The Task of Anthroposophy in the Context of Science and Life

GA 77a — 28 July 1921, Darmstadt

2. Closing remarks after Carl Unger's lecture on “Technology as a Free Art”

Dear fellow students, esteemed audience! I would very much like to stick to the topic, and since we will be talking about threefolding afterwards, I would ask that any questions relating to threefolding be deferred to later. But I do believe that it is justified to say a few words about the threefold order here, because Dr. Unger himself, in his discussions, took the threefold order as the basis for his views on the creation of technology as a free art.

In a certain sense, it cannot be maintained – I also expressed this in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, and Dr. Unger probably meant it that way – that the idea of threefolding as such, that is, the threefolding of the social organism as an idea, as a concept, is a kind of new discovery in the strict sense of the word. Rather, there may be a kind of new discovery in the social laws to which I referred in the essays of 1905. The threefold social order is actually an old idea and has been mentioned many times before in this form. The essential thing about the way in which the threefold social order is presented here and how it appears in the present is not its actual character as an idea but the position it seeks to occupy in relation to the whole social organism. The idea of structuring the life of humanity as a whole into a spiritual part, a state-legal part and an economic part has had to come up again and again. And if, here and there, someone were to claim that this is something completely new as an idea, I believe that, as I am well aware, there are bound to be claims of primacy. That is why I pointed out in the “key points” that the way the idea of threefolding appears here is something quite different.

The idea of threefolding, as it is advocated by me, for example, is the result of decades of observation of the needs of contemporary humanity. If you look at the situation with open eyes in the present day, you had to recognize as early as the end of the 19th century that things were heading for a catastrophe. And in the spring of 1914, in a series of lectures that I gave in Vienna to a small circle (a larger one would probably have laughed at me at the time because of my remarks), I pointed out that in the near future the conditions of the civilized world (I did not just say “European conditions” at the time) were heading towards a decisive catastrophe. You see, that was at a time when disaster was already very close. Nevertheless, in the following weeks, people in positions of responsibility for the course of events spoke in the following way. A statesman with responsibility, to call outstanding - of course only in the sense of what our time so often calls “outstanding” - said, when it came to discussing the general world situation in a parliament: the relations between Central Europe and Russia were in the most favorable way imaginable; one could be convinced that peace would be consolidated more and more. He could see this from the friendly neighborly relations that existed, for example, between St. Petersburg and Berlin. — So it was in May 1914, spoken of by those in positions of responsibility, after it had been necessary, as it was by me, to point out with all energy beforehand that the circumstances were pushing towards a catastrophe, and simply because the three elements of human coexistence, the spiritual, the legal and the economic, had interacted in such a way in all of social life that the catastrophe in its depths can actually only be seen in the confusion of these three areas. One could see, especially if one had an eye for it, how the increasing intellectualism of modern times affected our entire public life, how the complete devotion of people to the intellectual element, as had developed in the usual scientific mind-set, which has permeated everything else as well – one could see how this devotion to the intellectual prepared everything for the catastrophe in a certain sense. That is where the deeper reasons lie, and anyone who does not yet see them there today cannot meaningfully participate in a discussion about constructive forces.

You see, back then you could experience something like this – I'm not saying this out of immodesty, but because it seems symptomatically significant to me as my own experience – in the summer of 1914, I gave a German lecture in Paris about the things I usually talk about and, for example, also talked about yesterday. This lecture was not given for a German colony there, but was translated word for word, so it was explicitly given for the French, not for German colonists living in Paris – they were not there either. So in May 1914, with what had flowed from German spiritual life in the strictest sense — for basically it is the case that everything that is asserted here as anthroposophy has flowed from German spiritual life — one could somehow make a certain impression with it all over the world. We were at that stage in the spiritual realm. But what worked against this was, again, the economic realm. And one only has to look through it carefully to see how this disharmonious working of the spiritual life with the economic life was the primal phenomenon of all the phenomena that were preparing in the 1880s and had reached their peak at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Of course, countless forces and currents converge there, so that it is impossible to summarize everything in a few words.

But if one wants to emphasize an important phenomenon, a fundamental phenomenon, it could be done in the way I once did in a lecture in Nuremberg in 1908. At the time, I pointed out how characteristic it is of modern social life that the personal has actually been increasingly eliminated, especially in what is called capitalism, in capitalism in general – without wanting to belittle capital in the economy , of course, you cannot conduct modern economic life without capital investments, that is, without capitalism. And the way that capitalism is often talked about today is nothing more than the purest layman or dilettante behavior. What it is about is that the capitalist essence, basically since the beginning of the 20th century, let's say – it was already prepared earlier – has become more and more impersonal and impersonal. I like to tell an anecdote here; anecdotes are sometimes indicative of what happened. When international economic life was still more dependent on personality, it once happened that the finance minister of the King of France also had to come to Rothschild in Paris because the king, for reasons you can easily imagine, had to turn to the banker. He came just at the time when Rothschild was dealing with a leather merchant. Now, capitalism leads to a certain instinctive socialism; one must realize that. Rothschild, who was very powerful and who asserted the personal element in everything he administered in a capitalist way, not the impersonal capitalist – Rothschild was therefore dealing with a leather merchant. The servant entered and announced the finance minister of the king. He should wait until I am finished, said Rothschild. The servant could not really understand this and the one who was waiting outside could not understand it at all. He thought there must be a misunderstanding. “Please say,” he sent the servant again, “the minister of the king of France is here.” Rothschild had him say again that yes, he would just have to wait. The minister did not understand this at all, he tore open the door and was inside. He said: I am the Minister of Finance of the King of France. - Fine, said Rothschild, I still have work to do, please take a chair and sit down. - Yes, but I am the Minister of the King of France! - Please take two chairs, - said Rothschild.

I tell this story so that you can see from this anecdote, too, that under capitalism something was indeed at work that lay in personal will and personal emotions. This personal element ceased to exist. What I have said is, of course, not a line of argument, just an illustration. The argument would have to be developed in a whole series of lectures. But just at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, this personal element took a turn towards the purely factual. I would like to say: forces came into play through which the capital masses moved as if by themselves. Share capital came to the fore, as opposed to individual capital, and society took the place of the influence of the individual personality. This introduced an impersonal element, so that in modern economic life man was gradually harnessed as if into an impersonal element. And in place of personal initiative came what might be called routine. It was no longer possible to develop anything other than routine in economic life. Those who study economic history will find how these things are rooted in the development of modern economic life, and how they are the things that pushed towards the terrible world catastrophe. That was now there, and so one could believe, especially at that time, that the right time had come when people could understand from their practical lives that the interaction of these three areas must be sought in an appropriate way. And that is the essential thing about the threefold social organism: not the idea as such, but the way in which, in every detail, things are thought out of the concrete, out of direct life practice. There is something thoroughly anti-utopian in this impulse of threefolding, as it appears here, something that rejects every kind of utopia, that only wants to work out of the practical side of life.

This is what is so rarely seen and what is often not given due consideration, even by adherents of the so-called threefolding idea. It happens very often that the threefold order is discussed, even by its adherents, as if it were a utopia, as if it had not emerged from what all people actually want in their fields. One need only summarize the individual wills. Most of the time people are not consciously aware of what they want, but they do want it. The subconscious plays a much greater role in social life than one might think. That is why people have repeatedly said to me: Yes, what is written in the “Key Points”, which after all underlie the impulse for threefolding that is emerging today, that is what this or that society in this or that field also wants. Another came with a different area of specialization. “That is nothing new,” they said. — ‘All the better,’ I said. ”The less something is new, the better. The more it is rooted in what people already want, the better.” What matters is that a certain understanding should arise among the individual specialized fields. And here I do believe that Dr. Unger's lecture today could be of extraordinary importance because it was inspired by the thought that ultimately what the technician wants in his field cannot be solved as a special question without turning one's gaze to the whole of social life. It is therefore of little significance when people say that the specialized ideas have already been expressed or have appeared here or there in echoes, or when they say that everything has already occurred before. Let us assume the most extreme hypothesis. Let us assume that Dr. Unger had not said anything new, but that his ideas had been expressed for decades by the most diverse technical branches and societies for my sake. But I believe that one thing must be agreed, even if this hypothesis were correct: they have not been implemented, these ideas – surely no one will claim that. Some may claim that they have been nurtured, but no one can claim that they have been implemented. Today they are questions as they were decades ago. And that is because they were treated in a specialized way, so that the technician limited himself to his circle and dealt with all special technical questions from this point of view. But things cannot be solved that way today. We not only have a world economy, we also have a world consciousness, something that encompasses the whole world and that can only be dealt with as a world issue in the economic and technical fields. The reason why a solution could not be found is that the technician was, to a certain extent, isolated. The technician was even painfully aware of this isolation because, as a modern technician, he is the most modern aspect of the personality in modern life. It can be said of the most diverse other aspects of modern life: they have their roots here and there. The modern technician is what he has become through modern technology. He represents a class in the entire social order, and his particular profession gives rise to a social context that is itself a social issue. However, this can only be treated in the context of social life as a whole. Therefore, what Dr. Unger formulated with the words “Technology as a free art” will remain a utopia as long as the connection between the special wishes and ideas of technicians and universal social ideas is not found. The technician most of all needs to acquire a universal view of social needs, and this is because he has placed himself in modern life as something new. The farmer also needs this social perspective, inasmuch as agriculture itself is being spun by technology. But as a farmer, he is ancient. But the essence of the social question must emerge most significantly from that which has emerged as something completely new in modern social development. And that is perhaps what needs to be emphasized. I do not want to go into specific questions of threefolding, which arise when one is speaking about specific questions of the technicians. The essential point is that the questions of the technicians are treated as a chapter of the great general social questions. It is not a matter of assuming, for instance, that the anthroposophical side simply wants to draw the question of the technicians into the threefolding movement from the outside. The threefolding movement would be a mere slogan if that were the intention. But slogans are not at issue here. The point is that the movement, which could also call itself something else, aims to bring the three aspects of social life into the right relationship with one another. This is in contrast to intellectualism, which seeks to throw everything into one pot , even if it then takes out of that pot, for example, the Fourteen Points, which, insofar as they were Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, truly leave nothing to be desired in terms of their intellectualism. The idea of threefold social order was first expressed by me, just when, at a terribly serious moment, the solution of the questions was once again sought not from the practice of life, but from minds, from intellectualism, with Wilson's fourteen points. Particularly abroad, one could see how these fourteen points, when they arose, addressed something pathological in humanity, and it was highly regrettable that at the most serious moment in the recent development of German history, in the fall of 1918, 1918, Central Europe even agreed to these Fourteen Points and could not see how, at the present moment, we are compelled to engage directly in practical life without any vague theories and to study things from that basis. The Fourteen Points were a utopia; further development has shown that. Humanity will have to convince itself that nothing can be achieved with such utopias, but that something can only be achieved if one engages realistically with what is there; if one is able to think out of what exists not only logically — that is easy today — but realistically.

Anthroposophy strives for this kind of thinking, which can only be grasped when, when we speak of the spirit, we do not do as that farmer did when he was shown a magnet: “Oh, nonsense, that's a horseshoe, I'll use it to shoe my horse.” That is more or less how someone who denies the spirit of this reality behaves. And there is no way around it: if someone wants to think in a realistic way, they must also address the spiritual. That is why anthroposophy is a spiritual science. And what it has in common with the deepest, most significant demands of our time is that it wants to be realistic, that it wants to be practical when it comes to practical matters, especially in the economic and technical spheres. And although everyone has or believes they have this or that different opinion – for example, that anthroposophy does not deal enough with God, which is a completely unfounded opinion, or that for some people it deals far too much with God, who are opponents from this point of view, and the same applies to the other things mentioned here, they are said from different points of view again — but everyone, even if they have different views on one or the other, if they are serious about realistically shaping our social conditions in some specialized area based on the universal thinking of the whole, will then also find points of contact with what asserts itself as the anthroposophical movement. For it does not want to be fanciful, but human. And it will be happy to join forces with anyone who understands the human element.