Current Social and Economic Issues

GA 332b — 27 June 1919, Stuttgart

Anthroposophy and the Social Question

Lecture at a meeting of members of the Anthroposophical Society

My dear friends! It should be clear that we are living in a time of change, a time that we have to see as a time of transformation, and that it is our primary responsibility to find our task in this time. We will, since we are not today on the ground on which we stood in the consideration that we devoted to the general cultural council, but precisely on our ground, as members of the Anthroposophical Society, we will do well to occupy ourselves a little with our thoughts from this point of view of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement.

You see, when we talk today about a spiritual-scientific understanding of the world, about the real content of spiritual science – you were also able to learn about this in Stuttgart, where spiritual-scientific lectures have been given for many years, which, it can be said, have found an ever-larger audience. When one speaks to people today from these spiritual-scientific points of view in the concrete, one first encounters an audience that corresponds to the conditions of the present. But you have also seen that, even leaving aside the public, we have continued to develop anthroposophy. Many of you have seen how we have applied anthroposophy fruitfully in a wide variety of fields, fruitfully applied from a very specific spirit. Let us imagine how this has been attempted from a particular spirit.

We can start with anything – let's start with the public lectures. These public lectures had to introduce a new insight, a completely new characteristic of spiritual life into the world. There was never any hesitation about this, not even in public lectures, and certainly not in the lectures that were then given to advanced students within the Anthroposophical Society itself. There was never any hesitation about pointing out in a concise and forceful way what should replace this cultural life of the present day, which is in decline. For decades now, it has been made clear that this cultural life is in decline; that the life in which we are immersed is in decline. And it has been pointed out everywhere that an upward development must be fostered from a renewal of the spiritual understanding of the world. It was pointed out very clearly that we must distinguish with the utmost seriousness between what is in a downward movement and what must fulfill humanity so that it can ascend again. Was that not, my dear friends, the spirit of all the lectures given to the public or to a smaller circle? And was not, in essence, what is now being illustrated in an outward way through world-historical events and world-historical misery always contained in these lectures?

Let us look at something else in our specifically anthroposophical field: we have erected a building in Dornach. In erecting this building, we have not followed any of the traditional forms of architecture, painting or sculpture. We have tried to create something out of the consciousness that a complete renewal and regeneration of our spiritual life is necessary, something that is a beginning, but that is also something new. We have not shunned the challenge of striking at the face of all that which we have created and which, out of old conceptions, wanted to judge architecturally, pictorially, sculpturally and so on. Yes, the philistines sometimes stood head to toe in front of the Dornach building; we let them stand head to toe. And we knew: it was precisely that which we had to have, that the philistine bearers of the previous worldview should stand head to toe in front of things. We also did not let ourselves be deterred when all the unsuccessful newer attempts to arrive at some unphilistine art, with all the backgrounds from which artistic creation so often arises, with the backgrounds of hysteria or of inability but of much wanting, when they simply pronounced it 'unartistic' about that of which they, precisely because they wanted to be artistic in a new way in their sense, understood nothing. We did not let ourselves be deterred from being looked at askance and askew by the philistines and, forgive the word, over-philistines.

When we set about cultivating eurythmy, with all that this involves, a recreation of the art of recitation, I said: the sensitive souls who will be involved in performing these things must prepare themselves that once they are brought to the public, they will be thoroughly criticized; but that will be the proof that they mean something; because if they were praised, they would agree with what is happening below, and then they would certainly be of no use. This awareness, which is now being challenged, I might say with blood, by humanity, was brought forth in the anthroposophical movement out of the demands of a new spiritual life.

We have performed our mysteries in Munich, the actual content of which has so far been understood by few people. We have performed these mysteries for four years, many people have seen them; they are buried from the world; since then they have not been spoken of at all. They have been forgotten because they have passed before those to whom they were performed, like a dream that one forgets; one may enjoy it, but one forgets it. These things must be said one day, my dear friends, otherwise we will not get around to what I actually meant last Sunday.

Yes, my dear friends, it would have been nice if we had tackled all the things that have been mentioned here today in 1907. But we are living in 1919, and today we can no longer merely tackle the things that we should perhaps have tackled on the basis of our awakened anthroposophical consciousness in 1907. So what is it about? Please excuse me if, in order to keep this matter from taking too long and to make it as painless as possible, I express myself somewhat sharply: I would like to say, with reference to our anthroposophical movement, that there were two types of people from whom two things could be assumed: those people who were at public events or who could see how the Dornach building is now open to the world, who could see what we wanted simply as - well, let's say, as contemporaries. That was one kind of people. We also experienced them here, when the general anthroposophical truths were specialized for the threefold social order. We experienced them here in the Siegle House. We have experienced people for whom these things are already understandable, as far as they need to be understandable for a general audience. But I have often characterized here how the understanding of people of the present day who actually deal with these things actually is. These people of the present, they do accept some things, they also see some things, but they cannot rise to make that which they see the content of their whole being; to make it not only the content of their thinking and dreaming, or dreaming thinking, but also the content of their will. And so one can experience that perhaps a whole assembly, or the majority of people who are listening publicly, show their clear approval to a certain degree for the things that must now be spoken for the benefit of humanity. But the next day everything is as it was before; it has no other significance for them than that they have heard the things for an hour and a half or two hours; that the things are there for man to take them up into his inner being, for that present humanity has absolutely no disposition. That, my dear friends, is the one kind of people.

The other type was the anthroposophists, a completely different type of person. With the first type of person that I have just characterized, one could hope for nothing other than what I have said, because that is the bourgeoisie of the present, that is the part of humanity that one could believe would have salted meat in its head instead of a brain criss-crossed with furrows. That is what people of the present age are like. But then the Anthroposophists were there, about whom, for decades, people had been talking in terms quite different from those that could be spoken in public. It could not suffice for the Anthroposophists to take these things in; it could not suffice for them to devote themselves to the general inner habits of the present-day human being. One must indeed ask: Is the modern human being seeking a spiritual life? Yes, he seeks it, he seeks a spiritual life, because what the church gives him, what the modern school gives him, is no longer enough for him. He seeks a spiritual life, but what kind of spiritual life is he actually seeking? He basically accepts the highest truths, but accepts them in such a way that, firstly, they bother him little, that, secondly, he needs to claim his inner self as little as possible for co-activity, and that, thirdly, he moves quite well in this outer decaying world, alongside what he takes from it, just as the outer decaying world demands. That is, he finds it perfectly natural, without feeling any inner contradiction in it, that he goes about the business of his life in the sense of the decadent world, in the sense of the destruction that he had to be confronted with head-on by the world war catastrophe and what followed, and then he sometimes feels the need to be uplifted by an anthroposophical lecture or instruction, which he accepts like a Sunday afternoon sermon that offers him a change from what he otherwise absorbs quite well as life within the decaying culture. It sometimes shakes up the people of the present that the things around him, the things he has to go through, are so nonsensical; then he also turns to something like anthroposophy, but not as to something he seeks in it is an impulse for how things should be done in detail for others, but rather seeks in anthroposophy a nice sleeping pill with which he can numb himself to what he can live with after all to externally calm his inner being.

You see, that was the ongoing call to those involved in the anthroposophical movement: to understand that this must not continue in modern humanity, that anthroposophy should not be understood as a sleeping pill and as a Sunday afternoon sermon, but that modern man must absorb his anthroposophy in order to truly embody it in all the details of life, to develop it, to develop the consciousness of self-reflection within himself, that we are in a decaying cultural world.

The adaptability of modern man is enormous. But what does one adapt to? You see, we live in a threefold unnatural environment in the present. We live in the phrase. We live in a mere positive statement of all sorts of commandments and prohibitions, instead of in the original human right. We live in economic egoism instead of in the brotherhood of economic life. All this is accepted by modern man in such a way that he needs to notice it as little as possible.

Yes, you see, anthroposophy, taken seriously, does not let you simply ignore these things, but it is something that I have often said: absorbing anthroposophical truths means a certain danger for life, means that you have to live courageously, means that you have to have the inner resolve to break with many things. In almost everything that has been said, reference has been made to what Anthroposophy seeks to be. The motto given was: 'Wisdom lives only in truth'. But modern humanity lives in lies. For what has gone through the world during the catastrophe of the world wars was only lies. People everywhere said different things about things than they actually were, because in the declining culture, people have unlearned the inner connection between what they say and their inner experience. Humanity needs a strong spiritual substance in its soul to regain this connection. We should be strict with ourselves on this point. One should also understand things in detail. For example, one should understand what led to this misfortune of world war catastrophe; it is necessary to know what the inability of the leading personalities has brought about, and that this inability has been nurtured from the ground up because antipathy towards spiritual life in all areas has been nurtured. But where was it nurtured the most? It was most cultivated in the church, because what is most materialized today is the popular Christianity of all denominations. This popular Christianity of all denominations is supposed to lift man up to the spiritual world, while it only ever attempts to present the spiritual world to man in such a way that it is tangibly material. All these things have often been pointed out in detail, again and again. It is of no use today not to see these things in their true form. Above all, however, it must be realized that what is now coming into the world as the threefold social order is a result of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. But one will only understand this in the right sense if, as I have just said, one looks into these things.

My dear friends, it is necessary for the human being to become a self-reliant personality through spiritual science, so that he learns to judge the outside world, including the human outside world, in the right way, precisely because he stands firmly on his own ground as a free personality. The free personality is no longer recognized in the world at all today. We have become accustomed to no longer recognizing the free personality at all. If someone says their own thoughts somewhere, their own thoughts that they have fought hard for, the foolish, stupid world today calls it a presentation. In such things, down to the last detail, it is important to see where things are rotten. This adaptation to the stupidity of the present shows how we are no longer able to stand on the ground of a free, self-creating personality. It is not pedantry to point out such things, for it is in the habitual tendrils of ordinary life that we see where things are rotten on a large scale. And if we want to recover, then this recovery must start from the large and be so strong in the large that the large can intervene in the ordinary smallest tendrils of life. At the moment when the whole world could already see externally that things were going wrong in Central Europe because of the arms race, we named our building in Dornach, which, I might add, stands directly on the border with the Entente, the Goetheanum, so that we could make it clear to the whole world what we believe to be right, never yielding in any way to what one might say: How will it affect people, what should be taken into consideration? and the like.

And in this context, I would like to point out that it would be good if the people of Central Europe in particular would remember that people like Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Herder and similar people once lived in Central Europe, that Fichte spoke there. Because these things, my dear friends, have been forgotten. It is not true that these things are still alive today. It is an enormous lie to say that Fichte is still alive. He no longer lives in people. For he does not live through the fact that his successors in the old, so-called German Reichstag in Weimar have even begun to quote him. These people, who constituted the greatness of Central Europe, became parasites on the life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They must first be unearthed. And we will have to understand that time is a reality.

My dear friends, I want to tell you the following in a radical way: Suppose Herder or Goethe had written something; you put that down in front of you; and today, whether by karma or by chance, someone writes something without knowing that Goethe or Herder had written it; they write the same thing, using the same words. Most people of the present day would say: Well, that is exactly the same. And yet, the truth could be that what Goethe or Herder wrote would be imbued with the real spiritual, and what a person today writes with the same words would be empty phrases. But from this you may see that when someone brings a piece of paper from this or that community that comes up today with some nice program that one should do this or that socially, and compares it to what appears here as threefolding , some of it may agree word for word; but anyone who sets store by such agreement shows only that he does not really stand within the anthroposophical movement with his soul. For the great difference between us and all these things — and I have repeatedly made this absolutely clear over the decades in the most diverse contexts — the great difference lies in the fact that behind what we proclaim socially stands the world characterized by anthroposophy . That is the substance, and that makes the difference; it elevates what our sentences say beyond the character of mere phrases to real content, while most people today only speak phrases that may sound like the content of reality. What matters is reality, not the phrase. That is what one would like to be understood. If the matter is understood, my dear friends, then it is a matter of being able to grasp our time in reality from this point of view.

I would have liked someone else to have said it, but since no one else is saying it, I have to say it myself: We do have anthroposophy, we do have spiritual science; from it arises the awareness that a transformation is necessary in our cultural world. But humanity does not yet know this, it does not know it enough, it has to be told, it has to be made apparent, and it has to be made as clear as I have just shown. If someone wants to found a school, good, let them do it; if someone wants to tell fairy tales, good, let them do it; one could have done that in 1907 as well. What is at stake today is to convey to humanity the awareness that anthroposophy is here and that anthroposophy must grow. And if it does not grow, nothing will grow, because the other will perish, as is clearly evident in intellectual life. And this must be seriously presented to humanity. Of course, we cannot immediately found any schools on a large scale, but we have to say to humanity: your world is perishing, here is the truth from which you can renew it. You have to found the liberation of the School of Spiritual Science in the sense of the new spirit! It is the awakening of this consciousness that is at stake. I am therefore pleased that my appeal “To the German People and to the Cultural World” in the last issue of the “Reich” was followed by an essay containing the words:

But the forces of self-reflection should ultimately be able to lead to such a common understanding if this self-reflection were directed in the right direction, which must lead to an understanding of the foundations on which alone reconstruction is possible. The forces of development in the new era must be included in the plan of construction. If one wanted to build without such a plan, then every well-intentioned effort would have to disintegrate due to the lack of a realistic foundation. Anyone who takes the step towards such self-reflection will realize the significance of the view expressed in the appeal that a real mission of the German people must be inextricably linked with all that the developmental forces of modern times demand. Valid foundations for a structure cannot be created if the inexorably surging developmental forces that have been released over the last hundred years are channelled into the riverbed of old habits of thought. These developmental forces want to carve out a new riverbed. Large-scale spiritual pioneering work is to be done if the future of the German people is to be secured. But the weapons of old habits of thinking are proving too blunt to accomplish this work.

Everyone who has participated in anthroposophical work should think this way, and everyone should make this their work. For what matters today is not what we do tomorrow in detail, but that as many people as possible know what needs to be done, then there will be as many people as possible who can do it. And we must never shrink from the decision to see things as radically as possible today. To see them in such a way that we truly do not remain in the old stupid formulations of the cultural program, but that we see: here is the old culture - here is the one that is to be replaced by spiritual science. The details will follow.

It was just demanded that the children in the lowest classes should play a certain music, that everyone should learn an instrument. Such a thing can be demanded in detail. Was it not our demand from the very beginning to give every child a musical instrument? These things will come about when the work that follows from anthroposophy, the spiritual work, is undertaken on a large scale, initially for the purpose of helping people to find themselves. That is why, when I came here, my main aim was to get as many people as possible to see the things that are most important in social life today. At first people thought, because they were foolish and did not feel the reality of things: these are dreamers, things have grown on anthroposophical soil. At first they were no longer anxious. Then we had thousands and thousands of followers who sealed their allegiance by name, and we had a large, large number of votes in many resolutions. Then those to whom the masses submit have become fearful due to the present-day conditions, and since it has become apparent to them that this is not anthroposophy but realities in the minds and souls, they have denounced it as utopian because the leaders of today's proletarian masses do not think proletarian themselves, but are precisely the most dreadful bourgeois philistines. They are the ones in whom the bourgeoisie is expressed in its most characteristic form. Therefore, it is important that we now grasp our task above all. We can only grasp this task if we know how to rebuild the education system from the ground up. And we have to make it clear to the world that this education system has to be rebuilt, that it has to be built from the spirit of spiritual science. We have to make it clear today that the universities that exist now serve the downfall of humanity; that our grammar schools, our secondary modern schools, our middle schools serve the downfall of humanity; that in our primary schools, people are not educated, but state cripples. But if we allow anthroposophy to be a Sunday afternoon sermon that we let go on alongside our lives as far as possible, and then we grovel and dare not tell anyone outside that the things that other people set such great store by contain nothing but impossible stuff, then we need not be anthroposophists. We must imbue ourselves with the spirit of the truly new age, not with the catchphrases of the new age. Therefore, if we are to work as anthroposophists, our first task is to ensure that people first know what needs to be done; that they learn to know what needs to be done. I would like to test the anthroposophists who are here, they are all individual personalities. I would like to ask you: Imagine, instead of you, instead of the fact that you are sitting there and I am speaking to you, there were a bunch of Jesuits, and one of the Jesuits was encouraging the others to action. I would like to know what these Jesuits, if they were here in such numbers, would do for Jesuitism – that is what I would like to know. They would work for what they are supposed to do. They do not need to do this or that in detail, they would just limit themselves to working on a large scale to create the consciousness they want to instill in people. Basically, the only important thing is the personality that we develop, because there is nothing else, my dear friends, that will achieve anything in the present situation except by permeating as many people as possible with the truth and daring to speak that truth. We are constantly experiencing how little courage there is for the truth and how little will there is to see things through. How is a cultural pest like Johannes Müller treated in the present day? Just today I received an essay that I believe a great many people consider extraordinarily clever. The Frankfurter Zeitung, that depository for all the current nonsense and fawning of those people who also want to participate in the redesign, the Frankfurter Zeitung even prints it as a feature, an essay by Johannes Müller, in which he talks about the fact that the German people had confidence in their generals, but the generals did not have confidence in the German people, and that this is the source of the misfortune. It is pure nonsense, it is pure brass, but people today follow this brass. And one must dare to confront this brass with all one's might, because anthroposophy should not be something that is received like a Sunday afternoon sermon, but something that pours fire into our blood. What matters first of all is that we say to the world, in the most comprehensive sense, what I pointed out at the end of last Sunday's reflection: we are here as anthroposophists! If we were to found a university today, what would be the result? Well, let us assume that we get students – I will leave aside whether we would have the teachers for them – we get students; I do not think that we would get students under today's conditions, because no matter how well these students were trained, even if the socialist state system, which is praised by many, continues to exist or comes into being in a different form, it would not be recognized by the state. They would have studied for the outside world, so to speak, for their own pleasure. That is not the point, but the point is that we make the world understand: the whole spirit that prevails in our public science today must become a different one. And we have a right to demand that everyone do it – that is what matters.

Do you see why I am saying these things? Yes, I am saying them for the following reason: We have been working on this for decades; much of what I have discussed from this platform only came before my mind's eye in these last decades; I know what some of them were a harrowing experience; I know how I have to look at them; but I also know how little willpower has been developed to see things as they really are in terms of their spiritual content.

The new issue of Reich contains a very interesting essay by Hermann Haase, a contribution to a phenomenology of consciousness. This interesting essay shows something very curious. The author points to an investigation by a psychiatrist, a pathologist, who examined schizothymia and its connection with dementia praecox, a certain form of mental deficiency. Through the examination of an imbecile, the psychiatrist in question came to the conclusion that there are four types of layers of consciousness in man: the superconscious (called sup.), the experiencing subconscious (called exp. sub.), the ordering subconscious (ord. sub.) and the deepest subconscious (d. sub.). There we find the modern researcher, who has emerged from the modern university. He establishes four levels of consciousness in individuals with mental deficiencies, in which this is reflected in a negative mirror image, and it is not realized that this matter has been proclaimed to the world in a healthy way by telling it: the ordinary object consciousness, the imaginative consciousness, the inspired consciousness, the intuitive consciousness. If something is said today in the light of sound spiritual work, it is not accepted. If a psychiatrist comes along and takes something out of the morbid states of morbid individuals, the world falls in line to receive the thing in a caricature. That is what we have come to. Such an abyss exists between what can and must be proclaimed today out of the spirit and what the world is willing to accept. We must make an effort to recognize this mission of ours in the present day and not give in to the thought: “Yes, but it can't be that bad after all, people want the best.” No, we have to recognize that the world is in decline and that it needs to be rebuilt. That is what we have to make it aware of first. If we do not make it clear, then nothing we put into the world will be of any use, and the world would not understand it at all if it were not first pointed out that it is necessary to replace contemporary state science with something else. This is how the world must experience it. And if we do not rise to this challenge, then we as anthroposophists are not working to transform modern culture. Anything else is wishy-washy. We must therefore seek the forms in which we can communicate this to the world, in which we are really always talking about spiritual science. We do not need to concern ourselves today at this important historical moment with whether or not we have fairy tales to tell; that may be a nice task, but today it is about how we present the spiritual wealth of spiritual science to the world. We must not always protect and patronize what is different, but really stand on the ground of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We have to represent spiritual science. That is what I meant last Sunday. And we should courageously represent this spiritual science wherever we can, in whatever profession we are active. This spiritual science can send its reforming and revolutionary power into every profession. We must not be deterred when something is possible, such as a first-class university of the old declining times producing an individual like Max Dessoir, who lies, lies scientifically. We must have the courage to present these things in their truth. But now we must be alert to the fact that slimy figures are creeping out everywhere, attacking what should have come from here. The things these slimy figures come up with! In addition to everything else that has been slime, a new slime has emerged that has added a slur on Dessoir and that produces the slimey lie that Dessoir has justified himself in the new edition of his book. We must be alert to the slime in today's culture, as it emerges particularly in the public press. If we do not aspire to clarity, all our confused thoughts will not help us. For that we need both courage and the humility to limit ourselves in our abilities and in our powers to do what we can do. You see, I just wanted to tell you these things to make you understand what I actually meant last Sunday. I did not mean that one should think one should now do what one should have done in 1907; then it would have developed in some way by 1919; but I meant that one should now seize the great historical moment and make it clear to the world that there is an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It does not know that. It does not know that at all, because people are not listening to these things, because they are not being transformed into deeds. I could give you countless examples of how things are not being transformed into deeds, how things mean nothing more than a passing sensation. That is not what anthroposophy is meant to be. Anthroposophy is meant in such a way that action can arise from each of its words, even if this action can initially only consist of words. But these words must not be empty phrases, they must not be formulated in an unctuous way, like the unctuous speech of ancient or contemporary Christianity; these speeches must be grainy. We must make it clear today that those who come out of our universities are stupid, and we must not tire of showing that this is a cultural-historical phenomenon, that all four faculties (or however many are newly established) are institutions of stultification in the sense of real human development. If we do not take a stand and speak out, then anthroposophy will have to work for a long time before it can fulfill its true calling. Then you see, do you believe that what I told you the other day, that for example what is described in our anatomy and physiology as “human” is actually not a human being but Lucifer, described by Ahriman, which is expressed by the fact that today's physiology distinguishes between two types of nerves, sensitive and motor nerves; do you think that it is easy to find? If it is found, it is a truth today that should not be taken as a sensation, as idle gossip, but that it could unhinge an entire system of science, as well as many other systems of science that are taught today at our universities by the boards of trustees, and how this spiritual science could unhinge many other things. But as long as we are not aware that anthroposophy is everything, that the other things cannot exist alongside it, that it is wrong of us to let ourselves be beaten down as soon as we are out of this door, then of course we cannot achieve what I spoke of last Sunday. We as anthroposophists should make it clear to the world that we are here. That is what matters. Above all, we must grasp that. The world must know that anthroposophy can advocate for its cause. Think about it: if there were only Jesuits sitting here and they were admonished to work, how they would work, then you would get a yardstick for what people who want to advocate for their cause do for their cause. But one must be able to look at things this way, not as a Sunday afternoon sermon. I believe that this is the most practical thing at the present time, and we would like to agree on this: how we can really bring the anthroposophical spiritual heritage into the world today, when the time is right for it, when it is high time for it. We have begun by saying that we were always embarrassed at the beginning, when this movement began here in Europe; we were always embarrassed; we wrung ourselves out, how we say this or that, but just not where it comes from, just not on what soil it grew; we have considered that as our task. We should think back to this time, and when we think back, we should learn the right lessons from it. Then we could, above all, be a community of people who practice the right, but now productive criticism of the unculture of the present. And this productive criticism, this emphasis on the fact that what is there must be replaced by something else, that the whole of the present school system is not worth a shot of powder, this productive criticism, that is what we have to do first. Then everyone can add what they can add from their own particular knowledge, and in doing so they can make fruitful use of what they are as individuals. But wanting to make all kinds of things fruitful without putting them at the service of the greater good will achieve nothing today, because today humanity is not facing small, but great reckonings, and this must always be said again.