The Big Questions of our Time and Anthroposophical Spiritual Knowledge

GA 336 — 6 February 1919, Bern

1. The Social Question as Determined by the Necessities of Contemporary Humanity

Dear attendees! Before I begin with the lecture, I would like to apologize to the esteemed attendees: My voice has suffered a little lately due to a very common cold. It could be that it suffers disturbances during the lecture and would do all sorts of somersaults. I kindly ask for your understanding in this regard. I hope that my voice will improve during the lecture.

What I would particularly like to emphasize in the first part of these reflections on social issues is the true nature of what actually lives in the social demands of the present. For a discerning person, when he considers human affairs, especially the affairs of the human life itself, it very, very soon becomes clear how that which man actually wills and strives for in the most comprehensive sense masks and hides itself externally in all sorts of forms that do not directly represent that which actually lives as an impulse in the soul.

Therefore, one must particularly try to explore the true nature of what actually lives in human souls when faced with social phenomena.

Social issues – no one, esteemed attendees, will be able to deny that they have been discussed for decades, not only discussed within circles in which one discussed this or that more or less seriously, that they were discussed by the world parties, world classes, world destinies. Much, much has been achieved in the second half of the nineteenth century in terms of what can be taught to solve these pressing issues that have become truly burning in the present.

In particular, however, it is the terrible catastrophe that has befallen humanity in recent years, which, with regard to what is alive in the social question, could have a galvanizing, enlightening effect on many a human soul.

One could see, dear honoured attendees, how the social question played into this war catastrophe, one could say, right where the most immediate causes of this war catastrophe came into question. Much of what is connected with the starting point of this war catastrophe will, one may still doubt today, be the subject of a social pathology, or rather, the subject of a social psychiatry. But much of the mental state of personalities who had a part, a living part, in the initial currents of this catastrophe can be traced back to their fear, to their whole relationship in general, to what they saw coming as the modern proletarian, social movement.

They understood little of what was alive in this social movement; but they saw it coming. What had a determining influence on those judgments, which were partly responsible for this terrible catastrophe, was not so much what was alive in this social movement, which had only just emerged in 1914, as what had become established in some of the souls of leading personalities under the influence of the emerging social movement.

Then again, esteemed attendees, on the one hand we see many things developing during the last four and a half years. So that, I would say, certain leading circles continued to fear the approaching social movement. But on the other hand, we see how hopes are being raised that what could not come from other world currents might perhaps come from the international socialist world movement, a balancing of the disharmonies that have come to light in this catastrophe. And now, now that this catastrophe has developed into a crisis, which short-sighted minds may mistake for an end, but which is by no means an end, now a large part of educated Europe is faced with the historical, with the actual necessity of taking a stand on what is hidden in the social problem. And must one not, when one follows these things with an unprejudiced eye, must one not say: something tragic is befalling the minds of precisely those who must now feel compelled to comment on the social problem from the immediate present? For decades, through diligent thought and diligent observation of social phenomena, some believed they had grasped a judgment, a power of judgment. Now that the question has become urgent, now that the question in the life of facts, let us say, is growing more urgent with each passing day: unbiased observation cannot say otherwise! And so at least one thing seems to emerge, especially from the role that social movement has played in the last catastrophic events of humanity – one thing seems to emerge from all this: that for a long, long time, people of all classes, of all professions, will have to deal seriously with what is today called social demand. This may justify, esteemed attendees, that I, who has been allowed to speak about subjects in spiritual science for years here in Bern, take the opportunity to speak about this social problem in the narrower sense, based on the foundations of this spiritual scientific research. If I may start with a personal comment, I would just like to say this: it is certainly not, as some might believe, from a purely theoretical method of knowledge, but rather from a theoretical work of knowledge that I would like to speak here about the social problem, as this social problem came to me when I through years among proletarians teachers at a workers' training school was, and from there, to teach and work had just among the proletarian population itself in the trade union, in the cooperative and also within the political movement, instructing, teaching.

Yes, esteemed attendees, I had the opportunity to observe what I believe is of primary importance to observe if one wants to understand the social question. Above all, I had the opportunity to observe, to witness, what I would call the proletarian state of mind.

Those who get to know this proletarian state of mind may be struck by the following conviction: You see, dear attendees, much that is urgent, astute and industrious has been written precisely the field of socialists and non-socialists in the course of the last few decades - actually already in the second half of the nineteenth century, and then through the twentieth century, as far as we have progressed in this twentieth century. This extensive literature expresses what is being thought within the modern proletariat as a social question.

If we compare what is expressed in the literature with what an unbiased observation of life reveals to those who can observe this life, we first discover a strange, highly conspicuous and instructive contradiction within the modern proletarian social movement.

Nothing is heard more often in literature, in speeches, in articles by socialist writers and agitators than a certain underestimation of everything intellectual, everything spiritual! The socialist side in particular emphasizes that everything that man thinks, everything that man somehow works out spiritually in himself, that this is nothing more than, so to speak, I would say, the cloud that rises from the great, only realities of the economic struggles of mankind.

How the individual classes struggle with each other economically, what takes place in economic life, that is the only true reality. Like clouds, those formations that develop as human thoughts arise, arise as that which is called knowledge, that which is called art, and so on.

Am I saying something particularly new to anyone who has somehow dealt with these things when I express this assertion in relation to all socialist literature and all socialist work? Because, dear attendees, a vivid observation shows that within the entire historical development of humanity, there has never been a party movement, a class movement, that has started from thinking, from knowledge, as intensely as the particular proletarian-socialist movement! Yes, it can be said, without exaggeration, that the modern socialist movement is the one that seeks to rest, in a quite unique way, on what is scientifically based. However strange it may sound, the modern socialist movement is the one that, in contrast to all other similar movements in world history, starts from a scientific basis in the most eminent sense, from a foundation of ideas!

As there are so many contradictions in life, indeed, as life itself consists of the interaction of contradictions, so – one could say – it is also there. People consciously say: We think nothing of thoughts; in the unconscious lie the reasons from which this movement has emerged: from thought. One has only to observe with true love for the facts and with true love for the observation of human nature to see how the proletarian soul was touched by an understanding of such difficult, such exact precision - at least an attempt at exactness is made - such exact thought work as that of Karl Marx ; one must see with love for the facts, with love for the observation of human nature, how the proletarian mind has been tried in an astute way to understand where Karl Marx, the leader of the modern proletarian movement, the theoretical leader, was actually mistaken.

It can be said that if you were a little tired of the superficiality of so-called bourgeois intellectual circles within contemporary human society and entered the circles of the proletariat, you could already notice the transition – the transition from the superficial, lightly veiled scientificity of an education that is only superficially constructed, to the intense striving to get behind the secrets of the immediate life that surrounds you in the modern proletarian world. One sensed, I would say, the approach of a terrible disaster, by the fact that one saw how little inclination there was, especially among the intellectual, leading people, to find understanding for what really lives in the proletarian soul.

One could feel a pang of heartache when one saw the paths the leading class of humanity took to look into the proletarian soul: they went to the theater to see Hauptmann's “Weavers.” Aesthetic enjoyment of proletarian situations – that was what they sought as understanding.

They had little conception of this – or they sought little conception. The real secret is that the modern proletariat has been penetrated by the strictest scientific thinking, the heaviest scientific artillery, which many intellectuals today avoid because it is uncomfortable for them, and this thinking has been able to penetrate the modern proletarian soul; one seeks little thought about the fact that this is so. If one took things seriously, one could feel for decades that there was too little understanding for what was emerging as the looming disaster.

Now, esteemed attendees, what is the reason for the contradiction that I have indicated, that on the one hand the thought is almost denied by the modern proletarian and that, however, this proletariat is entirely based on thoughts, has a sense and interest and attention for the thought life - what is the reason for this contradiction? I believe that observation of life shows that this contradiction lies in the fact that this movement is not so much concerned with what people imagine, what these economic or social goals are, but that it is more a matter of what the soul of the living person who belongs to the modern proletariat actually is.

And I must say: No word has spoken more intensely to my soul than all the astute discussions of economic issues, which I believe I can dignify; but more indicative of what lives in the time, has always seemed to me to be a word that can be heard everywhere within the modern proletarian movement: it is the word that says: the modern proletariat has advanced in the development of humanity to class consciousness. What does it actually mean, as the word is used directly? It wants to say: the modern proletarian does not live instinctively as—say—in the old patriarchal life, in the old craft life, as an apprentice or journeyman; the modern proletarian worker does not live instinctively within the social structure; but he lives in such a way that he knows what he means within this social structure, how he is a special class—precisely the class of employees in relation to the other classes, the classes of the employers. That he does not merely live instinctively within this social structure, in the way he knows he is placed within it, but has something of class consciousness, is what the word “class-conscious proletariat” is initially intended to express.

But when you get right down to it, the term “class-conscious proletariat” is just a mask for something else entirely. We would recognize this other thing if it were not for the fact that modern humanity has lost not only the ability to recognize the full reality of the course of human events, but also the concepts that necessarily had to be discarded. Today, I would say, people are almost obsessed with a very comfortable instinct for knowledge. This instinct for knowledge aims to link cause and effect in the simplest possible way everywhere: there is the cause - there is the effect; the effect follows from the cause. And then it continues, possibly in a very subjective way, perhaps adding to justify this straightforward progression of knowledge along the thread of cause and effect: “Nature doesn't make leaps.” Of course, anyone with even a little insight knows that nature makes leaps everywhere. But such a word is simply used up. Nature does develop successive green color leaves after green color leaves; but then it makes the leap to the green sepal, and then the even greater leap to the petal, then to the stamens and so on. And so one would notice refutations of the convenient sentence “Nature does not make leaps” in all of life, in all of nature's processes.

Where would we end up if we were to observe human life in such a bare way as it develops in the physical world, so bare that we follow events in a straight line according to the immediately preceding cause and the immediately following effect? Do we not see in the individual human life how a particular crisis occurs when the teeth change around the seventh year? Do we not see how a significant crisis occurs when a person reaches sexual maturity? Do we not see how, in between, there is more of a calm succession of cause and effect? And how then, at the change of teeth, at sexual maturity - there are also other crises in later years, even if they are less noticeable - all these things show how, in such times, nature truly makes leaps. In this respect, an unbiased observer of natural processes will still have a great deal to do in the future. By throwing overboard, and rightly so, what belongs to ancient metaphysics, one has at the same time lost the possibility of viewing historical development in such a way as to see and perceive the real impulses contained in it, just as one can perceive such changing impulses as they assert themselves in the human tooth change, in human sexual maturity.

For the truly impartial observer, it is evident from the course of human historical development that there are special times when the human soul undergoes a transformation and new impulses enter into the human soul.

One such age was the one that roughly coincides with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this respect, the history as it is presented in schools is in many ways a “convenient fable”. It does not point to the magnificent transformations that have taken place in the soul conditions of human beings in successive ages. Once we move from the blinkered history that prevails today to an unblinkered history, we will see how very different the inner soul state of a person in the eleventh or twelfth century AD was from that of a person in the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century! History cannot be viewed in such a way that one can simply trace cause and effect in a straight line; but such crises – crises that are fundamentally connected with the organization of the whole of humanity – such crises must be acknowledged, as one must acknowledge such crises, such fundamental upheavals, in the partial development of the human natural organism.

And that which lives there, I would say, as an elementary impulse in the modern development of humanity, has not been portrayed anywhere except in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which I represent. On the other hand, however, modern development has been repeatedly and justifiably presented in such a way that modern life as a whole, and economic life in particular, has undergone a transformation on the one hand through modern technology, and on the other hand through the advent of the capitalist economic order, as it emerged in the wake of modern technology.

I do not need to characterize these two impulses in the development of modern humanity in more detail here, because this has often been presented: modern technology and modern capitalism – many sides have aptly described what these two impulses of modern development mean with regard to the emergence of this modern proletarian consciousness. But this modern proletarian consciousness must not only be traced back to these two economic impulses: to modern technology, to modern machine production, to modern capitalism – but it must be seen as that which, as a kind of partial phenomenon, had to emerge in a very elementary way in the development of man. It is the result of those revolutions in the organism of human development, that inner revolutionary impulse of which I said that it manifested itself in the development of modern humanity around the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries. The other classes have taken relatively little part in what broke into modern humanity. The modern proletarian has been pushed by his very necessities of life, especially in his state of mind, to take up this impulse, which arose from the forces of human development in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, this impulse into his soul.

What was this impulse? Well, this impulse cannot be characterized in any other way than to say: Much of, indeed, all of what has been thought and felt and invented by people in earlier times more instinctively, more from the subconscious, intuitive powers of the human soul, is consciously being lived through by humanity from this crisis in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth century. The conscious inner clarity of the human soul is developing more and more. This is what the human personality has been relying on since that time.

The transition from an instinctive life to a conscious life was particularly true of the modern proletariat. Just observe how this modern proletariat is separated from what is natural and what is humanly produced. Contrast this with the old crafts, with the old relationship of man to nature, with the direct, natural, original production, where man is connected with what he works, what he does, how a personal relationship develops between man and his labor.

It is an interesting study to see how the modern age has torn apart what used to be connected: man and his work. And most of all, the modern proletarian experiences this, who is placed in front of the machine, next to the machine! There is now an extremely impersonal relationship between man and the thing with which he works! And in the most impersonal way, he is placed in the whole social organism, in that he is a member of an economic order that does not arise from the impulses of personalities, that does not arise from the personal impulses of human individuals, but that arises, one might say, objectively, from the workings of capitalism itself. Man is torn away from what used to constitute his joy in his occupation, what used to constitute his zeal, his enthusiasm for his occupation, what constituted the honor that he associated with his occupation, and so on; and a completely abstract, sober relationship between man and his occupation has arisen. Because this is not the case for the other estates and classes, because this in particular comes out, comes into its own among the proletarians, that is why it is the proletarian above all who is pointed out, in his soul the actual impulse of modern times, consciousness, to develop.

Behind the saying “class-conscious proletariat” lies the other fact that the proletarian, above all, through his world position, through his being placed in human development, aspires particularly to modern human consciousness, to consciousness of human dignity. The old estates are not so detached from what used to be their joy, used to be their thoughts of human dignity and honor from their actions. The modern proletarian, because no interest can connect him with his means of labor, is thrown back on himself as a mere human being. It is in him that this impulse of the transition from unconsciousness, from the instinctive social life to the conscious social life, develops.

One could say, esteemed attendees, how Christianity broke out in an unknown province of the Roman Empire, how it spread first to the educated countries, Greece and Rome, but took much less root there than it did among the barbarian peoples with their simple – as one often says from a haughty point of view, childlike – state of mind, and how Christianity in the simple minds of the Germanic and other tribes descending from the north, the most significant impulse of human development, the transition from instinctive life to life in full human consciousness, cannot develop most intensely in the other classes, but most intensely – even if the other classes may otherwise have greater prerequisites for intellectuality and so on: What the new impulse actually is in the development of humanity can develop most intensely in the modern proletarian precisely because of the proletarian's unfavorable position in general human development. The modern proletariat is moving against the educated world of today, just as the Germanic Christians once moved against the Roman and Greek world. One can say that human consciousness, consciousness of human dignity, is actually hidden behind the words: “class-conscious proletariat”.

Thus, dear attendees, for those who can observe life, it is not just any economic demand, it is not just some abstract notion, it is not just some one-sided economic impulse, but the living human being is at the center of this modern social proletarian movement, the modern proletarian himself with a special way of consciously striving for the realization of true human dignity. And it is from this deeper class consciousness that the true form of social demands develops, which are often masked behind mere economic disputes and economic demands.

If you know this modern proletariat, dear attendees, one thing stands out above all. It is striking that this proletariat is the aspiring population, the more educated classes, which, as I mentioned at the beginning, can truly be said to It is founding a social movement that is based entirely on science and on thought. In his class consciousness, in his striving for conscious human dignity, the modern proletarian also strives for real knowledge, for real inner thought deepening.

But where does this deepening of thought lead him? Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a point that the modern proletarian himself, being more devoted to external work, does not really notice – but it is noticed by someone who may justifiably call himself a spiritual proletarian – and it is a point that provides a particularly deep insight into the state of mind of the modern proletariat , and actually into the whole structure of modern socialism: the fact is that everything spiritual, everything that man acquires in terms of concepts, artistic experiences and otherwise, is perceived by the modern proletarian, and also by the theoretical leaders of the modern proletariat, as - as they themselves always say - as “ideology”; ideology - a spiritual life that is not convinced that among the real forces and entities that pulsate and interweave the world, there is also objective, real spirit - no: a spiritual life that is nothing more than the subjective reflection of external material and economic reality. Not that an effective spirit penetrates into our humanity, which leads us not only to have a kind of brain digestion, but to have thoughts and feelings within this brain digestion, it is not a real spirit that leads us to develop a life of thought, a different inner spiritual life - no: this spiritual life is mere ideology. Nothing of spiritual reality corresponds to it. All that lives in ideas is only the mirror of material processes, economic processes.

One could even say that the modern proletarian is, in a sense, inwardly happy in theory that he can be such an enlightened person, no longer believing in old metaphysical entities, but knowing that everything that is spiritual life for people is ideology, bubbles that rise from the material and economic world of facts. And yet, what the modern proletariat brings into the whole social structure depends in many ways on its perception and recognition of intellectual life as ideology in the way I have described.

But why is that so? Of course, the proletarian himself thinks that in doing so he has made a special contribution of his own to human development. But that is not the case. The modern proletarian has inherited only what the other classes were able to hand over to him in this particular field. At the same point in time that I mentioned to you – the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth century – when humanity went through a significant crisis, moving from a mere instinctive life to an inwardly soulful conscious life. At the same time, a phenomenon can be observed in the leading classes and leading personalities: spirituality loses its driving force in relation to what the human being can think and research further.

In this way, we touch on a very significant secret of the whole of recent human development. We must look back, esteemed attendees, to those times when everything that man researched, everything that man thought about the individual facts of nature and human life, how all of this was incorporated into an overall world view, which was also permeated by religious impulses into the most minute branches of human knowledge and research, how a common impulse spreads through what was a central religious feeling and what wanted to know and research about individual parts of the world.

In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, with the advent of modern times, the spirituality of man loses its momentum. Just imagine what it means, for example, for the Church, which, out of its own initiative and on the basis of its last old impulses, very commendably founded universities and all sorts of other institutions, that this Church, out of the old world view, has no momentum that could fruitfully spread beyond what the Brunos and the Galileis have produced. Outer knowledge, knowledge of the world and its facts, comes to the fore. And the old spirituality does not possess the impetus to place the center of the human being, the center of the human soul and spirit, in a truly appropriate, human relationship to this new spiritual life. And so it is not religious, not general human impetus, not real spirituality that lives in this science, in this wide universe, that lives. Under the influence of this loss of spirituality, the newer spiritual life becomes ideology.

And the modern proletarian has inherited the fate of those times when there was no proletariat in the modern sense, to inherit the spiritual world only in the form of ideology, to inherit the spiritual world in such a way that in the relationship of man to the spiritual world no longer lives the recognition of the real spiritual forces and entities that permeate and animate the world.

This is the great, perhaps tragic error of the modern proletariat: it believes that it has a special proletarian achievement in interpreting spiritual life as an ideology, but that it has precisely the peculiar inheritance of the old class in it. The modern proletariat has adopted the particular way in which people relate to science from the bourgeoisie and the other classes!

But it turns out that because the other classes have certain old traditions, the modern proletarian is at the top of his personality, it turns out that the modern proletarian must take the impulses more seriously, and to a quite different degree. Here again lives a significant social problem, which will not be exhaustively illuminated by popular science and popular observation of such things for a long time to come.

Of course, the other classes, too, if they are Christian, have only one ideology in their spiritual lives today. But they are not so honest; they still believe they have something of the old religious impulses, of the old driving force that emanates from the center of the soul and penetrates into that which man researches and recognizes beyond the individual facts. The modern proletarian has simply taken an extremely radical view of ideology. The consequence of this is that the appreciation of this spiritual life is, after all, a very superficial one. And this way of relating to the spiritual life is the reason for the feeling that this spiritual life is actually only something that seems to be an addition to the serious life of man, but that it consists only of materialistic and economic processes.

Must not a view that takes the spiritual life seriously as an ideology, must not this view think quite differently about everything spiritually achieved in the course of human development than the other classes, who, still arising from other impulses, have recognized this spiritual life?

There is a terribly revolutionary element in the view of spiritual life as an ideology, the consequences of which, one might say, people today still dare not dream of! There could be a very uncomfortable awakening from this oversleeping of what is revealed in this point in relation to the social question. The loss of a living, real spirituality, the descent of spiritual life to a mere ideology, that is the first thing I would like to mention among the true forms of social demands.

The second, however, dear attendees, lies in the realm of public political life. Again, one could say: In the consciousness of the proletarian lives a kind of mask; in the depths of the soul lives something completely, completely different.

What has struck people, and also the modern proletariat, most of all in the more recent development of humanity is the inundation of all conditions by modern machine technology and by modern capitalism. Certainly, it is these things that have struck the modern proletarian most of all at first. As if by historical suggestion, his attention was fixed on this. And he understood that Karl Marx, in a special study of economic processes, also wanted to explain to the modern proletarian how he actually comes to his social position.

And yet, the second essential form of social demands that now arises cannot be understood from economic life alone. It is not the economic structure, not the economic conditions that drive this second true form of social demand into the soul of the proletarian, but this second social demand lies in the direct further development of that which, some time ago, already led to the abolition of of the old slavery, which later led to the abolition of serfdom, and which must necessarily lead to the end of something that the modern proletarian, economically misinterpreting it, perceives as the most degrading in his position.

What was the essential thing about the slave? He was not recognized in his full human dignity; he was considered a commodity by his master. And in a certain way, serfdom in feudalism is also still a commodity. In the most insistent way, one could say that the last remnant of this unworthiness of the human being lives in the consciousness of the modern proletarian, in that it is clear to him what his labor power is. No longer is he as a human being in serfdom, as in slavery, but rather that which is his labor power is a commodity in the modern social process.

Just as one otherwise buys this or that commodity within the capitalist economic system, in that the commodities come onto the market, circulate through the market according to supply and demand, so too does one buy the commodity “labor power” on the labor market. Nothing has been more forcefully absorbed by the modern proletarian from the Marxist doctrine than this perception that his labor power is equal in relation to the economic process, equal to the commodity.

The same impulses that led to the abolition of slavery, the same impulses that led to the end of serfdom, live in a different form in the modern proletariat and actually strive towards a possibility of divesting human labor of the character of a commodity within the human social structure.

I know a great many people in the present day – when I explain to them what I have just said about human labor power and its relationship to the commodity, they say they cannot understand how it should be possible, through any measures, to divest the labor power of the craftsman of the character of the commodity, of the character of a commodity.

Plato and Aristotle, the most enlightened Greeks, the great philosophers, could not imagine a human society without slaves in it. In the Middle Ages, certain people could not imagine a human society without serfs in it. Today, many people still cannot imagine a humane social structure without labor power being included as a commodity. How this can be achieved will be discussed by me tomorrow, dear attendees, as part of the attempts at a solution that I will try to characterize. Today I just want to point out that the second demand in its true form within modern proletarian social life is that human existence requires that human labor no longer be a commodity, that it can no longer be bought by capitalists in such a way that they give money for a certain amount of labor, which the worker must then make available to him, just as the farmer makes available the goods that he, the farmer, obtains from his field, just as the merchant makes available as capital what he has in his shop. The modern proletarian feels – he may not express it clearly, he may present it in some national scientific guise, but that is how the modern proletarian feels – that it cannot continue to be the case that human labor power has its commodity price in the economic structure of human society. That is the second link.

The third link is that the modern course of human development has led to an overestimation of the external, economic life, just as it has led to an underestimation of the spiritual life by decreeing that spiritual reality is a mere ideology. Precisely because of this, I might say, because of a certain lack of balance, economic life has leaped upward on the other side. As if by a mighty suggestion of world history, people's attention was directed to economic life itself. And so it happened: people were drawn away from everything else and devoted their attention entirely to economic life.

From ancient times, a certain spiritual life has emerged. But this spiritual life, as I have shown, has lost its momentum and has degenerated into ideology. What else has emerged from ancient times? Certain state, as they are called, political connections of the public legal system; how man can find a relationship to man within a certain territory as a citizen or as something else within the social structure. Furthermore, a certain economic order has emerged. This economic order, however, has been given its special character by modern technology, by the modern circulation of commodities in the sense of the capitalist economic order.

This is what has broken into modern life in such an overwhelming way, overwhelming all else. That – as I said – the gaze of modern man was fixed only on this economic life, as if hypnotized, dulled the spiritual life in him, on the one hand, to ideology. On the other hand, state life, public legal life, loses all content for him if it is not filled with what is the only reality for him: material economic life.

Under the influence of this third real form of modern social demands, we see the call for nationalization, for socialization, first of all of the means of production, then of the enterprises and so on, and so on. Simply, the state has also more or less lost its content in the old sense in the eyes of modern man, who is hypnotized by economic life.

Thus we see that in recent times it has become desirable for certain classes to nationalize certain branches of public work, as they say. Then, in theory, the modern proletariat next proceeds radically to demand the socialization of the whole of economic life, and thus of life itself.

And so we see that these three figures emerge as the true ones within the social demands of modern times, out of the necessities of life. On the one hand, we see what the life of feeling goes through when the spiritual is reduced to mere ideology. We see how there is a tendency to hypnotically focus on mere economic life and to want to radically merge the state, the political realm and economic life because only then does the state have content for those who believe that all social reality is exhausted in economic reality when the state is a large economic system.

But we see, I want to say, how three sparks of light complement what we see as the proletarian movement: we see three real figures, three social demands: one that shines forth from the spiritual life; the second, it shines forth from the life of public law, from which only the real relationship of the equal human being to the equal human being can arise, from which the position that labor must have in the social structure must also follow. And thirdly, we see the economic body itself.

Thus, from the real three forms of social demands, we see the threefold form of the social question arise at the same time. This threefold nature of the social question can only be a spiritual, a political, and an economic one. And only by considering these three, which have acquired a very specific configuration within modern proletarian consciousness, can we arrive at possible solutions for what is going through the world today as a social impulse, so that for a long time to come people of all professions, people of all walks of life, people of all social classes will have to deal with it.

A consideration of the true nature of social demands, as we have practiced it today, can only lead us to seek solutions to the social question from the full, unbiased reality of intellectual, state, and economic life.

This more important part of the social question of the present day will now occupy us tomorrow, when I will try, just as I have tried today, to characterize the true form of the social demands, when I will try to present possible social solutions to you.