UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In the uncertainty following the end of the First World War, Rudolf Steiner perceived a unique opportunity to establish a healthy social and political constitution. He began lecturing throughout post-war Germany, often to large audiences, about his social ideas. Here, speaking to a more intimate grouping at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, Steiner seeks to deepen the themes of social threefolding, showing specifically how new social thinking is integral to anthroposophy.Steiner speaks of the superficiality of the materialistic view of history, originating with the economic shift amongst the population at the time of the Reformation. Back in Egyptian-Chaldean times, initiates ruled out of spiritual impulses. Later, in the Greco-Roman period, priests had power over their congregations. Today, homo economicus – or 'economic man' – has become the dominant idea, with the capitalist and the banker taking control. But the healing of social relationships can only come about through different modes of thought; the life of spirit must be separated not only from politics but also from economics. True social understanding allows for comprehension of karma – the appreciation of each person's individual destiny. In parallel, says Steiner, we should work towards a global consciousness, as true social ideas are founded on people feeling themselves to be citizens of the world.In an important corollary, Steiner studies the incarnations of three significant spiritual beings in human evolution: Lucifer, Christ and Ahriman. Lucifer incarnated in the third pre-Christian millennium, Christ incarnated at the dawn of a new age, whilst an incarnation of Ahriman in the West is immanent. Ahriman is preparing this incarnation by insidiously promoting various ideas, for example that economic security is sufficient for healthy public life. A new wisdom must be achieved out of free human will, says Steiner, or else we will succumb to Ahriman.

Leseprobe

UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY

Through Spiritual-Scientific Knowledge

Social Threefolding, Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman

Fifteen lectures given in Dornach between 3 October and 15 November 1919

TRANSLATED BY MATTHEW BARTON

INTRODUCTION BY MATTHEW BARTON

RUDOLF STEINER

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

CW 191

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the generous funding of this publication by the estate of Dr Eva Frommer MD (1927-2004) and the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain

Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2017

Originally published in German under the title Soziales Verständnis aus geisteswissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis (volume 191 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 latest available (third) German edition (1989), edited by Robert Friedenthal

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1989

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2017

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 619 7

Cover by Mary Giddens Typeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press Ltd., Malta

CONTENTS

Introduction by Matthew Barton

LECTURE 13 OCTOBER 1919

Threefolding movement and anthroposophy. Germany, Switzerland and the threefolding social movement. Ignorance of anthroposophists regarding social problems. The future form of social contexts: associations. Feeling howastronomy relates to society. Greek sense of place and nation, modern earth consciousness, future global consciousness.

LECTURE 24 OCTOBER 1919

Intuition, Inspiration, Imagination in the three phases of child development. Memory and digestion. Earth forces at work in the first developmental period, air forces in the second, influx from without in the third. After the age of 21, these forces active in the blood. The unconscious forces of the blood have been waning since the fifteenth century. A new pedagogy is needed to consciously acquire what was once an endowment of the blood.

LECTURE 35 OCTOBER 1919

The human being as citizen of the earth and the cosmos. Social ideas are founded on the human being feeling himself to be a world citizen. To grasp the concept of goods, we need Imagination, to grasp that of labour, Inspiration, to grasp that of capital, Intuition. The human being as threefold being (body, soul and spirit) in contrast to the doctrine agreed at the Council of Constantinople in 869. The effect of dead human bodies as necessary rejuvenation of the earth. Materialism as a path to freedom. Modern theology.

LECTURE 410 OCTOBER 1919

The forces of decline in our civilization: lack of a cosmogony; instead of freedom, fatalism or natural imperative; instead of altruistic feelings, egoism. Disposition of different peoples to partial truths: the Asiatic to a fraternal outlook, the European to freedom, the Westerner to cosmogony. Ideas sundered from reality. Conservative and liberal party positions in their connection with agriculture and industry.

LECTURE 511 OCTOBER 1919

Regional and national predispositions. The intellectualism of Europeans inhibits development of religious and economic impulses. The gulf between knowledge and faith. Lujo Brentano’s superficiality of thinking. The economic stream from Europe towards America. Most recently, in Europe, faltering of the religious stream from the East and of the economic stream from the West. The streams can only be configured anew by means of threefolding.

LECTURE 612 OCTOBER 1919

Superficiality of the materialistic view of history, originating with the economic shift amongst the population at the time of the Reformation. In Egypto-Chaldean times, initiates ruled out of spiritual impulses, while priests ruled in the Graeco-Roman period. Since the Reformation, ‘Homo economicus’ has become dominant. Changes to the human configuration of soul: a real connection with worlds of spirit until the eighth century BC, awareness of the divine origin of human intelligence until the fifteenth century. Since then, belief in the dependency of intelligence on the body. Spiritualization of the intellect. James I of England as successor to the old priest kings, Cromwell as representative of modern economic man. Rapid reincarnations of leading individuals in modern times. Degeneration of the physical earth. Healing through an independent life of spirit.

LECTURE 717 OCTOBER 1919

Sense knowledge and moral knowledge. Natural knowledge fosters neither ethical nor social ideas. Kant’s critiques of ‘pure’ and ‘practical’ reason as an expression of the gulf between ethical ideals and sense knowledge. In pagan culture both were united: ‘the lost Word’. Primordial wisdom had to be lost to make human freedom possible. The Mystery of Golgotha preserves the ancient primordial wisdom and bears the moral impulse onward into the future. A new wisdom since the mid-fifteenth century: knowledge of nature without morality. This must be acquired through supersensible knowledge so that social impulses can develop. Research method and results in science and spiritual science. Love of ease as the primary obstacle to supersensible knowledge.

LECTURE 818 OCTOBER 1919

Healing of social relationships only by means of different modes of thinking than the scientific, whose findings largely serve technology. Lack of ‘pure perception’ which is corrected in science through observation but not in the social sciences. Thus arises the illusion that social reality consists in economic processes and that the configuring forces are abstract ideas. ‘Inner’ and ‘outer’ in the human being. Through our senses we live in the present; the life of thinking is a reflection of pre-birth life; the will element is the germ for life after death.

LECTURE 919 OCTOBER 1919

Human destiny: reincarnation and karma. Perception of the I through omission of consciousness during the night. But in respect of his will the human being is also asleep in the day. The fact that we can only negatively perceive our I makes it possible for us to perceive the I of others. We perceive it through our will, which in turn makes us briefly fall asleep. This back and forth reverberation is the archetypal element of social interplay between people. The old forms of affinity based on blood and race must be overcome. Three stages since the Reformation: the dominance of economic man, of the banker and of capital. But now social understanding must arise, creating understanding of karma in a following incarnation—that is, understanding for each person’s individual destiny.

LECTURE 1023 OCTOBER 1919

Life incomprehensible without enlarging our awareness to encompass pre-birth life and life after death. To secure power, the Church has withheld from human beings an insight into pre-birth life. All individual qualities are the echo of pre-birth existence; the social realm is where the germ for life after death is engendered. If you deny pre-existence you also deny individual gifts. The education arising from this leads to standardization. Social democracy issued from Catholicism. We must overcome our entanglement in languages. From ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to modern stenography. The building at Dornach as a world hieroglyph.

LECTURE 111 NOVEMBER 1919

The third post-Atlantean epoch and the present era. Ancient pagan culture was one of wisdom. At that time the human being felt himself to be a part of the cosmos, and did not need intrinsically moral impulses. The initiates read from the stars what human beings should do. This pagan wisdom was inspired by the wisdom of Lucifer, who incarnated in the third pre-Christian millennium. This was followed by the Christ incarnation at the dawn of a new age. Well before the end of the third millennium after Christ, an incarnation of Ahriman will occur in the West. Ahriman is already preparing this incarnation: he is doing so by promoting the view that the cosmos should be regarded as a machine, the sense that economic security is sufficient for public life, the principle of nationalism, partisan perspectives, and one-sided understanding of the Gospels. The collaboration of Lucifer with Ahriman.

LECTURE 122 NOVEMBER 1919

The life of spirit must be separated not only from the life of rights but also from economic life. Ahriman is interested in conflating the life of spirit and culture with the state and economic life. Romain Rolland. Humanity must advance from words to a perception of spirit. Space and time convey only the outer aspect of things. Science as ahrimanic mirage. Within us, Lucifer acquires special power if a person only mystically deepens what he was endowed with by birth. We must try to establish equilibrium between luciferic and ahrimanic power: the ahrimanic must be permeated by the luciferic, the luciferic within us by the ahrimanic element. The longing of Cardinal Newman for a ‘new revelation’.

LECTURE 139 NOVEMBER 1919

The human being as a being of will and intellect. Will forces and natural forces. Immorality led to the Atlantean catastrophe. The will has a disintegrative capacity and is connected with our planet’s destructive forces. The workings of black magic are based on this. The forces that build up the world lie in the pole of the human being’s intelligence acting in sleep life. Humanity has responsibility for what the earth undergoes in cosmic ages. With world consciousness human responsibility expands to world responsibility. True art is a reflection of supersensible truth. Goethe’s Faust. The rise of landscape painting as a symptom of the materialistic outlook. Modern civilization regards everything outwardly apparent as reality. The human being is not a reality without the earth, nor the earth without the human being.

LECTURE 1414 NOVEMBER 1919

Primordial wisdom diversified and specified, and faded away. Without a new influx people across the globe would become entirely differentiated in terms of their specific regions: in the West only economics, in the East, spiritual truths, while central Europe would cultivate the intellectual realm. The East would become an object of economic exploitation by the West. The three aspects of earthly cultural life: the Orient as home of ethics, the West of the utilitarian principle, and at the centre, development of the aesthetic type (Kant, Schiller, Goethe). The ‘artistic’ element in The Philosophy of Freedom. Tirpitz, Bethmann and Ludendorff: the thinking of pre-Christian Rome. The two types of ‘practical’ and ‘fantasist’ human being in the nineteenth century. Through the realities of life (the World War) and history (Bismarck), human beings must learn to reassess their judgements.

LECTURE 1515 NOVEMBER 1919

Without primordial luciferic wisdom, human beings would have remained in a childlike state. The wise sages of ancient India had to undertake to use this wisdom in the service of earthly evolution, but without succumbing to Lucifer. Speech and thinking were cunningly wrested from Lucifer. Luciferic thinking generalizes while ahrimanic thinking differentiates. Goethe was a very un-luciferic thinker. As human beings have developed more affinity with the earth, they have been distancing themselves from the luciferic element, and it proves less useful to them. In the place of luciferic wisdom a new wisdom must be achieved out of free human will, or else we will succumb to Ahriman. The Christ being has become a kind of companion to human beings, leading us forth from the battle with Lucifer and into the battle with Ahriman.

Notes

Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner

Index

INTRODUCTION

In the poem by William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, composed in 1919 shortly after the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the poet laments the ‘blood-dimmed tide’ of war and famously writes:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ...

This and other things in the poem chime remarkably with some aspects of the lectures in this volume, also given in 1919. The old forms of authority and hierarchy were ending at the time in social upheaval and convulsion, and the measures and models proposed to remedy chaos were, as Steiner keeps reiterating here, attempts to impose human constructs on a living reality and thus not only in vain but a violation of that reality. This imposition, as Steiner makes clear, always follows from the individual human mind, from thoughts and concepts, programmes and tracts, which, however idealistic, do not arise from the ever-changing immediacy of a truly social context: one in which actual people relate to each other, intuiting from this interaction what each necessary next step together might be.

In general, says Steiner in lecture 14, prefiguring the words of Eliot in The Four Quartets, people cannot bear very much reality. Taking refuge in the intellect, they wrap themselves in a comfortable cocoon of ideas about how things should be shaped. Science, founded on the remedies of peer reviewand the correction of hypothesis through actual observation, is less prone to the intellectual or mechanistic malaise; but what Steiner laments particularly is the uncorrected application of the scientific method to all other realms of life, including social thinking and education. An education that prioritizes the child’s understanding over the development of all other capacities, embracing the scientific paradigm as unquestioned, universal standard, will, he thinks, inevitably become shallow and superficial. Education for life, if it is to have real meaning, creates warmth, love and enthusiasm in the child’s soul, out of which deeper understanding can later be born.

That Steiner emphasizes education in these lectures on society suggests he was concerned about the effect of a primarily intellectual upbringing on later generations and their ability to act morally and creatively within society. At the other pole from the intellect, which is past-related in Steiner’s view of the human being, lies the will, a faculty that carries us into the future, is born in warmth, and is by definition much less easily accessible to our conscious perceptions. It is through the will that we relate in moral intuition to others in society, that we actually ‘engage with life’, changing and shaping it for the future. Thus social interaction between two or more people, as the core and essence of all society, involves an unconscious element: in a continual alternation, we only perceive others by momentarily ‘dreaming into and falling asleep’ in them, then waking up to ourselves again. To be alive to the reality of this process is to allow others’ reality to inform us, is to honour the gifts that each one brings and to incorporate them into a living weft of mutuality, an awareness of reciprocal dependence that enlarges us, as opposed to the construct of an ‘agenda’ or ‘programme’ for social reform pursued or imposed (inevitably in a top-down manner) without this awareness.

‘The best lack all conviction’, writes Yeats, ‘while the worst / are full of passionate intensity’. In lecture 6 Steiner likewise stresses how our political leaders, with all their rhetoric, have the least insight, while deeper natures find it most difficult to get anywhere with or in society as it currently is. But it is also worth remembering that there are grassroots and civil society movements today who know that real hope and change is created in community together, very often outside the power-mongering of the political machine.

Between Yeats in 1919 and Eliot in 1935, the artist René Magritte painted his famous image of a pipe, with the subversive caption below it: ‘This is not a pipe’. The sensory or intellectual image is not the full reality, and recognizing this can jolt us awake for a moment to the provisional nature of all appearance and to the comfortable fixity of our perceptions and mental definitions. So where, in this flux, do we find a way forward? Inevitably Steiner takes us back repeatedly here to the human being’s actual nature, seeking to read from this the social forms that most fully accord with it; not offering these as a model to be imposed but as on going, evolving perception of the realities we inhabit. He returns here to human faculties, related respectively to the past, future and present in the broadest sense: of the free individual spirit and its gifts, intellectual and otherwise; of our will and moral actions, through which we create future social realities together; and of the bridging realm between them, our scope for true feeling and perception in the moment. While the distinct ‘spheres’ of society founded on these three aspects of reality—those of cultural and spiritual life, freedom of thought and liberty, of economic fraternity, and of political rights and equality before the law—might seem like just another programme, it is central to Steiner’s appraisal that these are not abstract ideas but contain the seeds of true development which, like any reality, might assume very varied and diverse forms in actual and always different conditions.

All this requires an enormous amount of inner activity and awareness on our part. Alert to the dangers awaiting us at every turn, Steiner warns us against nationalism, utilitarianism and any other ‘ism’. Like Dickens before him in his humorous and ironic depiction of the bureaucratic ‘Circumlocution Office’, he pours gentle scorn on the exponentially increasing ‘data’ (lecture 11) in which we can have such misguided faith, in the numerical or quantitative mass of proofs and evidence that clog our shallower minds. He warns, somewhat prophetically, against our failure to think or create for ourselves because of all that is ‘given’ to us on a plate, without any need for us to process it ourselves (think devices).

In his poem, Yeats writes of the ‘rough beast ... slouching towards Bethlehem to be born’. The spirit of cold divisiveness and isolationism, of unsympathetic feeling and enmity, of action either immobilized or excessively violent, is clearly incarnating amongst us. But Steiner offers us remedies, and in an insight of real genius, instead of dogmatically castigating the coldness of science or the self-referential voluptuousness of our subjective feelings, he proposes a beautiful reversal: to regard ourselves and our subjectivities with scientific objectivity, and to observe the outer world and its phenomena with all the subjective warmth of our keenest interest. For me, this has all the persuasive depth, simplicity and difficulty of a true way forward.

Matthew Barton

LECTURE 1

DORNACH, 3 OCTOBER 1919

MANY very diverse points of view have recently been expressed, here in Switzerland too, about the relationship that exists between the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science we have been cultivating in our circles for years—and has led to the construction of this very building, the Goetheanum—and on the other hand our efforts, ultimately, to engage with contemporary social movements, our striving to realize something in society and the world. Our need to complement anthroposophic endeavours with these social endeavours has met with the most varied responses, both dismissive and welcoming. Such reactions cannot of course be the determining factor in the way we pursue our aims, and yet we do also need to look at various realities that have emerged in this context.

Anthroposophists often say that our movement ought not to have burdened itself with what is implicit in the movement for a threefold social organism. And on the other hand, some of those whose interest has been awoken for this social movement find it troubling that this idea began with an anthroposophic outlook which they may often feel to be obscurely mystical and lacking in clarity. Thus social threefolders are often criticized by anthroposophists, and anthroposophists by social threefolders. The area of commonality between them is sometimes a bone of contention for both sides.

As I say, this cannot lead us astray; but it is important to be fully aware of this state of affairs and keep remembering the inner connection between both outlooks, which we have often had cause to highlight in our reflections here.

But there is another thing that has increasingly become apparent—something which may have still greater bearing on our task. You see, ultimately, if sociologists censure any commonality with anthroposophists, there’s nothing we can do about it, just as little as when anthroposophists assert it would have been better not to saddle ourselves with ideas about society. There’s nothing much to be done about that either, except pursue our path unerringly since we have recognized it to be right. But more urgent for our consideration, perhaps, is that there are more and more people saying that an anthroposophic foundation is needed for them to understand the idea of threefolding. The threefold social organism would be much better understood, they say, from an anthroposophic perspective. And this anthroposophic foundation is increasingly being called for precisely in proletarian circles. This is something that may surprise people, although it isn’t really all that surprising.

The way our friends pursued anthroposophic endeavours in the past—also determined by differences of class—made it difficult to introduce anthroposophy into proletarian circles. But now it is unavoidable that anyone who engages with threefolding also hears something about anthroposophy, becomes at least outwardly acquainted with it. And in fact it is very remarkable that this is creating a lively need for anthroposophy.

In Stuttgart, for instance, after disseminating the idea of social threefolding for a period, without referring to anthroposophy as such, we found it necessary to give lecture series on purely anthroposophic subjects. There were well-founded reasons why this became necessary; and these series are continuing still.

We should take particular note of this here, and today, by way of introduction, it is really only this that I want to impress on you. Here in Switzerland, we are in a very particular position as regards both these orientations—the social impulse and the impulse, which for us at least is connected with it, of anthroposophy. The question of social endeavours born out of anthroposophic thinking is actually very different for central Europe from the way it appears to us here in Switzerland. In central Europe it is a matter of life or death, the life or death of national culture and tradition. There may be many today who do not realize the gravity of the situation—but the life or death of national culture is at stake. When they hear something like this, people think far too superficially. If you say ‘the death of national culture’ they think it completely exaggerated—you can’t kill off 80 million people in a short time, they say, so how can we be facing the demise of national culture?

But this is to entirely misunderstand what is at stake. Naturally 80 or 90 million people are not going to be killed off all of a sudden. But the death of culture means something quite different. We need only recall that when Jerusalem was destroyed it wasn’t just a matter of the death of individual Jews living there, but of the death of a culture—which can happen in a quite different way from how it did there. It really is true to say that this is a life or death question, and that life will only prevail if we begin to create a threefold social order. If this were not so one could easily regard social threefolding in some other light. But here we are truly facing an either/or situation in the near future: either developing understanding of threefolding or the death of culture. People may hear this and think it immodest or even absurd. And yet it is so. There are good reasons why circumstances compel us to resort to threefolding. We may have more time or less, but there are compelling reasons—in eastern Europe, likewise, this region that has been indescribably downtrodden by its karma.

Things are different here. Here there still is, and potentially will be, a chance to resort to something like threefolding out of free will. Here, you see, as in the West, it is not a matter of life or death so much as the continuation of events in either a more spiritual or an unspiritual manner. In Switzerland and in the West we can pursue life materialistically for long periods, without any spiritual impulse. Or alternatively, out of our own free will, we can come to see in an eminently spiritual movement such as threefolding something essential for providing a new impulse. We do not need to think in terms of life or death.

Well, it makes a great difference whether we undertake something out of free will or by compulsion, in an unfree way. In fact, it would signify something entirely different for the world’s whole evolution if people in a place like Switzerland were to form the free resolve to embrace the threefolding movement. It is extremely difficult nowadays, even for me, to formulate and express these things objectively. I believe that it would be a great blessing if someone in the West, especially someone in a neutral country, were to find the courage to say this in unadorned fashion. It would signify something quite different in the public domain. In particular the following should be considered: whatever came from the few countries that have remained neutral would have the greatest significance, also in an inner sense. If the threefolding impulse could proceed from a country that has stayed neutral in the recent conflicts, this would be a deed of very great significance in world history.

To comprehend this is already an anthroposophic matter. You see, we can only say what integration of such an impulse into all human evolution would mean if we draw on anthroposophy. And it does matter if this impulse is simply formulated in abstract form or emerges from particular realities: whether it proceeds from the fact of free discernment or emerges from necessities, as it can only do in central Europe since at present nothing can arise there except through bitterest calamity.

So specifically here in Switzerland, it seems to me, we should view the idea of the social organism and its threefolding with enthusiasm. But then a question becomes pressing: how do we surmount a particular dilemma? Some among you here have been participating in our anthroposophic movement for rather a long time, and have been able to observe how quickly or slowly—and it is usually slowly—the intentions of this anthroposophic movement penetrate human souls. This takes its time. And if it were necessary for people to become anthroposophists first in order to think in the right way about society, it might well be far, far too late. For this reason we must think of putting the idea of threefolding as such out into the world even if it then appears to have less sure foundations—because we can’t afford to wait until anthroposophically oriented thinking has become a matter of course. But then this threefolding idea will need a certain kind of support. Since it won’t get this from a real spread of anthroposophy—which takes its time—it must be supported by the presence and engagement of members of the anthroposophic movement; in other words, members of the anthroposophic movement should try to elicit trust through their social conduct and activities.

This is at least a question that cannot be resolved theoretically but only practically, through life itself, since it is a question of our manner and demeanour. We must try to represent social thinking in a way that elicits trust from others, even if is not possible to create an anthroposophic foundation quickly enough.

You will ask how this can be done—how can you develop the right tact as you work to promote the social movement? Again, this cannot be answered categorically. But there is something that will help if given enough consideration. Every individual here amongst us should try increasingly to familiarize himself with the nature of the social movement in a real and living way. That this was lacking was evident in our circles when attempts were first made to launch a kind of social movement. Amongst the most well-meaning of our members, amongst the most benevolent adherents of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual-scientific movement, were really quite a few who had slept through the modern social movement that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century and through into our own times. I don’t mean they were all unaware that a social movement existed. But it’s not enough to know this theoretically, or to read about such things in the papers. Instead one needs to really be familiar with the utterances and aspirations of this movement. Not that long ago I met people in our midst who, as the threefolding movement began, did not know that unions existed, or what they are. We have become too used to passing people by and not concerning ourselves with what they are actually doing, their actual lives. We must learn to really concern ourselves with human souls, to show real interest in them. And here there is a great hindrance which, without wishing to offend anyone, I would term ‘middle-class benevolence’ towards the working class. This middle-class benevolence towards the workers, often as it were dripping with social impulses, is actually a serious obstacle to modern social effectiveness. We have seen what I mean here in the most varied spheres. Think of how ‘the people’ have been portrayed to us, in historical novels, popular novels, by authors who understood nothing about ordinary folk—Berthold Auerbach1 and suchlike. We have been shown the nature of ordinary people in a kind of theoretical engagement with them. The middle classes consider themselves to be engaging with the social question when they watch, say, Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers.2 Well, certainly this play does portray the misery of the masses—it shows them surviving by eating a dead dog. But it is an odd way to understand the nature of society if we watch a poor family eating a dog onstage and then return home to our usual, pleasant supper. I’m not saying we can bridge the class divisions in society by tomorrow morning, but we can at least get a real sense for what’s happening instead of just passing people by and not knowing the circumstances they live in. It is very important that every individual today should be able to summon before his mind’s eye a broad, world-historical panorama—one that only becomes apparent if we look back to former times that have left certain social residues still existing today, and look as well at new things that are erupting through the surface of life as though from primordial depths into modern society.

One question that repeatedly surfaces when people are talking about modern society is the question of organization. Our ways of life have become complex. Division of labour has increasingly come to the fore, so that an individual works within a narrow sphere of activity. We can only work and act as modern people through and within organizations. Organizations have always existed. But no account is taken of the fact that organizations in the old days were quite different from those that nowmust arise. Nowadays almost all our organizations perpetuate the old as well as already encompassing new elements, and are in continual upheaval. But so far an awareness is lacking that must allow something radically new to erupt from the depths of humanity’s evolution to its surface.

Older forms of organization were really governed by human blood, by blood relations. Looking back to olden times we see tribal and extended familial groupings, things belonging together and organized by the blood principle rising from human depths. This meant that organization was something largely unconscious, not surfacing fully into awareness. People were involved in organizing themselves but this didn’t become fully conscious. Higher spirits aided human beings in this organizing activity.

Today we face the need to accomplish consciously ourselves what once occurred unconsciously, that is, largely by virtue of higher powers than the human. We must work together in associations, in organizations to sustain society. The blood ties between people are gradually losing their meaning.

The observed and recognized aim and concern, the objective, must provide the basis for this associative activity. Unconscious or subconscious confederacy must give way to conscious and intentional association. At present we live in the midst of an interplay of these two streams, conscious and unconscious organization, and the convulsions in society today are very much connected with the confluence of these two currents. Just consider for a moment the efforts of socialist parties of all shades today. In them lives a certain impetus towards conscious organization, albeit as yet instinctive. People want to organize themselves. But on the other hand they have not yet found the objective that provides a foundation for this conscious organizing activity.

If you want to understand this, just look at the primal phenomenon of modern social striving. Let’s assume someone stood up here—let’s be clear and honest about this—and said, ‘We must endeavour to work socially!’ What would he mean by this? He would mean that this effort should be undertaken here in Switzerland. If you were to suggest that he should think differently, he would of course take offence. Or imagine someone standing up in France and saying the same thing—he would be speaking of social endeavours within French borders. It has also been stated, theoretically, that socialist programmes should use the old national borders as a framework for great socialist cooperatives or collectives. But the state is a residue from the old groupings based on blood relationship. In other words, socialist programmes today seek only to impose something new, put something different on top of the same old blood affinities.

It is asking a lot for people today to think clearly about such matters. People simply won’t be able to do this without becoming anthroposophists. However strange this may sound, it is true to say that people won’t be able to think clearly about these things. A call is sounding across the globe today: freedom for the people. In other words, the old blood relationships originating in long-gone times should somehow be reorganized. Freedom for the people! But this trumpet call resounding through the world completely overlooks the nature of conscious organization. This is howgreatly things clash in our time. In fact, only truly universal, anthroposophic insight into human nature will lead us where we need to go.

But there’s a long way to go to achieve this. Anthroposophic and particularly theosophic insights, as they were, have always been stumped by this question. Yes indeed, people said that we need brotherly understanding of human beings without distinction of race, colour and so forth. But has this become a reality in our era? No, it has become theoretical, abstract, not real. And at present it is least real of all.

And in consequence these anthroposophic and theosophic endeavours have been drawn into a general love for the abstract which we have so often discussed here—a general love of abstraction that lives in thinking and feeling capacities that sunder themselves from life. As modern people today we live a life we ought not to live, a double life: on the one hand life in outer work, our profession and various other things resembling or relating to it; and then a life of thinking and feeling. A workaday life and a Sunday life, if you like. When someone speaks of the spirit we don’t really care to hear this intervening in our Monday-to-Saturday existence. Talk of the spirit, we think, belongs in the Sunday sermon, which we can enjoy in its separate and distinct place, when we don’t have to remember the business of the week. Then, and only then, we can feel a certain pleasure when we hear about fraternity, neighbourly love and so on. This double life extends into science. And here we must see the historical causes of it clearly.

You see, our mundane academic disciplines no longer allow themselves to speak of the soul, let alone the spirit. It is thought perfectly self-evident that they should not. Academics today tell us that science must be free of belief, and in saying this they think that they serve unprejudiced science. They say that anything connected with soul or spirit will constrain and hamper scientific enquiry, since such matters are decided only by subjective faith—or that is what they believe. But what is this due to in reality? In fact, in our era, religious faiths and confessions have as it were monopolized the soul and spirit for themselves. And nowadays the view that anthroposophy should not be cultivated is regarded as quite self-evident, that science must be free of such taints and should have nothing to say about soul or spirit since that is a domain monopolized by the confessions. Academics proclaim that science must be ‘objective’ and therefore refrain from engaging with matters of the soul or spirit, since this will violate rules of scientific exactitude. It is very humorous really. Forgive me for speaking of humour in such a serious concern, but there is such a thing as serious humour. Sometimes the tragicomic is more important for the world’s development than the purely tragic or merely comic. It is humorous to hear academics discourse in this way since it is actually due to the fact that they were forbidden for long periods to speak of spirit and soul. Those who today believe they should keep science untainted by faith for the sake of its exactitude are unaware this ‘purity’ results from a dogma that prohibited them from thinking about soul and spirit. What academics proclaim as the dictates of exact science is the deposit and residue of the old ecclesiastical ban. People are simply unaware of this, of the historical antecedents to what they announce and proclaim as a self-evident and—sometimes in their view—lofty truth. But we should wake up to this, not sleep through it, and without doing so we won’t get anywhere. However fine our declarations about the social question, we will get nowhere if we give ourselves up to illusions about the greatest lie that exists—the scientific lie of the modern era. As yet we do not have a real feeling of this lie in science, but we must learn to feel it.

What I have just said is not intended emotionally but entirely theoretically, and can only be properly understood in its theoretical intentions. You see, I only feel obliged to speak of the ‘scientific lie’ because, as much as I unreservedly criticize modern science from this point of view, at the same time I defend it equally staunchly. Science became great by virtue of the very fact that people only focused on the physical, corporeal realm for a period, and no longer concerned themselves much with soul and spirit. But we should only regard this as a principle of utility, and as a pedagogical principle in humanity’s evolution, and not as something of fundamental, intrinsic value.

Today it should be realized that the mundane sciences need once again to be imbued with real knowledge of the soul and spirit. This alone will give rise to vigorous engagement with social problems. In our time, it is necessary for people to start to perceive and discern things differently from the way recognized in our schools. There are matters of knowledge and discernment that are now becoming incumbent upon us in a way that, for a long period, they were not. The Copernican world-view3 was entirely sufficient for a long time— it was useful for people to conceive of the cosmos in these neat terms: here the sun, around which the earth orbits in an ellipse; and around the earth the moon orbits in turn; and then between sun and earth we have Mercury, Venus, and Mars further off and so on. It was very neat to have this whole picture of the movements of the planets in ellipses round the sun. Humanity found this perfectly sufficient until now.

But what were the historical origins of this picture? I have often referred to this. Historically it arose when the great Copernicus wrote his book about the revolution of the planets, at the beginning of which we find three key principles. If all three are considered, that’s fine. But they were not all given due weight: only the two first principles were taken up, while the third was overlooked. The first two give us the Copernican system as later elaborated by Kepler and Newton. But unfortunately this system is not correct. If, in the calculation of this system, a particular planet is supposed to occupy a particular position and you direct your telescope to where it ought to be, you find it is not there! The system says it should be, but it isn’t. This is why people have been using ‘Bessel’s Reduction’ or ‘Bessel’s Correction’4 for a long time now, to correct the calculation. You direct the telescope not to the point you should according to the Copernican system but to the point established after you have corrected the calculation. What are these Bessel’s Corrections exactly, what do they mean? They signify the need to always apply anew something one would apply only once and for all if proper account were taken of all three Copernican laws instead of ignoring the third. But if we do include this third law of Copernicus, then in turn the whole picture, with the planets revolving round the sun, no longer works so neatly at all, and we have to conceive a different cosmic system. In fact, people will not conceive this different picture of the cosmos until they have been properly prepared to think differently by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. You see, how do people look at the world nowadays? They look at it as if they were sitting in a railway carriage but never looking out of the window or alighting from the train: just sitting inside and living with the other passengers. In fact you can travel for a while, then, when the train stops, get out and visit a town or city to see what is there, then perhaps board another train and travel further to another town, and do the same again. These are stages of experiences and you carry them with you.

Board drawing 1*

But modern astronomers see the passage of the earth through the cosmos as if they were sitting in a railway carriage, never alighting, and experiencing nothing but the other passengers. You might ask how one can stop the world and get off? Is this possible? Well you can, actually, though it is different from getting out of a train. To alight from a train you depart through the carriage door and head off in some direction. To alight from the earth means to go inwards, into the soul. If you really penetrate into the soul you come to what lives within the soul and you have alighted from the earth. In relation to the earth you have undertaken the same procedure as alighting from a train and boarding it again. But the remarkable thing here is that, when alighting in this way—that is, going deeply within in contemplation, not in an illusory but a real, tangible way—you experience something different each time you do so; something really different each time. Mystical professions of finding God in the soul through inner contemplation are declamatory statements. Really experiencing something inwardly, it turns out, is different in different eras, an ever-renewed and different experience. Why so? Because we experience the cosmos when we do this, always a different place in the cosmos.

The ancients discovered their system of the heavens through such inward experience rather than through purely outward observation. The Copernican system, on the other hand, arose by a mode of experience that resembles sitting in a train carriage. The system of the cosmos in future will have to become inner experience once more, a journey through inward experiences, and this will give rise to a different picture. Above all we will learn to experience the world in a tangible way, rather than through the abstract cognition so prevalent today.

Something curious, and actually very pleasing happened to me in Berlin recently. Not long ago a squalid piece appeared in the German journal Die Hilfe,5 entitled ‘False Prophet’. Such articles are read and forgotten. But a few weeks back, when I was in Berlin, an American visited me and told me he had come to see me because he had read this article and reckoned that such a diatribe must mean there was something interesting afoot. This only by way of introduction to what actually pleased me, which was a question the man posed, a very apt question. He said he had quickly understood what was involved in threefolding of the social organism but he wanted to ask this: Do you think that this threefolding of the social organism is an eternal truth which, once discovered, will create social conditions that hold sway for ever more, or is it a truth that applies to a particular time, which will eventually give way to something else? I was very struck that one could still find people today who show such insight, who do not believe in millenarianism,6 in some thousand-year Reich, in some absolute, single and never-to-be-questioned truth that applies uniformly, ubiquitously and for all time. Socialist thinkers believe that the socialist state must be realized tomorrow, and once it has been established it will never have to change.

I replied to him as follows. Naturally people have striven for a unified state in recent centuries; but now we have got to the point where we need to structure this state in a threefold way. After a further period something else will come, a synthesis; and in turn the opposite will inevitably appear.

You see, it is not always so comfortable to have to engage with actual specifics and real conditions—it is not as easy as working out an absolute system. But it is necessary to deal with specific conditions today, to be aware that what we must create is something that accords with the current situation in the world. This can already be understood today in terms of ‘astronomy’—by seeing, for instance, that mystical experiences vary depending on whether they occur in one or another decade or century, and that we can observe the actual movements of the earth, experience them mystically within us. But today the ‘great astronomical principle’ must be seen and felt in relationship to society, to social realities. We need to develop the capacity to progress by going beyond a stage that bears only an outward parallel to stages of former times in that they too were not only transitional stages but impulses for evolution.

Think of the ancient Greeks. They inhabited a particular region extending as far as the Pillars of Heracles. Within those confines the earth was specific and tangible for them. Beyond that was only vagueness and generality. The Greeks had a regional consciousness. Then the modern era arrived, the discovery of America, the voyages to the East Indies and suchlike. Earthly consciousness arose. The regional consciousness of the Greeks became our modern global awareness. Just as everything further than the Pillars of Heracles was vague and undiscerned for the Greeks, so today everything that goes beyond earthly consciousness is indeterminate for us—merely mathematical fantasy, Galileian or Newtonian fantasy. Such fantasy must be replaced by realities. We have to transform earth consciousness into cosmic consciousness in the same way that the regional or national consciousness of the Greeks was transformed into global consciousness of the whole earth. That is where we are today, at this point, and we will make no social progress unless we find the way to elaborate the cosmic consciousness of the future from the earthly consciousness of today.

Unless we develop, through the teachings of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, the great astronomical world picture of what lies beyond us in the cosmos, we will not comprehend the truth of the cosmos. And if we do not do so, we cannot become citizens of the cosmos. But we will not become social citizens, either, until we become conscious citizens of the cosmos.

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*See page 222 in relation to the board drawings.