# The Task of Today's Youth

## GA 217a — 14 February 1923, Stuttgart

### VIII. The Three Main Questions for the Anthroposophical Youth Movement

My dear friends! I think I can assume that the present appeal to the members of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany has become known to you all. You have seen from it that it is recognized in the circles of the Anthroposophical Society that, to a certain extent, the rudder, as it has been steered from Stuttgart in particular, must now be turned, and that there is an awareness that such a change in direction is necessary. The details that come into consideration will naturally be discussed at the delegates' meeting. I believe you will be particularly interested in all that will be going on there. You found society in a particular state when you yourself were seeking the path to anthroposophy from the external circumstances of your life. You imagined that what a young person seeks from the depths of their soul but cannot find in the institutions of today's world must be found somewhere. They were placed in these institutions and found that what has emerged from recent history does not correspond to what is actually demanded from the human soul as humanity. Perhaps you were looking for where this demand for true humanity would be fulfilled, and finally you believed you could find it in the Anthroposophical Society. Now, however, many things are not in accordance with the facts as they are. At first it was not all of you who somehow made this discord a conflict. You found many things unsatisfactory, but at first you remained at the stage of merely stating this dissatisfaction. In the face of the past and present facts within the Anthroposophical Society, however, the fact must be faced that the Anthroposophical Society has simply not fulfilled the development of anthroposophy, and that the extent to which something completely new must be created or the old Anthroposophical Society must be continued with a completely new impulse must be faced.

This has been considered by the personalities who have been involved in the leadership to a greater or lesser extent, and the conclusion has been reached that some old sins, which mostly consisted of omissions and bureaucratic forms, should be abandoned and an attempt should be made, in agreement with the representatives of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, to create the basis on which the Society can be continued.

In Stuttgart, it must be said that the developments of recent years have brought together a large number of excellent workers. As individuals, they are excellent people, but when brought together in a group, they are a truly great movement in their own right. But as one of the leading personalities here has already said, each one stands in the way of the other. This has actually been the cause of much unproductivity here. Each individual has filled his post quite well. One can be highly satisfied with the Waldorf School. But the actual Anthroposophical Society, despite the fact that the anthroposophists were there, has basically disappeared bit by bit, began to dissolve, one cannot even say, into favor, but into displeasure. An end must be put to this state of affairs if the society is not to disintegrate completely.

You have obviously noticed this very clearly and then formed your views. But it was necessary for the Anthroposophical Society to give itself a form again out of its old supports. After all, the work of twenty-three years has been done in the main body of the Anthroposophical Society. Many of its members are in a completely different situation and find something that exists: even if the branch decays, the individual anthroposophists remain, and anthroposophy will find its way; for example, Mrs. Wolfram, who led the branch in Leipzig for many years and then resigned from the leadership, recently founded a local group of the “Bund für freies Geistesleben” (Federation for Free Spiritual Life), in deliberate contrast to the local anthroposophical circle.

The fact that replacing old forces with young ones is not enough is evident in Leipzig, where the local chairman emerged from the student body. A balance must therefore be struck between what has been created over two decades and what is coming in from young people.

The appeal should also represent this in the right way. Many members of the Anthroposophical Society have sought a calming element in this society; they were always very uncomfortable when something had to be said against external opposition. Sometimes harsh words had to be used. But this will not be avoidable in the future either, because the opposition is taking on ever more savage forms. A strange defensive position must therefore be adopted. We must not lose sight of this. It is difficult for the elderly to be good anthroposophists after the calming element has become a habit in them.

As soon as one lives in anthroposophy in such a way that one experiences things as if out of habit, this is something very bad. Anthroposophy is something that actually has to be acquired anew every day; otherwise one cannot have anthroposophy. One cannot just remember what one once thought up. And the difficulties of the old Anthroposophical Society are due to the fact that human beings are creatures of habit, as we used to say when I was very young. For Anthroposophy must not become a habit. You will in turn find difficulties because Anthroposophy demands that we go beyond everything that is merely egoistic in an intellectual sense. Of course, a person can be selfish like other living beings. But anthroposophy and selfishness are not compatible. You can be a tolerable philistine if you are an egoist, even a tolerable human being. If you are selfish as an anthroposophist, then you get caught up in perpetual contradictions. This is because man does not really live on earth with his whole being. When he comes down to earth from a pre-earthly existence, a part of him still remains in the astral, so that when man wakes up in the morning, it is not the whole man that goes into him; it is precisely what goes down from the supersensible man that comes from the supersensible man. Man is not completely on earth; he leaves a certain part of his existence in the supersensible. And this is connected with the fact that there cannot actually be a completely satisfactory social order. Such a social order can only come from earthly conditions. Within such a social order, human beings cannot find complete happiness.

I have said it again and again: threefolding is not paradise on earth, but it shows a possible organism; otherwise it would be a deception, because man is not only an earthly being. This is the fact that one must actually hold to in order to truly feel one's whole humanity; and that is why one can never be satisfied with a merely materialistic world view when one feels one's full humanity within oneself. Only when we really feel this, are we truly ready for anthroposophy, when we feel that we cannot come down completely to earth, we need something for our supersensible human being.

You have evidently felt something of the kind quite instinctively, and that is why you have come to the Anthroposophical Society. You will have to realize that this fact makes your difficulty more or less clear to you. For if, on the one hand, Anthroposophy can never become a habit, on the other hand it is necessary that Anthroposophy does not merge with a nature that really comes from a merely earthly one. For that which arises from egoism is connected with the earthly. A person becomes as bad as he is as a human being when he is supersensible and at the same time egoistic: a supersensible being is completely shaped by the character of a sensual being. Spiritual feeling and perception do not go together with egoism. That is where the obstacle begins. But this is also the point where the anthroposophical movement coincides with what today's youth is really seeking, due to the fact that all connection with the spiritual world has been lost. And now the external institutions are there. The youth flees from them and seeks a consciousness of their humanity. Based on this feeling, you must try to come to terms with what is already there and feel with your own inner being. You must hold together the difficulties you encounter with those of others, and then the way will be found to actually create a strong Anthroposophical Society for the near future, one that is strong even in the circles seeking internalization, a strong Anthroposophical movement.

If you follow this path, you will have to go through many a privation and many a difficulty, because humanity does not want such a movement. There is still much to be faced before you are truly ready to be firmly connected to the cause with your whole being. Then anthroposophy will assert itself under all circumstances. The disintegration of the civilized world is so strong that Europe will not have much time left if it does not turn to the spirit. Only from the spirit can an ascent come! Therefore, the spiritual must be sought without fail, and in this striving you have done the right thing, you have taken the right path. Now it is a matter of taking up the work for the near future. And in order to hear something about how you will shape your intentions, we have come together today.

A participant asks how scientific work should be organized today.

Rudolf Steiner: When it comes to science, nothing of what will be needed in the future is actually there. This is not to say that absolutely nothing is there. In all fields of science, there is a body of knowledge of external facts that can be used to penetrate into those areas that must really be there in the future if uncorrupted human souls are to arise in the future. There are already a number of scientific fields with significant results, from the smallest collections up to the London Museum. But those who are currently doing research cannot use them in the sense of a science of the future, because the people who have come into positions today through the world order or in the social order are inwardly dead. They do not know what to do with the factual material because they have come to it through a kind of automatic development.

The difficulty for anthroposophists is not that anthroposophical work cannot be done – the summarizing ideas and spiritual insights already exist – but that what is needed for science today, namely the factual material, is preserved by those who cannot do anything with the facts. So it happens that those who should actually establish the cultural content come away empty-handed, and that the factual material is the monopoly of people who cannot do anything with it. At the universities, the factual material is not presented to the academic youth in such a way that they learn to look at it with the right eye. Instead, when they are shown a skeleton in zoology, or a plant in botany, and so on, they actually learn nothing from it. What she does learn is: there is the skull bone, here is the shoulder bone, there the shin bone, and so on. This is also how one could describe a table or a machine. A skeleton, for example, is not shown to academic youth in such a way that they should have the feeling that it has grown, but it is shown to them as a machine that can be taken apart into its individual parts.

If you first sharpen your soul-imbued gaze in the right way, you will immediately see, for example, if you look at a dog's skeleton along the backbone from back to front: there, in the back part, moon power is at work, while if you now move on to the skull, you see that solar power is at work there; and in addition, earth power is at work in the flow of the legs. This is something that can be seen directly, if only people are not prevented from seeing it by the fact that they are not taught to recognize it at all. What I have just said, one should be able to see it as one would immediately see a sculpture that is supposed to represent a human being and also reminds one of him: that is a human being. In the same way, one should be able to see in a dog skeleton what is solar and lunar about it. One must only have the antecedents for it.

Those who have received the means with regard to the facts cannot do anything with them. That is just how it is. But those who actually needed the scientific means do not have them. This is the reason for the statement: there is nothing there. The other parallel is also possible: there is everything there. That is the tremendous difficulty of finding one's way. Unless the present-day student, through a particularly favorable karma, through the whole way his soul is directed, comes to the realization that there is a spiritual world, he is dissuaded from it, and the fact that there is a spiritual world seems simply ridiculous to him. So today's student is quite clear, for example, that he has to look for the germ in the mother's body, but he does not realize that a human germ or an animal germ should be seen as it emerges from the elements of reality, namely that germination is based on the fact that at one point in the maternal organism the albumen breaks down, but this disintegration is immediately arrested by the cosmic forces beginning to work in it, and the whole macrocosm expresses itself in miniature in the disintegrating but immediately reassembling albumen, so that the form of the universe is actually expressed in the development of the embryo. The motherly organism only provides the material that must first disintegrate so that the macrocosm can rebuild it. If you look at germination through today's scientific eyes, it is exactly the same as taking a paper rose and claiming that you have just plucked it from a rose bush. In these matters, it is evident that a thorough reversal is necessary in all areas of science, as well as in the arts and in religion. Even in the religious field, the most extreme materialism prevails.

In Germany, the circumstances are particularly difficult. Over time, people lose all courage to live. But this courage to live can only come from the supersensible world. Doubt is entirely possible; it comes from the sense world. The courage to overcome doubt comes from the supersensible world. And it takes courage to look at things in the right way. In the course of natural science which I gave at Christmas in Dornach, I pointed out the fact that where atoms arise, there is death. Atomism is the science of what is dead. Modern science is approaching the anthroposophical-scientific view by stating many facts. Everywhere one can find facts that point to the spiritual-scientific. Radium, for example, is the most striking case of disintegrating matter, producing atomized atoms. Facts are everywhere to be found that lead to the spiritual, but the external science rejects this lead to the spiritual for lack of courage.

In the economy, too, it is the case today that since the 19th century we have had a world economy instead of many national economies. The world economy is already much faster than the national economy; this slow pace of the national economy can be seen even in the smallest of its reaches. The trains that run through the national economy travel slower than those that arrive in Stuttgart today, that is, those that run through the world economy. And if you now want to go back from the world economy to the national economy, this can only mean destroying what has already been achieved and what exists.

A participant then asks how one could develop a relationship to architecture and sculpture.

Rudolf Steiner: It depends very much on the world view. Today's world view, which is based only on pure logic and sensory observation, must necessarily imagine that the world is nailed down somewhere with boards. We have set ourselves external natural boundaries that we cannot get beyond. In logic, we have the inner legislation that human beings give themselves, quite apart from nature. All knowledge, even purely scientific knowledge, must lead to the purely artistic. One must educate oneself to be an artist, so that one shapes forms as they are shaped in nature. But this can be learned as soon as one finds one's way to the point where nature itself becomes an artist. One must also deepen one's knowledge of nature to such an extent that it is only possible to regard plants, animals and humans as artists. Only then can one begin to recognize the infinitely interesting static and dynamic relationships that the human body alone encompasses. Then one will see how each bone, so to speak, represents a system of beams; how there is a difference between standing with legs apart at the front or bringing one leg forward and standing with a step. Every human being is a finely wrought structure in and of himself. The older religions taught their students, who were to be initiated, about the wonderful position of a person in the world through their own dynamic and static relationships. When you look at a statue of Buddha, you see the dynamics and statics of the human being. The fact that the legs are placed wide under the upper body, the structure and the statics of the upper body are recognized and particularly emphasized. As far as one studies the human being in motion and standing, one gets the form of architecture. A perfect building is nothing other than the perfect standing and walking of the human being. Every culture has conceived and represented this static and dynamic in the human being through its architecture in a different way. The Assyrian-Babylonian culture represented the proclamation of the Logos more through the leaning forward of the human being, the Greek culture through the calm standing. One need only be familiar with the way in which the human being stands in the world in order to recognize all forms of construction in a lively way. Today, of course, the architectural imagination is very limited. And yet today's architectural style must be one that is born out of the human experience of self, that flows from the “know thyself”. This has been attempted at the Goetheanum.

If we move from the human being's movement to the human being's form, we come from architecture to sculpture. Sculpture is the experience of the human being's form. To move from architecture to sculpture means to move from the human being's equilibrium to his form. The more knowledge of the human being advances, the more art, the more differentiated architecture and sculpture will be possible, art that is close to the human being. But in order to be able to move on to the form of the human being, an independently built social life, built on selflessness and love, is necessary in today's world. The Greeks could still feel their own form by being in the world. Today's man must find the sculpture that is necessary in today's world by looking at the other man in a synthetically constructive way. The Greeks had no need to look at other people; they found the plasticity they needed by experiencing their own bodies.

Art is based on revealing the secret forces of nature. We need art to understand people and nature. So what we need to bring into today's sculpture is a living artistic view of the human being. We must look at the human being in such a way that we see how, on the one hand, in the form of the head, as I tried to shape it in the group at the Goetheanum, the Luciferic life is expressed, and how, on the other hand, as a counterpoint, Ahriman is active in the hardening of the bone skeleton, and how the interaction of the two then forms the ideal human being. We must regain the human form.

Hebrew culture has deeply embodied the moral impulses inherent in its religion. But it did not dare to make an image of its God. Gradually, through evolution, it came to the logical-empirical conception of human nature and then lost the artistic. So it came about that there is no longer a convergence of world view and art. On the one hand, there is the logical-empirical world view, on the other, artistic imagination.

No connection has yet been created between the view of the laws of nature detached from the human being on the one hand and artistic arbitrariness on the other. The architecture and sculpture of the future will have to be created from the knowledge of the human being in his full form.

A participant: About the difficulties students face in asserting themselves with anthroposophical works.

Rudolf Steiner: The Anthroposophical Society must learn to recognize how important it is that the work done within its framework is not ignored; it must come to recognize the achievements. It must learn to appreciate work such as that of Dr. von Baravalle or the brochure by Caroline von Heydebrand, “Against Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy”. Little by little, even if our research institutes have already solved the tasks that lie in the natural science courses and cycles, it must come to pass that even our opponents will say that there is something to be respected in the work being done in the Anthroposophical Society. We need to train ourselves to recognize human achievements. Today, a student who writes an anthroposophical dissertation is rejected! The Society must become a place where such things become “conscience”, so that it can no longer happen that a professor rejects an anthroposophically oriented work for these reasons. The research institutes, in which people are involved in practice, must stand behind it so that the student who works in a seminar or does a doctoral thesis also gets it developed. The Anthroposophical Society must become such that the professor must accept an anthroposophically oriented seminar paper or dissertation, provided it is substantial enough, because he is concerned that otherwise he will get the Anthroposophical Society on his hands.

Rudolf Steiner asks whether representatives of the youth will come to the delegates' meeting.

A youth representative says a few words about the delegates' meeting. Rudolf Steiner: It would be good if something could be presented in as comprehensive a form as possible and taken completely seriously on the three main questions that must be addressed here:

Firstly: What is the situation regarding the student and youth movement?

Secondly: What experiences do people have at university who feel their full humanity through anthroposophy?

Thirdly: What do academics and younger people expect from the Anthroposophical Society?

These things must, of course, be brought to bear by grasping them in a penetrating way. Nietzsche showed in a penetrating way what the situation was at our educational institutions at the turn of the 1960s. He brilliantly described how the educational institutions should be and what he expected of them. Unfortunately, Nietzsche has almost been forgotten. Today, what Nietzsche described at the time would have to be surpassed. These three questions, which have just been characterized, are the most important. And if we succeed in bringing personalities into the center of the Anthroposophical Society who not only have the highest interest in their field, but also attention to everything that is going on in the Society and everywhere, then everything will be fine. What has been lacking is interest and attention. This is shown by the fact that the emergence of the religious movement went unnoticed until it occurred. Attention and interest must be paid to everything in the Anthroposophical Society. For it is the case that thoughts do not grow, they remain unchanged, but that attention and interest grow and can bear fruit.

Above all, one must seek and follow the path into the supersensible worlds with clarity and determination. Then one will also find the right relationship with people. And the other way around: if one has found the right relationship with people, then one is no longer far from entering the supersensible worlds.

Ill

From the Youth Section of the Free University