The Reorganization of the Social Organism

GA 330 — 18 June 1919, Stuttgart

IX. Liberty for the Spirit, Equality for the Law, Fraternity for the Economy

It is understandable that in these days of the most difficult and consequential decisions, one can only, dare I say it, speak with a certain deep sense of oppression. But at the same time, the idea arises in the human soul that what has been predetermined for the development of Central Europe for centuries, even millennia, must be achieved from completely different foundations, which lie in the depths and must ultimately be successful, even if the most significant and serious external material means are used to lead Central Europe economically to its end. These underlying factors have indeed been discussed in the whole series of lectures that I have had the honor of giving here, and which should also be discussed today in these difficult days. For only from these underlying factors can a light shine on the question that weighs so heavily on our hearts today: Can we still hope?

There are seemingly small, seemingly insignificant events in human life, but they leave a deep impression on the soul of anyone who feels they are immersed in this life with all their human powers as external symptoms of what is happening deep within the development of humanity. I had such an experience when I spoke in Basel a few months ago about the same subject that I have now repeatedly had the opportunity to speak to you about. At that time, in Basel, I spoke at the invitation of the Basel student body about what actually underlies the call for socialization of human institutions in the present day. And in the discussion, the strange word sounded out to me that no salvation could come from the external institutions that had become fragile and needed to be rebuilt before Lenin would be the ruler of the world!

Now, from these words one could indeed hear, on the one hand, humanity's call for socialization, and on the other hand, the most unsocial views about this socialization prevailing in wide circles. The person who had made this statement was obviously a supporter of the dogmas of today's popular communism, and I could only reply that it was highly significant for our time that people could talk about the socialization of humanity in such an unsocial way. For if one speaks out of the spirit of what is necessary for humanity today, one must at least recognize that the first step in socialization is the socialization of the conditions of domination, and that true socialization cannot begin with the oldest form of monarchism over the whole earth in the form of an economic papacy.

There is much, much to think about, that in our time, precisely those who believe that they are talking most intelligently about what should happen talk about it most incomprehensibly. To me, such an absurd assertion, as I heard at the time, was only, I might say, a distant call, uttered by a single person, to be thoroughly recognized by all who are reasonable and practical, as what must be done to meet the call for socialization that is sounding throughout the world today. For what must happen must happen very differently for the sake of those calling than these callers imagine, or actually do not imagine, but rather outwardly paint in front of their soul in dark phrases arising from their emotions.

Two things that shine out from the more recent development of humanity will have to be properly observed if one is to grasp what is currently striving to be realized. From the most diverse things that emerge here and there, in an understandable or misunderstood way, two demands of the present always emerge. These two demands are often expressed in a misleading way, but one must get to the bottom of them in their true form if one wants to be able to cope with what is striving for reality in our present time, which is putting humanity to such a difficult test. These two mottos of the latest time are, firstly, democracy and, secondly, socialism. Those who raise their voices more for a reorganization today out of general human sentiments clothe their call in the word democracy; those who think and feel more out of real life and its needs, in turn, clothe the call for a reorganization in the word socialism.

In this, one thing has been completely and strangely thrown out of the heraldry of public life in recent times. A party has drawn together the two impulses of recent times, democracy and socialism, in its name 'social democracy', and it has already left out in its name what I would like to prove today should be the basis for any real, serious and practical reconstruction of our society.

What has been left out of account in these two calls is the actual intellectual life, the intellectual life in the most comprehensive sense, in the sense in which it extends not only to what one absorbs in the way of higher concepts and ideas, in the way of all kinds of scientific and ideological questions, in the way of all kinds of artistic and religious, but in the sense in which it also extends to knowledge and insights with regard to both state and economic life, and in the sense in which it extends not only to theoretical but also to practical human capacities.

It can be said that in recent centuries, modern humanity has developed in such a way that, with regard to public life, it had a strong sense of trust in institutions that it wanted to make ever more democratic. And in these endeavors, based on the experience of modern economic conditions, demands have been made for a social organization of this economic life. Therefore, today one can have the feeling that, even if the confusing and chaotic conditions of the present cover up much of what is striving in the underground, the striving for a socialization of human institutions in a democratic sense, for a socially shaped democratic organization of our public life, is still present. But it is strange that trust in the forces of human spiritual life has been lost. People believe that democracy can help, people continue to believe that socialism can help, but they do not believe that there are forces in the spiritual life itself which, if they were grasped in the right way, could release from the human being what must be released from the human being for the good of the present and the near future.

If you take a little time to look around in today's world, where so many are pushing towards socialism, you will make a curious discovery. You might almost say that the call for socialization has grown stronger and stronger to the extent that human drives have become more and more anti-social, to the extent that human soul life has become more and more anti-social. And one might even say that man perceives from his own antisocial inner life how little he has been able to shape external institutions in a social sense, and because he is so antisocial within, he calls for a social shaping of external conditions. But anyone who knows human nature also knows that without a certain transformation of the human inner life, the social shaping of external institutions is an impossibility. The great error from which humanity has long since proceeded in its leading minds is — and I have already touched on this the day before yesterday — that man by nature has certain qualities that can be directly reckoned with in human society. Although one always believes in the opposite, but what I have just said is nevertheless the result of the experience of human life itself.

What I tried to draw attention to in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the 1890s was that a human being can only come to their full existence if they really develop this full existence in their becoming between birth and death, when he develops, in particular, that which a soul must have if it strives for a dignified human existence — when he first releases the consciousness of his free human nature through the development of the powers inherent in his inner being. One can only become free and can only be free if one is educated, or educates oneself, in freedom. Anyone who sees through this will look at what is presented today as a call for socialism in a deeper way than is usually the case. He will ask, is it not perhaps the case that we do not find our way to social and democratic values as human beings because our educational life does not develop in the right way that which is in us that is predisposed to democracy and socialism? One needs very specific inner impulses of human nature if one is to place oneself in a democratic community or if one wants to establish a social economic community. And one could almost say, if one did not shock too many people of the present time with an admittedly true truth: just as a person is born - the development of the child shows it clearly - so he initially has neither the impulses for democracy nor for socialism. These must first be instilled into his soul. They are present in the soul, but they do not come out by themselves. And until our education system is based on a thorough and realistic understanding of human nature, we will not see people being able to place themselves in a social or democratic community with democratic and social attitudes. Even if they are not aware of it, they will always try to destroy democracy and socialism out of subconscious impulses. And if no efforts are made to educate people in a democratic and social sense, then in the long run they will live together in such a way that the democratic element will develop into some form of tyranny, and the social element will develop into something anti-social. This is certainly what has happened to the social element that is being striven for in the eastern part of Europe, and it is bound to become the most anti-social element in a relatively short time, and it already is so!

This draws the attention of anyone who is sincere about the development of humanity today to the spiritual life and education above all. And it has become necessary to place, before all else, a truly objective knowledge of the human being, spiritual life and its most important component, education and teaching. Sometimes we instinctively take into account what is at stake here, but this instinctive observation is not enough. We must imbue what underlies it with a thorough pedagogical insight. Far too little attention is paid to the fact that the growing human being shows three very different developmental stages in three successive epochsof life. The first epoch of life is that which concludes with the change of teeth, around the age of seven. The second is that which extends from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, and the third is that which then extends from sexual maturity to the end of the second human decade of life. That these three human life epochs are essentially different from each other, that education and instruction must be built upon this difference, is something that must become as clear to humanity as the laws of nature, if the social and democratic impulses are to shine forth in humanity that are necessary for a new formation of human developmental conditions.

Those who have the ability to observe the child inwardly in that important epoch of life, from birth to the change of teeth, know that all activity, all somehow directed action of the child in this completely unconscious, instinctive childhood is dominated by the principle of imitation. During this time, the child definitely strives to speak, to make faces, to move its hands, to do as those around it do, speak, make faces, move their hands. There is something of the utmost significance for human life in the child's striving to imitate, which must be met with a truly practical education. It is in this that human nature unconsciously and instinctively attempts what it can never consciously achieve in later life: to come together with other people as an individual. Through imitative action and endeavor, a sense of belonging in human society should develop, and a truly human coexistence of people should develop, through bonds from person to person.

Let us assume that humanity could decide in the present to take a radical look at this principle of imitation in the first years of childhood. If we paid attention to this, we would develop something for later life that can only be developed consciously if imitation is properly fostered in the unconscious childhood years. This imitation is not always seen in the right form. Parents come to you and say: Oh, I am very worried, my child has committed a theft, it has taken money out of the drawer! — You ask: How old is the child? — Five years. - One must then say: If all other educational conditions are in order, there is no need to be particularly concerned about this, because the child is an imitator, it does what is done in its environment. It has seen how mother so-and-so takes money out of the drawer often every day, and it imitates this. At this age, words expressing moral commandments have no influence on the child's development, only what is done in the child's own environment.

If we bear this in mind, we can lay the foundation for a suitably structured education, so that when a person is brought up in the right way, with a focus on the natural tendency to imitate, age, what can be called the right respect, the right assessment of the other person, the endeavor to respect the other person as he deserves to be respected, simply because he bears the human face. And this is the first condition for the proper development of a democracy! Democracies can only develop in the right way on the basis of the law if people in democratic parliaments shape laws that govern the relationship between people as equals. This will happen if these people have such impulses within themselves that lead to respect for human beings and can only arise if they have been educated in the right way in childhood according to the principle of imitation.

And if we now look at economic life; modern times demand a reorganization of this economic life in the sense that profit, the acquisition of capital and wages are no longer the decisive factors, but rather that consumption, the consideration of human needs is established on the basis of free associations, cooperatives, and corporations, which must proceed from the needs of human economic life, from the needs that are always present in a living way and according to which trade and production must first be established. What is based today on the blind supply and demand of the market will have to be based on insight into human interrelationships and insight into human consumption needs. Practical experience, which must be able to respond to human needs, can only develop if people have been educated in childhood according to the principle of imitation, if they have learned unconsciously to adapt to people. If they have developed respect for human life in the public legal life of the state, then they can develop understanding for human needs in the field of economic life.

Today, we must demand that in the field of economic life, coalitions, let us say, for example, cooperatives, be set up by works councils. These works councils will have a difficult time if, in the future, after understanding production and consumption, they have to take care of what is currently left to the mercy of supply and demand. But no works councils, no councils of any kind in the field of economic life will ever be beneficial if the education of the human being is not organized in such a way that the talents for these councils, that is to say for human adaptation, for this is also expressed in the understanding of human needs, that the development of these councils is not prepared by the right education in the tender childhood after the principle of imitation.

The second phase of the adolescent's life begins with the change of teeth, which means a much greater intervention in the entire organism than today's anthropology and physiology can yet foresee, because they start from external appearances, until sexual maturity. This is the age at which human nature tends towards the trust that expresses itself in the sense of authority, from the adolescent to the adult. Today, when we basically want to extend to other areas of life in an abstract way what applies to a life-giving force, today we do not even want to speak of the necessity of authority for this childhood. But if we were to disregard the orientation of this education towards a healthy sense of authority, in which unconscious inner soul drives develop that are necessary for later life, then nothing else would be able to emerge in the conscious and understanding life that can make human beings into social beings as well as democratic beings. In the first years of life, the human being orients himself to other people through imitation, so to speak. In the second age, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, he wants to adapt even more to the inner life of the other person. He wants to learn to understand the other person, wants to learn to believe in what the other person passes on to him. He wants to experience within himself, as his experience, what the other person expresses to him as an experience, he wants to look to a person who can already do what strives for existence in him. Then the human being wants to fit together socially with the other human being instinctively. When the human being has grown up, full consciousness sets in, then the blossoming of what has been experienced in childhood in response to authority will arise again.

Thus one cannot live in the right social way in the human community of democracy if one has not first found that adaptation to the human interior, which is realized in the child's sense of authority. No one will be able to stand on the ground of legal democracy in the right way today who has not learned, between the change of his teeth and sexual maturity, to look up to the other person who is ahead of him. For only when he has learned this will the true, healthy feeling arise in him: We are all equal as human beings, we must live together as human beings in such a way that equality among human beings becomes a legal reality. In the final analysis, nothing can come into being in a legal or constitutional parliament on the soil of democracy that is truly democratic, that is, that establishes what makes all people equal, if those people who make such laws have not, by their own efforts, brought up from their inmost being what has been created in the soul, when they had that feeling, so beneficial in youth, of looking up to another human being as their authority. One will never learn to recognize the other person as a truly equal one in later conscious life if one has not first felt the human value in this looking up to the other person. That equality may prevail, that democracy may become possible, depends on our learning to educate human nature according to its inner essence. For only out of the sense of authority in the child, which during the school years expresses itself in the most diverse forms, can the right sense of the equality of human beings flourish in later life.

If in economic life, on the basis of economic life, as the call for socialization also suggested, in place of the distribution of goods, which is currently dominated by capital gains and wage gains, if that distribution of goods is to be replaced by a distribution of goods that is reasonable, a system of councils, then the force that brings about this just distribution of goods must flourish – like the sense of equality in democracy – from that attraction between person and person, which in childhood can only grow out of the sense of authority. If we set up works councils and transport councils to deal with the distribution of goods, which is currently dominated by the needs of capital and wages, and if we set up such councils to , then those who carry out such distribution of goods must be imbued with that understanding of the innermost human nature that can only come from a healthy sense of authority during the child's school years. Never again must we forget what must be the human and spiritual basis for all democratic and social life.

The third age, in which most of our young people already believe themselves to be full people – they even write feature articles at this age – is that from sexual maturity to about the end of the second decade of life, into the twenties. Not only is sexual love born at this time, but what was previously a sense of authority is transformed into what is now truly active, a sense of universal human love. Through the transformation of adaptation to imitation and adaptation to authority, what actually gives us truly social instincts descends into the human soul, what makes us capable of presenting ourselves as human beings alongside one another in brotherly love. The sexual love relationship is only a special case of what occurs in this age as general human love. During this period of life, all young people, whether manual laborers or intellectual workers, must be given the opportunity, in addition to training for their practical occupation, to acquire such ideas, such concepts about the world and life, in other words, such a worldview, such knowledge about the life of nature and the spirit, that understanding arises for everything that lives, above all love, brotherhood to other people. The fact that today we still have not managed to give the apprentice, who is to hasten to a practical life, the opportunity to also receive a general world view education that does not shut him off in a class from the privileged classes, but that instead places him as a human being on an equal footing with other human beings, is what still generates anti-social impulses in our time.

And what blossoms forth in our time, when properly educated and trained in universal love of one's fellow men and brotherhood, on the soil of right and on the soil of democracy, that is what may be called true active devotion to the welfare of mankind and to the human condition. For democracy will only be able to develop by also developing, alongside the feeling for the equality of all people, what can be characterized as follows: Every human being is regarded as something to which one should devote oneself, to which one wants to serve. And on the ground of economic life it will be necessary that - I say this again - if the coincidence of supply and demand, which is based on capital and wage acquisition and on the market, is to be replaced by reasonable human cooperative and coalition institutions, then it will be necessary on this ground of economic life that the council, let us call it that, which arises there, will have to look to see whether any article here or there is too expensive or too cheap according to the general human conditions of the economic area. This council will then have to approach the people who produce an article too cheaply and tell them through their council – it should be councils that work not through tyranny and violence, but through advice – this business is unnecessary, it must therefore be shut down. You must turn to another occupation, so that only so much is produced in a closed economic area that no article is too expensive or too cheap! In this way the right mutual price relationships can exist.

This will be an important institution in the economic life of the future, that people, their insight and their understanding will be approached in such a way that they will be guided away from mere production for profit by their own inner impulses, which can be awakened, and guided towards a kind of production that serves necessary consumption, the necessary needs of the community. But what is necessary to advise in the right way here, to place people in the economic life in such a reasonable way that the mutual price conditions come about, that no surplus of labor on the one hand and no under-work on the other side is possible, which is necessary for this, can only arise in those who are to advise in economic life if, in their youth, people have developed a sense of human brotherhood, of love for their fellow human beings. For if we are to found our human development on the inner community of men, if we are to base our new development on this, not on external institutions, which would be useless, then in the future, out of democratic philanthropy, we will have to feel from those who advise us: There is brotherhood! There life is organized in such a way that the individual does not just earn capital or wages, but people work so that everyone can receive the appropriate satisfaction of needs for their life and work.

This shows how, basically, I would say, 'in between' has fallen by raising the calls for democracy and socialism, how intellectual life, in particular, must be tackled. Only by passing through imitation, authority and love in the youthful mind does the human being become a fully human being, so that what sits in his soul can be lived out democratically and socially in the human community. But only through this can people achieve what I mentioned the day before yesterday: true human freedom, which is cultivated by passing through imitation, a sense of authority and love. Therefore, one cannot say that one simply demands freedom, but one must admit: our education system must be permeated by those forces that place the human being as a free human being in democracy and in social economic life. The fact that we have neglected this principle of educating people to become free human beings out of objective knowledge within European civilization and its American offshoot is basically what has brought us to our present situation. Man is not fulfilled by the content of his soul; he only looks at external reality. He does not want to mean in life only what he has become through the content of his soul; he wants to mean what the state employs him as in a certain position. He wants to signify what makes it possible for him to gain, whether in a capitalist or wage-earning sense. As a result, we have slipped into something that is indeed given too little attention, but which has led to the worst resistance in our human culture, which is so in need of progress. We have slipped into a life that has actually lost out due to the unliving development of intellectual life: the living idea, the living inner impulse of the idea. We have descended into the world of empty phrases. Our intellectual life has become full of empty phrases, and our public life is developing under the empty phrases. This empty phrase, which is devoid of ideas, separates us from reality.

And in the area where democracy should be developing, we have slipped back into something else. Instead of increasingly equipping ourselves – this is not meant to be a historical critique, but merely a statement of fact – with the one thing that can lead to democratic laws, respect for human beings, faith in human beings as equals, and devotion to human beings – instead of that, we have developed obedience to laws and the striving to make ourselves suitable for some position in the state. In the age in which universal human love should develop, from puberty into the twenties, what has become more important than this development of a soul fund that lives entirely in the atmosphere of universal human love is what one might call the system of entitlement. Instead of making man a complete human being, he is to become some kind of official in some state, he is to become the one who can make his way in a capitalist or wage-earning manner, as in a pure commercial partnership. Obedience to the law and outward conformity — that has become man's lot because the spiritual life has been absorbed by the state, because the state has become the driving force of the spiritual life.

If we want to grasp inwardly that which can lead to real democratic equality for all people in a true constitutional state, then it is necessary to enter into the inner nature and essence of the human being. This endeavor to base the spiritual life, especially the education and school system, on the human being alone, and not to let it be shaped in such a way that the state imposes an external stamp on it, should be the endeavor of the widest circles in the present day who have an interest in the real progress of our culture and enthusiasm for it. That is why the “Federation for the Threefold Social Organism” has set itself the task of calling together those people who have such an interest to form a cultural council, or whatever it wants to be called, so that the liberation of our intellectual life, especially our education and school system, can arise from it, that the de-nationalization and de-economization of the school and education system can arise. It is understandable that those who are involved in this intellectual life as teachers or educators have a certain fear if the state no longer pays their wages. What would they do then? Yes, that is one of those experiences that unfortunately one has so often in the present, the experience that people do realize from time to time that it is necessary for a reorganization of our social conditions to take place – but that they cannot bring themselves to really want what could lead to such a reorganization. If one has spoken a lot with people about the necessary reorganization in recent times, even with those who are generally quite convinced that such a reorganization must come, then they ask one: Yes, but you must say in a certain way what will happen to the individual person, what will happen to the individual profession in the future! — Postal workers ask one, when socialization is mentioned: How does one socialize the postal worker, what will his situation be? These discussions are based on something very peculiar. People do not look at present life, they still have illusions today about the durability of the present conditions, they do not want to rise to the level of ideas of a real reorganization, and then they ask you: Yes, tell me, how will what I am accustomed to as the old be in the new order?

Such a question actually implies nothing less than the demand: How do we revolutionize the world so that everything remains the same? And if one does not answer the question: How will the old be excluded in the new order? then people say: What you are saying is completely incomprehensible to me! — That is more or less how it is when those who work in education and teaching are concerned about how their economic position will be shaped. Insofar as people in the spiritual life are involved in teaching or education, the spiritual life will be able to be organized from within, independently of state and economic life, according to purely pedagogical-didactic aspects and inward spiritual ideas; otherwise, since they also have to live, they are a economic community in the economic organism within the threefold social organism. And just as a factory naturally knows from the factory workers what it needs to satisfy its needs from economic life, so the council of economic life will also have to ensure that there is the right economic relationship between the economic body, which is independent in the three-tiered social organism, and the other economic body, which is responsible for spiritual life. And what remains between the inside as the third link of the social organism, the constitutional state, will have to ensure that what is concluded in the free economic contract between the economic body and the spiritual body is actually carried out. Those who truly want to understand inwardly and have the courage to understand that spiritual life must become free, that what is spiritual in it must be placed on its own spiritual foundation, will also be able to summon themselves to understand how the economic aspect of this spiritual part of the threefold social organism will take shape in the future.

Thus it is seen that freedom must reign in spiritual life. For this freedom in spiritual life is the foundation for the equality of the legal life, and it is also the foundation for the fraternity of the economic life. This foundation must be taken into account above all when socialization is discussed. Otherwise, yes, otherwise, one might perhaps be able to make external arrangements of all kinds, but if these external arrangements go a little further, one will end up as one has in Russia under Leninism, where one has equal rights for all – in the phrase! But today we have already reached the point where some workers have six times higher wages than others, and where certain intellectual workers already earn up to 200,000 rubles, and where there is already a strong tendency towards the old capitalism.

If you want to socialize, then you have to address the real living conditions of a healthy social organism, not just shout party phrases and Marxist papal dogmas as the only practical thing in the world. Brotherhood and true socialism will only be able to flourish if, on the basis of a genuine social education of the people, there can be those who replace anti-social instincts with social instincts, because external institutions will not create socialism. Particularly in the field of economic life it will soon become evident that socialism cannot be brought about by external institutions alone, if the people who are involved in this economic life do not understand how to organize it according to reason and fraternity, which has so far been done on this basis according to the abstract principles of capital and wage generation, supply and demand. For from the confused ideas that the relations of production develop by themselves in such a way that people can live socially in them, from these confused ideas, it is already clear enough today that social life must be brought about by man himself, the social man. It will be the organizations of people working together socially that will produce what I have described in my book, The Necessities of Life Today and in the Future, as the replacement of capital.

When we see how capital has worked, we must be clear about the fact that capital has detached people from the real, material interest in production. Instead of devoting oneself to what one produces, producing it in such a way that one imbues it with one's own attitude: In the way I make you, you serve the other people, my fellow human beings, whom I consider as brothers and sisters. Instead of giving this to the human products, today one looks at what can be written in the ledger as the selling price of the product. The actual harm of the capital and wage relationship lies in this detachment of the human being from the interest in human value. This is also the only reason why capital has come to be regarded as something that can be completely detached from real work, from directly active participation in the human community, from human endeavors, and that capital is something that multiplies by itself, that also multiplies in the hands of those who do not earn it themselves through their labor.

The damage caused by the radical capital system can be expressed in the simplest terms. In principle, all capital is brought about in a just way, in that some spiritual labor produces something that serves one's fellow human beings, as the production of goods. But in place of this connection between the spiritual powers of man and capital, something else has come into being: the personal, private ownership of land and soil, the personal, private ownership of the means of production. There can never be a right to private ownership of land and soil in a true constitutional state. The distribution of land and soil must take place in a democracy, and the utilization of capital – as I have described in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' – can only take place in the right sense if the finished means of production is no longer for sale, but is a free good. Then what is given to capital today will be given back to spiritual work.

This is what we must strive for, but we can only strive for it if we educate people in such a way that they know how to place themselves in relation to their fellow human beings with a free spirit, that they place themselves in the place themselves in the human community, and that they create organizations for economic life, which should be based only on production and consumption, that are structured into free associations, corporations, and cooperatives built on the principle of true brotherhood with an understanding of the needs of human consumption. Anyone who wants interest paid on capital without being connected to any kind of intellectual work can only have inherited the capital or otherwise received it from someone who was connected to the capital through their intellectual work. But the connection between capital and people is only justified as long as the abilities, the spiritual work of the person, justify the connection with the means of production, which are actually the capital. Socially, the possession of capital by someone who does not produce it himself is like wanting to be paid for a ship that has sunk into the ocean. A ship that has sunk into the ocean can no longer bring anything to people. It is gone, and another ship must take its place. He who draws interest on capital without working is like he who seeks to be repaid for something that comes from a sunken ship. With the loss of human abilities and with the death of the human being, the connection between him and the means of production, that is, capital, must be allowed to die.

These things are not yet clear to people today only because they run counter to present-day customs and institutions. It is only because we are accustomed to the old conditions that we do not understand them, not because the matter itself cannot be understood.

Now one can say: You claim that the things you are saying are practical, while they are actually idealistic! Yes, anyone who does not realize today that the idealistic must become practical, and that we have come to today's conditions precisely because we have always only believed that the practical consists in the routine of being together with external institutions, anyone who does not realize that this belief was deceptive and that ideas are now the practical, cannot really participate in what is necessary for the new building of our human development. We live in a time when idealism - if one wants to call it that, what is brought forward here from the practice of life - is the most practical of all.

The day before yesterday, I pointed out the great difference that exists in the human soul-disposition of the Orient and the Occident. We here in Central Europe are placed between this soul-disposition of the Orient and that of the Occident. If we recognize that we, as the middle people, have the task of bringing about a balance between the Orient and the Occident through an even, independent development of spiritual life, of the legal, political and economic life, and of economic life, we also bring about the harmonization between Orient and Occident. Then we stand on the ground from which the future must emerge for us, even if people on all sides today want to pull the ground from under our feet. They can do this to a certain extent because we, as a people of Central Europe, have neglected for decades to stand on the ground from which our true strength as a Central European people springs. But we must not forget the connections with those forces of our national character from which the great idealistic and at the same time greatest achievements of humanity have blossomed, the achievements of Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and so on. Nor must we forget the Central European impulses from which, in another harsh period, Johann Gottlieb Fichte poured fire into the hearts of the Central European peoples. What this fact is actually based on is sensed by the other nations. But we should not merely sense it, we should recognize it. We should say to ourselves, if others hate us, and compete with us and want to destroy us by something, then it is what we have developed in recent decades, not as our very own nature, but as what is too much the same as the others, what we have imitated as un-German industrialism. If we then recognize where the true roots of our strength are, then there is still hope for us! We Germans must not place ourselves on the ground on which the merely external capitalist life of the last decades has placed us in competition with the others. We must place ourselves on spiritual ground. We must understand that that patriotism which consisted in devoting ourselves only to the hope that Germany, victorious, would bring even more capital to entrepreneurship, that patriotism, which has now been replaced by the other: Let us go over to the others, let us now be patriots there, because that is where capital can bring interest, - we must understand that this patriotism is not German patriotism!

We must be able to place ourselves on this ground. We must be able to understand ourselves as the people who are placed between Orient and Occident for a new construction out of freedom for the spirit, out of equality for the law, out of brotherhood for the economy. Over there in the East, the strongest spiritual light once arose; in the West, the fuel for this spiritual life is produced. The spiritual light of the East is dying down, has expired into nirvana. The fuel of the West will not be able to shine if it is merely placed in the darkness of the capital and wage relationships between people. We in Central Europe must draw our hope solely from the fact that we can awaken the fuel of the West into a fire that can fuel humanity through the light of the East.

This is our idealistic but highly practical task. This is what one would most like to think about in these days, which are so terribly oppressive for hearts and souls, where the fuel of the West wants to take away what we still have a little of, where we are to be plunged into material need and material misery. Many still do not understand it today, but it is so. These days proclaim it loudly: it is a matter of being or not being! And what should arise from this realization that it is a matter of being or not being is that we are called to ignite the fuel of the West with the light of the East. Today, when we are weighed down by the bitterest adversity, we may remember a saying of Spohr's, who, speaking of Germans to Germans, said: If you do not recognize yourselves, if you do not find yourselves within yourselves, then the world will lose what it can only have through you! — We may, despite all the oppression, if we have faith in the spirit, despite all the hardship and misery that await us, raise our heads to those who want to destroy us and call out to them: If you destroy us, you will destroy something that you need, that you cannot get from anywhere else but from this Central Europe that you now want to trample underfoot. You have learned to shout “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” but we want to give content to what has long since become a mere phrase in these three words, to give content from the mind by saying wholeheartedly, not half-heartedly: Liberty for the mind! We want to give it substance from the heart, by saying wholeheartedly, not half-heartedly: Equality for the law! And we want to give it substance from the whole, from the full human being, grasping this spiritually and physically, by saying not half-heartedly, but wholeheartedly: Fraternity for the economy! Fraternity for all human coexistence!