Lecture 6
Dornach 7th March, 1919
In a lecture Kurt Eisner
recently gave to students in Basle we find a remarkable sentence. Eisner
starts with a really curious question about the present external world,
namely, whether what can be expressed as the present situation of mankind
is a reality or a mere dream; whether what mankind is now experiencing
is not actually a sort of dreamed reality? What he said about it ran
something like this: “Do we not hear, do we not see clearly that
pressing for realisation there lives a longing in our life to know that
this life, as we have to live it today, is only the outwardly expressed
invention of some evil spirit? Picture to yourselves, gentlemen, some
great thinker living about 2000 years ago and knowing nothing of our
times, who dreamed what the world would look like in 2000 years. With
the most vivid imagination he could never have a thought-out a world
like the one in which we are destined to live. Nevertheless what persists
is the one Utopia in the world, and what we want, what lives in us as
this longing, is the final and deepest reality, and everything else
is horrible. Only we are confusing dreaming and waking. Our task is
to shake off the old dream of our present useless existence . Look at
the war — can it reasonably be thought possible that such a thing
could be thought-out? If the war were not what is called reality it was
perhaps a dream out of which we are now waking. We are in a society in
which, in spite of railway, steam and electricity, we men see nevertheless
only a small part of the star on which we were born.” And so on
and so forth …
This is what Kurt Eisner
felt, and what he said about it shortly before his death in Basle. The
reality makes us ask ourselves today whether we are awake or dreaming.
Is this reality a reality at all? It would be a good thing today were
the mass of humanity to set themselves such questions. Above all it
is of importance that we should be in a position to discern the actual
truth about what surrounds us in the external world. It is particularly
important that what the world needs and above all what is needed for
our social life should no longer be judged according to the old customary
way of thinking during recent centuries. For it is this customary thinking
that has led to the present catastrophe, which becomes plain when one
really studies all the conditions. With this way of thinking many of
those who think themselves really practical have started out with mere
abstractions which they have tried to carry out in real life. And it
is because such men have applied their customary way of thinking to
social conditions in the common life of men that reality has gradually
become unreality, a mere image incapable of dealing with life. And there
man stands regarding it as reality, and he lacks the forces to bring
about conditions possible for life.
These are things that cannot
be too strongly emphasised today; they must be given clear and unmistakable
expression by everyone who without prejudice looks facts in the face.
These facts, working in the external everyday world, speak to us clearly
and show us that the cure for existing conditions can come only from
impulses out of the spiritual world. For what has become estranged from
the spiritual world, what has held sway economically without regard
to the spiritual world, has today lost its way in a blind alley. Believing
as men do today that they can continue their economic life in the way
that has brought the world to this catastrophe is simply refusing to
think.
We have been living through
a time in which existence was believed to have come to the highest point
of material civilisation, Looking back before August, 1914, how comfortable
life was, how easily, if we had the means, we could travel from country
to country. Consider how simple it was to communicate by telegraph or
telephone between the most distant places and across national frontiers.
Think of all men called modern civilisation. And then think of what
since August, 1914, has become of this modern European civilisation,
consider the conditions in which we now live. Truly it does not need
much thought to see that the one does not exist without the other, that
in the life we led until August, 1914, so comfortable, so civilised,
was contained the present situation, so much so indeed that in lectures
given in Vienna before the war I referred to it as a carcinoma, a
cancerous growth, in human society.
[ Note 01 ]
We should give due weight to the fact that at the time everything was
so ‘comfortable’
and the world so ‘civilised’ and all going according to
the wishes of those whose social position allowed of their fulfillment,
at that time Spiritual Science forced those who saw into the real state
of affairs to say: this is not a healthy society we are living in, but
an unhealthy one. It has long been offered the anthroposophical way
of thinking for its healing. For this healing nothing will serve but
the realisation that all other ways of thinking, not directed to what
is really spiritual, are more or less quackery. Reality must come into
the dreams men dream today. Whence is this reality to come? It does
not exist in the region whence practical men derive their thoughts.
Reality exists only where the spirit can be seen. From there the principles
and impulses flowing into social life must be found. That is why the
connection between such things must continually be stressed.
Now in connection with these
lectures I have often mentioned the name Fritz Mauthner. When in a series
of catchwords he classified alphabetically the thinking of the present-day,
he made of this two volumes and called them a Philosophical Dictionary.
In this philosophical dictionary, in Mauthner's own style, with his
criticisms that were often caustic and biting, a description of present-day
thinking was contained. There, among other things, he deals with the
State, the res publica. From his outlook Mauthner even arrives
at some sort of answer to the question: What exactly is the State? And
his particular definition is that the State is a necessary evil, the
necessity of which there is no denying. But it has dawned on some people
that the social structure we today call the State has led to what we
are living in the midst of now. That is why people call it a necessary
evil, for its evil character in its present form is before their very
eyes. The question, however, is how a positive conception is to be arrived
at in contrast to all that is negative.
If something be rejected,
what would be acceptable in its place must be indicated. If someone
says that the State is a necessary evil it is important to define the
good, in contrast to this evil of the State. What is this something
of which this State should be the opposite: In the spiritual-scientific
connection something very remarkable appears. To understand the State
one must have insight into the form of the rights that prevail in the
State, which is regulated according to possession, work and so on. One
has also to ask to what this form of rights can be compared.
Now the conditions existing
in the spiritual world in the time lived through by man between death
and a new birth have often been described to you. How do these conditions
existing between man and man between death and a new birth stand in
relation to the conditions of rights established within the State community
on the physical plane? As soon as this question is put intelligibly,
we get the answer: All that the State consists in is the exact opposite
of this. The human relations that are State-controlled are the exact
opposite of those in the spiritual world. This gives you a true idea
of the State. Men who know nothing of the spiritual world can get no
idea of the State, because they have a purely negative attitude towards
the relation between man and man. What is positive is the relation arising
between one soul and another in the spiritual world. With this in view,
read the chapter on the soul-world in my book
Theosophy;
you will there find a certain regulation existing in the relation of soul
to soul, which may be described as the mutual working of soul to soul,
continuing into what is called spirit-land, and governed by forces going
from sympathy end antipathy. Read in this same chapter how sympathy
and antipathy bring about a certain connection between the souls in
the spiritual world. You will see that there in the spiritual world
everything depends on the inner life, namely on what through the forces
of sympathy and antipathy is working from soul to soul. In man on the
physical plane the forces of antipathy between soul and soul are concealed
by the physical body, and because this is so its place in the State
has to be taken by all that is most external — what has to do
with rights, Whereas we must describe the unfolding of the innermost
forces of the soul as belonging to the actual spiritual world, what
can live in the State is all that is most external in the relation between
men. And the State is not in a healthy condition when seeking to establish
anything beyond the external relation of rights. Therefore everything
should be eliminated by the State that does not concern this most external
relation. As opposed to the State itself on the one side must be the
spiritual sphere, the administration of the affairs of spiritual culture,
and on the other side the third member, the purely economic life of
the social organism. Whereas the actual State represents the exact opposite
of the spiritual world, the spiritual life signifies a continuation
of what we experienced before we descended through birth into earthly
existence. What we experience here in religion, schooling, education,
art, science, and so forth, in company with others, what develops from
our mutual relation as between man and man, all this, though a mere
reflection, is the earthly continuation of the real spiritual life before
birth.
And in the economic life,
in what we call ordinary material life, we find the origin of much that
we shall have to experience beyond the gate of death, that is, in the
life after death.
But the State has nothing
to do with spiritual life. It is its very opposite. To understand the
terrible facts of today men must learn to penetrate this fact in all
its significance. Present-day man must learn to grasp that, to come
to a conception of external reality, it is essential once more to have
in mind spiritual reality. In the spiritual world sympathy and antipathy
work together. What persists in us from the spiritual world as antipathy,
what has to go on working as antipathy, is experienced down here as
spiritual culture. Through speech we learn as men to understand each
other and to create a spiritual bond between man and man. And by understanding
one another in speech we have to overcome certain antipathies still
left over from the spiritual world. We learn to speak among ourselves
in certain conceptions, developing thoughts in common, in a common art,
in a common religious belief, thereby overcoming certain mutual antipathies
we had in the spiritual world. We learn here in our economic life to
help one another, to work for one another, to be of advantage to each
other economically, thus laying foundations for certain sympathies to
be woven into the life after death between souls who, through their
ordinary karma have found no previous bond.
In this way we have to understand
how to unite this earthly world with the spiritual world. Ultimately,
the deepest and most active cause of our present time of catastrophe
is that man has lost his connection with the spiritual world, which
has largely become for him mere empty words. It has become so for the
upper classes to an increasing degree during the last four centuries.
And there has developed more and more in the dumb instincts of great
masses of the proletariat a subconscious, unconscious yearning for something
different from what the upper classes can offer as so-called culture,
science, art, religion, and so forth.
Where the spiritual life
is concerned people become accustomed with such difficulty to the necessity
of gradually learning to understand a new language. They would prefer
to go on speaking the old one for they think that will serve their purpose.
And we hear unctuous prophets
today holding forth on their views — I have often referred to
these views. One such prophet, greatly respected today, says for example
how this war has shown that men have been living in a kind of external
organisation but have not inwardly come nearer each other. And so in
the guise of this war there has come a lapse into barbarism. —
To rescue us from this barbarism only empty and sentimental words are
forthcoming, exhorting men to return to a kind of inward spirituality.
But today it is not a question of reprimanding people, telling them
they should once more become good Christians, learn to love their fellow
men, and to find an inward bond between man and man. It is far more
important now to develop a power of the spirit able to give external
relations a form in which the social organism can prosper. One cannot
with honesty say that the real reason for man's sickness today is first
and foremost his not believing in the spirit. There are still plenty
of men who believe in the spirit. And every little village still has
its church where I fancy there is much talk of the spirit. Even those
who struggle against it have a certain respect for the spirit. In ordinary
thought, too, there are still certain references to it. Those who would
say in the true Anzengruber manner: “As sure as there
is a God in Heaven I am an atheist” are no great rarity though
they may not put this into words. The point is not whether the spirit
is spoken of nor whether people believe in the spirit, but that the
spirit should become effective in all material life and that it should
be realised how there can never be any matter without spirit.
At present, however, we
are farther than ever from such insight. One man may affect superiority,
despise external material life, consider it a necessary evil and turn
his attention to the inner life, perhaps becoming a theosophist so that
he can develop an inner life alongside the external one. He thinks the
external life to be without spirit and that it behooves him to give
himself up to a life of inner contemplation. Another does not go directly
this way — said by the socialist to be very middle-class and decadent
— but still believes that on the one side there is material reality
in which there lives all that is capital, human labour-power, credit,
mortgages and money in any form; in short, spiritless reality. And on
the other side he sees spiritual reality which has to be striven for
out of the depths of the heart.
We could quote many variations
of this particular way of understanding the connection between the material
life and that of the spirit, as it holds sway today. For people generally
feel that, to reach the spiritual, they have to turn away from external
material reality. Ultimately this is all connected with the fact that
in these days we see so many broken lives, so many people discontented
with external existence. My dear friends, indeed I am not speaking just
for the honour of the cause — pro domo — for it
is my karma alone that obliges me to do this work. Had my karma led
me to something different, I should be able to understand that too.
No, I am speaking quite objectively. In spite of this I venture to say
that there is nothing in life that is not interesting if only we have
a healthy social organism in which man is rightly placed in accordance
with his karma. Strictly speaking, no one has cause to consider any
world-current of less worth than another. The healing of the social
organism must, it is true, be brought about by every single worker having
as much connection with the spiritual life as those who can now have
the good fortune to occupy themselves with it. For it is one of the
greatest defects in present social life that certain interests inaccessible
to ethers are cultivated in exclusive circles. Just realise how today
this exclusiveness has been increasingly fostered in religion, in art,
and in everything else, in bourgeois circles, and how the proletariat
stand outside all this. That is why the proletariat have been given
‘People's Institutions’, ‘People's Houses’,
‘People's Art’, and so forth. But all this has arisen out
of the experiences of the middle-class. Received by the proletariat
it becomes one of the lies of life, for only what has arisen out of
general experience can become a common spiritual life. There is no general
experience where one member of the community stands at a machine eight
hours a day (you see I take the eight-hour day as an actual fact) whereas
another is able to build a social life peculiar to his class, and then
throws as crumbs to those working at the machines what, in its inner
structure, can really be understood only by those who have always belonged
to the governing classes.
Within these governing classes
it is possible, with its up-bringing and education, to speak of the
Sistine Madonna — to take a concrete example. I have taken working
men into galleries and have seen how false it is to show them anything
arousing the kind of impression the Sistine Madonna creates upon the
bourgeoisie. It is an impossibility. By trying to do so one brings about
a false situation, since there is no common life between the two classes.
And where there is no common life there is no common speech. Those who
up to now have formed the upper classes were destined during man's former
evolution to receive something, even in art for example, that can take
root in the experiences of their life. Through the way mankind has lived.
until now, a picture like the Sistine Madonna has become a real gift
for the upper classes. For the others it is incomprehensible. There
has first to be sought a speech common to both, and that means efforts
have to be made to find a cultural life common to all men. At present
our schools and universities are very far from such a cultural life. In
these there will never be realised what is so often striven for — a
universal school for the people. In a school common to all must be taught
what is derived from a free life of the spirit which, as an independently
working member, has its roots in the social organism. We must teach
something very different from what is taught today, for in his innermost
being the proletarian does not understand what is now taught in the
ordinary schools.
Now you may be right in
saying that I am contradicting myself, and you may tell me that in the
schools the people all are on a level, so why should the proletarian
child understand less than the bourgeois child? But the bourgeois child
in reality does not understand anything either, for the teaching in
our ordinary schools is so unsound that everything is incomprehensible.
And it is only because members of the upper classes, who have the means
to go to the better schools, reflect something of what they learn there,
like a shadow, on to the people's schools so that something of what was
formerly learnt is understood. Those who have no opportunity to receive
the reflection of what was learnt earlier cannot profit by the education
which is present in our life like the dream of something real.
Due attention should be
paid to this; it is deeply connected with the gravity of the present
times and the present situation. And can we not actually feel that our
only salvation lies in a new life of the spirit. Now try to be honest
about what concerns one sphere or another. Consider what has happened
in the course of the last centuries in the sphere of art, for example,
and the appreciation of art. Try to look intelligently at what has been
said about art, what artists themselves have said about the arts of
painting and sculpture and so on, how critics have influenced public
opinion. Follow this, than try to make it clear to the working-man,
who is supposed to listen to it, after eight hours at a machine —
for him it is just meaningless rubbish! For him it is a life lived by
others from which he is excluded in an anti-social way, and he can form
no idea of its necessity for human existence; to his mind it is simply
luxury. It is not that I am giving judgment; I am merely stating facts
that are comprehensible.
But now let us consider
what fruits have been produced by this worthy middle-class society which
continued to develop so comfortably up to the year 1914. I was still
experiencing it in the eighties when, for instance, the young people
of Vienna were imitating everything originating at the time in Paris
as the new trend in art. These young people wrote a great deal of verse,
and having done everything calculated to make dark rings under their
eyes, wandered about in pensive mood declaring their preference for
the decadent and their desire to sleep in rooms scented with hothouse
flowers, and so forth. Then with this background they propounded how
verse should be written. I have no wish to criticise all they did; it
is just one side of the human being coming to expression in an extreme
way. But eventually it was carried so far that something resulted which
to a great many people today may seem merely an impulse towards cultural
extravagance, cultural luxury, which in any case could not appear to
them as necessary for a dignified human existence. Everything in life
finally depends upon what pulsates in the human soul, and upon the way
in which human souls can be moved in life. It was indeed a cancer breaking
out in a dreadful way in human society. From all these things we must
recognise that these facts are now so firmly established that we no
longer speak with the some conceptions; we must learn a new language.
And it is clearly manifest that we have to strive for something that
besides being human is universal.
In our building we have
striven for something universally human, but how far this is so will
not immediately be understood. Within it there is meant to be nothing
of interest only for the middle-class and incomprehensible to the proletariat.
Even if the very highest spiritual claims are made, what is striven
for is something everyone can understand. Much is certainly imperfect
and what is middle-class still meets us in much of it, but on the whole
— naturally I am not here referring to the people — the
chief thing striven for is quite generally human. It can be understood
from the point of view of life. And because men have various standpoints
in life today we must speak to each one differently. But it is possible
now to bring to the simplest, most primitive hearts and minds what is
meant to be expressed in the forms and other features of our building.
Thus the attempt has really to be made in every sphere of life to leave
behind what is old, to speak a new language , and to see how it was
the old ideas that landed us in this catastrophe.
Today it is often said that
to oppose the aims of modern Socialists, really frightening to many
people, we might hold up the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, where
not by class struggles but by love, the weary, heavy-laden should be
led to a new world-order. This is not something just thought-out but
the way of speaking adopted in the moral sermons of well known tub-thumpers
and repeated over and over again in recent weeks. Only a few days ago
in Berne you could have heard someone saying that we should go back
to the pure spirit of Christianity, to the spirit of the Sermon on the
Mount, which is not to be found in the modern class struggle. Unfortunately
the speaker went on — The Christian spirit prevails only in private
lives; it ought, however, to do so in the life of the State too; external
public, life must be christianised. — Then people get up and say:
Ah, that is spoken out of the spirit! And they finally show the path
modern man must take to free himself from all this unfortunate materialism
and turn back to the spirit of love. The fact remains, however, that
for nearly two thousand years people have been talking thus, and it
has not helped a whit, so that at last they ought to be able to see
how today what we need in a new language.
But today the difference
between the two languages often remains unnoticed. It is still unnoticed
that something different is represented by this new life of the spirit
that directly penetrates material reality. This is because the new spiritual
life is convinced that spirit lives in all matter, and that matter must
be regarded as matter and not in an unreal way as a thing to be despised.
Where there appears to be nothing but matter one is simply not seeing
the spirit. Therefore today we must be conscious of the pressing need
to develop the spirit that can master reality and penetrate material
life. This spirit will not teach us to say: Deepen yourself within and
you then discover the God there; you will be able to unfold the source
of love within you. You will then find the way out of the present social
order to one in which men will stand inwardly united with one another!
No, today it is a matter of finding such spirit, such speech, such Christianity,
that we shall not merely talk of ethics and religion bit be so strong
in spirit hat we are able to comprehend the most everyday things. Out
of this spirit it must be asked: What should we do to discover the right
way to heal the wastage, the ravages of this capitalism to which man's
labour power is exposed?
As things are, people feel
what is destructive and unsound in the social organism without knowing
the causes. In matters great and small it can be seen how money is the
root of much that is harmful. Many who may not themselves have money
can see today in small matters around them that something is wrong with
it. The time has come to end the old indifference when things were brushed
aside with the saying: “One holds the purse, the other the money”.
The time has come when this saying no longer holds good. People even
when seldom crossing the frontier notice that much harm is created by
money. Is it not true that though we now have peace, people cannot cross
this frontier even as easily as during the war? Beyond it the mark has
a certain value, here it is worth very little. With the money question
is united that of standard values. In big things and small, people are
realising that with money a situation has arisen that has to do with
the most ordinary affairs of men. They wonder what the remedy may be
for the harm done today, but they do not see the necessity of shaking
off the ordinary superficial thoughts bound up with the situation, and
of penetrating the thoughts that are original, primal. For certain primal
thoughts are the basis of all human affair. It is, however, inherent
in human life that these affairs gradually grow farther and farther
away from the thought originally behind them. Then these original thoughts
withdraw into the inner regions of man's being, and turn into feelings,
instincts, that then express themselves in such a way that their original
nature is no longer recognised. The social demands made today are the
reaction of the primal thoughts on modern human relations. Men who formulate
their thoughts merely in accordance with these relations are the most
vexatious of all fanatics; for all the demands made by the proletariat
are nothing but veiled feelings having their roots in primal thoughts.
To such thoughts belongs the separation of the spiritual, political
and economic spheres of life as we have seen it here, for which the
instincts strive. And they will not rest until that direction at least
is now taken again towards these archetypal thoughts. For it is because
we have come so far from them that we are now going through this difficult
crisis.
All other remedies are quackery,
even where the most external material questions are concerned. For today
the question is often put, even from the lecture platform, what actually
is money? And there are innumerable discussions as to whether money
is a commodity or a mere token of value. One person deems it a commodity
among other commodities to be bartered in the economic market and considers
that men have simply chosen a convenient commodity to avoid certain
other difficultly in modern economic life. Suppose you were carpenter
and there were no such thing as money. You would have to eat, to have
vegetables, butter, cheese, but being a carpenter you would make only
tables and chairs. So you would have to betake yourself with your tables
and chairs to the market , and try, for example, to get rid of a chair
so that someone will give you a certain amount of food in exchange for
it. You have to get a table taken in exchange for something else, perhaps
a suit of clothes. Imagine what all that would mean! In reality, however,
it is exactly what one does. Only it is disguised by an ordinary marketable
commodity, money, being there, for which one can exchange everything
else, so that the other goods can then wait until needed.
Now it appears as if money
were only there as a medium for the exchange of commodities. Thus many
national economists hold the view that money is a commodity. Paper money
is looked upon as a substitute for this commodity. For the commodity
on which it depends is really gold and States have been obliged to introduce
the gold-standard, having had today to follow the leading economic State,
England, because it chose gold as its medium of adjustment and its sole
standard of value. Thus the medium of exchange is there and the carpenter
has no need to take his chairs to market, but sells his wares to those
who want them, and gets money with which he can then, on his part, buy
his vegetables and cheese.
Others hold a contrary opinion
about money. For them it is not a question whether one has a piece of
gold or not, but a matter of the existence of a substitute medium bearing
a certain stamp. Our modern paper money, for example, bears a stamp
stating its value. And there are economists who consider it quite unnecessary
that the corresponding value in gold should be lying at the back. There
are also, as you may know, individual States having only paper values
with no corresponding gold. With it, however, under present conditions
they can to a certain extent carry on their economy.
In any case you see —
in our sphere we must take our stand on the basis of a purely human
point of view — that now-a-days there are clever people who consider
money to be a commodity, whereas other clever people regard it merely
as something stewed, marked, a mere mark. But which is it in reality?
Under present conditions it is actually both! It comes to this, that
as things are today we see that on the one hand in international trade
money has the character of a mere commodity, while on the other hand
it represents outstanding debt. What serves as the real covering is
the exchange of gold as a commodity carried on between States. Everything
else depends upon there being the assurance that when a certain amount
of paper or barter goes from one State to another, whoever has been
responsible for this possesses the gold also, that the commodity gold
is also there to be dealt with in the some way as any other commodity.
A merchant is given credit no matter whether he possesses gold or fish
or anything else, if only there is something real behind this as a covering.
In this sense therefore money is a commodity in international trade.
But the State has interfered
and has gradually made money into something assessed, something stamped.
Thus the two things work together. The trouble that arises comes from
the control of money not being given over to what we have called the
third member of the social organism. Were money entirely controlled
by the economic part of the organism, that means freed from the State
member of the organism, money would then have to be a commodity and
derive its commodity value in the commodity market. The present curious
dependence expressing itself in the remarkable relation between value
and wages would no longer exist. The curious thing now is that when
wages rise, values fall, so that the worker often derives no benefit
from higher pay, since he is unable to buy more than he could with his
former smaller wage. When both wages and cost of living rise at the
same time, which means that a change takes place in values, no other
conditions can help. Help can come only by the economic commodity, money,
being freed from the political State, and when the money that exists
for the purpose of balance can be controlled by the third member, the
economic member of the healthy social organism.
Thus on the path of the
threefold order special problems too are resolved in the right way.
Therefore whoever wants to work out sound ideas for the social organism
must go back to the primal thought. Those administering the State today
are asking what they should do in face of the chaos that has arisen
in values. The answer, and the only answer, is that as long as they
have to do with the control of the political State they should not meddle
with values at all, but leave the control of money and values to the
economic organism. Only there can the sound basis be created for these
affairs. We must be able to get back to what today will create a healthy
state of things. Before the catastrophe of the war there was the strange
fact that because a condition existed between States upon which the
internal political taxation had no influence, we had relations between
individual States which, for example, in the economic life resulted
from the economic life itself. Thus these relations arose internationally
between the States. They did not take effect within the individual States
because the States extended their control over the economic life, Therefore
the conflict broke out from which the world can be freed only by real
striving towards the threefold order. Then every time adjustment is
needed facts of one member of the organism will be corrected by the
facts of another. There are no other means possible than a return to
primal ideas, to the practical trinity — spiritual life, political
life, economic life. Only those so placed in a community thus organised
will be able to solve our present problems from one or another point
of view. The health of the social organism can be brought about only
when economic matters are regulated by one member, democratic rights
discussed in another, and all cultural, spiritual relations arranged
by the third. For, as in the human being the three members, head-system,
heart- and lung-system and digestive-system, work together naturally,
so also do the three members in the healthy social organism. They work
over into each other. And as in the head you can trace disorder in the
stomach in spite of the separation of the systems because the stomach
is not taking care of the head, so too in the healthy social organism
one member, say the economic, works over into the rights member and
the cultural member. They work together in the right way only when relatively
independent. But this correct mutual working, when in order, really
takes place only when the three members are independent and each governed
by its own laws. How, for example, how does the spiritual life work
into that of the economic? You know what is the spiritual element in
the economic life? Capital is the spirit in economic life: And a great
part of the present evil rests on the control of capital, the fructifying
of capital, being withdrawn from the spiritual life. The relation between
the physical workers to those organising with the help of capital, must
in a healthy social organism be managed on a basis of mutual trust and
understanding. Take, as an example of this, the election in our Waldorf
School. In a healthy social organism the existing gulf between employer
and worker will necessarily cease. Today the worker stands at a machine
without knowing what it is producing. For this reason outside the factory
he naturally wastes his time in trivialities. The employer, again, has
his own life that corresponds to what he has made of it. I have already
described the young men who went about with dark circles under their
eyes and slept with tuberroses beside their beds! The employer leads
this freed spiritual life, freed, that is, not for himself but for others.
But when a spiritual, cultural life has been built up, which includes
those who work physically and spiritually, capitalism will be out on
a social basis, not, it is true, in the way the modern sentimentalist
would approve, but so that a possibility is created for every individual
worker to have a spiritual life in common with all those who organise
his work in the social organism, and distribute the products throughout
the world.
It must be regarded as essential
that with the same degree of regularity with which work is done at the
machine, discussions take place concerning business relations between
employer end employed, so that the worker can have a comprehensive grasp
of all that is happening. In future the aim must be to oblige the employer
to have frank and full explanation of all details to the employed, so
that factory and management may be limited in a common spiritual life.
This is what is important. Only than will it be possible for the situation
to arise when the worker will say: The employer is just as necessary
as I am; for what would my work be in the social organism without him.
He gives it its right place. But he is also obliged to give the worker
his right place end to allow him to come into his own. Then everything
will become quite clear.
There you see how the
spiritual life must play into the working of capitalism. Everything else
today is simply talk, sheer sentimentality. Sound relations between work
and capital cannot come about in the social bureaucratic way, but only
through a spiritual life common to all men having the individual capacity
for it, all men who are in a position to out it into practice and to
produce capital for a sound social organism. With this will come the free
understanding of those who do the physical work. Understanding will then
be able to arise for the initiative of the individual faculties which, in
a free life of spirit, are socialised from the start. Today they work in
an anti-social way because of unnatural relationships. Socialism must rest
upon the free initiative of individual faculties and the free understanding
of what these faculties promote. There is no other socialism that is
genuine. From symptoms already appearing in the social organism we can
realise the truth of this.
There are two things in the
world the value of which for everyday life can be, and is, very differently
estimated. The one is a piece of bread, the other a world-outlook.
About a piece of bread everyone will admit that it is the means for
satisfying man is hunger; there is no disputing the fact that he will
have bread. But about a piece of world-outlook there is a great deal
of despite what one man finds true the other thinks false. And however
true a world-outlook is it cannot have universal value. There can be
strife about the spirit but not about affairs of, the economic life.
This is merely because the spirit is not working as a reality but only
as something connected with the economic life and the life of the State.
When it is based upon itself it will have to display its reality to
the world and to reveal itself, and then reality will flash out from
the spiritual. And then it will certainly not be found in the idle talk
of the would-be moralist, in what is said by those who, because they
regard as spiritual only what is entirely divorced from reality, exhort
people to be good Christians, and uphold all manner of virtues having
nothing to do with external, material reality. There must be a bridge
between this abstract form of the spirit and the spirit working in capital,
for capital is also spirit in its organising of labour. This organising,
however, must in actual fact be the result of spiritual direction.
Thus on the one side the
control of money must be left to the economic life, whereas the organising
of labour by capital should be under the control of the life of the spirit.
There you see the interworking of things which, to outward appearance,
are separate; for naturally in industry capital is represented by money.
The relation, however, between employee and employer, this whole relation
based on trust and especially the fact that the employer has a certain
position as giver of work — all this is organised from the spiritual
sphere. The equivalent of a certain commodity in money will be regulated
by the economic life, and for the health of the organism things will
be woven into each other, just as they are in the three systems of the
human organism.
In this way you will be
able to penetrate into the things of everyday life, and you will see
that what your attention has been called to here comes from the actual
and real archetypal thoughts which must be the basis for the cure of
the social organism.
Notes:
1. See
The Inner Being of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth, Lecture 6
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