How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order?

GA 338 — 13 February 1921, Stuttgart

Second Lecture

We shall now only make headway if we succeed in establishing the things we have to say for the recovery of the present civilization in a satisfactory way, that is, in a way that is convincing to the individual people. And much depends on our taking our stand on valid starting-points in dealing with the various questions. Above all, a sound judgment must be spread about what is actually involved in such statements as those contained in the “Key Points” and in everything that follows from them.

It is a matter of social conditions and of forming judgments that are socially directed. When seeking such judgments, the following always applies: if one judges these real circumstances, in which people are always involved with their feelings and their will – because that is the case with social circumstances – on the basis of mere intellectual logic, then one ends up in endless debates; and this must be borne in mind, especially in discussions. In matters that involve human beings and are therefore uncertain in reality, one must start from experience, from some kind of experience, not from rational logic, because from this or that point of view, one can indeed say the same for and against a matter. These things can only be judged from the standpoint of experience. We have ended up with so many different and contradictory socio-political views in modern times precisely because the people who put them forward did not start from experience, from observing conditions, and did not judge from this standpoint.

This has in fact been attempted in a comprehensive sense for the first time in the “Key Points”. And it must be made clear to people that actually all of the science and education that exists in the present day does not provide a basis for such a judgment, except for that which is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It does not proceed from logic alone, but from comprehensive experience. And it teaches one to judge from experience, whereas the insistence on experience among our present-day scientists is only an illusion. They talk a great deal about experience, but basically they judge from mere abstract intellectuality. Our spiritual science does not do that. Therefore, it also essentially trains one to make judgments based on experience.

You see, the man I mentioned here the other day in the public lecture, the economist Terhalle, he quoted a saying of a man who is not particularly authoritative in this field, Georg Brandes, who said that it is so difficult to arrive at the right solution in social conditions because the broad masses of the people judge not according to reason but according to instincts. It is easy to get the impression, if one firmly believes that one has a certain infallible point of view from which to judge all things, that everything that arises in the soul of a social group is based on instinct rather than reason. In a way, it is perfectly legitimate to say such a thing. But it does not achieve very much. For if not an individual comes into consideration for the formation of the judgment, but groups of people - be they ethnic or class groups - it is never possible to judge from reason. For what emerges as judgment is not always the result of the confluence of what the different people think, but also of what they feel and want. A clear judgment can never arise from this.

From the standpoint of reason, there is no such thing as an unequivocal social judgment. One can only judge socially from the standpoint of imagery. You must not tell people this without further explanation, because without it it will be misunderstood. But today, if you want to make and justify a social judgment, you have to know that it is only possible from the point of view of imagery, that is, from a point of view that the judgment is such that it can be bent and shaped, that it has, so to speak, even if the word is frowned upon, a kind of artistic structure and not a merely logical structure. Only judgments that have such a plastic form can be applied to social life in some way. That is something I had to say to give our intention a certain direction.

Furthermore, however, it is necessary today to accustom people to having a certain broad outlook. We actually face a world today in which everyone passes judgment from the narrowest conceivable standpoint, and in fact passes judgment in such a way that they believe things are absolute, are infallibly correct. They overlook nothing but what is closest to them; but they judge everything. That is the characteristic of our time. You will have realized, therefore, that in all that I have tried to give, especially since April 1919, when it was already the case earlier, my aim was not to present ready-made judgments everywhere, but to point out such things from which the individual can only gain a judgment. To create the basis for one's own independent judgment has been my aim since April 1919. This is something that should be made clear to the widest possible audience: we are not dealing with ready-made, dogmatic judgments, but with guidelines that enable individuals to form independent judgments. And you would do well in your work and in your speeches not to hold too much to ready-made, dogmatic judgments, but above all to see to it that you provide the basis for a judgment that one person can form in one way and another in another. For it is only from such judgments that something flows together that we can actually use in reality. Unfortunately it is only too true that the present world is very rich in judgments, but that basically it is far removed from the actual foundations of justified judgments.

And here I come to a point that I want to put at the beginning of our considerations, a point that must be clear to you above all, from which I would say you must start more in the formation of your speeches than in saying exactly the same things to people as I am now explaining to you here. But you must start from the consciousness of what I am now going to try to explain when formulating your speech.

You see, within European civilization, over the last 100, 150, 170 years, the most diverse judgments and the most diverse forms of agitation have emerged in the most diverse areas of social life. Just try to get an overview of all the views on social life that the 19th century brought forth, and you will always see, as you go through these things, that every single such endeavor always has weak points. You see everywhere that a proper overview of what is needed is actually not available. The people who have judged and discussed social issues in the last century have put forward many astute, many extraordinarily astute ideas. But in the end one had to say to oneself: yes, all of this does not actually achieve much in reality; one cannot do anything with what has been put forward by national economists, by practitioners and so on, about any social institutions and the like. Sometimes it could be used in a small area, but nothing could be done with it on a large scale. And that is because, basically, for almost two centuries within Europe, questions have been “resolved” on the basis of very first principles - at least, it is believed that they are resolved on the basis of very first principles - which cannot be resolved on the basis of these principles.

I would like to use a comparison to make what I want to say understandable. When someone builds a house and the foundation and the ground floor are ready, it should not occur to him that he now wants a completely new blueprint for the first and second floors. He must continue building in a certain way, as he laid the foundation and made the basic plan. If something is in progress, you cannot go back to the foundations and make something completely new. But that is what happened in Europe. National economists, socialist agitators, bourgeois agitators, practitioners and so on wanted to solve the economic and legal questions, but everywhere the so-called solutions were actually in the air. It was simply not possible to start from the fundamentals. If you had the whole of modern civilized life in mind - which was increasingly becoming such a whole that you couldn't take individual things out of it - you couldn't help but say to yourself: Yes, after all, we live in development. We cannot ask today: What are the first foundations of the legal relationships within the civilized world, what are the first foundations of the economic relationships within the civilized world? That is something that people today completely ignore. It is curious in Switzerland, for example. It is believed that by disregarding everything else in the world, one can consider special “Swiss conditions” and think again about legal and economic conditions. But that is basically how it has been done for more than two centuries. And that is essentially how the chaos came about. Because, you see, people have just tried to “solve” questions - I have to put “solve” in quotation marks here - that actually, if I may refer to my comparison, all went as far as the first floor being completed in the 18th century. You could only build the next floor on top of what was already there. All this stems from the fact that within European civilization one had completely lost the ability to have the right feelings about historical events, about such historical events that lay the foundations for the life that emerges from them. And the most important historical events must be properly evaluated if one wants to judge later. One cannot always judge from the foundations.

And here I would like to point out two important events that, although they lie very far behind us, must now be clearly considered. For our spiritual life, as well as our constitutional and economic life in Europe, are based on such events, and one cannot think about modern civilization without being clear about what has been brought to Europe through these events. One of the events is that of 1721. It is the Peace of Nystad, which ended the Northern War. The other event is that of 1763, the Peace of Paris, which brought the differences between France and the Free States of North America and England to an end. These two events are actually in the world of facts in the midst of us in the life of European civilization; the real effects are everywhere. But the European has completely forgotten how to think about these events in the right way. That is why he judges unreal things everywhere. The facts that I have just mentioned are everywhere. I would like to say: at every breakfast table we eat as it has come about through these two events. But people do not want to know anything about it, just as they do not want to know anything about reality, but always judge only from their heads and logically from their heads but really - spin. Because most of what is judged in social life today is basically actually spinning in the sense in which the word is often used in the vernacular.

You see, if you want to evaluate these two events correctly, you have to bear in mind the direct connection between them and the European catastrophe in which we are currently embroiled. In the development of humanity, it is simply not the case that you can only judge a few years, because the facts simply extend over longer periods of time.

The situation is as follows: It was only in 1721, with the Treaty of Nystad, that Russia was recognized as a power to be taken into account in the intellectual, legal, and economic life of Europe. Now, that means an extraordinary amount. Because Russia, in terms of its spiritual constitution – we are not sticking to the buzzwords here, but to reality – Russia is still, in terms of the spiritual interests of humanity, quite an Asian power, an oriental-moral power. Its spiritual life is in a state that we only know in relation to oriental conditions of the soul. Only what came through Peter the Great was pushed into this oriental state of mind, which then led to Russia advancing as far as the Baltic Sea.

All later events were thus already decided. And that, in turn, is characteristic: Europe has continued to discuss whether Russia should come to Constantinople or not. The important thing was not that, but whether it should participate in European affairs at all. And this question was decided in 1721 in the Peace of Nystad. And that is the essence of all the European discussions: that they constantly wanted to resolve questions that had actually already been largely resolved. The solution was already there to a certain extent, and they kept starting from square one, without taking into account the fact that there were already facts on the ground.

What has become of this? If you take the whole history of Europe, insofar as Russia is involved in it in the 19th century, then you will have to say to yourself: This involvement of Russia, just think of the Pan-Slav and Slavophile aspirations, they are definitely going in the direction of raising the spiritual questions of European life in an oriental way. Before the Orient, for example, Rome had to capitulate in a certain way. The Orient wanted to maintain its spiritual state; hence the split of Oriental Catholicism from Roman Catholicism. It is a completely different world in terms of spiritual outlook. Above all, it is a world that has always tended to combine what emerges in the spiritual life with what is worldly, secular, and state administration. In a certain sense, people wanted to find religious leadership in the state leadership.

This is how the whole relationship between European civilization and the East has been shaped. This is how the questions arose that were really there, not the ones that people dreamed of and about which they had so many illusions. Consider, for example, the continual tendency of the Czech Slavs and the southern Slavs in the east to turn to Russia, which Russia accommodated with what was only a phrase in the external political sphere of power, but which had an enormously seductive effect on the hearts of the Russian people: the liberation of the peoples in the Balkans. Everywhere it is spiritual forces! Into this the other mixed, which in turn are spiritual-national conditions: the antagonism between the Polish-Slavic element and the Russian element. This characterizes the whole situation for Eastern Europe.

And everything that has taken place in the spiritual depends on the overall life of civilization. One cannot talk about the things that take place in the development of humanity in such a way that one only starts from the partial. One simply cannot say that there is a general view of how spiritual, economic and political-legal life should relate to each other, but one can only talk about these questions under certain real given conditions. And the whole way in which the oriental intellectual life transplanted into Europe has worked depends entirely on the fact that Russia is to such an extensive degree an agrarian empire that is still far from having come to an end, that everything there is still such that one can say: nature still provides what actually sets the overall tone of life. The state of mind that has entered European life from the East depends entirely on what is made possible by the external agricultural life in Russia. The individual Russian, regardless of his class, would not have the state of mind he does if his external life were not so intimately connected with nature. For the whole oriental way of life, the economic question, the third link in the threefold social organism, is non-existent.

These three areas of human social life can be found everywhere in the world: spiritual life, state-legal life and economic life. But the state of mind of people under the influence of these three elements is always different, depending on whether humanity is inclined to look at what the land gives, or whether it looks at what the land gives; Je- The further east we come, the more it becomes natural to let nature take its course, to take from it what it gives and to manage it without particularly organizing economic life as such. And what it is about in Russia is that there was no need to organize economic life as such, or at least it was not considered necessary. But that is oriental thinking.

The Oriental way of thinking, if I may say so, goes as little as possible beyond the point of view that another “population” of the earth occupies in this respect. That is namely the animal world. Anyone who believes that this animal world does not also have a spiritual life and even in some respects a state-legal life would be on the completely wrong track. Animal life certainly also has a spiritual world and a kind of legal constitution. But it does not have an economic life. It takes what nature gives it. And of these inhabitants of the earth, the animal kingdom, the Oriental population stands out as having a particularly pronounced spiritual life that is based on the figurative and intuitive, precisely because it takes what nature offers it in its economic life, and does not really discuss this economic life at all. All the social structure that exists is actually based on other foundations than economic conditions, based on power relations, on inheritance relations, but not on economic thinking. This particular state of mind is the prerequisite for being able to give as much as is given in the Orient to the national element.

Now, Europe has been discussing national and social issues for two hundred years. But both have been discussed in such a way that one started from the elements without being based on the reality that was already there. It was simply no longer possible to think about national and social issues in the way that was thought about them in the 19th century, especially in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, after the national element had been given the nuance that was given to it by the fact that an Asian element, the Slav-national, had permeated it in the way that was the case. Thus, national questions were actually discussed anachronistically. The things that were still being discussed had long since been settled.

One should have been aware that one day the big question might simply arise as to whether the Orient could not flood the whole Occident with its way of thinking about the spiritual life. Today the dawn of this is already here. In the Orient, in Asia, they are discussing how to make all the technical-scientific stuff in Europe, with its abstraction, with its exploitation and so on, disappear and how to cover the whole earth with the Asian element of human feeling and sensation, of the soul.

In abstracto, one can of course agree with this. But the fact of the matter is that the spiritual and intellectual life in the Orient is in a state of decadence. This does not prevent there being future forces in the Russian soul. But what was there was completely in a state of decadence. One cannot count on something coming over from the Orient as if it were a form of redemption. You see, the Peace of Nystad in 1721 actually introduced a particular nuance into national thinking throughout Europe, which was imposed on the Slavs. And everything that has emerged from there has, in a sense, infected Europe, really infected it, in that Russia was able to participate in European conditions.

And the experimental country – if one were really concerned about world affairs, not always stopping at the borders of one's own state affairs, one would recognize something like that – the experimental country was Austria. And Austria perished for the reason that one continually discussed questions there that had long since been pushed in a certain direction to a certain extent. Austria was unable to resolve its Slav problem, because it could only have been resolved if it had developed an appreciation of the primary production of the mind, of a spiritual life that comes from its own elements.

Of course, one was not allowed to talk about such a spiritual life at all, for example to the liberals, least of all to them. For they always said to you – and in those countries that are republics, this is still said about them – these liberals always said: Yes, if we hand over the school to a free spiritual life, then Catholicism will take possession of this school, then we are at the mercy of clericalism. That is what people object to! But this objection arises only from the fact that one imagines appealing to a spiritual life as the only possibility, which was productive centuries ago, but is now there as something anachronistic, as something decadent. In the moment when one would become aware that we necessarily have a free-creating spiritual life, one would find it self-evident that this free-creating thinking must naturally be given school life. But because people lack the sense to participate in the creation of civilization with their will, but because they merely want to devote themselves to something - be it the state or an already established economic life - that feeds them, because they lack the sense to imbue their will with something creative, that is why such disheartening things as this occur. The point is that one can free oneself without surrendering the school to something old.

The people who talk as I have just indicated say: We are not producing a new spiritual life, so the old one will overwhelm everything. Of course, it is easy to become a follower of Spengler with his “Decline of the West”. It does not matter whether we do nothing at all or hand everything over to the Catholic Church. But a new spiritual life must be there! It was not wrong for the Church to have once had the school; for everything we have now in the sciences comes, on the one hand, from the old Church. That is not the wrong thing, but this is the wrong thing: if the traditional Church were still to have the school today, when we are faced with the historical necessity of creating a new spiritual life.

So, it was only Europe's impotence in pondering a new spiritual life that brought up the discussion of the national question. It should have been worked from Central Europe to the East in the sense of a productive spiritual life. Then, undoubtedly, what has asserted itself in the Pan-Slavist and Slavophile aspirations would have been frozen out. This spiritual life was there at the beginning. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, people began to create a free spiritual life, which we call “Goetheanism”. But there was not the courage to hold on to it - that on the one hand.

On the other hand, there is what is discussed in the socio-economic sense. Since 1763, when France had to cede important territories to England and thus the decision was made that America would not be Romance in its north, but Anglo-Saxon, the economic-social question was steered into a very specific channel. In the eighteenth century, important decisions were already in place: in the east, the one of 1721 with the Peace of Nystad, and in the west, the one of 1763 with the Peace of Paris. These two important decisions, which are embedded in the entire intellectual and economic life of Europe, must be considered, because one cannot arrive at a judgment without considering them. And you see, we must not evaluate the things that happen in world history from today's entirely subjective point of view. Sometimes we cannot avoid using certain radical terms: the Orient once had a great, powerful, ancient wisdom. Today, in a sense, the Orient, with its decadent ancient wisdom, has fallen into barbarism. For barbarism is nothing other than when the original human instincts are rationalized, when they are directed by the intellect and by the mere life of the head. But if we call an Oriental a barbarian and speak of barbarism in this Schillerian sense in the case of the Oriental, especially the Russian, then the further we penetrate westward, starting from England and going over to America, the more we must call this western civilization, in the same sense, not civilization, but savagery. This is the opposite of barbarism. The barbarian tyrannizes the heart and mind through the head; the savage tyrannizes the head through what comes from the rest of the organism, through the life of instinct. And that is essentially the Western life, and this Western life is a predisposition to savagery! Basically, if one disregards Europe's smugness, which is found in America, one must ask: what is American culture? It is, radically speaking, savagery. But there is no jingoistic agitation behind this! If you really want to recognize the essence of this American life, you have to say to yourself: actually, it was not the European who inwardly triumphed over the Indians – outwardly, yes! – but inwardly, the European actually imbued himself with Indian life. Instincts have become dominant. And that is the essential thing: the contagion of the European with Indian instincts. For it is not only that the European, when he lives over there for a long time, gets longer arms and the like - that is something that has been anthropologically established - but his state of mind also changes. It does not depend on what ideas and conceptions a person has, but on what kind of constitution he has as a whole person. And here one must say: the further one has penetrated to the West, the more the Anglo-Saxon nature has passed over into savagery.

This savagery is certainly there. And it is based on the fact that, again, the economic question is not really under discussion. In the Orient, the entire social structure becomes absolutist through the special way I have described to you. In the West, it becomes anarchic.

Study what has become established in the West. They relied on the inexhaustibility of economic life by always feeding it from the colonies, by working from the inexhaustibility and not relying on thinking through this economic life. Western economic life is based entirely on getting as much as possible out of the colonies, whether the colonies are inside or outside is irrelevant. It is quite significant when you consider how, in the 1880s and 1890s, more and more areas in America were won over to supply products such as crops, wheat and so on. They drew from nature. There was no need to think about economic life in particular. They were naturally indifferent to what associations mean in economic life, because economic life works from inexhaustibility. But something is happening: an economic structure is forming. England's structure is based on the fact that it has India. In America, a certain economic life is emerging. This has imposed its structure on the whole of Western society. Something has emerged that has only led to economic activity arising out of inexhaustibility.

In the East, the decadent intellectual life, which did not take economic life into account at all, tended towards absolute domination over all areas of social life; in the West, the assimilability of the Anglo-Saxon element led to the development of what I have just characterized. Modern civilization was placed in this contrast between East and West.

It is interesting to contrast two people, for example: Rodbertus, the German political economist, who, despite being a fairly unprejudiced man, could even join the ministry – which means a lot – and, let's say, Karl Marx. A person like Karl Marx was only possible because he first learned to think in Central Europe and then looked at the economic conditions in the West. What Karl Marx did for the proletariat he could never have done if he had remained in Germany. He only achieved it because he learned to think in Germany, because he became familiar with the way one goes about it in France, in Paris, and because he then became familiar with an economic life, with all that goes with it, in England, drawing on an inexhaustible source. And only on this latter could he rely. It is also characteristic - so compare two such people, Rodbertus and Karl Marx - that Rodbertus judges like a Pomeranian landowner who has suddenly become a socialist - that is an exceptional case, of course - like a Pomeranian landowner who has suddenly become a socialist. That is how he judges, and it is interesting, because if you consider two such contrasts as Rodbertus and Karl Marx, a lot of interesting things emerge! But from this starting point, Rodbertus can be understood: a Pomeranian landowner who has suddenly become a socialist! He knows very well that agriculture cannot be dispensed with anywhere; he knows what it means in the national economy. The others talk nonsense, which very easily takes hold of people who, even in their youth, did not learn to distinguish barley from wheat because they lived in the city. But a man like Rodbertus knows that. He also knows what the overburdening of agriculture through mortgages means. If, in addition, he has the socialist airs that he has had, then one thing does not spoil the other too much. Something questionable may come about, but one thing is corrected by the other. And then something half-genius comes out, as it has come out with Rodbertus. So if you compare that with what Karl Marx said, you will say to yourself: the proletarian of today, in the broadest sense of the word, finds that what Karl Marx said makes immediate sense to him. Why does he think so? Because it is thought out from an exclusively economic point of view, and the proletarian is only involved in economic life, and because it is astute, because Karl Marx learned to think in Germany. But the German could not possibly have any idea of the way in which economic life will develop if everything is thought of only in economic terms. He still cannot do so today. He could only do so if he were willing to say: I must create a reality in which it is possible to think only economically. That is possible only within the threefold social organism.

What otherwise emerges, even what is great in Western countries, take Darwinism, take men like Spencer, Huxley or any of the American scientists up to Emerson, Whitman, and so on, everything, everything in the spiritual life is basically such that one must say: the head thinks what the belly hatches. They are instincts that have been transformed and transposed. In fact, thought is only economic. It is only thought in terms of how one eats and drinks. This is the case to the greatest extent and in the most intensive way. Of course, many people in the present do not notice it. And when it is said, they take it as an insult. But it is not meant as an insult. It is something great at the same time; it is the only great thing in the newer, in the most recent civilization, this way of thinking. But that is the way it is. And European civilization has been squeezed between these two extremes since the eighteenth century. Only the people who were excluded from this European civilization, who were only put to the machine, have brought to the surface a way of thinking that seems to have no connection with these conditions, but in reality it has the very deepest connection with them: that is the proletarian world. And it is highly interesting when you look at things realistically.

As I said, Austria was the testing ground. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Austrian state experienced some very strange developments. On the one hand, there was much discussion about the Slav question. Some people referred to it, rather better, as “Austrian federalism”. The whole intellectual life in Austria, this one link in the threefold organism, takes its structure entirely from this discussion of the Slav question. The other thing is that - one finds it in the sidelines of parliamentary speeches much more than one could say it is downright emphasized in the right way - terrible fears arise about the decline of Austrian economic life due to Americanism, due to the Anglo-Saxon economy. One could see everywhere in Austria how exports, for example of grain from Hungary, are affected by what comes from the West. In those days, very perceptive people in Austria said: 'The westward drift, which is flooding our country with mortgages, is gradually ruining agriculture. These were clear indications of symptoms that corresponded to deeper historical foundations, so that in Austria at that time there was much talk of what was shining in on the one hand as the Slav question in spiritual terms, and on the other as the agrarian question in economic terms.

And then, for example, I think it was in 1880, a strange plan emerged in Austria in individual minds, which actually made a strange impression; it has also been discussed in the Austrian parliament: the plan of a League of Nations emerged, a League of Nations, however, in the form that one said: Western European League of Nations. But you can't form an alliance that encompasses the whole world; that's nonsense. The idea that you can bring the whole world together can only arise in the mind of an abstract thinker like Woodrow Wilson. If that were the case, then of course you wouldn't need an alliance anymore. So, as early as the 1880s, this idea of a League of Nations emerged. Here again we see something of which one can say: Yes, in the course of the 19th century the impulses that were actually needed arose quite sporadically; but they were always submerged by the unsuitable solutions that were always put forward, without taking account of the historical reality. Wherever reality shone forth into human contemplation, it was immediately eradicated. For the modern man is, after all, a theorist.

And that is what I would particularly like to recommend to you: if you do not succeed in discarding the theoretical man before you go out now, you will achieve nothing. You must discard the theoretical man, must try to speak out of reality. Whether you are better or worse at it is not the point. But this is the point: to speak from real foundations. That is why I did not want to make any judgments today, but rather to point out the facts to you. I said: look at what emerged from the Peace of Nystad in 1721 and from the Peace of Paris in 1763. You can look at everything that history presents: you have a point of view. You will find it everywhere, still playing a role in intellectual, political, and economic life. I would like to shine a light on just one path. For if you allow your own judgment to inspire his words, you can achieve something – not if you just parrot them.