Past and Future Impulses E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 462

Beschreibung

Barely four months after the end of the First World War, with Europe in chaos and exhausted from years of conflict, Rudolf Steiner offered these lectures of hope and renewal. Despite continuing social troubles around the world, he knew that human beings had an opportunity to organize society in a new way. Steiner responded to this prospect by giving suggestions for creating innovative social structures that are in harmony with people's inner needs. Humanity as a whole is now facing a great challenge in that it is 'crossing the threshold' to the spiritual world, says Steiner. This means that an evolutionary separation is taking place within the human soul between thinking, feeling and will. For this to happen in a healthy way, the outer make-up of society should mirror and support our internal evolution. Steiner points to the urgent need for 'threefolding' – a separation between the workings of culture, economics and politics. This is a subconscious demand, he asserts – not for thinking up cranky ideas within a sect, but for shedding light on what is needed universally! These important lectures cover numerous themes, including the overcoming of class distinctions, the administration of money, technology and capitalism, the antisocial tendency of nationalism, and the future management of international relations. Twelve lectures, Dornach, Mar.–April 1919, GA 190

Leseprobe

PAST AND FUTURE IMPULSESIN SOCIETAL EVENTS

Twelve lectures given to members of the Anthroposophical Societyin Dornach, Switzerland, from 21 March to 14 April 1919

TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED BY PAUL KING

RUDOLF STEINER

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

CW 190

Rudolf Steiner Press

Hillside House, The Square

Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2023

Originally published in German under the title Vergangenheits- und Zukunftsimpulse im sozialen Geschehen. Die geistigen Hintergründe deer sozialen Frage—Band II (volume 190 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. Based on shorthand notes that were not reviewed or revised by the speaker. This authorized translation is based on the third German edition (1980), edited by R. Friedenthal, A. M. Balastèr and C. Wispler

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1980

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 644 9

Cover by Morgan Creative

Typeset by Symbiosys Technologies, Vishakapatnam, India

Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd., Essex

CONTENTS

Editor’s Preface

Introduction, by Paul King

LECTURE ONE

DORNACH, 21 MARCH 1919

Humanity’s longing for spirituality. The destructive effect of scientific thinking on the social organism. The formation of capital as a hotbed of revolution. The threefold social order as a subconscious demand. Overcoming class distinctions. Administration of money. The gold standard.

Pages 1-19

LECTURE TWO

22 MARCH 1919

The human organism and the social organism. The three systems. Nationalism as an antisocial tendency. The decline of the intellectual-spiritual life that must be freed from the economy and legislature. The over expansion of the economic life. Technology and capitalism. Future management of international relations.

Pages 20-32

LECTURE THREE

23 MARCH 1919

The activity of the angels, archangels, and archai in the life of thought, the legal system, and the economic system respectively. The need to understand reincarnation. The longing in souls descending to Earth for the destruction of materialistic culture.

Pages 33-44

LECTURE FOUR

28 MARCH 1919

Children being born at the beginning of the twentieth century. The deceased’s understanding of language; progressing from the abstract to the concrete. The connection of the social question with the inner life of the soul. The need to develop a pictorial image of the human spiritual being. Listening to the genius of language. The strong connection between eurythmy and our cultural development. A return to a concrete element in language through pictorial thinking is a task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The position of the human being within the Trinity.

Pages 45-60

LECTURE FIVE

29 MARCH 1919

The underground spiritual factors of the social question. The role of the unconscious and the subconscious in people’s life together in society. The cultivation of an inner understanding of society needs to become part of our school education. The imaginative spirit-culture of the future needs to develop from the life of the nations instead of from the abstractions of the present day. In overlapping epochs, the impulses of the inspiritive and intuitive life of the sixth and seventh epochs are already reaching into the present. The creativity of the genius of language and individual creativity. The speech of nature. The three elements of language.

Pages 61-76

LECTURE SIX

30 MARCH 1919

The social question as a world-historical challenge of our time. Our future task is to let go of ourselves. Through the development of personality people become able to understand each other less and less. The rejection of spiritual life leads to naturalism in art. The soul element in art. Social understanding through interest in things that go beyond our own narrow sphere of life.

Pages 77-89

LECTURE SEVEN

5 APRIL 1919

Superficiality is leading modern humanity into confusion. The wave of confusion caused by ahrimanic influences. This confusion used by certain people for their own ends. Since 1721 there has been a loosening of the connection between the human physical heart and the etheric heart. People who only want to have a naive feeling-relationship to the spiritual world make the heart of humanity materialistic. The proper relation between the etheric heart and the spiritual world when people seek spiritual knowledge.

Pages 90-103

LECTURE EIGHT

6 APRIL 1919

The question ‘What is the human being?’ is asked most earnestly in Eastern Europe. Bakunin, Gorky. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is the great narcotic. It is impossible to come to a proper view of the human being through the culture of the nineteenth century. Three parts of human life: (1) talents, (2) that which unfolds between person and person, (3) experience. Becoming experienced expresses what is individual in the human being, and from experience the question ‘What is the human being? can be answered.

Pages 104-120

LECTURE NINE

11 APRIL 1919

The whole of humanity is about to cross the threshold. Because of this, the thinking, feeling, and willing of humanity as a totality will become more independent. Fritz Mauthner. Natural science owes its greatness to the fact that it is, and is meant to be, thought-less. The life of ideation as a shadow of reality. Through thought-will, the soul must carry these shadow images into something that still remains unconscious for the most part in people. Humanity’s passage over the threshold causes a split in soul life. In order for inner threefolding to develop there needs to be a threefolding of the social organism.

Pages 121-135

LECTURE TEN

12 APRIL 1919

The age of the Nibelungs was succeeded by the era of Central European ‘burgherdom,’ which has come to the end of its development. In the age of burgherdom, the territorial princes of Central Europe and their adherents express the Nibelung soul-character in a state of decay. Frederick the Great and Goethe. Henry IV and Walter von der Vogelweide. The demise of Central Europe was brought about by the collaboration of the ahrimanic element of modern industrialism in the form of technology and capitalism, with the adherents of Nibelung wildness in a state of decay. Crossing the threshold as the passage through the portal of death.

Pages 136-149

LECTURE ELEVEN

13 APRIL 1919

Tendency in human subconscious since the end of the eighteenth century towards a threefolding of the social organism. Central European burgher period was pulsated through by soul, but was lacking in spirit. Because people did not observe the conditions necessary for the life of the spirit in Central Europe, and did not put the spiritual-intellectual life on its own independent footing, catastrophic conditions resulted. Since the middle of the fifteenth century the spirit must be born through experiencing a spirit-less natural science. Since the turn of the fourteenth to the fifteenth century souls descending to the Earth are less concerned about race than about geographical conditions. Due to the way of thinking in Asia, light shines out from there into cosmic space; in the West, life pulsates into cosmic space.

Pages 150-167

LECTURE TWELVE

14 APRIL 1919

Spiritual-scientific work awakens understanding for the social question. The double nature of the human being: our inner being lives in the metabolic system and in the lower section of the rhythmic system; with regard to the nerve-sense system, the human being is strongly reliant on externality. We are able to get free of ourselves when we develop interest in the concerns of humanity. The bourgeoisie has reached such a nullity with regard to the social question because people today lack the will for inner activity. The idea of a threefolding of the social organism cannot be realized in a sect. It is not a matter today of thinking up cranky ideas for social reform, but rather of shedding light in a universal way on what is needed. A broad stream of enlightenment concerning the urgent needs of society is meant to flow from the Anthroposophical Society. The mission of Switzerland.

Pages 168-190

Notes

Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner

Index

EDITOR’S PREFACE

THE lectures in this volume were given to members of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach between 21 March and 14 April 1919. They follow on from the lectures printed in Die Soziale Frage als Bewusstseinsfrage (‘The social question as a question of consciousness’, published in English as Conscious Society), CW 189. The lectures were given following a period of intensive activity, in February and March, in the public sphere concerning the social question and the threefolding of the social organism, and prior to a similar period of public activity in Stuttgart (and its environs) from 20 April onwards. Rudolf Steiner also gave a farewell lecture in Dornach on 19 April, which was printed in the Nachrichtenblatt (a supplement to the weekly journal Das Goetheanum), 1943, No. 9, and which is due to be published (in German initially) in the projected GA 255.

INTRODUCTION

WHEN Steiner gave these lectures to members of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach between 21 March and 14 April 1919, it was barely four months since the ending of the First World War. Europe was exhausted and in chaos from four years of conflict. There were continuing social troubles in Eastern Europe, and Russia was embroiled in revolution and civil war.

This was a moment, one might think, when Europe would open its eyes, look around, and realize, ‘We must be doing something wrong! What sort of national (social) structures do we need to make things better?’ At this point Steiner worked intensively to try and help with this eye-opening process, and to give a suggestion as to how things could be structured in a new way that was in harmony with the deepest inner needs of humanity.

But, it was not to be. Eyes remained shut and the Second World War followed, leaving Europe not only exhausted once more but also in ruins.

Steiner points to the urgent need to structure society in a threefold manner, with a distinct separation of functions between the life of culture and intellectual activity, the economic system, and the legislature. This division, he argued, was essential in order to reflect and facilitate a similar evolutionary separation taking place in the human soul between thinking, feeling, and willing. For this inevitable separation to take place in a healthy way in the soul, the outer structures of society must be likewise separated in order to mirror and support the internal evolution.

Today, however, there is a strong drive in precisely the opposite direction. The tendency is to advocate the merging of all these functions into a comprehensive fused global system. Economics merges with and dominates politics; the ‘art’ of education is anything but independent and is dictated by government policies and agendas; academic research is influenced by commercial funding concerns, and so on and so on.

The need for the threefold idea to find resonance and take root seems more urgent and relevant now than ever. It is as though the world is trying to shake us awake. Will humanity open its eyes?

*

What does Steiner mean by ‘Geistesleben’?

In the threefold social order, Steiner speaks about the Rechstleben (literally ‘the life of rights’) or the legal system or simply ‘the law’; the Wirtschaftsleben (literally the ‘economic life’) or economic system; and the Geistesleben (literally the life of the mind and/or spirit). The first two are fairly straightforward to translate, but Geistesleben poses a challenge.

The challenge lies in the meaning of the German word Geist. This can mean mind or spirit in a broad sense, or both at the same time. In the context of these lectures, Steiner uses the term to describe a very wide sweep of human activity. Elsewhere he states:

The ‘mind’ [or ‘spirit’] branch of the threefold social organism encompasses science, the arts, religion, education at all levels, and the administration of justice. Only in complete freedom from state interference can all these intellectual and cultural factors fulfil their functions and fructify society in the right way. The life of the mind and spirit (Geistesleben), culture, must take shape out of the free collaboration of all creative individuals, and have its own administrative bodies. (GA 24, Renewal of the Social Organism.) [My emphasis.]

Depending on context, Geistesleben can therefore be translated as ‘the life of thought’, ‘intellectual life’, ‘spiritual life’, ‘cultural life’, or synonyms of these. I understand the term to cover the areas of life in which individuals are free to develop their own individual capacities and talents, thus enriching civilization and culture in general.

Paul King

August 2022

LECTURE ONE

DORNACH, 21 MARCH 1919

IHAVE often mentioned that the need in modern humanity to socialize the social order arises from the antisocial impulses that are emerging in people more strongly now than in the past. In their sensibilities, in their soul life in general, people are substantially more antisocial than they were in former times. And we might say that, with regard to the elemental natural development of humanity, antisocial tendencies are on the increase. And we can say further that in the course of the last four centuries people have more or less—there is a historical imperative behind it all—acquiesced to certain antisocial impulses in the wider context of societal life. And the counter-current against this acquiescence to antisocial impulses is the call for socialism. The call for socialism ignites in the consciousness of people precisely because in their subconscious strong antisocial tendencies are awakening.

We can follow this today into the most inward aspects of soul life. Never has it been so hard for people to accept someone else’s opinion or to follow their reasoning; never was pig-headedness with regard to sticking to one’s own opinions as great as it is today. And if it happens that one draws attention to the one-sidedness of every human opinion, indeed even to the one-sidedness of everything we call human truth, if it happens that one elucidates things from different sides, one is accused of expressing different opinions at different times. We won’t come to a healthy socialism based on a social understanding of the human being if this ability of one individual to adapt to another doesn’t also enter our souls.

Now, the fact that things are like this with regard to antisocial tendencies is naturally rooted deeply, very deeply, in historic developments. For since the middle of the fifteenth century people have been developing in the age of the consciousness-soul. People are gradually to stand on the foundation of their individual consciousness. Thus, how they achieve societal life will have to be different from how this was in former times when group instinct, group-egos, still played a much larger role than they do today. This is why we see disagreement between people everywhere in the life of society today. We see peculiar discord. The human being always has something somewhere in the underground regions of his soul by which he understands everything that can reveal itself in a particular age. It is just that he usually lags behind with his head-understanding, with his reason. Then a curious phenomenon can emerge—which should be particularly observed by those who have joined a spiritual-scientific movement—whereby precisely those who have learnt too much in one direction, remain behind in their development. We see plenty of this today. We would be able to advance far more rapidly in understanding what is needed in society if the mass of the population were not held back by those who have learnt too much from what is old, who live too much in old concepts, who have aligned themselves too rigidly to old ideas. As a whole we can say that the broad mass of the proletariat would most certainly have an understanding for the most progressive impulses if they were not held back by the leadership, which for centuries has adopted very particular rigid concepts and can’t move on. This being-held-back by those who have learnt too much, too much particularly of what could be learnt in the nineteenth century, is very significant for a psychological understanding of our time. Thus only slowly and gradually will we be able to see what it is intensely imperative that we see.

From where have the leading individuals of the present day—this is something we must ask again and again—got their concepts, their ideas, their sensibilities, and also their social will? They got them from the scientific ideas of the nineteenth century that have played such a decisive role ever since. We must be under no illusions about this. Scientific ideas have penetrated into everything. But scientific ideas, in the form they have arisen in the last four centuries, are only applicable to what is dead or fading away, to things that no longer have life. It is of no slight importance but lies deep at the heart of the matter that the present thinking about the nature of the human being only regards as valid what can be learnt from a corpse, what is learnt excluding the sphere of life. What scientific ideas can give us concerning the human being do not lead to the human being, not to Homo, but to homunculus.

And that is why, when people start to think about society today, they actually always bypass reality. Fundamentally, they only think about what destroys social organization, what breaks it down, and not about what provides it with new and fructifying life. Because during the past four centuries people have not adopted ideas that can grasp what is living, they have also not learnt how to provide a healthy organism with fruitful life. The tragedy of modern life is that we live only with ideas about what is dead, whereas the social organism requires us to awaken impulses that are applicable to what is living. But it is precisely in what is regarded today as education that we have no conception of what life is. For is there anyone today who asks questions about the social organism as of something living? No, they don’t.

I have already recently pointed out the following. Imagine someone asking the question: ‘Why should we always have to eat? We are satiated by eating, but all we really achieve is that a bit later we get hungry all over again—so let’s just stay hungry!’ It would be folly, would it not, if someone were to think about our natural organism in this way? But people actually always think along the same lines as this folly when it comes to the social organism! The effect is that this social organism must always be rattled and shaken by upheavals which, when the misunderstanding of societal life continues for a particularly long time, will perforce become revolution-like convulsions or even full-blown revolutions.

The dreadful tendency towards revolution has arisen in our time because in the last centuries people have been carried away into all sorts of social illusions. What can be of help here? The only thing that can help is to see societal life as something really living. For, what is a revolution really? A revolution is no less than a summation of many necessary small revolutions. For there are always revolutions.

Just as in the natural human organism that undergoes very important revolutions from one period of satiety to the other, so there are always revolutions in the social organism. Why? Because things cannot be otherwise than that, through the interaction of individual human abilities—of the mental-spiritual aspect of the human being—with the economic life, there is a constant tendency for one individual to gain the upper hand over others. This tendency is simply always present in economic and in mental-spiritual life. In economics, for example, there is always the tendency to accumulate capital. Were this tendency to accumulate capital not present in economic life, economic life in general would have to die out. For only through capital is it possible in our advanced age for our complex means of production to exist.

But the actual work done using these means of production can only be achieved through individual human capacities. As capital accumulates, it naturally always generates small hotbeds of revolution. And government must consist of keeping an eye on the formation of these small hotbeds of revolution. Revolution must be constantly prevented, but not by asking ‘How can we stop the generation of capital?’ but rather ‘What should be done with capital once it has accumulated over a certain period of time in a particular place?’ It must be transferred from the one individual to the others! That’s the important point. The way must be found—also for the material goods resulting from the means of production—that is practicable for what present-day humanity regards as the meanest goods, as I said recently. What one produces intellectually is gradually lost for the family of the producer; it becomes common property (es geht in die Allgemeinheit über). Material goods, the moment they no longer have any connection with the individual human skills [of those who produce them], must find a way into the social organism so that they in turn can be best utilized by other individual skills. With regard to the social organism, socialist thinkers today are asking the wrong questions. Socialist thinkers today ask: ‘How can we prevent private ownership of the means of production and of land?’ This means: how can we kill off the life of the social organism? People have seen in the course of the capitalist economic order that private ownership of land and the means of production result in great harm. The simplest question would then seem to be: How do we get rid of what causes harm; how do we prevent it from arising in the first place?

But this is a deadening question. An enlivening question would be: What should be done with private capital so that it causes no more harm? How, when it is no longer productive in the service of the social organism, do we separate it appropriately from the private capitalist and transfer it to another producer? The questions will have to be asked out of a far deeper understanding than modern humanity has any inkling of. Present-day humanity actually lives in its illusions only because it does not draw the consequences of these illusions in reality. All manner of professors of national economics in universities the world over teach things today that amount to trying to wash without getting wet. This is the basis of the teaching squinting at socialism. Only a few of the older chaps still advocate the very old antisocial teachings. But the fact that these stalwart professors teach these things is only possible because they do not draw the consequences. But the consequences of what these professors teach are drawn by Lenin1 and Trotsky2. There is a continuous connection here. And with regard to the social order, one would actually have to exercise some exertion to raise oneself to a completely different kind of thinking. One would have to avoid getting stuck in old habits of thought and move on to new habits because the old ones, when applied, must necessarily lead to the overexploitation of the old social order.

And a decision to acquire new habits of thought is so very difficult for people to make. It will probably not happen until people really think in a spiritual-scientific way and, in the thoughts they get used to thinking through spiritual science, have the teachers—or perhaps better said, the taskmasters—for how to think in social terms. It will always remain something of a half-measure if people simply spread social theories without permeating them with real spiritual-scientific teachings, which first make our thinking, feeling, ideas, and above all our judgements, as flexible as they need to be today if we are to integrate ourselves into the great complexity of life that has necessarily been drawn over modern humanity.

Ought not our question rather be: So what then is this human being that is to be placed in the social organism, what is this human organism? Can we really expect to have the right sensibilities regarding the social organism if we do not have the right sensibilities regarding the human being himself? The human being is, after all, a part of this social organism. But science, despite all its great advances, has led away from an understanding of the real human being, not towards it. This is what we need to bear in mind.

When we say to people today: Look, the healthy social organism must consist of three independent branches—the life of thought [for an explanation of this, see translator’s note on page xi], the legislative and legal system, and the economic system; and if we then point out that the human being by nature consists of three aspects—the nerve-sense system, the heart-and-lung or rhythmic system, and the metabolic system—clever people come along and say, ‘Oh, not another game with analogies!’ But it is not about a game with analogies but about the fact that on the one side we train our mind, through a proper understanding of the natural human being, to be able by means of this training to comprehend the social organism as well. It is not a matter of jumping from one to the other as Schäffle3 did previously and Meray4 is doing now, but about making one’s thinking so mobile by study of the human organism that one can really understand the needs of the social organism also.

A basic phenomenon for human understanding in the future will be this: that the human being descends through birth from a spiritual life, lives his physical existence between birth and death, lives a social life in society, and then through death returns to the spiritual world. It will be a matter eventually of really understanding the human being in his threefold nature. The present-day anatomist, the present-day physiologist, has the human being before him. For him, a muscle in the head is the same as a muscle in the arm. He doesn’t divide the human being into his three parts; knows nothing, this modern researcher, about how the human being has his origin from three sources. He does not ask the relevant question, and therefore doesn’t reach a relevant answer as to what the human being has, for example, from the mother, and what from the father.

We have often discussed this subject,5 and can discuss it today once more from a particular perspective. You know that when a person lives in this regular life, they live in two different states of life or consciousness. When they are awake, the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego all interpenetrate one another. When they are asleep, the physical body and etheric body remain lying in bed; the ego and astral body are in the spiritual world. In the morning the ego and astral body recombine with the physical body and etheric body. Focus for a moment on what it is of the human being that is lying in bed—without the ego and astral body—when the person is asleep. Naturally this is not a human being; but it is an essential aspect of a human being living on the physical earth. You can easily separate what is there of the sleeping human being living on the physical earth and which manifests in the physical body and etheric body—[you can easily separate this] very precisely from the whole human being. We will disregard the whole human being for the moment, and will look at what is lying in bed during the night when the ego and astral body are away, and we will ask about the origin of this human being that consists of physical body and etheric body and lies in bed at night—we will ask: Where does this come from? To be sure, it is only a piece of the human being, but where does it come from?

What lies in the bed comes, as far as its disposition and forces are concerned—so not how these are later in the full adult human being, but as a predisposition, as a set of forces—comes from the mother and is already in the mother before conception. What is set in place purely through the woman by way of forces, is the part of the human being which, fully grown, lies in the bed when he sleeps. It is not the human being; and what comes purely from the mother cannot become a human being.

It is not mere arbitrary chatter when we divide the human being into these parts we usually speak about, but is pointing to something very real. When we speak about physical body and etheric body, we are speaking about what is predisposed in the mother before conception, and what is always predisposed in the mother. When, after having lived for a period in life between death and new birth, the human being descends from spiritual heights and inclines once more to a physical life, he senses, as it were, that in a female individual who is connected with him there is the predisposition into which he can pour that which, since his last life, has developed in him out of the rest of the organism into the head [i.e. between lives, the new head is developed by metamorphosis out of the forces of the previous organism, excluding the previous head]. Human embryonic development therefore proceeds from the head. The head is the first thing to achieve a certain degree of perfection during embryonic development. What is at work on this head formation, which actually comes out of the cosmos, is already in the ego and astral body. And what makes it possible for the ego and astral body to come together with the physical and etheric body, is conception. Conception facilitates a coexistence between the ego and astral body, and the physical and etheric body.

What is conception by itself directed towards? Conception is directed initially only to the metabolic life in man. It is directed towards giving him a new metabolic and respiratory system, since the forces of the head-organism derive from the previous incarnation. So, as we are coming from a previous incarnation, everything that brings us together with our head-organism is thanks to our relationship with the spiritual world. Everything that enters the human being, as it were, in the life of the embryo once conception has taken place, is thanks to our coexistence with the being of the Earth, with the earthly being.

You see from this how complex a process it is to bring about what the human being actually is. Our limbs, which are inwardly also part of our metabolic system, are given us, as it were, by the Earth. What functions in the human head is given to us by the spiritual world. And that which is respiratory and heart system, is in between.

And now you can ask: So what is it that we actually inherit from our father and mother? In which of our systems are the forces to be found by which we can inherit something from our father and mother? We inherit nothing for our head from father and mother; we bring what functions in our head from our previous incarnation. We inherit nothing for our metabolic system, for that is first given to us by the Earth after conception. We inherit only what lies in the heart-and-lung system; we inherit only the forces that live in our breathing and blood circulation; that’s what we inherit. Only one part—the middle part of the human being, the respiratory and circulatory part—is what has its origin in both sexes. This is how complex the human being is. He is a threefold being also in his physical organism. He has his head, which he can use for what is not earthly. He has his limbs and metabolism, which he can only use for what is earthly. And he has what is in his respiration and circulation through the relation of one person with another.

Here I can only touch on something that leads into a broad, broad field of knowledge of the human. What I have mentioned looks like theory. But for our times it is not theory; there is something in people today that has a sense of what I have just said. There is something developing in people at the present time that has a sense of this threefoldness. People today, without fully realizing it, have complicated feelings in their innermost being. Through their head they know themselves to be citizens of something beyond the Earth; through their heart-and-lung system they know themselves to be in relationship with one another. Something inside them says: When I meet another human being, this meeting is a reflection of what was implanted into me also from one person to another, namely through father and mother. Through their heart-and-lung system, people really feel themselves within a context involving others. Through their metabolic system people feel themselves to be a member of the Earth, as belonging to the Earth. These three different ways of sensing are really in people today. But the intellect won’t go along with it. The intellect wants to have everything simple; the intellect would like to be able to derive everything from some kind of monon. And this is making people chronically sick today. It will no longer make them sick when the sense of threefoldness they have inside them, which is really already to be found in people, corresponds to a threefold social organism, when people find a reflection of their being externally.

You see, this is the dreadful thing in the subconscious of people who belong to social movements today. For the past three to four centuries the life of thought and everything that predominates in people’s collective life in society has developed in such a way that this intellectual life is a reflection of material life. But inside people there pulses the longing for external life to reflect this inner aspect. That is what is making modern humanity sick. They would like to structure external life so that the external social organism is an image of the human being, whereas today the human being is an image of the outer world. And this is what people today overlook; they find it complicated, they find it theoretical. They find it simpler to present the human being as one whole. It is naturally more complicated when someone asks ‘What is the human being?’ to have to answer: Look at the centre of the Representative of Man,6 with Lucifer above and Ahriman below! All three belong in the unity of the human being. The human being simply is threefold, and there is no other way to understand him.

This is not theory but something very, very real in life, that is evident in human nature. And because people are beginning to have this threefold sense with regard to themselves and the world, in their subconscious they are demanding a threefold social organism, not a monistic unitary state structure that encompasses the economic and legislative systems, but an [independent] structure in itself for the life of thought, a structure in itself for law or politics or the state, and an economic structure in itself. Only then will people find themselves in this external world. And the seismic-like convulsions in our time are happening because a culmination, a high point, has been reached with regard to this non-correspondence of the external social organism with people’s inner being. Whereas, fundamentally, people are aspiring to sense an independent threefoldness in the social organism, their leaders, the leaders of the socialists, stand up and say: ‘The economic system will deliver everything if we let it develop properly, if we reverse it a bit so that what was hitherto below comes up on top, and what was on top goes down to the bottom—then things will develop properly.’

Nothing right will result from the economic sphere alone, but only when one grants independence to the economic life in the first instance, [independence] to the legislative and legal system in the second, and [independence] to the organizations of thought in the third. If we really put the life of thought on its own footing, then it has to shape its reality out of itself. Otherwise the chasm between the classes will persist. We have little idea today how these chasms have opened up. We can really sometimes encounter something that is completely justified in terms of our present culture, and will not realize that a thing that seems completely justified to a member of one class can be incomprehensible to a member of another.

To take an obvious example, imagine a painting of a landscape, a very artistically painted landscape. Now, the members of the middle-classes have acquired certain sensibilities, certain ideas about how a well-painted landscape should look. They stand with these sensibilities in front of a landscape painting stretched in a frame and admire it. A proletarian might also be induced to admire it because he has been persuaded that it is ‘cultured’ to admire such things. There are also many non-proletarians who likewise don’t understand landscape paintings but admire them because they have been persuaded that it is cultured to do so.

But this can even breed untruthfulness. For when someone among those who do physical work, is not one of those who are allowed to be physically idle so they can paint, so they can figure out how one should paint, that person only remains truthful when, in front of such a landscape, they say: ‘What’s the point of this? Someone has made a bit of forest with blobs of colour on a canvas, but the way I see it every day when I walk through the woods is far more beautiful. No one can ever make a picture of a landscape that is more beautiful than how it is outside in nature. Why do people, who don’t want to look at nature, hang up in a gold frame in their room a piece of landscape to look at that is just a clumsy imitation of nature?’ This would be the true sentiment. And this sentiment is in the depths of the soul of many people who are not constrained by reasons of ‘culture’ to admire these things. Certainly, in a certain class, the admiration is genuine. But the admiration of by far the greater mass of people for such a landscape cannot be genuine, because they are not brought up with the others.

We must touch much deeper things in our life of feeling if we want to comprehend today the nature of the chasms between human souls. We will not awaken an understanding for art—and this can be applied to other areas of life—until in painting, for example, we want to explore not what we can see every day out in nature, but what has to be brought down from the spiritual world. Every person will understand this, and something else will come via this indirect route. The spiritual has to be brought down from the spiritual world by people. Trust will arise again between person and person because a certain thing must be brought down from the spiritual world by one person, and another thing by another. By no other way than by bringing things down from the spiritual world will it be possible for soul to connect again at a societal level with soul.

So we have to push more deeply than is usually the case, we could say, into what is pulsating in our times. Unctuous preachers, who actually offer only a poor imitation of what the Catholic pulpit orators in their own way do better, are out and about a great deal saying that people should come together ‘inwardly’ once more, after the terrible catastrophe of the last four and a half years has shown how little people are inclined to a life at harmony with itself. But one can’t bring people together inwardly through phrases; one can only bring them inwardly together if one has the will today to change to radically different habits of thought and feeling.

Recently someone said that one has to have seen poverty in order to develop social feeling. It is not enough today to have looked at poverty, to have gone into some quarter of a city and seen how ragged the people are and how little they have to eat; that is not enough today. The only thing that suffices today is really getting to know the souls of those who want to work their way to a better place in society. Just being aware of poverty is not what is needed today, but getting to know the poor in their souls, in their innermost life—that’s what is needed today. But there is no other way to achieve this than by finding a new path to the human soul, than by really learning to penetrate into the innermost being of the individual. And then we find that people will not be able to exist in future without finding a reflection of their own being in the external social organism.

We must really be able to lead people to the highest heights of spiritual life on the one hand, and to dive with our thinking right down into economic problems, on the other. Indeed, one has to say curious things today. On the one hand one has to say: Separate schools from the state, separate the life of the intellect from it; establish the life of thought on an independent footing, let it manage itself: the life of thought will then be continuously obliged to fight battles out of its own forces. This life of thought will then, out of itself, relate in the right way to the jurisprudence of the state and to the economic life. As discussed in my book7 on social matters that will be published shortly, the life of thought will then also be, for example, the proper administrator of capital.

On the other hand, one should also put the economic life on its own independent footing. If you make the economic system independent, separate it from the state, then you must separate from the state above all something very, very concrete, namely money, the administration of the currency. You must give the administration of currency back to the economic life. In the various places where the people have developed from a barter economy to a monetary system, they have maintained this for the time being by a representative of money that is something between goods and a mere money order.

Very clever people argue about whether money, paper money, is purely a payment order or whether money is a commodity. People can argue about this for a long time because money is both one and the other. It is the one because it facilitates the economic process; this makes money a commodity. It is the other because the state determines by law what the value of a particular coin will be. But money should be given back entirely to the economic life. Then something will happen, although only gradually.

For it to happen, what I have just spoken about must become international. This won’t happen for a long time because England, the leading trading nation, which is in reality the reason we have the gold standard, will not easily give up this gold standard. So it will take a long time. But an economic system based on its own independent footing, whose job it is also to manage the currency, the monetary system, will no longer need to place gold as a commodity between other commodities as a means of exchange. The economic system doesn’t need this.

Naturally the economic system will still use money, but only for the distribution of commodities. For it will turn out that whatever is the solid and real basis of the economic life will also be the currency basis for money. Gold is money only because it has gradually become a particular favourite commodity among people, because people have agreed to give gold value. It sounds rather dilettantish when put like this, but it is far more correct than what is said by the non-dilettantes, the academics. The value of gold rests purely on an unspoken agreement among people about its worth. It might also be possible for something else to be valued in the same way. But when the three branches of society are centralized, something that only has apparent value will always be given this value in the economy. In reality gold only has an apparent value. You can’t eat gold. You can be very rich in gold, but if no one will give you anything for it, you can naturally not live from the gold. This only rests on an unspoken agreement between people. In internal matters within the state, it is not needed at all.

In transactions between nations it is only needed to bring about certain balances which could otherwise not be brought about due to lack of the great trust that would be required. But this apparent value attributed to a particular metal would cease if the management of money was handed over to the economic structures and the state could no longer interfere in the management of the currency. The state then remains on purely legislative ground, stays on the foundation of what can be agreed between one person and another on a democratic basis.

Now, when certain monetary tokens, money orders, are in circulation, the state has a certain reserve of gold [that backs the money]. What will the situation be when truth takes the place of appearance in the threefold system? In that situation money will be backed by everything that in truth will not belong to the individual—the individual will only work on it—but which has the same value for everybody who lives in the social organism: gold will be replaced by the means of production itself, by that through which things having the nature of a commodity can be produced. By the means of production being brought into flow, in the way that only what the intellectual produces is in flow today, the means of production will gradually take on the character of the [standard]-basis of money.

These things are very difficult, and one needs a very complicated prerequisite knowledge of national economics—which naturally I do not assume in you—to give them scientific proof; but they can indeed be scientifically proven. I would rather give you a concrete example of what I mean.

You see, I once came across a very curious kind of money—I think I have mentioned this here before. This curious form of money consisted of Goethe’s letters and manuscripts. I got to know a gentlemen—or actually a few gentlemen—who were very clever with money. In the 1850s, and through the 60s, 70s, 80s, they began to buy Goethe’s letters and manuscripts cheaply. At that time you didn’t have to pay much for them. So now they had them. Finally the time came when they had all been sold and, through circumstances that would take us too far to go into, Goethe’s letters and manuscripts became very valuable. Then the letters and manuscripts were sold. This was a curious form of money whose value increased significantly over around thirty to forty years. One of these gentlemen assured me that no stock on the stock market would have increased so much over that period as Goethe’s letters did. They were the best of paper and had actually taken on the character of money. They were sold at a very high price.

Now, just consider what this all depended on. It depended on the fact that a constellation of circumstances had arisen that was completely independent of the creation [of the letters] in the first place. When Goethe wrote the letters, they probably had great personal value for the recipient, but no one would have bought them. At the time they were not yet money. You couldn’t have bought bread with them. Herr von Loeper,8 who bought the Goethe letters in the 50s, could get a great deal of bread for these Goethe letters in 1895. They were like good money. The way in which ordinary money participates in the economic organism is no different from this participation of Goethe’s letters. The value of these pieces of paper which had Goethe’s handwriting on them depended on a social process, on what had happened in connection with the personality of Goethe between the 50s and the 90s. One needs to be well acquainted with the social organism in order to evaluate this curious process whereby something, which at one time has no particular value in the economic process, later becomes valuable.

The usual demand of social democrats to socialize the means of production would by nature lead to a paralysis of creative qualities, of people’s mental gifts. It is something that is impossible to implement. But think, for example—one could of course think of this in many variations—but imagine this: someone [an entrepreneur] who has certain talents for some area of business or other, would be able in free competition to acquire capital—savings capital—in the form of loans. There could of course be intermediary agencies, but I’ll reduce the process to its simplest form. The person in question would make certain demands for his intellectual work, for his management and leadership.

If a real contract is made between employer and employee—the usual contract today is only an apparent contract—the employee will realize that his interests are best served when the entrepreneur manages the business well through his mental skills, but doesn’t own it. And this would be possible if at the start the entrepreneur on his own initiative put forward his demands for his mental management [of the proposed business] and negotiated this with the workers. (If his demands can’t be met, the entrepreneur and his demands would go under.) But the demands must be made right at the start out of a completely free initiative. (If the entrepreneur can find no takers, he would obviously have to go under.) [If successful] it [the terms] would now be fixed. What he gets from the business is no more than his negotiated portion, which can be increased if his work increases. But there is still the interest [to pay].

Alongside this is the productivity of the means of production, the profit arising from the business. These are two very distinct things: what one earns by one’s mental work, and what is generated by the business. Working with the means of production is something very different from putting one’s saved capital into it. People don’t distinguish these things today. In a healthy social organism a distinction will be made between them.

If I put a certain amount of capital I have saved into a factory, that is something quite different from if I use this capital to buy myself interior furnishings. For when I use capital to put into a factory, I have worked, by having saved the capital, for the social organism [i.e. my saved capital is put to work for the social organism]. When I use it to refurbish a room, I get the social organism to work for me. In a healthy social organism a distinction is made between these things. This distinction is not made in the ailing social organism of today. I am not saying, of course, that people shouldn’t buy furnishing for their interiors. But in a healthy social organism buying furnishing for an interior will have a completely different significance from what it has today. Today it can be a form of exploitation; in the future it will be making use of the furnishing as a means of production, because one will have no benefit from the furnishing if with its help one doesn’t produce something, whatever that might be, for the social organism. The notion of the ‘means of production’ will only be put on a healthy basis in a healthy social organism.

You see here that we can make a clear distinction between what a person gets as interest, and what comes from one’s own work on the means of production. As long as the profits from the means of production are used to increase the business, well and good; that’s how it is. But the moment some profit from the means of production is not used to increase or expand the business, then the manager is duty bound to pass the profit on to someone who in turn can manufacture something else.

Here you have a circulation of capital. Here you have a transfer to another individual. A person who doesn’t consider themself qualified to transfer their capital to another individual, should pass it on to an institution of the mental organizational sphere, which is not allowed to use it for itself, but passes it on in turn to someone else, or to a group of people, to an association. That way you bring into social flow, into real social circulation, everything that is produced by the means of production. What circulates in this way in the social organism, what is in constant circulation, has permanent value despite constantly changing. But it has permanent value because what is used up has to be replaced. When you read in books on national economics why gold lends itself so well to being used as money, you find all its fine qualities: firstly, that all people agree on its attractiveness. Secondly, that it is long-lasting, doesn’t wear down, doesn’t oxidize and so on. This ideal commodity, which circulates as a means of production, has all these fine qualities. In the future, when money is created and administrated in the economic system and not in the organs of the legislature, money notes will be backed by the accumulating capital wealth that is not in private hands; what will really be fructified in the economic process will be the means of production.

My dear friends, the Central European nations, and including Russia particularly, will have to bite the bullet and believe this. Initially and as long as the stay of execution lasts, the Western nations will not believe it; they will continue to believe in gold for the time being. The Central and Eastern [European] nations will have to believe that their completely derailed currencies, their completely defunct valuta, will be restored by nothing other than by making the economic life independent. No matter how many projects crop up to improve the currencies in the Central and Eastern nations, they will all be useless, will lead to nothing; only the removal of the currency from the state to the economic life will resolve the money question in these Central and Eastern [European] countries. To be sure, the economic institutions in the Central and Eastern countries will have to work with gold for as long as the gold standard is maintained. But this will only be an apparent decoration. When trade with the Western nations starts up again, gold reserves will be necessary. But real welfare, money’s real backing, will have to lie in what constitutes the circulating means of production.

And here, on this very concrete point, threefolding starts to become an international affair. People are so easily inclined to think that this threefold structure I am always speaking about is only an internal matter within a country. And this is why in my ‘Call’9 I assert that healthy dealings between the Central and Western countries, once they start up again, can only be based on the delegates of the Central countries being chosen independently [and separately] from economic bodies, legal bodies, and intellectual bodies. For the Western