13. The Relationships Between Spiritual Science and Individual Academic Subjects III

Distinguished Audience! It has often been emphasized, and with good reason, how the division of labor, which is an external phenomenon, has had a damaging effect on the more recent development of humanity. And anyone who takes an unbiased look at the development of social life in modern times cannot help but realize the profound effect this has had on the individual human being, who in earlier times performed tasks to which he was, so to speak, also bound spiritually. Just think of the inner satisfaction that lay in the old crafts, where what one made was transparent in terms of its place in the whole context of the human environment. The door lock that was once made by the craftsman could give him joy because he could see the path it took from his hand to its destination. How different things are today, when the individual person day after day, hour after hour, produces some individual part of a larger whole, without being able to have any interest in what emerges from his hand or from the machine by means of his hand, because he is not directly connected with the path that the thing in question takes from its maker to its final destination. This division of labor, which must, as it were, tie man to something that can never be of interest to him, and which must therefore make man extremely one-sided in his entire life, this division of labor, we will still have to deal with it in particular when we study the social process tomorrow.