6. Spiritual Scientific Findings on the Ideas of Freedom and Social-moral Life

One must be involved in social life if one wants to deal with living concepts rather than a lack of reality. One must be involved in such a way that one is not dependent on this life giving one something, but that one knows the laws that otherwise only operate in the subconscious and is able to introduce them into life. From imaginative knowledge, from the kind of knowledge that can elevate ordinary abstract ideas to inner vitality in such a way that these ideas are pictorial but also submerged in reality, from this imaginative knowledge emerge all those concepts that can be effective in the future in relation to the social structure. Social experiments have remained so bleak and have caused so many real errors because people believed that social concepts could be understood in the same way as scientific concepts, because these concepts were established in a way that was divorced from reality. From imagination, from immersion in that which is otherwise experienced by ordinary consciousness only as in a dream, can be drawn those impulses needed by anyone who has something to say that can be considered a social idea. Every age is a time of transition. It is, of course, a trivial truth to say again and again that an age is a time of transition; what matters is what is being transitioned. But in our time, instinctive consciousness is transitioning into free, full consciousness that lives under the idea of freedom. The old impulses that came from instinctive consciousness—including Roman law—must be replaced by what provides imagination for social life, inspiration for ethical and moral life, and intuition for legal life. This is certainly not as convenient as constructing all kinds of legal concepts out of the abstract and knowing, because one is an intelligent person, how the whole world should be. One knows that!