Social Ideas, Social Reality, Social Practice II

GA 337b — 30 August 1920, Dornach

6. The Artist in the Threefold Social Organism

Ernst Uehli speaks as an introduction on the topic “The Artist in the Threefold Social Organism”. This is followed by a discussion in the course of which Paul Baumann asks Rudolf Steiner the question:

Paul Baumann: What is the relationship between the artist or his work and the social cell? Does he not also have to do preparatory work?

Rudolf Steiner: When it is a question of art and social life, I actually always have a certain unsatisfactory feeling in a discussion concerning these two things, for the simple reason that the whole way of thinking, of soul-attitude, comes into question when one speaks of social organization, of social structure, must be somewhat different than that which one must have when one speaks of art, of its proper emergence from human nature and its assertion in life, before human beings.

In a certain respect, the two areas are not really comparable. And precisely because they are not comparable — not because they are comparable but because they are not comparable — it seems to me that the whole position of art in relation to the artist and to humanity can be illuminated from the point of view of the threefold social organism. When speaking of art in the social organism, we should never forget that art belongs to the highest blossoms of human life and that everything is harmful to art that makes it impossible to count it among the highest blossoms of the development of human life. And so we must say: If it becomes possible for a threefold social organism to shape life in general in such a way that artists and art can emerge from this life, this will be a certain test for the correctness, and also for the inner justification, of the threefold social organism. But the question will not be posed in this way: How should one or other thing be organized in the threefold social organism in order to arrive at a right fostering of art or a right assertion of the artist? Above all, the question will be: How will people live in the threefold social organism? One could say that if the idea of the threefold social order were some kind of utopian idea, then one could of course say what one says about utopias: people will live happily – as happily as can be. Now the idea of the threefold social order does not start from such utopian conditions, but simply asks: What is the natural structure, the self-evident structure of the social organism? One could well imagine that some person might have the idea that man as such could be much more beautiful than he is, and that nature has not actually done everything to make man beautiful enough. Yes, but the way the world is, man had to become as he is. It may be, of course, that some Lenin or Trotsky says: the social organism must be so and so. But that is not the point. It matters just as little whether someone imagines a different nature of man than can arise from the whole of nature. What matters is what inner laws the social organism must have. And if we understand the threefold social organism from this thoroughly practical point of view, we can then also gain ideas about what will be possible in this threefold social organism. Above all, a certain economic utilization of time will be possible in the threefold social organism, without the need for compulsion at work or similar fine things that would thoroughly eradicate all freedom. It will simply be impossible, due to the way things work out in the three-tiered social organism, for as many people as now to loiter around uselessly. I know that these words “loitering around uselessly” may cause misunderstandings, because people will say: Yes, the actual loiterers, the actual life-dawdlers, are very few. But that is not the point. The point is whether those people who do a lot, do something that is absolutely necessary for life, whether they do something that is rationally and fruitfully integrated into life.

If you consider any branch of life today – I will immediately highlight the one that is most fragile in this life today – if you consider journalism, for example, and see how much human labor is required, from the typesetter to all the others who are involved in producing newspapers. Take all the work that is done there – the majority of this work is done by people who are drifting through life, because the majority of this work is actually unnecessary work. All this can be done more rationally without employing so many people. The point is not to have as many people as possible doing something so that they can live, but rather to carry out those activities that are necessary for the fruitful development of this life, this social cycle, in the sense of a truly social life cycle. All the chaotic developments that are taking place today with regard to the utilization of human labor power are connected with the fact that we do not really have a social organism, but rather a social chaos caused by the deification of the unitary state. I have often emphasized examples of this social chaos. Just imagine how many books are printed today, of which fewer than fifty copies are sold. Now, take such a book – how many people are involved in its production! They make a living, but they do unnecessary work. If they did something else, it would be wiser and countless other people would be relieved in a certain way. But as it is, countless typesetters and bookbinders are working, making piles of books – mostly lyric poems, but other things are also considered – piles of books are being produced; almost all of them have to be pulped again. But there are many unnecessary things like this in today's life; countless things are absolutely unnecessary.

What does that mean? Imagine for a moment that our human organism were not properly structured into a nervous-sensory system, which is localized in the head, and a rhythmic and appendage system, which interact in a regular manner and thus function economically. Just imagine if we were a unified being that goes haywire everywhere, that produces useless things at a rapid rate: the amount of useless things that humans produce today would not even be enough. We must bear that in mind. We must realize that it is essential that this social organism be structured, that it be designed in accordance with inner laws; then it will also be economical. Then human labor will be in the right place everywhere, and, above all, no useless work will be done.

What follows from this? People will have time. And then, my dear audience, the basis will be given for free activities such as art and similar things. Time is part of this. And out of time will come that which must be there for art, and art will then work together with something else, it will work together with the free spiritual life. The aim of this free spiritual life is to develop the talents together with the time present in the threefold social organism, not in the perverse way it is done today, but in a way that is in keeping with nature. When the free spiritual organism is truly separated from the other organisms, the number of unrecognized geniuses will decrease considerably, because there will be a much more natural development. There will be much less pursuit of idle dreams of some kind or other. So the development of talent will simply be placed on a more natural footing by the development of the free spiritual life. And something else is necessary if art is to develop: an artistic sense, an artistic need, a natural human desire and aspiration for art is necessary. All this must arise out of the threefold social organism as something that comes into being when there is organized social life together, not chaotic social life as there is today. You see, above all, in recent times we have come into the chaos of artistic feeling. The original artistic feeling, which wells up with elemental power out of human knowledge, has completely disappeared under modern education. It would come again if we developed in the sense of the threefold social order. And so one must now think of the whole thing that is emerging.

If we speak from the point of view of the threefold social organism, we must speak only as practitioners and not as theorists. We must not ask about principles, but about facts, and then we must say that what I have now indicated can come much more quickly than one might think. And what happens then? Then associations arise for the most diverse things - partly from intellectual life, partly from economic life. And one should not imagine what these associations will do somehow boxed in paragraphs and principles. In these associations, there will again be people who will be able to make judgments out of the full warmth of human feeling and experience. People will emerge from the associations who, through what they otherwise do in life, will achieve a certain validity in life that is not guaranteed to them by the state, that is not guaranteed to them by a title. Whether people are privy councillors, works councillors, medical officers or the like, they will derive their worth from the threefold social organism, not from these abstract things, but from what they do, from what lives continually. It is not paragraphs that will live, but what the people who rightly hold sway in the associations negotiate with each other; it will result in what is now present in caricature as so-called public opinion. One must only imagine very concretely what can come about through the living interaction of the associations.

Associations also include those that come from free spiritual life. Yes, here again something will be given to the life experience in a person, which can establish things as justified judgment. And if you just take that in its full concrete meaning, the following will emerge: the artist will really be able to achieve something materially for his work of art out of this public judgment, but what will come into its own out of the associations. Out of these conditions, something will really be able to develop that will make it possible for an artist, even if it takes him thirty years to create a work of art, to still be able to receive enough for this work of art to satisfy his needs for the thirty years it takes him to create a new work of art – which, in any case, might no longer be an option if he is already sixty or seventy years old. That will work out. It will actually work out – if one does takes the whole thing in a philistine manner – that the artist can be compensated for his work of art from within such a tripartite social organism in the sense of the economic cell. He cannot be compensated today for the reason that there are such unnatural prices. In fact, people today cannot pay the artist what he would actually have to demand if he only thought about himself for a moment. But today he thinks: I have managed to create some picture or other, and yes, if I only get enough to last me for the next three months, then I'll take it – of course I won't be able to finish a decent work in three months, but people don't understand that either – and I'll just pump it up again in three months.

Now, I would like to say that these things will only arise as the highest extract; therefore, one cannot really discuss these things well from the outset. I always find it a little awkward to discuss these things. It is true that, according to the Pythagorean theorem, the square above the hypotenuse is always equal to the squares of the two legs, but once you have this theorem, it is impossible to talk in advance about all the possible degrees of application. It is the same with the threefold social organism. It is not possible to specify what will now develop as the highest flowering of social life. That is why a discussion of these matters is actually awkward, because they are too disparate areas – social life and artistic life. But if we now take things in detail, we have to say: something like this building in Dornach had to be built, it had to arise out of a certain cultural and civilizing task of the present, out of the recognition of this task. And I would like to say: if there were even fewer people who have a thorough knowledge of what has actually been built and sculpted and painted here, it would still have to be built in some way. Of course, this building could only come into being because the material means were there, but it will only be possible to complete it if further material means are provided. These questions cannot be discussed by saying, “Yes, something must be done,” because, when talking about these things, “must” has a fundamentally quite different meaning. And so I think: above all, it should be quite clear that the freedom of human movement necessary to give art its proper foundation will be brought about by the threefold social organism. And only when natural foundations for social life are in place will each person be able to take proper root in that social life. Ultimately, it is really more about the thing than the words.

You see, I remember, for example, the 1880s. We had just passed through that period in the external bourgeois development of art when the theater was dominated by the comedies of a Paul Lindau, a Blumenthal, in other words, by those who put all manner of farcical, tragic or dramatic straws on the stage. We had the last phase, hadn't we, of conventional painting and so on. At that time, a book was published by a boundlessly narrow-minded person - a person of whom, when you saw him, you really couldn't say anything other than: he can only be narrow-minded. - And this book, what did it demand? It demanded nothing more urgently than, yes, than this art that we have had, this theater art, this sculpture, this musical art, and so on. All of this has no social foundation; it is uprooted, and everything must be rebuilt from the social. They were terribly beautiful phrases, but it was actually terribly bleak stuff, because it was rooted nowhere in life. And so I would like to say: what matters today is not that we say the right things about such things, but that we feel in the right way out of the real necessity of life, and that means: we must feel the necessity of transformation, of the new formation of life. This makes it especially necessary in this area to draw attention to the fact that we must, above all, get away from the phrase. And so, when we speak of the threefold social order, it is important that we first understand this threefold social order ourselves; the other things will then follow.

I believe that basically one speaks about art incorrectly, if one speaks about it at all. In art one should paint, in art one should chisel, in art one should build, but one should actually talk about art as little as possible. Of course there are certain ways of talking about art, but that itself must then be something artistic. There is, of course, also a thought art. Something equally justified is constructed in works of thought art as in the other arts, the art of painting and so on. But when you look at the creative process, what is brought forth artistically is something that cannot be said to be produced in one way or another or to be received in one way or another. Rather, all the necessities of life must be transformed into a kind of matter-of-factness. It is necessary to familiarize oneself with the idea that if there is no genius, there can be no proper art. In this case, all the discussions about how the social organism should be organized in order to allow the artist to be properly appreciated are in vain. At best, one can say: in an otherwise well-functioning social organism, art will be present when there are as many geniuses as possible; then the right art will be there. But first these geniuses have to be there. And how they are to be realized – well, it is certainly true that the lives of many people of genius have been extraordinarily tragic. But for geniuses to be able to have a real effect on the world, for geniuses to be able to realize their potential in accordance with the gifts they have been given at birth, that can only happen in a free spiritual life, because only there will there be real spiritual life.

Then we will also go beyond what is most eminently inartistic today. No, something like the Renaissance and Gothic, these were categories that were basically taken from a fully living reality. It was life, and life is always universal. And so Mr. Uehli was absolutely right when he said that something like Gothic and Renaissance was born out of the whole social context of the time. The divisions that we have recently in the field of art have actually, I would say, arisen more and more purely artificially, and they have arisen because the principle of bourgeois life has continued into intellectual life. Isn't it true that bourgeois life has produced rentiers, that is, idlers who live on their property rents. I mean it like this: if they had just enough ambition, they became artists. But that's not the point, because the point is not to create something that is a kind of human necessity, but to create something out of human ambition, which, although it is usually denied, is still there. And that is where, as Mr. Uehli quite rightly said, the actual artistic endeavor becomes uprooted.

The inner artistic striving, which is completely honest and true, cannot be uprooted, but the artistic life can of course be uprooted from everything abstract in life – if life is uprooted at all. And in such an uprooted artistic life, things come that have their basis in the tendrils of life, not in life itself; the slogans 'Impressionism', 'Expressionism' and the like come. These are things that always have to be brought together again because they have been carved apart. When we talk about impressionism and expressionism, these are only templates, words. But when we talk about our eurythmy, then we have to — not because these things are there — but because these things are there, then we have to turn expressions into impressions and impressions into expressions again in eurythmy. It is extremely important to realize that such catchwords, such didactic abstractions as 'impressionism' and 'expressionism', always arise when the original life is not there. For such words can be applied to anything. What is not an expression? If someone writes a bad poem, that is also an expression; if someone sneezes, that is also an expression. And so, in the end, everything, even the Dornach building, can be called an expression. But that is not the point. The point is to characterize things out of a concrete life document. Then one will not resort to catchwords, but arrive at things that can somehow be seriously meant.

Let me make a comparison: in the Theosophical Society, people talk about the “equality of religions”. When someone starts talking in such abstract terms as the equality or unity of religions, then one also comes across such terrible abstractions in other areas, so that one might say, for example: Well, everything on the table is “food ingredient”. Just as you can find the same thing in Hinduism, in Persia, in Theosophy, in Judaism, so you can also find the same thing in pepper, salt, paprika and other things, namely “food ingredient”. But then you soon see that it depends on the specifics, otherwise you might add salt to coffee and sugar to soup. What is important is to have the will to go into the specifics. But then again, when it comes to the artistic, the categories that have emerged in recent times are basically perceived as something particularly tendril-like. I am certainly not of the opinion that everything that individuals who call themselves expressionists achieve should be condemned. On the contrary, I believe that I can have a very broad heart and that I can even have a heart for such expressionist achievements that other people see as something that has been stuck together. But the theorizing that is attached to such things really seems to me to lead people away from a healthy basis for life. And it is indeed the case today that many people actually only know life from the derived sources. There are people who do not know life but know Ibsen or know Tolstoy or know Rabindranath Tagore, who is now beginning to become a kind of fashion in circles that cannot acquire their own judgment. And when we look at all these things today, when we see how people are caught up in the tangles of life, then we feel it is indeed necessary to emphasize once again how, in a healthy social organism – and that should be the threefold social order – this sense of being uprooted must cease. From this point of view, many of Mr. Uehli's remarks seemed to me to be of particular importance.

Unfortunately, although I have spoken for long enough, I have not been able to add much in concrete terms, because anyone who talks about these things with artistic sensitivity - as was also evident from Mr. Baumann's speech - must talk in such a way that talking about all the questions that are floating around today about the position of the artist - for example, whether or not to exhibit or whether or not geniuses fail - is actually quite futile. I think people should realize this more; then it will lead to the right thing. If someone is an artist, then he can also starve, then he can also have a job that occupies him from morning to evening; he will still develop his artistic genius at night. This cannot be suppressed. If someone is an artist, then he will live his artistic life, even if he has to chop wood or shine boots for the rest of his days – he will live his artistic life, even if he only lives it for his own room, for his own closet. These are things that absolutely cannot be rationally treated, that should be treated, I would even say, a little artistically themselves. And being treated artistically basically precludes philistinism; it cannot be made to look sophisticated. And now it is actually the case, isn't it, that if you are to bring general humanity into a social order, then you cannot integrate that which depends only on personal genius into a paragraph or principle. Even when discussing the position of art in life, one must always have some artistic feeling, and then things will actually always flow into free speech, into free creation; one cannot circumscribe them. The things that are so necessary for life must not be circumscribed.

I would like to say that it is necessary to talk about art from an artistic point of view and that one should have at least a little philistinism in one's veins – one need not make it too bad – if one is to talk about what is universally human. Because, ladies and gentlemen, it would be a bad thing in life if there were only those who were artists, or if all those who believe that they should achieve recognition as artists actually did achieve it. I would like to know what would become of life then. What is necessary for life is genius, but what is also necessary for life is philistinism. And if there were no philistinism, there would probably soon be no more genius either. The categories of “good” and “bad” cannot be applied to life so easily, but life is multifaceted. You can talk a lot, but you should actually talk nothing but what is taken from life itself.