The Big Questions of our Time and Anthroposophical Spiritual Knowledge

GA 336 — 18 August 1919, Dresden

12. The Threefold Social Organism I

I do not want to give a program for solving the social question, but rather speak about observations of life.

It is said that never in the history of mankind have people experienced such terrible things as in this war: but then, to be consistent, one would also have to add: it takes a very special idea to find a solution to today's task. What is given, what people have to absorb, must be completely different now than it has been so far. The Communist Manifesto is not just a theoretical question, but a question of world history, one must understand that. What is called the social question lies deep, deep down in the development of humanity, only one must grasp it.

Thermometer – an indicator of the temperature of a room.

What consciously comes to the surface, the demands, are not the real thing at all. Everything that flares up in the Communist Manifesto of all countries is a historically necessary thing: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” It is not an idea that is being appealed to, but the impulses that arise from a certain life situation, precisely because one is a proletarian, the vague demands that arise from proletarian life, something un-ideological, a force arises. The proletarians do not want ideology, they do not want any ideas. But what comes from the bourgeoisie is and will be built upon. One speaks as if the proletarian programs were something new, but that is not the case. They have been adopted from the bourgeoisie. This will only be recognized later. A gap has opened up between the leading forces and the proletariat. But this is not the case; only the class differences are there; the proletarian world has learned a great deal from the leading circles. But when it saw that their science could not bring it salvation, it lost faith in that science and in those circles. The proletariat recognized the ideology of the intellectual life.

The earlier worldview still had a very different impact; it was still connected to the spiritual world. Today's worldview has no impact; the working of spiritual power is absent. This worldview does not fill people. It is a matter of the head, while the other is a matter of the heart. This difference is expressed in the Protestant confession: understanding everything that the world around us offers with the mind; for the other, faith must suffice. In the bourgeoisie there is still a remnant of the earlier worldview, a kind of connection with the spiritual world. The proletarian is placed in the factory, at the machine. Nothing passes into him, as it did, for example, in the old crafts, when the soul spoke out of the old door handles, for example, and so on. Cut off from any connection that the old craft still had, what spoke out of things and events.

“What am I in the world?” - “I am a highly developed animal organism.” This is the proletariat's perception of what he [the proletarian] has adopted from science. You can be inspired by such ideas, but you can't live with them in the long run. The intellect is convinced that this does not come from the spiritual, but the soul revolts against it. And this is what underlies all social questions. That is the real face. It is thought that everything that lives as art, as science, as custom, law and so on, is ideology, smoke. With such a view, one can think - one cannot live with it.

It is also connected with the fact that economic life has been absorbed by the state in recent centuries.

The municipal administrations have been absorbed and united with the interests of the princes. Intellectual life flows into this state structure. It was bound to happen that the school was wrested from the church and handed over to the state. The state has absorbed the church's “trailing resentment” with regard to schools. The demand for socialism and democracy must lead to the call for the liberation of intellectual life from the state.

Should the dependence of schools and education on the state be further increased? Intellectual life is now being crushed in Russia.

Every person who has come of age should be free to decide on the organization of everything that a person who has come of age has to decide on. In the spiritual life, only those who are knowledgeable and competent in this spiritual life should have a say. Only those who are active in the spiritual life, from the lowest teacher to the highest teacher at the university, should have a say. He must have sufficient time to be able to share in the administration of this life alongside his work in education. Not as it is today, when people who are not practically involved in the profession determine what has to happen.

Then we will have true democracy in the legal life and knowledgeable, efficient leadership in spiritual life.

But the decisions that are made in economic life can only come from knowledgeable and competent and capable individuals or groups of people. It is difficult to form appropriate judgments. The current economic structure of the state is a product of historical development. That is very true. Marx's friend, Engels, explained this very well in his book.