The Constitution of the General Anthroposophical Society

GA 260a — 23 March 1924

From the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science III

What else I have to say to the younger members

Wherever the “youth movement” appears today, it reveals that it lives out of a sense of deprivation. What does the young person who becomes aware of his youth ‘lack’? After all, there is so much to “learn” within today's civilization. It contains not only a wealth of knowledge, but an abundance of it.

It is easy to believe that this superabundance confuses young people, that they cannot “understand” the content of this superabundance. But experience shows that this belief is false. Young people “understand” very well what civilization offers them. One can understand what can be grasped in thought. And despite its abundance, our civilization today can almost entirely be grasped in thought.

When young people begin to develop a relationship with civilization, they realize that they understand it. And a true instinct tells them that this understanding, this intellectual grasp, should also be their future destiny. But “understanding” alone is not enough to be young. One can only be young if one experiences with all one's heart and soul what awaits understanding. And as a young person, one senses that one grows old when one gradually transforms what one has experienced into what one understands.

Today's youth absorbs something from civilization that makes one grow old, but not something that makes one young. This civilization has almost nothing to offer the first stage of life. One would have to enter the world at the age of twenty today to be able to permeate oneself with the content of civilization.

This civilization has lost its spirit. It brings only matter into thought. These thoughts cannot be experienced; they can only be understood. And once they have been understood, they lie immutable, rock-hard in the soul. They are already completely mature when they arise; therefore, they cannot grow. But young people must grow, and they want what they take into their souls to be able to grow with them.

A true spiritual science can only reveal itself in thought. Only these thoughts are visible, can be experienced; they cannot be absorbed by anyone with a higher degree of maturity than they themselves have. But they are related to the essence of the human being. They grow and mature with them. If someone gives me, as an eighteen-year-old, thoughts from the material world, I absorb them in the same way as I would if I were forty or fifty years old. If someone lets me experience thoughts that spring from the spirit in his human development, he may be seventy years old; if I myself am only eighteen, they unite harmoniously with my eighteen-year-old state of mind and grow as I myself grow.

The materialistic way of thinking and viewing the world demands that young people fill themselves inwardly with “old” things. But young people want to experience their youth. That is why the “experience of age” becomes a deprivation for young people. The Youth Section at the Goetheanum wants to give young people a living insight, through which they can grasp their youth in a lively way. Today's civilization has no ideas with which to experience “youth.” A true spiritual science will have such ideas.

When older people today hear young people speak, they often have the feeling: oh, how old-fashioned the words coming from the mouths of young people sound! But these are the words that young people find among the “old” today. They absorb them, but they do not unite them with themselves. When they try to experience them, they feel untrue. They speak what cannot be true in them, and they carry their truth within themselves without being able to reveal it to themselves. It suffocates them; it becomes an inner nightmare.

Young people want freedom of breath in their lively spiritual life so that the nightmare pressure disappears. They want to awaken to a healthy spiritual outlook so that their consciousness can be filled with the experience of being young.

Young people want to be awake in their youth, but the thoughts of materialistic civilization allow them only to dream of it. But one can only dream when one's consciousness has been dulled. Thus, the consciousness of youth must wander through mechanical reality, dulled. Its hammer blows, its electric waves, strike into dreams. But they cannot bring about awakening. For they are not human; they are superhuman. Spiritual science can be for souls who want to awaken. It does not merely want to impart knowledge to people, but to bring them closer to life. Then they will have the freedom to transform life into knowledge.

People who believe themselves to be poets, but who are really just philistines, object: take away the dreams of youth, bring them to awakening, and you take away the best of their youth. Those who speak in this way do not know that dreams only attain their full value when they are illuminated by the light of wakefulness. Mechanistic civilization does not bring youthful dreams to fruition in their joyful radiance, but wears them down as they arise, so that they become oppressive and burdensome.

Only in such images can what the Youth Section wants to achieve be expressed here. It will not publish a “program”; it will not give an explanation of the “essence of youth.” It will try to bring to life what its founders themselves can experience in the deprivations of young people today. This will give rise to a “youth wisdom” that can unfold anew every day in life.

Young people living at the Goetheanum immediately after the announcement of the Youth Section and ever since have continuously expressed their desire to work within this section. Enthusiasm speaks from these expressions. In the first appeal, I said that the Youth Section will be able to work if it is understood what is meant by it. I truly believe that enthusiasm can bring about the right kind of “understanding.” Not the kind of “understanding” I have spoken of here, which young people lack, but the kind of understanding that is described with the same words, yet is something quite different. An understanding that comes not from the intellect, but from the whole human being.

The desire of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society can only be to feel receptive enthusiasm. Then it can hope that the vitality of spiritual science will be sufficient to give this enthusiasm what it would like to carry. To live with young people in such a way that they can carry their youth into old age in true humanity – that is what this Executive Council would like, because it believes that this is precisely what young people lack and what their longing hearts desire.