The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have often had the opportunity to speak here about the so-called threefold social order, which is supposed to be the way to fulfill the current demand for socialization. Today, I would like to take the liberty of adding a few details to supplement and explain what I said in the previous lectures. I am well aware that even what I will be able to present today will not yet be what everyone imagines by way of the practical advice that is called for. But I would like to say that it will be recognized more and more that the impulses that want to be put into the world under the name of the threefold social organism are practical impulses to such an extent and of such a kind that, as with all truly practical impulses, it is necessary to apply a certain instinct for reality to what is put forward. For only that which does not want to be a preconceived program, which is thought and felt from the outset in such a way that it is formed out of reality and thought into reality, can basically only be understood by someone who takes the trouble to put himself in the position of how such things appear when he wants to lend a hand in realizing them. It is easier to have some preconceived party program and demand its realization than to listen to reality itself and discern what that reality demands. The tripartite social organism seeks to solve the problem of socialization in such a way that everything that happens in the direction of its impulse must first prove itself in practice, by being directly applied in reality. On the one hand, the present time is just as little accessible to impulses of this kind as, on the other hand, it needs them precisely for the most essential demands of the time. The impulse towards a threefold social organism wants to tackle the facts which can be subject to real socialization in an honest and open way. Above all, it does not want to destroy all the fruits of human culture that have resulted from the great developmental advances of modern times. It does not want to dismantle, it wants to build. He does not want to destroy certain lines of business that have emerged and that definitely meet human needs, for example, by socializing them in a stereotyped way, without taking into account the facts of the matter. For such a realistic program, if we had another word, I would not call it a program, one must indeed muster the goodwill to understand, because it is very easy to misunderstand what is actually meant by this three-part social organism. What is meant is, above all, what can be deduced from our practical life, from the way it has developed through technical and industrial progress, from what has been created in the way of means of production and knowledge about production.

But today a truly practical impulse in this direction must be based on something quite different: it must be based on a true understanding of the human being. Therefore, I must emphasize again and again, the threefold social organism is not about establishing any new classes or other groups of people and their differences, but rather about merely threefolding everything that takes place around people in the world. In future we shall have a separate economic administration, a separate legal administration, and a separate spiritual administration. But the same human beings will be active in the economic organism, in the spiritual organism, and in the legal or state organism. It is precisely this threefold organism that will enable man, through his continuous interaction, to establish the necessary unity of human social life. Anyone who wants to understand this in the way it actually is today must, above all, realize that it means something when a person is brought from one sphere of life to another. The same people will work in the economic organism, which will have its own administration and organization. The same people, of course not at the same time, will be active in the legal and spiritual organism, at least through their relationships with the spiritual organism.

Now one could say, yes, but what significance does this structure have? Only someone who wants to close their eyes to the true reality would raise such an objection. I will give you an obvious example. Until very recently, anyone who had a little knowledge of life would have said that merchants were a completely different breed, I would say, based on their way of life, than, say, stiff bureaucrats. Now, something very strange has happened recently under the influence of the so-called war economy. Merchants were brought into the bureaucratic government offices, and lo and behold, these merchants became the most beautiful bureaucrats in the bureaucratic government offices. Now, that is an undesirable example of human adaptation to what man is placed in, but this perhaps unsympathetic example points to a general human phenomenon. Man behaves in a certain way because of the circle in which he works. If we reorganize the entire life of human society in such a way that the three most essential branches of life have their own administration, let us say, their own representation, their own organization, then the person who has to live in such a sphere as one of the members of the social organism will work out of the spirit of that sphere. He will be able to contribute to the whole of human life in a way that would never be possible if everything in social life were mixed up and confused. However, creating clarity in such a field requires dedicated observation and practice of life. And if what is being striven for in the future for the good of humanity is not based on such devoted observation and practice of life, we will only end up in more confusion and chaos, but not out of it. Above all, if we want to create something healthy in the individual, we must be able to devote ourselves to what the immediate present can actually teach us with regard to social life. We must not ask: What have we thought for decades about socialism, about socialist programs? - and then, in this thinking, completely overlook what is around us in the immediate present, but we must have the ability to really look at this immediate present. This immediate present has brought something up that should surprise most of all those who have thought about socialism before.

Anyone who is familiar with the thinking about socialism, even among the socialists of past decades, must say that the events of the present must come as a surprise if one only wants to take things in their true sense and truthfully, openly and honestly, especially today. If we look beyond mere appearances and try to see what holds the germ of the future in a phenomenon, what is the most striking and significant phenomenon in the life of social demands of the present? I believe that anyone who has really taken a proper look at what is actually happening cannot find any other answer to this question than: the most striking phenomenon is the so-called soviet system. And I would like to say that one should have the ability to pay proper attention to the tremendously significant symptomatic phenomenon of the soviet system. For in a certain respect it can be said that the emergence of this system of councils is precisely what should have surprised traditional socialism the most. Traditional, old socialism should have listened attentively to this system of councils; it should have said to itself, this is actually the refutation of much of what I have thought. The council system refutes many old ideas about socialism. One need only recall, I would say sketchily, what traditional socialism has always emphasized and unfortunately still does: People do not make social upheavals, evolution does. It has been said that economic forms will gradually be transformed, primarily through the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few capitalists, so that, to a certain extent, the old type of society itself grows into the new one.

Then came the world war catastrophe, which shook humanity. It poured out on the one hand over capitalism, which was driving itself into its own destruction. But it also poured out over the truly justified aspirations that arise from human nature, which are called the social movement. What has actually emerged from this social movement? People have emerged who, in the most diverse ways, as councils, as people's councils, want to take further development into their own hands, who want to intervene in development out of their own human resolve, their human insight, and their human will. If one were to have a sufficiently developed sense of discernment for the facts of reality today, one would perceive what has been indicated as an enormous surprise. But it seems almost as if precisely in those circles that have settled down so well into the old ideas of socialism, this power of discernment would be difficult to achieve. The November events have occurred. What has announced itself in the East - I will speak neither approvingly nor disparagingly about it - as the system of the Soviets, has also occurred in Central Europe. One was forced to think of something that could be called, by what was there through the November events: the realization of the social aspiration to which one has devoted oneself for a long time and from which one has promised oneself so much for a long time. There, very strange phenomena have come to light. One need only recall a few events in this, our present, strange transitional period, and one will immediately notice how little the old habits of thought were suited to the new phenomenon, which should actually have been surprising. I will highlight one example. A very clever person, full of enthusiasm for social ideas, gave a lecture in Berlin on socialization. He discussed certain very general ideas about socialization, the kind that were current when socialism still justified criticism, but could only criticize, when it was not yet called upon, as it has been since November, to intervene in events. He had very definite general ideas about what socialization should look like, and I believe – because it is perfectly clear to someone who can discern the human soul between the lines of what is said – that the man must have said to himself: What I have imagined in general program sentences cannot be done! — When something cannot be done, then today one says — it was also said in the past, but today it has become very characteristic —, well, people are not yet ready for it, it will come later. Yes, later, according to this man's views, true socialism will come. But what comes until then? He has now worked out a broad socialization program, it is the engineer Dr. Hermann Beck in Berlin, and he calls what is to be achieved in the transition period social capitalism. We have thus happily arrived at a situation in which the events that have occurred do not lead us to envision as an ideal what has always been called for: a real overcoming of the damage done by capitalism. However, one must learn to distinguish between real socialization and what is often striven for today, namely the transformation of private capitalism into state and municipal capitalism. That is not socialization, that is fiscalization or something similar. Do not confuse socialization with fiscalization. What needs to be looked at today – if you have a sense of reality, you will – is, as I have already indicated, the way in which people who want to participate in social events stand out, and this is expressed in the so-called council system. But no one who wants to make the transition from capitalism to socialism based on abstract principles, on some ideology or on some utopian premise can cope with this system of councils.

The striving for the system of workers' councils shows that it is unwise today to attempt socialization from above. The only way today is to work together with those who aspire to the council system, to create an exchange of views and experiences in ideas that are directly human. That is why I said, when I spoke here on Tuesday, that it is necessary today that we learn to understand the reality of trust, that we learn to really create with those who come from the working people and strive for certain goals. It is much more important today to listen to what those who come from the working class have to say than to reflect on how some law or the like should be based on some ideas. What we need today, what must be real reality today, is to recognize that what is to happen must come from the people. It is therefore more important to establish a living connection with the broad masses of the people than to hold meetings among ourselves upstairs. Holding meetings at the top only leads us to continue the old damage, because what wants to be realized today must come directly from the people, and the symptom that history wants this is the system of councils. And in addition, this system of councils has basically already emerged in two forms, and just as the proletariat's ordeal has necessarily led to the threefold social order because the proletariat has experienced physical and mental hardship in the three spheres of life, so too does the remarkable phenomenon of the system of councils already point to the threefold social order. At first this system of councils presents itself in such a way that on the one hand so-called workers' councils arise, but on the other hand another form of council is already emerging, the form of council that is now appearing as a demand for works councils.

Those who have an instinct for what is emerging from the times can already know today that the system of general workers' councils points to the political side, the state side, the legal side, and can only be developed if we 'can go towards a legal life separate from economic and spiritual life. Such things come about, I might say, with unavoidable historical ambiguity, in that they break away from humanity. But the question must be asked: how can that which asserts itself in this way be shaped on a healthy soil that makes a real organization of human society possible? Just as the system of workers' councils points to the independent legal basis, so the institute of works councils points to the independent economic basis, for it is in this that the practice of impulses for the tripartite social organism is to be sought, so that it is not built into the air with a program, but is built on soil and land, out of the historical reality, which one only has to observe correctly. There is really no need to discuss whether the councils are a reality or not. They are partly a reality, they will become more and more so, no one will be able to drive them back again, they will arise in even more diverse forms than they already are. Realistic thinking demands that we create the ground on which these councils can be worked with.

The one area in which the threefold social organism wants to create is the economic area. The esteemed listeners who have heard earlier lectures of mine will know that what is at issue here is to shape this economic ground in such a way that the so-called wage relationship disappears on its own, that the regulation of the type and time and the like of human labor is removed from the economic cycle and transferred to the legal state, where decisions are made about the time, type and measure of human labor. What remains on the economic plane is what is revealed in reality as the production of goods, the circulation of goods, and the consumption of goods. You will also have gathered from earlier lectures that economic life is about an organization that consists of associations, mainly of those associations that together regulate the conditions of consumption and production. It has often been said from the socialist side: In the future, production cannot be for profit, but must be for consumption. It is therefore self-evident that the consumer interest, which has not played a conscious role in the economic process itself to any significant extent, must come to the fore in economic activity. Cooperatives will have to be formed in which both the consumer interest and the dependent production relationship are represented. In these cooperatives, the main thing will be to always find out, within the practical work, how large such a cooperative must be. The size of such a cooperative cannot be derived from the boundaries of the state structures that have emerged in the course of modern history – for the simple reason that these state structures have emerged as closed administrative bodies for reasons quite different from the conditions of production and consumption, and because other boundaries arise as soon as people associate socially in relation to relations of production and consumption in such a way that the regulation of relations of production and consumption results in the mutual value of commodities, which makes a healthy life possible for the broadest sections of the population. In order to accomplish such tasks, we will have to develop a genuine economic science, one that cannot be conjured out of thin air, nor even out of subjective human experience, but out of the experiences of collective economic life. Within these experiences, one will have to observe how cooperatives that are too small lead to the members of these cooperatives having to wither away in terms of their economic situation; cooperatives that are too large must also lead to withering away in the economic life that is provided by the cooperatives. Once the relevant law, which underlies economic life, is clearly recognized, it will be expressed in the following words: Too small cooperatives promote the starvation of the participants in these cooperatives, while too large cooperatives promote the starvation of the others in the economic life associated with these cooperatives. Therefore, it will be a matter of avoiding this twofold atrophy of human needs. That will be the guideline for the work to be carried out by all sections of the national community. For it cannot be determined by any mathematical calculation how large such a cooperative must be; it must have a certain size in one place and another in another. It must regulate its size according to the actual conditions. These actual conditions are to be determined by those who are directly involved in economic life. They cannot be regulated in any other way than by disregarding any state legislation on economic life, leaving this economic life to its own vitality, so that it can be shaped by the continuous living interaction of the councils. One cooperative must be enlarged according to the circumstances at a certain time, while another must be reduced in size. For the social organism is not something that can be defined by a constitution or determined by laws that have been established once and for all; rather, it is something that is in a state of perpetual life, just as a natural organism basically is. Therefore, what is the measure of economic life can only be expressed at most in more or less short- or long-term contracts that are concluded, but never in any limitation or definition of the powers of the councils that are part of economic life.

You can still say today, and rightly so, that he is telling us about the extent of the size of a cooperative, but where is the evidence for this? Yes, that is precisely because we have not yet achieved an economic science that must be based on economic experience in the most eminent sense, that cannot be constructed, that cannot be gained from the idea, but only from life. I can tell you that no one who has truly studied economic life with selfless devotion comes to a different conclusion than the one I have expressed to you. For it is the peculiarity of social laws that they can never be proved in the same way as natural laws, but that they must be proved directly in their application, and that therefore only those who have a certain instinct for social reality can have a sense for them. This is so difficult in the present time that we are confronted with facts which require this instinct for reality, but people are so reluctant to develop this instinct for reality that is present in every human soul.

The second task that will arise in the future will be a price regulation arising from the laws of economic life, which will represent the mutual value of the goods. For it is only through such a price regulation, observed in economic experience, that the basic law of all socialization can be realized. This will make it possible to fulfill the basic principle of all socialization, which, after all, basically consists of nothing more than ensuring that what a normal person can achieve through normal human labor based on his or her abilities is equal to what the society in which he or she lives provides for him or her, so that everyone can receive from society the equivalent consumption for what he or she produces. In addition, of course, there is what the community must provide for those people who, due to illness, old age or abnormality, must be supported by society itself. This is not achieved by wage struggles or the like, but only by ensuring that the economic cycle is such that prices are formed in a healthy way, not too low and not too high. Prices themselves, ladies and gentlemen, can be said to be irrelevant. It just always depends on earning what things cost. But that would only be the case in societies that merely produce land products. The moment a society has to simultaneously produce products for which man-made means of production are needed, there is a necessary normal price that must not be exceeded or fallen short of.

In this respect, we could learn an enormous amount from history if we could look at history today on the basis of real insights into economic laws, rather than economic fantasies, as is often the case in the economic histories of recent years. For example, it is extremely instructive for people who are honest in this regard that we have already reached the point in the most important regions of Central Europe that a kind of normal pricing system exists over large areas. That was around the fifteenth, towards the middle of the fifteenth century. This normal pricing - please read about it in the histories that at least give some clues about it - which at that time extended over a large part of Europe, only became possible because the old serfdom and semi-slavery, the old hereditary leasehold and the like had gradually given way to better conditions, better conditions, by no means ideal conditions. But then an event occurred that undermined this economic development. It is impossible to say what it would have meant for European humanity if this event had not occurred. Of course, I do not want to engage in bad historical construction, nor indulge in historical criticism, but only point out these things for a better understanding, because what happened had to happen. One cannot even imagine the favorable economic development that would have followed if what had already been prepared around the middle of the fifteenth century had found a straightforward continuation. But it was cut off by the radical introduction of Roman legal concepts; it was cut off by the fact that economic life was disturbed precisely from the legal point of view. Anyone who is familiar with this phenomenon at its very roots has in it an enormously strong historical proof of the necessity of separating actual state life from economic life. Old habits of mankind led to a certain sympathy for these Roman legal concepts. In the Baltic region, from which so much reactionary thinking has emanated, there were people at the Diet who said: According to Roman legal concepts, which we must reintroduce because they are the right ones, the farmers should actually become slaves again.

Today, when we are facing not a small reckoning but a great one, as I said before, we must see through such things with a healthy eye of the soul, see through them in all their consequences for the present. But if we want to shape our economic life independently in this and many other ways, we will need a real organization of the council system. It will be a matter of introducing into the factory the system of workers' councils, which today is longed for and hoped for, which some people are already trying to set up based on a certain understanding of the times, so that it so that it can be an intermediary between the workers and the managers of the future, in the sense that I characterized it in my last lecture here and as I presented it in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question'. That will be the first task for which the works councils will have to come up with, to really be able to mediate for those contracts that have to be concluded between the workers and managers of the future, who will no longer be capitalists. But all these things can be prepared today. All these people who are part of such a council can already take on functions today, even if they can only be transitional functions. Furthermore, the works council will, above all, have to mediate in everything that arises from the company and is of general interest in the context of life in a unified economic entity. But other things will also be necessary for this system of works councils if we do not want to continue to individualize economically, which the working class in particular would soon come to resent. If we want to socialize the whole of economic life, the unified economic entity, then we will need many other types of councils. I would just like to point out from the types of councils that there will be a need for transport councils and economic councils. The factory councils will be close to the production conditions and production needs of the working people. The economic councils will be close to the consumption conditions.

This will create an economic body that, above all, will represent a real system of councils. Such a system of councils, which does not prevent – that is what will be important in its practical design – the initiative of the individual in economic life from being decisive in the individual case. But that can really be developed if trust prevails. If the initiative of the individual were undermined by, say, the soviet system, then all internationality of economic life would be lost. This internationality of economic life would be particularly lost – people today have little idea of the extent to which this would be the case – if, instead of socialization, nationalization were to be introduced, that is, state capitalism, if economic life were to be merged with state life. If the state were to manage the economy, as some strive for – anyone who is familiar with the actual circumstances knows this – then it would be impossible to control the complicated conditions that the internationality of economic life necessarily creates. If you set up a real system of economic, transport, works councils and similar councils, which will truly not take as many people out of the working population as the current bureaucracy, then, if you can still manage to avoid undermining the initiative of the administrative people in the practical implementation, then all the fine apparatuses of internationalism can be fully maintained despite socialization. Then, if the councils are real councils, that is, institutions that set the direction of life, then the councils, through their coexistence with the administrators, will bring it about that the administrative man, whom they trust, can also take the initiative in their sense in detail. The broad lines of the institutions will always emanate from the council. The day-to-day activities will be taken care of by the council. In this respect, anyone who can imagine economic life as separate from the rest of society, and taking into account all the circumstances , which are present today, to institutions which do not reduce the achievements of the old culture, but which make it possible to bring about a dignified existence for all people within these achievements.

You may ask what means the economic life, separated from the state, will have to carry out the measures it has taken, in a sense against the resistance of individuals? Today, however, it is thought that such measures can only be implemented by means of coercion. In this respect, we have not yet deviated very much from the old habits of thought. I do not know how many people have noticed that such old habits of thought continue in a strange way. If, for example, I read a certain passage from a certain speech today, many people will be astonished. This passage, taken from an address to troops in Danzig, reads: “The troops shall see the man who stands up for their weal and woe and advocates military discipline and order. If the right military spirit lives in the troops, I will repay loyalty with loyalty.” You will say, in which old imperial speech did you find that? No, it is from the speech that the Reich Minister of Defense Noske gave to the volunteer troops in Danzig. This is how old habits of thought take root. But it is essential that we move beyond the old habits of thought. Today, people do not yet realize how they are muddling along in the old habits of thought, how little they have come out of the old things. So naturally some people ask, who can only imagine that what is decided upon as a measure will be carried out by some kind of state or even military force: What means does the economic body have to enforce what is born out of its womb in the way described? — In the future it has a very effective but at the same time very humane means, the boycott. The boycott, which does not even need to be imposed by coercion under such conditions as I have described, but which simply arises by itself. If a cooperative exists for any business and branch of consumption and someone wants to go over to the other side, he will not be able to produce, precisely because of the law that the circle from which he produces will then be too small. And in a similar way, other conditions for thwarting economic measures through the obvious boycott can be eliminated. If someone were to believe that the recalcitrant could then come to such a large cooperative that he could compete, he need only reflect on the real laws of economic life and he will know that by the time he would come to this competition, he must have perished long ago.

You must seek this as the practical life behind the threefold order, that this threefold order takes account of reality and seeks to create a foundation for this reality. Of course, we shall have to take certain things seriously that today still go against human habits of thought. We shall have to take seriously what I have already explained in earlier lectures, namely the emancipation of spiritual life. We shall have to realize something with this spiritual life that has always been implicit in the call of socialist thinkers, but is poorly understood today. It was always inherent in socialism that it would lead to something new, but people have never thought about it clearly. Time and again, the adherents of socialism have said: competition and profit-making must be replaced by objective administration. That is quite right. This must be done especially in the field of intellectual life. It will, of course, be necessary for this intellectual life to be able to administer itself. Purely from the observations on human existence, one will be able to create something truly fruitful for the future through a mass pedagogy. I know that I am perhaps saying something crazy to many people today by saying: If we want to socialize in a healthy way, then we must, above all, express human strength and potential in such a way that the human being can stand powerfully in reality throughout his normal lifetime.

This will be particularly evident in the free administration of education. In other areas, it has already been shown in a less than pleasing way, in that the conditions of promotion in the old state have led to the fact that the highest council positions were usually occupied by old men who then wanted as little as possible to do with the matter. In the future, the necessity will arise from the self-government of the mind that these old gentlemen will have the most diverse leading tasks. But for that they need to be young and fresh. Our state school undermines youthfulness. This youthfulness has certainly not been found in the Reich Railway Office – it was called the Reich Railway Office because the posts were mostly filled by old men. It will be necessary for us to shape the very first stage of school teaching, which can only develop in a free spiritual life, on the basis of a thorough anthropology, so that the human powers of thought, feeling and will are not developed in such a way that later life is unable to maintain them, but weakens them. During the years in which the human being develops thinking, feeling and willing, we must shape all of this in such a way that we create a foundation for life. What can be achieved in the years of youth can never be made up for by the human being later on. But only if school life is administered according to the most intrinsic laws of human life, not according to the state corporation, can it be possible that the strength of his power will not be weakened throughout his entire life. And for social life it will be necessary in the future not only to acquire knowledge through school institutions, but also to learn to learn, to learn to learn from life. It still looks strange today when one says that a properly organized school system will provide us with very different people in the future than we have today.

You see, it is necessary for new things to arise, things that are not even thought of now. People today still look perplexed when you talk to them about wanting intellectual life to follow its own laws. They cannot imagine anything other than an intellectual life administered by the state because they have no idea of what the human being is in human society. Matters are serious today, and those who want to take things lightly will not achieve what is so necessary for us today: the recovery of the social organism. We must see again and again how strangely people continue in their old ways of thinking, how they at best bring themselves to say, “What he says is so unclear to us.” Of course, such things, which must have the power to give birth to a long-lasting reality, must first be accepted as something that is unclear, because one must get used to acquiring a new, realistic view of life by dealing with them. Today we have the duty to reflect on our deep instincts. When we reflect on them, we will be able to recognize with clarity what appears to be unclear. When many people today say that the impulses of the threefold social organism are unclear, it is often due to the old, wrong school education, which has prevented people from coming to a truly concentrated thinking, from coming to the conception of realistic thoughts. And so, on the one hand, one is obliged to say what is necessary, but on the other hand, one has to fight to prevent all kinds of prejudices from wanting to create new things in the world out of old habits of thinking. When people today keep asking: What is the way? How do you do it? — I would like to know what would be a clearer way than that of the threefold organism, if only one wants to follow it. But just think of what has to happen first if one wants to go down this path. The government, which has continued to develop from earlier developments, will have to say to itself one day: We reserve for ourselves all those departments that relate to legal life, public safety and the like. With regard to intellectual life, culture, education, technical ideas on the one hand, and with regard to economic life on the other, to industry, trade, commerce and so on, we will become a liquidation government. This requires our time as something immediately practical: the insight that governments that come from the old practices and habits can pull themselves together to say such things as those just mentioned; to cast aside intellectual and economic life to the left and right, so that these can shape and administer themselves.

Only the initiative can lie with the previous governments, because they have already developed out of the old conditions, but they must have the selflessness to become liquidation governments to the left and to the right. This requires a great reckoning. Those who call this impractical, I can understand, because they cannot rethink what centuries have hammered into their heads. Today, however, we are faced with the necessity of hammering out of our heads what centuries have hammered into it. Today we are faced with the necessity of taking things with the utmost seriousness, because only this utmost seriousness is the truly practical thing to do. This seriousness will then unite with the necessary insights that I have mentioned to you with regard to the organization of economic life, the size or smallness of these or those cooperatives, price fixing and so on. But these are tasks that arise in the concrete, in the practical, and to which we must resolve, for these are the foundations of a real socialization, the foundations for a truly social shaping of human life. This is what the councils want, even if they cannot yet say it, as they strive to emerge from the greater community of the people. Therefore, people should have been surprised by the council systems, especially all those who believed that they had already come far enough in what is called socialization. Today we are experiencing strange things.

This afternoon, I had to read a remarkable sentence that I would like to say had to be received by me with the strangest feelings in these serious times. There I read the following sentence in connection with the impulses of this three-part organism. You don't really want to believe it:

“The present struggle is not about finding an idea or putting the right man at the helm, but about how the socialist idea must be translated into reality. It is not about beautiful plans, but about execution.”

Now I ask you, my dear audience, how can you execute if you have nothing to execute? Such things are said today in good faith, out of a good opinion. But they are nothing more than a symptom of how little sense and understanding people have for what has to happen. Someone presents the plan of a house, and someone objects: It is not the plan of the house that matters, but the execution. — It may well be asked: Where is your plan? Where does it show itself? — We would remain silent if your plan showed itself, for we speak truthfully only through the facts.

That such things are possible today, that such thinking is possible in the face of the seriousness of the times, is what makes one sad again and again when one thinks of the possibility and necessity of what has to happen. We must be seized today, especially we here in Central Europe, by the seriousness of the situation. For only by breaking ourselves of today of thinking and speaking outside of things - because we never look into things - only by doing so will we avert the great disaster. Today, one needs the opportunity to create out of the broadest masses of humanity. If anyone attempts to do so, he is told that he is suggesting things to the masses, for the masses do not understand them. The ruling circles have no idea what the masses already understand in their fresh minds, things they themselves do not understand because they do not want to understand anything. These things are a problem for our time, and I do not shrink from speaking about them, no matter how many objections are raised about suggestion and the like, because basically I only say what would come from the hearts and souls of people themselves if they were to become clear about what lives in these hearts and souls. I only want to clarify what lives in the hearts and souls. But many people today do not want to know anything about that because they shy away from living with those who clearly carry the demands of the time in their hearts. However, you can find out a lot about this from all sorts of voices of the time. Recently, for example, a gentleman wrote in the widely read magazine 'Die Hilfe' (Help) - and it is not a socialist magazine, but it aims to be a social magazine; similar views can be found in socialist magazines today - that we cannot socialize now. He does not consider the possibility that he does not know how to do it, but of course he does not attribute the reason why he has no idea how socialization should be carried out to himself, but to the others. In his article, he says quite naively: “Capitalism has simply corrupted our people... Yes, anyone who had a nation of healthy, happy, kind-hearted people who were eager to work and for whom fraternity was a living concept and not just a slogan like ours could dare to introduce communism overnight.”

Now I ask you whether anyone in the world would need to introduce communism if we lived in a social order in which people are healthy, happy, cheerful, kind-hearted and in which only fraternity lived. You see, that is today's world of thought. People have no idea what they said just a short time ago. They would truly have no need to think of an ideal of socialism if people were as they should be, as they are supposed to be, precisely through socialization.

People always forget one thing: if the natural organism is healthy, then a person does not feel what the health of the natural organism is. Then he must first seek in health, but then he can feel the harmony of his soul, or the joy of his soul, for that matter. But if the organism is sick, then he feels pain, then the pain of the organism is part of his soul experience. Then no one can come and say, “I cannot make you healthy,” because I could only do so if you first felt healthy in your soul, if you had harmony and joy in your soul. We must strive for a healthy social organism. That is what matters. We must not ask, as the gentleman I just spoke of did, “But where shall we get the people from?” Mankind must first be educated for socialism! — Think of the Munchausen hero who wants to lift himself up into the air by his hair. No, socialism should be there to educate people.

It is easy to call people immature when one is unable to develop mature impulses oneself. Our task in the present is not to accuse humanity, but to create conditions that will no longer require us to accuse humanity to the extent we do today. Therefore, the impulse we are talking about here sets itself the task of examining the conditions of a healthy social organism. We shall not make any progress until there is an awakening of understanding for this threefold social organism. Then I would like to see, if in a sufficiently large number of people - and that is what matters today - there is understanding for what is to be done, which government can resist such understanding! Under any other circumstances, we will not make any progress with all the experiments.

Today, the effort must be made to create understanding in the broadest circles. This can happen faster than one might think. And it must happen faster than one might think, because only those who are immature themselves speak of people's immaturity. We have no time to waste dreaming that it will take a long time to socialize. If one recognizes the practical possibility of basing social life on the three fundamentals of the spiritual, the legal, and the economic, then one will realize that one can carry out a real socialization on these three fundamentals. But one must resolve not to cling to old prejudices. We must make up our minds to really relearn. The same gentleman I have already told about, says the beautiful sentence: “Any renewal that tries to rush ahead of this development,” he means the development towards kind-hearted, friendly, contented people, “must fail because it finds no support in the people's feelings.” — In the feelings of this gentleman, it certainly finds no support. Such sentiments must simply be ignored if they cannot be improved, because humanity must not be held back any longer by old prejudices and old habits of thinking. Today we need to go deep within ourselves, to reform and revolutionize our feelings and our thinking. Then we will find the resonance in the people. We need not suggest anything to people; we need only find the clarity for what they legitimately want. We need only do the work of trust and not shy away from this cooperation with the broad masses, then we will truly serve the demands of the present time.

Today, I want to say once again that everyone must take themselves by the word: I must learn to understand what needs to be done from the phenomena of the time, from the loudly speaking facts, before it is too late. And it could very soon be too late, which would then be most regretted by those who have not taken the trouble to transform themselves, out of the abilities they have acquired, so that they can really understand these new demands of the time and place themselves at their service. To be able to place oneself at the service of the times, even if we have to relearn in the deepest part of our being, that must become the task of all people, before it is too late!

Closing words after the discussion

Since, in principle, hardly anything has been said in the discussion against my statements except by one of the honored speakers, it is also unnecessary for me to say much in detail in the closing remarks. I do not wish to go back over the arguments of the speaker who has contradicted me. I think it is certainly a strange way of putting things to say that one should refute things that are quite incorrect in comparison with what is in my book. A discussion cannot be conducted in such a way that one asserts inaccuracies or fallacies during the discussion and then demands that one refute what one never deigned to assert. I would like to point out just one thing. It has already been said by Mr. L. and it is also my conviction that, as far as Karl Marx is concerned, anyone who really knows Karl Marx will have to say that Karl Marx has always allowed himself to be taught by the facts of history, contemporary history, in such a way that there is no doubt that anyone today who would not be able to answer the question: What would Karl Marx think under today's conditions? — You see, there is a very, very strange word from Karl Marx that comes to mind when someone like Mr. W. refers to Karl Marx in such a strange way. Marx had many contemporaries who were his followers, who called themselves Marxists, and Karl Marx said something very strange, but it has a very deep meaning for these Marxists: As far as I am concerned, I am not a Marxist. Such a saying should really make you think. Sometimes you have to ask yourself what the followers of a certain view actually believe. A view, such as that put forward by Karl Marx, is meant by its creator to flow into the full movement of time. And only those who are able to take it up in such a way that they are able to transform it for their own time will understand it in a later age. That is enough on this point. Now, because three questions were asked, I would just like to make a few comments about these three questions. All three questions relate to foreign policy. Of course, I could answer them individually, but perhaps it would be better not to answer these three questions in particular in the form in which the questioner wants them, given the events that are still pending. It is necessary to withhold information about current events, although it is not likely that what I am saying here will be in the newspaper tomorrow. But it is better if certain things are not spoiled by being talked about. But I will tell you the following about it, so that you do not think that something can be withheld lightly with regard to answering this question. You see, what is now presented as the threefold social order was initially treated as a foreign policy matter during the terribly difficult war period. At a time when it was out of the question to tackle socialization within Germany just before the end of the war, when the only question was what Germany would do in response to Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, for example, if there was to be a possible end to the terrible events? Today, even more than in the past, I am of the opinion that much could have been helped if people had shown understanding for that foreign policy, which, in addition to socialization, lies in this threefold structure of a healthy social organism. That, I would say, is precisely what stands before me today with such sadness. This structure would, I believe, have been the only way to avoid such a terrible end to the war as we have come to. May that lack of understanding which the relevant circles showed in the past not also become what those who matter, the broadest sections of the people, make it theirs today. If only we could find the hearts of the broad masses of the people more than we could find the hearts of those who, instead of seeking some kind of sensible foreign policy under the influence of these impulses, have wreaked havoc at Brest-Litovsk and in the aftermath.

I cannot give you a second lecture on foreign policy now. But one day we will study the real causes, the more distant and more proximate ones, of these unfortunate European events of the last five years. In the future, we will study, for example, the web of so-called causes of war that led to the Austro-Serbian conflict. Interwoven into this conflict as foreign policy are chaotic economic and political causes. And anyone who, like me, has spent half their life, that is three decades, in Austria, who is familiar with Austrian conditions, knows that this was bound to happen from the unfortunate development of these Austrian conditions, because these conditions could only have been maintained if the economic and political-legal conditions could have been disentangled at the right time, also in relation to foreign policy. You see, I came to Vienna once during the war. Various people approached me and said, emphasizing only the economic side of the causes of the war: “Oh, this war with Serbia is only a pig war.” Of course, this only expresses the economic cause in terms of one area, but it was present. In addition, there were the political and even the cultural causes, even if they lay in different languages, of which Austria officially had thirteen. In short, as I said, I would have to give a very detailed lecture if I wanted to show you how these things have crossed the former state borders, which I call an inorganic, chaotic jumble of the three branches of life, which must first be separated in the future. So today, for easily understandable reasons, I can only hint at all this.

You see, what is now called war guilt, what is now called the terms of peace, which are the subject of the question at hand here – well, is that an impossibility when you think of the realization? No, that is not an impossibility, but mere nonsense, because it is something like sailing into a dead end. It is absolutely incomprehensible how people in Versailles can even imagine such things. Of course, one might not look clearly enough, not concretely enough into the circumstances, but just consider this. Let us leave aside the war debt. Let us assume that which has arisen from the old conditions, the debts that are to be repaid within the German borders themselves. So let's leave the war guilt aside for the time being. Then, for the next few years, the mere interest, listen carefully, ladies and gentlemen, the interest, as I believe, is 28 billion marks annually. So not only is it impossible, but it is really nonsense. Things that cannot be realized.

This is a typical phenomenon of the present time: we have sailed into something under the influence of the old conditions, and it can only develop further if we build something completely, completely new, from completely new foundations. Now, people will very soon be convinced that they have to build on completely new foundations. Those who today still do not want to know about the threefold social order will have to learn it from the field of foreign policy, when it becomes impossible to escape the calamities if we do not manage to establish international relations that go beyond all political and spiritual conditions and arise out of the necessities of economic life. Of course, this must be studied in detail. If it is studied, it will be seen that recovery can only come if we try to build international economic relations on the basis of the tripartite structure of the social organism, at least for us. It is no obstacle that the Entente states do not have a tripartite structure. For us, it would only be necessary for us to make progress, to get some air and the possibility of life again, that Russia and the Ukraine could also enter into the tripartite division to the east.

But anyone who, on deeper grounds, is familiar with the intentions of the Russian national soul also knows how much has actually been achieved by the peace of Brest-Litovsk and how it would have been possible, had not so much been buried, to win adherents with this threefold organism, especially in Russia. This is something for which, of course, ways must be sought to make up for it. But for those who do not take things according to programs, not according to preconceived ideas, but as they present themselves in reality, including in foreign policy, there is only one possibility, to gain strength over a sufficiently large territory in Eastern and Central Europe, so that we find the possibility of not being harmed by the fact that in the West there is that intention, which is expressed in the dreadful peace conditions. I would like to point out to you that the impulses of this tripartite division were first thought of during the course of the war as a foreign policy, and that is what can weigh heavily on us today: After these terrible and bloody experiences, are we to go back to the way things were during the war? At the time, I tried to make it clear how people would have reacted quite differently to everything else if there had been a manifestation in this direction, which of course would not have been worded as one has to speak about these things now, according to the demands of the times. But that is something one would wish for, that now that a new era has dawned, this new era would understand these things better than they were understood by those people who were the last stragglers of the old era and who, because they were these stragglers, led European humanity into terrible misfortune. May as many people as possible now open their hearts, so that they may not be among the stragglers, but may be the forerunners of that which alone can help, namely, that which really cures the inner organism. And the healthy inner organism will also find the ways and means to assert itself in the right way on the outside.

In a series of lectures, I tried to explain the extent to which the present should strive for a division of the social organism into an area of the spirit with independent administration, an area of law on a democratic basis, and an independent economic area. The idea and practical formulation of this view of the threefold social organism, when it attempted to place itself in today's cultural and intellectual life, was expressed to those people who could be expected to have learned something for their work in relation to human development from the loud and clear facts of the last four to five years and also from our present. And one should actually believe that in the present time everyone living with a truly awakened soul should learn from these facts that speak loudly and clearly about the reorganization of social matters. Naturally, the idea could not actually arise in the mind of the bearer of this threefold thinking that those who, by virtue of their entire mental makeup – mentality is what one has been accustomed to calling it in recent times – want to hold on to old programs, to old party opinions, will readily profess their support for this idea of the threefold order of the social organism. For what must one actually have within oneself in order to grasp this idea as one that has really been plucked out of the life of the present in a practical way?

You have to be able to say: the terrible events of the world war catastrophe have shown how the old views on economic life have driven this economic life of humanity into external institutions, which, in the end, by combining the individual institutions into the great state imperialisms, had to lead to the world catastrophe. They were driven to this because economic life developed in a certain sense in such a way that it was, I might say, left to its own driving forces; that we neglected to arrive at truly comprehensive economic ideas which could have lived through themselves through economic measures. A man who is officially responsible for the reorganization of economic life in the Reich Ministry, Wichard von Moellendorff, recently stated that it was his conviction that, under all circumstances, even if the world war catastrophe had not occurred, or had not occurred in the form in which it did, economic life would inevitably have driven itself into a crisis of the most terrible kind, to the detriment of humanity and of nations, for the simple reason that this economic life lacked truly fruitful guiding ideas. And the forces that operated in the states and in the legal conceptions of nations were closely allied with this economic life. In the final analysis it had come about that only economic interests were reflected in the legal systems of the nations. And we had to experience that in 1914 the mutual relations between the states ran into such unclear currents that basically no state power, even with the most earnest goodwill, was actually in a position to avert the terrible threat at that time.

So it might seem that for economic life as for state life, there is much to be learned from the course of events that led to the impossibility of their own destruction for the inner drive that says: A new idea, a new willpower must be found if humanity is to flourish in its development; a new idea for economic life, a new idea for political or legal life. And is not, after all, the whole of political and legal life and of economic life based on the spiritual powers that humanity can unfold, that humanity can cultivate in the growing generation, and which can then intervene in the economy and in the legal life as rational thoughts? Can we not also say that intellectual life also shows how we have arrived at a critical epoch, and how we can learn from it, that we must reflect on and contemplate its further fruitful development and on a new foundation for it?

In the three most important areas of human life – economic, political and legal, and spiritual life – the big question arose, the question of the world war catastrophe and its aftermath. People should actually be around who have learned from the course of events. The fact that humanity's new phase of development cannot be mastered with old thoughts and old party opinions should actually be a basic conviction of the modern human being, based on the world of facts itself. It is out of this attitude, out of this conviction, that the lectures have been given so far here by me. In today's lecture and the one the day after tomorrow, I would like to add a few things to what has already been said, which could serve as a supplement to what has been said so far, from a more spiritual point of view today and from a more practical point of view the day after tomorrow. One thing has emerged that is, in essence, extremely instructive in view of the conviction and attitude just expressed.

What I would characterize as a strange alliance has emerged, a kind of coalition from the far right to the far left. In terms of their opposition to what has been presented here as the basic ideas of the tripartite social organism, Spartacists, independents, majority socialists, the Civic Party and extreme reactionaries are marching in complete agreement with each other today. It could hardly have seemed better, as it could have, to let the Spartacists and the bourgeois and the reactionaries converge in their attitudes.

This peculiarity therefore exists, that basically, at least in form and in attitude, the most amicable harmony reigns from left to right. From the extreme left, we could hear the following judgment about what has been said in these lectures very recently. We could hear that people agree, completely agree, with my criticism of the previous economic order, that they also completely agree with the threefold social order, that they even believe that this threefold order must come about, but – now comes the other thing: they will summon up all their strength to fight tooth and nail against what has been said here in criticism of the previous economic system and about the threefold social organism.

Strange things – one declares one's full agreement with the matter and at the same time declares that one must fight the matter at all costs! Similar arguments can also be heard from the extreme right. So there could perhaps have been no better opportunity for those who, whether from this or that hole of old views, wanted to come together to fight against that which absolutely does not and will not compromise with old views.

Today, by way of introduction to what I will have to say in detail the day after tomorrow, I would like to draw attention to a side of the modern social movement that has actually always been misunderstood, and which has been taken into account precisely in the formulation, in the conception of the idea and the practice of the tripartite organism. Today, I would like to touch on the spiritual basis of the current development of humanity, because I have to be aware that this spiritual basis is of the utmost importance and that the misunderstandings that arise with regard to what can and should be socially desired today stem precisely from the failure to take this spiritual basis into account.

And there is another reason why it is necessary, urgently necessary, to place a movement that today merely wants to be economic or, at most, political, on a spiritual foundation. For anyone who follows today's events as they unfold, not only on the surface, but who tries to penetrate deeper into what is actually happening in the depths of the development of nations today, must surely say to himself: the mighty, the terrible terrible, blood-drenched battle that has taken place is only a wave that has arisen from something in the depths of human nature, something that has been building for a long time. It is an inner restlessness in human nature that is showing itself almost everywhere in the world. One could feel it all these years since the outbreak of this world catastrophe by the facts, as more and more populations across the continents joined in what was actually taking place, joined in such a way that sometimes one truly did not know why, or that the reasons they put forward for joining made a very dubious impression. One could see from this that something elementary lies in this world catastrophe, something that is emerging from the depths of human existence over the whole earth. And it seems to me that nowhere is there more opportunity for a real recognition of what is actually taking place in the depths of humanity than in Central Europe, which has recently found itself squeezed between the whole of the Orient and the whole of the Occident.

This prompts us to ask: What is actually at the root of this? And it should be understandable that the understanding of such things must be based on a certain inner contemplation of the circumstances, on a certain experiential grasping of the facts, that something like instinctive, intuitive contemplation is needed to understand these things. Therefore, one should be understood when one draws attention to what arises from such a view, so that one encounters, I would like to say, what is happening to people. It will not be too much to say today that what has developed out of the world war catastrophe in terms of moods through Central Europe towards the East, towards Russia, towards Asia, and what is developing in terms of moods towards the West and across to America, if one understands that one sees in it only the continuation of that elementary restlessness of humanity that first found its horrific expression in the world war catastrophe. That was, as many have said, the most terrible external armed conflict that has taken place since the time when people have been talking about history. And this armed conflict has been waged with the most physical means by a large part of contemporary humanity. But we can see emerging, rising out of what has produced this armed conflict, something that will take hold of humanity with equal significance and equal impact, and we are actually only at the beginning of it. If what we have experienced was the most terrible armed conflict, then we will also experience - all the signs, which are present in the moods of the people, show it - the greatest spiritual battle, the greatest, the most terrible spiritual confrontation between the East, the Orient and the Occident. We are at the beginning of great and comprehensive spiritual struggles for humanity. And what is now taking place in social demands seems only to be the wave of a spiritual struggle of humanity that has been driven to the surface. Even those contemporaries who have already reached a respectable age will have to engage themselves in this spiritual struggle of humanity. In particular, however, the younger generations will have to engage themselves in this spiritual struggle that encompasses humanity. And what we can say to these growing generations about what we learn from the events, much, very much, will depend on the shaping of human development in the future. Today, the coming event is first announced by something that is outwardly connected with things: half of India, more than half of India, is half starved, and from starved India, the call goes up from a thousand and a thousand souls today: “Away from England!” This must not be judged merely from the political point of view that one is accustomed to from elsewhere today; it must be judged from a broader, more incisive point of view, one that is effective in the development of humanity. For what lives in the Orient is imbued with the heritage, with the heirloom of ancient spiritual life, which has only declined.

Expressed through the deeds of men, the heritage of ancient Oriental spiritual life will come into conflict with the spiritual aspirations of the Occident as far as America, and it remains to be seen whether those forces in the Anglo-American population that their tenacity and generous comprehension of their own selfish national interests have dealt with Central Europe in the well-known way, whether they will also be able to cope with Asia when, driven by the hunger of India, quite different forces will speak than those which the West has heard so far? This is only a hint of what is alive in the cultural atmosphere of the earth today. Because this is alive within, it is not enough today to judge what is actually happening from the traditional political and economic concepts. Therefore, it is necessary to extract the impulses for a new development of human conditions from a spiritual understanding of what is taking place in human moods across the whole earth today. Today, we must not only look at how the proletariat of Russia or Central Europe or the Entente is faring, although these are of course the most pressing questions for us.

Today, we must not just look at how certain people want to sit on their money bags. Today, if we do not want to miss the most important event, we must see as essentially involved in the social forces of the present that which the still half-asleep Orient will pour over the world. It is not necessary to say more than a few words, but when these few words are taken with all the weight that they carry for the spiritual development of mankind, then in these few words one will hear something that has a say in the reshaping of human development. The Orient, in so far as it is the cultured Orient – if we may apply this Occidental expression to the Orient – the Orient lived through thousands of years and, basically, to this day, yes, today, especially in its most spiritually minded representatives in the view that reality, true only that which man can experience spiritually and soulfully within himself, that which rises within the human being as inner soul content, that which can fill the human being so that he draws his true human consciousness from this inner soul content. This is true reality for the Orient, as far as it is the educated Orient. And the external, physical-sensual world, the world in which we work, the world in which the land for our work lies, in which we place the means of production for our work, this world is for the Oriental the Maja, the great appearance, that which is not real, which lives like a minor planet of the true spiritual-soul reality that arises only within. The Oriental is one with this view. He lives with it in his social community. This view fills him at all times, whether he withdraws in solitude for contemplation or whether he lends a hand in the oriental way to his fellow human beings in the physical world. One must consider such things if one really wants to see the world that presents itself to us in people living east of us, because basically, in Russia, it is already beginning to be as I have just characterized it. It only reaches its culmination, its peak, when one looks further east. On the other side, we see a completely different human disposition, a completely different inner life, when we cross the Rhine to the west, when we look in particular at the Anglo-American world. But on the other hand, everything that actually characterizes the attitude and the state of mind of the Western world is increasingly being shared by the basic character of Central European people, and there it reaches its peak in the attitude and state of mind of the present-day socialists, of socialists of all colors, basically.

We can find it again and again when we look at the people of the West and now also the people of Central Europe, as we have just looked at the people of the Orient. We will recognize what underlies the West when we grasp it in the way in which it has come to expression most clearly and most radically, when we grasp it precisely in the modern socialist mentality. What now prevails, no longer as a theoretical view but as a fundamental mood of the soul, is that the only reality is that which surrounds us in the physical, sensual world, that which we grasp when we do our work in the physical world for our fellow human beings. What is expressed in the land on which our work is done, what is expressed in the means of production with which our work is done, that is the only reality, and what appears in human souls as right, as custom, as art, as science, in short, as spiritual life, is only a result, a smoke, so to speak, of this single sensual-physical reality; this is, as every socialist thinker of the present day is firmly convinced, ideology. Ideology is the same thing seen from within, just as the Maya is for the Oriental. The Oriental says: physical sensuality, the physical world around us, the economic world, material existence, is Maya, it is an ideology, and reality is solely that which arises within the soul. And the Westerner says: Reality is only that which surrounds us externally, what is in the economic life, and an ideology, a maja, is what arises inwardly in the soul. If we know how such a basic mood of the soul actually makes a person, how it places him in life, then we see in what is happening today as a mood within the human race on earth this great, powerful contrast that I have just described. And this contrast has an enormous historical impact. From this contrast, not only a struggle between nations will develop, not only a race war, but a struggle of humanity, in which we and those who follow us will be placed. He who can see in the present mood of humanity the preparations for this struggle of humanity will not fail to be able to let himself be fertilized by what is really going on in present-day humanity in terms of the ideas and forces necessary for a social world view. What can be grasped in the present, I would like to say, as two abstract thoughts, but what will become reality, will grow out of fighting forces, although of a different form than the physical fighting forces of armed combat were, but to fighting forces that challenge the inner strength, the inner resistance of man to an even greater extent than the past armed combat did.

And further: a remarkable parallelism arises when one follows the moods that have just been indicated to you with more or less abstract but very real thoughts. We look towards the Orient and rightly ask ourselves today: What has become of the mood that created the greatest spiritual wealth in the ancient world of the Orient? Those in the know are aware of this. What has become of all this for today's cultural humanity of the Orient? The man of the Orient is weighed down in mystical-dark rapture, in half-sleepiness. That which used to give strength to the Oriental under the influence of the thought “sensuality is Maya, inner soul is reality, divine reality” used to give the Oriental strength and power, today it gives him weakness, it makes him a fatalist, someone who surrenders without will to the fate of the world. This is the fruit of a spiritual life that was directed specifically at the human, spiritual and soul. If one paints the corresponding counter-image of the Occident, then one says something highly, highly uncomfortable for very many people today – I am well aware of this – something that strongly provokes their antagonism. But I have often said: We are not living in the time of the small, but in the time of the great reckoning, and one must not shy away from telling people the truth.

We have seen how, in a certain higher development, what has been prepared for centuries in the West has found a particularly characteristic expression in modern socialism. Through Western development, the human mood has gradually emerged that actually sees the only reality in the physical-sensual world of economic life. And the leading and governing circles, that is, those who were there before, were the first to feel that the physical-sensual world and its material economic factors are the only reality, that the other things that arise in the soul are Maya, ideology. Socialism merely articulated what others also felt but did not dare to express. Under socialism, it has only emerged that the whole world of law, of custom, of art, of science, all that is called the spiritual life of man, is an ideology, a maja, for the newer humanity of the West. How did this basically genuinely Western view come to this climax? It has come about because more and more has emerged within modern economic life that which is referred to as modern private capitalism. This modern private capitalism has created the mood in economic life that has ultimately transformed our entire social system into a kind of acquisition society. Bit by bit, we have seen it come about over the last few centuries, how the current economic conditions have arisen from earlier ones. Even if people today do not pay attention to it, in earlier centuries there was a much greater interest in the objects and products of the environment, in everything that was part of the law and the economy, than there is today.

There was a much deeper factual interest than there is today. Owning this or that object because it has this or that form, because it has this or that origin, because it bears this or that signature, that was a human interest in earlier times to a much greater degree than it is today, where this objective human interest in external arrangements is often clouded and obscured by the fact that people arrange their home according to what they acquire purely for the sake of money and capital in the competitive struggle for survival. Torn away from the admiration for the beauty of what people create, torn away from the value of something simply because it was made by a human being, the interest of a large number of people today is in being able to see from their annual balance sheet whether they are in an active balance with their surroundings. That is a somewhat radical way of putting it, but it is the economic signature of the present. And this economic signature has given rise to another with regard to the concept of human labor. If we look back just a short time, we find how people, so to speak, allowed their work to grow together with their products. You can feel this when you are in a museum, standing in front of old door handles, old locks, even old boots. You can tell from the objects how the work of man has flowed into them. Today, the work of man is separate from the product; that is why most of the products that people delight in are so ugly. Today, human labor is something that has market value only in that it is rewarded with a certain payment. Today, human labor is what is calculated primarily according to its market value. And so, with regard to the administration of goods, the capitalist competition for the administration of goods, and with regard to his relationship to his work, man has become detached from the world. He stands, as it were, beside the machine, stuck in the soul-deserting capitalism of modern times, without connection to the external reality that he sees around him, which he cannot deny, and which has even become the only reality for him. And he cannot believe that what arises within him, the spiritual and soul-like, torn away from nature and economic order, is anything other than a Maja, an ideology. This is what the modern economic order has done.

The modern proletariat has grown into this modern economic order, has been pushed into it, especially over the last three to four centuries, gradually pushed in to the extent that it is in it today. This detachment from external reality has reached a climax in the development of humanity in modern times. One could demonstrate this in detail, how man has gradually, I might say, been alienated from himself. You see, today one can speak with countless members of the proletariat – if one has learned to think and feel with the proletariat, then one hears from their mouths also that which moves them above all – but then one hears you often hear: Above all, it must not be the case that we work all day and work with our hands and that our souls remain empty, because we come home tired in the evening and can do nothing but fall down and lie down. We want a reasonable working hours. And from what has been done with the working hours of people in recent centuries, which has now improved, the demand for an eight-hour working day emerges: 6 X 8 is 48, the 48-hour week. This is something that people who work want to achieve today. People talk about it: yes, of course, something like that is being striven for, humanity must move forward, but in the old days people had it even worse. In the old days, people had to work even harder, they were even more like beasts of burden. – I can share with you a decree from King Ferdinand I of Austria from the year 1550. In this decree it says: Every worker shall – and I ask you to pay particular attention to the following words – every worker shall work as has been the custom for many years, mornings and afternoons, with the exception of Sunday and Saturday afternoons, half a shift, that is, four hours. That makes 1550 hours for the year: 5 mornings of 8 hours (a half-shift in the morning and a half-shift in the afternoon, each of 4 hours) and 1 half-shift on Saturday of 4 hours, which adds up to 44 hours in the week for the year 1550. And of these 44 hours in the week, it is said: each laborer should work “as has been the custom for ages.” It is pointed out that this is the old custom. The modern age has not only brought us what is so celebrated from the progress of humanity; the modern age has also brought us the fact that we have to reclaim what already existed. These things should, I think, make us think! And under the influence of such things, especially the influence of the endeavor to extract as much as possible from work, this clinging of the Western man to physical sensual reality as the only reality has arisen. From this arose the feeling that the spiritual and soul is Maya, is ideology. But this has also brought about the modern proletariat's being placed in mere economic life. And so the great error of the modern proletariat has arisen. This modern proletariat was harnessed into economic life by the leading and guiding circles. They had to say to themselves: In this economic life, the soul is desolate, in this economic life, spirit is only smoke and sound, maya. We must have a different economic life. We must reshape economic life. From the reshaped economic life will emerge a spiritual life that is not a class spiritual life, but a universal human spiritual life.

It is not surprising that the modern proletariat has fallen prey to this error, because it was completely pushed into economic life. What it had was only born out of economic life. For the proletariat, the other world was a Maja, an ideology. As a proletariat, it could believe nothing other than that the only economic life it knew was merely to be transformed. Then everything else would fall into place by itself. Instead of – and this could not be the case at first, it could only arise from the lessons of the bloody world war – instead of saying to themselves, it is our situation that is to blame for the fact that we have only and solely entered into economic life, that this economic life has made the spiritual life dependent on itself, so in the future the spiritual life must no longer be dependent on the economic life, it must be freely based on itself - instead of drawing these radical conclusions, the proletariat drew the other: a different economic life will certainly arise, that will certainly produce a different spiritual life.

Today we are facing a great turning-point: either the proletariat will bring about its own misfortune if it remains only in the economic sphere and wants to transform only that, or it must realize what other people must realize with it , namely that spiritual life, as it is projected by the threefold social organism, must be taken out of the state and economic life, so that it is detached from them and placed on its own feet, in its own self-government.

And what has become of it? Through these influences, which I have just characterized, what has become of this Occidental belief that the spiritual-mental is Maya, the ideology, and that the outer economic life is the only reality? This has become what then found its ingenious expression in Marxism, because ingeniousness is also characterized by the fact that it produces not only the greatest positive achievements of humanity, but also the greatest errors. The view has become: Since you can't conjure into reality with the mind, with the thought, with what you ideologically develop – because only spiritualists believe that you just need to have a thought and then machines will move – since you can't work with thoughts, can't produce physical products, you can't control economic life with thoughts either. Therefore, economic life moves forward by itself alone. And if that is the only reality, then it must produce by itself what is to be achieved for humanity. Hence the Marxist doctrine – even if it is not stated by Marx, because Marx was not a “Marxist”, as he himself said, in the sense of many of his followers – hence the doctrine that at most can be promoted by man, what is brought about by the production process, by the economic-material process, by the external institutions themselves, but that all real progress actually takes place independently of man through the economic forces and factors themselves. This has developed into Western fatalism, into the belief that external reality will take care of itself without humans. The capitalists, for example, will concentrate the means of production more and more; the concentration of the means of production is taking place, and when these are sufficiently concentrated, they will automatically enter into the new socialization. The expropriation of the expropriators will take place. Fatalistic belief, combating as utopian all that is aware and convinced that man is the one who makes history, that what is to become action must first live in human thought – the drowsiness of the Oriental from his ancient spiritual life goes parallel to the fatalism of the Western majority in the belief that economic conditions will do it, one has only to wait and see how the development takes place. Is it not the case that we are clearly at a major turning point in human development? Fatalism in the East – fatalism among the most advanced people in the West. Fatalism here, fatalism there. A new force must flourish from what is in decline on both sides. How can we muster faith in the further development of humanity if we are unable to believe that something can arise from this mutual fatalism that will bring new impulses and new developmental forces for humanity? It is out of this faith that the ideas for the threefold social organism arose. Out of this belief, out of this belief in progress and in the development of humanity, arose the consideration of the world from two points of view: How does one engage with modern institutions, especially in economic life? How does one engage with modern spiritual life, so that it does not remain an appendage of economic and state life, but so that it becomes a free impulse in the development of humanity?

I believed that in the early 1890s the world would understand from the events of the time the impulse to point to the depths of human nature, from which a new, liberated spiritual life can gradually develop. And I tried to express this belief in my Philosophy of Freedom, which was first published in 1894. I did not reprint this Philosophy of Freedom even though it had long been out of print, because I could see that the ideas contained in it were not met with understanding, at least not during the decades immediately preceding the world war catastrophe. In particular, there was no response in Central Europe, where people were always saying, “We need the sun,” but they did not want to include the longing for a spiritual sun in this saying. And it was only when the belief arose that people could gain a new understanding of spiritual freedom from the lessons of the terrible world war catastrophe that I was impelled to produce the new edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom” that is now available. For in what has been expressed, again and again, from subconscious, not conscious, depths of human nature in modern times, which is particularly expressed in the things that the modern proletariat now feels, although it cannot yet consciously express them because it has been deprived of education to do so, there is a threefold. There is the dark feeling that the external institutions of legal and economic life have taken on a form in which I, as a human being, am so constrained that I am merely inhibited, and that there is basically no point in of free will in the modern competitive market, where everyone must either acquire capitalistically or by wage labor, where all connection is dead between what man must do, that is, what he works, and what is then the product. There is no sense of connection: I am connected to the world in such a way that my will is free. One felt an inhibition of the will. And then, when one looked at one's relationship to other people: to a climax seems to have come under modern capitalist competition, under the forced labor of the newer times in the wage relationship, to a climax seems to have come what one can call a dwindling of trust from person to person. In the most extreme sense, anti-social instincts have taken the place of the old social instincts, which at least still existed in some form. These anti-social instincts have finally led to a lack of understanding between the modern classes of humanity, and have created the abyss between the proletariat and the non-proletariat, which is so difficult to bridge in modern times. This has given rise to the second experience of the inner man in modern times, the oppression with regard to the sense of right and wrong. And to this was added a third, which I already hinted at at the beginning of my discussion today: People saw each other exchanging their economic goods, they saw what lived in the exchange of these economic goods being entered on the left and right side of the books. But, as even Mr. von Moellendorff had to admit, no thought was given to the institutions of economic life. The third experience of the soul: It was as if one were plunged into darkness when looking into the maelstrom of modern markets, where the real thing for people was only what was acquired in a capitalist way. These have been the three experiences in modern times: the inhibition of free will, because there was nothing in which one could develop free will; complete oppression of the sense of right and obscuration of thought with regard to the external institutions of legal and economic life.

That was the feeling that gave rise to the impulse – it may have been weak and clumsy, it may still be weak and clumsy today, I readily admit – that gave rise to the impulse to seek the essence of the free human being, the human being who feels so integrated into the human order that he can say to himself: I lead a dignified human existence. The impulse to seek the essence of this free human being, the essence of the free spiritual human being, in the sense that all people can be such free spiritual human beings within the institutions of modern legal and economic life. One thing emerged above all others. People ask so easily and have asked again and again for centuries, and philosophers have speculated about it and countless opinions have been formed about it: Is man free according to his will, or is he not free? Is he a mere creature of nature who can only act out of the mechanical impulses of his inner being? The question has always been approached wrongly because more and more in the West the feeling for the actual reality of spiritual life has faded. For the Orient, the question of freedom or unfreedom has almost no significance; it plays no role at all there. In the West, it became the fundamental question of world view and ultimately even of political life, yes, of criminal law and so on. And one thing was not realized – you can read in detail about the individual steps that lead to this train of thought and this realization in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” – one thing was not realized, namely that the question “Is man free or is he not free?” actually makes no sense at all, that it must be put differently, that it must be put like this: Is man, from his birth onward, through an education appropriate to his nature, to be developed in accordance with education and schooling in such a way that, despite external legal and economic institutions, something can arise within him as an experience that makes him a free being? Yes, that not only makes him a free being inwardly, but that develops the power of freedom in him to such a strength that he can then also set up the external legal and economic life in his own way? This arose as a basic impulse in modern developing humanity, on the one hand the democratic urge for equal rights for all, on the other hand the social urge: I will help you as you should help me. But one felt: such a social order with “equal rights for all” and with “help me as I want and must help you,” such a social order can only be established by people who, as free people, as free spiritual people, develop a true relationship to the whole of reality.

One must first understand that man is born neither free nor unfree, but that he can be educated and developed towards freedom, towards an understanding of freedom, towards experiencing freedom, if one brings him into contact with that spiritual life that imbues him with forces that first set him free in his development as a human being; that one can develop up to the point where our thoughts are no longer abstract, unreal, ideological, but thoughts that are grasped by the will. This is what I tried to present to the world as a realization in my Philosophy of Freedom: the marriage of the will with thoughts that have become inwardly free. And from this marriage of the will with the inwardly freed thoughts, it is to be hoped that the human being emerges who also develops the abilities, in living together with others, that is, in a social community, each for himself and each socially with each other, to produce such legal and economic orders that one accepts as necessary, just as one accepts the necessity of having to carry one's physical body, of obeying its laws, and not being free to grow one's right hand on the left side and vice versa, or one's head in the middle of one's chest. We do not fight against what is naturally reasonable out of our freedom. We fight against what is inhuman and unnatural about human legal and economic institutions with our freedom when we have come to the appropriate awareness, because we know that it can be done differently. And we know and want to know, as modern people, that every human being should work democratically on this transformation of the external economic and legal order to such a rationality that it does not impair our freedom any more than it impairs the natural lawfulness of our physical body. To understand this, however, one must have a heart and mind for the reality of spiritual life, because the kind of spiritual life that is an appendage of state and economic life, the kind of spiritual life that one acquires only if one is the son of rich people or has received state scholarships, or for the sake of acquiring a state position, this kind of spiritual life does not make one free. A spiritual life that stands on its own, that works out of its own strength, that is free, and that produces, in contrast to those moods, those three moods: inhibition of the will, oppression of the sense of right, obscuration of thoughts, which are present when the will is unfree, the other mood: the free development of the will in spiritual life.

If what I have described here in a series of lectures comes about as a free spiritual life, a spiritual life with self-administration of the pedagogical-didactic in the threefolded social organism, then the human being will no longer feel his will inhibited, but will be surrounded by an atmosphere generated from this free spiritual life, so that he will say to himself, this free spiritual life also accepts my will as a free one. And from the understanding of the self-governing spiritual life will emerge what the new social impulses are, which consist in the mutual, true, objective tolerance and understanding of one person by another in the field of the second link of the social organism, the constitutional state, where every person, provided they are mature, faces every other person as an equal. And thirdly, as we shall see in more detail the day after tomorrow, there will emerge a structure of economic life such that those who work in this economic life, from the highest intellectual worker to the last manual laborer, will participate socially as independent, free human individuals, so that the time when people were plunged into darkness at the thought of economic life will be replaced by the time when the reasonable action of works councils, the economy will be regulated by the rational activity of workers' councils, transport councils and economic councils, where the individual human being will no longer be at the mercy of the hazards of supply and demand and the crisis-prone nature of the capital economy, but where the individual human being will stand in life as an economic agent alongside other human beings; where fair distribution of prices and work will arise out of reason, so that we can place ourselves as free human beings in that which is once necessary in economic life. And just as we place ourselves in the body in its natural necessity, so man will achieve his freedom in modern democratic socialism, in modern social democracy.

To achieve this true humanity, it is necessary to overcome the old party patterns, the old party opinions, which, in the face of today's human demands, are nothing but mummies of thought and judgment. Truly, those who constantly speak of the fact that I want to use what underlies the threefold social organism to promote myself, know me badly. Oh, I would much rather have remained in quiet Dornach, where I worked before coming here, on a work that is very close to my heart, and I stand here only against my subjective will, out of the realization that today, in the face of the old party programs and party thoughts, which are mummies and which gather in the holiest unity from the extreme right to the extreme left, that it is a duty to work against these mummies as far as I can. I admit that it may be weak, then it may be fought factually and something better may be put in its place, but as a duty one must feel it towards the old and towards the new facts, to put a new thing before humanity. It does not seem to me at all as if humanity would not long for this new thing, as if humanity would not actually want this new thing to appear. For what is the real aim of this idea, this practice of the threefold social organism? They want people to finally understand that we are living in a time of great reckoning, in which the three main areas of human life, spiritual life, political or legal life, and economic life, have been set in motion and have become restless, and that we need a reorganization, a transformation of these three areas of our general human life.

So what does the idea of the threefold social organism want? Perhaps with weak, insufficient, or defective forces, then one may improve them objectively, may deal with them objectively. It wants a formulation of what is to become reality in order to bring about the necessary transformation of political life, economic life, and spiritual life.

Now, the Social Democratic Party Congress is meeting in Weimar, the party congress of the party that professes to want to transform modern life in the appropriate sense. And a minister, even the Reich Minister for Socialization, spoke the following words to the Social Democrats in Weimar: We need not only a political revolution, but also an economic and spiritual one. Whoever finds the formulation that also mobilizes the spiritual and moral forces in the people will bind them to his banners. The League for the Threefold Social Organism may still be insufficient, then it will be happy to make way for others who can do better, but the fact that at least the same direction must be taken as the League for the Threefold Social Organism is acting in, is admitted before its party members even by the present Reich Minister for Socialization, Wissell. And from his words: We need not only a political, but also an economic and spiritual revolution —, one may well hear that we at least, even if we cannot do it in a sufficient sense, at least we want what these people must also want when they are clear about the demands of the present in a spiritually clear moment. But then, if that is the case, it must not happen, as I very much fear it will, that people of Mr. Wissell's ilk, when they get hold of the writings of the Federation for the Threefolding of the Social Organism, do as other party members do: they say, “Well, we agree completely, but we will fight it tooth and nail.” We would agree if someone came along who did it better so that we could step down. But that is not the point. The point is not to fight things that you yourself have to describe as necessary, but if you want to do something about them, to do it better. And you can be sure that the appearance of this idea of the threefold social order is based on the attitude that arises, firstly, from the necessity of this threefold order in the present, and that arises from the realization that something must happen before it is too late. Therefore, she calls out to all those who want to fight this threefold order of the social organism: All right, we'll step down, but you do better if you yourselves have to admit that the threefold order of the social organism is a necessity!

Closing remarks.

No one wishes to join the discussion. Dr. Unger therefore asks Dr. Steiner to say a few final words.

Dr. Steiner: Dear attendees! I would just like to point out that despite some resistance, which has come precisely from party circles, it is nevertheless a success that some impulses in the field of economic life have already come from the Federation for the Threefold Social Order, and that, after all, some things have already happened in the direction of taking economic life into hand, of taking economic institutions into hand on the part of the people involved in this economic life. What form this should and must take will be discussed further the day after tomorrow. But the matter must not be taken in such a way that if one of the three limbs of the social organism shows a little that it is actually taking effect, then the others can sleep. If something is conceived as seriously as this threefold social order, then the one-sided success of one part of it is the greatest failure of the whole. Nothing endangers the threefold social order more than if only the advancement of one area, such as the economic, succeeds. Therefore, the present most serious concern of the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism is that a spiritual movement should join the economic movement, within which we stand as the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism, whether it is called a “cultural council” or a “spiritual council” or whatever, it is unimportant, that a large number of people should join, we have once distributed an appeal here “To All People,” because culture is actually a matter for all people —, an association of people, then, for whom the reorganization of our school and education system, in particular, is close to their hearts, so close to their hearts that they see how the free development of human physical and spiritual abilities is inhibited in the school system, which is clamped by the state. Therefore, the Federation for Threefolding fights for the liberation of the school system, for the self-administration of the school system from bottom to top. For this to happen in the right way, it is necessary that as many people as possible demand this self-administration of the entire educational system, indeed of the entire spiritual life, in public. To avoid the one-sided pursuit of economic forces from becoming a failure, it is the concern of the alliance to now bring together people who will work on this liberation of the school and spiritual life, the educational system. In doing so, there should be no dogmatism whatsoever. On the contrary, the more opinions are expressed and the more intelligent ideas are brought forward, the better. We shall not become inflexible in any self-made dogma, but shall be open to everything that may come from an informed mind. But anyone who believes that the new formations today also include those of intellectual life should actually feel the inclination, feel the necessity, to join others in such a union of people to form a kind of intellectual or cultural council, or whatever one wants to call it.

We have by no means failed to approach the positive as much as we can with our forces. There is a project here in Stuttgart that will probably be implemented as early as the fall: with the help of teachers who understand a truly humanistic concept of development conceived in the sense of a spiritualized anthropology, to bring about a truly comprehensive school that is not based on state omnipotence but on the development of the free human being. We hope that we will be able to bring such a school into existence here in Stuttgart for a small group – it should not be a “class school”, it will be a proletarian school – a school that, as far as it is already possible under today's conditions, will strictly reflect the views of the threefold social order in its pedagogy and didactics. The aim will be to develop the human being so that he grows into a truly free spiritual being. The aim will be to develop the forces that one has to develop in a human being between the ages of seven and fifteen in such a way that thinking, feeling and willing are cultivated to the full extent that they can be cultivated in these years of life, so that later life and its destiny cannot break these forces again. For anyone with sufficient psychological insight will notice how much of our present time, how much of the damage of our present time depends on the fact that thinking, feeling and willing are not developed with sufficient strength in the corresponding very young years of life, so that they cannot be broken later by the blows of fate in life. More than one might think, the undeveloped powers of the soul are crushed by our present-day cultural conditions; and more than one might think depends on these things in our circumstances, in relation to our decline.

I only want to point out this one example so that you can see that we are not visionaries, not ideologues, but that we want to work practically in all areas as far as our limited strength allows. But in order that such things may not remain isolated, and that by degrees our whole spiritual life may become free, it is necessary that many people with many opinions, many insights and knowledge and practices should join us in the cultural council or similar organization. This is what I did not clearly express in today's lecture, but it was the underlying desire that there should also be enough people in this spiritual link of the three-part social organism who, working together in this field, might achieve something of what is necessary in our time, which is not a small reckoning but a great one. For we do indeed need a transformation of conditions in the economic, political and spiritual spheres. If we cannot bring ourselves to work actively in this direction before it is too late, then it will have to be too late! And that would be the most terrible thing that could arise from this world war catastrophe. But if it leads many people to the realization that we must develop the strong will to reshape all three areas of life, then, even if not for the immediate present, then at least for the future of humanity, something great will come out of this will, and thus something great will come out of the disaster of the world war, even if it is not in the full sense. And we, as Germans, wedged between the Orient and the Occident, have this great task, to understand what is most in danger of falling asleep there and there and to awaken it from the center. And I believe that this is the best patriotism today, which will ultimately prevail against all that threatens us from the murky swamps of Versailles, in that what can prevail in the center between the East and the West will be that we will let arise from Germany's great time - from our Lessing , Herder, Schiller, Goethe, from the great period of our German philosophy, which summarizes German essence in its own way, the philosophy of Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, from the period of the German Romantics - that we allow to emerge, to shine forth, what our task is after the terrible experiences of the last years. This task is to awaken a spiritual life that is capable of shaping the material world reasonably and humanely and an economic life, a material life, that is capable of giving people the freedom to live a free spiritual life!

It is understandable that in these days of the most difficult and consequential decisions, one can only, dare I say it, speak with a certain deep sense of oppression. But at the same time, the idea arises in the human soul that what has been predetermined for the development of Central Europe for centuries, even millennia, must be achieved from completely different foundations, which lie in the depths and must ultimately be successful, even if the most significant and serious external material means are used to lead Central Europe economically to its end. These underlying factors have indeed been discussed in the whole series of lectures that I have had the honor of giving here, and which should also be discussed today in these difficult days. For only from these underlying factors can a light shine on the question that weighs so heavily on our hearts today: Can we still hope?

There are seemingly small, seemingly insignificant events in human life, but they leave a deep impression on the soul of anyone who feels they are immersed in this life with all their human powers as external symptoms of what is happening deep within the development of humanity. I had such an experience when I spoke in Basel a few months ago about the same subject that I have now repeatedly had the opportunity to speak to you about. At that time, in Basel, I spoke at the invitation of the Basel student body about what actually underlies the call for socialization of human institutions in the present day. And in the discussion, the strange word sounded out to me that no salvation could come from the external institutions that had become fragile and needed to be rebuilt before Lenin would be the ruler of the world!

Now, from these words one could indeed hear, on the one hand, humanity's call for socialization, and on the other hand, the most unsocial views about this socialization prevailing in wide circles. The person who had made this statement was obviously a supporter of the dogmas of today's popular communism, and I could only reply that it was highly significant for our time that people could talk about the socialization of humanity in such an unsocial way. For if one speaks out of the spirit of what is necessary for humanity today, one must at least recognize that the first step in socialization is the socialization of the conditions of domination, and that true socialization cannot begin with the oldest form of monarchism over the whole earth in the form of an economic papacy.

There is much, much to think about, that in our time, precisely those who believe that they are talking most intelligently about what should happen talk about it most incomprehensibly. To me, such an absurd assertion, as I heard at the time, was only, I might say, a distant call, uttered by a single person, to be thoroughly recognized by all who are reasonable and practical, as what must be done to meet the call for socialization that is sounding throughout the world today. For what must happen must happen very differently for the sake of those calling than these callers imagine, or actually do not imagine, but rather outwardly paint in front of their soul in dark phrases arising from their emotions.

Two things that shine out from the more recent development of humanity will have to be properly observed if one is to grasp what is currently striving to be realized. From the most diverse things that emerge here and there, in an understandable or misunderstood way, two demands of the present always emerge. These two demands are often expressed in a misleading way, but one must get to the bottom of them in their true form if one wants to be able to cope with what is striving for reality in our present time, which is putting humanity to such a difficult test. These two mottos of the latest time are, firstly, democracy and, secondly, socialism. Those who raise their voices more for a reorganization today out of general human sentiments clothe their call in the word democracy; those who think and feel more out of real life and its needs, in turn, clothe the call for a reorganization in the word socialism.

In this, one thing has been completely and strangely thrown out of the heraldry of public life in recent times. A party has drawn together the two impulses of recent times, democracy and socialism, in its name 'social democracy', and it has already left out in its name what I would like to prove today should be the basis for any real, serious and practical reconstruction of our society.

What has been left out of account in these two calls is the actual intellectual life, the intellectual life in the most comprehensive sense, in the sense in which it extends not only to what one absorbs in the way of higher concepts and ideas, in the way of all kinds of scientific and ideological questions, in the way of all kinds of artistic and religious, but in the sense in which it also extends to knowledge and insights with regard to both state and economic life, and in the sense in which it extends not only to theoretical but also to practical human capacities.

It can be said that in recent centuries, modern humanity has developed in such a way that, with regard to public life, it had a strong sense of trust in institutions that it wanted to make ever more democratic. And in these endeavors, based on the experience of modern economic conditions, demands have been made for a social organization of this economic life. Therefore, today one can have the feeling that, even if the confusing and chaotic conditions of the present cover up much of what is striving in the underground, the striving for a socialization of human institutions in a democratic sense, for a socially shaped democratic organization of our public life, is still present. But it is strange that trust in the forces of human spiritual life has been lost. People believe that democracy can help, people continue to believe that socialism can help, but they do not believe that there are forces in the spiritual life itself which, if they were grasped in the right way, could release from the human being what must be released from the human being for the good of the present and the near future.

If you take a little time to look around in today's world, where so many are pushing towards socialism, you will make a curious discovery. You might almost say that the call for socialization has grown stronger and stronger to the extent that human drives have become more and more anti-social, to the extent that human soul life has become more and more anti-social. And one might even say that man perceives from his own antisocial inner life how little he has been able to shape external institutions in a social sense, and because he is so antisocial within, he calls for a social shaping of external conditions. But anyone who knows human nature also knows that without a certain transformation of the human inner life, the social shaping of external institutions is an impossibility. The great error from which humanity has long since proceeded in its leading minds is — and I have already touched on this the day before yesterday — that man by nature has certain qualities that can be directly reckoned with in human society. Although one always believes in the opposite, but what I have just said is nevertheless the result of the experience of human life itself.

What I tried to draw attention to in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the 1890s was that a human being can only come to their full existence if they really develop this full existence in their becoming between birth and death, when he develops, in particular, that which a soul must have if it strives for a dignified human existence — when he first releases the consciousness of his free human nature through the development of the powers inherent in his inner being. One can only become free and can only be free if one is educated, or educates oneself, in freedom. Anyone who sees through this will look at what is presented today as a call for socialism in a deeper way than is usually the case. He will ask, is it not perhaps the case that we do not find our way to social and democratic values as human beings because our educational life does not develop in the right way that which is in us that is predisposed to democracy and socialism? One needs very specific inner impulses of human nature if one is to place oneself in a democratic community or if one wants to establish a social economic community. And one could almost say, if one did not shock too many people of the present time with an admittedly true truth: just as a person is born - the development of the child shows it clearly - so he initially has neither the impulses for democracy nor for socialism. These must first be instilled into his soul. They are present in the soul, but they do not come out by themselves. And until our education system is based on a thorough and realistic understanding of human nature, we will not see people being able to place themselves in a social or democratic community with democratic and social attitudes. Even if they are not aware of it, they will always try to destroy democracy and socialism out of subconscious impulses. And if no efforts are made to educate people in a democratic and social sense, then in the long run they will live together in such a way that the democratic element will develop into some form of tyranny, and the social element will develop into something anti-social. This is certainly what has happened to the social element that is being striven for in the eastern part of Europe, and it is bound to become the most anti-social element in a relatively short time, and it already is so!

This draws the attention of anyone who is sincere about the development of humanity today to the spiritual life and education above all. And it has become necessary to place, before all else, a truly objective knowledge of the human being, spiritual life and its most important component, education and teaching. Sometimes we instinctively take into account what is at stake here, but this instinctive observation is not enough. We must imbue what underlies it with a thorough pedagogical insight. Far too little attention is paid to the fact that the growing human being shows three very different developmental stages in three successive epochsof life. The first epoch of life is that which concludes with the change of teeth, around the age of seven. The second is that which extends from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, and the third is that which then extends from sexual maturity to the end of the second human decade of life. That these three human life epochs are essentially different from each other, that education and instruction must be built upon this difference, is something that must become as clear to humanity as the laws of nature, if the social and democratic impulses are to shine forth in humanity that are necessary for a new formation of human developmental conditions.

Those who have the ability to observe the child inwardly in that important epoch of life, from birth to the change of teeth, know that all activity, all somehow directed action of the child in this completely unconscious, instinctive childhood is dominated by the principle of imitation. During this time, the child definitely strives to speak, to make faces, to move its hands, to do as those around it do, speak, make faces, move their hands. There is something of the utmost significance for human life in the child's striving to imitate, which must be met with a truly practical education. It is in this that human nature unconsciously and instinctively attempts what it can never consciously achieve in later life: to come together with other people as an individual. Through imitative action and endeavor, a sense of belonging in human society should develop, and a truly human coexistence of people should develop, through bonds from person to person.

Let us assume that humanity could decide in the present to take a radical look at this principle of imitation in the first years of childhood. If we paid attention to this, we would develop something for later life that can only be developed consciously if imitation is properly fostered in the unconscious childhood years. This imitation is not always seen in the right form. Parents come to you and say: Oh, I am very worried, my child has committed a theft, it has taken money out of the drawer! — You ask: How old is the child? — Five years. - One must then say: If all other educational conditions are in order, there is no need to be particularly concerned about this, because the child is an imitator, it does what is done in its environment. It has seen how mother so-and-so takes money out of the drawer often every day, and it imitates this. At this age, words expressing moral commandments have no influence on the child's development, only what is done in the child's own environment.

If we bear this in mind, we can lay the foundation for a suitably structured education, so that when a person is brought up in the right way, with a focus on the natural tendency to imitate, age, what can be called the right respect, the right assessment of the other person, the endeavor to respect the other person as he deserves to be respected, simply because he bears the human face. And this is the first condition for the proper development of a democracy! Democracies can only develop in the right way on the basis of the law if people in democratic parliaments shape laws that govern the relationship between people as equals. This will happen if these people have such impulses within themselves that lead to respect for human beings and can only arise if they have been educated in the right way in childhood according to the principle of imitation.

And if we now look at economic life; modern times demand a reorganization of this economic life in the sense that profit, the acquisition of capital and wages are no longer the decisive factors, but rather that consumption, the consideration of human needs is established on the basis of free associations, cooperatives, and corporations, which must proceed from the needs of human economic life, from the needs that are always present in a living way and according to which trade and production must first be established. What is based today on the blind supply and demand of the market will have to be based on insight into human interrelationships and insight into human consumption needs. Practical experience, which must be able to respond to human needs, can only develop if people have been educated in childhood according to the principle of imitation, if they have learned unconsciously to adapt to people. If they have developed respect for human life in the public legal life of the state, then they can develop understanding for human needs in the field of economic life.

Today, we must demand that in the field of economic life, coalitions, let us say, for example, cooperatives, be set up by works councils. These works councils will have a difficult time if, in the future, after understanding production and consumption, they have to take care of what is currently left to the mercy of supply and demand. But no works councils, no councils of any kind in the field of economic life will ever be beneficial if the education of the human being is not organized in such a way that the talents for these councils, that is to say for human adaptation, for this is also expressed in the understanding of human needs, that the development of these councils is not prepared by the right education in the tender childhood after the principle of imitation.

The second phase of the adolescent's life begins with the change of teeth, which means a much greater intervention in the entire organism than today's anthropology and physiology can yet foresee, because they start from external appearances, until sexual maturity. This is the age at which human nature tends towards the trust that expresses itself in the sense of authority, from the adolescent to the adult. Today, when we basically want to extend to other areas of life in an abstract way what applies to a life-giving force, today we do not even want to speak of the necessity of authority for this childhood. But if we were to disregard the orientation of this education towards a healthy sense of authority, in which unconscious inner soul drives develop that are necessary for later life, then nothing else would be able to emerge in the conscious and understanding life that can make human beings into social beings as well as democratic beings. In the first years of life, the human being orients himself to other people through imitation, so to speak. In the second age, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, he wants to adapt even more to the inner life of the other person. He wants to learn to understand the other person, wants to learn to believe in what the other person passes on to him. He wants to experience within himself, as his experience, what the other person expresses to him as an experience, he wants to look to a person who can already do what strives for existence in him. Then the human being wants to fit together socially with the other human being instinctively. When the human being has grown up, full consciousness sets in, then the blossoming of what has been experienced in childhood in response to authority will arise again.

Thus one cannot live in the right social way in the human community of democracy if one has not first found that adaptation to the human interior, which is realized in the child's sense of authority. No one will be able to stand on the ground of legal democracy in the right way today who has not learned, between the change of his teeth and sexual maturity, to look up to the other person who is ahead of him. For only when he has learned this will the true, healthy feeling arise in him: We are all equal as human beings, we must live together as human beings in such a way that equality among human beings becomes a legal reality. In the final analysis, nothing can come into being in a legal or constitutional parliament on the soil of democracy that is truly democratic, that is, that establishes what makes all people equal, if those people who make such laws have not, by their own efforts, brought up from their inmost being what has been created in the soul, when they had that feeling, so beneficial in youth, of looking up to another human being as their authority. One will never learn to recognize the other person as a truly equal one in later conscious life if one has not first felt the human value in this looking up to the other person. That equality may prevail, that democracy may become possible, depends on our learning to educate human nature according to its inner essence. For only out of the sense of authority in the child, which during the school years expresses itself in the most diverse forms, can the right sense of the equality of human beings flourish in later life.

If in economic life, on the basis of economic life, as the call for socialization also suggested, in place of the distribution of goods, which is currently dominated by capital gains and wage gains, if that distribution of goods is to be replaced by a distribution of goods that is reasonable, a system of councils, then the force that brings about this just distribution of goods must flourish – like the sense of equality in democracy – from that attraction between person and person, which in childhood can only grow out of the sense of authority. If we set up works councils and transport councils to deal with the distribution of goods, which is currently dominated by the needs of capital and wages, and if we set up such councils to , then those who carry out such distribution of goods must be imbued with that understanding of the innermost human nature that can only come from a healthy sense of authority during the child's school years. Never again must we forget what must be the human and spiritual basis for all democratic and social life.

The third age, in which most of our young people already believe themselves to be full people – they even write feature articles at this age – is that from sexual maturity to about the end of the second decade of life, into the twenties. Not only is sexual love born at this time, but what was previously a sense of authority is transformed into what is now truly active, a sense of universal human love. Through the transformation of adaptation to imitation and adaptation to authority, what actually gives us truly social instincts descends into the human soul, what makes us capable of presenting ourselves as human beings alongside one another in brotherly love. The sexual love relationship is only a special case of what occurs in this age as general human love. During this period of life, all young people, whether manual laborers or intellectual workers, must be given the opportunity, in addition to training for their practical occupation, to acquire such ideas, such concepts about the world and life, in other words, such a worldview, such knowledge about the life of nature and the spirit, that understanding arises for everything that lives, above all love, brotherhood to other people. The fact that today we still have not managed to give the apprentice, who is to hasten to a practical life, the opportunity to also receive a general world view education that does not shut him off in a class from the privileged classes, but that instead places him as a human being on an equal footing with other human beings, is what still generates anti-social impulses in our time.

And what blossoms forth in our time, when properly educated and trained in universal love of one's fellow men and brotherhood, on the soil of right and on the soil of democracy, that is what may be called true active devotion to the welfare of mankind and to the human condition. For democracy will only be able to develop by also developing, alongside the feeling for the equality of all people, what can be characterized as follows: Every human being is regarded as something to which one should devote oneself, to which one wants to serve. And on the ground of economic life it will be necessary that - I say this again - if the coincidence of supply and demand, which is based on capital and wage acquisition and on the market, is to be replaced by reasonable human cooperative and coalition institutions, then it will be necessary on this ground of economic life that the council, let us call it that, which arises there, will have to look to see whether any article here or there is too expensive or too cheap according to the general human conditions of the economic area. This council will then have to approach the people who produce an article too cheaply and tell them through their council – it should be councils that work not through tyranny and violence, but through advice – this business is unnecessary, it must therefore be shut down. You must turn to another occupation, so that only so much is produced in a closed economic area that no article is too expensive or too cheap! In this way the right mutual price relationships can exist.

This will be an important institution in the economic life of the future, that people, their insight and their understanding will be approached in such a way that they will be guided away from mere production for profit by their own inner impulses, which can be awakened, and guided towards a kind of production that serves necessary consumption, the necessary needs of the community. But what is necessary to advise in the right way here, to place people in the economic life in such a reasonable way that the mutual price conditions come about, that no surplus of labor on the one hand and no under-work on the other side is possible, which is necessary for this, can only arise in those who are to advise in economic life if, in their youth, people have developed a sense of human brotherhood, of love for their fellow human beings. For if we are to found our human development on the inner community of men, if we are to base our new development on this, not on external institutions, which would be useless, then in the future, out of democratic philanthropy, we will have to feel from those who advise us: There is brotherhood! There life is organized in such a way that the individual does not just earn capital or wages, but people work so that everyone can receive the appropriate satisfaction of needs for their life and work.

This shows how, basically, I would say, 'in between' has fallen by raising the calls for democracy and socialism, how intellectual life, in particular, must be tackled. Only by passing through imitation, authority and love in the youthful mind does the human being become a fully human being, so that what sits in his soul can be lived out democratically and socially in the human community. But only through this can people achieve what I mentioned the day before yesterday: true human freedom, which is cultivated by passing through imitation, a sense of authority and love. Therefore, one cannot say that one simply demands freedom, but one must admit: our education system must be permeated by those forces that place the human being as a free human being in democracy and in social economic life. The fact that we have neglected this principle of educating people to become free human beings out of objective knowledge within European civilization and its American offshoot is basically what has brought us to our present situation. Man is not fulfilled by the content of his soul; he only looks at external reality. He does not want to mean in life only what he has become through the content of his soul; he wants to mean what the state employs him as in a certain position. He wants to signify what makes it possible for him to gain, whether in a capitalist or wage-earning sense. As a result, we have slipped into something that is indeed given too little attention, but which has led to the worst resistance in our human culture, which is so in need of progress. We have slipped into a life that has actually lost out due to the unliving development of intellectual life: the living idea, the living inner impulse of the idea. We have descended into the world of empty phrases. Our intellectual life has become full of empty phrases, and our public life is developing under the empty phrases. This empty phrase, which is devoid of ideas, separates us from reality.

And in the area where democracy should be developing, we have slipped back into something else. Instead of increasingly equipping ourselves – this is not meant to be a historical critique, but merely a statement of fact – with the one thing that can lead to democratic laws, respect for human beings, faith in human beings as equals, and devotion to human beings – instead of that, we have developed obedience to laws and the striving to make ourselves suitable for some position in the state. In the age in which universal human love should develop, from puberty into the twenties, what has become more important than this development of a soul fund that lives entirely in the atmosphere of universal human love is what one might call the system of entitlement. Instead of making man a complete human being, he is to become some kind of official in some state, he is to become the one who can make his way in a capitalist or wage-earning manner, as in a pure commercial partnership. Obedience to the law and outward conformity — that has become man's lot because the spiritual life has been absorbed by the state, because the state has become the driving force of the spiritual life.

If we want to grasp inwardly that which can lead to real democratic equality for all people in a true constitutional state, then it is necessary to enter into the inner nature and essence of the human being. This endeavor to base the spiritual life, especially the education and school system, on the human being alone, and not to let it be shaped in such a way that the state imposes an external stamp on it, should be the endeavor of the widest circles in the present day who have an interest in the real progress of our culture and enthusiasm for it. That is why the “Federation for the Threefold Social Organism” has set itself the task of calling together those people who have such an interest to form a cultural council, or whatever it wants to be called, so that the liberation of our intellectual life, especially our education and school system, can arise from it, that the de-nationalization and de-economization of the school and education system can arise. It is understandable that those who are involved in this intellectual life as teachers or educators have a certain fear if the state no longer pays their wages. What would they do then? Yes, that is one of those experiences that unfortunately one has so often in the present, the experience that people do realize from time to time that it is necessary for a reorganization of our social conditions to take place – but that they cannot bring themselves to really want what could lead to such a reorganization. If one has spoken a lot with people about the necessary reorganization in recent times, even with those who are generally quite convinced that such a reorganization must come, then they ask one: Yes, but you must say in a certain way what will happen to the individual person, what will happen to the individual profession in the future! — Postal workers ask one, when socialization is mentioned: How does one socialize the postal worker, what will his situation be? These discussions are based on something very peculiar. People do not look at present life, they still have illusions today about the durability of the present conditions, they do not want to rise to the level of ideas of a real reorganization, and then they ask you: Yes, tell me, how will what I am accustomed to as the old be in the new order?

Such a question actually implies nothing less than the demand: How do we revolutionize the world so that everything remains the same? And if one does not answer the question: How will the old be excluded in the new order? then people say: What you are saying is completely incomprehensible to me! — That is more or less how it is when those who work in education and teaching are concerned about how their economic position will be shaped. Insofar as people in the spiritual life are involved in teaching or education, the spiritual life will be able to be organized from within, independently of state and economic life, according to purely pedagogical-didactic aspects and inward spiritual ideas; otherwise, since they also have to live, they are a economic community in the economic organism within the threefold social organism. And just as a factory naturally knows from the factory workers what it needs to satisfy its needs from economic life, so the council of economic life will also have to ensure that there is the right economic relationship between the economic body, which is independent in the three-tiered social organism, and the other economic body, which is responsible for spiritual life. And what remains between the inside as the third link of the social organism, the constitutional state, will have to ensure that what is concluded in the free economic contract between the economic body and the spiritual body is actually carried out. Those who truly want to understand inwardly and have the courage to understand that spiritual life must become free, that what is spiritual in it must be placed on its own spiritual foundation, will also be able to summon themselves to understand how the economic aspect of this spiritual part of the threefold social organism will take shape in the future.

Thus it is seen that freedom must reign in spiritual life. For this freedom in spiritual life is the foundation for the equality of the legal life, and it is also the foundation for the fraternity of the economic life. This foundation must be taken into account above all when socialization is discussed. Otherwise, yes, otherwise, one might perhaps be able to make external arrangements of all kinds, but if these external arrangements go a little further, one will end up as one has in Russia under Leninism, where one has equal rights for all – in the phrase! But today we have already reached the point where some workers have six times higher wages than others, and where certain intellectual workers already earn up to 200,000 rubles, and where there is already a strong tendency towards the old capitalism.

If you want to socialize, then you have to address the real living conditions of a healthy social organism, not just shout party phrases and Marxist papal dogmas as the only practical thing in the world. Brotherhood and true socialism will only be able to flourish if, on the basis of a genuine social education of the people, there can be those who replace anti-social instincts with social instincts, because external institutions will not create socialism. Particularly in the field of economic life it will soon become evident that socialism cannot be brought about by external institutions alone, if the people who are involved in this economic life do not understand how to organize it according to reason and fraternity, which has so far been done on this basis according to the abstract principles of capital and wage generation, supply and demand. For from the confused ideas that the relations of production develop by themselves in such a way that people can live socially in them, from these confused ideas, it is already clear enough today that social life must be brought about by man himself, the social man. It will be the organizations of people working together socially that will produce what I have described in my book, The Necessities of Life Today and in the Future, as the replacement of capital.

When we see how capital has worked, we must be clear about the fact that capital has detached people from the real, material interest in production. Instead of devoting oneself to what one produces, producing it in such a way that one imbues it with one's own attitude: In the way I make you, you serve the other people, my fellow human beings, whom I consider as brothers and sisters. Instead of giving this to the human products, today one looks at what can be written in the ledger as the selling price of the product. The actual harm of the capital and wage relationship lies in this detachment of the human being from the interest in human value. This is also the only reason why capital has come to be regarded as something that can be completely detached from real work, from directly active participation in the human community, from human endeavors, and that capital is something that multiplies by itself, that also multiplies in the hands of those who do not earn it themselves through their labor.

The damage caused by the radical capital system can be expressed in the simplest terms. In principle, all capital is brought about in a just way, in that some spiritual labor produces something that serves one's fellow human beings, as the production of goods. But in place of this connection between the spiritual powers of man and capital, something else has come into being: the personal, private ownership of land and soil, the personal, private ownership of the means of production. There can never be a right to private ownership of land and soil in a true constitutional state. The distribution of land and soil must take place in a democracy, and the utilization of capital – as I have described in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' – can only take place in the right sense if the finished means of production is no longer for sale, but is a free good. Then what is given to capital today will be given back to spiritual work.

This is what we must strive for, but we can only strive for it if we educate people in such a way that they know how to place themselves in relation to their fellow human beings with a free spirit, that they place themselves in the place themselves in the human community, and that they create organizations for economic life, which should be based only on production and consumption, that are structured into free associations, corporations, and cooperatives built on the principle of true brotherhood with an understanding of the needs of human consumption. Anyone who wants interest paid on capital without being connected to any kind of intellectual work can only have inherited the capital or otherwise received it from someone who was connected to the capital through their intellectual work. But the connection between capital and people is only justified as long as the abilities, the spiritual work of the person, justify the connection with the means of production, which are actually the capital. Socially, the possession of capital by someone who does not produce it himself is like wanting to be paid for a ship that has sunk into the ocean. A ship that has sunk into the ocean can no longer bring anything to people. It is gone, and another ship must take its place. He who draws interest on capital without working is like he who seeks to be repaid for something that comes from a sunken ship. With the loss of human abilities and with the death of the human being, the connection between him and the means of production, that is, capital, must be allowed to die.

These things are not yet clear to people today only because they run counter to present-day customs and institutions. It is only because we are accustomed to the old conditions that we do not understand them, not because the matter itself cannot be understood.

Now one can say: You claim that the things you are saying are practical, while they are actually idealistic! Yes, anyone who does not realize today that the idealistic must become practical, and that we have come to today's conditions precisely because we have always only believed that the practical consists in the routine of being together with external institutions, anyone who does not realize that this belief was deceptive and that ideas are now the practical, cannot really participate in what is necessary for the new building of our human development. We live in a time when idealism - if one wants to call it that, what is brought forward here from the practice of life - is the most practical of all.

The day before yesterday, I pointed out the great difference that exists in the human soul-disposition of the Orient and the Occident. We here in Central Europe are placed between this soul-disposition of the Orient and that of the Occident. If we recognize that we, as the middle people, have the task of bringing about a balance between the Orient and the Occident through an even, independent development of spiritual life, of the legal, political and economic life, and of economic life, we also bring about the harmonization between Orient and Occident. Then we stand on the ground from which the future must emerge for us, even if people on all sides today want to pull the ground from under our feet. They can do this to a certain extent because we, as a people of Central Europe, have neglected for decades to stand on the ground from which our true strength as a Central European people springs. But we must not forget the connections with those forces of our national character from which the great idealistic and at the same time greatest achievements of humanity have blossomed, the achievements of Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and so on. Nor must we forget the Central European impulses from which, in another harsh period, Johann Gottlieb Fichte poured fire into the hearts of the Central European peoples. What this fact is actually based on is sensed by the other nations. But we should not merely sense it, we should recognize it. We should say to ourselves, if others hate us, and compete with us and want to destroy us by something, then it is what we have developed in recent decades, not as our very own nature, but as what is too much the same as the others, what we have imitated as un-German industrialism. If we then recognize where the true roots of our strength are, then there is still hope for us! We Germans must not place ourselves on the ground on which the merely external capitalist life of the last decades has placed us in competition with the others. We must place ourselves on spiritual ground. We must understand that that patriotism which consisted in devoting ourselves only to the hope that Germany, victorious, would bring even more capital to entrepreneurship, that patriotism, which has now been replaced by the other: Let us go over to the others, let us now be patriots there, because that is where capital can bring interest, - we must understand that this patriotism is not German patriotism!

We must be able to place ourselves on this ground. We must be able to understand ourselves as the people who are placed between Orient and Occident for a new construction out of freedom for the spirit, out of equality for the law, out of brotherhood for the economy. Over there in the East, the strongest spiritual light once arose; in the West, the fuel for this spiritual life is produced. The spiritual light of the East is dying down, has expired into nirvana. The fuel of the West will not be able to shine if it is merely placed in the darkness of the capital and wage relationships between people. We in Central Europe must draw our hope solely from the fact that we can awaken the fuel of the West into a fire that can fuel humanity through the light of the East.

This is our idealistic but highly practical task. This is what one would most like to think about in these days, which are so terribly oppressive for hearts and souls, where the fuel of the West wants to take away what we still have a little of, where we are to be plunged into material need and material misery. Many still do not understand it today, but it is so. These days proclaim it loudly: it is a matter of being or not being! And what should arise from this realization that it is a matter of being or not being is that we are called to ignite the fuel of the West with the light of the East. Today, when we are weighed down by the bitterest adversity, we may remember a saying of Spohr's, who, speaking of Germans to Germans, said: If you do not recognize yourselves, if you do not find yourselves within yourselves, then the world will lose what it can only have through you! — We may, despite all the oppression, if we have faith in the spirit, despite all the hardship and misery that await us, raise our heads to those who want to destroy us and call out to them: If you destroy us, you will destroy something that you need, that you cannot get from anywhere else but from this Central Europe that you now want to trample underfoot. You have learned to shout “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” but we want to give content to what has long since become a mere phrase in these three words, to give content from the mind by saying wholeheartedly, not half-heartedly: Liberty for the mind! We want to give it substance from the heart, by saying wholeheartedly, not half-heartedly: Equality for the law! And we want to give it substance from the whole, from the full human being, grasping this spiritually and physically, by saying not half-heartedly, but wholeheartedly: Fraternity for the economy! Fraternity for all human coexistence!

Lecture for the “Association of Younger Teachers”

It gives me great satisfaction to be able to speak to teachers for a change. For although my destiny has immersed me in the most diverse professions, and although I try to understand what is happening in the various professions and classes, especially in today's times of confusion and chaos, I also feel particularly at home, I might say, with the teaching profession, to which I myself belonged for many years of my life, albeit in a private way, but therefore under not exactly easy circumstances. But perhaps that is precisely why I feel called to specialize in what is to be said now with regard to the reorganization of conditions within human development for this profession.

One can say, especially when one surveys what is alive in the present day, alive with demands, alive with insights, more or less bright or dark insights, regarding what has to happen — one can say: If the teacher were not heard in what today, as the demand of the time, resounds throughout the world, the whole civilized world, then it would be the greatest conceivable loss for the reorganization of our lives. And if one could imagine that teachers would not turn their attention to working on this reorganization of human affairs, then this reorganization of human institutions would certainly produce something that would very soon be in need of improvement and that, on the other hand, could truly not in any way benefit humanity.

You may assume from my following remarks that I will have many objections to today's school institutions; but I ask you not to take this as if it were somehow directed against today's teachers themselves. For I fully recognize how today's teachers – even if they do not always fully realize it in the pressures of life – suffer deeply, sometimes even groan, especially under today's school conditions. But it is precisely for this reason that it may be possible to discuss what is now called the social question most profoundly and most meaningfully in the circle of teachers. After all, the teacher is also personally and to the highest degree interested in what should happen in the present and in the near future as a result of the call for socialization of human society, even if this is less important. For one may have various objections to the party programs that are floating around in the world today, more or less radically; but from these radical or less radical socialist party programs, all kinds of programs about the so-called “socialization of the school system” are also emerging. If the school system were to be socialized in line with these socialist programs, then not only would the result be what many anxious minds today fear from a transformation of human conditions in line with party socialism, but it would most likely, even if this is not yet sufficiently understood today, result in the realization of the socialist party program for the school of the purest pedagogical madness. If this is again a somewhat radical statement, please excuse it by the fact that I am not inclined to develop anything other than a factual idea, a practical factual idea, in any direction at all, and certainly not something party-related.

After this introduction, you will find it understandable that the question is raised precisely in relation to our current school system: How are the fruits of this school system manifested in practical life, in that practical life from which the call for transformation is emerging everywhere today? |

If we are not just superficially theoretical, but if we are attached with heart and mind to the school system, as the most important factor in the development of humanity, then we must say the following to ourselves. We see how today, in sometimes quite a disturbing way, people who cannot see life in its real demands and possibilities draw up party programs. We see how the belief is nurtured that people want to reform or revolutionize life, when all they can do is reform or revolutionize the worst out of it. We must ask the question, after all, haven't basically the souls of all those who now frighten so many, haven't these souls gone through our schools? We look anxiously at the proletariat today, and it must even be admitted that this anxiety is not entirely unjustified, not at all unjustified. But this proletariat has gone through our schools, and we must admit, if we are not short-sighted, that our schools have educated this proletariat as well. And in what the proletariat wants, as well as in what it is mistaken about, we must recognize something of what is expressed by the saying, “You shall know them by their fruits.” This is not meant to be a superficial, agitational phrase; it is only intended to draw attention to the cultural-historical problem of today's education and teaching. We must be clear about the following.

With the proletarian, a new human being has emerged in the last three to four centuries, but particularly in the nineteenth century: a human being who, in the previous centuries, did not yet exist with this physical and mental and spiritual constitution. What characterizes the proletarian of today is that, in contrast to other members of human society, he is, to a much greater extent than was previously the case, to a certain extent, suspended in the air with his entire human existence. And this must interest us particularly from the pedagogical point of view, that the proletarian in the present is the person who, with regard to his life, must say to himself: If he himself is induced, or if others induce him to give up his position, then he faces nothing. Then, to a certain extent, he no longer feels connected to what holds human society together. On the other hand, it must be said that the education provided by the school, especially in the period during which the proletariat developed in this way, was such that it could not make people into fully-fledged human beings. This was certainly not through the fault of the teaching staff, but through the fault of the school's dependence on the state and on economic powers! In the recent past, it would have been possible to deal with the growing child in the most appropriate way, based on real knowledge of the human becoming. However, as a teacher, one was sandwiched between two powers that basically did not always work in the sense of what the teacher had to consider his task with regard to the education of the human being through the school. Today, with the advent of the school as it has developed out of earlier conditions, the teacher is caught between the parental home and the state. Of course there are exceptions in all fields, and naturally a word that seeks to characterize something cannot always be applied to all individual cases, but on the whole it is true, even if it is radically expressed: Today the teacher has to take over the children from the parents , and when he has to hand them over to the State at the end of their schooldays, the State soon draws out of their souls what the teacher has tried to instil in them. The teacher today is actually stuck between these two extremes, which do not at all work in the sense of education through the school. And when he becomes fully aware of his profession, then he actually groans between these two distortions of his pupil, the distortion by the parental home and the distortion by the state. That is, as I said, a radical way of putting it. But do we not ultimately get different children from the parental home than those who have initially grown up with the parents themselves, who have grown up with the parents in such a way that they enter school with all the prejudices of their parents, that everything that the parents themselves carry in their minds and in their state of mind has rubbed off on them – from the class in which they find themselves? And on the other hand, we release children from school and let them go out into human life, and we have to send them out into the community. What that means for the present time is shown by the terrible situation of humanity in this era.

Of course, we have experienced great misfortune, and we will experience many more misfortunes. But have we not seen in misfortune what we could have seen in happiness if only we had had a sufficient eye for it? Have we not seen as a fundamental characteristic of the present human being that he has not actually developed the inner strength of soul during childhood that would enable him to face life in such a way that the fate of life cannot bend his thinking, his feeling, his will? Today, more than one would imagine, we find broken characters and broken natures in all walks of life. This can be seen in the dark, gloomy thoughts and ideas that people throughout the civilized world are entertaining today about the terrible events that have befallen them. Can anyone today actually imagine how this came about? Can they still see anything at all in life? Do they still feel strong enough to really fit into life energetically? More people than you would think are actually broken human natures in our time! And we also have to ask why school could not work to create a firm hold in people for life, so that they could not be broken by life and their fate?

If it had been left to schools alone for a long time to educate people in such a way that they would have to enter life through what schools had to give them, then today's conditions would be different. But that was not the case. School was able to give people something. But those people who belonged to the privileged, the leading, leading circles of people, they did not place the person in life through school, but through family, through kinship, through patronage and the like. They made sure that the young person got into this or that position in life, precisely through the connections in which they themselves stood in life. The only person for whom this does not apply is the proletarian. That is why he is the only 'modern' person for the school. The proletarian's child cannot be spoiled so much – of course by other things, but not by the parents – because the parents have no time to do so. And the child of the proletarian, when he leaves school, is not introduced into the human community by family connections, by patronage and the like, but must find his place in life by virtue of his own inner soul-life. The proletarian, the human being let loose on humanity, who can only rely on himself, is therefore in a completely different position in relation to this point than the people in the leading, guiding circles. This is what has shaped our school, given it its character; this is what needs to be considered in the present. And this is also what raises the questions from which the teaching staff in particular must take part in the great social problems of this time.

The question arises in a completely new way: How should we forge the human being for life? How should we educate through school so that the human being, in the time in which he goes through school, develops those forces that are inherent in his inner being – the forces of thinking, feeling, willing, and doing – so that they are present in later life in such strength that the vicissitudes of life cannot break them? This question, along with the fundamental questions of the proletariat, is arising with unprecedented intensity. How one must educate, educate through the school, this question takes on a new face today. And that is precisely why it is necessary, above all, for the teacher to have an opinion on how the people who are to be placed in life must be developed in a scholastic way.

What is actually being demanded now, but of whose form one has truly quite dark ideas in the various party programs and party opinions, and how such questions are actually viewed today, is shown precisely by such socialist school programs and school ideas that are being put forward. One need only look at a few of the main points of these socialist school ideas and programs. For example, certain socialist personalities emphasize the unified school. This should not be uniformed; it should be differentiated as much as possible, so that the individual human abilities and talents are taken into account. The socialists express this demand by saying: We demand the differentiation of the curriculum for the unified school, but we demand the unity of the “organization”. That is, the unified school should be organized in a uniform manner. The organizational structure should not take into account the individualities of human beings, but these should be introduced later – but how? It is very strange that such a school program could arise from socialist circles, for the simple reason that socialists, based on their materialistic view of history, always emphasize that the human being is entirely the product of external circumstances, that he is not at all the product of moral, legal, aesthetic, or religious views. All this, law, custom, religious and aesthetic views, even science, is called by socialism in its Marxist papacy a mere “ideological superstructure”. Reality for it is the way in which economic conditions are organized. That actually makes man, everything else evaporates in the human soul as an ideological superstructure. And now socialism draws up a school program in which it demands uniformity of organization and specialization of the curriculum. The curriculum would then provide something that is supposed to be more or less the ideological superstructure, and the organization provides the existing conditions in which the child is to be placed, through which the person is to be formed and shaped.

If you demand a uniformity of organization, then you are actually demanding, according to the basic ideas of socialism, the uniformity of the whole of human nature, because the differentiation in the curriculum will not make it so that the object of this differentiation is not merely the “ideological superstructure”. From this program you can see the contradictions that abound in today's demands, and what is to become of them if we imagine that these contradictions should somehow become reality from today's demands! |

But the demands of the time themselves – can we do anything against them? We cannot really do anything against the demands of the time. They are there. Humanity has at some point reached a certain level of consciousness at its present stage of development, has at some point reached a certain state of mind, which is expressed in particular in proletarian demands, which can only be the signal for a new development that takes place in a completely different way than the proletarian imagines. But a certain inner impulse has taken hold of humanity in its ongoing development, and this impulse has long been expressed in two words – in our time they have become very much a cliché and a catchphrase – democracy and socialism. These two words are emerging with ever-greater force from the depths of human development. And in our time, even though much foolishness is said about democracy and socialism, it must be said that in our time both resound with increased power from these depths of humanity. There is a demand for a greater degree of democratization of the state, and there is also a demand for a greater degree of socialization of economic life. Nothing can be done against these demands; they are certainly elementary demands of the development of humanity. But the task we face in the face of these demands is to take a reasonable position on them. What do these two demands, “democracy” and “socialism,” mean?

They basically mean that much more than has been the case so far, what happens in the state and economic community is placed in the will of the individual. In a democracy, the individual wants to have a greater measure of participation in the institutions of the state, even in the very downtrodden proletarian classes, than he has had up to now. In socialization, the individual wants to have personal influence again, a far-reaching influence on economic life. One need only recall superficially what conditions were like in earlier times, and one will have to say that human society was much more cohesive. The individual was much more inclined to conform to traditions, customs, and conventions, to what was imposed on him by the authorities, by whatever authorities. It is from this sense of authority, from this sense of authority, that man wants to extricate himself through democracy and socialization. And by wanting to take these demands into account, especially on the socialist side, what is actually being demanded for the school? Socialization is also demanded for schools. It is imagined that what is to take place among adults in public and economic life, perhaps in a somewhat weakened form, should also take place to a certain extent in schools. In a program written by a socialist thinker, it is also stated that in the future the authority of the headmaster or principal is to be abolished. They also want to limit the authority of the teacher himself to a certain extent, and they speak of school communities with a certain self-administration of the students, where the teacher is to place himself in a comradely way in the school community. And by eliminating the principal's office and the directorate, the aim is to cultivate people who are particularly suited to democracy and socialism. This means that what appears to be a developmental requirement for humanity is actually being established for children, based on the conditions of the adult community. But something is being forgotten in the process. And the fact that this is being forgotten shows how poor our present-day psychology, our present-day study of the human soul actually is. For good psychologists would never think: If the bonds between adults become weaker, then the bonds between growing children should also become weaker. Good psychologists would say exactly the opposite. They would say, well, if the demand has been made that the bonds of human community should become weaker among adults, so that there may be more democracy and socialism, then all the more reason for the children to be educated in such a way that they become capable of democracy and socialism in later life. For if they are educated as children in such a way that democracy and socialism prevail among them in the organization of the school, then they will certainly be good for democracy and socialism in later life.

That is what, I am convinced, good psychologists would have to say, who are sincere about socialism and democracy for the rising generation. They would have to say: So all the more reason to implant the seeds in the minds of children that cannot be driven out again by democracy and socialism in adulthood! But this leads us to the fundamental question of the methodology of schooling, to the fundamental questions of education, for in future this education will have to take on a different form from that of the past. In future it will have to be based, above all, on a deep consideration of the human being, of human nature itself. One will have to study human nature itself much more deeply than one can at present in order to be able to work as a teacher among children. Our natural science has celebrated the greatest triumphs in the last four hundred years. Those who are familiar with the methods and conscientious nature of scientific research also know what humanity owes to this scientific direction and scientific research ethos in the last four hundred years. But it is impossible, precisely when natural science fulfills its ideal, to recognize the human being with this natural science. One can never recognize the human being with natural science! For, with all the concepts that arise from the observation of nature, the human being can never recognize that in himself which, in him, rises above all nature, which is soul-spiritual in him. It is therefore understandable that in the age in which natural science has risen to its highest level, knowledge of human nature, especially in our Western civilization (the Orientals reproach us for this in sufficient strength), has declined more and more. Anyone who has acquired a knowledge of natural science in the modern sense knows how the actual human existence falls apart under one's hands, especially when one is a good natural scientist. But it is not the case that only natural science makes the human existence fall apart under one's hands; rather, what has become of the natural scientific way of thinking, of imagining, has taken possession of the whole consciousness of the time. It lives in every newspaper editorial, and it dominates the widest circles that today participate in the demands of the day in the latest sense. And that shows us a very significant dichotomy. I could give you many examples that could be proof of this. I will give just one.

There is a very important natural scientist today, Oscar Hertwig, who is an excellent person in his field, biology, perhaps one of the greatest, most important biologists of the present day. He wrote a book several years ago: “The Becoming of Organisms, a Refutation of the Darwinian Theory of Chance”, a very beautiful, meaningful book from a scientific point of view. Now this unfortunate man has decided that he must write a book on social issues. And this book is pure nonsense, it is worthless. This is a characteristic phenomenon. Today, one can think in a scientifically penetrating way, one can conscientiously master scientific methods, and one can know nothing at all about everything social and legal and about that through which man rises above nature. Precisely because our pedagogical thinking has also been influenced by scientific thinking, it has lost sight of the actual process of becoming and development in the human being. However, this becoming and developing human being will be the greatest problem for future pedagogy. I am well aware that some people will say that what I am about to explain in the following sentences is self-evident. But such obviousness is all too often ignored in the present day. There is a saying – as there are many sayings that are correct when applied correctly and that are totally wrong when applied incorrectly – that is: nature does not make leaps. Yes, nature makes leaps everywhere. When it transitions from a green leaf to a colorful flower, it takes a leap, and when it transitions from a colorful flower to a pistil, it takes another leap. Nature takes nothing but leaps. It is the same in human life, if you only look at it deeply enough.

We have three strictly separate life epochs for the youth of humans. The first includes childhood up to the change of teeth. This change of teeth is accompanied by a much, much more intense intervention in the human organism than current physiology in any way suspects. The whole being of the human being, as it develops from birth to the change of teeth, becomes something quite different, spiritually and mentally and to a certain extent also physically, when it has gone through the change of teeth. The second phase of life is that which extends from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. The third begins with sexual maturity and extends to the end of the second and the beginning of the third decade of life, into the twenties. A more precise study, based on the inner qualities of the human being, of the developing human being, must become the basis of a true pedagogy in future anthropology.

In the first period of life, there is a certain moment of growth for the growing child that dominates everything else: the child is an imitator. The child is so predisposed that, as an imitative being, it adopts the nature of the people around it, right down to the gestures it makes, the actions it performs, and the skills it acquires. But this goes much further than one might think. What works from person to person is actually much deeper than one usually suspects. If we are a good person in the environment of a child, then our kindness, our ability to love, our goodwill goes over to the child along with our outward gestures. And especially when we begin to learn language from our environment, then there is an overflow into the growing child of what parents and the environment otherwise keep in their souls. The child adapts completely to its environment; it becomes like its environment, because the principle of imitation prevails in human nature until the time of the change of teeth. This can be observed in individual cases.

Then parents come to you and say: Oh, we have experienced a great misfortune with our child, our boy has stolen from us! — You have to say, look, maybe what the child did does not mean theft at all, how old is the child? — Five years. — You ask further: How did the incident happen? Well, it opened the drawer, took out a coin – I am talking about a specific, concrete case – and even shared with other children what it had bought as a treat. You can then tell the parents: Of course you don't have to let something like that happen, but it happened out of nothing other than what the child has seen so often every day: the mother goes to the drawer, takes out a coin to buy something. The child imitates, does the same, not as a wrong, but as something that must happen as a matter of course out of the principle of imitation. Therefore, until the child changes teeth, parents need to be less concerned with trying to influence the child through all kinds of preaching and good teaching, which has no meaning at all, because during this time, teachings are actually only a sound that penetrates the child's ear. Instead, parents need to be concerned with being such that the child can imitate everything. This would be the best educational principle during this time.

If we reflect a little on the present situation, we will not find it so radical to say that schools very often get children who are not very well brought up. For this principle of doing nothing, saying nothing, indeed, thinking nothing, that the child might not spoil by imitation, this principle is truly still little known. But what lies in this principle of imitation? Yes, when this principle of imitation is taken into account in the first years of childhood, when the soul forces are particularly strengthened by what can be strengthened by a properly observed principle of imitation, then something arises in the child that later — because the flowering of what has been sown often occurs quite late in life — enables it to be a truly free human being. Someone who has never had such people in their environment, to whom they can give themselves so completely that they can imitate them, that they absorb into themselves what they do, is not prepared for a democratic life and will never be able to enjoy freedom in life. This is what must be considered in the context of life. As I said, we must only be clear about the fact that the blossoms and fruits of what has been sown into human life sometimes arise much later than one might think. What is sown in the first seven years of life through a correct principle of imitation is then deeply imprinted in the soul of the child and only comes to fruition in the twenties and throughout the whole of the following life. As is generally the case in life: no one acquires the ability to bless with their hand for their later life who has not been educated in their childhood to ask with their hand. What is educated in childhood often transforms into the opposite in life, asking transforms into blessing and the like.

Then the time begins, which is particularly significant for school, the time from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. This time has an underlying characteristic developmental principle in the developing human being. This is - if you really study people, you will come across it - the sense of authority. There is no way to develop certain powers of thinking, feeling and willing in the growing human being between the ages of six or seven and fourteen or fifteen that must be developed if you want to raise the child in these years without the sense of authority. One must go through it in these years, to look at one or more other people in such a way that one can say to oneself – even if one does not say it out loud as a child – but that one says to oneself inwardly: What this person says is the truth. You never learn to seek the truth in life if you have not first sought it in a person who was an authority for us. There is no way to develop certain abilities in human nature if we do not put the child in a position to be the absolute authority for the child through what we are as teachers and educators. In this respect, a kind of sacred sense of authority must prevail in the school. And if you believe that anything other than this sacred sense of authority will educate towards democracy and socialism, if you believe that a democratic-socialist school community will educate towards this, then you are very much on the wrong track. If we want adults to have an inner maturity, if one may say so, in relation to democratic and socialist life, then children must have learned to look up to teachers as authorities. Above all, we must create this atmosphere in the school if we want to educate in the right way for our time. Only when a person grows up between the ages of seven and fourteen in such a way that he or she, so to speak, climbs up to the other person who is his or her authority, will the fully developed human being develop. And this fully developed human being can only develop if we approach many things in a very thorough pedagogical way during this time. It must be said that, especially for this time, one thing in particular is characteristic when it comes to authority.

You all know Jean Paul's saying that in our first three years we actually learn more for life from our nurse than we do later in three academic years. That was still the case in Jean Paul's time. This saying is absolutely correct, there is no objection to it. But you know that much is determined by the physiology of the child. The child does not need to be maltreated in terms of his memory. He remembers so much, retains so much in his memory, than he needs to retain at this age until the change of teeth. But with the change of teeth, it becomes necessary to take careful consideration of the child's memory. Above all, we must not overload the memory during this period, that is, we must not force something into the memory that will then fall out by itself. It is hard to believe that this is not known. This, too, is a consequence of today's poor psychology. It is hard for a person when his memory is so mistreated during this time that he has to incorporate things into his memory that then fall out by themselves. Therefore, one has to ensure that one works as much as possible through repetition and the like – repetition must form the basis for the period between the seventh and fourteenth, fifteenth year – that one lays the things that one first presented in more detail, if possible in short, summarized sentences, for the memory, so that one really has certain things within oneself, at least to a certain degree, and retains certain things from these years of life within oneself, as a Christian does the Lord's Prayer, albeit to a lesser degree, so that it comes up again and again and again, and forms part of the inner life of the soul. During this time, one must not forget to focus on the development of the soul's powers. But in this respect much is sinned, for in this time more attention is paid to the school subjects that are required by life and the state than to the growing human being himself. The situation is such that everything that is as conventional for life as reading and writing is not something that is as internally based as, for example, geometry or arithmetic. The fact that we have this language, in particular, is something that is less fundamentally connected to the outside world, and also to the generality of the world. That we have these letters of the alphabet has less to do with general world conditions than, for example, a triangle having three sides or its angle sum being 180 degrees or the like. Everything that is as conventional as reading and writing can be used primarily to develop intellectuality, which particularly forms the mind. It would be going too far if I were to now expand on this sentence of a true psychology in a broader way, but anyone who looks at life from all sides will find this sentence to be true.

On the other hand, everything that is more closely related to general world conditions or that appeals to human memory, such as history or geography, is more closely related, though it may seem paradoxical, to the forces of feeling and shapes the life of feeling. And everything we teach the young child artistically shapes the life of will, and we should actually organize the individual school subjects in such a way that we have the developing human being in mind and always know: with this we shape thinking, with this we shape feeling, and with that we shape the will. It is the developing human being that matters, not a certain amount of knowledge.

Once we have these principles, children will learn something that is very rarely taught today. Nowadays, children learn a great deal: geography, arithmetic, drawing, and so on. I do not want to talk about that. But they should learn in the way I have just described; however, there is little teaching about learning. But life itself is the great school of life, and you only get out of school properly if you bring with you the ability to learn from life throughout your entire life. But you can't do that if you are grafted onto knowledge during these years. You can only do that if the school is used to develop these powers of thinking, feeling and willing in the human being in his soul. Then one learns how to learn from life. If we want democracy and socialism, then we must not be so arrogant as to think that we can determine everything and already know everything. We must get beyond megalomania. One only has to be a twenty-one-year-old reasonable, mature person to be elected into all state parliaments, to speak in a way that those people who have experience in life speak. But then one must be educated to the innermost human modesty, that we are not absolutely perfect human beings for a moment, but developing human beings from birth to death. That every day of life has a certain value, and that we do not live into our thirties in vain after going through our twenties, but that every new day and every new year always brings new revelations.

But this must be imparted as a real impulse for life through the things I have just mentioned. In the age of natural science, these things could not always be properly appreciated. In the age of natural science, for example, a principle has crept into schools that is extremely correct when viewed from one side, but highly questionable when viewed from the other: that is, the principle of visualization. I always feel a little horror when I enter a classroom and see the calculating machine there, with which the children are supposed to learn counting and adding “vividly”. In arithmetic, it is still possible. But if we radically extend the principle of vividness, it must be said that the principle of vividness in education is only justified if everything in the world is really vivid. But do you believe that everything in the world is really vivid? There are many things in the world that cannot be vivid, namely all emotional and volitional values, sympathy, antipathy, and so on. These cannot be made clear at all, they must pass from the teacher to the pupil precisely according to the principle of authority, through indeterminate fluids, if I may use this expression. This has a very great significance in terms of cultural history.

We see how people today are intellectually over-educated, especially in our Western civilization, and how they always express everything they demand of life in intellectual principles. That which is now the most intellectual, which is entirely only intellect, is the Marxist program. That is precisely the fundamental characteristic of the Marxist program, that it only received its structure from the intellect. One really only understands what is in the Marxist program when one knows that everything in it is dictated only by the intellect, often by a very sharp intellect, by an extremely sharp, ingenious intellect – but only by the intellect. In human nature, in the human soul, the individual soul powers are interrelated. If one power is developed too strongly, the others are left behind; some powers develop more, others are left behind. If the powers of the intellect are developed too strongly, the emotions are left behind at a lower level. They may become strong, but they become elementary, they become wild. And so we see that in our time of intelligence, the most desolate emotions and the most terrible instincts arise as “historical demands”. For that is what comes from Eastern Europe, what is beginning to flood Central Europe: elementary instinctive demands, which are the opposite pole to intellectuality. One would like people to start thinking about the actual connections in this regard.

For example, there are two truly bourgeois philosophers. One is more of a naturalist in the world of the nineteenth century, Avenarius, the other is Mach. One is in Zurich, where he also taught, the other in Vienna. These two people, Avenarius and Mach, had developed the scientific mentality to the highest degree. They had made this mentality into a philosophical system. Why? Because the principle of bringing only the most vivid aspects of natural science to bear on human science was everything to them.

These people were really very good, good citizens, highly respectable people, I can assure you of that. And now Avenarius' philosophy and Mach's philosophy have become the state philosophy of the Bolsheviks in Russia! This connection might seem inexplicable. On the surface, one might perhaps want to justify it by saying that many Bolsheviks studied in Zurich. But that is not the point, because no philosopher likes to be associated with someone to whom he is not inwardly related. Rather, the inner connection is that what has been expressed in such purely natural-scientific thinking is so one-sided that, on the other hand, through the mysteriousness of human nature, it evokes those emotions, those elementary instincts, which are then given full expression in Bolshevism. This is no coincidence; there is an inner lawfulness behind it. And no one has more to reflect on such things than the teaching profession, because these things belong most intensely in cultural education.

We simply have to ask ourselves how we should educate the child. We cannot just rely on formalistic methodology, pedagogy and didactics in our time, when everything is in turmoil; we have to draw on cultural history to build a healthy pedagogy. Therefore, we have to counter the principle of vividness with something that builds character. We have tried in our circle – one can have objections to some of it, but it is along the lines I have just indicated – we have tried to replace mere physiological gymnastics, where only limb movements in relation to physiology come into consideration, with e which is the soul-inspired art of movement for human beings. It will be seen that, just as it is an art, it is also, on the other hand, inspired gymnastics, and that it is precisely through this that it can achieve something significant for the education of the will. And so we must reshape many things in which we now firmly believe if we really want to count on an education of the human being through which the human being can grow into democracy and socialism in the right way. Otherwise, democracy and socialism will become the most terrible scourge for civilized humanity in the future. What must be taken into account most of all is that in an age when people want to participate, firstly in state life, secondly in economic life through all kinds of “councils”, where even what has been achieved by capital is to be replaced by the reason of the various works councils, transport councils, economic councils – that in this time, precisely in terms of their education, people must undergo what will enable them to practise what democracy and socialism demand. For democracy and socialism should not be a mere human demand; they should also represent a system of human duties and obligations.

That is how seriously we must take things today, and we must in particular bring what lies in the demands of democracy and socialism into pedagogy and education. And if a person is to develop true insight into the needs and abilities of others, if socialization is to take place, then the human being must have developed within himself that capacity for love through the principle of imitation, through the principle of authority, which brings him to true brotherhood in life. Socialism without people inclined towards brotherhood is a wooden iron! Therefore, one may say: It would be a pity not to ask the teachers first and foremost when it comes to dealing with new developments in our social future, because only from this quarter can the wind blow that will really have a healing effect with regard to the characterized demands of the time.

I can easily believe that today, and also for the transitional period, the teaching staff in particular might have serious concerns about what needs to be done to make such a school and such an education possible, as characterized here, through the efforts of the “Federation for the Threefold Social Organism”. This Federation for Threefold Order sees in the dependence of the school on the state, in the permeation of the school with the state principle, that which will make it impossible for the future to cultivate in the school what has been discussed here today. The socialists could reflect on this a little. They want to nationalize or socialize everything in a certain way. The class of people that preceded them nationalized the school. The school is completely nationalized; it is a good place to learn what nationalization is. And today, with the call for socialization, anyone who takes things seriously, anyone who is capable of seeing the big cultural and historical picture, must say: what is needed is denationalization of the school. Therefore, the “Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” has the principle of placing the school system entirely in its own hands, of giving the school system self-government, so that not even supervision remains with the state, but what is achieved in the school through self-government should grow purely out of the needs of spiritual life itself. Much will arise from this. I will give you just one example, because it may be easier for us to communicate through an example on this broad topic.

Today we distinguish between primary schools, secondary schools and universities. At the universities, education is also taught. This education is now to be given a slightly better position at the universities, but it is actually still always taught as a “minor subject”. Until now, it was like this: some philosopher was appointed to teach philosophy, and then he was also given education as a minor subject. This was usually a burden for him, he did not like doing it at all. In the future, things must be different. For in the future, everything that is spiritual life must be connected with general human life. In the future, if such an ideal as I have outlined before you today can really be fulfilled, in the future the teacher will definitely be a psychologist. He will educate the growing human being based on his in-depth knowledge of human nature, and he will know best what pedagogical truth is. Then the teacher, who otherwise teaches children, will be called to the university to teach pedagogy there. And after teaching there for a while, he will go back to school to teach children again, gain new experience, and then teach pedagogy again later. This will become a true 'Republic of Letters', as Klopstock once dreamed of. Only by taking things so thoroughly and so deeply can we make any progress at all. The present time is destined to communicate these things to the outer life.

But to accomplish all this, every sphere of the spirit must be a kingdom unto itself. At most, it could give rise to the following concern: If the state, through its regulatory measures, no longer contributes to the teacher's income, then the situation of teachers will be very dire. Well, the teacher will belong to an economic corporation, just as there are other economic corporations. Besides being a teacher, he will be part of the economic body, the third limb of the threefold social organism, and will receive his income from this independent economic entity. For the threefold social organism will have an independent economic entity, just as it has an independent state entity, where the right to cultivate on a democratic basis and as it will have its own free spiritual realm. And what today goes indirectly into the teacher's bank account through taxation will then come directly from economic life. Furthermore, it is only through the independent spiritual life that the right atmosphere for school and teaching will be created.

A healthy social organism also requires a correct evaluation of the various goods and achievements of life, one that comes from the whole human being. This evaluation of goods and achievements must be there. But in a healthy social organism, the view must not prevail that what the teacher actually achieves for the growing generation can be “paid for”. That is a gift that the teacher will impart from the spiritual world to humanity! This attitude must take hold in the healthy social organism, so that the teacher is the medium through which the abilities of the human being, the individual qualities of the human being, are brought up from their dark backgrounds, as they are predisposed in human nature. It is merely the megalomania of philistinism to believe that what can actually be achieved in the school must be paid for. What the economic body of the healthy threefold social organism will have to provide is only the opportunity for the teacher to live as all other people live. In the consciousness of this offering of the possibility of life and the evaluation of teaching, which will be the healthy impulse, without which there can be no democracy, one must completely separate. For that democracy which levels everything, which can no longer evaluate things, will only destroy things, and that socialism which believes it can pay for everything will also destroy life. Not only must the teacher himself be the one factor that is heard when the call for democracy and socialization can be followed, but the evaluation of the teaching profession itself must arise again from the constitution of the healthy social organism. The aim of the Federation for the Tripartite Social Order is to achieve independence in each of the three areas of life. Therefore, it wants to place what has so far been mixed into an inorganic, chaotic unity – economic life, spiritual life and state life – on its healthy three foundations: an independent spiritual life, an independent democratic state or legal life and an independent social economic life. And the human being forms the higher unity in the three. He will participate in all three areas. There is no need to fear that unity will be lost. Anyone who thinks that the idea of threefolding is about dividing the horse into three parts has a poor understanding of what it is about. We do not want to divide the horse into three parts; we just do not want it to be said that the horse is only a real horse when it stands on one leg. A healthy social organism stands on its healthy three legs. This is, firstly, an independent spiritual life, to which education and the school system belong; secondly, an independent legal life, to which the democratic state belongs; and thirdly, an independent economic life, which alone can be socialized. If you want to co-socialize legal life and even intellectual life, then you end up with nothing more than a socialism of economic life, which pushes everything into the uniformity of economic life, which is supposed to clothe and feed people, and which gradually drains everything that can only develop independently: state or legal life and intellectual life.

This is a serious question, especially as a pedagogical question, as a cultural pedagogical question, which in the broadest sense is the fundamental question of our time. As far as I have been able to do so in these already long considerations, I have tried to show an understanding of what the impulse of the threefold social organism really wants and what it particularly wants for the liberation and redemption of spiritual life and of the school and education system from some of the bonds in which they are bound. It would give me great satisfaction if the aims that arise from such considerations were to a certain extent taken into account by teachers and educators.

Final words after the discussion

In the lively discussion that followed, it was objected that the proletarian children had been spoiled by bad role models and were not suitable for educating “new people”. Authority would be better replaced by leadership and following, as the school communities strive for. Education is determined by the personality of the teacher, regardless of the political context. Only a new teacher training program must educate the teacher to be independent; today the teacher needs the authority of the state. The state has given the teacher authority and has not disturbed him further; he is not to be dispensed with.

Dr. STEINER: First of all I would ask to be allowed to deal with the individual questions that have been put to me. First of all the Chairman's question regarding the children of the proletariat.

If I said, or if it can be inferred from my words, that I have described the proletarian as the “type of the new man,” then I ask you not to take this to mean that the “new man” is a kind of angel. It is a very common mistake to assume that when one speaks of the new, especially in the development of humanity, one also has the view that the new is always also the better. That is the effect of a capital error of the stereotyped parties. For them, the new was always the better. In this sense, I did not want to describe the proletarian as the “type of the better man”, but only to say that he is the type of man who has developed in the last times, in the last three to four centuries, especially in the nineteenth century. When I said that the bourgeois child is pampered by its parents, I also said that the proletarian child is pampered too – I ask you to please remember that I added this subordinate clause – but it is not pampered by parents who have no time for it. The fact of the matter is that the proletarian child today is usually a bigger rascal than the bourgeois child. One can fully agree with that. And I imagine that the honored chairman, who is a teacher of proletarian children, experiences it perhaps just as horribly as he describes it. I could think that precisely because the proletarian is the type of the new man, the proletarian child is the bigger rascal. But it is so in a different way. It is not because it imitates its parents, who are in a certain class, and thus imitates the class characteristics, but because it is educated on the street and left alone, imitates everything possible. It is generally worse off. It has outgrown humanity, to which there is simply nothing particularly good to imitate today. It has grown out of a general humanity, so that in this respect it stands in life as the proletarian stands in life later on. It has more outgrown life. The bourgeois child, on the other hand, is more placed in a certain hothouse. That is the difference. There is no question that the proletarian child imitates all sorts of things and comes to school with the success of this imitation, with things that are not very desirable. But my aim was to show how new tasks arise for the proletarian child, firstly, because it does not come from its parents with very specific class peculiarities and is then not released into life that father, mother, brother, sister, uncles, aunts and others who support it, but that it needs to rely only on what has been brought up in its soul, in the whole person. One has often repeated a saying of a man who has not exactly distinguished himself favorably in his post, the saying “Free rein to the most capable.” But things have now become a cliché. Because it is easy to say “free rein for the most capable” when you really mean only your own nephew or your sister's child. So these are things that must be taken literally, not by the letter but by the spirit. We live in such a phrase-ridden world precisely because we can take things literally so little. I ask you to bear this in mind. That, then, with regard to imitation.

As for the sense of authority, it is natural that the children of the proletariat may have little to go by in this respect. But here we must strive, above all, by training our pedagogical staff, to really develop this sense of authority in the children of the proletariat.

Then it was said that it does not matter whether the personality takes care of the development of thinking, feeling and will within or outside the state. I could not really understand the question, even though it came up twice. What matters is that the personality is not deprived of its strength by being crammed into state regulations. One must simply take into account what it means when what comes from the free personality of the teacher himself cannot be passed on, but only what is introduced into what he is supposed to teach through the decrees, curricula and objectives of the state; when the aim is not to educate people to become full human beings, but to train people who will then have to serve the state in the right way at this or that point in the state.

Then the objection was raised – and this always comes up when this question is discussed – that educational interests and needs are not all that great in today's world, and that most parents would be happy if they didn't have to send their children to school. It has even been said that no one would send their children to school anymore. But what I said did not touch on the superficial question of whether or not to send children to school. In my book The Essentials of the Social Question, I speak of a child's right to education, and of the need for a corresponding contribution to education from the future economy, even in the future state. So, I am not talking about the fact that “compulsory schooling” is perceived as a nuisance by those parents who do not want to send their children to school, but rather to the fields, but I am talking about the fact that in a healthy social organism, the child has a right to an education. Now one could say: if this right exists, the state – why the state should have been hammered today, as one speaker said, I don't know – will still be there as the legal institution – but I only had to speak about the spiritual institution today. And here the objection could be raised that if this right to educate the child is asserted, then parents will have to send their children to school, and then, for all I care, compulsory schooling can be abandoned. But that has nothing to do with the self-sufficiency of spiritual life, nothing to do with what is done in schools, with the administration of the school system. I recently answered the question as follows: If there is no compulsion to attend school, if there is a right to education, you can even threaten to appoint a guardian for the child of those parents who do not want to send their children to school, who will represent the child's right to an education with the parents; then they will happily send their children to school. All these secondary questions can be answered if there is the goodwill to truly understand the main question: everything depends on the spiritual life being freely left to its own devices.

Then the conflict that arises when the state or some other force later fails to tolerate what the teacher has planted in the children as an authority has been hinted at. But it is precisely from the realization of this conflict that the demand for the separation of the school system from the state arises. It is precisely in order to avoid the impossibility of a state later not tolerating what has been placed in the soul of the child through authority at school, that the school and education system should be placed on its own ground. If the state is not at the same time the authority for the teacher, then when later in life a person is forced to do something else, he will not think back to his teacher in such a way that the teacher is now worthless to him when the state says otherwise, but he will think back in such a way that he will feel it as a difficult fate that he cannot carry out what the authority of the teacher has planted in his soul. If you think about it in detail, you will see that the solution to this conflict has already been very successful. But precisely because this conflict weighed heavily on the soul for a long time, the demand for the spiritual independence of the school and educational system has been established from an observation of life. All similar things – and there are many similar things to the conflict that has been very successfully mentioned here – are only possible if the school system is placed in what is based on democracy, in the legal life of the state.

What Mrs. B. said about authority sounded so abstract and theoretical to me that I do not believe such things can have any real significance for life, for practical life. No one could tell from what I said that I assumed that the child could form a “judgment” about the fact that the teacher is an authority. These are things that arise naturally in the atmosphere of life.

Regarding the question of teachers, it will arise from all kinds of prerequisites that in the future it will be important that there is a selection process for the teaching profession and that people are not admitted to the teaching profession merely by passing exams or acquiring a certain amount of knowledge. Knowledge can, under certain circumstances, be acquired later in a few hours, it can be caught up on from the various manuals. What matters is the whole personality, the innermost gift of the teacher. Of course, I do not mean that if one has not been immersed in this knowledge before, one can easily acquire it later in a few hours. Rather, if one needs it – one must of course have been in it before – then one can easily acquire it again later, where it is needed. What is important is that a certain guarantee be created for what should determine the teacher to teach, a guarantee that through his whole personality he is so immersed in human culture that something can pass from him to the pupil, which can then work in an authoritative way. These are things that must be considered much more deeply and thoroughly than is often attempted today, when such abstract things as “leadership” and “followership” or “school community” are put forward. I would also ask you to consider the fact that I spoke of “school communities.” What matters is that we take things as they are said, and not that we first translate them into an abstract program that we have made up ourselves.

Then there would be much talk about the question of the separation of church and state. Historically, it is the case that for a long time it simply could not be otherwise than that the school was in a certain way an appendage of the church. The state has done a good job in modern times of detaching the education system from the church and putting it on its own ground. But now we are once again faced with the necessity of improving the things that are attached to the school by making it dependent on the state, by placing the school on its own ground. The fact that these things can very easily be viewed one-sidedly and in an agitative way should not be underestimated today. In much of what is said about these things today, I hear something that is not entirely objective. We must be clear about one thing: we must not in any way arrive at a standardization of the human soul through any kind of future pedagogy or future school constitution. We must not consider something to be the only valid view of the soul and demand that it be taught to children. We must also be able to put ourselves in the shoes of people who think and feel differently. It is important not to be afraid of this when, for example, Catholic parents demand that their children also receive Catholic religious education. There is no need to be afraid of this if you yourself stand strong on your own ground. Just as you need not be afraid of any other world view if you have your own enthusiasm and strength for your own world view. These things should be allowed to develop in the free competition of ideas, but in no case by the law-making power of the state. Just as it is harmful when a church is made a state church by the law-making power of the state and thereby receives the favor of the state, it is equally harmful when a church is persecuted. No kind of religious belief should be persecuted or supported by the law-making power of the state. And anyone who starts with this thought and thinks it through to a sufficient extent will find that it is indeed necessary to put the spiritual life and especially the school and teaching system on its own ground.

What has been said about the authority exercised by the teacher not being intended to remain for life, but for the young person to break free from it, is either a matter of course or something has been misunderstood. For it is of course quite natural that one cannot be placed under the authority of a teacher for one's entire life. This authority should work towards one being able to say: What would it be like to become a teacher? Then, through what the teacher's authority has placed in one's soul, one would be able to become an authority oneself. But one must grasp things much more thoroughly and deeply, because a teacher's authority can indeed be maintained throughout one's entire life. I have already said that what the teacher gives in education cannot really be 'paid for'. Payment means something quite different. But what education can do is to shape the mutual relationship between teacher and student in such a way that the teacher can remain an authority for a person throughout their life. And I would like to ask what could be more beautiful than to remember a teacher later on, when one has reached the age of sixty and can look back to one's youth, and then say to oneself: This teacher was an authority for me, I still feel the greatest gratitude towards him today, I have become what I am partly through him! This authority can be retained and can live on in a lifelong gratitude towards the teacher. These are the things that a psychology that is equal to today's tasks must take into account.

If it has been said that the state is necessary after all, or that it can be replaced by a spiritual senate or the like, then it has already been said: Those who have not felt state coercion have simply not seen it. And you see, the fact of the matter is that it really is the case that being a teacher of the state has become second nature to many people. And when it has become their second nature, they no longer realize that their free personality does not actually teach from the sources of spiritual life, but they have become accustomed to the state, have become accustomed to continuing in teaching what the state offers them. They feel “free”. But this feeling of freedom is no proof that one is really free, especially in the mentality of present-day humanity.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that a person who is the “great world teacher” for a large number of people, Woodrow Wilson, gives such a strange definition of what he understands by freedom in his writing “On Freedom” that one could climb up on the walls. He says something like: You can call a mechanism that has no inhibition and runs as the various events cause it to; or you can call a ship that moves in the same way according to the same principle free. But this mechanical freedom is not the real one we mean: you have to feel it.

Then, too, many things have been said that I have not said at all. In particular, the gentleman who defended the state spoke of all sorts of such things. I did not speak at all about the present state, but anyone who understood me correctly will know that I said: From what is being striven for by today's socialists, this and that threatens to become reality, and what must not come about would come about, so things must be arranged in a certain way. — Now, my dear audience, I really cannot go into things that are only constructed from my words and then polemicized against. But there is one thing I would like to address: An authority will also be necessary for the teacher again. I did not say anything about the authority that will be necessary for the teacher, but I did say that the teacher should be an authority for the child! Whether an authority is necessary for the teacher is a completely different question, which will be answered by the fact that ultimately life itself will take care of it. Pay attention only to life as it is, that is far too little observed today. Pay attention only to life and reality, and you will say to yourself: Yes, people are so different from each other that ultimately someone who can be an authority in the most diverse ways will still find an authority above himself. It will be taken care that someone can always find an authority above himself. Well, this does not have to lead to a supreme pinnacle. A person can be an authority simply by being superior in other respects.

When I spoke of Klopstock's “Republic of Letters”, it does not mean that everyone will now do as they please. Rather, they will not simply do as they please, but out of the needs of intellectual life, in order to make it as fruitful as possible, there will again be a voluntary leaning towards those who are to be an authority in the future. A “constitution” that is not based on rigid laws, on bony, state decrees, a constitution can be conceived in the free spiritual life; only it will relate to the real, living conditions of the people who participate in this spiritual life. The “law”, however, must first be replaced on this ground by the free human relationships, which are, after all, individual and can always change from week to week, and which cannot be bound by rigid laws and immortalized in some rigid form. What is important, therefore, is that spiritual life be given the opportunity to live in the form that is possible for it out of its own strength, so that the teacher of the school is not dependent in any way on a state official, but that he in a human, objective and appropriate way, as follows from the spiritual life, by another person who is also directly involved in the spiritual life and works with him in the same spiritual life. That is what matters. We can see that even today there is a certain fear of independence in spiritual life, and that many feel comfortable under the protection of the state. But that is precisely the point: so many feel comfortable under this state protection. However, this state protection is being sought even more by those who now want to succeed.

The development of the last few centuries was such that the state had power from earlier conquests and similar circumstances, and then little by little individuals wanted to get hold of this power in order to be protected by it. For a time it was the church. It preferred not only the living word, flowing from the spirit and convincing people, but also a little help from the police. Then came the schools. They preferred not the living word flowing from the spirit to reach the child, but state compulsion behind it. Then, in the end, the various economic classes and corporations also came, until we finally got that economic corporation – in Germany, of course, the industrialists and heavy industrialists in particular were keen on this – which also wanted a share of the power of the state. And then behind them were the Social Democrats, who in turn wanted to take the state for themselves. So the state power was the gathering place for everyone. What the future must strive for is that state power should not be a gathering place for everything that wants to creep under this power, but that it should be placed on democratic ground. But what matters is that on this state ground that which the mature human being has to agree with every other mature human being should be realized; there we are dealing with what the mere constitutional state is. It is remarkable that people still do not want to understand this today, although it was very close to understanding this constitutional state when someone who was once Prussia's Minister of Culture came to a correct understanding of these conditions. In Humboldt's essay “On the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State” you will find beautiful approaches to what the state should actually be. But if it is to be “democratic”, then only that which every mature person has to do with every other mature person may prevail in it. Then that which can be discerned in spiritual life must be taken out of the actual life of the state, and then the state must not include economic life, where what matters is economic experience, credit, and so on. That is to say, if anyone seriously wants democracy, then he cannot want socialism and intellectual life in the state, but must say to himself: If democracy is to be carried out, the only healthy thing to do is to place the intellectual life on the one hand and the economic cycle on the other in free territory. The fact that this is not understood – in Russia it has not been understood! has the effect that today something highly undemocratic, even anti-democratic, is being striven for in economic life: the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat. I encountered this in its most blatant form a few months ago in Basel, when after a lecture someone stood up, obviously a communist, and said: If the salvation of the future is to come about, Lenin must become world ruler! — You call for 'socialization' with these people and you don't even understand the very beginning of socialization, namely that you first have to socialize the relationships of domination; that socialization does not consist of monarchizing the relationship of domination and imperializing socialism. They think they want to socialize, but they don't even want to start with the socialization of the power relations, but instead they appoint an “economic pope” over the whole world. That is how they think.

These are the contradictions that arise today. That is why one would like to have a sense that the things that come to light in the threefold social organism are based on something deeper. We did not arrive at the idea of threefolding by being able to say, out of arbitrary, abstract principles and out of habits of life: I believe or I do not believe in these things. Of course, many things have to be placed in their proper context. But the impulse for the threefold social order comes from a truly hard observation of life and from a felt seriousness about the great cultural tasks of the present time. If one honestly wants socialism and democracy, then one must not simply want what many people say when they put it together: “social democracy.” Because in that way, spiritual life is not properly taken into account. On the contrary, anyone who honestly wants democracy and socialism needs above all a truly free spiritual life, which cannot be an arbitrary spiritual life. The impulse for threefolding has arisen out of an understanding of reality and out of a sense of the seriousness of present-day conditions. In these days we in Central Europe should feel here very particularly how serious the times are. We should in this time, when we have to say to ourselves: the question is one of life or death! — we should feel that we need to rethink and relearn about many old things, and that for the future it cannot be a matter of small changes to some institutions, but of a real rethinking, re-feeling and re-learning of the whole human being. Only in this way will we understand our time and only in this way will we be able to truly move forward!

Study evening on “The key points of the social question in the necessities of life today and in the future”

Stuttgart, July 30, 1919

This evening I do not want to anticipate what these study evenings, based on the book 'The Key Points of the Social Question', are actually supposed to be; instead, I will try to give you a kind of introduction to this evening. I would like to use this introduction to give you a sense of the perspective from which this book was written. Above all, it was written from the immediate present, from the conviction that the social question has also taken on a new form through the events of the present, and that it is necessary to talk about the social question today in a completely different way than it was talked about from any side before the world war catastrophe. With this book, an attempt has been made at a time in the development of humanity when the social question is becoming particularly urgent and when every person who is consciously living today, who is not sleepily and sleepily living the life of humanity, should know something about what has to happen in the sense of what is usually called the social question. Perhaps it would be a good idea to look back a little today. I may mention things that you are partly aware of, but we will then put them in a slightly different light. You probably know that what is being said today about the social question has been said for a relatively long time. And today the names Proudhon, Fourier, and Louis Blanc are mentioned as the first to have dealt with the social question in the mid-nineteenth century. You know, of course, that the way in which this social question was treated until the middle of the nineteenth century is called by today's representatives, at least by many of today's representatives of the social question, “the age of social utopias.” It is good to be clear about what is actually meant when one says: In its first stage, the social question arose in such a way that it lived in this age of utopias. But one cannot talk about this matter in the absolute sense, but one can actually only talk about the feelings of the representatives of the social question in the present. They feel the way I am about to describe it. They feel that all social questions that arose in the age of which I want to speak first were in the stage of utopia. And what do people mean when they say that the social question was in the stage of utopia at that time? By this they understand the following: Saint-Simon and Fourier observed that even after the French Revolution there were people in a certain social minority who were in possession of the means of production and other human goods, and that there were a large number, even the majority, of other people who do not have such property and can only work with the means of production by entering the service of those who own the means of production and the land, people who basically have nothing but themselves and their labor. It has been observed that the life of this great mass of humanity is one of oppression, and that it lives in poverty to a large extent in relation to those who are in the minority. And attention has been drawn to the situation of the minority and to the situation of the majority.

Those who, like Saint-Simon and Fourier, and even Proudhon, have written about the social situation of humanity, have started from a certain premise. They started from the premise that it is necessary to point out to people: Look, the great mass lives in misery, in bondage, in economic dependency, this is not a decent existence for the great mass. This must be changed. And then all kinds of means were devised by which this inequality among people could be changed. But there was always one specific prerequisite, and that prerequisite was that one said to oneself: If one knows the reasons for this inequality, if one has enough words of warning, if one has enough moral awareness oneself to strongly pointing out that the vast majority of people live in economic and legal dependence and are poor, this speech will touch the hearts and souls of the minority, the wealthy, the more favored minority. And it will be through this that this minority realizes: it cannot remain so, changes must be made, a different social order must come, a different social order must be brought about. The prerequisite was that people would be willing to act on their innermost spiritual impulses to liberate the masses of humanity. And then they suggested what should be done. And it was believed that if the minority, if the people who are the guiding, leading people, realize that what one wants to do is good, then there will be a general improvement in the situation of humanity.

A great deal of extraordinarily clever things have been said from this side, but all that has been undertaken in this direction is felt today by most representatives of the social question to be utopian. That is to say, today one no longer counts on the fact that one only needs to say: This is how one could set up the world – then the economic and political and legal inequality of people would end. Today, it is of no use appealing to the understanding and insight of those who are favored, who have the privilege, who are in possession of the means of production and the like. If I am to express what has been lost in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, I have to say that faith in the insight and goodwill of people has been lost. Therefore, the representatives of the social question, as I now understand it, say: it is all very well to come up with grandiose plans for how to organize the human world, but nothing comes of it; because no matter how beautiful the plans are, no matter how touching the words of appeal to the hearts and souls of the ruling minorities, nothing will happen. All these are worthless ideas, and worthless ideas, which paint the future, are in reality, to put it popularly, utopias. It is therefore useless, so they say, to imagine anything that should happen in the future, because there will be no one who lets go of his interests, who can be moved in terms of his conscience, in terms of his moral insight and so on. Faith in conscience and moral insight has been lost in the broadest circles, especially among the representatives of the social question. People say to themselves, people do not act according to their insight when they make social arrangements or when they live their social lives, they act according to their interests. And the haves naturally have an interest in keeping their possessions. The socially privileged have an interest in maintaining social privileges. It is therefore an illusion to count on the fact that you just need to say that people should do this or that. They just don't do it because they don't act out of their insight, but out of their interest.

In the broadest sense, it can be said that Karl Marx gradually, but really only gradually, came to accept this view. One can describe a whole series of epochs in the life of Karl Marx. In his youth, Marx was also an idealistic thinker and still thought in terms of the realizability of utopias, in the sense that I have just characterized it. But it was precisely he, and after him his friend Engels, who in the most radical way possible abandoned this calculation of people's insight. And when I characterize something in general that is actually a great story, I can say the following: Karl Marx finally came to the conclusion that the world could not get better in any other way than by calling on those people who have no interest in keeping their goods and privileges. These people cannot be seen at all, they must be left out of the calculation altogether, because they will never deign to respond in any way, no matter how beautifully they are preached to. — On the other hand, there is the great mass of proletarian laborers, and Karl Marx himself came to believe this during the period when what is now called the proletariat was basically only emerging in Central Europe. He saw the proletariat emerging from the different economic conditions in Central Europe. When he then lived in England, it was of course different. But at the time when Karl Marx developed from an idealist into an economic materialist, the modern proletariat was only just emerging in Central Europe.

And now he said to himself: this modern proletariat has completely different interests than the ruling minority, because it consists of people who own nothing but their labor, of people who cannot live in any other way than by putting their labor at the service of the propertied, namely at the service of those who own the means of production. If these workers leave their jobs, they are, and this was particularly true in those days in the most radical sense, thrown out onto the street. They have no other prospect before them than the possibility of serfdom for those who own the means of production. These people have a completely different interest from the others. It is in their interest that the entire previous social order should come to an end, that this social order should be transformed. You don't need to preach to them in order to be seized by their insight, but only by their selfishness, by their interests. You can rely on that. To preach to those on whose insight one should count, nothing comes of it, because people do not act on insight, they act only out of interest. So one cannot appeal to those to whom one should appeal to insight, but to those to whose interest one must appeal. They cannot help but advocate for the newer times out of inner compulsion. That is the egoism that Karl Marx has developed into. Therefore, he no longer believed that the progress of humanity to newer social conditions could come from any other human work than from the work of the proletariat itself. The proletariat can only, according to Karl Marx, strive for a renewal of human social conditions out of interest, out of its own selfish interests. And in so doing, the proletariat will liberate all of humanity, not out of philanthropy, but out of self-interest, because there can be nothing left but what people can achieve, people who are not attached to old goods and have nothing to lose by transforming the old goods.

So one says to oneself: On the one hand, there are the leading, guiding circles, who have certain rights that were granted to them in earlier times or that were enforced by them in earlier times, which they have inherited in their families, and they hold on to them. These leading, guiding circles are in possession of this or that, which they in turn inherit within their circles, their family, and so on. These circles, as the leading, guiding circles, always have something to lose in a transformation. Because, of course, if they lost nothing, no transformation would happen. The point is that those who have nothing should get something, those who have something could only lose. So one could only appeal to reason if this reason would give the possessing, leading class the impulse to want to lose something. They won't go for that. That was Karl Marx's view. So you have to appeal to those who have nothing to lose. That's why the Communist Manifesto ends with the words: Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, but they have everything to gain. Proletarians of all countries, unite!

Now you see, since the publication of the Communist Manifesto, this has become a conviction, so to speak, and today, when certain sentiments that are already influenced by this view are alive precisely in the majority of the proletariat, today one can no longer properly imagine what a tremendous turnaround in socialist thought took place around the mid-nineteenth century. But it would be good if you would take something like The Gospel of a Poor Sinner by Weitling, a journeyman tailor who wrote it not so long before the Communist Manifesto, and compare it with everything that was written after the Manifesto appeared! In this “Gospel of a Poor Sinner,” truly inspired by genuine proletarian sentiment, there is a language that is, one might say, in a certain sense even poetic, glowing language, but it is certainly a language that seeks to appeal to people's good will, to their insight. Weitling is convinced that something can be done with people's good will. And this conviction only disappeared around the middle of the nineteenth century. And the event that caused it to disappear is precisely the publication of the Communist Manifesto. And since that time, since 1848, we can actually trace what we call the social question today. For if we wanted to talk today like Saint-Simon, like Fourier, like Weitling – yes, we would really be preaching to the deaf. Because to a certain extent it is absolutely true that you can't achieve anything on the social issue if you appeal to the insight of the leading and guiding circles who have something. That is quite right. The leading and ruling circles have never admitted this, and they are hardly likely to do so today. They are not even aware that they do it, because unconscious forces in the human soul play an extraordinarily important role here.

You see, in the course of the nineteenth century, our intellectual culture has almost entirely become a cliché. It is a much more important social fact that we live in cliché with regard to intellectual culture, it is a much more important social fact than is usually thought. And so, of course, the members of the leading and ruling circles also talk about all kinds of nice things when it comes to the social question, and they themselves are often convinced that they already have the good will. But in reality they only believe that, it is only their illusion. The moment anything real is attacked in this regard, it immediately comes out that it is an illusion. We will talk about that later. But as I said, we can no longer talk as we did in the age of utopias. That is the real achievement that came through Karl Marx: he showed how humanity today is so enmeshed in illusionism that it is nonsense to count on anything but egoism. It must be counted with one day. Therefore, nothing can be achieved if we want to somehow count on selflessness, on goodwill, on the moral principles of people - I always say: with regard to the social question. And this change, which has led to our having to speak quite differently today than was possible in the first half of the nineteenth century, for example, with regard to the social question, this change has come with the Communist Manifesto. But it did not all come at once. Even after the Communist Manifesto, it was still possible, as you all know – some younger socialists have already forgotten the time – for a very different kind of social thinking, the kind of Ferdinand Lassalle, to capture hearts and souls well into the 1860s. And even after the death of Lassalle, which occurred in 1864, what was Lassallean socialism continued. Lassalle is one of those people who, despite the fact that the other way of thinking had already emerged, still counted on the power of ideas. Lassalle still wanted to reach people as such in their insight, in their social will above all. But this Lassallean tendency gradually diminished, while the Marxist tendency gained the upper hand, which only wanted to take into account the interests of that part of the human population that only had itself and its labor power. But it did not happen so quickly. Such a way of thinking only develops gradually in humanity.

In the 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s, it was certainly the case that people who belonged to the proletariat, or who were politically or socially dependent even if they were not proletarians, viewed their dependency in moral terms and morally condemned the non-dependent sections of the human population. In their minds, it was the maliciousness of the leading and guiding circles of the human population that they left the great mass of the proletariat in a state of dependency, that they paid them poorly and so on. If I may put it trivially, I can say that in the 1960s and 1970s, and well into the 1980s, a great deal of social indignation was manufactured and, from the point of view of social indignation, spoken. Then, in the mid-1980s, the strange turnaround actually only really occurred. The more leading personalities of the social movement then stopped talking about the social question out of moral indignation in the 1980s. That was the time when the great leaders, who were more or less still glowing with youthful zeal, were those whom you, who are younger, only saw die: Adler, Pernerstorfer, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Auer, Bebel, Singer and so on. It was precisely in the 1880s that these older leaders increasingly stopped preaching this indignant socialism. And now I would like to express it to you as if these leaders of socialism were expressing their innermost convictions when they transitioned from the old indignant socialism to their newer socialist worldview. You will find that what I am about to tell you is not in any of the books on the history of socialism. But anyone who lived through those times knows that if you left people to their own devices, that is how they would have spoken. So let us assume that in the 1880s, leading proponents of socialism were in discussion with others who were still bourgeois in their attitudes, and let us assume that there was a third group: bourgeois who were idealists, who wished everyone well and who would have agreed that everyone should be made happy. Then it could happen that the bourgeois declared that there would always have to be people who are poor and people who are rich and so on, because only that could maintain human society. Then perhaps the voice of one of those who were idealists would be heard, who were indignant that so many people had to live in poverty and dependence. Such a person might say: Yes, it must be achieved that it is made clear to these propertied people, the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, that they must let go of their possessions, that they must make arrangements by which the great masses come into a different position, and the like. Very fine speeches were made on these lines. But then someone who was just becoming interested in socialism and its development at the time raised his voice and said: What are you talking about, you're a child! It's all childishness, all nonsense. The people who are capitalists, who are entrepreneurs, they are all poor wretches who know nothing but what has been drummed into them by generations. If they were to hear that they should do it differently, they wouldn't even be able to do it, because they wouldn't come up with how they should do it. It doesn't even occur to them that something can be done differently. You must not accuse people, you must not morally condemn people, they cannot be morally condemned; the guys have grown into this, these poor darlings, into this whole environment, and that inspires them with the ideas they have. To morally accuse them is to misunderstand the laws of human development, to have illusions. These people can never want the world to take a different form. To speak of them with indignation is pure childishness. It has all become necessary in this way, and it can only become necessary again in another way. You see, you can't do anything with such childish fellows who believe that they can preach to the propertied, to the capitalists, that a new world order should be established, you can't do anything with such childish fellows. A new world order cannot be brought about with them. They only indulge in the belief that one can accuse these poor capitalists of making a different world.

I have to make the matter somewhat clear, so some things are said in sharp contours, but in such a way that you could hear the speeches I am talking about absolutely everywhere. When they were written, they were retouched a bit, written a bit differently, but that was the basis.

Then they continued: “With those guys – they are idealists who imagine the world in terms of an ideology – we can't do anything. We have to rely on those who have nothing, who therefore want something different from those who are connected with capitalist interests. And they will not strive for a change in their circumstances out of some moral principle either, but only out of covetousness, to have more than they have, to have an independent existence. In the 1980s, this way of thinking increasingly came to be seen as the development of humanity, no longer in the sense that the individual is particularly responsible for what he does, but that he does what he has to do out of his economic situation. The capitalist, the entrepreneur, exploits the others in the utmost innocence. The proletarian, on the other hand, will not revolutionize out of a moral principle, but in all innocence out of a human necessity, and will take the means of production, the capital, out of the hands of those who have it. This must take place as an historical necessity.

Now, you see, it was actually only in 1891 at the Erfurt Party Congress that all Lassallianism, which was still based on the insight of the people, was replaced by belief in the so-called “Erfurt Program”, which was intended to make Marxism the official view of the proletariat. Read the programs of the Gotha and Eisenach party conferences, and you will find two demands that are genuinely proletarian demands of the time, still connected to Lassallianism. The first demand was the abolition of the wage relationship, the second demand was the political equality of all people, the abolition of all political privileges. All proletarian demands up to the 1890s, up to the Erfurt Party Congress, which brought about the great turnaround, were based on these two demands. Take a close look at these two demands and compare them with the main demands of the Erfurt Party Congress.

What, then, were the main demands of the Erfurt Party Congress? They were: the transfer of private ownership of the means of production into common ownership, the administration of all production by a kind of large cooperative, into which the existing state must be transformed. If you compare the former program, which was the proletarian program of the 1880s, with what emerged from the Erfurt Party Program and has existed since the 1890s, you will say that the old Gotha and Eisenach programs still contain purely human demands, the demands of socialism: political equality of all people, abolition of the degrading wage relationship. In the early 1890s, the attitude that had emerged during the 1880s was already having an effect. What is more a demand of humanity has been transformed into a purely economic demand. You no longer read about the ideal of abolishing the wage relationship, you only read about economic demands.

Now you see, these things are connected with the gradual development of the idea that one had of externally bringing about a better social condition for humanity. It has often been said by people who still had ideals: what harm does it do to smash everything to smithereens, a different order must be brought about, so a revolution must come. Everything must be smashed to smithereens, the great Kladderadatsch must come, because only a better social order can arise from it, many people still said that in the 1880s, who were good, idealistic socialists. To which the others replied, who were in touch with the times, who had become the leaders, those who, as I said, are now buried, they said: It's all pointless, such sudden revolutions are senseless. The only thing that makes sense is to leave capitalism to its own devices. We see that in the beginning there were only small capitalists, then there were big ones, they joined forces with others, became capitalist groups. Capital has become more and more concentrated. We are in the process of capital becoming more and more concentrated. Then the time will come when there will actually only be a few large capitalist trusts and consortia. Then it will only be necessary for the proletariat, as the non-possessing class, to peacefully transfer the capitalists' property, the means of production, into community property one fine day, through parliamentary channels. This can be done quite well, but we must wait and see. Until then, things must develop. Capitalism, which is an innocent child anyway, it is not its fault that it is exploitative, that is brought about by historical necessity. But it also works in advance, it concentrates capital. They are then nicely together, then they only need to be taken over into the public domain. Nothing of rapid revolution, but slow development!

You see, the secret of the view, the public secret of the view, which underlies this, was discussed beautifully by Engels in the 1890s. He said: Why fast revolutions? What happens slowly under the development of modern capitalism, this massing of capitals, this concentration of capitals, it all works for us. We don't need to establish a common ground first, the capitalists are already doing that. We just need to transfer it into proletarian ownership. Therefore, Engels says, the roles have actually been reversed. We, who represent the proletariat, have no complaints about the way things have developed; it is the others who have complaints. Because the guys who are in the circles of the propertied people today have to say to themselves: We accumulate capital, but we accumulate it for others. You see, the guys actually have to worry about losing their capital. They get hollow cheeks, they get scrawny from these worries about what will become of it. We socialists are doing very well in this development. We will, says Engels, get bulging muscles and full cheeks and look like eternal life. Engels says this in an introduction he wrote in the 1890s, characterizing what is developing, and how one need only wait for the development, which is actually being taken care of by capitalism itself, ism itself, which then leads to what I have presented to you: the transfer of what capitalism has concentrated into the common ownership of those who have had nothing so far. That was also actually the mood with which the twentieth century was entered by the leading circles of the proletariat. And so it was thought, especially since the time when Marxism was no longer taken as it was in the 1890s, but when, as it was said, it had been subjected to revision, when the revisionists appeared, when those who are still alive but are old people, such as Bernstein, for example. Then the revisionists came. They said that the whole development could be advanced somewhat, because if the workers only work until the capitalists have gathered everything together, they will suffer hardship before then, they will have nothing in their old age. So assurances were made and so on. That's all well and good, but above all, they saw to it that the institutions that the leading classes had in political life were also appropriated. As you know, this is how trade union life in particular came about. And within the Socialist Party, there were two strongly divergent directions: the declared trade union party and the actual, as they said at the time, political party. The political party was more down-to-earth, a sudden revolution would be of no use, the development had to take place as I have just described. Therefore, it is important to prepare everything for the one point in time when capitalism is sufficiently concentrated and the proletariat has a majority in parliament. Everything must be pursued through parliamentarism, the acquisition of the majority, so that at the point in time when the means of production are taken over into public ownership, the majority is also there for this transfer. In this group of people, who thought very highly of the political party, at the end of the nineteenth century, not much was thought of the trade union movement. At that time, the latter was committed to establishing a kind of competition between itself and the entrepreneurs in order to obtain wage increases and similar things from the companies from time to time. In short, they set out to imitate the system of mutual negotiations that exists among the leading and managing circles themselves, and to extend it to the relationship between the leading circles and the proletariat. You know, of course, that those who were most accused by the representatives of the actual political socialist system were those who became most bourgeois under the trade union movement. And at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, you could see everywhere among those who were more attuned to the political system a great contempt for those people who had become completely absorbed in trade union life, such as the printers, for example, who had developed a completely different system after union life, again to the extreme.

These were two very strictly separate directions in social life: the trade unionists and those who were more inclined towards the political party, as they said. And within the trade unions, the printers in the printers' association were almost the model boys; the model boys who had earned the full recognition of the bourgeoisie. And I believe that just as there was a certain fear, a certain concern about the political socialist party, so little by little we saw the emergence of such good people as the people in the printers' association, and we were very pleased about that. One said to oneself: They are becoming bourgeois, you can always negotiate with them, it works quite well. When they strike with their wages, then we strike with our prices, which we demand. It works. And, right, it worked for the next few years, and people don't think beyond that. So one was very satisfied with this exemplary development of the trade union movement. Well, if I omit some of the more subtle nuances, one can say that these two directions more or less emerged until the times that were then surprised by the world war catastrophe. But unfortunately people did not learn everything from this world war catastrophe that should have been learned with regard to the social question.

As soon as one considers the conditions in Eastern Europe, in Central Europe, if one disregards the Anglo-American world and also partly the Romance world, if one limits oneself to Central and Eastern Europe, then we can say that history has not really turned out as one would have liked. History has always been defined as follows: capital is concentrated, then the majority is in parliaments, then capital is transferred into the ownership of the community, and so on. The catastrophe of the world wars has ensured that this cannot be expected to happen so smoothly today. Those who expected some kind of revolution have often been portrayed as childish. But basically, what has happened in the last four to five years? Let us keep clearly and distinctly in mind what has happened. You have often heard what happened in the last four or five years: in July 1914, the governments went a little bit mad or went mad in the head and rushed the people into a world war. The people believed that it was a world war, battles took place, although with the modern means of warfare, with the machine means, something completely different was there than in previous wars. There was no possibility of anyone becoming a particularly famous general, because ultimately it only came down to whether one side had a larger quantity of ammunition and other means of warfare, whether one side was better at producing the mechanical means of war than the other, or discovered a gas and the like that the others did not have. First one side won, then the other side discovered something, then the first side again; the whole thing was a terribly mechanical warfare. And all the talk about what happened here and there on the part of people was influenced by the phrase, it was nothing but a phrase. And little by little modern humanity will also realize in Central Europe what was put into it as a phrase when one or the other, who was actually nothing more than a somewhat twisted average soldier, was made a great commander in Central Europe. These things have only become possible under the influence of the phrase.

But what really happened? People did not realize this before the external events: in reality, while people believed that a world war was being waged – which was actually only a mask – a revolution was actually taking place. In reality, the revolution happened in these four to five years. People still do not know this today, they still do not pay attention to the fact that in reality the revolution has taken place. War is the external aspect, the mask; the truth is that the revolution has taken place. And because the revolution has taken place, the society of Central and Eastern Europe is in a completely different condition today, and one cannot start with what people had in mind for earlier situations. Today it is necessary that all the thoughts that were formed earlier be completely reorganized, that one think about things in a completely new way. And that is what has been attempted in the book 'The Essential Points of the Social Question', to calculate quite correctly with the situation in which we have ended up as a result of the very latest events. It is therefore no wonder that people, who cannot keep up fast enough in the socialist parties, encounter misunderstanding after misunderstanding in this book. If people would just take the trouble to examine their own thoughts a little, to examine what they say they want, they would see how they live under the influence of the ideas they formed up to 1914. That is the old habit.

These ideas that were held until 1914 have become so engrained in people's minds that they cannot be shaken off now. And what is the consequence? The consequence is that, although a new approach is needed today, although the revolution has taken place in Eastern and Central Europe, although we now need to build up not according to old ideas but according to new ideas, people nevertheless preach the old ideas. And what are the parties today, including the socialist parties? The socialist parties are also those who continue to preach this or that socialist gospel in the old way, as they preached until July 1914; for there is no difference in these party programs from the earlier ones, except at most the difference that comes from outside. For those who know the issues, there is terribly little that is new, indeed nothing at all that is new, said in the individual party groupings. The old party ideas are being trotted out again. Of course, there is a slight difference: if you have a copper kettle and tap it, it makes one sound; if you tap a wooden barrel in exactly the same way, it makes a different sound. But the tapping can be exactly the same. It is the fact that it sounds different that depends on what you tap. That is how it is when people come up with their party programs today; what is contained in these old party programs is actually the old party storekeeper. It just sounds a little different today because the social conditions are different, just as it would with a copper kettle and a wooden barrel. When the Independent Socialist Party or the Majority Socialists or the Communists speak, they speak the old party phrases, and it sounds different because there is a copper kettle and a wooden barrel. In reality, many have learned absolutely nothing. But what matters is that one learns something, that one is aware of this terrible world war, as it is called, but which is actually a world revolution.

And here one can truly say: in the broad masses, people are prepared to hear something new. But with the broad masses it is like this: they listen to what the leaders say. There is a good understanding, a good, healthy human understanding in the broad, uneducated masses, and one could actually always count on understanding when one presents something timely, something correct, in the best sense of the word timely. This is partly due to the fact that the masses are uneducated. But as soon as people enter the kind of education that has been available for the last three to four centuries, this godly quality of being unspoiled ceases to exist. If you look at what today's bourgeois school education is, from elementary school up to university – and it will be at its worst if the socialist unified school is founded now, because then everything that has been done wrong by the bourgeois elementary school will be present to the greatest extent – what is taught in schools distorts minds and alienates them from life. And you have to get out of all that stuff, you really have to stand on your own two feet in the spiritual life if you want to get out of this education. But you see, it is through this education that the great and small proletarian leaders have become. They had to acquire it through this education; this education is in our schools and in popular writings, it is everywhere. And then you start to get a dried-up brain, no longer accessible to facts. Instead, you stop at party programs and opinions that you have grafted and hammered into yourself. Then even the world revolution can come, you always whistle the old programs at it.

You see, this is essentially what the book “The Essentials of the Social Question” and the lectures intended in many respects. For once, real account was taken of what the proletariat absolutely needs today, what is necessary in the present situation. This was understood at the beginning, but then it was not understood by those who are the leaders of the proletariat in the various party groupings. That is, I do not want to be too unjust, and I do not want to press the truth; I do not want to claim, for example, that these leaders do not understand this book; because I cannot assume that they have read it, that they know it. I would not claim something correct if I said: they cannot understand the book. But they cannot bring themselves to understand that something else should be necessary than what they have been thinking for decades. Their brains have become too dry and too rigid for that. And so they stop at what they have thought for a long time and find that what is the opposite of all utopia is that utopia. For you see, the book fully anticipates that today one can no longer operate in utopia in the sense of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon and so on; but also that one can never again take the standpoint: development will happen by itself. For what Marx and Engels saw, what developed, and from which they drew their conclusions, cannot be drawn from today, because the world war has swept it away in its true form, it is no longer there. Anyone who says the same thing today as Marx and Engels says something that Marx would never have said, because he has become afraid of his followers: As far as I am concerned, I am not a Marxist. — And today he would say: At that time the facts were still different; I drew my conclusions from facts that had not yet been modified and changed as much as the world war has changed everything.

But you see, those people who cannot learn from events, who today are of an attitude as the old Catholics were towards their bishops and popes, they cannot even imagine that something like that must also be further developed in the sense of the facts, as Marxism is. Therefore, the facts are taking place, and people are still whistling and hissing the same things that they whistled and hissed before the world war. The bourgeois do it, but so do the socialists. The broadest circles do it. The bourgeoisie do it, of course, quite sleepily, with completely sleepy souls; the others do it in such a way that they are indeed in the thick of it and see the collapse, but they do not want to reckon with the facts that it reveals. We simply have to have something new among people today. And that is why it is necessary to understand something that is not utopian, but that actually takes the facts into account. If those who are so concerned with the facts call it a cross-current, then one could actually be quite satisfied. Because if people go straight ahead with what they are doing, if they call it a straight line, then, in order to do something sensible, you have to shoot in a cross-current to take the sensible thing in a different direction.

But you see, those who do see the rational should delve into what is presented here. And these evenings can be used for that.

What has been derived from the facts has long been tried in practice, and so we have been meeting for weeks – I do not need to repeat all these things, you can still ask questions or discuss the pros and cons after this lecture – to get what we call the works council up and running. We have tried to create this council out of the facts that are currently necessary, to create it in such a way that it comes from the economic sphere, and not from the political sphere, which cannot provide the basis for economic life. For if we look the facts in the eye today, we have to stand firmly on the ground that is represented here as that of the threefold social organism. And anyone who does not want this threefold structure today is acting against the historical necessity of human development. Today, as I have often explained, the spiritual life must be placed on its own, the economic life on its own, and the legal or political life must be administered democratically. And in the economic life, the first step towards a truly social organization is to be taken with works councils. But how can this be done? Only by first asking the question: Well, there is the impulse of the threefold social organism, which is new compared to all previous party mummies; is there anything else? Today, fools claim that ideas are just buzzing through the air. If you listen to the discussions, they bring up all sorts of negative things, but they don't bring up anything that could be compared to the threefold order of the social organism. What comes from the socialist side is all wishy-washy. As was said in a newly founded magazine in a review of the threefold order, ideas are just hanging in the air. The point is, first of all, to raise this question and be clear about it: is there nothing else? Then one adheres to the threefold social order until one can refute it in an objective way, so that one can put something objectively equivalent alongside.

The old party programs can no longer be discussed; the world war has discussed them. Those who really understand know that these old party mummies have been refuted by the world war catastrophe. But then, if one cannot answer this question by putting something else alongside it, then one can honestly say to oneself, if one wants to go further: So let us work in the sense of the threefold order of the social organism. Let us be honest: the old party contexts have lost their meaning. We must work in terms of threefolding. When I spoke in Mannheim the day before yesterday, a gentleman came forward at the end and said: What Steiner said is nice, but it is not what we want. We do not want a new party in addition to all the old parties. The people who want that should join the old parties and work within them. I could only say in response: I have been following political life very closely for a long time, when the gentleman who spoke was far from being born. And although I have become acquainted with everything that has somehow functioned as a social force throughout my life, I have never been able to work within any party or be a member of one, and it does not occur to me, now at the end of my sixth decade, to somehow become a party person. I do not want to have anything to do with any party, not even one I founded myself. No one need fear that a new party will be founded by me, because I have learned that every party becomes foolish after some time through the necessities of nature, precisely because I have never got involved with any party. And I have learned to regret the people who do not see through this. Therefore, no one need fear that a new party will be added to the old ones. That is why a new party has not been founded either, but the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism has come together to represent the ideas of the threefold organism – the non-utopian but realistic nature of which is, after all, understood by a number of people. But those people who understand this should also honestly and sincerely profess it.

For this must not happen either: there is a play in which a cock crows in the morning, and every time the cock crows, the sun rises. Now, the cock cannot see the connection at once, so it believes that when it crows, the sun follows its call, coming because it has crowed, it has caused the sun to rise. If someone in a non-social life, like this cockerel crowing on the dung heap and wanting to make the sun rise, finally succumbs to such a delusion, it does not matter. But if, under certain circumstances, the idea of the works councils, which are truly economic on the basis of the threefold social order, were to flourish here and those people who cultivate it because the impulse of the threefold organism has brought this idea into fl but then wanted to deny the origin and believe because it was said that the works councils would come, that would be the same error, and a very disastrous one. But that must not happen. What is happening in this direction, what has been tackled here, must not be detached; it must remain in the context of the correctly understood impulse of the threefold social order.

Those who want to realize the works council in the sense of this impulse can never allow themselves to be drawn into the one-sided idea that only the works council would be founded and that there would always be crowing about “works councils, works councils”. That is not enough. It only makes sense if, at the same time, one strives for everything that is to be achieved through the impulse of the tripartite social organism. That is what matters. Because if you really want to understand what is in this book, then you have to take the point of view that can be learned from the facts that the last four to five years have offered. If you see through these facts, they will have the same effect on you as if you had lived through centuries, and the party programs will have the same effect on you as if their supporters had slept for centuries. Today this must be clearly and unreservedly faced.

What I have told you now, I could just as easily have written as a preface to this book. But in the last few months we have seen how rigid and unfruitful the party programs currently are. But it would be useful if that were the preface to this book. Much of what is not in it, I have told you today, because you have, it seems to me, decided to come together here to study the serious social issues of the present day in a proper way, taking up where this book leaves off. But before doing so, it must be clearly understood that we cannot continue in the old style of party programs and party patterns, but that we must decide to approach the facts realistically today and put an end to everything that does not take into account these new facts. Only in this way will you grasp in the right way what is to be achieved with this impulse of the threefold social organism. And you will grasp it in the right way when you find that every sentence is designed to be put into action, to be transformed into immediate reality. And most of those who say they do not understand it or that it is utopian and the like, they simply lack the courage to think so strongly today that their thoughts can intervene in reality. Those who always crow: “dictatorship of the proletariat, conquest of power, socialism,” they usually think little of it. Therefore, reality cannot be intervened with these word templates. But then they come and say that something is being offered that is utopian. A utopia only comes into being in the minds of people who understand nothing about it. Therefore, one should make clear to these people, in a somewhat modified form, what Goethe once said with reference to something else, laughing at the physiologist Haller, who was an ossified naturalist.

Haller had coined the phrase:

No creative spirit
No creative spirit can penetrate.
Happy the man to whom she
The outer shell!

Goethe resisted this, saying:

Into the heart of nature.
Oh, you philistines!
No created spirit can penetrate
---
Happy the man to whom she The outer shell!
I have heard this repeated for sixty years;
I curse it, but furtively,
---
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
All at once it is everything.
Just test yourself most of all
Whether you are the kernel or the shell.

To those who speak of the threefold social organism as a utopia, one would also like to say: Examine yourself most of all to see whether what haunts your brain is utopia or reality. You will find that all the crowers mostly have utopias in them and that is why the reality in their own heads also becomes a utopia or an ideology, or whatever they call it. That is why it is so difficult to get through with reality today, because people have blocked their access to reality so much.

But we have to realize that we have to work seriously, otherwise we will not be able to translate our will into action. And it is essential that we translate our will into action. And if we had to say goodbye to everything because we recognize it as an error, then, in order to be able to move from will to action, we would have to turn to the truth, which we want to see through as such. Because nothing else can lead from volition to action but the ruthless, courageous pursuit of truth. This should actually be written as a motto, as a motto, in front of the studies of this evening.

I wanted to give you a preface to these study evenings tonight. I hope that this preface will not deter you from attending these study evenings so that, before it is too late, thoughts that contain the seeds of action can be fruitfully introduced into the world. The book “The Essentials of the Social Question” is written in a special way in two directions. Firstly, it is written in such a way that it is actually based entirely on reality. This is something that some people do not consider when reading the book. I can also understand that it is not fully considered today. I have already spoken here in this circle, but not everyone who was there today was present, about how people really think today. I referred in particular to the example of the professor of economics, Lujo Brentano, who delivered it so nicely in the previous issue of the “Yellow Sheet”. — I will briefly repeat it because I want to tie something to it. This luminary of today's economics at the university – he is, so to speak, the first – has developed the concept of the entrepreneur and has tried to characterize the features of the entrepreneur based on his enlightened thinking. Well, I don't need to list the first and second features; as a third feature, he states that the entrepreneur is the one who puts his means of production at his own risk and expense in the service of the social order. Now he has this concept of the entrepreneur, and he applies it. He comes to the strange conclusion that the proletarian worker of today is actually also an entrepreneur, because he corresponds to this concept of the entrepreneur in terms of the first, second and third characteristics. This is because the worker has his own labor power as a means of production, and he has control over it. In relation to this, he turns to the social process at his own risk and expense. Thus this luminary of political economy very aptly incorporates the concept of the proletarian laborer into his concept of the entrepreneur. You see, that is precisely how people who form concepts think, who have no sense at all when it comes to demanding that concepts should be truly applicable to reality. But however little you may be inclined to accept this today, it is safe to say that well over ninety percent of everything that is taught or printed today operates with such concepts. If you want to apply them to reality, it is just as impossible as with Lujo Brentano's concept of the entrepreneur. This is the case in science, in social science, everywhere. That is why people have forgotten how to understand anything that works with realistic concepts.

Take the basis of the threefold social order. No, you can't lay these foundations in the most diverse ways, because life needs many foundations. But one thing is clear: in modern times, what might be called the impulse of democracy has emerged. Democracy must consist of every person who has come of age being able to establish their legal relationship, directly or indirectly, with every other person who has come of age in democratic parliaments. But if we honestly and sincerely want to bring this democracy into the world, then we cannot manage spiritual matters in the sense of this democracy, because then every person who has come of age would have to decide on matters they do not understand. Spiritual matters must be regulated on the basis of understanding. This means that they must be left to their own devices. They cannot be administered at all in a democratic parliament, but must have their own administration, which cannot be democratic, but must be based on the matter itself. The same applies to economic life. Here, too, economic experience and inner life must be the basis for administration. Therefore, economic life, on the one hand, and spiritual life, on the other, must be excluded from the democratic parliament. Thus arises the threefolded social organism.

In Tübingen, as I have already mentioned, there is Professor Heck, who said that there is absolutely no need to admit that there is something degrading for the proletarian in the normal wage relationship, where one is paid for one's work, because Caruso is also in a wage relationship and there is no difference in principle. Caruso sings and gets paid, and the ordinary proletarian works and also gets paid; and he, as a professor, also gets paid when he lectures. The only difference between Caruso and the proletarian is that Caruso gets thirty to forty thousand marks for one evening and the proletarian gets a little less. But that is not a fundamental difference, only a difference in the amount of the wage. And so, this witty professor says, there is absolutely no reason to feel that the wage is degrading. He does not feel that way either. — That is just by the way. But now this clever professor has also written a long article against the threefold social order. He starts from the premise that if we organize in three, then we will end up with three parliaments. And now he shows that this does not work with three parliaments. Because he says: In the economic parliament, the small craftsman will not understand the points of view of the big industrialist and so on. — There the good professor has formed his ideas about the threefold order, and he attacks these ideas, which I find much more stupid than Professor Heck finds them — I would also criticize them to the ground —, but he has made them himself. The point is not to have three parliaments running alongside each other, but to take out what does not belong in any parliament. He makes three parliaments and says: That does not work. — So one lives in unrealistic terms and judges the rest accordingly.

Now, almost the only thing that has been introduced into political economy, into economics, are unreal concepts. But you see, I couldn't write a whole library listing all the economic terms at a time when time is of the essence. Therefore, of course, this book contains a multitude of terms that need to be discussed appropriately. For example, I need only draw attention to the following:

In a time that we have outgrown, social conditions arose basically only through conquest. Some territory was occupied by one people or race; another people burst in and conquered the area. Those races or peoples who were there earlier were pushed down to do the work. The conquering people took possession of the land, and that is how a certain relationship between conquerors and conquered arose. The conquerors had possession of the land because they were conquerors. Thus they were the economically strong, the conquered were the economically weak. This is how what became a legal relationship developed. Therefore, in almost all older epochs in historical development, legal relationships based on conquest were established, that is to say, privileges and rights of disadvantage. Now the times came when conquests could not be made freely. You can study the difference in free and bound conquest. If you look, for example, at the early Middle Ages, how certain peoples, the Goths, had pushed over to the south, but into fully occupied areas, they were led to do different things in terms of the social order than when the Franks moved to the west and did not find fully occupied areas there. This resulted in different conqueror rights. In more recent times, not only the rights arising from conquests and dependent on land and soil have been in force; the rights of people who had property have been added to these, and who, through economic power, were now able to appropriate the means of production. To what is meant by land law in the modern sense was added the ownership of the means of production, that is, the private ownership of capital. This then gave rise to legal relationships based on economic relationships. You see, the legal relationships arose entirely from the economic relationships.

Now people come along and want to have the concepts of economic power, of the economic significance of land, they want to have the concepts of operating resources, of means of production, of capitals, and so on. Yes, but they have no real insight into the way things work. They take the superficial facts and do not realize what is actually behind the land rights, behind the power relations in relation to the means of production. All these things are, of course, taken into account in my book. That is the right way of thinking. When the word “rights” is used, it is used out of an awareness of how rights have developed over the centuries; when the word “capital” is used, it is used out of an awareness of how capital has come about. Care is taken to avoid using a term that is not fully understood in terms of its origin. That is why these terms are used differently than in the usual textbooks today. But something else is also taken into account.

Let us take a specific fact. It is true that Protestantism arose at some point. In history books, it is often told that Tetzel went around Central Europe and that people were outraged by the sale of indulgences and the like. But that was not the only reason; that is only the surface view. The main thing behind it was the fact that there was a banking house in Genoa, on behalf of which, not on behalf of the Pope, this seller of indulgences went around in Germany, because this banking house had granted the Pope a loan for his other needs. The whole story was a capitalist enterprise. In this example of a capitalist undertaking of the sale of indulgences, where even spiritual things were traded, you can study, or rather, when you start to study, you gradually come to the conclusion that ultimately all capital power goes back to the superiority of the spiritual. And so it is. Study how capital actually came to its power, and you will find the superiority of the spiritual everywhere. It is true that the clever and resourceful have more power than those who are not clever or resourceful. And in this way, much of the accumulation of capital comes about justifiably, but also unjustifiably. This must be taken into account when considering the concept of capital. From such real studies one comes to understand that capital is based on the development of spiritual power, and that to the land rights, to the rights of the conquerors, from another side has been added the power of the old theocratic spirit. Much of what was then transferred to modern capitalism originated from the old church. There is a secret connection between modern capitalist power and the power of the old church. And all this has become mixed up in the modern power state. In it you find the remnants of the old theocracy, the remnants of the old conquests. And finally the modern conquests were added, and the most modern conquest is now supposed to be the conquest of the state by socialism. But in reality it must not be done that way. Something new must be created that completely does away with these old concepts and impulses. Therefore, it will be important that in these studies we also deal with the concepts that underlie them. Today, anyone who wants to talk about social issues must give us a precise explanation of what is right, what is power, and what is actually a good, a good in the form of goods and the like. It is in this area that the greatest mistakes are made. I will point out one mistake, for example. If you do not pay attention to it, you will misunderstand much of my book.

Today, there is a widespread belief that goods are stored labor, that capital is also stored labor. — You may say that it is harmless to have such concepts. It is not harmless, because such concepts poison all social thinking. — What exactly is the situation with labor, labor as the expenditure of labor power? Yes, it is the case that there is a big difference between, for example, wearing out my physical muscle strength by doing sports and chopping wood. When I do sports, I wear out my physical muscle strength, and I can get just as tired and need to replace my muscle strength as someone who chops wood. I can apply the same amount of work to sports as to chopping wood. The difference is not that it has to be replaced; labor power must naturally be replaced, but the difference is that the one labor power is used only for me, in the selfish sense, the other in the social sense for society. It is the social function that distinguishes these things. If I say that something is stored-up labor, I do not take into account that labor actually ceases to be in something the moment work is no longer done. I cannot say that capital is stored-up labor, but rather that labor is only there as long as it is being performed.

But in our present social order, capital retains the power to summon labor again at any time. The disastrous thing is not in what Marx means, that capital is accumulated labor, but in the institution that capital gives the power to summon new labor, not accumulated labor, but new labor always again into its service. Much depends on this. Much depends on this, that clear concepts based on reality are developed. And this book of mine is based on such concepts, which are now fully embedded in reality. It does not rely on such concepts, which were quite useful for the education of the proletariat. Today, when we are supposed to build something, these concepts no longer make sense.

You see, when I say: capital is accumulated labor - that is good for the education of the proletariat. It got the feelings it was supposed to get. It didn't matter that the concept was fundamentally wrong. You can educate with fundamentally wrong concepts. But you can only build something with the right concepts. Therefore, we need correct concepts in all areas of the economy today and cannot continue to work with false concepts. I am not saying this out of frivolity, that you can also educate with false concepts, but rather out of general educational principles. When you tell fairy tales to children, you do not want to build something with the ideas that you develop. In education, something else comes into consideration than in the construction of physical reality. There one must work with real concepts. Something like: “Capital is stored labor,” that is not a concept. Capital is power and gives power to put newly emerging labor into its service. That is a real concept with factual logic. One must work with true concepts in these areas. That is attempted with these things. Therefore, I believe that much of what is not in there in terms of definitions of the terms, in terms of characterization of the terms, must be worked out. And anyone who can then contribute to the work of understanding what is needed to understand the way of thinking, the basis of this book, will make a very good contribution to these study evenings.

So it is particularly important that what — well, it wouldn't be true to say that you would have to write an encyclopedia if you wanted to clarify all the terms — but what is now “capital” can be done on such a study evening. Because without a clear understanding today of what capital actually is, what a commodity is, what labor is, what law is—without these concepts we will make no headway. And these concepts are completely confused in the broadest circles; above all, they must be set straight.

The lectures printed here were an immediate experience for the speaker and the audience, arising out of the dramatic eurythmy presentation of scenes from Goethe's “Faust”, which brought all the forces of the participants into action, from the development of an understanding of the given riddles to the creation of every scenic detail. The work of the intellect was only the bridge to grasping the essential reality that Rudolf Steiner opened up here, which stands behind the secrets of this work and seeks ways of expression for which the previously known artistic means are no longer sufficient. In eurythmy, Rudolf Steiner had created a means of expression through which the supersensible element can speak its own language: the language of movement, which is the form of expression of those worlds that have not hardened down to the physical. Secret laws of nature can be revealed again through the medium of a new art. And in his wisdom of man, in his science of initiation, Rudolf Steiner has opened the gate through which we can find access to those realms into which the Faustian poetry repeatedly transports us, and which must appear to us throughout as phantasmagoria if we cannot handle the key that opens that gate. Who then understands Faust? Commentaries and learned reflections cannot help us here. They do little more than weigh down, even stifle, the spirit that wants to speak to us through poetry. Although we owe a debt of gratitude to Schröer, because his diligent explanations enable us to refresh many things that would otherwise easily disappear into the depths of our memory, this work often reminds us of the pain we go through when example when reading the “Divina Commedia”, when one's soul is crushed by the commentaries that almost every spirited terzetto is accompanied by: a difficult-to-bear dissection into the pedantic-dry. The distance between text and commentary is not so enormous here. Schröer has an affinity with Goethe and enthusiasm, and so his scholarly work seems not so much drying as conscientious. You can put it aside without annoyance and then experience the text of the Faust poem directly. What is behind the poem speaks to us at first like a hunch. Something seizes us that no learned commentary could explain, that would be word and sound if it did not contain profound truths that are not accessible to us at first. The rushing of undercurrents becomes audible; secrets murmur in our inner ear. We are grateful to Schröer for not having drowned the voice of the deep, for only helping to imprint some mythological or historical elements more precisely on our memory. These explanations have not been able to lead us to the sources that pulsate through the poetry. The sources that Faust presses for, yearns for, so that he risks the salvation of his soul, they, which are supposed to give him back his lost humanity through the potion of life that he wants to drink from them, have not flowed into this scholarly existence either; they have only shaken his soul as a yearning and as a moral impulse. Faust, and through him Goethe, cries out for the sources of life; it is also the cry of today's humanity, which still fully deserves this name, which has not numbed its humanity with the noise of machines and the pressure of soul-crushing mechanics. It should hear this cry in poetry in its harrowing force, let it rummage in itself, react to it. On the stage, however, we usually see a jaded Faust, who talks to us about something that sounds very abstract and does not touch him strongly in his depths, only filled with endless boredom and disgust, which ultimately make him reach for the bottle of brown liquid; that makes him somewhat sentimental. It is hardly possible to feel a real relationship with the experience of the earth spirit. Then a piece of not quite well-founded, unreal, legendary romance takes place on stage, a medieval spook - and Faust only really comes to life when it comes to Gretchen; then he knows where he stands. But his game with her does not last long. He has to get back into the spooky romance. Then follows some remorse at the sight of Gretchen in the dungeon, who has gone mad. But he quickly forgets and wakes up refreshed and strengthened in a flowery meadow.

How harrowing reality and crazy superstition combine here to create an overall effect of inescapable grandeur is rarely thought about. Admittedly, the human aspect of this Gretchen tragedy is so grippingly expressed that it is enough to give the poem lasting value, even if one only perceives the other, the actual driving force in Faust, as an ingredient. But since the other material far outweighs the Gretchen episode in volume, at least when reading the work, where one cannot freely abridge or delete as in a stage presentation, one can still be amazed that the poem has become so established and is recognized for its high cultural value, which elevates it to the first place among the treasures of German intellect. The sparks that fly from the finely polished diamonds of thought, that flash out at us everywhere in the dialogues with Mephistopheles and in Faust's soliloquies, they have, along with the magic of the blossoms and the suffering of Gretchen, , in their colorfulness and luminosity, to save the entire work from obscurity, despite Goethe's own statement that his “Faust” could not become popular: it is too mysterious.

And we have to take this fact into account. Before Rudolf Steiner no one could lead into the deep shafts of Goethe's thought processes, his hunches and intuitions, into the world of those imaginations from which the finely honed words have received their wealth of images and eternal value. He alone makes it possible for us to go deeper into those layers of soul-forming human events from which today's insights derive their substance. They provide the carbon from which, through metamorphosis, the diamond is formed. And just as carbon could not become a diamond unless the sun's rays were captured and stored in it, so too does thought receive its light from the spiritual sun that underlies the archetype.

Rudolf Steiner has opened up the path to these deep shafts of emerging events, the path to the “Mothers”. Unlike Faust, created by Goethe, and like the Faust of legend, we should not seek this path with the means of medieval occultism, which had already become obsolete by the time Faustian figures were struggling between outdated, decadent alchemical research methods and newly emerging exact natural science at the dawn of the modern age. At that turning point in the age, people were working with many aberrant, murky means to penetrate the secrets of life: with faded magic formulas, with incantation experiments, with mediumship, hypnosis, tinctures and ointments that would also entice today's experimental psychologists to enrich their science. Rudolf Steiner showed us other ways to access the sources of life: the paths of pure thought, moral self-education, scientific and artistic work, and the free activity of the I in the service of humanity. But in order to do so, it was necessary to prepare ourselves by doing what has happened in the meantime: the renunciation of the last remnants of atavistic clairvoyance on the part of advanced European people, the immersion in the limits of natural science, the conquest of technology, the temporary severing of the personality from its spiritual source. Now we are standing before another turning point. We are on the verge of losing our personality, of letting mechanics kill the human being. The power of thinking must lead us back to our soulfulness, to the seizing of pictorial contemplation, to the understanding of the spirituality that rules in us and underlies all phenomena of life. In our striving towards the highest goal, the figure of Faust, as portrayed by Goethe, can be our example and incentive. We no longer need to be tempted by the aberrations of medieval sorcery. In spiritual science we are shown a sure path to knowledge.

The tragedy of the medieval occultists, standing at the threshold of modern times, was that through the tradition of the secret schools they still knew about the real spiritual intercourse of the most highly developed people with the intelligences of the cosmos, but they also knew that this path was now closed to them. They could not advance further than to communion with the powers of the intermediate realm. A gradual darkening, a turning away from the strict paths of spiritual research, was often the result of this experimental work with retorts and with the forces of the elements and their animistic natures. The striving went astray, grasped in desperation to the means of despair, chased after mirages. In this sense we have to understand what the soul of Faust was going through. Yet there was a strength in the intensity of striving of these researchers that awakened the I. Through suffering, their consciousness opened ever more to the alert impulses of the I. Through the conquest of matter, the human being strove toward the center of his being, where he would be able to find himself, which could bring him back to life in the spirit. In the smaller dome of the burnt Goetheanum, in which Rudolf Steiner had the representatives of the different cultural epochs of humanity created in image and color, one could also see this figure of Faust, the serious alchemist at the threshold from the Middle Ages to modern times, in a pensive gesture and with a deep gaze, raising his right hand to his face, behind whose eloquent finger gesture the word “I” appears; stretching out his hands to him, the higher, spiritual self of man hovers in the form of an angelic child. Below him looms the skeleton, the other pole of the human ego; above the figure of Faust, the inspiring genius bends towards him.

We cannot approach an understanding of Faust from a narrow-minded perspective; we must gain perspective. The lectures presented here provide us with a basis for understanding Faust. They are not commentaries written in the study, but an introduction to the fields of spiritual science based on a work of poetry inspired by them, the secrets of which can only be properly illuminated through this spiritual science. There is no other way to get to the heart of the Faust problem. And only then will this greatest poetry of the German spirit be able to become popular when spiritual science will have penetrated the cultural life of the people as much as natural science has done in the last few centuries.

Of course, there are many objections that could be raised to publishing a book like this, which seems to consist of fragments. The explanations were given on a case-by-case basis, depending on the work at the Goetheanum; the scenes in which Faust wrestles with the secrets of existence and moves into the supersensible realm were presented. The play was performed in the large carpentry workshop at the Goetheanum, where the columns of the burnt building had been constructed. The conditions were primitive, but the aim was to bring out the spiritual reality on which the play is based. The art of movement known as eurythmy, which is practised at the Goetheanum, was found to be the appropriate means of reproducing those scenes that take place in the supersensible worlds, whether in the upper or lower world. It was as if the Faust poem had been waiting for this form of expression in order to come to life on stage, to transform the otherwise unspeakable into artistic reality. What would otherwise have remained abstract and conventionally stereotyped found in eurythmy the appropriate living language. Rudolf Steiner helped and advised the actors in every detail of the performance. Our suffering consists in the fact that under the prevailing circumstances at the time, only partial performances could be given. However, they serve as a guide for us to grasp the whole. Therefore, we must not anxiously reserve this gift to a small circle. We must pass on to our contemporaries and to the future what we have received here for the formation of knowledge. Unfortunately, these are only inadequately transcribed lectures that arise from an immediately given situation, but they contain what no one else can give and what will further humanity's salvation. The people, whose task it is to conquer the spiritual, should be able to draw from the greatest work of German poetry, which at the same time aims to educate world views, the impulses that will give them strength and courage for their difficult task.

Spiritual science that wants to live into the modern cultural current does not want to be something new and precisely in this way differs from the many world views and other schools of thought that come forward and believe that they can prove their right to exist by claiming to bring something new to this or that question of spiritual life. In contrast to this, the subject that is called spiritual science should emphasize that the sources of its knowledge and its life have been present in the same way at all times when people have thought and striven for the highest questions and riddles of existence. I have often been able to emphasize this, also in this city, when I had the honor of speaking in previous lectures.

It must now be particularly appealing to consider not only the various religious beliefs and world views that have emerged in the development of humanity from this point of view, but also to look at personalities who are close to us from this perspective. For if something is to be true in spiritual science, then at least a kernel of this truth must be found in all those who have honestly and energetically striven for knowledge and for a dignified human existence.

Now when spiritual science is discussed today, the most diverse judgments are asserted from one side or the other, and those who have not penetrated deeper into the corresponding field, who have gained a superficial knowledge from these or those lectures or pamphlets, will, depending on his point of view, regard this spiritual science as the fantasy or reverie of a few unworldly people who have strange ideas about life and its foundations. It must be fully admitted that, if one does not look more closely, such a judgment may seem understandable, because although today we are not talking about a specific topic, it should be pointed out that some of the main insights of this spiritual science are based on a special theme. And as soon as these are mentioned and characterized, our contemporaries may well feel, in all honesty, “What curious stuff is this?”

On the whole, spiritual science, if taken seriously, is based on the premise that what surrounds us in the sensual world, what we can perceive with our senses, what we can grasp with the mind that is bound to our senses, is not the whole world, but that behind everything that is sensual lies a spiritual world. And this spiritual world is not in an indefinite hereafter, but is always around us, just as the phenomena of color and light are also around the blind. But in order for us to know about something that is around us, we need to have an organ to perceive it. And just as the blind man cannot see color and light, so too, as a rule, people in our age with normal abilities cannot perceive the spiritual facts and beings that are around us. But when we have the good fortune to operate on a blind person, then there comes for him the moment of the awakening of the eye, and what was not there for him, light and colors, now floods into his inner being. From the moment of his operation, this is a perceptible world for him. In the spiritual realm, there is a higher awakening, the awakening through which a person becomes initiated into the spiritual world. To speak with Goethe, there are spiritual eyes and ears, but as a rule, human souls are not ready to use them. But when we apply the means and methods by which these powers come into existence, then something happens in us on a higher plane, as when a blind person is operated on and is then flooded with the world of colors and light. When a person's eyes and ears are opened, he becomes awakened. A new world is around him, a world that was always there, but which he can only perceive from the moment of awakening. But then, when a person is ready, he learns to make various insights his own, insights that brighten life, insights that can give us strength and security for our work, that enable us to see into the essence of human destiny and the secrets of fate.

And only one of these insights will be discussed here, one of those insights that, if not crazy, must often seem strange and dreamy to today's people. It is an insight that is nothing more than the revival of an ancient process of knowledge, its continuation in a higher realm, a truth that was only recently attained for a lower realm. In general, humanity has a short memory for great events in the spiritual world, and that is why so few people today remember that in the 17th century not only laymen but even scholars believed that lower animals, even worms and fish, would develop from river mud. It was the great naturalist Francesco Redi who first pointed out that no earthworm or fish grows out of dead river mud unless an earthworm or fish germ is present in it beforehand. He stated that life can only come from life, and from this it can be seen that it is only an inaccurate way of looking at things to believe that a fish or worm can grow out of lifeless river mud. A closer examination shows that we have to go back to the living germ, and that this living germ can only draw from its environment the forces that are there to bring to the greatest development what is alive in the germ.

What Redi said, that living things develop only from living things, is taken for granted by science today. When Redi uttered these words, he only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Such is the way of the development of humanity. First, a truth must be so hard won that those who first express it are branded as heretics. Then it becomes a matter of course, the common property of humanity. What Redi did for natural science should be done for the spirit through spiritual science today, by transferring the sentence that Redi pronounced for natural science from the knowledge of the awakened spiritual eye and spiritual ear to the soul realm. And there this sentence means: The spiritual and soul can only arise from the spiritual and soul. This means that it is an inaccurate way of looking at it when we see a human being come into existence, to believe that everything that comes into life comes only from the father and mother and the ancestors. Just as we have to go back from the developing earthworm to the living earthworm germ, so we have to go back from the human being, who develops from the germ into a specific being, to an earlier spiritual existence, and we have to realize that this being, which comes into existence through birth, draws from its bodily ancestors only the strength for its development, just as the earthworm germ draws strength from its inanimate surroundings. And in a corresponding extension, this sentence: Living things can only come from living things, leads to the other sentence: The present life, which comes into existence through birth, not only leads back to physical ancestors, but through the centuries back to an earlier spiritual-soul. And if you delve deeper into it, you will see that it is scientifically shown that there is not just one, but repeated lives on earth, that what is in us now between birth and death is the repetition of a spiritual soul that was already there in earlier stages of existence, and that our present life is in turn the starting point for subsequent lives. Spiritual-soul-like comes from spiritual-soul-like, goes back to spiritual-soul-like, which was there before birth, which descends from the spiritual world and lives in physical embodiments. We now see something completely different when, for example, we as educators are confronted with a child who gradually develops his powers. At birth we see something indeterminate on his face, how something unfolds from within, ever more distinctly and distinctly, which does not come from heredity but from previous lives. We see how this center of the spiritual soul unfolds more and more from birth through talents.

Today, spiritual science has something to say about repeated lives on earth. Today it may be a mere reverie, as what Francesco Redi said in the 17th century was considered a mere reverie. But what is considered a mere reverie today will become a matter of course in the not too distant future, and the sentence: spiritual-mental comes from spiritual-mental, will become common knowledge for humanity.

Today, heretics are no longer treated as they were in the past. They are no longer burned at the stake, but they are considered fools and dreamers who speak out of random fantasy. They are ridiculed, and those in the know sit in the high chair of science and say that this is not compatible with real science, not knowing that it is true, genuine science that demands this truth. And now we can cite a hundred and a hundred such truths that would show us how spiritual science can illuminate life by showing that there is an immortal essence in man that passes through death into the spiritual world and, when it has fulfilled its destiny there, returns to physical existence to gain new experiences, which it then carries up through death into the spiritual worlds. We would see how the ties that are woven from person to person, from soul to soul in all areas of life, those traits of the heart that go from soul to soul and cannot otherwise be explained, can be explained by the fact that they were formed in previous life circumstances. And just as the spiritual bonds we weave today do not cease when death draws over existence, but just as what passes from soul to soul as bonds of life is immortal like the human soul itself, how it lives on through the spiritual world and will revive again in other, future earthly conditions and new embodiments. And it is only a matter of development that people will also remember their earlier experiences on earth, what they have gone through spiritually and soul-wise in earlier lives and states of existence.

Such truths will become established in human life in the not too distant future as necessary things, and people will gain strength and hope and confidence from such conditions. Today we can only see that a few individuals in the world are drawn by their healthy sense of truth to what spiritual researchers have to proclaim from their experiences in the spiritual world. But spiritual-scientific knowledge will become the common property of mankind and will be assimilated by those who earnestly seek the truth. And those who have trodden the paths of earnest seekers after truth have always, in all that they have offered to mankind, developed the great wisdom and knowledge that spiritual science brings again today.

An example should arise before our soul in a personality that is close to our modern life: the example of Goethe, and with him again that which occupied him as his most comprehensive and greatest work throughout his life: his “Faust”.

If we approach Goethe and try to illuminate his striving with what spiritual science can give, we can actually start quite early on. One can say that from his entire disposition, one recognizes in Goethe how there was soul and spirit in him. Everything that pushes one to seek a spiritual element behind the phenomena of the sensual world was an early predisposition in him. There we see the seven-year-old Goethe, who could have absorbed ordinary ideas from his surroundings, as a boy can absorb them, for his first soul perception. That does not satisfy him; he recounts it himself in 'Poetry and Truth'. There we see how the seven-year-old boy begins something quite remarkable to express his yearning for the divine. He takes a music stand from his father's collection and makes an altar out of it, placing all kinds of minerals and plants and other products of nature on it, from which the spirit of nature speaks. The boy's soul builds an altar, puts a little incense on it, takes a burning glass, waits for the morning sun to rise, collects the first rays of the rising sun with the burning glass, lets them fall on the little incense, so that the smoke rises. And in his later years, Goethe remembers how, as a boy, he wanted to send his pious feelings up to the great god of nature, who speaks through minerals and plants, who sends us his fire in the rays of the sun. This grows with Goethe. We see how, at a more mature stage – but still out of a yearning soul, as it lives in Goethe – after he comes to Weimar and is appointed by the duke as his advisor, how this feeling for the spirit that speaks through all of nature is expressed in the beautiful prose hymn. There he says: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it, unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Unwarned and uninvited, it takes us into the cycle of its dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall into its arms. We have not done what we do, she has done everything; she is constantly thinking and pondering, looking at the world with a thousand eyes.” And again later, in the beautiful book about Winckelmann, ‘Antiquities’: ”When man's healthy nature works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when the harmony of pleasure gives him pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult in reaching its goal and admire the summit of its own becoming and being. Thus Goethe felt, like everything that lives and moves outside in nature, a resurrection celebrating from the human soul, and like a higher nature, a spiritual nature is brought forth from the spirit and soul of man. But it took Goethe a long time to fully grasp the spiritual realization of nature. And there is no clearer or more obvious example of how Goethe was a lifelong seeker who never rested or paused, always striving to reshape his knowledge and reach higher levels, than his life's poem, “Faust.”

From his earliest youth, he had begun to put everything that filled his yearning and intuitive soul into his poem; and as an old man in his later years, shortly before his death, he completed this poem, on which he had worked for over fifty years and into which he had put the best of his life. The second part was sealed at his death, like the great testament he had to give to humanity. It is a momentous document. We can only understand this document if we follow Goethe a little, as he himself sought to struggle towards knowledge.

For example, there is the student Goethe at the University of Leipzig. He is supposed to become a lawyer, but that is of secondary concern to him. Even then, the young student was possessed by an invincible urge to fathom the secrets of the world, to seek the spiritual. He therefore immerses himself in everything Leipzig has to offer in the way of knowledge about nature. He seeks to eavesdrop on what nature has to say to us in its phenomena, to eavesdrop on the world's riddles of existence. But Goethe needed, in order to rework what natural science could offer him, to re-melt it in his soul to that all-powerful urge of his inner being, which does not seek abstract knowledge but warm hearted a great experience, an experience that really leads the human being to that knowledge which is the gate toward which we intuitively look, the gate that closes for today's normal human being, the invisible, the supersensible: the gate of death. At the end of his student days in Leipzig, he experienced death. A serious illness had prostrated him, brought him close to death. For hours and days he had to face the fact that at any moment he could pass through that mysterious portal. And the mysterious, impetuous urge to understand demanded the utmost seriousness in the pursuit of knowledge. With this newly formed attitude of knowledge, Goethe returned to his native city of Frankfurt. There he found a circle of people, headed by a woman of great and profound talent: Susanne von Klettenberg. Goethe created a wonderful monument to her in his “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul”. He showed how this personality, to whose spiritual world he had such close access at the time, contained something that can only be described as a soul. In Susanne von Klettenberg, there lived a soul that sought to grasp the divine within itself in order to find, through the divine within itself, the spiritual that lives through the world. Goethe was introduced at that time by the circle to which this lady belonged, to studies that, if you, as a truly modern person, let them have an effect on you today, seem crazy. Goethe immersed himself in medieval writings. Those who pick them up today cannot do anything with them. When you see the strange signs in them, you ask yourself: what is the point of this in the face of science's modern quest for truth? — There was a book called “Aurea catena Homeri”, “The Golden Chain of Homer”. When you open it, you find a strange symbolic illustration: a dragon at the top in a semicircle, a dragon full of life, bordering on another dragon, a withering dragon dying within itself. All kinds of signs are linked to it: symbolic keys, two interlocking triangles and the planetary signs. To our contemporaries this is fantasy, to today's science it is fantasy, because one does not know what to do with these signs. Goethe senses in his intuition that they express something, that one can do something with them when one looks at them. They do not immediately express something that can be found here or there in the world. But if you let these signs take effect on you, by memorizing them so that you become deaf and blind to your physical surroundings, only letting these signs take effect on you, then you experience something very peculiar, then you experience that the soul within itself senses something that was dormant before, like a spiritual eye that opens. And if you have enough stamina, you will grasp what you can call meditation, concentration, which will develop your soul to such an extent that you will actually undergo something like an operation of the spiritual eye, through which a new world will open up. At that time, a new world could not yet be opened up for Goethe; he was not yet that far. But what came to life in his soul was the inkling that there are keys to this spiritual world, that one can penetrate into this spiritual world. One must visualize this mood; the vivid sensation, the vivid feeling: something is being stirred in me, something is coming to life; there must be something that leads into the spiritual world. But at the same time he senses: he cannot yet enter it. If Goethe had ever been identical with Faust in his life, we would say: Goethe was in the same situation in which Faust appears at the beginning of the first part, when Faust, after having studied the most diverse fields of human science, opens books in which there are such signs and feels surrounded by a spiritual world, but cannot enter into the spiritual world. Goethe never felt identical with Faust. Faust was a part of him, but he outgrew what was only a part of himself. And so, what went beyond Faust in Goethe grew because he, fearing no discomfort, always strove further and further, saying to himself: “One does not get behind the secrets of existence in a flash , not by incantations and formulas, but by patiently and energetically penetrating, step by step, in a truly spiritual and soulful way, whatever comes our way in the physical world. — It is easy to say: “What is higher knowledge must be absorbed by the soul.” This higher knowledge must penetrate the soul, but it only takes on its true form when we strive with patience and perseverance to get to know the real phenomena of the physical world step by step and then to seek the spiritual behind these phenomena of the physical world. But with what Goethe took with him from his time in Frankfurt, he was able to summarize everything else, he was able to see everything in a different light.

Goethe came from Frankfurt to this city, Strasbourg. We could cite many things that led him higher here. But what is particularly characteristic is how that which has such great significance in this city came before his soul: the cathedral, the minster. At that time, the idea of this wonderful building presented itself before Goethe's soul, and he understood why every single line is as it is. He saw with spiritual vision, with the vision gained through his immersion in Frankfurt, every triangle, every single angle of this significant building as belonging to the whole, and in his soul the great idea of the master builder celebrated a resurrection, and Goethe believed he recognized what had flowed into this building as a thought, as an idea. And so we could cite many instances of what had entered this soul as an inner vision and what it had taken up from external world processes entering into a marriage in Goethe's soul. Therefore it is not surprising that when he later came to Weimar, he took up natural science from a new angle, botany, zoology, bone theory and so on, in order to consider everything like letters that together make up the book of nature, leading into the secrets of existence. This is how his studies of plant development and the animal world came about, which he later continued as a student, only that he sought the spirit behind the sensual phenomena of existence everywhere. Thus we see how, during his Italian journey, he regarded art on the one hand and natural objects on the other, and how he observed the world of plants in order to recognize the spirit that reigns in them. The words he wrote to his friends, while he was engaged in this kind of spiritual natural science, are great and beautiful. He said: Oh, here everything presents itself to me in a new way; I would like to travel to India to look at what has already been discovered in my own way. — That is to say, as his development demanded, according to the indications we were able to give. And so we see how he also looks at the works of art that come to him. He writes in a letter: “This much is certain: the ancient artists had just as great a knowledge of nature and an equally sure concept of what can be imagined and how it must be imagined as Homer. Unfortunately, the number of works of art in the first class is all too small. But if one also sees these, one has nothing to wish for but to recognize them correctly and then to go there in peace. These lofty works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature, produced by man according to true and natural laws. All that is arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God.” Just as the great spirit of nature spoke to the seven-year-old boy from the altar he had erected, so the great spirit of the existence of the spiritual world spoke to him from these works of art, which he regarded as a unity. Thus Goethe gradually arrived at the contemplation of the individual in energetic, devoted work. Then he could calmly await the moment when a real insight into the spiritual world leaped out of his observations, a true spiritual science, which then confronts us, artistically transformed and reworked, in his “Faust”.

Thus the first sections of Faust that were written have all the atmosphere of a man who senses the secrets of existence but is unable to penetrate these secrets. We see how Faust allows the signs to take effect that surround him with spiritual reality, but we also see how he is not yet mature enough to really feel this spiritual reality. These are the sentences where Faust, as the Nostradamus aura, allows the signs of the macrocosm and the earth spirit to take effect on him, where the spirit of the earth appears before him. Faust characterizes the earth spirit in wonderfully beautiful words. We see how he senses that what the planet Earth is, is not simply the physical sphere that natural science regards it as, but rather, just as the body contains a soul, so the Earth body contains a spirit.

In the tides of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of divinity.

That is what lives in the earth as the spirit of the earth, just as our spirit lives in us. But Goethe characterizes Faust as not yet mature, his spirit as still unfinished. He must turn away from the terrible sign like a timid worm curled up. The earth spirit answers him: “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me.” In Goethe's soul there lived the realization, even if at first only a presentiment, that we cannot declare ourselves satisfied at any stage, but must strive from each stage to higher and higher stages, that we cannot say at any stage that we have achieved something, but must always strive higher from each stage. Goethe was led into these secrets by his diligent studies from phenomenon to phenomenon. And now we see him grow.

The same spirit that he first summoned, and of whom he could only say, “Terrible face!” is addressed by Goethe through Faust, after Goethe himself had reached a higher level after his trip to Italy, after his journey, which I have characterized as one in which he wanted to permeate all of nature and art with his vision. Now Faust is attuned to the same spirit that Goethe himself was attuned to. Now Faust stands before the same spirit, which he thus addresses:

Eminent Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in fire.
Gavest me the glorious Nature's kingdom,
Strength to feel it, to enjoy it. Not
You only allow cold, amazed visitors,
Grant me into their deep chests
To look as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce topples, brushing neighboring branches
And squashing neighboring trunks,
And the hill thunders hollowly hollow;
Then you lead me to the secure cave,
Then you show me myself, and my own breast,
Secret, deep wonders open up.
And when the pure moon rises before my gaze,
Soothingly across: silver figures of primeval times,
and ease the strict desire of contemplation.

There Goethe has arrived, and with him Faust, to the heights, no longer turning away from the spirit that he had wanted to reach by leaping. Now the spirit presents itself as such that he no longer needs to turn away from it. Now he recognizes it in all living things, in all realms of nature: in forest and water, in the silent bush, in the giant spruce, in storm and thunder. And not only there. After it has appeared to him in the great outdoors, he also recognizes it in his own heart: its secret, deep wonders open up.

This is a step forward in Goethe's knowledge of the spirit, and Goethe did not rest on his laurels. We then see how, spurred on by Schiller, he sought to deepen his knowledge, particularly in the 1890s. This knowledge enabled him to go beyond the vague characterization of spiritual consciousness that a spirit lives in everything. He succeeded in grasping this spirit in a concrete way. But Goethe needed much preparation before he was able to depict the life of the human spirit in the sense that spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things. However, the fact that Goethe never failed to attempt to get deeper is shown by some of the works he created before the second part of Faust was completed. The second part of Faust shows the heights to which he has risen. Some have already turned away from him when they got to know the introspective Goethe in Pandora. Even today we hear people say: the first part of Faust is full of life, it breathes direct naturalness, but the second part is a product of Goethe's old age, full of symbols and contrivances. Such people have no idea what is in it, what infinite wisdom is in this second part of “Faust”, which only the Goethe of his rich life could have produced in his old age, leaving it as a testament. Therefore, we also understand when Goethe writes the lines about some works that already breathe the spirit of “Faust”, and we know that he presents Faust as a struggling soul, a soul that has been overtaken by something new. We recognize it in the anger he poured out on those who called “Faust” an inferior work of old age. He says of them:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars
In their favor;

The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
They think the riffraff,
It would no longer be!

Goethe once put into words his feelings towards those who believe that only what Goethe achieved in his younger years has validity, who do not want to ascend to what he achieved in his more mature years.

After Goethe has introduced Faust into the life that directly surrounds us, and has allowed him to experience that wonderful tragedy of Gretchen, he leads him out into the world that is outwardly the great world, first of all into the world that is outwardly the great world: the world of the imperial court. There Goethe now wants to show that Faust should now really penetrate spiritually into the secrets of this world. But then Faust should be introduced to the real spiritual world, to the supersensible world.

Right at the beginning of the second part, we see how Goethe has Faust surrounded by all kinds of spiritual beings. This is to express that Faust is not only to be led into an external physical world, but that he is also to experience what can be experienced by someone whose spiritual eye is open, whose spiritual ear is learning to perceive. Therefore, in the second part, Goethe shows us step by step the nature of the human soul, human development. What is Faust to experience? He is to experience the knowledge of the supersensible world. He is to be initiated into the secrets of the supersensible world. Where is this supersensible world?

When we consider the spiritual content of “Faust”, we can only begin to address the question of Mephistopheles, the spirit that surrounds Faust from the very beginning and plays a part in everything Faust undertakes. But it is only in the second part, where Faust is to be led into the spiritual world, that we see what role Mephistopheles plays. After Faust has gone through the events at the “imperial court”, he begins to see what is no longer there in the sensual world: the spirit of Helen, who lived centuries and centuries ago. She is to be found for Faust. She cannot be found in the physical world. Faust must descend into the spiritual world. Mephistopheles has the key to this world, but he cannot enter this spiritual world himself; he can describe it intellectually. He can say: You will descend. One could also say: You will ascend. He then actually describes the spiritual world into which Faust is to descend in order to get to know it supersensibly, to find in it the spirit, the immortal, the eternal that has been left behind from Helena. A word is spoken, a wonderful word: Faust is to descend to the Mothers. What are the “Mothers”? One could talk for hours if one wanted to characterize exactly what the Mothers are. Here we need only say that the Mothers were for spiritual science at all times what man gets to know when his spiritual eye is opened. When he looks into the physical world, he sees all things limited. When he enters the spiritual world, he comes into something from which all physical things come out as ice comes out of a water pond. As one who could not see the water would say: Nothing is there but ice, it piles up out of nothing — so says he who knows not the spirit: Only physical things are there. He sees not the spirit that is between and behind physical things, out of which all physical things are formed as ice is formed out of water. There, where the source of physical things is, which is no longer visible to the physical eye, are the Mothers. Mephistopheles is the being that is to represent that intellect which only knows what is outwardly formed in space, which knows that there is a spiritual world but cannot penetrate into it. Mephistopheles stands there beside Faust, as the materialistic thinker stands today beside the spiritual researcher, and says: “Ah, you spiritual scientist, you theosophist, you want to see into a spiritual world? There is nothing in there, it is all a dream. It is all nothing. To the materialist, who wants to build firmly on what the microscope and the telescope reveal, but who wants to deny everything that lies behind physical phenomena, the spiritual researcher cries out: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” Thus the materialistic thinker stands opposed to the spiritual man, who hopes to find the spirit precisely where the other sees nothing. These two powers will confront each other forever. And from the very beginning, Mephisto confronts Faust as the spirit that can lead to the door, but cannot cross that threshold. The theosophist or spiritual scientist does not say: material science is nothing, is unnecessary. — He says: we must take this science seriously, study it, but it only has the key, it leads us to where the true spiritual life is to be found.

Faust then descends into the realm of the mothers, into the spiritual world; he succeeds in bringing up the spirit of Helen. But he is not yet mature enough to truly connect this spirit with his own soul. Hence the scene where passion stirs in Faust, where he wants to embrace the image of Helen with sensual passion. That is why he is repulsed. This is the fate of everyone who wants to approach the spiritual world from personal, selfish feelings. He is repulsed, as Faust is repulsed when he has brought up from the realm of the mothers the spirit of Helen. Faust must first mature, learn to recognize how the three members of human nature really come together: the immortal spirit that goes from life to life, from embodiment to embodiment; the body that lives between birth and death; and the soul that stands between the two. Faust is to learn how body, soul and spirit are connected and how they belong together. Faust has already sought the archetype of Helen, the immortal, the eternal that passes from embodiment to embodiment, from life to life, but in an immature state. Now he is to mature in order to become worthy of truly entering the spiritual world. To do this, Faust must learn how this immortality first approaches the human being when he can embody himself again in a new life between birth and death in his physical existence. Therefore, Goethe must show how the soul lives between spirit and body, how it places itself between the immortal spirit and the body that stands between birth and death. This is what Goethe shows us in the second part of “Faust”.

In Goethe, the soul is hidden in that wondrous structure about which Goethe researchers do not know much to say, in which spiritual researchers who are well-versed recognize the archetype of the soul. This is nothing other than the wonderful structure of the homunculus, the little human being. This is an image of the human soul. What does this soul do? It is the mediator between body and spirit; it must draw the elements of the body from all realms of nature in order to connect with them. Only then can it be united with the immortal spirit. Thus we see how Faust is led by this homunculus into the realm of the natural philosophers Anaxagoras and Thales, who have been reflecting on the origin of nature and life.

Therein is shown the true doctrine of evolution, which goes back to the fact that not only an animalistic element underlies human development, but also a soul that gathers the elements from nature to gradually build up the body. Hence the advice given to the homunculus: you must start from the lowest realm in order to ascend to higher and higher ones. The human soul is first referred to the mineral kingdom. Then it is told: “You have to go through the plant kingdom.” There is a wonderful expression here: “It grunts so” to describe the passage through the plant world, the juicy green. There the soul gathers all the elements of the natural kingdoms in order to ascend. It is explicitly said: “And you have time until you reach the human being.” Then we see how the spirit of love, Eros, approaches after the soul has formed the body out of all the realms of nature. There it unites with the spirit. Body, soul and spirit are united. Here that which is the soul of the homunculus, that which it organizes into the body, unites with the spirit of Helen. That is why Helen can appear to us in the third act of the second part in the flesh. We see the doctrine of re-embodiment poetically and artistically enshrined in the second part of Faust. One does not unite with Helena by drawing her to oneself in stormy passion, but by truly living through the secrets of existence, truly living through the re-embodiment.

Goethe was not yet able to express the idea of repeated lives on earth in the way we can today, but he did include it in the second part of his “Faust”. That is why he was able to say to Eckermann: “I have written my ‘Faust’ in such a way that it is suitable for the theater; that the images it presents are outwardly sensually interesting for those who only want to see outwardly sensually. But for those who are initiated, it will be evident that the deepest things have been woven into the second part of “Faust”. - Goethe expressly pointed out that one can find his view of life, his spiritual view, in this poetry. And so we now also understand that Goethe was able to illustrate to us in this reconnection of Faust with Helena what true mysticism is.

Faust unites with the spiritual world. Not an ordinary child is born, but Euphorion, who is as true as he is poetic. He represents for us what comes to life in our soul when it unites with the spiritual world. When the soul penetrates into the secrets of the spiritual world, there comes a moment of development in the soul that is of tremendously deep significance for that soul. Before the soul can go further, it must first, for brief moments, gain connection with the spiritual world, to know for a very short time what the spiritual world is. Then it is as if a spiritual child were born out of spiritual knowledge. But then come the moments of life again, when this spiritual child seems to have disappeared into the spiritual world. One must grasp this with the heart, full of life, then one feels, like Euphorion, the mystic's spiritual child, despite all the poetic truth of life, sinks down into the spiritual world, cannot yet fully enter Faust, but as he passes over, something else does. That is an experience of the spiritual researcher, the spiritual seeker, when our soul has the hour when it truly senses its relationship to the spiritual world, and when knowledge appears as a child of a marriage with the spiritual world. Then it experiences it deeply when it sinks into the everyday, and it is as if it takes with it the best that we have. It is as if our own soul were to escape and go with it into the spiritual world. When one has felt this, one feels the spiritual words of Euphorion, who has sunk down, and who cries out from the dark depths: “Let me not alone in the gloomy realm, mother, let me not alone.” The true mystic knows this voice, the voice that calls from the spiritual child to our soul as its mother.

But this soul must go further. It must break away from that which is only personal passion. We must be able to devote ourselves to the spiritual world impersonally. As long as there is still self-interest, self-will, we cannot grasp the spiritual world. Only then can we grasp this spiritual world when all that is personal has been erased before the higher things of the spiritual world; only then can we truly enter the spiritual world permanently. But there are still many moments when we have already experienced that moment that pushes us back into the physical world, moments that take away all mysticism for a long time. These are the moments when we have to say to ourselves: Yes, even if we have overcome all selfishness and self-will, there still remains this or that, as it is left behind in Faust, even after he has said: “I stand here in the open, I only want to work, to gain everything from nature, to do something only for others.” But he has not yet come that far. As he looks at the hut of Philemon and Baucis, something disturbs his view, he shows: he has not yet overcome the selfishness that wants to be pleased by the sight. He wanted to create a possession, selflessly, but he cannot yet bear what disfigures him: the hut of Philemon and Baucis. Then the spirit of evil approaches him once more. The hut is burnt down. Then that appears to him which appears to everyone who undergoes development: the worry that approaches everyone who still has selfish aspirations within them and which does not allow them to ascend into the spiritual world. Here it is, worry, and we learn to recognize it in its true form; then it is something that can lead us to the last of real spiritual knowledge. It is not intended to show that man should become unworldly, hostile to the world, but how man in the world should get to know that which does not let him go from the world. In wise self-knowledge, we should let worry take a back seat so that we can become free from the selfishness of worry, not from worry itself, which is illustrated by the fact that worry says it creeps in through a keyhole. When we get to know this worry, not just feel it, but learn to bear it, then we attain that degree of human development that opens the spiritual eye to us. This is illustrated by the fact that Faust goes blind in old age, can no longer see with his physical senses, but can look into the spiritual world. “The night seems to penetrate deeper and deeper.” It is dark on the outside, but inner bright light, the light that can illuminate the world, shines, the light in which the soul is between death and birth: the realm of the mothers. Only now can Faust begin his journey into the spiritual world, where his ascension is so beautifully described.

Then Goethe can summarize what has become of Faust, from the intuitive striving of that person who despairs of science and turns away, to what he has become from that stage to the highest spiritual knowledge. He can summarize it in the Chorus mysticus, which, as its name indicates, is intended to signify something deeper. In this Chorus mysticus, it is intended to summarize paradigmatically in a few words what holds the key to all the secrets of the world, how everything that is transitory is only a parable for the immortal. That which the physical eye can see is only a parable for the spiritual, the immortal, of which Goethe showed that he even attained the knowledge of re-embodiment when he entered into this spiritual. It shall finally be shown that when man enters into the spiritual kingdom, then all that is present in the physical world as presentiment, as hope, is there a truth. What is striven for in the physical world becomes a presentiment in the spiritual world.

It may appear pedantic when I state here something that one must know to understand the final words.

Goethe spoke somewhat unclearly in his old age because he was toothless. He dictated the second part of his “Faust” to a scribe. Since he still had some of the Frankfurt dialect, some words and sounds came out a bit unclear. So for some words, the scribe used g's where there should have been ch's. For example, “Erreichnis” was written as “Ereignis”. When dictating the final words of Faust, Goethe spoke “Erreichnis”. The inadequate becomes here something that can be achieved, an “Erreichnis”, that is, with two r's and two ch's. Everywhere, in all editions of Goethe's works, you will find “Ereignis” written. Goethe researchers know so little about penetrating into the sense. That which is inadequate in the physical world becomes “achievement” in the spiritual world. What cannot be described in the physical world is done in the spiritual world. There it becomes a living deed.

And finally, we experience the great thing that Goethe is allowed to express in the closing words of the second part of “Faust”: “The eternal feminine”. Oh, it is a sin against Goethe to say that Goethe means the female sex by this. Goethe means that depth which the human soul represents in relation to the mystery of the world, that which longs as the eternal in man: the eternal feminine, that draws the soul up to the eternal immortal, the eternal wisdom, and that gives itself to the eternal masculine. The eternal feminine draws us up to that which is the eternal masculine. It does not refer to something feminine in the ordinary sense. Therefore, we may well seek this eternal feminine in man and woman: the eternal feminine that strives towards the eternal masculine in the cosmos in order to unite, to become one with the divine-spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world, towards which Faust strives. This secret of men of all times, towards which Faust has been striving from the very beginning, this secret to which spiritual science in a modern sense is to lead us, is expressed by Goethe in a paradigmatic and monumental way in those beautiful words at the end of the second part of Faust, which he presents as a mystical spirit-choir, that all physical things which surround us in the world of sense, Maja, illusion, deception, are a parable of the spiritual. But we see this spiritual when we penetrate to what covers it like a veil. In this spiritual we see what cannot be achieved here on earth. We see that which is indescribable for the mind bound to the senses, transformed into real action when the spirit of man unites with the spiritual world. “The indescribable, here it is done.” And we see that which is significant, where the soul unites, lives together with the eternal masculine of the great world, which lives through and weaves through this world. That is the great secret that Goethe expresses with the words:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable;
The inadequate,
Here it becomes reality;
The indescribable,
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
draws us on.

Goethe was able to say to himself: Now I have done my life's work. It does not really matter now what I accomplish on earth during the rest of the time I have left to live.

Goethe sealed up the second part of his “Faust”. And this second part was not given to mankind until after his death, and mankind will have to draw on all of its spiritual science to penetrate the secrets of this mighty work.

Today, only sketches could be given. One could spend hours and weeks using all the means of wisdom to illuminate what Goethe gave to mankind as a testament. May humanity open up this testament more and more! Seal after seal will fall, the more people will have the will to penetrate the secrets of the second part. The voices of those who say, “You are seeking to find something in there that Goethe never intended to put in his work,” will fall silent. Those who speak thus do not know the depths of Goethe's soul. Only those who see the highest in this work and in what Goethe condenses into the mystical chorus, which can conclude so many reflections that are intended to lead to the spirit, recognize this.

Since Ms. Wandrey's illness has prevented her from giving her Faust lectures during our time together in Berlin, I would like to make some brief and rather random remarks about Goethe's “Faust” this morning. I have often lectured on Faust and I hope to one day put together a compilation of what I have said in various lectures in a smaller publication. The Faust theme is an extraordinarily comprehensive one on the one hand, and on the other hand it is extraordinarily difficult, difficult because there are probably not many works of world literature that are as inextricably linked to their author as Goethe's Faust is to Goethe. We need only consider the fact that Goethe brought with him to Weimar a kind of first form of the Faust legend, which he had developed as a Faust legend, and that in Weimar, in a relatively early period, he only had to add a little and work it out in detail, and then he could read it aloud. It is the figure that was published at the end of the 19th century, found in a copy that bears the rather distasteful name “Goethe's Urfaust”. So with this we actually have the Faust figure before us, which Goethe had very early on. Then we have a version of the Faust poem that Goethe published in 1790 out of certain feelings, a “Faust fragment”. I say out of certain feelings, of course, because the fact that Goethe published it was associated with the fact that Goethe actually despaired of finishing this Faust poem at the time. So it was a matter of repelling what he had thought up to that point because he no longer saw any possibility of continuing it. Then we have the form in which 'Faust' appeared in the early 19th century. That is roughly our first part today with the 'Dedication', the 'Prologue in Heaven' and so on. But that is not the end of it, because the “Helena Scene” was already finished at the time, and this now appears as the third act of the second part, so that at the time when Goethe had this figure of “Faust”, he already had in his feelings and thoughts a connection between this Faust figure and the figure of Helen. And then, in 1824, when Goethe was seventy-five years old, he energetically set about rounding off the second part and making it into a full-fledged poem, which he then left as a testament after his death.

We therefore have a piece of writing before us that not only accompanied Goethe throughout his entire life, on which he not only worked throughout his entire life, but which also continually changed its entire inner structure, content, form, conception, everything at all in the course of time. To this we must add that Goethe shows himself in this “Faust” as one of the most truthful poets that we find in world literature. For in writing Faust, his aim was never to present something outwardly beautiful or perfect, but always to give what he could give out of the deepest, innermost sincerity, to give unadorned what his soul had grasped as truth at the time. If we add to this the fact that this Goethean life was a striving through and through, that we can follow how this Goethean life developed and rose from decade to decade, how Goethe thought and recognized new things, formed relationships to new worlds, then we will recognize the importance that lies in the fact that Goethe always let what was in him flow into the Faustian poetry. So it could well be that here and there his “Faust” seemed rather questionable to him, when he undertook what he had written decades ago. In the meantime, he had progressed. Now, what he had created years ago is to be continued.

One thing will be considered here to take a look into Goethe's soul with the help of “Faust”. If you take what has now been published as “Urfaust”, you have something that you can call: It is approximately what brought Goethe to Weimar and rounded off the first Weimar years. It is something that could be called the poetry of a young, extraordinarily talented poet who, however, has not yet been able to bring much of what was actually in his soul out of his soul for himself. For this form of Faust poetry still lacks all the connections that Goethe would later in life call connections with the spiritual world. There are actually only the external, quite realistic human scenes that could be conceived in such youthfulness. It is self-evident that people who want to remain in such a relationship to the spiritual world all their lives, and who do not want to see the becoming, the development in Goethe, find contradictions. Of them, Goethe said:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars
In their favor.

The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
It means the riffraff
One would no longer

But let us look at Goethe's situation, let us look at the matter with regard to Goethe's soul. We can stop at the time when Goethe was in Italy, when he was in Rome, that is, in the second half of the penultimate decade of the 18th century, 1787 to 1788. What happened in the time between when Goethe wrote what is now combined in the Urfaust, until the time in the Goethean soul when he was in Italy, when he regarded as most appropriate the form of art he had given in “Tasso” and in “Iphigenia”? Consider what it means that it is the same personality that had already written the strange, chaotic “Götz von Berlichingen” in its first form on the one hand and then gave the wonderfully rounded form in “Tasso” and “Iphigenie” on the other. It is the same person. For reasons that will become clear later, when we no longer know that these works are by the same poet, it will be possible to prove that the same poet could not possibly have written these things. We can say that there were already different people in Goethe himself in the truest sense of the word. In 1775, Goethe had overcome Goethe, and in 1788, it was the Goethe who wrote “Hexenküche” (Witch's Kitchen) in the Villa Borghese in Rome and the wonderful scene “Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything, why I asked”. It is a fact of profound significance for our knowledge of Goethe's soul that the images of the original Faust, which he wrote in youthful titanic rebellion against the prevailing intellectual currents, arise before Goethe's spirit in the same mood in which “Götz von Berlichingen” was created. In Rome, the same Goethe felt the urge to bring measure and harmony into his conception and to take up the old figures again. He must again honestly and sincerely add something from his present to Faust, seek to continue Faust himself, as he himself has progressed. That was a very difficult situation. The earlier time is no longer there, but it confronted the poet Goethe. He would have had to rewrite everything that had been written so far, or he had something in front of him that was really as if he, at the age of forty, had his figure at seventeen, twenty-five, thirty, and so on, as if he had all that in front of him. And again, if he had completely reworked the whole of Faust, it would not have been true, because he would not have expressed the mood that was in him when he was interested in these scenes. All this makes the Faust legend so tremendously important and so unfit for the philistinism we find in life. But there is still something in Goethe when he wrote the “witch's cauldron” and the scene “sublime spirit”, there is still something there.

What had already occurred before Goethe? Goethe had approached everything that was in his soul, the fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, the Greek-Latin period. He is full of enthusiasm for this fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, for the Greek-Latin period. I have the suspicion, he wrote from Italy, that I am on the trail of the laws of Greek art. The artists proceeded according to the same laws that nature itself follows. After reading Spinoza deeply to find God in nature, when he stands before the works of art in Italy, what appears to him as art, stands before him, as he said: “Here is necessity, here is God.” Now, he felt himself confronted with what he had absorbed in the north from a culture in which what had emerged as the first dawn of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period had essentially played a role. No matter how strange some of the beliefs, legends, and superstitions that emerged during the strange twilight of the Middle Ages may seem, they are connected to the cultural period that followed the Greco-Latin period. And now, in this period, the completion of the human being in the Greco-Latin period stands before Goethe's mind in a very remarkable way. It was a perfection that was brought about by the fact that this cultural period, which is the middle of the post-Atlantic period, is preceded by three periods that are repeated to a certain extent later, but that this fourth period is the middle, the center of gravity of the post-Atlantic period, that at that time man went out into the physical world to the utmost. Hence the sense of completion and calm perfection in this art. That was what made such an impression on Goethe. He felt: when you have such a work of art before you, you do not need to go out into space, into the external world, everything has been poured into the work of art. — It was this outpouring into form, into the “how”, that particularly gripped him.

In the north, he was confronted by what he himself loved so much with the other side of his nature in the early days. Take a Gothic cathedral or the art of Dürer, Holbein and so on. There we have what prepared the fifth period. The works of art are not closed. You have to look for what is inside the work of art. A Greek temple is complete, so complete that no one needs to be there. The Gothic cathedral is not; it is only complete when there are devoted people in it. Until the time of decline in Greece, we always have the spiritual in the outer form. But in Dürer's form, we have the endeavor everywhere to go deeper than what the outer form expresses. The forms are sometimes ugly in the Greek sense because a powerful will wants to express itself there. In his youth, Goethe was a follower of this art, of Shakespearean art, which is the opposite of Greek art. What is here like two opposing elements in Goethe's soul would hardly have caused such inner turmoil in another soul. For Goethe wanted nothing less than to have everything that confronted him in the external world, and at the same time the supersensible, the spiritual. He was not one of those people who were satisfied with the external form, but rather one of those who valued the external form that he saw in Greek-Latin art so much because the supersensible was present at the same time. Form itself was a super-sensible reality. For Goethe, what is given in nature, what otherwise confronts him in the world, is already Maya, great illusion; Maya or great illusion is everywhere present. But from art he demanded that it place the true in the midst of Maya, the Greek temple, the Greek god, which from the super-sensible point of view is the true. Thus Goethe was thirsty for the truth of the supersensible in the sensible, drunk with Greek-Latin art because he wanted to place a realm of truth in the realm of Maja through art. All that is untrue should be removed from art.

But on the other hand, he saw how dangerous such an artistic demand is. Through spiritual science, we know why it is dangerous. Because every form of art is tied to a particular epoch, because it cannot reappear later. That was something for the fourth period, but not for the fifth. There, people had to focus on the supersensible, which cannot express itself in form. That was the fate of humanity, to be judged by that. Hence the struggle in the Nordic cultures against all outward appearance, the grotesque appearance of the spiritual in everything. As long as one — Goethe said to himself — merely talks about these things — Goethe said this to himself when he was sitting in the Villa Borghese —, as long as one merely talks, as I also did in my youth, one is not really true. For in external speech, the phrase is unavoidable as long as it is not imbued with inner soul. Everything Goethe had created up to that point seemed to him to be untrue compared to the plan he now had to place truth in art in the Maja. Thus arose in him the urge to bring across into the new era that which, like an eternal, can live on in every epoch, to bring across from the Greek-Latin epoch that which can live on. Do you grasp that? No, it is unconsciously brought across, because every cultural epoch stands on the earlier one. Unconsciously, the fourth lived on in the fifth cultural epoch. All this lived in Goethe as an urge: how can one consciously bring this across, how can one let that which lived at that time and has eternal value flow over? How would it appear if people could consciously transfer what lived in Greco-Latin culture into their consciousness? — This was something that lived in Goethe's soul: What would a person who had lived entirely in the Greco-Latin period and who now consciously transferred his consciousness into later times be like? — This was the beginning of the whole problem of reincarnation in Goethe's soul. It could not have been more deeply felt at that time. He wondered how one could consciously transfer earlier cultural ideas into later cultural ideas. It lived in him so much that he did not know how to grasp it in his own soul. In the subconscious soul lay that which had transformed the soul in such a way that in the transition from the fourth to the fifth period a figure as remarkable as Faust could appear.

Faust really lived and is registered in the records of the University of Heidelberg. What kind of a person was he? In a certain sense he was a contemporary of Nostradamus. He was a man who felt, in a certain way, the longing to bring forth, more or less consciously, what must now be brought forth again from the hidden depths of the soul. The third cultural epoch is to be brought up again. It is Faust's destiny to bring up this third cultural epoch again. The justification of such a spirit, alongside the spirit that arose as an ideal in Goethe's soul, was always clear to Goethe. He could never doubt that this modern spirit had a right to exist alongside the ideal man in his soul from the Greco-Latin period. But now he said to himself: This spirit must dive down into the depths of its own soul, must become acquainted with all that divides man when he enters the higher worlds. No sooner has man approached the “Keeper of the Threshold” than Goethe felt that a multitude of figures immediately confront him. Thus, for Goethe, Faust became a highly questionable figure, but one that he could not ignore: “How is the spirit that I have carried over from the fourth cultural period legitimately contained in a spirit in transition to the fifth cultural period?” It is contained in such a way that all the dangers that confront man when he passes the “keeper of the threshold” and enters the supersensible worlds must play a part in the striving. That Faust enters the supersensible worlds emerges from his longing, from his intuitive contemplation. Goethe was aware of this from the outset, but only gradually became aware of the dangers that still existed at that time, but no longer do today, because they can be avoided by following the teachings in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But Faust still faced these dangers. The way in which Faust enters the supersensible worlds is such that, simultaneously with the arising of a certain imaginative realization, an arousal, an inflammation and ignition of the lower passionate life must go along with it. Both things cannot be separated unless a regular spiritual path is taken. These things cannot be separated, you can also read that in Blavatsky. She says that one can only notice how the karma of someone who wants to penetrate into the spiritual worlds changes, how he can bring misfortune upon those around him if he does not enter the higher worlds in a regular way, how he spreads the circles that emanate from the impulses within him over his entire environment. In return, his own urges and passions also mingle in the higher worlds; worlds of forms surround the human being.

Goethe had to picture these real seekers of the spirit before his soul because he stood on the ground of having an inkling within himself of the absolute truth of Greek and Latin culture. He had to picture this seeker of the spirit of the fifth period with all its difficulties before his soul. What surrounds such a man, what dangers befall him? In the whole world of sense there is nothing that corresponds to what such a man experiences. He must enter into the spiritual world. But first one must know how what such a person experiences differs from the sense world. That is why there is the 'witch's kitchen': because Goethe wanted to show the whole supersensible environment into which Faust had to enter, because it had to be shown how the supersensible worlds present themselves in all the antecedents of which we have spoken. One must accept this 'witch's kitchen' as part of the spiritual world. It must be realized that Goethe knew certain secrets of the supersensible world, so that he was able to describe accurately how things are actually perceived by the clairvoyant consciousness. Thus the supersensible world is described with extraordinary accuracy, with all the seething human passions being described when the terrible process of entering the spiritual world takes place. All the seething passions that arise there are reflected in the monkeys, which have the names Meerkat and Meerkat, and are reflected in everything that is appropriately depicted in the “witch's kitchen”.

But Goethe has the urge to get Faust up to the truth, not to this world of untruth. It is a world that is absolutely true in fact, but a world that is even more illusion than the ordinary world of the senses is for the senses, Maja. Goethe must endeavor to approach the truth. He must depict how the external world, to which Mephistopheles belongs, the supersensible world, which is depicted in the “Witches' Kitchen”, is surrounded. Goethe wants to show that Faust can get out of the world from which Mephisto can receive his inspiration. Imagine a person placed in the supersensible world, as Faust is in the “witches' kitchen.” If one can no longer find one's way in this world, then not even the ordinary laws of the number system can be right. It does not depend on a witty interpretation of the witches' multiplication table; one must feel what it means to really stand in the presence of what is written in the witches' multiplication table:

You must understand!
From one, make ten,
And two let go,
And three make equal,
So you are rich.
Lose the four!
From five and six,
So says the witch,
Do seven and eight,
And it is done:
And nine is one,
And ten is none.
That is the witch's multiplication table.

It is about putting oneself in the shoes of a person who suddenly finds themselves in this world, where everything is different, after having known the ordinary number system. If you interpret these things more or less ingeniously, you do a disservice to the poetry, because it then seems as if the poet himself had symbolized it that way. No, the situation was vivid before the poet. Anyone who calls Goethe a symbolist or an abstract thinker shows that he is incapable of grasping the meaningful and real aspects of this situation. What had to happen to Faust if he did not want to destroy his own karma and that of those around him, such as Gretchen? It was a long way from this Faust to the one who speaks out of the contemplation of the fourth cultural epoch: Oh, from the human heart arise the imaginations that spin a web around the whole world of illusion:

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked. You did not give me
Your face in the fire in vain.
Gave me the glorious nature of the kingdom,
Strength to feel and enjoy it. Not
Coldly astonished visitors, you only allow,
Allow me to look into her deep chest
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks,
The giant spruce topples, crushing neighboring branches
And neighboring trunks, sweeping them down,
And the hill thunders hollowly with their fall,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, showing
Then to myself, and to my own breast
Deep, secret wonders open up.

That is Faust, who speaks with nature by connecting his imaginative world with what is present as Maja or illusion, who is different from the one to whom Mephistopheles may say so strangely:

How would you, poor son of the earth,
Have led your life without me?
From the creeping craw of the imagination
I have cured you for a time.

How did he cure him? By introducing him to the transcendental world. But Faust is not to be cured of imagination in this way, but rather in such a way that he recognizes imagination as the all-embracing Maja, the illusion. What is necessary for Faust to be able to say:

And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks,
The giant spruce toppling neighbor branches
And neighbor trunks squashing down,
And her fall dull hollow the hill thunders,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then show me myself, and to my own breast
Deep, secret wonders open up.

In order for this classical sense of calm to arise, what must Faust confront in the “witch's kitchen”, where he must lose himself if he does not develop something very specific? He must not proceed like a theosophical theorist; he must come to himself like a human being with a very specific experience; he must see himself objectively. He must encounter something in the “witch's kitchen” in which he sees himself. Something of higher truth must appear in the imagination, but something that has a higher reality than the “witch's kitchen”. The higher self is feminine for man. This is very realistically depicted in the appearance of “Helena” in the “witch's kitchen”, the appearance of the etheric body, which can only be seen from a certain distance. Faced with this figure, Mephistopheles says, because he does not understand her:

With this potion in your body,
Soon you will see Helens in every woman.

This is portrayed from a true poetic impulse that strives for what people of the outer world will not see as what is important. For the people of the fifth period, there will still be a question about what they need, a question that could easily be somewhat ambiguous, but when it is truly answered, it is easy to understand. How could one speak to the most important matter of the people of the fifth period?

What is cursed and always welcome?
What is longed for and always chased away?
What is constantly defended?
What is harshly scolded and accused?
Who should not be summoned?
Whom does everyone like to hear named?
What approaches your throne's steps?
What has banished itself away?

It is a remarkable enigmatic speech with which Goethe approaches us at the beginning of the second part. One could find enough words to solve this riddle, but for our humanity the best solution will be found if one word is applied to everything that is asked. The word: Spirit. But Goethe did not want it to be so easy to solve the riddle, he did not want to present it so bluntly. But the spirit is enchanted in the most diverse ways and yet always welcome. One need only observe the spiritual development of mankind to know: What is longed for and always chased away? One need only point to spiritual science, for example. In those days, the spirit was only allowed to show itself in the guise of the court jester, otherwise it was not very welcome.

The big question is how the fifth post-Atlantic culture should come to spirit, to spirit from what it has, how it can grasp the actual basic essence of the world. Now, in no cultural epoch has humanity been better suited to finding the spirit in the form of the ego than in our cultural epoch. But how could one find the true nature of man if one could grasp this I on the basis, on the background of the astral body? Let us assume that if a person in the 19th or even the 16th century wanted to find out what the astral body is. Imagination is not something that a person has in their external perception. Man should seek the astral body, that which lies at the basis of the moon-time of the outer development of the I. Of course, because all the powers can reach everywhere, even when man applies the intellect to things, he can arrive at something, but what will he bring out of the astral body? Let us assume what emerges from the astral body when we apply to it that which is well suited to the external world of maya. We cannot express this more aptly than by calling what emerges from the astral body the homunculus. The homunculus has something to do with the astral body, as it is structured around that which is the I. We are dealing with the supersensible, so that Goethe is allowed to coin a word here that from the outset refers to something that is created in the supersensible world. Then Wagner says – the philistine intellect does indeed produce the homunculus in the laboratory –:

It will! The mass stirs more clearly!
The conviction of the true, the true!
What was praised as mysterious in nature,
We dare to try intelligently,
And what otherwise allowed her to organize,
We let crystallize.

With these words of conviction, commentators have tried to explain the strangest thing, because they could not understand that it is not a matter of conviction here, but that Goethe, in the sense in which he speaks of the superhuman, is speaking here of a conviction. But the second part of Faust has been commented on in such a strange way that the spelling mistakes have been commented on. For example, when Goethe dictated and the writer wrote: “Only do not strive for higher orders” and so on — it is truly not meant here, but the one to whom Goethe dictated wrote “order” instead of “places”. These things that we have here show us that for Goethe, after he had envisioned Faust in all his spiritual striving, the question now becomes particularly urgent: How can one consciously bring across consciousness? — The consciousness that lived, for example, in Helena, who now came before his mind. That was the burning question. In this context, I must mention – you have to take the Goethe of 1797 – that the greatest change that has ever taken place in the entire soul of Goethe has occurred. At the same time that the Faust figure in him, as a result of the necessity to think it, not only as a result of processes of the inner soul, when he had to write the “Prologue in Heaven”, all things in his inner being changed, so to speak. Then necessity also approached him, to give ever more definite form to this conscious coming over of consciousness from the fourth to the fifth period. Hence also the endeavor to solve the question somehow.

I have often hinted at how Goethe attempts to solve the question of reincarnation in poetry by showing that the eternal part of Helena rests in the spiritual world of the “mothers”. But man cannot enter the spiritual world without further ado, otherwise what happened to Faust when he looked at the image of Helena would paralyze him. The spirit must first envelop itself with the soul, then with the natural body. Helena envelops herself with the soul when soul material is made available in the astral as a homunculus. In the homunculus we have the forces of the astral body of a human being entering into existence.

He does not lack spiritual qualities,
But he is sorely lacking in tangible substance.

Everything is described quite appropriately, and finally the enveloping with the outer nature, where we are shown how the external corporeality is taken up. There he must pass through all the elements of nature, beginning with the mineral world and passing through the plant world. Goethe finds the wonderful word “It grunelt so” (it grunts so) to indicate what can pass from the greening plant world into human nature. So it goes through everything. “... until you reach man.” But then you cannot go any further.

Because once you have become a human being,
Then you are completely finished.

This continues until the human being comes into existence through the mystery of love, which is so wonderfully portrayed, as the human being is called into existence through the mystery of love, through the mystery of the sexual opposition. After Goethe has portrayed everything that precedes the mystery, he has the sirens express the wonder:

What fiery wonder transfigures the waves
That crash against each other, sparkling?
So it shines and sways and brightens up,
The bodies glow on their nocturnal path,
And all around is enveloped in fire;
So let Eros, who started it all, reign!

And man comes into existence.

Hail to the mild-favored airs!
Hail to mysterious tombs!
Here be celebrated,
Element, all four of you!

And we turn the page. Act Three: Helena has arrived. These things must not be grasped with coarse hands, must not be entrusted to external interpretation. These things can only be described by running after and slipping into what is being expressed, by dissolving them in the metamorphosing water, as in Goethe. But that is all there is to it. In Goethe is the urge to consciously bring up what has unconsciously lived in man of the fourth cultural period and what must consciously come up.

And then Goethe still uses the moral-religious-mystical element of the north to show how what has shown itself unjustifiably in the “witch's kitchen” can indeed come out justified. He shows this so magnificently in the final scene, where spiritual science and mystery interact so wonderfully, where everything that lived in Goethe is so wonderfully compressed in the 'Chorus mysticus', that this Chorus mysticus can almost be used as a symbol of spiritual science, which is already expressed by the scattered roses, and when it is said:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable;
Here it becomes reality;
The ineffable
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
draws us on

In just a few lines, everything that we recognize as spiritual scientific truth is expressed.

after the eurythmic-dramatic presentation of the “Easter Vigil”

Among the Easter performances that have just passed before our minds were also those that depict how a soul that is about to pass through the gate of death through its own decision is brought back into the world of earthly life through the Easter message. I believe that, of the many impressions that the Faust story can have on us, this scene must be one of the most profound. Now, after the transformation, I would like to say, after the transformation, ¹ the scene that signifies the world with its evolution, bring that you have absorbed as a prospect within the Faustian poetry into your soul, in connection with what was said here yesterday, so to speak, before the transformation, about that meaningful real vision that can arise in the human soul when it steps before the symbol of Jesus Christ resting in the tomb. Let us bear in mind that yesterday we were able to say that the sight of what is connected with human life through its development on earth in relation to the world of Lucifer and Ahriman is evoked through a corresponding spiritual contemplation or spiritual perception. Let us bear in mind that in the Faust epic we have a soul which announces itself to us immediately at the beginning of the poem as having absorbed Ahrimanic knowledge and insights. And then let us look into this soul as it struggles out of its connection with the Ahrimanic wisdom towards the — we may say from our point of view — Christ-imbued source of life: a momentous moment that is presented to us for a human soul. Let us visualize this human soul! There she stands before us with all the knowledge she has absorbed through observing the external material world and its interrelations, with the insight she has been able to gain through the instruments by which the external naturalist attempts to penetrate the interrelations of nature... And what has this soul come to with all the research that is linked to the various instruments and also to the phial containing the juices that “quickly make one drunk” for earthly life? We feel how an Ahrimanic nature already rules at the side of the Faust soul, and how this Ahrimanic nature is linked to what is earthly death. Do we not see how this human soul, filled with Ahrimanic nature, draws the result of its Ahrimanic insights? And this result of knowledge that Ahriman can give to man on earth is what is summarized in the words:

I greet you, you only vial!
Which I now bring down with devotion,
In you I honor human wit and art.
You epitome of the sweet slumber potions,
You distillation of all deadly subtle powers,
Do show your favor to your master!
I see you, pain is alleviated,
I grasp you, the striving is diminished,
The spirit's flood tide ebbs away little by little.
I am expelled into the high sea,
The mirror tide glistens at my feet,
A new day beckons to new shores.

And already this soul has the vision of coming to the other shore, where it may be able to find that which it must believe it cannot find on this earth because of its ahrimanic entanglement. Already it has the vision of crossing over to the other shore:

A chariot of fire floats, on light wings,
Towards me! I feel ready,
On a new path to penetrate the ether,
To new spheres of pure activity.
This lofty life, this divine bliss!
You, still a worm, and do you deserve them?
Yes, just turn your back resolutely
to the lovely sun of the earth!
Dare to tear open the gates,
before which everyone likes to sneak by.
Here it is time to prove by action
That manly dignity does not give way to the height of the gods,
Not to tremble before that dark cave,
In which the imagination condemns itself to its own torment,
To strive towards that passageway,
Around whose narrow mouth the whole of hell is aflame;
To take this step serenely,
And, even if it means flowing into nothingness,

And now that he has also taken up the other Ahrimanic instrument, he is ready to take the path over to those realms that he learned in Ahriman's school are numberless to the soul as long as it is enclosed in the earthly body. And this soul is torn out of this mood by the sound of the Easter bells and the choir of the Easter song. And so the Faust soul has lived an earthly life to now seek within the earthly body what this human soul, as a result of its seeking in the earthly body, is to carry through the gate of death, so that it can carry it up into the spiritual realm where it needs it for its further development.

What you have heard today from the first part of Goethe's “Faust”, and much of what belongs to this part, to this scene of Goethe's “Faust”, first appeared as the completed first part of the poem in 1808. But before that, in 1790, Goethe had already published “Faust, a fragment”, this fragment, which did not yet have the last Gretchen scene. But this fragment did not even have the scene that has brought the events of such significance for Faust's soul to our own soul today. In 1790, Goethe published his fragment without this Easter scene and without the monologue that leads to the deepest depths of human and spiritual experience. And at the end of the 19th century, what Goethe had finished in the 1780s, even as early as the 1770s, was discovered in the 1790s. It was then published under the tasteless title “Urfaust”. In this Urfaust, we do not find, one might say, of course, this Easter scene. Why is it not there? Yes, Goethe, who was a child of his time, had to mature in order to be able to depict the effect of the Christ impulse on Faust's soul in his own way, in accordance with his soul; he first had to mature for this. And Goethe was not ripe for it until 1790. The nineties saw the deepening of Goethe's soul, which found its reflection in the well-known “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. It falls into the time between the moment when “Faust” was published without the Easter scene and the moment when it was published with the Easter scene. Goethe's soul experienced a profound deepening through what it developed in the “Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. And it was only through this experience that Goethe realized how he could allow the Easter experience scene to affect Faust's soul.

Now, let us look into this soul of Faust itself, and try to put ourselves in the place of the beginning of Goethe's “Faust,” which is more or less the same in the various successive publications. We know that it reads:

I now, alas! have philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine,
And unfortunately also theology!
Thoroughly studied, with hot endeavor.
There I stand now, I poor fool!
And am as wise as before;
I am called Magister, even Doktor,
And for ten years now,
Up and down and hither and thither,
I have led my students by the nose –
And I see that we cannot know anything!

So he has been a lecturer for ten years. Let us assume that he entered the teaching career regularly, then we might think that he became a lecturer around the age of thirty. In fact, he has been leading his students by the nose since the age of thirty! Let us recall what I said yesterday. In the thirties, the human being will stand before the image of the Jupiter existence when he visualizes the seduction I spoke of yesterday. And a vision, a prophetic vision of this seduction, is what one has before one when one stands before Christ Jesus lying in the tomb. Do we not have this vision dramatically developed in Faust? Does he not stand before us before the Easter Mystery, and does he not stand before us, one might say, at the end of the 1830s, before the Easter Mystery? May we not assume that in his feelings, what man must feel from the Easter Mystery, rumbles like a premonition of the Jupiter experience with Lucifer and Ahriman? In Goethe's time one could not present it as one can present it now, but Goethe could present the rumbling sensation in the heart towards the Easter Mystery, and it rumbled in Faust's soul. And is it not as if Faust felt, when Mephisto-Ahriman approaches him, how his soul has fallen prey to the Ahrimanic powers? How he has to save himself from something? Yes, but from what? From what must he save himself? Can we not say that Goethe sensed something of this when, as a mature man, as a mature soul, he allowed the spirit of his own Faust to take effect on him again, as he was able to sense it in his time, of the Easter mood that we have been picturing in our minds these days, and that this gave rise to the need to insert the Easter scene into “Faust”, which did not have this Easter scene before? The “Faust” was re-written into Christian verse with the insertion of the Easter scene between the years 1790 and 1800.

So what years did Faust have to live through? Before which years of life did he shudder so much that he wanted to reach for the vial himself? Well, before the second, descending part of life, that part of life of which we have said how man, when he stands before the vision of the Jupiter existence, knows that later on he must carry to Jupiter that which the Christ can give him as provisions for the journey, because otherwise he would have to go without nourishment in the second half of life. What is Faust seeking? He seeks nourishment for the soul for the second half of life. We have all been seeking it since the time when the Mystery of Golgotha has passed over the evolution of our Earth. We are all seeking it. For that which will take physical and psychic form on Jupiter is already living in the depths of our souls, and we must all feel something of this Faustian mood. We need a power that we cannot have through that which, as human beings, only gives us freedom and thus leads us to Ahriman and Lucifer; we need a power for those impulses in us that are connected with the descending half of life. It is the power of Christ, the power of Christ, which the Christ has after he has passed through the gate of death and has not lived through in an earthly body the second half of man's life. Why did he not live through it? Because this power, which must be bestowed upon people in the second half of life, had to flow into the earth aura so that all people can find themselves through the evolution of the earth. Through the Easter mystery, that which we need to enable us to journey through our entire life on earth with our soul is resurrected. And now imagine this profound connection in Goethe's “Faust”. Faust has absorbed within himself — Goethe knew how to absorb this, because he presented it without the Easter mystery when he published his fragment without the Easter mystery — Faust has absorbed within himself what man can absorb through the connection with Lucifer and Ahriman, what gives us the possibility of a free soul. But Faust, who measures the depths of the soul, is aware that he cannot continue to live with him; he needs something else in order to live. And Goethe was ripe to show what Faust needs, what is the impulse of the Easter Mystery. Does not the Easter Mystery stand profoundly before us in what Goethe made of his “Faust” only as a fully mature man, what he could not yet have included in 1790 because he did not yet understand it?

How did the poetic idea for this poem, which takes us to such depths, come about in the young Goethe? We know that the young Goethe was deeply impressed both by the puppet show of Faust, which he saw, where the fate of Faust was simply presented through puppets, and by the folk play of “Doctor Faust”. This thoroughly popular element came before Goethe's soul. What then is this Faust? And Goethe's soul immediately realized: this Faust must be the striving human being in general, who, through his striving, can dive down into all the depths of the human soul and must find the way up to the bright heights of the spirit. That an inner path must be traversed by a human soul, the young Goethe knew that. For what is it, after all, if not a meditation that Faust experiences in his soul as he gazes at the various signs? It is a meditation that ultimately leads him to the vision of the Earth Spirit that flows through and permeates the Earth. The meditation receives the words in response:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and death,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I work at the whirring loom of time
And weave the living garment of divinity.

Meditation and counter-meditation! It leads Faust into the depths of life, but how to get out? How to ascend to spiritual heights?

Now that we have placed ourselves before the soul, what a grandiose idea of the striving Faust in Goethe's soul arose from the puppet show and the folk play, and what form this grandiose idea took through the penetration of the Goethean soul into the mystery of the soul, we now ask ourselves: What did Goethe make of Faust throughout his life? After we have realized the magnitude of what Goethe's soul was capable of through the impact of the Faust impulse, we may well ask ourselves: What did these impressions become in artistic and poetic terms? Well, one thing I just said can help us in our quest to understand this 'Faust' in aesthetic and artistic terms as well. Goethe published a fragment that roughly concludes with the cathedral scene in 1790. What makes the “Faust” seem so grandiose to us today is not in it. He added it later, when he was in Rome. In 1787, he added what we now know as the “Witches' Kitchen”. He inserted other scenes into the manuscript at other times. The original manuscript was written and copied by someone else, and at the time the later scenes were added, Schiller himself described it as a “yellowed manuscript”. And when Schiller called upon Goethe at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century to do something to round off Faust, Goethe said that it would be difficult for him to take on the old monster Faust again and to appropriately complete what had been left unfinished for so long. Goethe was afraid of incorporating into this his “Faust” that with which he had later matured, into all that he was and had appeared by the year 1790.

And now let us look at the first part of this “Faust”. Is it not a work that we can clearly see has been patched together from what was created at different times? If people were not attached to traditional judgments, they would see in “Faust” the most magnificent poetic idea that has ever come into the world with regard to the individual human being. At the same time, they would have to admit to themselves that in terms of art and poetry, this “Faust” is the most inconsistent, that it is a thoroughly disharmonious work, into which one could still put many things that are not in it, that has cracks and fissures everywhere, that is artistically far from perfect. Goethe's great genius could only ever complete fragments of what was before his soul. And however much we may admire the magnificent beauty of individual scenes, if we are not merely attached to the traditional judgment that literary historians have passed, but if we are unbiased, we cannot deny that “Faust” as it is is not a harmonious work of art, that it is glued in many places, but shows cracks and fissures everywhere. Why is this so? At a very advanced age, Goethe once again undertook to complete the second part of his Faust, for which he already had individual scenes, to which he added what he could add in his very old age. For example: the beginning of the classical-romantic phantasmagoria, the Helena interlude, was already completed around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, and some parts were completed earlier. And again, we have every reason not to say, as some literary historians say, that one cannot understand the second part of “Faust,” or, as a very clever man, who is by no means stupid, said, that “Faust” is “a cobbled-together, patched-up concoction of old age.” It is not! On the other hand, it is a work whose task was so great that even Goethe's rich life experience was not enough in his time to shape it. One may well have one's own opinion even about the greatest things in the world. But why is that so? Well, I have already indicated on one occasion, in a lecture series held in The Hague, that this Faust is by no means, I would say, so extraordinarily young in world history. Faust, as he lived in the folk play that Goethe saw and as he lived in the puppet show, represents the human being descending into the depths of spiritual life and the human being wanting to rise to the light of the heights; he represents him in such a way that the greatest poet of modern times needed the Easter mystery for the liberation of his soul. As he appears in the folk play, he is a combination of the external physical reality, of the Dr. Georg Faust, who lived in the second half of the Middle Ages and wandered around like a tramp; of whom Trithem of Sponheim as well as other important men who met him report, and who even had a certain respect for him, the respect that one has for a remarkable personality who, through the way he expresses himself emotionally, knows many things and is capable of many things. And it was not for nothing that this real Doctor Faust was called by the name, as I have once stated here:

Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior, fons necromanticorum, Magus Secundus, Chiromanticus Aeromanticus, Pyromanticus, in hydra arte secundus.

That was the name he gave himself. Now, it was common in those days to have many titles, and a long list of similar-sounding titles could be said of Giordano Bruno and many other important minds of the Middle Ages. If today's sophisticated people may find it strange that Trithem von Sponheim and others who knew about the existence of this real Faust thought that he was in contact with demonic powers of the world and the earth and through them was able to accomplish many things, then we must remember that in Luther's time, for example, there was nothing special about telling such a story. We know how Luther himself wrestled with the devil. We know that all this was common practice, the views and stories of that time. But a feeling lived in all this, which helped to shape Faust in the popular consciousness. The feeling lived — I say the feeling and not the concept, not the idea — natural science is coming up, natural science, which brings the Ahrimanic part of real reality before the human soul. And from this arose the feeling that Faust is a personality, and always has been, who has something to do with these Ahrimanic powers. People saw, as it were, the secret spiritual connecting threads that went from the soul of Faust to the Ahrimanic powers. And they found that Faust's destiny was tied to this inclination towards the Ahrimanic powers. That the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic has to do with the entire evolution of the human soul was still sensed and felt from the remnants of ancient clairvoyance and clear-sighted knowledge. And so the Faust figure was linked to this feeling of man's connection with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers. But at the same time, this intuitive knowledge was already descending into twilight, becoming unclear. And so, one might say, the feeling arose that one could depict the striving human being with all his temptations and dangers for his soul in the figure of Faust. But how this striving of the human being is connected with Lucifer and Ahriman was no longer known exactly. It had become blurred, and that is where the tremendous vagueness came from, which one gets a sense of when one picks up the medieval Faust book, in which all that the folk character is said to have experienced is where everything is thrown together in a grotesque ragout of all kinds of adventures that the human soul experiences in its quest to master all possible demonic and elementary spirits, Ahriman and Lucifer. After they were no longer seen in their full form, after they were shattered and ground into a ragout with all possible elemental spirits of nature, the figure of Doctor Faust was now placed in this ragout in this folk book. It was only Goethe's inspired insight that was able to discern in this gruesome ragout the mighty fundamental idea and to develop it to the point of the Easter Mystery. But it is really quite interesting to observe how, I might say, Lucifer and Ahriman were gradually dismembered into such ragout pieces.

If we go back and search for the figure of Faust in ancient times, we can look in books that were written as popular books at the time and that were in the hands of all those who were dealing with matters related to such things at the time. Augustine's works were very widespread when this book was written, cobbled together, glued together. One has the feeling of a bookseller who wanted to make a book that was as thick as possible, and not as if it were from a writer or even a literary man. But he must have known his Augustine, especially the biography of Augustine. And Augustine presents himself to us in all his development in such a remarkable way. How he at first cannot understand what Christianity is in its essence, how he gradually overcomes the inner resistance that he must bring to bear on Christianity in the development of his soul, first to what can now become known to him from the Manichaean doctrine. And from a great and important man within the Manichaean sect, Augustine receives knowledge from the Manichaean bishop Faustus. And we almost sense who this Faustus senior is, in comparison to whom the Faustus I mentioned earlier calls himself Faustus junior. He is the one whom Augustine once encountered in ancient times, the one who represented something of the Manichaean doctrine as Faustus, as bishop of the Manichaeans.

But what did he represent of the Manichaean doctrine? That which is corroded by Ahriman, that which no longer allows one to see how man, with his soul, is connected to the whole cosmos, to all cosmic, all stellar impulses. One can say: Even in the Manichean Bishop Faustus, the bond of knowledge that leads up to the cosmic insights that show how the human soul is born out of the cosmos, and which one must know if one wants to understand the Easter mystery in truth, is already torn. So it could be that in the person who wrote the folk book about Doctor Faust, precisely through the figure that Augustine describes as the Manichean bishop Faustus, it could emerge in this writer and compiler through the figure of Faustus, who had fallen prey to Ahriman. But since everything had become blurred, he did not understand that it was going against Ahriman. We see the scraps of the Ahrimanic danger shimmering through the stories of the folk play, but we see nothing clear. Yet we can get a clear feeling that Faustus is to be presented as the representative of the striving human being, so that danger threatens him from the Ahrimanic side. And much of what has been added to the Faust figure as it developed up to Goethe has been added by that Manichean Bishop Faustus, Faust senior. Many chapters of the folk tale seem as if they had been copied, but badly copied, only from the book in which Augustine describes his own development and his encounter with Bishop Faustus. We can prove that the Ahrimanic trait in the Faust figure points in this direction, and that when the folk book was written only the last dark urge remained to depict the Ahrimanic elements of human nature in the Faust figure.

And now, what about the Luciferic element? How were the Luciferic elements chopped up into those ragout pieces, which were then cooked into the ragout of elemental spirits and pieces of Lucifer and Ahriman, as I just said? Yes, we have to search if we want to find the connection between Faust and Lucifer. We can also search for it historically, we don't even have to go terribly far, we just have to go to Basel, and we can find clues in Basel as to how Lucifer was chopped up into a ragout. We are told that Erasmus of Rotterdam met with Faust in Basel, where they wanted to have a meal in the college, but could not find the right food. And since Erasmus lacked something that should now taste good to him, he told Faust, who was sitting with him and wanted to eat with him, but they had nothing right. So the Faust saga tells us that Faustus was now able to suddenly bring to the table, cooked and roasted, from somewhere - we don't know where - very strange birds that were not otherwise available in Basel. So we see a scene between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faust, in which Faust is able to present such birds, which could not be bought in Basel at the time, nor far and wide in the surrounding area, to Erasmus. What is it actually? As such, it is not at all comprehensible in the legend, one can say, completely incomprehensible, but it becomes more understandable to us if we go back and bring together what we can gain from the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who himself tells us that he made the acquaintance of a certain Faustus Andrelinus in Paris. This Faustus Andrelinus was an extremely learned man, but also an extremely sensual man. At first, Erasmus became so familiar with this Faustus that he had no real taste for the sensual sides of this Faustus. But again, we hear about a meal that the two are said to have eaten together. Now, however, two learned gentlemen of the time, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faustus Andrelinus – we cannot expect them to serve each other such birds and in such a way, as Faustus of Basel is said to have served them to Erasmus. So it is likely that what has been handed down to us is just a kind of, I would say, joking speech that the two exchanged at the meal. But we do get a little behind this jocular talk when we also hear within this talk that Faust – this time it is probably Faust – was not satisfied with what was served to him, and demanded something else. Faust would now like to eat, in order to particularly torment himself, strange birds and rabbits; yes, strange birds and rabbits. Erasmus initially has the idea that this must mean something. So he behaves exactly like some theosophists who reflect on what things mean. Well, then the other one says, okay, he wants to do without the rabbits. Erasmus said: Could it not mean flies and ants? He wants to do without the rabbits. But the birds really are flies, and he wants to kill himself with flies for a change. Now we are very far. Now the birds have transformed into flies through astral transformation. And in Goethe we have the god of the flies in the figure of Mephisto. All that is needed is the spirit that commands these beings, and it could conjure up these beings. And so we have built the connecting bridge from the incomprehensible Basel legend and the strange birds to the flies that simply come from the devil. And we need not be surprised that the devil presents flies to him whom he invites to the table. But what kind of soul Faustus Andrelinus has, what kind of soul he has, that much becomes clear to us when we follow Erasmus a little further on his journey in Paris. In Paris, Erasmus was not yet quite inclined to engage with this Faustus Andrelinus character. But then he has to make a trip to London. There he writes that he has now learned – truly, Erasmus, think! , that he had manners like a coarse peasant, — that he has now learned to bow and even knows how to move around on the court parquet! And, yes, Erasmus writes it, that he lives in an atmosphere where, as you come and go, you always kiss each other by mistake. One recognizes from this that he wants to meet the tastes of his Parisian friend. He writes: “Come over here.” And if the gout prevents you too much, come over through the air in the spirit chariot. That is an element for you! — One sees that Faustus has a connection with the Luciferic kind of soul tendency.

With Goethe, we then encounter how Faust carries out his seductions by seducing Gretchen and so on. Lucifer has really fallen so far from the surroundings of the Faust figure that one must already do such literary investigations if we want to state the connection of Faust with Lucifer in the Parisian Faust. But we literally see Faust standing there, Lucifer and Ahriman at his side, albeit indistinctly through the confused time, boiled down into a ragout in the folk play. Should we be surprised to find in the folk play and folk drama, and even in Marlowe's Faust, something that is a remnant of ancient beliefs, still rooted in those times when man's connection with Ahriman and Lucifer was recognized through atavistic clairvoyance? But all this has become blurred, and in the literary product of which we have spoken, it is presented in a thoroughly blurred way. Goethe sensed the deep connection. But what could Goethe not do? He could not separate Lucifer and Ahriman from each other. They merged for him into the hybrid figure of Mephisto, in whom one does not really know whether it is the devil, Ahriman, or the real Mephisto. For he has also taken upon himself what Lucifer has. Goethe receives the ragout, as it were; he senses that Ahriman and Lucifer are at work, but he cannot yet sort it out; he devours them in the occult impossibility of the figure of Mephisto, who is a hybrid of Ahriman and Lucifer. One would like to be able to name the time that Goethe looked into by getting to know the Faust book: the last darkening of an old knowledge of this matter, the dying evening twilight of the old knowledge of Ahriman and Lucifer. And Goethe's Faust is the first dawn of the as yet unascended knowledge of Ahriman and Lucifer, dark and confused in the figure of Mephisto, Ahriman and Lucifer still mixed up. But already with the need to depict what the human soul can have by allowing itself to be affected by what has flowed into the earth's aura through the Christ being having passed through the mystery of Golgotha!

The Easter Mystery appears to us as the dawn of a new era of spiritual life for humanity in Goethe's “Faust”, which, despite its grandiose nature, still has something confused about it, something of a dark, foggy dawn. It appears to us as something within this dark dawn that we can see when we climb a mountain and see the sun rise earlier than we could see it before we stood on the mountain. We feel how one of the greatest of men, in his striving for the renewal of ancient knowledge, turns his soul towards the Paschal Mystery, when we allow Goethe's Faust to take effect on us. And if we allow it to take effect on us in the right way, then we feel what can take place in the heart of one of the greatest of men when this human heart has been touched by the Paschal Mystery, as Goethe himself felt at the same time. There is also something in this intuitive presentiment of Goethe to the Easter Mystery in Goethe's anticipation of it, is something like a hint: Yes, after the dawn, into which the first dark-light rays of the Easter Mystery shine, will come the sun of a new spiritual knowledge. The human soul will rise from the grave of darkened knowledge into which it too must descend. In the course of its development, the human soul will experience the Easter Mystery, the resurrection of that which is the Christ impulse in its deep, grave-like depths, when it unites with the power that emanates from the contemplation of the Christ Easter Mystery.

So, one would like to say, we feel Goethe's call and, after letting the tragedy of the Easter mystery take effect on us, would like to transform it into the call: May spiritual knowledge appropriate to the future rise in human hearts, in human souls! May human hearts and human souls, after sensing the deepest tragedy of the Easter mystery, feel and experience its depth in their innermost being, and may they experience resurrection in themselves through Christ!

May you, today, through the words that I have taken the liberty of speaking to you, absorb something of the feeling in your soul, so that you are united here, in our building dedicated to spiritual research, so that you, through the power of your souls into the future, something of that resurrection impulse which is so powerfully illustrated in the Easter mystery, and from which we could see how the greatest spirits of that time, which has now passed away, longed for it.

Feel in “Faust” something of what the magical sound of the Easter bells can resonate in the spirit of your souls.

• 1. At the words “Christ is Risen,” the black color of the scene transformed into a red one.

after a eurythmy-dramatic presentation

Today we have preceded the Easter scene in 'Faust' with the scene in which the Earth Spirit appears to Faust. Eight days ago, we were able to tie in many thoughts from 'Faust' that can be meaningful to those who want to approach the laws of the world, the life of the world, in a spiritual scientific way. It is not just to give you explanations of Goethe's 'Faust' that I am taking up Goethe's poetic creation last time on Easter Sunday and this time here. The reason is because the human soul can truly perceive something of the artistic images that confront us in “Faust” that must be called the development of this soul into the spiritual worlds, which one can call becoming familiar with the spiritual worlds. To the extent that we can, so to speak, immerse ourselves in “Faust” from a spiritual scientific point of view, we may indeed tie one or the other reflection to this poetic creation. In essence, Goethe's 'Faust' is the expression of the striving into the spiritual world in Goethe, and thus the expression of how, at an important turning point in modern history, a mind as deep as Goethe's tried to enter the world that we seek through our spiritual deepening.

Last time, we were able to convince ourselves that Goethe lived in a time in which it was really not yet possible to find the way into the spiritual worlds in a clear, I would say unambiguous, way. We were able to convince ourselves that such truths as those of the significance of Lucifer and Ahriman still hovered before Goethe's soul as an unclear realization, one might say, like an unclear sense of the spiritual world, and we were able to convince ourselves that in the figure of Mephistopheles the two figures of Lucifer and Ahriman have been conflated, so that Goethe has before him an unclear figure in Mephistopheles, to whom he cannot get close in an unambiguous spiritual-scientific relationship. And so we can see precisely in this striving of Goethe's, as it is expressed in 'Faust', with what seriousness and with what inner conscientiousness, one might say, with what responsibility before our own soul we should pursue what spiritual-scientific deepening is intended to open up. When a spirit so profound encounters such difficulties in the way of what many, many people today are seeking, there is truly an opportunity to learn a great deal from Goethe's own quest and striving. One would wish that everyone who has delved a little into the results of our spiritual science would again approach this document, Goethe's “Faust”, which is a document from the dawn, not yet from the time after the sunrise of spiritual-scientific endeavors. Last time I said that Goethe needed the maturity of his life to emerge from the state of his soul in his youth. Goethe's soul cannot be satisfied with just seeing in the world what the sensory eyes see and what the mind, bound to the brain, perceives. And what lived and raged in his soul for the deeper spiritual foundations of life, he shaped it in the striving Faust, who is not a likeness of Goethe, but who does present certain aspects of Goethe's striving and Goethe's life in a truly artistic way. And so we have here, in the scene with the Earth Spirit, one of the oldest parts of Goethe's Faust that he wrote down.

Last time I spoke about Goethe's “Faust” in such a way that if I were misunderstood as I often am, one could go and say that I had called “Faust” a defective work of art and would even have said some harsh words about it. And someone who is particularly inventive might say that I have undergone a change in my view of Goethe, for I was of course once an admirer of Goethe and have now proved myself to be someone who criticizes Goethe. Now, I should not need to mention that I venerate Goethe no less than I ever did, that he appears to me as the most magnificent spirit of modern times. But what is venerating devotion to a personality should never lead us to a blind sense of authority, but should always keep us clear-sighted for that which we have recognized as truth.

The various parts of Faust can be said to have been pieced together, not to mention glued, and it can be said that at the time when Goethe wrote the oldest parts of Faust in the 1770s, 18th century, was really incapable of writing the later parts, that he really had to mature first in order to come from his longing for the spiritual world to what one might call his understanding of Christianity. It was only through the maturity of life that Goethe was able to continue Faust, who is searching for the spirit world, in such a way that Faust comes to be preserved in life through the Austrian memory, and that Faust even comes to take the Gospel into his own hands and to begin translating the Gospel of John. When one hears some people today saying that they need no spiritual knowledge to fathom the depths of Christianity, that this spiritual science is unnecessary stuff, because Christianity can be sufficiently understood by what every pastor proclaims from the pulpit, that mere belief must prevail, especially in this Christianity, and one compares such soul mood with what must be said about Goethe, who, as one of the deepest took decades to mature to his understanding of Christianity, then one can get an idea of the tremendous arrogance, the tremendous conceit, that is in people who, conceited and haughty, always speak of the simplicity of their minds, and who dismiss what they do not need — the content of spiritual science, what they do not need according to their view.

In the scene with the Earth Spirit, we see something of what occupied Goethe in his youth, in his thirties, and also in the last twenties of his life. We can see from this earth spirit scene and from what preceded it, the so-called first Faust monologue, how Goethe immersed himself in so-called occult-mystical literature and how he tried to find the spiritual world through meditation and meditative devotion, through what this literature gave him. We see him in the scene that has been presented to us today, in the midst of his search through meditation, which arises from the allusions that he, as it is said here, can gain from an occult-mystical book, from an old mystical book by Nostradamus, as he strives through his meditation, which arises from a mystical book, to rise up into the spiritual worlds.

Let us try to imagine the worlds to which Faust, and thus also Goethe, actually wants to go. When the soul of man has really managed to strengthen its inner power so that the spiritual-soul core of man's being is released from the instrument of the physical body, when the soul, so to speak, with its powers that are not perceptible to it in ordinary everyday life, has slipped from the physical body, what becomes – not the physical body itself in its spatial boundaries, but the physical life, with which the human being is always spiritually connected because a ray or stream goes to this physical life – what becomes for the human soul this physical experience? In the time between death and a new birth, a ray or stream of spiritual life goes back to what we have experienced on earth, as you can see from the illustrations of earlier lectures. So there is always something like a spiritual reaching out, or even more than a spiritual reaching out, back to what is physical experience. What then does this physical experience become for the human soul, which has been freed from the use of the instrument of the physical body? I would like to say: the whole physical experience becomes a soul organ for the person who has emerged from this physical experience. The physical experience becomes, as it were, an eye or an ear; the whole human being becomes a sense organ, a spiritual sense organ, an organ, one might say, of the whole earth, which looks out into space. In order for our eye to see physical objects, we have to be outside of our eye. The eye has to be embedded like a kind of independent organ in the eye socket, which is even closed off by bony walls, so that the eye is a relatively independent organ. In a similar way, the ear is also closed. Again, the whole physical apparatus of the brain is enclosed in the head cavity and closed off from the rest of the human body. The physical experience of the human being must become so closed off that it becomes a kind of sensory organ, a kind of eye or ear through which the human being, who is outside of what his physical experience is, looks out into the vastness of space.

What is experienced there can also be described as follows: one can say that one is now in the world that is presented in the book 'Theosophy' as the soul world. This is the world that one first enters when one has the experience of being outside the body with the soul that has become independent and having one's own physical experience outside of it. In the Vienna Cycle of April 1914, I described how, in the life between death and a new birth, the human being has a spiritual-soul sense organ through his last life on earth to perceive the rest of the world, that is, he perceives the rest of the world through this life on earth. In this world we find our deceased for quite some time after their death, until they advance to another world, which can only be reached by a later state of development of the soul, even for the human initiate. In this world, into which we enter, many things must strike the observer. Only details about this world can be said. From the various lectures, one must gather what characterizes this supersensible world. Above all, what the soul immediately notices is that, having become free from the body and entering into a new world, the soul now sees the stars going out, feels the stars going out. The soul settles into an elementary world, so that it now weaves with the sea of air, itself surges with the warmth surging in the world, radiates out with the light, and since the soul radiates out with the light, it cannot see external objects through the light. That is why the sun and stars fade, and the moon extinguishes its light before the soul. It is not an external looking at, in which one then is, it is a co-experiencing of the elemental world. And at the same time it is a co-experiencing of that which one calls the power of historical happenings, of historical becoming. In this world one can see in process what history really does in human life.

In its further meditative development, the soul can then struggle up to a higher experience. Then, not only its own experience becomes a spiritual-soul sense organ, but the whole earth becomes a sense organ. To put it quite paradoxically, but you will understand me, the human soul must advance to such an experience, of which one can say: The human being is now something in which the whole globe is inserted, as otherwise the eye or ear is inserted into our body, and as we otherwise see with our eyes, hear with our ears, so we perceive the cosmic space with the whole earth and its experiences. There we become aware that what physicists say about the sun and the stars is mere materialistic dreaming. The stars have indeed already gone out, the sun, the moonlight has gone out in the previous world. But now we become aware that where we suspected the sun there is a community of spirits, that everywhere we suspected a star there is a spiritual world. And we become aware, by remembering our life on earth, that the materialistic reverie of which the physicists speak is a fantastic one, because when stars or suns appear to us, it is because somewhere in the spiritual world there is the seat of a spiritual community, just as the earth is the seat of a community of people. But just as little as one would perceive the physical bodies of a distant star, only the human souls, so little can it be said that something up there among the stars could interest us that is not of a spiritual-soul nature. But what we see, we must imagine as the vapors of the earth's atmosphere, which collide with what is coming in, and the physical eye can see nothing of what the star really is, but only the vapor that the earth itself throws out into space. All that we see as the starry sky is nothing but the material, albeit ethereal, material of the earth itself woven together, it is a curtain that the earth draws across what is behind it. But when the soul comes to live itself out in this world, then it perceives that out there are not these fantastic stars, these materialistic-fantastic stars that physicists speak of, but living beings, living communities of beings, floating up and down, weaving back and forth in the outer space of the universe, passing the gifts from top to bottom, and in turn the gifts are passed from bottom to top. If you translate the words into the spiritual:

How everything is woven into the whole,
One thing within the other lives and works!
How heavenly powers ascend and descend
And pass the golden buckets!

— Powers, but now in the sense in which we speak of primal forces -,

With wings that smell of blessing
From heaven through the earth they penetrate,
Harmoniously through all the universe they resound!

But if we imagine all this in spiritual and mental terms, then we have roughly the world in which the soul lives out itself.

Now, what did Faust have of all that has been described here at the time when he is presented to us? He has opened an old book, written by someone who has recorded an ancient observation in signs: this was given by the sign of the macrocosm. But Faust is naturally not in a position to project his soul into worlds where the entities in space develop their great happenings. Faust is not able to reach that level. He only sees the sign that someone who has reached that level has written down, the sign of the macrocosm. But a dream, a presentiment is evoked that this sign means something. So imagine yourself in your soul, that you had never heard of spiritual science, that you had the sign in front of you, but that you had an inkling that someone had once seen something similar that you would also like to see, then you are in Faust's soul. At first you can dream yourself into it, so that your imagination brings to life something through these outer signs, which are essentially the signs of the zodiac, the signs of the elements, the signs of the planets. You can even begin to break out with overflowing feeling into the words:

What a spectacle!

But this strikes back at you, for now you become aware that you have nothing but the sign in the book, nothing but a fantasy...

But alas! only a spectacle!

Even just a spectacle as an inner fantasy! And you are thrown back. The sign has brought you to nothing, on the contrary, it has thrown you back, has brought you the feeling: there is the world of the spirit, before which you stand, but nowhere can you find an entrance.

Where can I grasp you, infinite nature?
Your breasts, where? You, the sources of all life,
On which heaven and earth depend,
Where the withered chest presses –

Nothing but feeling inside the elements, in the light and in the air, as I said, in the subordinate world. And now even more clearly expressed. Faust has pushed his way up into the spiritual world, fallen back into the world that I described earlier as the next supersensible world. This with the air and light life, that expresses itself very well in the words:

You spring up, you water, and must I languish in vain?

He has fallen back completely, back from the spiritual world into the elemental world. But he is not yet able to recognize this either. It helps him that he opens the book and sees the sign of the earth spirit. That is the sign that someone has written who has had this lower world, the elemental world, as his own world. Now he feels at home in it. He has a presentiment of being at home in it.

How differently this sign affects me!

— because he feels something in it, because he has turned away from the appearance of meaning and feels something of the world's inner workings. Now he is actually always speaking of this world:

Already I feel my powers increased,

— that which one experiences when one lives in warmth and light -,

I glow like new wine.

Imagine feeling warmth in your soul when you live and weave in the world as a heat wave!

I feel brave enough to venture out into the world.

It really is like moving in the elements. I told you that life on earth becomes a sense organ, and just as you feel your eyes and ears within you, you now feel your sense organs in the earth.

To bear the earth's sorrow and its joy,
To battle with the storms around me,

when you are a wave in the air.

Clouds gather overhead,
The moon hides its light.

No wonder! I have just described to you how this happens, how stars like the moon go out. The light goes out because it goes with the light itself.

It steams! – Red rays
Twitch around my head

This is now internal perception.

A shuddering blast
From the vaulted roof descends
And seizes me!
I feel it, thou art hovering around me, implored spirit.
Reveal thyself!
Ha! how my heart is torn!
To new feelings
All my senses are awakened!

Do you not notice how life is expressed in the elements here?

I feel my heart completely given to you!
You must, you must! Even if it costs me my life!

And now, out of his meditation, he speaks the spell that is added to the sign of the earth spirit, a meditative, suggestive spell that really does lead him to the sight of the spirit, who is the leader of the spirits in whose realm we enter when we enter the elemental world. But immediately we realize that Faust is not actually ready for this world, and above all cannot feel ready for this world. What will become of him, then, of Faust? He will come to self-knowledge, in the sense that this is the highest knowledge of the world, in that we all experience what can be experienced when we swim and weave and roll and dwell in the elemental world. But Faust cannot recognize what individualizes itself in it.

This spiritual conversation between Faust and the Earth Spirit is so very characteristic of the state of maturity of Goethe at the time when he wrote the scene, as he describes his tremendous striving into the spiritual world.

Spirit: Who calls me?

Faust is already turning away. Of course, it doesn't sound like what we usually hear with our ears, that it sounds to us from afar, but rather so that we live in the sounds. It sounds different from what can be heard on earth, very different. Just as one does not see what one sees through the light, but rather shines with it. It looks different. Faust wanted to become a superhuman. That is, he wanted to enter the spiritual world, but he is seized by horror at this spiritual world. Through this encounter with the earth spirit, it becomes clear to Faust that one must become a different person than one was before as a human being if one wants to enter the spiritual world, that one cannot enter this spiritual world with one's ordinary powers, feelings and passions. Faust must have felt this deeply, how he was first thrown back, falling from the higher spiritual world into the elemental world, and how he is now thrown back in the elemental world in his knowledge, because he has remained only the ego he used to be, because he did not develop into this elementary world, to which the suggestive meditation brought him, which he carried out through the saying attributed to the earth spirit. He was able to see for a moment what kind of beings are within. But the spirit says to him:

Where are you, Faust, whose voice resounded for me,
Who with all his powers penetrated me?

That this voice resounded from the subconscious, I have already pointed out, that this was the Faust whom the outer Faust himself does not even really know.

Is it you, surrounded by my breath,
Trembling in all depths of life...

This “you” now refers to the ordinary Faust, while the striving Faust was the higher human being Faust.

A timid, cringing worm?

But now Faust's defiance awakens. He wants to plunge into the world for which he is not ready:

Shall I yield to you, flame formation?
It is I, I am Faust, I am your equal.

Now he can still hear how the spirits of the elemental world, into which he has transferred himself, live with human history, with what takes place on earth through the races and cultures, and how they live with it. And the secret of the elemental world is expressed by the earth spirit; it never speaks of being, but of becoming, of happening.

Spirit: In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I labor at the whirling loom of time
And weave the living robe of divinity.

Not in space, but in time: read the lectures given in The Hague!

Faust can grasp that this is the spirit that walks through history:

You who wander the wide world,
Busy spirit, how close I feel to you!

You who wander the wide world! You who are the spirit that belongs to the spirits of the age, how close I feel to you! — So he says in his presumptuousness. The spirit now tells him what Faust himself later calls the word of thunder, which strikes his soul like a word of thunder and in turn strikes him back into the ordinary world in which he is because he is not yet mature. He should seek self-knowledge and in the self expanded to the world, the spiritual world. He cannot yet find it, so the word of thunder must sound to him from this earth spirit:

You resemble the spirit that you comprehend,
Not me!

What spirit is it then that Faust comprehends? What spirit does Faust comprehend? He, the image of the deity, who cannot comprehend the earth spirit? How can he then advance in self-knowledge? What kind of human spirit can Faust comprehend? Enter the other Faust, wearing a dressing gown and nightcap: this is the spirit you comprehend! You do comprehend Wagner! You have not progressed any further, for the other part of you lives only in defiance, as a passion! In self-knowledge he comes a little further. That is precisely what is so remarkable about Goethe's Faust, that is the beautiful artistic form of Goethe's Faust, that what is brought onto the stage in real form is always, at bottom, a piece of self-knowledge. Just as Mephistopheles is a piece of self-knowledge, so is Wagner also a piece of Faust's self-knowledge. Wagner is Faust himself. And it would not be wrong to stage “Faust” in such a way that the character of Wagner, dressed in a dressing gown and nightcap, to whom Faust turns away, would be a likeness of Faust himself. Then people would immediately understand why it is precisely this Wagner who comes in. What Wagner says is basically what Faust already understands; he only recites the rest. He just lets it out. He believes he is elevating himself to the highest truths, which he can recite in a phrase-like manner, but which he does not experience inwardly. And now a piece of self-knowledge takes place. Wagner speaks the truth. Basically, Faust has not spoken his innermost experiences, he has recited.

Forgive me! I hear you declaim.

That is one truth: he only declaimed. And it is a piece of self-reflection to realize that you do not approach the spirit of the world in this way, but at most read a Greek tragedy. So many people, when they approach spiritual science, want to declaim about the highest truths, even if it is often a self-declamation about the highest truths. Basically, they want nothing more than to benefit from this spiritual science, to profit from it, to delude themselves with a hazy mist. With regard to today, it can be said that this is often the case in some circles. Some people are very interesting when they talk about their visions. In earlier times, we heard this from the priests; now the actors have learned it even better, so that the priests can learn something from the actors. If Faust were to go only as far as his understanding, he would have to say the words that Wagner speaks, his mirror image. But he goes beyond the limits of his passion, and goes beyond with the Luciferic, not with the genuine, full, human core of the soul, but with the Luciferic core. It is the Lucifer in Faust who now answers what Faust is, but what stands before us as Wagner:

Yes, when the pastor is an actor;
How that may come about in time.

This contempt, this arrogance comes from the Luciferian in Faust, because if Faust were not seized by Lucifer, he would speak as Wagner does when he expresses only what he can honestly admit as the subject of his understanding. The other thing is a dark foreboding in him of something he wants to get to. But this soliloquy – really, it is only a conversation with himself – does get him a little further. You get so much further in life when you encounter yourself in another. You don't like to admit to yourself that you have these or those qualities. But when they confront you in another, you are more willing to study them. In this way, we acquire self-knowledge when a quality presents itself in the form of another, as in Faust by Wagner. Faust has not yet reached the point where he would say to himself, now that Wagner is gone: Yes, that is actually me. — If he had already fully penetrated to himself with his understanding, he would say: I am only a Wagner, the Wagner is only here in my head!

How all hope does not fade from the mind,
That clings forever to stale evidence,
With greedy hand digs for treasures,
And is glad when it finds earthworms!

For up to now he has done nothing else, except seek the spirits in the manner described. It is self-knowledge that confronts Faust in Wagner. Who sent Wagner into him? The Earth Spirit sent him in, the Earth Spirit:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend,
Not me!

And now Faust shall see what spirits he resembles. He does not resemble the Earth Spirit, who is the ruler of the Earth, but he shall see one of the forms within him: there is your Wagner! This Wagner is in you!

But now there is not only Wagner in Faust, but the Luciferic element is opposed to Wagner, that is, opposed to itself. There is another element in him.

If you look at “Faust” in its earlier form, as it was at the beginning, it is the case that Goethe did not finish the following after the earth spirit scene at the time. It continues like this: conversation with Wagner, then with the student, Mephisto... Mephisto enters, of whom Goethe does not quite know whether he is Lucifer or Ahriman. If he had studied spiritual science, Lucifer would appear now. But he has the other one, who is sent to him by the earth spirit. The earth spirit sends him Wagner, sends him Mephisto, we would say Lucifer. Faust is to get to know little by little what is in him. Mephisto is sent by the earth spirit: There you have another one of the spirits that you understand. Try to understand the Lucifer that is in you, and not immediately look at the spirit of the earth!

How unclear Goethe was about the matter can be seen from the fact that a small piece, which was later left out, is in the original writing, in four lines. In 1775 there were four lines after the scene where Mephisto has brought Faust so far that he has led him to Gretchen, and that Faust now wants to force himself on Gretchen. There are four lines that were no longer in the fragment as early as 1790. After Faust, who is actually Lucifer – Goethe just mixes them up – has asked Mephisto to take care of the jewelry for Gretchen, Mephisto says in the old manuscript, after Faust has left:

He acts as if he were a prince's son.
If Lucifer had a dozen princes,
They would surely conjure up something for him;
In the end, he would get a commission.

There it is, Mephisto himself calls himself Lucifer. As I said, the four lines were later omitted. So what was Goethe actually trying to do in his earlier days, when he wanted, one might say, to express himself in his “Faust”? Well, he wanted to show how man should come to self-knowledge. But, one might say, there is an inkling of it in this first scene, which Goethe wrote in his youth, and which you can now read with clarity, where it is described in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold. You foresaw in Faust how the human being, who gradually realizes how different entities are within him, divides himself up, how he divides himself up into Wagner and Lucifer-Mephisto. He gets to know himself bit by bit in his individual parts, he gets to know himself as Wagner, he gets to know himself as Lucifer-Mephisto. But as I said, Goethe first had to mature in order to really see the great significance of the Christ impulse for humanity, as far as that was possible in his time. Therefore, we see how Goethe, in his later years, sought to supplement what he had written earlier about Faust's striving until man encounters himself in his various images, including the image of Lucifer, by having Faust come into contact with what has been incorporated into earthly development through Christ. One could say that the cultic symbols of Christ approach Faust. And so we see in Faust the document that shows us how Goethe himself brought occultism to Christianity, to the Christ impulse, and how we are indeed continuing today to work on the path that Goethe took with regard to its first steps. In Goethe's time one could only get a glimpse. Today, the time has come when it is possible for man, through spiritual science, to truly enter into the realm of spiritual life, into which all of Goethe's striving was directed. Today, Faust must be understood differently than Goethe himself understood him. Yes, the world is progressing, and if we do not fully recognize that the world is progressing, then we are not serious enough about the world. But such experiences, that one splits, that one encounters oneself in one's true form, in a Luciferian form, such experiences do bring one forward, but always only a little way. We must part with the belief that we can see the whole spiritual world if we have only made small advances, such as we can make through meditation. One always advances only a little.

There are two natures in Faust: the Wagner nature and that which now strives forward. When Goethe wanted to point this out in his later years, he did it very beautifully. Goethe felt the need, when Faust had already approached Christianity, to show what the Wagner nature in Faust is. Therefore, he lets Wagner and Faust take the Easter Walk together. It is now the case that, as is naturally dramatic, two people are presented to us, showing what is going on in Faust's soul. The higher man in Faust strives forward, but the Faust-Wagner holds Faust back. A spark of comprehension of the spiritual world has been kindled in Faust, so that he now sees not only the sensual poodle, and there really is something like a soul force in Faust that expresses itself in the conversation with Wagner:

Faust: Do you see the black dog roaming through the seed and stubble?

Now the nature of Wagner awakens in Faust.

Wagner: I saw him long ago, he seemed unimportant to me.
Higher Nature: Look at him closely! What do you think the animal is?
Wagner Nature: A poodle, who in his own way is trying to follow his master.

These are objections that Faust himself actually raises. And now it continues. Faust begins to see the supersensible behind the sensual; he already senses it. So, it is a hunch, brought on by the experiences he has had. A spark of the spiritual world has entered into him. And it is beautiful, one wants to say, how infinitely artistically sincere and honest Goethe is, one just has to understand him. When Faust now feels the Luciferic in himself – as you know, the Luciferic is connected with obstinacy, with inner egoism – he, Faust, now also carries this Luciferic into his being gripped by the Christ impulse. It is a Luciferian trait that the Gospel of John, in that he wants to translate it, does not seem perfect to him at all. For the understanding, the Goethe commentators are a bit curious, who really go along with the poet, because they always go along with the poet, even where he distributes the things he wants to say among his characters. Faust does not yet understand the text of the Gospel at all, otherwise he would stop at “In the beginning was the word”. He falters because he does not yet understand it. The professors present it as if Faust understood it better, but he does not yet understand it. What appears to him now is the power, the deed – so he brings rationalism and intellectualism into the gospel. This now evokes the opposite phenomenon. Whereas he was once pushed down into the sensual world, he is now drawn up into the spiritual world. By fully asserting his limitations, by setting 'sense and power and action', he is pushed up into the spiritual world, because there is already a spark of spiritual power in Faust. Then the spirits come and again as the messenger of the earth spirit... Mephisto, this unclear figure between Lucifer and Ahriman. So you see, one must understand Goethe's struggle to penetrate Faust's spiritual world, and one can learn an infinite amount from it, especially for our present time.

What I particularly wanted to do in the last lecture on Easter Sunday and in this lecture was to show you how it is more difficult for a spirit that wants to delve deeper to penetrate to the Christ impulse than for a spirit that remains in its infinite pride and conceit and does not want what spiritual science can offer it. On the other hand, I also wanted to use Faust to illustrate how powerful the impact of the Christ Impulse has been on the world. There will come a time when we will learn to understand the inner nature of the Christ impulse ever better and better, precisely through what spiritual science has to give. It stands there in the world – I would like to say, as an illustration of the development of humanity on earth, brought about by world history, of what the Christ impulse is – the fact stands that centuries after the Christ impulse entered into the development of humanity on earth, something occurs in this development of humanity that is also not properly understood. But at the moment when one begins to understand it correctly, one is led precisely through this understanding to a deeper feeling for the Christ event. You know, of course, that six hundred years after the Christ impulse entered into the evolution of mankind, a prophet arose in a certain community who initially rejected what had entered into the evolution of mankind through the Christ impulse: Mohammed. Today we must no longer profess the superstition of the 19th century, which, out of rationalism, seeks to explain in a belittling way what must be explained out of spiritual insight. And it must appear ridiculous to anyone who really wants to penetrate into spiritual science when a particularly learned and clever man says of Mohammed: Yes, he claims that the angel who whispered in his ear what he wrote in the Koran approached him in the form of doves! But Mohammed - so the rationalist scholar says - was a mere juggler. He put some grains, which doves like to eat, into his ear, so the doves flew up and took the grains, but flew away again when they had had them! Yes, there have been such explanations, within and outside of Christianity, in the very clever 19th century.

There will come a time when such explanations will really only be laughed at, even though they are fully capable of satisfying materialism. We have to take Muhammad more deeply; we have to be clear that what lived in his soul was really such intercourse with the spiritual world as Goethe sought for his Faust. But what did Muhammad feel? What did he find? Today I can only hint at it, another time I will explain it more precisely. What did Mohammed find? Well, you know, Mohammed first strove for a world for which he had an expression, it is only one word: God. The world becomes a monism, a monistic expression of God. This world has nothing of the essence of Christianity, of course. But Mohammed does look into the spiritual world; he enters the elementary world of which I have spoken today. He promises his believers that they will enter, when they have gone through the gate of death, into this spiritual world. But he can only tell them about the spiritual world that he has come to know. What kind of spiritual world is this? This spiritual world, of which Mohammed tells his believers, is the Luciferian world, which he regards as paradise, the world that is to be aspired to. And when one passes from the abstract to the real, and adds, by way of interpretation, the meaning of Islam's striving in the spiritual world, one recognizes what spiritual science also proclaims. But this spiritual world is the world in which Lucifer rules; reinterpreted, the Luciferian world becomes a paradise, the world that people are just beginning to strive for.

I believe that it must make a deep impression on our souls if we can delve into the essence of historical development in such a way, through a very important phenomenon. It must give us pause when we learn in the progression of religious life how a great prophet emerged with the error that the Luciferic world is paradise. I do not want you to take this in just as abstract truths, I believe it can shake the soul if you let it affect you. But what does the Muslim do to enter his spiritual world? Perhaps we could later have a note handed in at the door from each of our dear friends here who has read the entire Koran. It would be interesting to count the slips of paper of those who have read it. But it is not easy to read the Koran completely, with its endless repetitions, which Westerners find so endlessly boring to read. But among Muslims, there are people who claim to have read it from beginning to end seventy thousand times in their lives. That means: to have brought a word that was given to the soul in such a way that this word has become alive in the soul! Even if we cannot learn anything in terms of content from such a religious community with regard to Christianity, we can still learn that within that community of people, even spiritual error is treated quite differently than what we are called to recognize as spiritual truths. At most, a European might read Faust, then, when he has forgotten it, read it again, and when he has forgotten it again, read it once more. But those who have read Faust a hundred times will also be sought after. It is also understandable within the context of Western education to date. How could anyone read everything that is printed in the West seventy thousand times? It is quite understandable. But we should still acquire something, that it is one thing to simply inform oneself about a content that is meaningful for the soul's life, and something else to live with it, again and again, so that one becomes completely one with it, completely one. It is something that one must first gain an understanding of, something that one cannot even understand according to the thinking habits of our national community. But we should reflect on such things. Not just to tell you something, but to stimulate your reflection, words are spoken as they are in this reflection. To increase our sense of responsibility towards ourselves and towards the world, with regard to what spiritual science can and should be for us.

We live in difficult times in many respects. The very difficult external events that surround us at present are only the outward sign of our very difficult times. It is not good to look at these very difficult times as if they were an illness, as we often call an illness an illness, because an illness is often a healing process, the true illness has preceded the physically apparent illness. So also what is now going through the world as mourning events has been preceded by something pathological, and we are to see into much deeper things than humanity is inclined to see into. Oh, a great pain can be deposited on the soul of the one who looks at the present time with the tasks it has, and with the little understanding that so many people have for these tasks. When one sees how people judge, think, feel and perceive the world today, and how these thoughts, feelings and perceptions lead to external events, and how people learn so little from these external events, then an infinitely meaningful pain is deposited on the soul. It is this feeling of pain that must now often come over the soul. If one can really look back over the past months of trial, to mention only the most recent, and turn one's gaze to what people have learned through these months of trial, to what judgment confronts one in relation to what confronted one eight months ago: it is the same kind of judgment, the same kind of feeling. What made people believe they were right eight months ago, they still think so, they even want the sad events to have occurred in order to prove them right in what they believed was right eight months ago.

I cannot express how infinite the pain is that one feels at the small way in which human souls have changed in recent months according to the assumptions that had to be made for this change, so that our time really would be a time of trial, a time of learning. But of those who stand within spiritual science, one would wish that they absorb much of what can be learned when such considerations as these are undertaken in connection with Faust. Again and again one would like to point out to souls the deep seriousness and the sacred striving for truth that must be connected with our spiritual-scientific view. And in such a movement there must be retribution for everything that does not arise out of deep sincerity and a deep sense of truth. We must really try to overcome everything that can make one say to the one who utters it: Forgive me, I hear you declaiming!

Is it not strange, when we see the stage traditions according to Wagner often on the stage today, and when scholars, when rationalists and intellectuals deride what Wagner is, instead of them knocking on their hearts and seeing themselves in the Wagner. This Wagner sits on the chairs everywhere, in the laboratories, and our scientific literature, our philosophical literature, would contain a deep truth if the majority of the authors chose the pseudonym “Wagner”. For they are written by Wagner, these philosophies of the present.

I am quite sure that many a person who lives in the ranks of spiritual science also has sufficient reason to beat their breasts, to examine themselves in self-knowledge, to see how much of their soul is mere self-promotion and how much arises from absolute honesty, from an absolute sense of truth! With this admonition to your hearts, to the deepest powers of your soul, I close this reflection.