16. A Foreword for the journal “Die Drei”
The present has inherited from the past of the last three to four centuries a legacy that has raised the people of Western civilization to a certain historical height, but also presents them, as spiritual beings, with riddles and tasks that are currently causing them to suffer. The unsatisfied moods in which souls live, the catastrophic upheavals of social life, are the expression of this malaise. In religious doubts and longings, in the groping and wandering of artistic urges, in disbelief in a scientific knowledge that is at the same time regarded as the ideal of research, the forces of decline in present-day civilization live it up.
That the sources of social evil also lie within these mental and spiritual phenomena is only understood by a few. The recovery of Western civilization depends on a sufficiently large number of people realizing this. All too many today would like to see these sources in external institutions and make healing dependent only on their transformation. This error is the cause of the chaos of civilization into which humanity has fallen.
The last three to four centuries have produced a sense of knowledge that has achieved great things in grasping natural connections. A mathematical-mechanical world view stands before the human soul, which is felt to be still incomplete, but which appears to a certain scientific mind as that whose nature must not be changed if one does not want to expose oneself to the danger of scientific fantasy and world-view enthusiasm. Man has sought to investigate the evolution of living things; he wants to penetrate this evolution from the simplest forms to his own design. The second half of the 19th century was enthusiastic about solving the true human riddle from such foundations.
The spirit of knowledge that has emerged in this way does not only make waves in the field of science. In artistic attempts, what dominates reason in cognition lives on emotionally. Many a person believes that they can write poetry, paint or educate from the most elementary foundations of the soul; they only believe this because they do not see the connections between their work and the scientific spirit of the present. In religious questions many believe themselves to be standing on independent spiritual ground; but in their judgments and intuitions the lines of thought of this spirit of science live in them unconsciously. — It lives in the methods of the school. According to the nature of the child one believes one is educating and teaching; one acts in reality according to the theory that one has accepted about the world and man. And it is not from human nature, but from this theory, that one would like to develop the impulses for social tasks. The man of the present age thinks he can avoid everything that dulls the sense of reality; and he does not know how deeply he has ensnared himself in a thinking that is alien to reality.
This journal aims to serve a true sense of reality, in deliberate contrast to the supposed sense.
The scientific way of thinking has achieved great things. And this greatness must be preserved not only in the results but also in the direction of research. This journal could only fulfill a poor task if it were to engage in the amateurish dismissing of spiritless natural research that is evident on many sides. A nebulous mysticism, which in such a debate behaves all the more arrogantly the less it has endeavored to become acquainted with the scientific, must not be served.
This journal seeks to gain its points of view from anthroposophical spiritual science. And on the one hand, this appreciates the value of scientific knowledge; but it also believes that it can see through with complete clarity where the limits of this knowledge lie and that they can be transcended by other means of research.
With his nature, the human being belongs to worlds that science in its present form cannot penetrate. Some people think that the methods of external experimentation could also reveal the nature of the soul and spirit. But the soul and spiritual cannot be approached experimentally in any way. It can only be revealed to those who seek it themselves through the inner paths of the soul. This is the aim of anthroposophical spiritual science. But it seeks to achieve this through paths that resemble those of natural science in their conscientiousness and inner clarity as it explores the external world. It does not want to experiment externally; but it wants to enter the spiritual world in the same state of soul as that which is proper to properly cultivated natural science. It is as far from nebulous mysticism as it is from true natural research; but it supposes that one can still be inspired by a genuine spirit of knowledge even if one is no longer guided by sensory perception in one's cognitive experience.
Anthroposophy seeks the means of knowledge for a contemplation of the supersensible. How it seeks to accomplish this is still widely misunderstood. It is not judged by its own intentions, which are overlooked; it is judged according to ideas that are formed from the outside.
On the other hand, anthroposophy is criticized for being too intellectual. Like external science, it is said, it speaks only to the intellect. Those who think this way do not know how, from this starting point, the path leads to areas of soul experience in which feeling and emotion experience an expansion and at the same time a deepening that can never be attained if one disparages the supposedly purely rational starting point. Anyone who does this and wants to stop at what he calls an emotional grasp of the soul-spiritual will lose their footing when the slightest breath of rational knowledge blows into their inner being. And this is unavoidable in the present age for anyone who is honest with their own soul. Those who want to walk the paths sought by anthroposophy will not need to lose the center of gravity of their soul despite all rational knowledge.
This journal aims to serve this anthroposophical knowledge. A School of Spiritual Science is to be established at the Goetheanum in Dornach for anthroposophy. The Waldorf School in Stuttgart works according to its own methods and insights. It is not intended as a school of world view. Anthroposophy is not dogmatic. Through its insights, it aims to develop a pedagogical-didactic art that reveals itself in the way one teaches and educates, not in the teaching of fixed judgments and soul content. At the still unfinished Dornach School of Spiritual Science, courses inspired by the anthroposophical spirit are already being held for the most diverse fields of knowledge and for the most diverse branches of practical life. Similar work is being done in Stuttgart. Many other activities along these lines could be mentioned. This journal is part of the same field. It aims to convey to a wider audience everything that can lead to the recovery of our age based on anthroposophical knowledge. It aims to show how a practical social impact of the anthroposophical approach is possible and necessary. In the ideas for the “Threefold Social Organism”, an initial attempt at this impact is available for the most pressing needs of the present.
It would be desirable if the publication of this journal were to attract as many prominent figures as possible who can make their voice heard in the indicated direction because their own nature already demands it. I am of the opinion that there are many such personalities in the present time who need only a small stimulus to work towards what anthroposophy really wants. It would be highly satisfying if this journal could provide many such stimuli.