4. Anthroposophy as a Moral Impulse and a Creative Social Force

Dear attendees,A very serious philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, spoke from his deepest insight the sentence: What kind of philosophy you choose depends on what kind of person you are. - For a philosophy that wants to talk about moral and ethical, moral-social aspects from its own field, such a sentence is, if you look more closely, downright devastating. For if, in its highest realizations, which are supposed to be the philosophical ones, one only reflects what one already is as a moral and social human being, then philosophy, world view, cannot possibly provide impulses for morality and the social. And anyone who takes such a sentence seriously will have to ask themselves the important question: How can knowledge, how can a body of knowledge have any kind of impelling effect on the moral, on the social life? For in our time, scientific thinking, which permeates all the life forces of human beings, would indeed like to have a certain authoritative effect on the moral and social life. This question seems to me to have a very special significance for our time, and to an even greater extent for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to be an active force in life. And how could it become one if it could not find any impulses for morality, for social life, which arguably include the greatest problems of our present time. Again and again, however, one is referred to the special nature of today's scientific spirit when such a question is raised.