FOREWORD
This volume
contains seventeen of the more than 6000 lectures given by
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) during the early part of this
century. As with many of his lectures Steiner assumes a
certain familiarity with his basic writings an the part of
his listeners, a familiarity which can be gained by reading
one or more of his introductory works. Chief among these are
four books:
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,
An Outline of Occult Science,
Theosophy,
and
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.
The readers unfamiliar
with the above works might be well advised to consider first
reading one or more of them before attempting this volume
both as a way of increasing their appreciation and
comprehension of this work and in fairness to Steiner who
explains in detail how he came to his knowledge in these four
volumes.
Some of the
volumes of Steiner's lectures are known as cycles because
they addressed a single theme and were delivered over a short
period of time to the same audience. The seventeen lectures
collected in this sequence do not, strictly speaking,
constitute a cycle. They are strung together along a definite
path stretching between the dates of August 6 to September
18, 1920; but two were delivered before a very different
audience, in Berlin. Added to these lectures is an address to
the General Assembly of the Berlin branch of the
Anthroposophical Society.
To the careful
student of Rudolf Steiner's work it may seem, however, as if
these lectures indeed form a definite cycle. They transmit a
powerful appeal to all those who are deeply concerned with
the condition of the social fabric, irrespective of political
partisanship; but who look to its cultural and philosophical
basis as a means for social action and renewal.
The range of
these lectures is enormous, and thereby symptomatic of Rudolf
Steiner's contribution to the civilization of our time. We
only need look at some of the themes of the lectures:
Spiritual science must be a knowledge of
action.
The twelve senses of the human being in
their relation to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.
The science of initiation and the
impulse for freedom.
Viewpoints for the forming of a healthy
social judgment.
The lectures turn to profound and deeply
stirring observations concerning the inherent tasks and
intentions of the peoples in the West and East, and describe
the diverse influences upon them through various spiritual
powers. To this stream a talk is added in honor of Hegel's
150th birthday, making us aware of the pervasive, albeit
mostly unconscious, influence of this thinker upon the West,
and by no means only in the form in which Communism claimed
him.
The lectures
which follow belong perhaps to the most exciting ones we can
find in Rudolf Steiner's lectures an the fundamentals for a
social renewal. Like a slow-growing plant they begin to open
only gradually into full significance.
The initiative
to make this volume available in English arose out of a
circle of people, including this writer, who have long
concerned themselves with social renewal. We are a group who
have chosen to live and work with handicapped people all over
the world in special communities, the Camphill
communities.
The social
forms developed by these Camphill communities are new types
of villages or related forms of communal life. In these
villages we have enabled exciting relationships, new ways and
new values of labor to emerge and for these strivings this
volume might become a constant source of strength and
encouragement. Just as there exists a curative course [
Note 1 ] by Rudolf Steiner which
provides insight and inspiration for educators of handicapped
children, so these lectures can be regarded as a source of
inspiration for the whole range of activities which unfold as
social therapy. The practical labor arising therefrom thus
could give the right background for applying the indications
given in these lectures. The lectures would then provide
truly new ways of understanding the impulses and efforts of
community life. They would demonstrate what it means to
become free from those often highly developed thoughts which
have, nevertheless, led the actions of individuals, groups
and nations into catastrophic situations for several hundred
years. And they still continue to do so despite increasingly
desperate calls for change! But do we truly want to change?
Without insights of a spiritual nature we cannot and will not
attempt to change. Neither can it be expected to be an easy
task or to be done by the mere acceptance of some creed.
Rudolf Steiner
says in the 10th lecture:
We come closer and closer to total
decline precisely because our intellectuals will not
venture to construe the tasks in this world by utilizing
ideas other than those gained from waking life, from what
lies between birth and death.
At the same
time we must be aware of the slow, though fundamental process
to which we can aspire when we take seriously what Rudolf
Steiner has to say at the very beginning of the 12th
lecture:
One becomes acquainted with the same
things from everchanging viewpoints; thus, conviction
increasingly gains in strength.
This growing
conviction becomes firmer, the more flexible the standpoint,
the deeper and the more truthful the shift from one to
another perspective is, and it brings that certainty we can
see in the planetary companions of the sun as they move in
their regular orbits, in that galaxy to which they belong, to
which we ourselves belong. Ultimately, this is the cosmos of
love and truth.
The
practical-minded expert will either smile or get angry at
this. What role shall such lofty sentiments play in a world
of brutality, deceit and despair? In the midst of such
conditions (where the practitioners of old vices and their
political and power-seeking responses continue to be at work,
Rudolf Steiner spoke the following, describing neither a wish
nor an ethical utopia, but describing rather his sober
insight into a law, that is akin to a law of nature.
This will be the healthy social
relationship in the future. You can see it already today.
Labor will be a free activity out of the insight into the
necessity that labor has to take place. Men labor because
they look at the human being and recognize that he needs
labor. What was labor in the ancient world? It was a
tribute; it was done because it had to be done. And what is
labor today? It rests upon self-satisfaction, and that kind
of enforcement which is exerted upon us by egoism. Because
we are where we are, we want to be paid for our labor. We
work for our own sakes, for our own wages. In the future we
will labor for the sake of our fellow human beings, because
they need what we can work for. This will be the reason for
our work. We will clothe our fellow human beings, we will
make our work available to them for what they are in need
of — as a completely free activity. Wages have to be
completely separated from this. A tribute was labor in the
past — an offering it will be in the future. Labor
has nothing to do with self-satisfaction, nothing to do
with payment. If I allow my work to be dictated by the
needs of my brothers with a view to what mankind really
needs, then I will find myself in a free relationship to
it, and my work becomes an offering for mankind. Then I
shall work with all my strength, for I love mankind and put
my strength at its disposal. [ Note 2
]
Who cannot
imagine the unbelieving, if not contemptuous, faces raised
upon hearing this — the cynicism and impatience? For all
those who at times play at intellectual games with Rudolf
Steiner's indications, another paragraph of the same lecture
shall be quoted. Rudolf Steiner continues:
This must become possible and will only
be possible when life's requirements are separated from
work. And this will indeed happen in the future — no
one will be the owner of the products of his own labor.
Mankind must be educated for free labor, one for all and
all for one. Each one will have to act accordingly. Today,
if you would found a small community in which each one
throws into a communal account what he earns and each one
works as best he can, then his very life's existence
— his needs — will be brought about out of the
communal consumption. This will cause a greater freedom
than the ordering of wages according to production. When
that happens we shall turn in the right direction. Today,
this could flow into law, into each regulation; of course,
not in absolute terms, but approximately. One could today
build up factories in this way. But it will require
healthy, clear and sober thinking in the sense of
anthroposophy.[ Note 2 ]
A deeper
understanding of all this can be obtained from the present
volume of lectures.
If Rudolf
Steiner's printed work needs a preface or an introduction at
all, it is to emphasize that it cannot be read like other
books. It belongs to the type and quality of his thoughts
that they have the characteristics of living things: the
inherent power of growth and potential for change which lies
in the unfolding of all living things. We are not accustomed
to such activity with thoughts, with thinking as a force akin
to doing. Yet such is the nature of Rudolf Steiner's
thoughts. They appeal to an otherwise dormant participation
in us and offer an invitation to social activity. No doubt,
this is an unusual demand. Conceivably it can cause offense.
But the request is emphasized here and with good cause.
In our time,
no one can be free from grave concerns for the future, which
is reaching with its tentacles right into the present. Much
good will and increasing desperation is spent on finding
“solutions,” on seeking, on organizing, on
imploring to try different ways; ways of amelioration, of
appeasement, of change with a truly human face — with
few results. It would not be, then, a wasted effort to enter
into the reading of these lectures with more than that
intellectual scanning to which we have become accustomed, but
instead to hear, almost from the first words, the intonation
of a selfless voice, selfless even in search for knowledge.
This voice speaks with the tone of hope and of insight and
with the aspirations of all of us. Its familiarity should, in
the encounter with its message, lead us securely — and
far more deeply than we usually listen — to those
places of the will in us which alone can bring about change
and evolutionary responsibility.
Carlo Pietzner
Michaelmas 1985
Notes:
1.
Curative Education, Rudolf Steiner Press, London,
1984
2.
These two quotations come from a public lecture given by
Rudolf Steiner in Berlin an October 26, 1905. This
lecture was published only recently for the first time in
Beitrage zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, St. John's
Time 1985, #88.
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