. Because, you see, what Mr. Mittwich said applies to a production plant that is too small. Of course it cannot survive because it belongs to an old economic order. But we must not let the production plants become too large for purely economic reasons, and this is why: too small plants - I must express this as an economic law today - too small plants will lead in the future to those who work in them starving to death. Too large plants will cause those who are supposed to buy what is produced in these plants to starve. The production plant must have a very definite size, and this size will only be able to be determined when in the future, through the people who understand something, a right balance between consumption and production is created. The interests of consumption are always such that they want to expand. You will always see that consumption cooperatives have an interest in becoming large. Production cooperatives always want to become smaller. The right balance is created by what production and consumption achieve together. Then such enterprises will come into being that will have a size that is appropriate for the spiritually active person to work for the benefit of the physically working person, and from this will come a natural prosperity that will ensure a dignified existence for the broad masses.

So, as you can see, it is not that simple. It is necessary to realize that it is unhealthy for someone to say that if all production is done by machines – as the gentleman told me at the time – then needs will also increase. It is a question of whether it is a healthy state of affairs if needs are allowed to increase, or whether we should not consider the possibility of relieving people of work so that they can find some rest. This can also contribute to the proper regulation of prices. People often fail to see the simplest things. I would like to give you an example: I once had a friendly argument with someone about scribbling on postcards. I said: I don't like writing postcards, because most of the time they are just a whim and actually unnecessary. And I believe that I can spare all the postmen who have to run up and down stairs from having to run up and down stairs. I want to spare them this work. The other one said: That's not right, because first of all, I'm happy when I can make someone else happy with the card. – Well, that was still tolerable. But then he said: Secondly, the current number of postmen will soon no longer be sufficient, and more will have to be hired. So someone will have bread again because I write a lot of postcards. – To that I said: But think about what you are actually saying now. Do you really believe that you can increase the amount of bread by even a single gram by employing people to carry picture postcards around? Carrying the cards around will not increase the amount of consumer goods needed for the same number of people! You have to distinguish between productive power, which just needs to be transformed into labor, and completely unproductive forces. And this horrible phrase, which is often used, that work must be created so that people can be employed, makes no sense at all when it comes to creating something completely unproductive.

So, it is important that, through sensible socialization, production is not simply increased blindly, but that a proper balance is struck between consumption and production. You see, it is so very necessary that we develop the good will today to educate ourselves about these things. Because if we continue to think in these dreadful terms, with which one thinks out of the capitalist order, then we will not get anywhere. One must always ask oneself: Is something still being thought in a capitalist way, or is it a realistic germinal idea for the future? Therefore, one must say to oneself: Today one must turn around a thought twice to be sure that it is a thought for the new structure and not a thought learned from what is ripe for the dismantling. That is what I wanted to say about the questions.

The following question was asked: Under the present circumstances, we can hardly get a majority for the threefold social order because not even the proletarians are united among themselves. What can be done to bring about this unity?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, that is one of those questions that always comes down to the fact that although one understands what is right, one imagines that for some reason it cannot be achieved. This question should not really be raised; it really gets you nowhere. The question must become a will question. I cannot express myself on this. You just have to do something. What we have recognized as being right must be carried from person to person. We must not ask ourselves: Will we win over the majority or not? but we must do everything to win that majority. Then we shall have done our duty, not only to ourselves but to all humanity. It must be a matter of will, not a mere theoretical question, such as: How can we get the majority? I say: We must have it! And therefore we must work to get it. It must be a matter of will. There is no other way.

Introductory words by Rudolf Steiner

Dear attendees, At our last meeting, we spoke at length about the threefold social organism, and I believe that you are essentially aware of what this threefold organism should consist of and that the only way to achieve real socialization lies in this threefold organism. Because, you see, at present the main thing is that no one really knows anything about the nature of socialization, especially not anyone who is still so influential today. This can best be seen from the laws that have been passed and that are supposed to be in the spirit of socialization. I am referring in particular to the law on works councils.

You may know that in Berlin, in particular, the word [...] was coined: “Socialization is marching!” — I don't think it's possible to say today that socialization is marching. It's not even plodding along! One might even be of the opinion that socialization is hiding. Well, in the future it will be important to really understand that the impulses of the threefold organism do not contain something utopian, something ideological, but that they contain the seeds of what can become deeds.

The essence of this threefold organism is that economic life, legal life and spiritual life are truly and distinctly set out. However, since we are in a transitional period, some kind of beginning must be found. As you can well see from the circumstances, this can be found today, initially in economic life, for the following reason: the proletarian is part of economic life, and the proletarian knows from what he has experienced in his body and soul the necessity of socialization. It can truly be said that apart from the proletarian, hardly anyone can form such a truly full and valid concept of what socialization is. Of course, some of the intellectuals can do so as well. And they can be counted on. But the point today is not for a few people to realize that this or that is right, but for as many people as possible to recognize what needs to be done and bring about a new social order that is truly social. Therefore, in my introduction today, I would like to say something about what is important for our progress in this matter. Further details can then emerge in the discussion, based on the questions that I hope will be asked by a large number of you. Therefore, in my introduction, I would just like to give a few very brief suggestions. What must happen, above all, is that we get people with whom socialization is possible. But these people must really be genuine representatives of the broad masses of the proletariat. They must, in a sense, have a mandate from these broad masses of the proletariat. Now, the impulse of the threefold social organism is so practical that it can be applied everywhere. You can start working from any point. Today, the question of works councils arises as a very important starting point. And we would like to discuss this question, about which you have already heard something from the previous speaker, in detail today.

When dealing with the question of works councils, it is now important that these works councils are initially, I would like to say, set up in such a way that they only arise from economic life. We must tackle the tripartite organism in such a way that we first do something really practical in one of the three links. Of course, something practical must then also be done in parallel in the other two links. We can only do something practical if we have first, so to speak, set up those people who are suited to work in a practical way. For this we need the works councils, which must emerge from the individual companies.

Now it so happens that these works councils can emerge from the individual companies in the most diverse ways. It is only necessary that the works councils that emerge from the individual companies have the absolute trust of the workers and, to a certain extent, as far as possible, also the trust of the intellectual workers of the company concerned. Therefore, it will be a matter of the actual workers of a company and those in the managerial positions who are really able to go along with it, initially setting up this works council based on the circumstances of the individual company. The circumstances can be very different in the most diverse companies. For example, in one factory the election or appointment – or whatever you want to call it – of a works council may be carried out in one way, and in another factory in a different way. The main thing remains that those who are appointed have the trust of the physical and intellectual workers in the respective factories.

But then we will only have the basis we need for practical work. These works councils will then exist as such and will form a works council. This works council must be clear about the fact that it must be the body from which the recovery of our economic life must initially emerge. Today it is not a matter of taking half-measures or quarter-measures, but of actually working from the ground up. This can only happen if we have people who are inclined to work from the ground up. Do not be beguiled by the idea that there are not enough educated people among the working class. This will prove to be the biggest mistake, perhaps even the biggest nonsense. Because it is not a matter of getting people with a specific technical education, but of getting people from the direct practice of economic life who have the trust of those who work in it. Then the rest will follow if there is real seriousness and goodwill to create something new from the ground up.

So once we have set up works councils in the individual companies, we will have a works council system. Then we need a plenary assembly of this works council system. And this works council system must, regardless of what is fabricated as a law on works councils by certain bodies, give itself a constitution based on the experiences of economic life. It must see itself as a primary assembly. This works council must negotiate the powers, the tasks, and the entire position of the works council itself. This can only be done by first discussing in this plenary assembly what actually needs to be done to restore our economic life. So it is not a matter of us now theorizing a lot about what the works councils have to do. That must arise from the plenary assembly of the works councils themselves.

Let us first state: you cannot socialize a single company. That is complete nonsense; you can only individualize companies. You can only socialize a closed economic area. Therefore, we do not need any general regulations on the functioning of works councils in individual companies, as is once again expressed in the laws, but we need an inter-company constitution of the works council. A fine works council over a closed economic area must be a whole. When this plenary assembly, this original assembly, has given itself a constitution, then it will be able to have an effect on the companies.

In a next step, a committee must then be elected from this plenary assembly of the works council, which could be called: works council director or central council of the works council. The election would have to be conducted according to an electoral system that in turn emerges entirely from the works council itself. Once this central council of the works council is in place, a significant step will have been taken. Because what we need in the future within the economic body is something like an economic representation or, if you like, if we want to use the old word, something like an economic ministry. These things cannot come about in any other way in the initial transition period than by seeking representation through the aforementioned assembly, the plenary assembly of the works council. And in order to have a basis for a socialist social order in the future, we must create a central office from this works council that is capable of forming what could be called a ministry of economics at any time. We must therefore prepare in this direction for what a truly appropriate administration of economic life from within the social society can be. If we do not work in this way, then the moment, which will surely come, when socialization is to be tackled, will catch us unprepared, and it must not catch us unprepared! That is a fundamental question today. The moment must not catch us unprepared. Those who have the power – and you see that this is a question of power, albeit a reasonable one – must know what they have to do. That was precisely the characteristic feature of November 9, that the people who came to the top did not know what to do. It must be ensured that the people are there who know what they have to do.

On various occasions, I have emphasized in my lectures that works councils alone are not enough today. Other councils will be needed as well. But that is not something we need to worry about today, because the point is that we first start to work practically at one point. The impulse for the threefold organism is not there to be used for further theorizing, but to move on, to move directly on to real practical work. The time when this practical work is needed need not be so far off. For if certain circles imagine today that with any peace agreement - some peace agreement must come about after all - an end would come, then that is complete nonsense. A peace agreement today does not put an end to it, but it marks the beginning of a period that we will have to go through and in which socialization must take place in the civilized world simply out of an inner necessity, but made by people.

We must take two things into account, and I would like to mention these two points in my introduction today. You see, in many gatherings – and I have now attended quite a few gatherings and discussions – capitalism is talked about in the same way as it was talked about before this world war catastrophe. Of course, all the evils of capitalism are just as valid today as they were before the war, but the fact of capitalism has become quite another as a result of this world war catastrophe. Consider only the conditions in Germany itself. Capitalism has indeed undergone a change through the war economy. The war economy has, in a sense, raised capitalism to its highest level. And it was able to do so because it was completely divorced from the real needs of the people, because it only produced for the war. But because capitalism has been driven into this crisis, because only unproductive things were created, the whole of capitalism has actually entered into a completely different relationship with the working class than was the case before. Today, capitalism is not in the same position as it was before the world war catastrophe. And what is actually at hand is that one should become aware that this capitalism no longer stands as such. For this capitalism, even if it is not so evident today, has simply ruined the economy of a large part of the civilized world, undermining it. It has already done so much to its own destruction that this destruction must come, not in “some time,” as was said earlier in socialist circles, not in “a distant future,” but in the immediate future, capitalism will point out to the civilized world that it was able to continue to work under the old regime and to enter into the relationship with the working class that you are so familiar with. But this relationship cannot be restored. That is why the question is so urgent today: what will the proletariat do at the moment when, as a result of capitalism's self-destruction, it is faced with the task of reshaping the world? Capitalism was able to continue operating under the old conditions. It can no longer do so. It cannot do so at all. It would lead to utter chaos and confusion if capitalism were to continue to operate in this way.

Let us assume that some kind of peace were to come about, even if those who now want to reject it do so. Something must come of it. But whatever comes of it, it could only be – and I ask you to bear this firmly in mind – that with the help of the not yet completely crushed Entente capitalism, Central and Eastern Europe would be trampled to death, because we would have enslavement as far as the Rhine, especially for the working people. That could only be if Entente capitalism were not crushed. For what might then happen? Any practical person can see that clearly. For the following would happen: Let us assume that peace were to be established, this peace, which is actually a peace of the already ruined capitalism of Central and Eastern Europe with the Entente capitalism, because the proletariat has not yet been called upon anywhere, despite the socialist government, to somehow participate in the fate of the world. Assuming that this peace is established, it would only make sense if the German proletariat were willing to rebuild capitalism by settling for a terribly low wage. If it accepted this terribly low wage, at which it would gradually starve, then German capitalism could rise again through this low wage, and it could be paid, so to speak, at the expense of the working class, what Entente capitalism demands. That is the one case.

The other case is that, which you probably will not believe, it occurs that, for example, the American and English proletariat decide to work as cheaply as possible, with the lowest possible wages, so that means of production can be supplied to Germany, which Germany can initially only pay for if the proletariat works almost for free. In either case, the German proletarian will find himself in a terrible situation. Only a genuine socialization, one that places social life on a completely different footing, can free him from this situation. If, as has often been stated, capitalism is removed from the social order in this way, then the peace, compromise or understanding that comes about cannot be something that is concluded between the capitalists of Central and Eastern Europe and the Western capitalists, but can only be something that emerges from a society that is becoming more and more socialist. And that alone can bring about healthy conditions in international relations. Because then it will be the case that, precisely as a result of the peace agreement, the Central and Eastern European capitalism, which is no longer on its feet, must actually withdraw from the scene. And that will have the consequence that capitalism can also be fought in a real way in the Entente states. Because if there is no capital in some place and yet productive life and productive power prevail, then one must approach such a productive economy in a completely different way than if one hopes that capitalism will regain its strength and pay war reparations or something similar. You see, I only say the latter so that you do not believe that something is being postponed to a distant future. It is about the very near future, it is about the fact that the time that begins with the necessary understanding between nations or with the conclusion of peace will either be the beginning of a terrible situation for the proletariat of Central and Eastern Europe or the beginning of a real socialization, which must arise out of your courage, your strength, and your insight into necessity. That is what I wanted to say beforehand.

I believe that we should talk about works councils today, but in such a way that it leads to real action, so that we do not just talk but see how the impulse for the threefold social order consists in the fact that it contains ideas that can be put into practice, that can become action.

Discussion

Debater Biel objects to the law on works councils proposed by the government and to an article in the newspaper about the coalition government.

Debater Lange asks: If the works councils are to be elected or appointed, has consideration been given to the fact that employees and directors, technical or commercial directors, should also have a say in the election? It is surely important that the laws or regulations that are made should really be made by people who have an overview of the whole context.

Rudolf Steiner: This question is extraordinarily important. The point is to bring about something that can work. Of course, in the present economic system, we cannot work without spiritual leaders. The economy would be driven into a dead end. Production would come to a standstill after a relatively short time if we could not win over the technical leaders for it. As you know, in Russia, due to the different circumstances – which it would be interesting to discuss at some point – it was not possible to win over the technical managers to the real idea of socialization, so that there one was faced with the fact was faced with the fact that on the one hand there was perhaps even a sufficiently large proletariat of manual laborers that could have taken up the idea of socialization, and on the other hand it was not possible to win over the masses of the so-called intellectual workers for the idea of socialization. The consequence of this was what must be most regretted for Russia: the sabotage of this intellectual labor. This sabotage of the intellectual workers must be avoided at all costs. That is to say, every effort must be made to overcome the obstacles within the intellectual workers. Let us not misjudge the serious obstacles that exist.

You see, I have already spoken about this here. We are faced with the fact that the proletariat has been politically educated to a certain degree through a long process of training. The proletariat is politically educated, even if this does not apply to every individual. Political education does not consist of knowing one or two details, but rather of having a certain basic disposition of the soul that is political. The proletariat has this, but those who belong to the circles of the so-called intellectual workers do not. These intellectual workers have become accustomed to cultivating what might be called a sense of authority. Whether this authority is a state authority or a factory authority is not decisive. What is important is to know that a deep sense of authority prevails in these circles. Of course, the individual may inwardly revolt, but mostly he does it with his fist in his pocket. But the intellectual workers are not dispensable for real socialization. That is why I say: It is necessary to win over the employees and also the plant managers and, above all, to win over those among them who have a sense and a heart for real socialization.

We must not let it come to the point where, when the time comes, a kind of Ministry of Economic Affairs is set up in such a way that? this ministry is forced to set up five or six or twelve armchairs as the top level, and the whole apparatus continues to work in the old spirit. But there is something else we must not let come to either. Mr. Biel has already given a good indication of what would be at stake if something like the works council system were to be included in this unfortunate law that is now being proposed. I have already told you that it is an essential fact that we are now at a point in time when capitalism has actually ruined itself and cannot rebuild itself from within. If a reconstruction is to happen, it must be done by the working people. The capitalists cannot continue. That is what proves that we must seize the moment. Such laws as the one that is to become reality are designed to help capitalism, which cannot help itself, to be nursed back to health with the help of the misled working class, and to regain its old dominance. The working class should form such works councils that, by the very nature of how they are set up, will help to resurrect capitalism. We can only counteract this if a works council is created from the bottom up by the working people themselves and gives itself a constitution, that is, if it does not concern itself with what basically wants to be a continuation of the old capitalism because it cannot imagine the world as anything other than capitalist.

We must be quite clear about the fact that our first task is to set up the works councils at all, and that we need the intellectual workers in these works councils as well, as far as possible. Those who have no sense or heart for socialization, we can't use there. It would hardly be a matter of having as many directors or top people in it as possible, but above all those who really have to do intellectual work. Then it is possible to accomplish something like socialization through such a works council. But if you endorse a law like the one currently being drafted, then you have done nothing more than rename the old labor committees. It is only a renaming, and of course – because the two cannot coexist – the old workers' committees are to be abolished. The old workers' committees were unable to eliminate capitalism, and the new works councils to be established under the law will not be able to do so either.

So, we must establish a works council as far as possible, and it must be able to run the factories by itself. We must not think only of agitation, but we must think of the practical work from which the enterprises can be newly shaped. It is not enough to advocate that production should be socialized, but it is important to know as precisely as possible how it should be socialized. This will happen when we really get the intellectual workers into the works councils. That must be our aim. Therefore, the apolitical attitude of intellectual workers must be eliminated. And we must not lose sight of what is being waited for today either. Today, under circumstances that the intellectual workers are perhaps sufficiently familiar with, the non-proletariat is waiting for not just any socialization to come about, but for the proletariat to be overcome. Do not forget, there are statements like that of a German industrial magnate who said: We big industrialists can wait, and we will wait, until the workers come to the gates of our factories and ask for work! This attitude is not uncommon. They are waiting to see if the workers will not let themselves be beaten. And that is what must be prevented by reality. That is what matters. This must also be borne in mind when considering the question of how to win over intellectual workers to our cause. At the beginning of what is to be revived as an act among us, there must first be the setting up of works councils, and secondly, as far as it is possible today, the intellectual workers must also be included.

A speaker asks: What do the works councils actually have to do? And what must be done in the very near future?

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to emphasize that what I have said is not for the near future, but for the very near future. I have already emphasized: today is not the time for us to think much about how to get well-educated works councils; instead, the first thing we need to do is set up the works councils and come to a plenary assembly of works councils. What is most necessary is that we have people from the business world itself who will then take it from there. Today, it cannot be about saying, with regard to individual situations, that the works councils have to do this or that, but rather, I see it as being very practical. Of course, among these works councils there will be some who already know how to proceed in this or that case with regard to socialization, while others will not know. But if there is real goodwill, it is not that difficult to identify the real tasks for the immediate future.

There are, of course, different approaches to the way forward. Let us assume, for a moment, that socialization cannot be limited to Stuttgart, so let us assume, for a moment, that it is limited to Württemberg. One approach would be to go around the whole country, going from workers' circle to workers' circle and talking to the individual groups about what is most necessary in terms of threefolding, where one is usually met with the reply: These are aims, but not ways! Although it is precisely intended to point to the right way. That would be the one way, because today we can achieve nothing without having a really large number of people on whom we can rely. But we do not have the time to go down this road, bearing in mind that it is not a matter of working for the immediate future, but for the very near future. So we have to think about the other way. We have to get those people, and that is what the works council wants to be, who, by having themselves elected or appointed as works council members, are fully committed to the work of socialization. Then I really don't imagine that it is so difficult to deal with such a cohesive body that has the trust of the broadest masses.

Once we have these works councils, the question of whether people already know exactly what they have to do is no longer so important. After eight days they will know. The only problem is finding the people. The problem today is not that it is terribly difficult to know what needs to be done first, but that there are so few people with the good will and desire to do what needs to be done. So, if we have those people who feel an inner responsibility to work on socialization because they have been elected by the trust of their colleagues, then we will have created the basis for the very next practical step.

As for the practical work that lies immediately ahead, let us not let ourselves be put off by saying: We must first educate. Those who say today: Socialization takes a long, long time, because every individual must first be educated. That is not the point. The point is to create a body of people who have the trust of their colleagues. Then it will be possible to continue working with them, and because they have a direct sense of responsibility, you will not constantly face the problem of having difficulty in reaching the masses. Because, you see, you can hold as many meetings as you like, there will always be some who have reservations about such meetings, such as: Today the sun is shining so beautifully, we are going for a walk, or: On Ascension Day it is not possible to attend a meeting — and so on. The work that lies ahead of us is enormous. We will not succeed if we proceed by educating each individual, so to speak. We must have responsible people who then take on the tasks completely. With them, the work can be carried out in the very near future.

Discussion speaker Mittwich proposes that the works council election be held separately for salaried employees and wage earners and that delegates be elected from each side.

Rudolf Steiner: I just want to say a few words, since I agree with everything essential that the esteemed previous speaker has said. But I would like to come back to an important question that he asked, namely the way in which the works council, which will of course consist of individual works council members, comes about. I also believe that the number he has given is sufficiently large for the individual companies. Of course, one or the other view can be gained from the different practical circumstances. But what I think is important is how this works council is set up in the first place. Don't think that when I said “by election or appointment” I meant an appointment from above or something similar. Rather, I was thinking, of course, of the fact that today, in the beginning, there are the most diverse conditions in the individual companies, and it is certainly very true that today there are numerous companies in which the workforce knows exactly: this is the right works council for us – where there is no need for long debates, but where it is clear simply from the trust: this is the right one. And I would like to point out the extraordinary importance of this existing trust being expressed in the election of the works council, so that the people who come into the works council are precisely those who have the trust of their co-workers. That would be similar to an appointment.

Of course, the election must be carried out in a practical and technical manner, but care should be taken to prevent the election from resulting in any kind of random composition. Only those personalities should be elected to the works council who have the trust of their employees. This is necessary because, above all, we need people who feel responsible for what they do. That is one thing.

The other thing is that I don't think it's right to ask how the number of works council members should be distributed between salaried employees and workers. I don't think it's possible to set up any kind of regulation today. I therefore fully agree with what the previous speaker said, namely that employees should not elect their works council on the one hand and workers their works council on the other, as this would lead to something monstrous. In that case, we would have an unworkable works council from the outset. Rather, it must be elected jointly by employees and workers as a unified body. And as to how many then come from the circle of employees on the one hand and on the other from the workers, we want to leave that to the election. It goes without saying that anyone who comes from the intellectual workers, for example, into the works council must be such a person who has the trust not only of the employees, but must also have the trust of the workers. The workers must accept him as an intellectual worker as well. So, for example, if in any enterprise, let us say, five manual workers and one intellectual worker are elected, it must also be possible for three intellectual and three manual workers to be elected elsewhere. It must be left entirely to the workers' own discretion. Intellectual and physical workers must elect those who are to be members of the works council as a unified group, based on their trust. In this primary election, every social distinction between intellectual and physical workers must be eliminated.

I cannot imagine that the one demand that we elect physical and mental workers together should lead to anything other than the fact that the person elected as a mental worker also has the trust of the entire workforce, regardless of whether they are a physical or mental worker. If we were to organize the election in such a way that we were forced to elect so-and-so many works council members from the ranks of the intellectual workers and so-and-so many from the physical labor force, then it would no longer be a free election based on trust. If we think that among the intellectual workers in the factories there are not so many who deserve trust, then people would be admitted to this primary assembly who are not needed! The election itself must not only be carried out in such a way that mental and physical laborers are considered without distinction, but that they have the power to elect together and elect together the one they want, and as many from one side or the other as they want. The mental laborers must be clear about the fact that they can only get into the works council if they have the trust of the entire labor force. This is the question that I consider to be of the utmost importance. I have come to this conclusion on the basis of my extensive experience. Today we must really make sure that the works councils are set up. In eight days' time, they will be in a position to provide a sound basis for socialization, stemming from the trust of the entire working class. Even if they are not completely ready, they will be ready enough to serve the purpose I have described.

Plenum: The assembly adopts a resolution containing the demand that works councils be set up everywhere as quickly as possible before the law, which is only a half-measure, comes into force.

Rudolf Steiner: I must confess that I cannot really connect the question, which arises very often: What means of power are available or do you want to give? I cannot really connect it to a practical sense. You see, it must be a matter of the works council, as I said before, really coming to form something in some central council or the like, which can really be a kind of economic ministry in an emancipated economic life. Now I ask: if it can be a real economic ministry, then only because it has the masses behind it. I would like to know who could resist such a central council or economic ministry if it had the masses behind it, if it had really emerged from the trust of the masses. By doing so, you give it power. Today, power can consist of nothing more than everyone wanting the same thing and having it carried out by individuals, so that there is really something behind such a ministry that makes it impossible for it to be shot down and the like, while at the same time enabling it to stand on firm ground, based on the trust of the broad masses. There is no other way to gain power. But this power is then there by itself, when the body is there. The question of what means of power I want to give such a body can only be seen as extraordinarily abstract. I don't know what people think about such a question. Do they think that regiments should be deployed or that proposals should be made to draft so-and-so many people so that when this body meets, it can function against the will of the others? I don't know what is behind such a question. Because if what comes into the works council comes from the trust of the masses, what happens then? Then the Central Council or the Ministry of Economic Affairs will be able to bring about real socialization, and the broad masses will then agree to it, because it is, after all, flesh of their flesh.

So, I think that by really putting something real on a healthy basis, power comes naturally. It did not come on November 9th because what was about to happen did not come from the trust of the masses and they did not know what to do up there either. All the other power is useless. There are no other means of power than those that lie in the matter itself. That is why I have always regarded it as a highly peculiar, quite abstract philosophical question when people today say: You tell us nothing about the way to get power. That is precisely the way to power: to find representation based on trust and then to shape that representation in such a way that it appeals to those who have given that representation their trust. That would be a practical way. Self-appointment and the like can only lead to the glory coming to an end soon.

In the way we are speaking today, we are discussing the question of power, and it would be a great mistake to lead the matter onto a side track by raising the question of what means of power should be given to those who already have the power because they came into their position on the basis of trust and not on some other basis. I ask you to bear this in mind, because I see confusion arising again and again over the weeks from the fact that on the one hand people say: Yes, that's all right. Such goals may be achieved one day, but first we need power. - We must gain power by placing ourselves with these objectives in the place where, when we go about implementing them, we actually win the understanding of the broadest masses. That is the way to real power, to real socialization. Any other way will lead to disappointment and to a repetition of what happened on November 9 and in the period that followed.

Radio commentator Funk asks: How should we act if the employers ignore or do not recognize the workers' councils?

Rudolf Steiner: Certainly, one can raise the question of how to deal with the matter when the works councils are in place and not recognized by the employers. But, you see, the way the matter has been presented to you this evening, everything possible has already been done to prevent such an eventuality. We do not think of this works council in such a way that it depends on whether the employer recognizes it or not. That is why this dreadful changeling of a works council should not be created, which is supposed to consist of the works councils in the individual companies in turn throwing dust in people's eyes, in order to reassure the workers by saying: We have works councils. We want a works council that extends across the entire economic area and from which a central power gradually emerges. This central power will be supported by the majority or, as I have repeatedly said, by the broad masses. Now I ask you: if this works council system leads to the establishment of a future economic government, what significance will the opposition of the various entrepreneurs have? These various entrepreneurs will simply be unhinged by this works council system as entrepreneurs! The works council system should do something. If it achieves its goal, it will no longer be confronted by the business community at all. Recently, I have often come across this in a wide variety of discussions: on the one hand, people want socialization, but on the other hand, they say, “Once we have socialized, what will the capitalists say?” Yes, if we get involved in this question, we will never achieve real socialization. But if we seriously tackle socialization, then the position of the capitalists is not important. That is precisely what “socialization” means: that in the future it will not depend on them, on the capitalists. They will be eliminated by not continuing to listen to the lies of individual works councils that are recognized by the capitalist authorities. We don't want to continue to work with them. That is why this law must be fought. We must actually take socialization seriously. If we take it seriously, then this question will fall away by itself. If the question, “What do the capitalists say?” continued to exist, then we would not have socialized. But we want to accomplish socialization! Therefore, we must not be discouraged by such questions, but we must gain clarity, must create a will in us that can take decisive action because it is based on healthy impulses. Then we just want to ask: How do we do it in order to push through this will without taking this or that into consideration? – and not: What could come? What do we want to do? – that is what matters.