Further West-East Aphorisms

The ancient Oriental felt that he was part of a spiritually ordained social order. The commandments of the spiritual power, which his leaders brought to his attention, gave him ideas about how he had to integrate himself into this order. These leaders had these ideas from their vision into the supersensible world. The follower sensed in them the guidelines for his spiritual, legal and economic life, which had been conveyed to him from the spiritual world. The views on man's relationship to the spiritual, on the behavior of man towards man, and also on the management of economic affairs, came to him from the same source of the spirit-willed commandments. In experience, spiritual life, the legal order, and economic management were a unity. The further culture spread to the West, the more the legal relationships between people and the management of economic affairs became separated from the spiritual life in the consciousness of people. The spiritual life became more independent. The other elements of the social order still remained as a unity. As civilization advanced further to the West, these too became separated. Alongside the legal-state order, which for a time also regulated all economic activity, an independent economic way of thinking developed. The Westerner still lives in the process of this latter separation. And at the same time, the task arises for him to shape the three separate elements of social life – intellectual life, legal and state behavior, and economic management – into a higher unity. If he succeeds in doing so, the Easterner will look sympathetically at his creation, for he will rediscover what he once lost, the unity of human experience.

Among the partial currents, whose interaction and mutual struggle constitute human history, is the conquest of labor by human consciousness. In the ancient Orient, man worked in accordance with the spirit-willed order imposed on him. In this sense, he found himself as a master or a worker. With the westward march of cultural life, the relationship between human beings entered human consciousness. Interwoven into this was the work that one person does for another. The value of labor found its way into legal concepts. A large part of ancient Roman history depicts this growing together of the concepts of law and labor. As culture advanced further westward, economic life took on ever more complicated forms. It absorbed labor, but the legal form which it had previously taken did not meet the demands of the new forms. Disharmony between labor and legal conceptions arose. To restore harmony between the two is the great social problem of the West. How labor can find its form in the legal system without being torn out of its essence by the economic administration, that is the content of the problem. If the West, through insight and social calm, sets out on the path of solution, the East will meet it with understanding. If in the West the problem gives rise to a way of thinking that lives out in social upheaval, the East will not be able to gain the trust of the West in the further development of humanity.

Unity of spiritual life, legal system and economic management in the sense of an order willed by the spirit can only exist as long as agriculture predominates in the economy, and trade and industry are integrated as subordinate to land management. Therefore, the spiritually inspired social thinking of the ancient Orient essentially supports the economic management of agriculture. With the spread of civilization to the West, trade first emerges as an independent economic activity. It demands the provisions of the law. It must be possible to trade with every human being. Only the abstract legal norm can meet this need. As civilization progresses further west, trade in industry becomes an independent element in the provision of economic services. One can only produce goods fruitfully if one lives in a way that corresponds to human abilities and needs with the people with whom one has to work in production. The development of the industrial spirit requires associative links shaped by economic life, in which people know that their needs are met, as far as natural conditions allow. Finding the right associative life is the task of the West. If it proves equal to this task, the East will say: our life once flowed in brotherhood; it has faded over time; the progress of humanity has taken it from us. The West will make it flourish again through associative economic life. It will restore the vanished trust in true humanity. In the old East, when man composed poetry, he felt that the powers of the spirit were speaking through him. In Greece, the poet allowed the muse to speak to his fellow men through him. This consciousness was the heritage of the ancient Orient. With the westward course of spiritual life, poetry became more and more the revelation of man. In the ancient Orient, the spiritual powers sang through people to people. The word of the world resounded from the gods down to men. — In the West it has become the word of man. It must find the way up to the spiritual powers. Man must learn to write poetry in such a way that the spirit may listen to him. The West must shape a language that is appropriate to the spirit. Then the East will say: the word of the gods, which once flowed out to us from heaven to earth, finds its way back from human hearts to the spiritual worlds. In the rising human word, we see and understand the world word, whose descent our consciousness once experienced.

The Eastern man has no sense of “proof”. He experiences the content of his truths by looking at them and thus knows them. And what one knows, one does not “prove”. — The Western man demands “proof” everywhere. He struggles to the content of his truths through the outer reflection of thought and thus interprets them. But what one interprets, one must “prove.” If the Westerner frees the life of truth from his proofs, then the Easterner will understand him. If, at the end of the Westerner's concern for proof, the Easterner finds his unproven truth dreams in a true awakening, then the Westerner will have to greet him in the work for human progress as a colleague who can achieve what he himself cannot.