Lecture V

One finds, however, that in actual fact this social organism like the natural organism must consist of three relatively independent members. Just as the human head, the chief bearer of the sense-organs, by reason of these organs stands in a special relation to the external world and is centred in itself; just as, too, the rhythmic system, the lungs and the breathing, and then again the digestive system are centred in themselves, as these three work together in relative independence; so it is fundamentally necessary for the social organism to be threefold, its three members being relatively independent. There must work side-by-side the independent spiritual organism, the independent organism of the political state in its narrow sense, and the independent economic life. Each of these bodies should have its own legislation and government, arising out of its own conditions and its own forces. This seems to be abstract, but this threefold order is just the element in which man can be so fused that from the working together of all the members a healthy social organism can result. It cannot be just a question of thinking out what for the social organism is to take. Our thinking, indeed, is not so advanced in the social sphere that a structure can be given straightway to the social organism. One individual by himself could as little bring about such a structure as a man growing up alone on a desert island without any human society could, out of himself, learn to speak. Everything social arises through cooperation, but a cooperation harmoniously regulated on this threefold basis. It is only by keeping in mind the direction leading to a really practical structure, a really practical life, that we understand how a men like Johann Gottlieb Fichte came to think out a social system which, put into practice, would actually be Bolshevism.