Living Speech and Moral Clarity for Social Transformation

GA 338 — 14 February 1921, Stuttgart

Fifth Lecture

It will be well to insert some formalities now, so that we can then move on to some factual considerations.

I have already indicated that by putting oneself in the place of one or other of the three constituent parts of the social organism and trying to grasp the full meaning and essence of the matter, one can, as it were, find the right tone. This comes naturally if one has a true understanding of the matter.

Now I would like to present you with a few more ideas in this regard. But I would like to note in advance that, of course, when it comes to practical advice, things can always be a little different, that one can only talk about such things as examples, yes, that one can handle the matter in one way in one case and differently in another. But if I imagine what might be appropriate for your speaking effect in the coming weeks, I would first like to point out that a very specific inner attitude is of great importance for the speaker in every single case.

You see, the worst thing you could do would undoubtedly be to take a subject such as, let us say, “The great questions of the present time in relation to the threefold social order of the social organism, and, since you will be giving a number of speeches at various places during the week, would now repeatedly present this topic, so to speak, with a mastery of the individual formulations from memory. For intrinsic reasons, this is probably the worst method to choose for such a matter. You can only develop a responsible and well-founded manner of speaking if every speech you give is, so to speak, subjective and personal. It is therefore necessary, even if in the way I will describe in a moment, even if you give the same speech thirty times, or, let's assume the somewhat rare case, a hundred times in a row, to still feel it as something new each time and to always have the same great respect for the content of this speech, to let it come to mind again and again in its basic nuance - pay attention to what I am saying - to let it come to mind again and again before you give it, not so much in the individual structure and in the individual formulations, but in the basic nuances, to relive the thoughts in it again and again. How you can adjust to this depends on your relationship to the material. I knew actors and actresses of the highest caliber who assured me that they only really felt they had played a role well when they had played it about a hundred times. Now, of course, in a sense there is a kind of illusion in that; they also had it at the forty-ninth, fiftieth time, but only in relation to the previous times. In any case, however, there is a way to have the same respect for the content of the speech, no matter how often you give it. And basically, only giving the speech with the necessary freshness will keep you feeling as though you never get enough of the material in question, even if it is repeated almost entirely the same.

Anyone who feels that they are already bored by a speech they are supposed to give, or who is bored of giving the speech because they have given it so often with the same content, strikes me as someone who if he has eaten for a whole month and on the first of the next month says: I am now bored of eating, because it is just a repetition of eating from the previous thirty days; I don't want to do that again. Basically, the organism does the same thing every day in a monotonous way with regard to its most important functions, at most varying the order of the food a little. But in the same way, one can also nuance the thoughts of a lecture so that there is a change, just as there is a change in the food on consecutive days. But essentially, for the organism, it remains a monotonous being hungry – being satiated, being thirsty – drinking and so on, and basically it never gets boring.

Our intellect, our soul life in general, deviates from these in a certain way, in that it comes into decadence compared to the living growth of the natural as well as spiritual elementary forces; it deviates in that it wants to have everything only once, and then it just “has” it. In the process of progressing in soul development, one comes back again to what nature and the original spiritual elementary forces have: rhythm, the repetition of the same. And to this return to what is close to the original creative forces, closer than our decadent intellectual and soul life, to this return we must come when we work in the spiritual world, in the sphere of the spiritual. Religions have already taken this into consideration. They do not have new prayers said every morning and every evening, but always the same ones. And they assume that it is not boring, that it is really related to the whole psychological development of the human being, as eating and drinking is to the organic development of the human being. And we can prepare ourselves for our work in the spiritual, especially in a field such as oratory, so that, even if we repeat the same thing countless times, we always go through the content inwardly with the same interest before we present the matter. Only when we go through the content internally, even if it is only for a few minutes at a time, will we develop the right relationship to what we want to express. Only in this way will we develop the right sense of responsibility.

And we need this sense of responsibility when we are in a situation like the one you will be in over the next few weeks. You must be aware that with your speeches you are not just saying something to the people, but that we are at a world-historical moment, and that your speeches have a meaning for this world-historical moment. You must be very clear about the significance of what you are doing. You must say to yourself: I have something to teach people that, when it strikes them, will truly be the only means of bringing the world to ascent, while all around us are the forces of decline.

And if you are committed to this cause, then you will also appreciate in the right way what is asserting itself from all corners as the opposition to our cause and lurking everywhere on the sides of the paths you now want to enter. The opposition is ignored within our movement, even by most of our members. They do not like to concern themselves with it, and that is just a lack of interest in contemporary history. But out of an interest in contemporary history, we must talk and we must act. Only by acting on it can our words carry real weight. We must not take this opposition lightly. Sometimes, especially within our movement, it is almost enough to make us despair when we see how people within our movement remain quite apathetic in the face of the terrible accusations that are being made against anthroposophy, against threefolding, and now also against 'The Coming Day' and so on. In this respect, if one may say so, our opponents are quite different. Sometimes they are quite ruthless crooks. But they have tremendous zeal as the content of their crookedness. And they often, or even usually, find words out of a certain enthusiasm, an enthusiasm born of evil, or out of an enthusiasm born of incompetence that fights back because it cannot assert itself against what is being asserted. But in a sense there is drive in it; there is drive even in the ranting. You can't find the right words if you try too hard. But you can find the right words if you can find them from the overall mood towards the matter. This is what we have to focus on, both in writing and in speech. We must not shrink from allowing the strongest rebuffs to be experienced by those who assert themselves in such a shameless way against anthroposophy, against threefolding and so on. And we must be aware that in this way, basically, the positive also acquires its shade.

The factual also includes the things that we present to our opponents in the midst of our positive speeches, in which we take as little care as possible to defend ourselves. Because, you see, of course, one has to defend oneself sometimes, I have said it before, but what does a defense actually mean against such individuals as Max Dessoirs and the like? On the other hand, it means a lot to characterize what a disgrace it is for German educational and university life to have such people as lecturers. We must find the right words and word nuances to put this general cultural phenomenon in its proper light. And there it is good to describe things, I would say, in a certain colorful way. Then you have to try to find the inks and colors from your life experiences to describe it in color. There is a karma if you only pay attention to it in the right way. This karma already carries the nuances.

You see, in my “Soul Mysteries” I have mentioned the peculiar fact that Max Dessoir is one of those people to whom it is imposed by inner soul destiny to sometimes have to stop in the train of thought, to be unable to continue; that it can even happen to him during lectures that he is suddenly so filled with the full power of what he has to express that, he does not say so, his mind stands still, but it is something similar to his mind standing still. I emphasized this in my “Soul Mysteries”. A few weeks ago I received a letter from a friend who had just attended the lectures in Berlin by Dessoir during which it actually happened that Dessoir's mind stood still. The students called this peculiar university piece of furniture the “beautiful Max” because he had the habit - as this friend writes - of putting on a different colored waistcoat every week and presenting it. It's only an imitation, you see. Greater minds than Max Dessoir's had such a weakness. For example, it once happened with the great philosopher Kuno Fischer that a young student came to the barber who was vis-4-vis the university building in Heidelberg. And this barber was of course very interested in the university and its disciples. And so he also got into conversation with this keen fox, who was about to start college with Kuno Fischer. He told him that he wanted to go to Kuno Fischer. “Today he's writing something on the blackboard,” said the barber. “How do you know that?” asked the young student in astonishment. ‘He was here just now getting a haircut at the back; when he does that, he always writes something on the board; that's when he turns around.’ Well, ‘beautiful Max’ was in a situation one day where his thoughts suddenly escaped him. He started to go wild, of course in the appropriate weekly vest. There sat a man in front of him who had a newspaper in his hand. He lunged at the man and berated him terribly, saying it was his fault because he had read in the newspaper that his thoughts had escaped. After five minutes, he had his thoughts again. - This really happened and can be documented!

You can add nuances to such things. And you will very often find that you can apply some inks when you want to describe the peculiar education system in our present day, as it is rampant at universities. In addition to its harmful, annoying and destructive aspects, it also has its comical aspects. I myself knew, if I may mention it, a chemist; he was a professor of chemistry and technology of organic substances. He said every year once in his lecture: Yes, there are actually only three great chemists: one is Liebig, the second is a more recent one, Gorup-Besanez, and modesty forbids me to name the third.

Now, as I said, the point for us is not to place the main emphasis on the defense, which can of course be incorporated; rather, it is important to present the cultural phenomena as such in all their harmfulness. That we therefore prove ourselves powerful enough to pass judgment on so-called intellectual currents of the present. We can let this flow in everywhere in the positive presentation and will perhaps best get it into the souls that way. For if we want to get through, we must absolutely be able to create in the souls of our contemporaries a repugnance for certain contemporary phenomena. We must be able to plant a correct judgment about the terrible things that are actually rampant among us through the incompetence and especially through the mendacity that is among us. In order to do this in the right way, we must train ourselves to keep a sharp eye on people and not let them get away with anything. We must emphasize the symptoms, the characteristic features. In our time, and we shall always find it, there is a terrible mendacity, especially in the field of so-called science. And this mendacity, which actually becomes all the stronger the more we come from the natural science faculties, the philosophical faculties, to the medical, to certain other provinces, this mendacity, we must not fail to present it to our contemporaries again and again, characterizing it with individual examples. This is of great, of tremendous importance. For today one does not really have a strong sense of what such dishonesty actually means, how corrupting it is in the mind, when the person who is otherwise a scientist is at the same time consumed by a certain dishonesty in his work. And we will even achieve quite a lot in the long run, even if not immediately, if we succeed in making our contemporaries aware of the hypocrisy of our current educational system. But we will find the right oratorical nuance for this if we speak from the kind of attitude towards the matter that I have characterized.

Then, you see, when you are in the situation you will be in over the next few weeks, one thing seems important: that you are fully immersed in the material of what you want to present, that you are, so to speak, constantly struggling with the material, that one's preparation should be such that one can visualize the matter in one's mind in terms of intentions and thoughts, but not in terms of wording, because one must actually fight for the wording before the audience. Therefore, it is good not to prepare a lecture right down to the wording, but only up to certain key sentences. Depending on your subjective nature, you can write down key sentences. Not buzzwords! That is something that usually misleads you. But key sentences, so to speak, the topics of the individual paragraphs. So you write down, for example: “Economic life has its own laws; it turns everything into a commodity.” And then you discuss this, not taking it as a starting point, but as the topic of a paragraph, as something around which everything else crystallizes. You speak in reference to such a key sentence. Then you move on to the next key sentence.

You can only have the first five or six sentences of the lecture literally, but even then not literally in memory, but in mind. Having the rest literally is never good, because it impairs the inner living relationship in a very strong way. But it is necessary to have formulated the first five or six and the last five or six sentences fairly precisely. Because, as a rule, if the person addressing the audience is a human being and not a speaking machine, they will have stage fright for the first five to six sentences. It is the case precisely when they are human and not a speaking machine. This stage fright is a thoroughly good thing. It can take on the most diverse nuances. It can be that the inner liveliness is there through this stage fright during the first five or six sentences, if they are well formulated, but that this formulation gives us a certain inner relationship to it, whereas if we have not formulated the sentences, it can all too easily happen that nothing occurs to us and the like, doesn't it. For example, I knew an otherwise excellent man who usually read his lectures. But once, as if it were still before me, I remember it so well, he wanted to at least present the first sentences, the first sentence, from memory, but it did not occur to him. He had to read the first sentence, the first word, so accustomed was he to the manuscript. So it's good to live completely inside it, right up to the formulation, in the first five or six sentences.

With the last sentences, on the other hand, when you get to the end, if you are just a human being and not a speaking machine, you are under the impression of your whole lecture, and that's how a certain liveliness comes about at the end, and one would not be able to find the right wording in every case so as not to detract from the end if one had not prepared well, especially for the end, for the last five or six sentences.

So that for such “occasional speeches” in the best sense, as you have to give them, especially given the current situation, it is undoubtedly best for such speeches if you bring the first five to six sentences with you, then the key sentences, and again the last five to six sentences. But if I may give you a piece of advice, which I ask you not to take as if it must always be followed under all circumstances and you are obliged to carry out what I have just said with regard to the note that you take with you, then the advice would be: make a note on which you formulate the first five to six sentences, then the striking sentences, then the last sentences. Stick to it. And then – burn it! The next day or for the next lecture, do the same. And burn it again. Do this fifty times rather than allow yourself to keep the note through all fifty lectures.

This is an essential part of the inner vitalization of a person's relationship to his subject matter. One must have come to terms with the living element of the lecture one has given in a certain way, as one came to terms on February 14 with what one ate on the 13th. This is something that can certainly be considered a rule.

For you see, in certain fields of work it is a matter of finding our way back to the elementary conditions of life. Only in this way can we tear spiritual work out of the mildewed nature that is due to the fact that in abstract intellectual life there is something like: one wants to experience something only once; if one has already experienced something, it no longer exercises any sensation, and the like. It is absolutely the case that if one acquires the habit of what I have just characterized, one gradually comes to receive one's spiritual products from much deeper regions than from the highly questionable regions that are located highest in the human being in terms of spatial expansion. And it is tremendously important that precisely the most exalted spiritual things do not come from this main region. For this region is colorless, is sober, is actually such that, however paradoxical it may sound, it actually concerns no one but ourselves. What the intellect can gain in clarity actually concerns only the person who is the bearer of that intellect.

What we have to say to the world is based not on what we understand, but on what we feel and live through, through which we have suffered pain and suffering and happiness and overcoming. And, my dear friends, the content of what you have to say to the world in the coming weeks will be revealed to you anew each day as you go through it in your soul, as overcoming and suffering, and in a certain way, when you feel what is to be, as happiness too, as redemption. Above all, however, you will be able to feel a strong sense of responsibility. All this can be experienced every day. And that is a much better preparation than all the arrangements and everything that is given in some rhetoric. This living inner relationship to the matter is what really prepares us so that those imponderables develop that exist between us and our audience, no matter how large it is.

In general, it is precisely in this area that we have become abstract and theoretical people. I once listened to a lecture that Hermann Helmboltz gave at a large gathering. He took out his manuscript and read the entire lecture from the first to the last word. After this procedure with the audience was over, a theater director, who was a friend of mine, came up to me and said: What was the point of that? The lecture is already printed, it could easily be handed to each of the listeners. And if Helmholtz, who is so esteemed and honored, were to go around and shake each person's hand, it would be a much greater pleasure than having someone read to you for an hour what you can read yourself when it is printed.

We really must keep this in mind: that what is printed, and thus also everything that can be read, that which has already been written down, is something quite different from the spoken word. And even if it happens often enough – for reasons other than purely artistic ones and the like – that the spoken word is written down, that this Ahrimanic art is practised and that it is then read again, one must not deny that this whole procedure is basically nonsense in the higher sense. It must be practised, this nonsense, for certain reasons. But it remains nonsense. For those who take these things artistically, what is spoken is not something that can be printed or written at the same time. So I couldn't help but feel deeply when the director told me that it would have been wiser for Helmholtz to have shaken everyone's hand and distributed his lecture.

These are things that one must keep in mind, because they are basically rhetoric, while what is in the rhetoric is usually such that one cannot actually fulfill it. Because basically it is a thicket, threshed straw, with which one cannot actually do anything if one wants to be alive in one's cause.

Well, you see, these are formalities that can only contain advice, but which, I would not say, have been thought through, but which you could feel through. And if you feel through them, then you will be able to prepare yourself in the best possible way for your profession in the coming weeks. For from the feelings you develop in response to such advice, you will gain an insight into what you should actually do with the material you will be processing in the coming weeks. And what else can be said in this regard is something like the following:

In speeches such as the one you are about to give, even if the topics are chosen as I have indicated, it is nevertheless good to start at the beginning with something that belongs to the day, some current event that is symptomatic of the whole period. We live in a time in which such events actually occur daily. We need only follow contemporary history a little, and we will notice symptomatic events everywhere. We can then start from there. This immediately creates a common atmosphere between us and the listener. For the listener then knows the matter, we know it, and we create a kind of communication, which is of very special significance in lectures on contemporary history, or rather, in those that are to have an effect on the development of the time.

Or one can also relate a more remote symptom. It is often particularly suitable to concentrate attention in the right way if you tell something that seems to have no connection at all with the topic, but which has a much stronger inner connection, and the listener is initially touched by it in a somewhat paradoxical way, not knowing why you are telling it; and then you try to find the transition from something remote to what you actually want to develop.

Another piece of advice is that in certain cases it is extremely good to come back to the beginning at the end. The best way to achieve this is to formulate something at the beginning, which is either presented as a question, or not pedantically as a question, but in a question-like way. Then the lecture is the execution according to the question posed; and at the end one actually comes to the answer, so that the whole thing closes in a certain way. This often has a very, very good influence on the soul of the listener. He retains it more easily than usual.

In certain matters it may even be very good to have a kind of leitmotif, which one returns to after certain paragraphs, even if in a varied form. You will not have a good effect by always putting it in more or less the same words, but if you return to it in a varied form, you may well have a good effect.

Then we will also have to have a reforming effect on the audience through the form of our speech; I could also say “educational” if it did not offend people to use the word “educational”. You can also have a reforming effect through the formality of speech. You see, people today demand that you define as much as possible. Now we want to resist any defining. We always want to characterize. We want to characterize many things from two or more sides, in order to evoke the idea that every thing has different sides from which one can characterize it. We do not want to make this concession, nor any other concession in speech, but this is the least of them: giving people pedantic definitions. We must create the impression that what comes from the spiritual world, what comes from spiritual science, must, even in its form, present itself differently to our contemporaries than what arises from materialism. Whatever comes out of materialism will be materialistic, even if it is permeated, for example, by something apparently religious; it will speak in nouns, even if it is religiously colored. What comes out of the spirit cannot speak well in nouns. For the spirit does not work in a noun way. It is in constant motion. The spirit is entirely verbal. It dissolves nouns. It forms a subordinate clause rather than a noun. In this way it avoids treating the entities like pieces of wood, placing them next to each other like pieces of wood, or like pegs. This placing of things like pegs is materialistic. What is grasped in the spirit dissolves the nouns. And it is important that we make no concessions in this respect to our materialistically inclined present. However, in this case you will not come; the poet in the present more easily; not so much the one who has to speak, what you have to speak - however, if anything is immersed in the visionary or only in the imaginative, then the nouns can also occur. Because then the imaginations are forms. Every style has its own character for its particular field. But what is needed in a certain relationship to bring something new to one's fellow human beings as a teaching, as a view, will, if it comes from the spirit, not feel inwardly compelled to put one noun next to the other.

Then it would also be good for you, I would like to say, to really carry out something moral. When we started our anthroposophical movement, people were almost proud when they could say: I have presented theosophical or anthroposophical views here or there, without saying where they come from and without using the words theosophy or anthroposophy. This denial of the ground on which one actually stands, this not wanting to clearly profess one's commitment to something, has become a real nuisance, especially in anthroposophical circles. Well, I would like to say to you that those people who have been won over in this way, by avoiding speaking clearly and distinctly about the matter, are either not really won over at all or, if they are won over, are not worth anything. Only that which has been won in full truth and in absolute honesty has value for our cause. And if we make this our guiding principle, we may perhaps suffer failures here and there. But where we achieve success, it will be a good success. Under no circumstances should we avoid making people aware of the spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical background. Even if it acts like a red rag to a bull for a large number of people at first! The problem with such things is not the red cloth, but the bull.

These things are what must be part of the moral nuance of our zeal for the cause in the coming weeks. And we need zeal for the cause. We do not need to feel that we are martyrs for a cause. But we should have a sense of great responsibility. We should definitely have the feeling that we are speaking out of the development of the times, out of contemporary history. The more we have this, the better it is.

Perhaps today I may remind you again of what I have said many times before. Once I wanted to make clear to two Catholic priests how wrong they were with their particular demand, which they made after a lecture I gave. I had given a lecture in a southern German city, which is no longer a southern German city today, about the wisdom of Christianity. Two Catholic priests were also present. It was a long time ago, in the days when the order to fight anthroposophy intensely, as is the case today, had not yet been so intensively carried into the circles of Catholic clergy. And so these two priests were there. After the lecture they came to me. Now, it is not the case with Anthroposophy that one can talk objectively about a subject for a long time, even if a Catholic priest is listening. If he is not set from the outset to fight against everything that does not belong to the constitutionally soldered church, he will not notice that he can bring anything against it. What the Catholic Church has to say against it must come from areas other than the area of truth. So the priests came to me and said: Yes, we have nothing to say against the content of your lecture – at that time the slogan had not yet been issued from Rome – but the way you speak is not acceptable. Because we speak in such a way that all people understand, but you only speak to a certain circle that is prepared. I said that I always have the feeling that in outer life one does not become dishonest when addressing people as is usual in outer life; I say “Herr” to every court official, I say “Reverend” to every Catholic priest. So I said, “Reverend, it does not matter whether you or I think something is for all people. It is self-evident that you and I think subjectively in this way. That is not the point. The point is whether something is entrusted to us out of the impulses of the time, whether it is to be presented or not, regardless of our subjective state. And so I ask you now, assuming this good, subjective conscience, whether all people who want to know about the Christ still come to you in church today? If all people come to church to you, then you speak for all people. I ask you quite objectively: Do all people come to church to you? You couldn't say yes, it wasn't possible. Then I said: Well, you see, I speak to those who no longer come to church to you and who still want to hear something about the Christ. That is objective. We can believe subjectively, you and I, we speak for everyone. That is not the point. The point is that we acquire the sense of learning from the facts as they are, how we should do it. Of course, that did not occur to the two reverend gentlemen, of course, but it is right nonetheless.

So, these are the things that I wanted to tell you today, as a kind of formality. They are not rules, nor are they advice meant to be dogmatic. I myself said at the beginning of my reflections that they are meant more in the sense of examples. They can be varied in many ways. You may be obliged to follow different guidelines in a different situation. But I have considered what those personalities sitting in front of me might need to think about, especially in the situation you may find yourselves in over the next few weeks, and how you might approach your audience in the right way to address your audience in the right way, and above all to face the matter at hand in the right way, regardless of whether you achieve it or not, and to face the matter you have to represent in the right way. And that's when I came to have to tell you what I just said in a formal way.