Healthy Thinking

Lecture 9

Today’s great tasks in spiritual life, legal life and economic life

A third lecture for the current time

Stuttgart on 2 September 1920

My dear honourable friends present here today! The circumstances of public life in the civilized world, over the course of the last 50 years, cannot be overlooked, their reciprocal relationships have become difficult to see though and find clarity.

From what one could call the great economic upswing before 1914, today's misery has emerged, rising from the most complicated circumstances with the most diverse facts — facts, in turn, of a kind that is difficult to grasp. No wonder that people who have to live in this decline today, have to work, to strive, while from the depths of their souls they long for an ascent to a new beginning, that now questions can be asked in a small circle in the attempt to find betterment for this or that individual. As understandable as this might be, anyone who looks deeper into today’s conditions must realize that nothing can lead from decline to reconstruction today, nor in the near future, if there is no understanding of the great tasks of the time. The great tasks of the time arise from specific sources which cannot actually lie within small areas. As well as I am able in one evening, I will try to give some reflections on some of these great tasks of our time in a modest way — I would like to say that one cannot do otherwise in the face of these tasks.

It seems that if anything obviously points to the way we must face the great tasks, it is to consider the great mistakes that have been made in this time. Two stages describe our whole public life in its immediate present development and it seems to me that these stages not only refer to external economic conditions but also to legal conditions, to moral and especially to spiritual conditions within the present civilization. If you name these two stages, Versailles, Spa and all that they have in their wake, if you remember all that they have brought to us, then it becomes somewhat difficult to characterize them, because today suspicions arise in the pursuit of a certain objectivity.

People’s opinions harshly opposed one another: If a member of the Central European civilization wants to judge the West, it is quite sure that his objectivity will be doubted vehemently by the people of the West. I would therefore prefer not to pass my own judgment about what happened at Versailles, which is still reverberating in our present day; rather, I would like to follow the judgment of the Englishman John Maynard Keynes, who wrote the important book "The Economic Consequences of the Peace Treaty" which I already referred to in my Stuttgart lectures, from another perspective.

Keynes, after all, was a man who was present in a prominent position at the Versailles negotiations up to a certain point, until it became too much for him, and in his book he judges what had happened and also what he thought should have happened, in his opinion. One could say that in three punch-lines he summarised our present as so symptomatic of the Versailles facts, which are also so symptomatic of our present day. He, the Englishman, whom Lenin only a short time ago called the "English philistine,” says quite simply: ‘Nothing, but nothing at all happened at Versailles regarding a mastery of the great task, which those would have had if they felt themselves victors. What did Clemenceau do? He has ruined Europe's economic resources and has done nothing for the economy in France itself. What did Lloyd George do? He made some deals that allowed him to shine in London for a short time. What came from Wilson? Wilson has had good intentions about what is right and just’ — thinks Keynes — but no way did it occur to him to somehow turn what he may have intended, with well-meaning, into reality. The three most important men, and they made huge mistakes at the time.

Now let us look at what actually come out of the terrible events that have taken place since 1914 for Germany. I do not need to describe it to you. Southeast of Germany, Czechoslovakia has become a relatively large empire. Born out of national aspirations, everything that governs there proves to be economically impotent in the face of tasks, which have been set for the economy in these areas. Northwards: Poland. Now, you only need to be reminded of the last few weeks to see, on the one hand, how what has been formed there has only contributed to the disquiet of Europe, and on the other hand, you only have to remember the perplexity of leading European figures in the face of what is boiling and simmering there. One only has to think of the tragic-comic in the transformation of the view from Polish "defeats" to Polish "victories,” how one had faced, without opinion, without great guidelines, today this, tomorrow the opposite.

If one goes further East, it can seem today as if there are no longer any other guidelines than Leninism and Trotskyism, especially if one takes into account the disastrous conditions in Italy — no other guidelines than those forces that develop out of a phenomenal megalomania, forces which can serve for the destruction of civilization. The Germans of Austria are down, not to speak of Hungary, where the sad spectacle is taking place that when members of that party which a short time ago was at the helm, are led through the streets, captured and bound, they are then poked in the eyes with umbrellas belonging to pompously made-up ladies. This description could be continued for a long time, and one could see what has emerged for mankind from the circumstances since the year 1914.      

If you look at what comes from personalities who are somehow active within this terrible decline — personalities who can often even indulge in tragic-comic illusions about an ascent that could be brought about by their intentions , one would like to say: In the short-sighted — monumental in its short-sightedness — lack of insight, was Lenin's speech at the second congress of the Third International, where he once again, in the old Marxist style, accused Western capitalism of all the banalities which have been heard so often. If one goes into it from a certain viewpoint of world history, of what is said in this large-scale speech about capitalism having grown into imperialism which tyrannizes five sevenths of mankind, then on the other hand the question must be asked: What would have become of the whole of modern civilization if there had not been capital accumulation? Should one not ask: Is it not obvious that the forces contributing to our modern times show that such an accumulation of capital has not also been for the progress of mankind? In the face of our collapsing world, is it still possible to get by with such an abstraction which only proclaims the struggle in a very abstract form, or does one not have to ask: Isn't our decline, especially when this note is struck, also clearly based on something moral? Do not, perhaps, just such fighters like Lenin confuse the harmfulness of capitalism in general with the kind of morality, or rather immorality, with which capitalism has operated? Can we not also trace this spiritual note in the effects of capitalism? Also, does one perhaps not arrive at deeper impulses than those which are constantly proclaimed today, and whose declarations have nevertheless brought so few practical successes for the better?

One can already say: Indicative of today's intellectual, legal and economic situation is of course the counterpart, which again comes from Keynes, the Englishman, the sharp condemner of the Western powers, but it sounds somewhat different in Lenin's words. Keynes says for example: Yes, terrible things happened at Versailles. Instead of doing something towards the rebuilding of Europe, everything was done to transform Europe into a heap of ruins of civilization; bad things are there for the time being, worse things will still come about in the next years. — I am quoting these according to the sense of it, not the wording.

Even more curious is the way Keynes remarks on a few things which are there as underlying spiritual states, which have brought us to our current situation. It is interesting to note how this man, who sat in for weeks at the negotiations conducted by Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George, how this man realizes how it actually came about that Wilson, who had beguiled so many people with his abstract Fourteen Points, had failed so utterly. A significant problem came to the Englishman Keynes, and something very strange comes to light.

Keynes constructs — as I said, from the view of the way Wilson sat there — how the others did everything they could to deceive him, just so that he wouldn't find out what they actually want. A strange psychological event that Keynes describes and dissects, which, I would like to mention, shines a profoundly significant light into the whole cultural condition of the present. Keynes obviously means: Had Wilson been told what France's wish was, that the Germans of Austria should not be allowed to unite with the Germans of Germany, if this had been clearly stated in such a way that Wilson would have heard these words, his sense of justice would have rebelled against it. Now one must see the struggle of such a dull mentality — if I may use that ‘Entente’ word — one must realize, how Wilson feels — as Keynes does — if you now visualize the following as a spectator.

Keynes said: Yes, the people around Clemenceau and Lloyd George did not say: ‘It will not be permitted for the Germans of Austria to unite with the Germans of Germany’ because Wilson would have rebelled against it, so that is why they said: ‘The independence of German Austria is to be guaranteed by a treaty with the Entente powers until the League of Nations pronounces a different verdict.’ This is what Wilson understood: the independence, the freedom of the German Austria had to be guaranteed. — Had he been told: They would be forbidden to unite with the Germans of Germany —, Wilson would have understood the same as he regarded for freedom and independence, as the ultimate constraint. Had he been told — this is how Keynes continues — ‘Gdansk is to become a Polish city’ he would have rebelled against it; this obviously contradicts the Fourteen Points. So he was told: ‘Gdansk will become a free city, but all customs matters shall be taken care of from Poland as well as the supervision of all traffic matters, and the Poles shall become the protectors of the citizens living abroad.’

Oh, that sounds different than if one had said: ‘Gdansk is to become a Polish city.’ One can almost say: Yes, if one says it this way: ‘Gdansk is to become a free city’ Wilson’s dull mentality gets excited. If, however, he had been told that Danzig should become a Polish city, it would have contradicted Wilson's view that every nation should be led to freedom. If Wilson had further been told that the Entente should have overall supervision of German rivers, he could have agreed, but this is how it was said: ‘Where navigation passes through several states, it is an international business.’ With this, Wilson was again satisfied.

If one wants to look at what moves in the world today as great powers, one has to look at what is happening between two aspects. I will now translate the word Entente into “Geistesverfassung” (frame of mind). Look what is happening between this “frame of mind” of leading personalities who have developed out of their former circumstances, to where they are now. Is uprightness and honesty still alive? Does a healthy sense and openness still exist? The opposite is mostly the case, and what is more, it lives in such a way that one is still convinced that one is an honest, open person, because what works has become an unconscious habit. How could Wilson become so deceived as he was in the style I have described Keynes? People who still cannot convince themselves that such an abstract, theorizing spirit like Wilson is a misfortune for Europe, sometimes say these benevolent words: ‘This Wilson knew too little about European conditions’ — admitting to it hypothetically, although I don’t admit it, ‘Wilson hardly knew European conditions.’ In fact Wilson had written a comprehensive work of 500 pages about the state in which he describes in great detail the conditions of the European states, the state relations, the legal relations and so on.

We are faced with the fact: either it is untrue, that Wilson didn’t know about European conditions or a contemporary authoritative figure writes an authoritative work for America, about European conditions without knowledge of these conditions. It is precisely the latter that would shed a bright light on the whole superficiality of our time, on everything that is in the spirit of superficiality and does not get involved in deeper foundations of things causing present events, the current developments living within the whole of human evolution. Still, something much more important lurks behind what I have presented.

Already many years ago, during a series of lectures in Helsingfors — at a time when Wilson was revered everywhere because two important literary works of his had been published — I drew attention to something that characterizes the whole nature of Wilson’s frame of mind. Wilson once said: ‘When one looks at the time in which Newton, the great physicist lived, one finds how for example, in the theory of constitutional law or in those who think about commercial and economic conditions, the same conceptual formations can be found for the economic and for the political conditions that Newton, the physicist, designed for the physicists.’ Now Wilson says: ‘From such dependence of the way of thinking and in relation to public, political or economic conditions we must free ourselves; today we must think in terms of the organic, regarding politics, world economy and so on.’ Now he develops a kind of political idea about which one can say: Just as those whom he rebukes because they were dependent on Newton in their time, so he is completely as a politician, as an economist, as a man of law, the follower of Darwinism and thinking Darwinistically, as those whom he rebukes who thought Newtonistically. ‘Darwin is in fashion’ — is what Wilson, the world reformer, thinks as a Darwinian. At the time I said: We are now in a time when we must no longer allow our view of the real conditions of public life to be clouded at all by that which comes to us from the scientific side. What comes out of the scientific side — I have often said it here — is perfectly suited for the research of the surfaces of things but what involves forming ideas about human action, human coexistence, must go deeper into the foundations of the world than science has any need for. For this reason I say the dangerous thing in our time is to precisely have such a way of thinking as that of Woodrow Wilson.

That happened long before the war; that was in a time after which Wilson had for a long time been glorified as the world hero. What matters today is turning away one’s gaze for everything which is outwardly perceived today. It is of necessity to deepen the gaze into deeper foundations of becoming and happenings. That, my dear friends, tries the direction of a world view which starts at the same scientific spirit, as natural science is on the soul-spiritual in human beings. It is the anthroposophically orientated spiritual science which I have almost for two decades — every year more often — represented here in my lectures in Stuttgart.

What do we need to strive for in our spiritual life in the sense of the spiritual science that is meant here? I briefly want to point out that spiritual science does not arrive at results in an external way, but through the pupil firstly — intellectually meant — performing exercises. The pupil must again and again repeat what I have characterised in one of my last lectures here as a comparison. I said: If a five-year-old child picks up a volume of Goethe's poetry, he will not be able to do anything with it, and will do something quite different from what is intended with the volume of Goethe’s poetry. If he turns ten years older, he would have undergone a development and attained a level of maturity that will enable him to do something with this volume of poetry. — The spiritual scientist as it is meant here, says: With that form of consciousness, which we use in ordinary life and which we also apply in usual science, with it we stand in the face of the higher world forces like a five-year-old child stands in the face of a volume of Goethe’s poetry. Forces slumber in every human being out of which he can, in himself, develop and which then show him a different, spiritual recognition of the world and shows him above all that one can research the surface of things with natural scientific thinking, although grandiose, and that in this respect natural science has justly achieved the greatest triumphs. They show him that with the natural scientific way of thinking we do not get behind the innate things that play into the actions of man, if we do not reach for such methods and ways of thinking that are permeated by the spirit, and by which we can also understand man and the forces in him in a thoroughly scientific way. But then however we come from the kind of comprehension of human beings in general to a completely different comprehension of the world than the conventional spiritual life in which we find ourselves today.

In the face of this common spiritual life, one would like to remember the deeply heart-stabbing words Hölderlin spoke when his mind was still bright, not yet mentally deranged, but fine, sensitive to what was present in his cultural environment. Hölderlin, who had immersed himself in the harmonious humanity of ancient Greece and had come to love it, he saw, to a certain extent exaggerating, as such a spirit might do in his time, that the people in his environment, in comparison with the Greeks, had the following kinds of characteristics. He asked: ‘Are there human beings living among ordinary Germans? Around me I don’t see any human beings like the Greeks had been, I see officials, teachers, professors but no human beings; I see advocates, artist and scholars, but no human beings; I see young and sedate people around me, but no human beings. What I miss in my surroundings is a whole, fully developed humanity, which can also gain a harmonious relationship to the universe.’ —

This kind of humanity lived consciously-unconsciously, sensibly-supersensibly in Goethe, and out of such a humanity, for example, streamed what Goethe himself cherished more highly than his own poetry — although it was, according to Goethe, so little understood: his natural scientific creations. In this Goethean scientific school of thought lived not only a one-sided physicist when he presents his theory of colours, there doesn’t live a once-sided botanist describing his plants, there doesn’t live a one-sided anatomist when he characterises human bones, but in this way of thinking the whole human being is alive; the whole human being grasps the individual parts of nature which can only be revealed when it is experienced, in its process, in the whole of humanity, from within.

In the course of time, this way of thinking has been increasingly contrasted with something that has been praised so much, but also sometimes criticized: specialization in all areas of life: specialisation which has entered our higher knowledge and from there has unfolded its effects, for example, down into elementary school education. This specialisation made people into physicists, into advocates, professors, teachers and so on, but drove out the human being. We must ask ourselves: Is it really a furtherance of knowledge itself if this knowledge has developed in recent times in such a way that the knowledge that led to a world view has split into those small parts from which even the human part has been lost and an eye for the world can no longer be preserved? Authoritative personalities are repeatedly portrayed as if they themselves are knowledge. If a person can look into the development of recent times, he would discover that it is not the case. He sees this knowledge and striving for the abstract unitary state as it has developed over the civilized world in the last three to four centuries. He sees that the unitary state, which absorbed everything that we want to re-divide today through the impulse of the threefold social organism structure, that this unitary state with its mingling of intellectual life, legal life and economic life into one fabric made of physicists and chemists, professors and teachers, in short specialized people, and with these it had to fill its staff positions if it followed its principles. It was this unitary state that sucked being human out of humanity which is what lived in Goethe and which Hölderlin so longed for, for his Germans. Spiritual science is that which can give the fully human element back to people, because out of being fully human alone it can happen that at the same time the cognition of feeling for everything human, a real legal and reasonable economic life can come about.

If one proceeds according to the methods of spiritual research, one does not get a superficial view of something or other brewed from single disciplines, but rather one receives fully living spiritual knowledge. This is like a light that can be cast over single areas. With it human beings are given the opportunity once again to place people above specialist positions; one gets the opportunity to put people first and the social entity afterwards — and not vice versa by putting the social entity first and then the human being next, thereby letting him wither away under a system template. Because spiritual science is something which in this way really comes from the fully human, but which must first be gained through spiritual research, it can also have a fertilizing effect on that which is fragmented in the world. What is fragmented in our world is for example our current legal science, the individual branches of our current economic life — everything is fragmented.

Well, whoever has listened to me over a longer period of time and is able to understand the actual meaning of what I say, knows that I do not say such things out of immodesty or silliness. I may as well point out that in February, in front of more than thirty specialists in Dornach, I tried to present the therapeutic element of medicine from a spiritual-scientific understanding of the nature of the human being in such a way that one really acquires a genuine therapy which is directly applicable to the human being. In this individual case I tried to show how stimulating a central view of the essence of the natural, the soul and the spirit can be for a single science. Whoever now considers the social effect of the striving of personalities imbued with our knowledge, will nevertheless reflect on the meaning of what I have said. It is a different matter if a physician is brought up in a closed circle and cannot see beyond the limits of his science, or whether he grasps his science in such a way that it becomes a light for him for everything of man’s physical, spiritual and soul nature and that through this, at the same time, he acquires a true sense for all social interaction and coexistence of human beings, and thus, from his medical art, a lively, fruitful judgement arise on the treatment of major social questions.

In Autumn, beginning on the 26^th September, more than twenty personalities, who have lived into the Anthroposophical spiritual science meant here, will hold a course of new university lectures in Dornach. In Dornach we have established our School of Spiritual Science, which we cannot open because it is not yet finished, but we will hold these university courses at the unopened Dornach School from September 26 to October 16. Personalities from the fields of physics, chemistry, political science, national economy and history, practitioners who are practical in life, in the factory or otherwise in life, artists in all areas, will first show in this trial course how that which specializes in individual fields, through living spiritual science, which is anthroposophically oriented, receives such a light that these sciences are no longer something theoretical, no longer something that one acquires and later has to peel away from oneself to a large extent, in order to then stand in a corner of life and from there survey nothing other than specialist things. No, it is shown how through this enlivening of knowledge which can come out of spiritual science, that specialization will be overcome and how through the new spirit, through a spirit which is as strictly scientific as that which is cultivated today in the universities, indeed “strict,” even more rigorously scientific, that by this spirit the specialists are brought together so that they will not in their mutual incomprehension go alone in mankind’s damaging ways but will work together socially and from the spirit lift our depressing time.

These university lectures are held in our Dornach Goetheanum in which every detail seeks such a style, such an architectural, sculptural, painterly style, as follows from the whole sentient conception, from the artistic conception, which arises from our spiritual science. Everything should work there, up to this framing as it were, like a symbol for what should happen from the spiritual side. For it must be the spirit that, following its true threads, comes back to the truth; to a truth from which goodness, from which morality and from which the healthy, strong will follow. It doesn’t result from surface knowledge but it results from cognition in spiritual depths. Much more than being able to express mere characterisation, I hope these lectures of ours in Dornach will show how, from the spirit, the forces are to be sought for the building up of our depressed civilization. We don’t want to logically discount remarks such as about the downfall of the Occident, as I characterized them last time here, but through action we want to create that which can be opposed to the forces of decline. I am convinced that we really would not be able to accommodate all the listeners in Dornach and its wider surroundings today, who would come — and hopefully in quite large numbers, despite the current sleepiness of souls today — if it were not for the fact that the traffic difficulties resulting from our decline were not so insurmountable.

If I may point out something closer to home, I would like to return once again to what is intended with our Free Waldorf School here. This Waldorf School, which we have opened up for the second school year, today, we have described here some time ago with reference to its achievements in the first school year. Through what it has become — it couldn’t become more in its first year — it has become because our teachers were enlivened and inspired by those feelings towards the developing human being, the child — feelings that come from the research of spiritual science, that spiritual science which, however, has to behave in a completely different way with regard to certain spiritual things than many people have assumed up to now with regard to these things.

In our current time we have proclamations which speak about the eternity of the human being. To what end have all these proclamations come? If you really look at the world without prejudice and listen to sermons or theologies about the eternal in the human soul, it is not an appeal of the urge for knowledge, but basically an appeal to the finer instincts of the person. For those of you who have often listened to my lectures, you would know from which foundations the spiritual science meant here speaks about regarding the immortal part in man, how it gives certain indications about what happens when a person has passed through the gate of death and has shed his physical body. However, from another background it is being spoken about what one has for centuries become accustomed to hearing in Western civilization. What is appealed to again and again in this occidental civilization? To the finer instincts of the soul; man does not want his whole being to cease when his body crumbles to dust. It is about the desire for eternity. I ask you to go through everything that is offered along these lines in traditional proclamations, in sermons and theologies: it is the appeal to human egoism that does not want to die. While it is only an appeal to egoism, things are conveniently separated: knowledge for the sensual world and faith for the supersensible world. Of course, by reasoning only about the instincts referred to here, in relation to immortality, you only come to a belief, not to knowledge. However, by applying methods of spiritual science which are not easier than chemical or astronomical methods but more difficult, in order to investigate the human being — more details can be found in my books "How to attain knowledge of the Higher Worlds" or "Occult Science, an Outline” or other books — then you find it isn’t merely a matter of speaking about immortality, that means from the forms which the soul-spiritual human being assumes after death, but comes down to look at what the human being was before birth or conception, before he as a spiritual being descended through birth out of the spiritual world into the physical world and took on a physical body inherited from the father and mother. Something like this can become cognitions, but cognitions of such an inner power that it can penetrate our entire being.

If we, as educators, approach the child with such cognition then we look at the child in a completely different way. Then we know something about how the soul-spiritual forms out of the deepest human substrata, how the physiognomy, the skills, that appear from year to year, are formed in the body out of the soul-spiritual. By facing the human being as a teacher and educator, one gets a feeling without which there can be no fruitful education at all, the feeling: What you are coming into contact with in this human form has origins in spiritual worlds; you are entrusted with what the gods have sent down — so you stand before it with holy reverence.

My dear friends, just as there are forces that can only be explored through their effects in the external, physical world, for example, electricity or magnetism, just so there streams through, when you are a teacher or educator, what you acquire as reverence which has the effect of an imponderable force like something you only learn to believe when you see its effects, when you see what emanates from such holy teacher reverence, that it is something which surrounds the child’s soul-spiritual growth in the same way that sunlight surrounds the plants to flourish into blossoms. A pedagogy out of the fully human, which is borne by feelings and sensations, yet by a sensibility that sees through world conditions and human conditions, a pedagogy that naturally becomes art, that does not talk abstractly about education, such a pedagogy is the kind that can strive in the decisive generation over the next decades, to lead from our decline into a new beginning. We can say: What anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has been able to make of our teaching staff has at least borne fruit in the first school year.

Today there’s only one thing in front of us, who have opened the second school year, that confronts the spiritual eye as a spectre to those whose whole heart and whole mind is with this Waldorf School. Out of the spirit we can bring Waldorf School after Waldorf School to life; out of the spirit practically — not theoretically — one of the great tasks of our time will be solved, step by step. However, we need understanding, understanding in the widest circles. We may hope for the spirit to be continuously supportive to us in our striving because to a certain extent it depends on us. Indeed understanding is what we need because the buildings housing the school need to be built; teachers are to live in apartments and also need to eat. All this is necessary. Already the spectre of destitution regarding such things and for what lies behind it, the lack of understanding in wide circles for one of the great tasks of our time, stands before our souls and impairs what we would like to do just in these days, for the second school year.

What we need most of all for the tasks of today is understanding in the widest sense of the word. Many people with idealism say: Ideals are elevated, they are not worthy to be brought into connection with mundane material relationships because the material world is something lowly; ideals are high, they have to find their own way — that's why we keep our hands on our wallets and spend nothing at all on our ideals, because why take idle money which isn’t worthy of serving ideals, and give it to ideals? — This sounds trivial. However, if we want to do something that is necessary for the Waldorf School today, in this case it may be spoken about. Idealism today often manifests itself more through the enthusiasm to keep material things together and to cultivate ideals in them.

Now I am able to sketch something for you which connects again with something quite new in our spiritual life. For a long time already we have lost the direction and current of our spiritual life which looks at what I want to characterise regarding the prenatal human being. Our very language testifies to it: When we speak of man’s eternity, what do we say? Immortality. — We only point to one end of life, towards where human egoism looks. We don’t have a word for the other: “unbornness” for example, one could call it. Just as little as we don’t lose our eternal essence when we lay down the physical body, just so, we don’t receive it at birth.

When we speak about the eternal part of man, so we must equally speak about unbornness as well as we speak about immortality. We don’t even suspect what we are missing in this direction. What we hope for in the time after death hardly inspires action in us. Should we know what lives in us, what lives in us as having descended from the spiritual worlds, as if it were only as a reflection of the spiritual world, then we can say we feel ourselves as — I would like to use the word — missionaries of the spiritual world.

In earthly work our feelings are moved, our actions inspired for our tasks as human beings in an earthly existence. From out of the spirit we must gain forces to really enter into what our tasks as human beings on earth are; it is not enough that we only remain in the nearest areas surrounding us in life. We must look at what surrounds us in spiritual life, what lives inwardly as spiritual life and even permeates all of life, right into the economic sphere. As far as this is concerned, people indulge in the strangest illusions. Whoever follows the historical course of mankind with a sense of reality, will see that the actual sources of spiritual impulses are not on the surface and can be looked for over in the Orient — actually not in the current Orient because today’s Orient in this regard is decadent. The source of this very special spiritual life, as I have described it here in the lecture I gave on the historical development of mankind, lived thousands of years ago in the Orient.

There lived a humanity that understood nothing of what we call "proving" or "logical thinking" — a humanity that drew from the same sources as the spiritual science meant here, but in a different way, in the occidental way, and once open up to man, they knew that something can live in a man's soul which reveals to him the spirit that permeates the world. Nothing that could be proved, or logical knowledge of the spirit, lived over in the Orient. Today, if we don’t want to place ourselves in an antiquated time, we can no longer penetrate this oriental spiritual life, yet our ordinary spiritual formation still has something of it. There is a straight line from that spirit which shone forth in the Vedas, in the Vedanta philosophy, in the ancient Indian yoga system, which lived even in the Chaldean teachings and in ancient China; it is a straight line that moved in many currents through many channels to the Occident. In what we think in ordinary life as actually spiritual today, still have traces of Oriental spiritual life in it.

Even when you place the Mystery of Golgotha in human evolution as is necessary to understand Christ Jesus, it was oriental wisdom that sought to understand this event, which could only be comprehended through supersensible knowledge and then spread over the whole Western world. In this oriental wisdom something lived which today can’t be experienced and felt in the right way, for which support is needed. What was present in the Oriental as its original soul-life had to, for centuries already, be anchored in dogmatic cohesive religious communities because the inner sources of spiritual life no longer flows in the same way and so people need such religious communities. This is what, to start with, sticks out like the first branch into our public life — a branch which is still has the Orient as the “lifeblood” in it. If one was to look impartially at our spiritual life, one would discover that today, what is thought, felt and sensed is still affected from what comes from the Orient, even in the sciences, physics, and above all, in religious proclamations.

Added to this peculiar oriental spirit which is little understood today in its entire configuration, it flows through the Occident — taking the way more over the South and pouring into Central Europe, but also fertilizing the West — a completely different school of thought. There came into, what I could term a comprehensive sense the legal-, the state- and the political thinking.

In the wonderful Greekdom we see a strange blending of what sounds from the Orient, what still lives in the Greek as having come over from the Egyptians, in which Greece is not yet fully revealed, now already the juristic thinking, which brought the peculiar proving art into the conception of the human being. In Greece, we see life only sparsely permeated by logistical, legal, governmental thinking that was not present in the Orient. If for example there were commandments presented in the Orient, they were something quite different there than commandments were in the Western world. We then see the judicial spirit essentially rising from ancient Rome. We see how the proving, using logic, the combining and separating of concepts, develop into a special art. We notice how a second element mixes into that which streams over from the Orient, as the judicial, the political pours into the spiritual current, the “state machine.” Even the spiritual-religious, the spiritual-scholastic we see permeated by this juridical element.

It would have been quite impossible for the Oriental to have found in the original thoughts of his world view, instead of the concept of "karma,” something like "guilt and atonement" or "redemption.” What lived in the Orient in the idea of "karma,” or in world fate, was something quite different. Then, however, the juridical element made itself heard in the world view; it put itself into the religious world view. The human being was seen differently at the turning point of time, than in the Orient. Now he is thought of as being “judged” by the world because he has loaded “guilt” on to himself. One spoke differently about “guilt” and “judgement” in the Orient. These judicial-proving and separating-judging elements of the Western world have even crept into the religious element.

If we go for example to the Sistine Chapel in Rome and consider Michelangelo’s painting of “Christ the World Judge” in front of us, where He passes judgement on the good and evil, then we see for ourselves how the judicial, world-political spirit is carried into the religious conception of the world, even there. This is the second branch in our civilization, which still has an effect in Fichte, in Hegel, and which saturates what still emerges at the turn of the 18th, 19th century in German intellectual life. It is not in vain that Fichte and Hegel started their thinking literally from the roots of law, from the political, the state relations, and the way in which these minds think of mankind’s development is to be understood in a “state-powerful” sense compared with earlier times.

More recently a third stream was added to the second one, which developed in the West out of the western folk systems and instincts of the people. In the East, in the times when the East had its greatness, nature gave what man needed in such a way that he made the distribution of the products of nature, as well as the distribution of what man produced, out of his spiritual life. There was no economic thinking; there was not even legal thinking. If we go as far back as the 18th century, we still find a low level of economic thinking in Central Europe. However we find everything dominated by an increasingly legal thinking, by a state-, political thinking.

In the West, this economic thinking had been developing for a long time and it evolved more and more out of the natural instincts and dispositions of people. The conditions developed in such a way that where one thinks essentially "western,” now also for what was grasped earlier from the viewpoint of logic — for science, for truth — economic thinking is applied. It came out of America. There one had the teaching of pragmatism, which roughly says: ‘"True" and "false" is something that is only illusion; we have taken this from the legal world view. Our view is this: If something proves useful in practical life, it is right, it is true, and anything that proves to be not useful is harmful, is false.’ According to this world view of life everything was judged according to whether it is “useful” or “harmful.”

These ideas came into human habits of thinking and live also in the philosophers. If for example you really want to understand philosophers like Herbert Spencer and others, you will only understand them if you say: This Herbert Spencer thinks out philosophical systems, but he has ideas which as such only stand in the wrong place; instead of thinking out philosophical systems his way of thinking should be used to build factories, set up trade unions and help the economy get on its feet; for this, his ideas are useful, but not in the philosophical field.

If we thus trace what our humanity is going through in its historical development, we see: First a spiritual life is formed, which refers back to an inheritance from earlier millennia in the later time, then gradually a state life, a political life, a juridical thinking comes up, later the economic life develops to it, and this life develops differentiated over the earth. Added to this, as we approach the newer times, we see how the spiritual life that has come over from the Orient has died away and the dry pedantic and philistine nature of today’s teaching and education comes particularly from the death of that old spiritual heritage. This points out with all vivacity that we should not wander back to the Orient but through ourselves we must develop a free and original spiritual life by opening ourselves up to the sources of this spiritual life.

The old legacy is over. A new spiritual life is wanted in our time, and such a spiritual science now wants to proclaim it from Dornach. With such a new spiritual life it will penetrate pedagogy, permeated education and through something like the Waldorf School it will make it fruitful for modern life. Even for the old legal spirit, little is left over today.

I recommend you read about characteristic, symptomatic phenomena of the present, such as in the small booklet on jurisprudence by the Mannheim teacher Rumpf, then you will see: Just as religious world views today have to borrow from the outside, because the inside no longer bubbles, so jurisprudence and political science borrow from economic conditions, because they no longer have anything bubbling alive from the inside. So when we look today, we see a mixture of economic thinking and legal thinking spreading chaos over our lives. For anyone who really sees through things, will know how much of this chaotic confusion within our public life has penetrated right up into the sphere where social upheavals, social trials and tribulations manifest in outer deeds. We can only move forward if we seek a new spiritual life in the way I have described. The old spiritual life has passed away as an inheritance. We will find the new spiritual life only if we do not hand over the school to the state, but if we position the whole of spiritual life on its own, for then alone can we lift spiritual life out of what it is now.

From the human individuality and personality the human being brings, when he enters the physical world from spiritual heights, some real spirituality and something new with him. This is what we want to uplift. We don’t want to dictate to people how they must develop according to some or other set of rules, but we want this real spiritual aspect to develop powerfully through love from the teacher, from the educator to the child. This spiritual life can only be maintained by those who are active in it. A new spiritual life will bring the living spirit, which our social life needs so much, back into the present; it will make the deep source, which man brings with him when he enters physical existence through birth, fruitful for human coexistence. This is one of the great tasks of our time.

A second task is how we get back to living — not regurgitating old Roman or, for that matter, old concepts and logistical fabrics, but originally, through the living together of one person relating to anther in the democratic structure of the state — how we can again come to live in the human sense of a social community with the pulse between right and duty. No dictated law will ever develop a sense of duty. Only that law which arises between equals, between one person who has become mature in living exchanges with another mature person, only this law will also make people eager to work and this law will include the regulation of work in itself.

Spiritual life, as I refer to it, is described in my "Key Points to the Social Question" in such a way that it must become the regulator, especially of capital. Then that which is needed for modern development, the accumulation of capital or means of production, is through the spirit — which will illuminate it, when the spirit is freedom, in its proliferation, in its progress from generation to generation will recreate itself anew — then capital, through the spirit, will also carry within itself what for example Keynes and others miss: morality. As a result economic life will not be set on egoism and only self-acquired capitalism but live with spiritually imbued capitalism — even out of insight into the necessities of the world — the new capitalism will work in the sense of people who have been educated in the new spiritual life. Then labour, too, will no longer be a commodity, but will be included in the independent constitutional state which is developing for itself; then labour will come into its own in that social fabric in which man who has reached maturity works with every other man who has reached maturity on the basis of an equal right. Only from the feeling for the duty to work in freedom can the upswing in our life arise, not from the demand of being in barracks and doing duty, which must suffocate every feeling of justice in man. From an independent spiritual life, from an independent legal life we must grasp the great tasks of our time. If we go into economic life, we see that if we separate out everything that is in it today and has to be separated out — the right to own land, for that belongs to the constitutional state, labour, which today is paid for as if it is a commodity, for that belongs to the constitutional state, and the means of production, insofar as they can be capitalized, for they belong to the spiritual limb of the social organism — if we take all of this out of economic life, commodity production and consumption remain in it.

A commodity, as a human product, does not only involve one human being; goods pass from one human being to another. It is not only the one who has something to say about the commodity, who has experience of its production, but also he who creates the traffic conditions for the things or who has to judge the needs. All kinds of people are involved in economic life and everything in economic life is a commodity. If we thus have within economic life, on the one hand, the administration of capital in the spiritual sphere and the administration of labour in the legal sphere, then what remains for the administration of economic life is that which is solely justified: the price situation, the mutual price value of the goods. If price is to be discovered between chance and reason, it can only be determined through associations.

In associations different groups of people must be involved with goods from the point of view I have characterized, and because people are involved with a commodity from different points of departure, in order to establish the price of one commodity in relation to another, money can only be the external indicator of the commodity’s value. Only through economic associations will it be possible to find the true price of an economic product — that’s what matters. This can’t be determined through dictates and so on, but only from experience of one association with another.

For example, if a person is employed in an industry and works in it, the price of his work product must be determined in such a way that it is neither too expensive nor too cheap. When I have finished making a pair of boots I must receive all kinds of goods to satisfy my needs until I have again completed another pair of boots. This can’t be calculated, it can only be experienced in the living interaction between associations. In order to understand that the problem of prices is at the centre of the whole economic life, a more detailed study of my “Key Points” and those that point to it, is necessary, especially my essays, for example in the Dreigliederungs-Zeitung which will soon be published together by the publishers of ‘The Coming Day’ (Verlag des Kommenden Tages). In these publications is what is needed to allow the spirit we require for our ascent.

To solve this one great task of the present time, we must have a new spiritual life to cultivate individuality; we must extract human self-importance and human abilities which can only be placed correctly in a human context through the correct understanding of the human personality and human individuality. In order to make spiritual life effective in the right way, we need state, or legal, or political life in its parliamentary structure left to itself — not encompassing spiritual life but letting it live from out of itself — which can never be in intellectual life or in economic life. From this then morality and mutual assistance will be brought forth, therefore everything that must play out between people, so that a humane existence can come about. In the economic life as well, we need to solve the price problems as one of the great tasks of the present. We can only solve them if we first let the economic life be on its own, existing on the basis of association.

We can only move forward if we let these three independent members work together in a free way and are not afraid of a possible “division” or “cutting up” of these three members. You only need to think a little about the human organism and you will no longer have this fear. In my book “Riddles of the Soul” I have indicated how the human organism also consists of three independent parts: the nervous-sensory activity, the rhythmic activity and the metabolic activity. From these three activities — as activities — the entire function of human life is structured. Just as little as one can’t breathe with the eyes or see with the lungs, just so the state should not determine the spiritual life, just so the spiritual life should not interfere with the legal life. Just as little as one can’t think with the stomach, just so one can’t from the basis of economic life give political dictates or determine laws. Just by the fact that the lungs breathe, that the head sees and thinks, and that the stomach digests, the three independent members in the human organism work together in a unity; this unity does not exist abstractly, but it arises as a living unity from the three independent members.

Thus, the true unity of the social organism will emerge when we grasp the three great tasks of the present in spiritual life, in legal life and in economic life. These three great tasks are certainly a Utopia for many. Even to the people of the thirties of the 19th century, what has developed in Central Europe from 1870 to 1913 would have been a Utopia in terms of economy. We can just think that in 1870, thirty million tons of coal were mined and processed in Germany, that in 1913, 190 million tons were mined and processed — truly, for a man of the 1930’s, that would have been Utopia if he could have spoken about such an increase in coal production and processing at that time. One should not be afraid of such an accusation of Utopia or phantasmagoria. Even if what is presented as Three-folding could not be realized immediately, let us remember words once uttered by Fichte to his listeners when he was talking about the nature and destiny of the scholar. What he meant was roughly the following. ‘We know that ideals can’t be realized in practical life immediately but we also know that in such great ideals, great impulses and great forces exist which can bring humanity forward. When the so-called practitioners don’t recognise this, then they testify to nothing other than that during the development of the world they were not counted; and so may a benevolent deity grant them light and sunshine at the right time, a good digestion and if possible also a little understanding in due time!’

He who is a real practitioner counts on the real practical forces of life and does not let himself be put off by those objections which are quite in the style characterized by Fichte and which then say: ‘What shall the prostrate Germany, what shall mankind in Central Europe do alone if all the others do not cooperate with the threefold structure?’

My dear friends, if we work with all our strength — even today, when it is almost too late — on this threefold structure of the social organism so much that it enters as many minds as possible, and really put it before the world in a living way, then the others, even if they are the victors, will see it as something fruitful and salutary for the world and for mankind. When my "Key Points" were translated into English, you could see how almost every review of this book began with the words: ‘You can't help but read this book with prejudice’ — but even then, they approached the content with a certain objectivity. There is only one thing missing: the people who help us make these ideas fruitful for life. We need people in whom the spirit of progress lives — but a progress spirit — not a progress phrase. The more we acquire such people, the less we will have to fear the reproach that we in Central Europe are unable to compete against. Another objection that is often made is this: What is the individual capable of even if he has sussed out the fruitfulness of the threefold impulse? Oh, may he as an individual not be troubled that the “others” can’t suss it out, may he look at it as an individual and therefore set the example for others to enter the path, where single individuals may add up to many. Nor should the other reproach be a source of vexation to us when people say repeatedly: ‘If you seek ascent along such a path, it will take a long time.’

We don’t want to waste time about how long it might take; we rather want to be clear: The more intensely we want it, the faster it will come! We do not want to "contemplate,” but we want to think and act in such a way that it must come as quickly as possible through our actions, our willing and thinking.

When, in your soul, you enliven the right ways for correct social community living, when you fire up your soul through these thoroughly experienced impulses which show you in what way, out of the spiritual life, out of the legal, state or political life and out of the economic life, an ascent is possible, then you can work from a single earth territory against the prejudices of the whole world in such a way that many individual territories come into being which take up the impulses and carry them on for the progress and salvation of humanity.

In this way a long period of pain can become a short one; in this way space and time and a multitude of obstacles can be overcome, if from the independent consciousness of what is right and out of the correct economic consciousness of the present, you really want to find true salvation for humanity towards a new ascent.