Social Questions

GA 305 — 28 August 1922, Oxford

Social impulses in the present

Ladies and gentlemen! Anyone who wants to think about social issues in the present must first and foremost take into account that in the real world, effects arise from causes that one usually does not think about when only looking at the surface. Such an approach allows us to see what is happening on the surface of reality, but not the actual deeper causes, the deeper reasons. That is why so many well-intentioned utopian ideas have emerged and continue to emerge, with which people believe they can cope with social life as it presents itself today. I have now attempted, at a very important moment, the moment between the end of the war and the Versailles peace attempt, to outline in a few lines how one might conceive of the structure as an organic one in the present social organism according to the three parts of social life that I took the liberty of characterizing in my last lecture.

In my last lecture, I drew attention to how, in the course of the historical development of humanity, three strongly divergent currents emerged from an original current, the theocratic current and how spiritual life, legal and state life, and economic life currently coexist in the social organism. I expressly noted that I do not believe that the social organism needs to be divided into these three parts in theory. In my realistic, non-theoretical view, that would be like someone wanting to think about how to divide human beings into head, chest, and limbs. The division in the social organism has become historical and is simply there today, and today it is not a question of thinking about how to divide the social organism into three parts, but how to find the connecting links between the three parts that are there.

If one wants to think correctly about this question as the fundamental social question of our time, then one must think in a completely realistic way, thinking only from the facts. But then one thinks for a specific time and for a specific place. And in my book, “The Key Points of the Social Question,” because the book was requested by friends in Stuttgart in southern Germany — I did not write it on my own initiative, it was requested of me — I wrote this book for that time, spring 1919, and that place, southern Germany, because I imagined that when people came to their senses, their will at that time and in that place might be such that they would find understanding for what is indicated in this book, not as program points, but as directions of will.

Now the situation is such that the question touched upon in this book is quite different for the East of the civilized world, for Russia, Asia, quite different for Central Europe, and quite different for the West, for England and America. This is the result of realistic thinking. For what I characterized in the last lecture, the emergence of the industrial world order from the two earlier ones, so that it continues alongside them as a special current, developed primarily under the influence of the Western countries. It developed under the influence of what was customary, habitual, and socially orderly in the Western countries in the 18th century, and it fitted in with that. To characterize it more concretely and precisely, one must say that England has become the great trading nation in the course of recent historical development. What I would say is the third most important word in the social proletarian question today, capital, has developed for Western Europe under the influence of major trade relations as commercial capital.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this gives a thing a very specific character, because the commercial nature has developed organically in recent times from Western lifestyles and customs. Karl Marx actually saw something different in England than what he had around him in Germany. He brought only the theory, the thinking, the dialectic from Germany. Here he saw a foreign social structure. And so one must say: everything that then emerged as industrial order appeared in continuous development as the next link in commercial development in the West. Industry developed organically out of trade.

This was not the case in Central Europe and in the representative country of Central Europe, Germany. Until the middle of the 19th century, Germany was essentially an agricultural country, a country in which agriculture was by far the dominant industry. And what existed as modern industry, this modern industrial trend that stood alongside the other two, was a state structure, a structure that became increasingly consolidated by the state and therefore developed a tendency to integrate and absorb industrialism into the state structure.

Just compare Central Europe as it was before the war with Western Europe before the war. In Western Europe, the economic essence has maintained a certain emancipation from the state, and the spiritual essence even more so. It stands in a certain independence from the other two elements.

In Central Europe, a compact mass of spiritual life, legal state and constitutional life, and economic life emerged. In Germany, therefore, it was necessary to think about how to separate the three elements in order to bring them together organically, how they should be placed side by side in order to make them effective side by side, in order to bring the bonds between them together.

Here in the West, the three elements exist side by side, clearly separated from one another, and even spatially, intellectual life is concentrated in places such as Oxford, where one has the feeling that there is no state or economic world outside, as if everything intellectual stood sovereign and autonomous. But one also has the feeling that what develops in this sovereign intellectual life no longer has the power to influence the other two elements. It is something that lives only within itself, that is not organically woven into the other two elements.

In Germany, one has the feeling that spiritual life is so embedded in state life that it first has to be helped to its feet so that it can stand independently. Here, one has the feeling that spiritual life is so independent that it does not concern itself with the other members at all. This gives a significantly different coloration when one thinks realistically about the whole social question of the present and the basic impulse of the social question in our days.

For this reason, I believe that my “Key Points of the Social Question,” although they are almost forgotten in Germany today — that is a slight exaggeration, but it is almost true — although they are almost forgotten in Germany today, and although they spread enormously quickly in 1919, that is quite natural. For the time when what is written in the “Key Points of the Social Question” should be realized has passed for Central Europe. It passed at the moment when the sharp decline in currency occurred, which completely tied the hands of the German economy.

When the “Key Points of the Social Question” were published, many people asked me: Yes, that would all be very nice, but now the main thing is how we can improve the currency. — At that time, it was still relatively good compared to today's disgraceful state. I could only say: It's in the “Key Points” how to improve the currency. But people didn't see it. They didn't know where to find the answer to the question, but instead looked for the answer somewhere on the surface, not in the depths. People didn't understand that the book itself was the answer.

Well, that is one of the basic impulses in the social life of our time. When you try to think from reality, to give people answers based on reality, they don't understand them, because they come up with theories, with a head full of “capital” and “surplus value” and “class struggle” and all sorts of things, and with all the old prejudices. They come with what are old habits of thinking. And today, especially in practical life, theories are killing reality. That is the peculiar mystery of our time, that the practitioners have all become theorists, that they all have ideas in their heads that they have forged together, for my sake, out of a factory, and want to master the whole of social life with these theoretical ideas.

That is why I believe that in the future my “Key Points” should be read more in the West and in Russia, that in Germany today they actually have no chance of having an effect. For in the West, for example, one can still see a great deal in this book, because it sets out, without utopia, how the three members should stand side by side and interlock. The timing is irrelevant for the West, because there is still much to be done there in terms of the correct structuring of the three currents: intellectual life, economic life, and state-legal life.

But above all, we must learn to think in a truly modern way in order to arrive at social judgment in the modern sense — let us not take this superficially, ladies and gentlemen — in order to arrive at social judgment, at social judgment-forming, in the modern sense. We can only do this if we look beneath the surface of social phenomena, into the depths. And this leads to a peculiar fact today. It leads to the fact that the individual, no matter how clever he may be, no matter how intelligent and, for my part, how idealistic and practical he may be—I would like to underline “practical” three times—that he, as an individual, cannot form a social judgment at all. It is, I would say, a social mystery, ladies and gentlemen, that every individual social judgment is wrong.

Take a look at the tremendously clever judgments that were made when the gold standard was to be introduced in Europe. Anyone who delves into what was said at the time in trade associations and parliaments—I say this not with irony, but with complete conviction—will find an excellent example of human intelligence. One cannot help but feel a deep respect when delving into what all these tremendously intelligent people said from the mid-19th century onwards about the influence of the gold standard on the social structure of the world. Above all, it has been proven so logically and practically that it inspires tremendous respect: it has been proven that when the gold standard comes, free trade will flourish.

The opposite has happened. As a direct consequence of the gold standard, it has even been necessary to re-establish customs barriers. This means that the most intelligent people talked nonsense when they looked to the future. This is not a criticism. It is because, when it comes to social judgment, the most intelligent people perhaps talk the most nonsense the more intelligent they are when they speak as individuals; when they judge solely on the basis of what can emerge from individual human individuality.

Therefore, today it is not a question of allowing ourselves to be influenced by what is widely regarded as social misery. Individuals are unable to form a judgment between cause and effect in social life. We must go deeper. We must look into the structure of humanity. We must ask ourselves: How can a real social judgment be reached?

In the old social judgments, which we do not want to evoke again, which belonged to an ancient time, the time of theocracies, in these old judgments, social judgment was not conscious, but was made unconsciously; but it was made by groups of people.

It is not true that the family was the first thing in the social order. The family is a late product that only appeared later in society. Primitive humans did not think about what social judgment should be; they allowed themselves to be inspired by the priesthood and understood this with their unconscious. But these social judgments, these unconscious ones, only arose when people were part of a structure – when they were part of a structure through blood ties and other bonds. Social groups had an understanding, social groups, not individuals; social groups that lived together. And from the coexistence of the groups, true sociality emerged. In the minds of people, what was right developed out of the group, including democracy and with it the democratic idea. This only reached its culmination over time. The individual human being entered the stage of world history. But he could still bring with him what the groups had formed. It lived on in tradition. This also entered into the legal and state order, but no longer entered into that which is detached from human beings, into the mechanical, industrial order. There it has no effect, there it no longer enters.

Now, we see that it is necessary to form something again within the economic order that is similar to the original social groups in a fully conscious humanity. In my book “The Key Points of the Social Question,” I referred to associations where social judgment does not arise from the individual, but from what lives together in the association, what is lived out together, in those associations that consumers, producers, and traders form among themselves. So that once again we have social groups from which, with full consciousness, the judgment is formed that the individual cannot form. No matter how long one thinks about a solution to the social question, all thinking is nonsense. The only thing that makes sense is to form social groups from which one can expect partial solutions to the social question to emerge, so that the people who judge together produce something that comes close to a partial solution to the social question for some place and some time, so that it fits into humanity.

This is what is particularly necessary today, and what is so little understood. I felt how little this is understood when I published my “Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the 1890s. I had come to feel this in a very partial area of the social question.

At that time, I also had to briefly touch on the women's issue as a social issue, and at that time—thirty years ago now—I did not say: This is how you solve the women's issue, because it is completely irrelevant what individuals imagine today; it may have some significance in the arts and culture section, it may be something you can write novels about, but it does not touch on reality. That is why I said at the time: First you have to ask women properly what they think, then you can gain a basis from reality for what can happen.

Women were not really asked at the time, because the few women who had spoken up until then had only expressed male opinions by simply applying the male way of thinking that had always prevailed from the lowest elementary school class to the universities. These women did not want to integrate social judgment into the social fabric at all. They did not ask how social life would turn out depending on what kind of skirt one had to wear; they strove—forgive me for mentioning this, even though it is frowned upon in England—they strove to wear trousers like men, they strove to become doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and schoolteachers, just as men had become; not to insert femininity into the social organism, not to take reality, but to start from a theory. For theory has been brought to the greatest sterility in our time. One must also realize that one should not form a theoretical judgment on the women's question, but first listen to real women. For it is reality that is at stake.

And so, in the whole social question, we should not answer theoretically: How should entrepreneurs and workers position themselves? How should the factory be structured in social terms? Instead, we should first form the right associations, the right groups of people, from which the answer will then come. We should ask the right questions and wait to see how the answers come from the connections between people.

So if you want to write books, you have to write books that do not give definitive answers, but rather point out how groups of people will provide answers when these people are brought together in the right way. A book must be based on social thinking and attitudes if it is to correctly address the social impulses of our time. I will continue to talk about this in the second section.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is extremely difficult to talk about practical thinking in the present day. People believe themselves to be realists, but in fact one encounters bizarre theories everywhere, which then have an effect on life. To make myself completely clear about what I still have to say here, allow me to make a personal remark.

I believe that what needs to be said about the threefold social order can indeed be read today in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question,” especially outside of Germany; but I myself was compelled, through practical and realistic thinking, to express things differently when I once wrote about the subject for a Swiss magazine outside Germany. And there you will find the essay that is now reprinted in The Hibbert Journal. It is written internationally because it is written for all people from the outset. But that is not how things are understood today. That is why I must make this personal remark, so that the following things, which are important for understanding social life in the present, so that the following things I have to say are correctly understood.

I am completely indifferent to any ‘theory’, and therefore I consider any formulation of ideas and concepts to be merely a language for expressing reality. If I find that reality can be expressed using the concepts formed by materialists, then I express what is to be said about reality in materialistic terms. If I find that the idealists have suitable concepts to express something truly, then I express it idealistically. Materialism, idealism, realism—in theory, they are all the same to me; I regard them as a language for expressing realities. Therefore, it is very easy to find, if at one time I expressed what I wanted to say in the words of Ernst Haeckel, that the writings I wrote at that time have a form that could give rise to calling me a materialist; and so one can find contradiction upon contradiction.

But that is how life is, especially the complicated life of modern times. If we want to think practically about social issues, we must take into account that everything we have in the way of naturalism, idealism, materialism, and spiritualism stems from legalistic-logical thinking, which is no longer appropriate for the present day; but neither are “industrialism,” “communism,” or “socialism.” All these things are good for expressing one thing or another, but when taken as theories, slogans, or directives for agitation, they are all already worn out. That is why it is so difficult to find titles. For example, I have chosen a title for my lecture tomorrow that I find basically repugnant because it basically reflects old slogans, but they no longer apply today. Today, we have to immerse ourselves in real life. That is not idealistic, it is real, and it demands to be viewed from a wide variety of perspectives. I have already said it: you photograph the tree from one side = “materialism”; we photograph the tree from the other side = ‘idealism’; the tree photographed from the third side = “naturalism.” You photograph social life from one side = “socialism”; from the other side = ‘autocracy’; from the third side = “communism.” But these are not things that should be used today. Today, we simply do not have the right instinct for finding concepts that must be derived from today's life, which is permeated everywhere by industrialism. One should only consider how intensely life has affected past epochs of humanity. Theocracy was once so intensely imposed on all social life that even the economy, as I said the day before yesterday, grew directly out of theocratic directives. But that only goes as far as agriculture. Agriculture can be fully integrated into a social organism that is theocratic in nature, because it lives in the human heart to bring land and soil together with the theocratic. Ask the person who has grown together with the land, with the soil, what bread means to him. For him, bread is first and foremost a gift from God. Here you see in the use of words that what he has on his table is connected with what he experiences in theocracy.

And then the social orders that I discussed the day before yesterday, which are based on trade and commerce, take shape. The question of work arises. I tried to discuss its origins in Roman culture the day before yesterday. And then a completely different way of thinking emerges. All the concepts we have, property, human rights versus human rights, took on a legal-dialectical-logical coloring at that time. “God willed it” was the social motto of theocracies. “People have to agree among themselves” — that became the social motto in the legal-state order.

And that had such an intense effect that it left its mark on all of life. Not only what I said the day before yesterday, that theosophy became a theology, but even more intensely, it entered into life.

Please take a look at the magnificent painting by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel in Rome: Christ, the judge of the world, from the time when legal-state life most intensely permeated everything. But a religious mystery was to be painted on the wall of the central place of religious activity.

Do you think that if Christ had been painted from the ancient Oriental theocracy, he would have turned out the way Michelangelo painted him? Never! He would have become the one who in some way hands down the gifts of the world, the graces that man can receive, with blessing hands, and he would have become the world god who blesses and gives to man.

What is Christ in Michelangelo's painting? The world judge, the great world jurist who rewards the good and punishes the wicked. The whole picture is legalistic, steeped in the time from which it was born. The whole social impulse of the time can still be seen artistically in this picture. The former view of the world of gods, where God was simply God, has been transformed in such a way that the world view has become a world jurisprudence. God is the great jurist in Michelangelo's painting. Jurisprudence penetrates into the most intimate threads of thought, including religion. Religion becomes a sense of what is just, unjust, good, and evil, and how to reward or punish it. The world does not end in something it ended in in the ancient Orient: the reunification of humanity with the divine substance. Instead, the world approaches its end in the great legal session, where the fate of the world is decided by law.

Michelangelo painted this way. Adam Smith thought this way. But he thought in the other direction. Michelangelo painted from the perspective of theocracy, and as an artist, the theocratic order slipped into the legal one for him. Adam Smith thought entirely in legal terms, as did Ricardo and Karl Marx, and they wanted to impose this legal thinking on the new industrial order, which no longer presents people in the same way as previous orders did.

In the theocratic order, man was placed on the ground, on the land; he had grown together with it. And he felt how he could grow together with this land when the theocratic social order was behind him. The center, the focal point, was the place where the inspired ones gave the directives, which in later times became the village with the surrounding land and the church. In the course of human development, the city came into being. The city arose from the social order of jurisprudence. Now there is no longer the contrast between farmer and priest, but between city and country.

However, this is entirely interwoven with legal categories. Based on these legal categories, those who then combined the social organisms of city and country into a state also thought in this way; this is how they continued to think, from Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx. Abstract legal categories prevail everywhere, even if they are treated critically by Karl Marx — positively by Adam Smith, negatively by Karl Marx — but he works entirely in legal terms. These legal terms have now become common property of humanity, which is no longer connected to anything.

The farmer was connected to the land. The merchant, the tradesman, was connected to other people. We don't study properly how one person became valuable to another when he bought or sold something that he had made himself, something to which he was still connected. What was decisive was what was thought in legal terms. The decisive factor for a fair price was what worked from person to person, what took place between town and country, the reciprocity, what people had to agree among themselves.

Now came the time when humanity was confronted with machines and technology. People in particular, who are now placed in the mechanical world, are torn away from all their former circumstances, no longer connected to the land, no longer connected to what used to happen between people in the days when trade and commerce dominated. They are left to their own humanity.

And in this context, the social structure is developing with great abstraction. The entrepreneur stands there, and basically he only has the possibility of calculating the balance sheet, of calculating what results from the enterprise, because all other factors escape his observation. He no longer has any relationship with human beings; he has a relationship with what has gone into the books from the human sphere. That is why it is extremely difficult for so-called practitioners today to understand truly correct thinking.

This became apparent when an attempt was made to establish something in practice that would in turn work its way into concrete life, where those who manage something do not merely manage according to the books, but are involved in real, concrete undertakings with their thinking. But no employees could be found. The majority of the employees stood up and said: That is the theorist who thinks something out; we are the practitioners. We as practitioners know how it is. — But what did these practitioners have in mind? A few concepts, entirely theoretical concepts, from which they imagined how things must be here and there. They were philosophers, but philosophers of the few concepts that they had formed from a corner of economic life, and now they said broadly: These theoretical concepts are the practice, and if anyone comes up with something else, then they simply don't understand anything at all.

It is therefore so incredibly difficult to get anything done in the world today with “practical” thinking, because the practitioners are all theorists, and indeed the most abstract theorists.

And so today we have people standing there, people of all classes standing there, because even the concepts of “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat,” “medical profession” and “priesthood” are no longer valid today. We can no longer do anything with these old conceptual coins. Because if we judge realistically—forgive me for using this image that has already been beaten to death—when I met our esteemed co-chairman in the streets wearing his robe and cap, I really could no longer tell whether he was a priest or something else. We are unable to distinguish between things because we are stuck in life with fixed concepts.

We must set everything in motion again, we must immerse ourselves in life, we must now see how industrialism has developed, how it has detached itself from humanity. In every door lock, just as in the Gothic church, there used to be something human inside. This is where social impulses emanated from.

In what the worker does in the factory today, and in what the architect creates as a department store in its aesthetic hideousness — which, however, is just right for the present, because the department store is the style, the architectural style of the present — nothing is expressed that has any connection to human beings. That is why we need something that radiates from within again.

The essence of the spirit radiated from the soil in such a way that people said: What the soil gives me, the bread, is a gift from God. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, theocracy not only grew down from heaven to earth, theocracy grew out of the ground with every stalk of wheat. That lived in human souls. And later, when people gave what they had acquired to others, a human relationship was established in trade and commerce.

But a human relationship with the machine – that is impossible. The machine is cold, it lives coldly. And we cannot form a social judgment because we do not understand how to give humans a human content from somewhere else entirely, which cannot emerge from the machine in the same way as it does from the soil. Wheat stalks grow from the soil, which are a gift from God to humans; trade and commerce give rise to what plays out between humans, where humans have the feeling: You must be decent to others. A gift from God does not exactly grow out of the machine; but even with decency towards the machine, it does not work properly. And so, an age like this, permeated by industrialism, needs a human content that is not of this earth, that is not of this earth at all, that fills the souls from the spiritual world.

As long as the earth gave spirituality to human beings, there was no need to attain spirituality in free spirituality. As long as the feeling between human beings was still strong, there was no need to attain spirituality in free spirituality. Today, we are dependent on this, now that nature, which gives God's gifts, has largely been transformed into the world of means of production, which has been created by humans in an abstract way as a second nature. Today, we need the world of free spirituality to go with the means of production, which gives us content.

With this content, one can also approach those with whom one wants to form associations. You see, I have recent experiences from Dornach, where we also have a small army of workers, a small workers' company. These workers don't just want to work, they also want to have something human. And we have also come to the conclusion that we should give workers something human. But we talk to them about all kinds of economic things, about capitalism, socialism, bourgeoisism, communism, and so on. At first, people believe that this will grab their attention. And the workers' leaders believe most of all that they should only talk to people about these things. Well, I also started out – when I finally had to take this matter into my own hands in Dornach – I also started out by talking more about economic issues. One day, out of the crowd of workers, whom I always let choose the topic themselves at the beginning of the lesson, I don't talk to these people about a topic that I choose myself, but I let them tell me the topic at the beginning of the lesson and then talk about it — one of them stood up, took our magazine “Die Drei” out of his pocket and said he wanted to know what it was actually like when the Earth was still a moon, i.e., when it was undergoing a completely different development. And since that time, things have developed in such a way that people talk about the nature of human beings, about the integration of human beings into the cosmos, in the way they understand things. Imagine, I was already able to talk to proletarians today about the influences of the zodiac signs in such a way that they take it for granted.

We must first find a way to recognize what is inside others in terms of soul and spirit, and what is inside us, if we want to join together with them in associations. We must bridge the gaps that have formed. That is the first requirement.

Therefore, the social question in its deepest sense is first and foremost a spiritual question: How do we spread a unified spirituality among people? Then we will be able to come together in associations in the economic sphere, from which the social question can be shaped in a concrete way and partially — I must always say — solved.

But today we still think entirely in the old categories. We develop legal thinking, but we do not yet develop economic thinking, because — as paradoxical as it sounds — economic thinking means thinking in freedom. Precisely at a time when a second nature has emerged in the means of production, at a time when the spirit has completely disappeared from the tools of labor, from the means of production, we need a spirituality that is no longer drawn from nature, that is not drawn in the way it was drawn in theocracy from what was still more physically alive in human beings, but that is freely attained and has substance.

I know that this sounds most utopian to people today, but it is the most practical thing. You can establish as many social communities as you like, create as many associations as you like, create as many trade unions and cooperatives as you like — with the concepts, with the thinking that has crept in from the Middle Ages into modern times, with this thinking, the social question does not even get off the ground, let alone find a partial solution. Today, the social question has become the world question.

But what has joined the thinking that judges the social organism entirely in terms of legal dialectics and customary morality? It has been joined by the beautiful, the joyful, the wonderful charity, human mercy, human compassion. Now that the social question has become a burning global issue, we see collection boxes for the East popping up everywhere in Western Europe. Money is being collected. Very, very nice! There is nothing to object to, and I would like to say that the more one can contribute to this collection, the more one should do so. But what happens as a result is the past, not the future. All of this, including this compassion, including this charity, is still based on medieval thinking. And I see two images: the medieval Gothic cathedral, where the magnificent vestments of the prelates were stored, those prelates who meanwhile stored their vestments in the cathedrals, sat together in their own dwellings and did something that came to light in a strange way when a Swiss newspaper published the menu a few months ago, the Christmas menu for the prelates who were once catered for in a Swiss cathedral during Christmas. You would be astonished if I told you the number of pigs that were eaten by the prelates during the holy days of Christmas at that time. Around these cathedrals were armies of poor people who were given alms. It was entirely in the style and spirit of the Middle Ages; it could not have been otherwise. It was taken for granted at the time. Whether one finds this beautiful or ugly in today's terms is irrelevant, because it was taken for granted at the time.

But isn't it the same today when, on the one hand, there is misery in Russia—the poor who camp in front of the cathedrals—and, on the other hand, there is collection? Good, very good, and well done. But that doesn't even touch on today's social issues, let alone solve them in any way. Because we shouldn't ignore the fact that, due to the impotence of our social thinking today, voices are being heard everywhere that don't say, “We are grateful for what we are given as alms,” but rather say, It is the worst thing of all that we are given alms, because from this we see that there are still people who can give alms. They should no longer exist!

This is what one must feel with all one's heart as the fundamental impulse of the social organism in our time, which is actually already the world organism, but which is everywhere seen only in a national sense. And that is what humanity should realize today, that above all else, we need something that bridges the gaps that exist in the social order.

Why do we talk so much about social issues today? Because we have become thoroughly antisocial. People usually talk most theoretically about what is not there in their feelings and instincts. What is there in their feelings and instincts is not discussed theoretically. If there were social feeling in humanity, we would hear very little about social theories and social agitation. People become theorists in any field when they lack something. Theories are actually always about what is not real. But today we must seek real life; that is what matters above all else. This requires more effort than devising a theory. But human progress will not advance if it does not truly find its way into life, for it is the theoretical mind that has fractured our world today, that is bringing our civilization close to chaos; it is the theoretical spirit. And the spirit of life is the only thing that will be able to lead us forward.

That is what, I must say once again, should be felt deep in our hearts as the fundamental impulse of the social question of the present. If we understand how people find other people, then we will have the opportunity to steer social issues in the right direction.

What have the higher classes done in one area? Yes, they have stuck their noses into proletarian misery and turned it into works of art. One can have a clear idea of the theocratic God, Christ—Michelangelo painted the Judge of the World. What must the one who is shaped out of the industrial order look like—in Dornach we are trying to do it. But people still don't understand this today because they are not yet able to relate the spiritual world to the cold, mechanical world. They do not yet have a way of thinking that, like the legal and theocratic thinking of earlier times, is based on reality, on today's cold reality, and can penetrate this cold reality. That is why the higher classes have stuck their noses into the misery and formed something, well, like the poets, sculptors, and painters of the present have formed: social art. It has turned into abominable sentimentality, because people are not yet fulfilled by what can really be added to the human order out of free spirituality. “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,” painted today, is truly sentimental, disgusting, if one does not approach it with prejudice, with preconceptions. The point is that one must work with the same force that comes from industrialism, but to which one must now add free spirituality, just as one was once able to work through theocracy with agriculture, just as one was once able to work through jurisprudence with commerce. So it is important that people develop a social way of thinking, social knowledge and concepts, which cannot be obtained unless one disregards abstract concepts such as “capital,” “surplus value,” and so on. Social concepts can only be acquired by bringing warmth and revealing spirituality to the cold machinery. And it is precisely those who walk among the machines today who, even if they do not know it, want real spirituality so that they do not have only the old materialism with which they otherwise fill their hearts.

The countryside and the city have been added to the village and the church. They were ruled by social thinking. The factory no longer belongs to the city. The factory is a new social entity. But the factory is also singled out as a special demon from the entire world order. The factory no longer has anything spiritual about it. The spiritual must be brought in from the other side. Therefore, the social question of today is, in the most eminent sense, a spiritual question. We must find a way not only to stick our noses into proletarian misery, but we must also find a spirituality that comes from our hearts in a completely natural way, but which also comes from the hearts of those to whom we speak, even if they are people of the lowest class. Just as the sun shines on all people, so what is real spirituality does not shine on this or that class, does not wage this or that class struggle, but is for all people. And the great world-historical moment of the present demands that all people be able to enter history as individuals.

In the past, we had to deal with social classes and strata. Today, and in the future, we have to deal with human beings; with human beings who give birth to a world out of themselves. To this end, we must help, not by perpetuating and muddling through with the old ways, but by actually descending into the depths of human beings in order to find the widest reaches of the world in a spiritual way. This will then certainly penetrate the social question.

You see, something like this was intended in the “Key Points of the Social Question” because the present moment is precisely the time when one must believe that people can understand something like this not only from their theoretical understanding, but also from their hearts, from their will. Those who take the “Key Points of the Social Question” as a book of the intellect do not understand it. Only those who take it as a book of the will, as a book of the heart, spoken from life itself, from what can be taken everywhere today beneath the surface of existence as the most important social impulses of the present, understand it.

The subject matter has made it necessary to divide the lecture into two parts instead of three, so I will conclude here and save what I have to say to round off the social problem for tomorrow.