The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If you look around in the somewhat more experienced economic literature, you will at least notice in many cases that a certain remark can be found somewhere among the authors, which goes something like this: the economist should not concern himself with how the people are educated or what is good for the people with regard to their needs. From another point of view, I have already pointed this out, he should leave that to the ethicist, the hygienist and so on.

If you take such a remark seriously, then it actually means nothing less than proof of the necessity for the threefold social organism. For what is being said? It is being said: If you think in terms of economics, nothing comes of it that could somehow aim at ethics, at hygiene, but what should aim at ethics, at hygiene, must come from another side.

If we now think of such a remark, which until today was actually only meant theoretically, exploited practically, it is said that it is necessary that economically real judged, that is, that the economy be designed so that only only those things that are purely economic, that disregard all ethics, all hygiene and so on, and that, alongside them, there are real administrations that are there for the ethical permeation, for the hygienic development of social life. These will lie in the free spiritual life.

And for you it will be an important pedagogical-didactic point of view to show that the foundations for this are present everywhere and that, if used in the right way, they lead to conclusions regarding the threefold social order. One can say that economists, if they really think economically, cannot think differently from the way it should be thought in the associative member of the social organism. But the things that are thought in this way do not remain in books; there are instances that also transfer them cleanly into reality.

I mention this today, when I want to point out more methodological things, precisely in a methodological way, to make you aware that wherever the threefold order is mentioned, one can start from things that people have already thought of somehow. Only today no one has the courage to draw the consequences from them. The essential thing for us is to draw the necessary consequences for social life.

Likewise, you will have to deal with other questions if you want to focus on social issues. If you familiarize yourself with the development of economic thought, you will find that a whole series of utopian ideas have emerged in recent times. We need only go back to the eighteenth century to find such utopian ideas, perhaps because the older ones are less relevant to the present day. But since the eighteenth century a whole series of social utopias have been conceived. Why did such utopias arise? This is important for you to know so that you can incorporate it into the overall attitude of your lectures.

You see, the following is available for intellectual life. Basically, it leads back to ancient wisdom and the customs associated with it. Take, for example, what we have in Europe today as a completely decadent intellectual life: on the one hand, Catholicism and, on the other, the highly filtered modern educational life, which is also still fed by ancient religious ideas; they are everywhere. You can follow them right into the materialistic parts of medicine; and they are in philology, these offshoots of theocratic or theological thinking. So if you consider how all modern thinking is thoroughly impregnated with this element that leads back to ancient wisdom, you will understand that in the whole way in which intellectual life, I should now say, administers itself - for it has already has become anarchic in that it has not been drawn into the tight fetters of state life, you will notice that the threads can also be seen in the administrations, which were in the constitution of the territories where ancient wisdom held sway. In the church you see it in the structure of the hierarchies. This leads back to the views of ancient wisdom. In jurisprudence, you may only see it in the struggle that is the struggle of materialism against spiritualism in the external life, in the struggle waged by lawyers and judges against the wearing of robes in court proceedings. In the robes you have the remnants of the old way of thinking; in the fight against the robes you have the modern materialistic way of thinking. And that has a much greater significance than one might think. And if you consider all the formal aspects of the doctoral degrees at some of our universities, you will easily be able to trace the threads back to the old theocratic element. In this respect we have something in it all that people have lost sight of, but which points back to the past, to the fact that people once knew how to manage spiritual life. Even if we no longer have this spiritual life in our present time, we have the forms in it; and I might add, we are even still stuck in them like discarded clothes. We need new forms everywhere. These will be found in the free spiritual life.

The other point is this. In England, for example, the political-democratic element developed out of the church-democratic element. This came about simply because the ecclesiastical background was stripped away and the democratic form of thinking was revealed. But in fact the political-legal element has gradually emerged everywhere from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element. It is just that it is no longer noticed so clearly in other places. For example, there is a secret connection between the entire system of civil servants, at the top of which one can imagine the absolute ruler “by the grace of God”, which latter reveals the origin from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element, because only the one who was appointed by spiritual authorities was “by the grace of God”. The entire body of civil servants is simply the ecclesiastical hierarchy that has become secularized. But the other side, which basically also developed out of the theocratic-ecclesiastical element, is the military. This is perceived as paradoxical by people today. But the military is only that which, like the shadow of an illuminated object, follows the whole organization of the state. And so, I might say, a certain way of handling the state has gradually emerged during the separation of the secular element from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element. This can be seen in all its details when we consider the transition of the forms of administration, as they were still clearly manifested in their theocratic-hierarchical form in those times when Charlemagne attached importance to being crowned by the Pope in Rome, how ecclesiastical life then passed over into the profane, how, as a latecomer to this transition, for example, the first state posts in France were filled by cardinals. If you consider this, you will be able to grasp everywhere the emergence of this modern political-legal element in the handling of the theocratic-ecclesiastical element and the independence of its administration. One could handle these things independently.

Now modern economic life is pushing its way into this, which has indeed produced instinctive practices, but so far not something that has been as internally permeated as the old hierarchical-ecclesiastical and state-militaristic elements. These two elements have brought the world to a tight uniform. By contrast, it was only in recent times that the urge arose to consciously penetrate what has become the predominant feature of modern life, namely the complex economic life, which in older times did not need to be thought about because it was drawn from inexhaustible sources. It is true that the necessity has arisen to find a certain way of handling economic life. But this way of handling has not yet been found.

And basically, the first attempt to bring something into economic life that can be paralleled to the state and the church element, is the associative principle. It is the first attempt to really found something organically in economic life. Because that has not happened before. And the most diverse theoretical attempts to develop a way of thinking, to organize economic life as such, these are the utopian theories, which were always infected by what had been inherited from the past. People still thought: If you organize, you have to organize in the same way as it is in the ecclesiastical-hierarchical or state element - after all, people were not aware of this.

And the practical expression of this in the outer world is the appearance of economic liberalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Why did this economic liberalism appear? What is it? It is an appeal to the efficiency of individual economic personalities. It was the same in the theocratic-hierarchical element. Before an organization could be found, it was necessary to appeal to the leading individuals. The same applied to the state element. Before passing over to a parliamentary system, it was necessary to appeal to those who had the ability to administer the affairs of the state. Economic liberalism is nothing more than this appeal to the individual efficiency of the personality in the economic field. It is only because things in the world have developed more rapidly that it has become necessary to find something that really paralyzes the harmful effects of the absolutist individual.

Surely you only need to study the constitution of the Catholic Church to see that in this Catholic Church, which simply preserves an ancient administration of spiritual life, you will find everywhere that the institutions and organizations are aimed at banishing the harmfulness of individuality. It is precisely through this that individuality can come into its own in a certain way.

I once attended a conversation in Vienna in which a professor at the Viennese theological faculty, who had somewhat liberal tendencies, but only indulged them in the most cautious way, complained that Rome was choking him completely and not allowing him to express anything from the lectern. It was discussed at length why, for example, in Innsbruck, where the same subject was taught by a Jesuit, he was allowed to express himself on the same topics in the freest manner. And those who were experienced in such matters said to themselves: Yes, it does not matter to the Catholic Church, for example, that exegesis is not also freely taught at the university, but rather that the individuals within it give an absolute assurance that, despite their liberal views, they are firmly within the organization, and of course the Jesuit is particularly good at achieving this, firmly within the organization. Then he is also allowed to take his special liberties. For the organization does not destroy individuality. It is not destroyed at all. The individual personality is free to a high degree in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Catholicism. But those who take things similar to Protestantism are choked, who take things so that they take dogmatics seriously; the Catholic only takes symbolism seriously. For them, there is always the danger of throwing off the robe. But that must not be. Within the church, anything can happen; outside the church, no one may place himself.

Of course, something like this cannot be imitated. But it can be cited as a characteristic example of what has been found on the other side: older times appeal to individuality, but have such an organization that individuality cannot be harmful. In the life of the state, the time has also passed when it was realized that these two sides must be present.

In economic life, it is a matter of finding the transition from economic liberalism to the principle of association. We are only in the middle of what needs to be done. This is what the world-historical moment actually reveals to us in this respect: the principle of association in economic life means nothing other than what must necessarily come about in the face of the degenerations of economic liberalism. And in modern times, precisely because thinking is inactive in a certain sense, people have not yet found the courage to move on to action, to move from liberalist thinking to active thinking. But the attempt has been made everywhere. If you pay attention, you can see some interesting experiences.

Recently I picked up the little economics book from the Göschenschen collection. It talks about economic liberalism and says: “It became necessary to move from an individualistic economic system to a kind of social economic system.” And so it was necessary to transfer more and more of the individualistically established to the state administrations: state socialism! So no trace of an understanding of the necessity of the association principle, but: state socialism! And in another part of this little book by Göschenen, which was also written by a fox, but not such a bad one, I found the following sentence: And the World War has shown us how right this way of thinking was; he means: to gradually transfer what individuals have achieved to the state. I said to myself: Now I have to turn to the title page. In which year is it still possible for a person to write that? I found: 1918! It was the last date when one could write this without being called a fool. [Interjection: Excuse me, Doctor: 1920! - Mr. Blume shows the latest edition]. It is questionable whether it is still in the latest edition. This is marked “reprint.” If it is still in there, it is because things would have remained in their folly even in 1920. Indeed! He did not feel the need to correct the matter after two years! They are not clever, these foxes. I opened to the title page, “1918,” and said: Could conditions still be such that one could believe that the transfer of what emerged from the old system as a world economy into a state economy or even into a city economy - I would like to remind you that the municipalities in particular are on the verge of ruin and will all collapse soon - was absolutely right?

What I am trying to suggest is that modern thinking has not yet found the real, correct transition from liberalist economics to associative economics.

Perhaps it will not be possible at all for anyone to grasp the associative principle correctly if they do not at the same time fully embrace the threefold social order. For in the unified state, what works properly in the threefold social organism will actually have a harmful effect. And this must be emphasized, at least in the nuance that you give to your lectures, that, for example, anyone who comes and says, “Yes, we want to leave spiritual life to the state. We don't want threefolding.” But twofolding – something similar was even proposed in the Weimar National Assembly – yes, but twofolding! It is possible to separate economic life! But it is not possible for the reason that a separated economic life, organized associatively, would in fact contain within the associations people who are completely dependent on the state and who have not grown out of the free spiritual life, and these people would then influence economic life in the state's interest. Thus the whole of economic life would take on the state mentality.

Likewise, we would never establish truly independent schools like the Waldorf School if we admitted that teachers were taken from state institutions, that the state license of the teachers would have to be taken along with the teachers. If one says that we could establish an independent school but could only achieve it if we found state-approved teachers, then that shows that one does not understand the matter. For that means nothing other than this, that one sticks to the old and just spruces it up in the modern sense, thus throwing dust in people's eyes. And the times are too serious for that. What should be advocated in terms of threefolding is what the real threefolding holds, even at the risk that the practical arrangements cannot be made immediately because of people's resistance. The most important thing today is to get the idea of threefolding into as many minds as possible. This is the quickest way to bring it into practical realization.

And now a few words about the method by which you cannot present the idea of threefolding without taking as a basis, in a tactful and didactically correct way, spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy. This can be clearly seen from the development of thinking in the social life of modern times.

There have been all kinds of utopian ideas, and the system that has become popular in the broadest sense among the proletarian population has developed: the Marxist system. Of course, this Marxist system has taken many forms. Revisionism on the one hand, Leninism on the other. This is a kind of radicalism that says: We know full well that Marxism does not solve the social question, but it works towards the radical destruction of everything that exists, and then another humanity will come along to rebuild it. But the Marxist system is at the root of all this. Karl Marx knew how to find his way into the souls of the modern proletarian world. And that is why it is also possible for the leaders of the proletarian world to influence the proletarian world with Marxist ideas. In a sense, it must even be said that this Marxism – not so much as it lived as a theory with Karl Marx, but rather as it lives in the views of the broadest proletarian masses – is, in terms of its form, the most modern social conception of life in terms of world view. The others, regardless of whether they are advocated by practitioners or university professors, are actually always somewhat backward.

Precisely because Marxism is the most modern form, it must also be sharply envisaged by those who now want something really radical. Today, one cannot simply speak to the masses without having a clear, at least intuitive, understanding of what Marxism means. The essential thing about it is that Marxism is the Weltanschhauung and outlook on life which best corresponds to the whole social situation of the modern proletarian. It is simply adapted to the whole social outlook on life of the modern proletarian. And if you fight Marxism purely theoretically, you are actually doing something that does not correspond to reality. They fight against Marxism without realizing that they have allowed the reality to develop in such a way that the modern proletarian has become what he is. This can be traced back to the carelessness of the rest of the population. But by allowing him to become what he has, he could do nothing but take Marxism as his world view and outlook on life. For this Marxism contains within itself, for the proletariat's conception, the threefold order of human social life. By becoming a Marxist, the worker has, from Marxism, his view of the threefold order of social life, which is appropriate for his class. That's what he has in there.

For you see, in modern times it has become more and more the custom to distract from consumption and its understanding and to look at mere acquisition. In doing so, one only had to let enough of this acquisition go so that the social organism could still be administered. One was only interested, whether aristocrat or bourgeois, in as much of the proceeds of the acquisition as one got and had to give up so that the whole thing could be held together at all. How did this work out for people who, through old privileges or other circumstances, were inside the real social organism? They tried to get as much as possible out of their earnings. They did not care about consumption and only grudgingly paid the taxes necessary for the cohesion of the whole. What did the modern proletarian do? He just stood at the machine and was outside of capitalism. He categorically refused to pay certain taxes if they were not knocked down. For he had no interest in the reality of the old social organism; he was only interested in what remained from the acquisition. Since he was not involved in the administration of capital, this only became the subject of a critique of what he calls surplus value. The proletarian's relationship to surplus value, criticizing it, is the same as the bourgeois's, when he grudgingly approves the taxes. By approving the tax, the bourgeois has not progressed to what lies behind it. The proletarian has not progressed either. But he has practiced critique. He has looked the surplus value in the eye and practiced critique. This shows, then, that the point is to add the positive to critique. That would, of course, be the associative principle. But it is in the theory of surplus value that which, within a worldview and conception of life, embodies the economic element for the proletarian.

The second thing that lives in Marxist theory, insofar as it is the proletarian's conception of life and worldview, is the class struggle, which, in his view, must be. That is the political and legal element. Through the class struggle, he wants to fight for his rights, he wants to organize labor, and so on. So the second area of social life is included. It is only the flip side of what it is like for the bourgeois and the aristocrats. They cannot get out of their class. They do not have the talent to go from the class-based to the general human. The worker does this consciously, but of course he takes his class with him. So in Marxism we also have what has developed in modern life as the political and legal element, which has not yet found the transition to the truly democratic element, which has not been carried out anywhere, but to which we must come, where, on the basis of the state-legal sphere of the social organism, all people who have come of age are equal before the law. That is more or less what the classes concerned have always meant until now. When, say, before the French Revolution, there was essentially an aristocratic element, this was quite democratic among itself, but below its class, the human being simply ceased to exist, he was no longer a human being in the fullest sense of the word. Then the bourgeoisie came along. That, too, was quite democratic among itself. But below that, the human being ceased to exist. What everything tends towards in modern times is general democracy. The one who stood outside the social organism, like the proletarian, constituted his own class against the others in the place of the general human, which can be defined in such a way that in all that is to be democratically parliamentarized, all people, whatever they may represent, all people who have come of age, face each other as equals. Thus, I would say, we also have in the class struggle that which we must characterize something like this: the proletarian knows that something completely different must come, he is modern in this respect, something must come that is quite different from what has existed so far. But he has not learned the general human. Therefore, he starts from his class instead of from the general human.

And within the Marxist philosophy and outlook on life, the proletarian also has a place for the spiritual. This is the materialistic view of history. In the materialistic age and in the whole education of the modern proletarian, who only comes into contact with the mechanism of life and not with the psyche and the spirit, this spiritual life quite naturally became the materialistic conception of history in the proletarian's view. But this represents the spiritual element in the world and in life.

So, in proletarian Marxism, you have the ultimate radical expression of what modern humanity actually wants and in which it does not know how to help itself. And you have to counter this with something that is just as well-founded as proletarian Marxism is for the proletariat. What is the essence of this proletarian Marxism as a worldview? The essence of proletarian Marxism as a worldview is disbelief in man.

This disbelief in man was justified in the times of the original wisdom of mankind, for then it was divine powers that sat within the human being and guided him. People knew they were dependent on what they unconsciously recognized from the depths of their souls as the revelations of the gods as guiding forces for life. Then there was disbelief in man and faith in the gods. When the state-administrative and the official-military elements had been separated out from the old theocratic-ecclesiastical element, this unbelief in man still existed. For then arose the belief that man as such cannot direct the destinies after all, the state must do that. The state became an idol, a fetish. And this led man, who was now harnessed into the state system, to disbelief in man, to belief in the external fetish. Of course, as soon as God comes down, he becomes more and more of a fetish. Proletarian Marxism is the third and final stage of disbelief in man. For the proletarian says to himself in his materialistic philosophy of history: it is not man who directs fate, but “the forces of production” that direct him. We stand there powerless as human beings with our ideology. The course of history is determined by the course of the production processes. And what human beings are within these forces of production is only the result of the forces of production themselves. Disbelief in man and real belief in the tangible fetish! There is no fundamental difference between the African savage, who has reached decadence in a different way, worshipping an external block of wood, making it into a fetish, or the European proletarian, who regards the means and processes of production as directing history. In principle, there is no difference in logic; it is our magic superstition! And we must look at this sufficiently. In various ways, people have come into decadence. In Africa, there was also an original wisdom. Then it deteriorated in administration; we see this in Egypt. Then it decays. Fetishism is not what stands at the starting point, but what occurs in decadence. At the starting point, pure belief in the gods is everywhere, and only in the decline does fetishism arise. Within the civilized areas, instead of worshipping external wooden blocks, the “forces of production” were worshipped. The prayers were, of course, also arranged differently. But “the forces of production” and “production processes” were made into idols. It is the last phase of unbelief in man, the phase of economically superstitious thinking. There is no difference in principle between an African savage who goes to his idol with a magic spell and a modern proletarian gathering to thrash out Marxist phrases. The prayer sounds different, but one must be clear about what the inner essence of the matter is.

This must be contrasted with what is now not unbelief in man, but faith in man. And ultimately it is essential that faith in man be found, the faith that the directing forces for life reveal themselves within man. Man must come to himself, to full self-awareness. He must find the possibility to say to himself: All externals are superstition. Only the directing forces within oneself are to intervene in life!

But for this, courage is needed to go beyond mere passive prayer and to have an active prayer in the grasp of the divine in the will. This transition to active prayer, to inner activity in general, this transition from disbelief in humanity to faith in humanity, is what must be present in your hearts and souls as enthusiasm. You must feel that you are at the turning point in history, where people must be led from disbelief in humanity to faith in humanity.

You don't need to tell people, but you must go on the podiums with this awareness, with the awareness that you have to teach humanity that the guiding forces of life must be actively grasped within, that life in the future must be organized in such a way that people say to themselves: I must be the one to do things.

It was the last superstition of civilization that people did not have faith in themselves, but that they had faith in “the forces of production” arranging life. And from this superstition arose the terrible worship of the rear in the East, where an attempt was made to imbue with willpower that which is not determined by willpower. The personality that ideally unites two unrelated things, inner passivity in conviction and activity in action, whereby one destroys the other, is Lenin. Lenin is the personality that most purely crystallizes in new times that which comes from ancient times. He most purely crystallizes what the real impossibility, the real destructive urge, the real ruinous urge has become.

What leads to construction, what leads to the re-imbibition of real life forces into social life, is, if we can find the possibility, to create in man out of disbelief in man, belief in man, a belief that ultimately expresses itself as follows: Whatever I experience as luck or misfortune, or as social institution, or as something in the outer life, I myself will make!

You cannot instill this in people without at the same time steeling them with your words. You have to bring people to have confidence, to have faith in their own being. And that is what you must strive for, at least in your heart. How you do it may depend on your abilities today. But if you devote yourself to the matter with good will, it will soon no longer depend on these abilities, but the necessity of the time will take hold of your abilities. And you will rise above yourself precisely in bringing this belief to people, so that in the place of unbelief in people, faith in people must come.

That is what I wanted to say to you before you go out to give your lectures. Feel the strength that can lie in saying to yourself: I have to bring about the conviction that the last doubt and disbelief in man in relation to man will be transformed into faith in man, into the inner activity of the human being! Because this is what matters when striving for real progress. Everything else will only lead to the propagation of that which is decadent. Do not uphold what is destructive, but rather apply Nietzsche's words to me: Let it still be pushed so that it perishes more quickly! But love what is not of yesterday and today, but what is of tomorrow!

I want you, my dear friends, to go out as people of tomorrow and to shape your words in the coming weeks from the consciousness of the people of tomorrow.

The impetus for our meeting is connected with an idea that has been discussed for some time among us here in the “Federation for the Threefold Order of the Social Organism”. Actually, it would be necessary for us to prepare ourselves for the agitation for the threefold order of the social organism comprehensively, that is, in a longer instruction and discussion. The threefold order was conceived as a movement from April 1919 onwards for a much faster effect than it then received. And that is why, at the beginning of the past year, I emphasized here the need to take up the agitation for the League for Threefolding, not by some formal treatment of the art of oratory or the like, but by agreeing on the necessity of treating something like the movement for the threefolding of the social organism in today's truly serious and agitated times.

We see all kinds of political, social and other forms of agitation around us, and everywhere we see how the whole way in which such agitation is conducted is basically dying out today. Only recently, we have had the most dismal experience of how people think and how things are presented when, from the point of view of today's life, something is to be propagated that is necessary for the further development of these or those conditions. We saw it at the League of Nations Assembly in Geneva, where basically all the important matters were only talked about, where in reality the issues at hand were not addressed at all and where not a single one of them was handled in such a way that the action had hand and foot, as it was by those who fled, the Argentinians.

Now, I said that our movement for threefolding was calculated to progress faster than it actually did. This is of course connected with the fact that in the present epoch of humanity, which has no time, it is not possible to carry out such a movement at a slow pace, otherwise the possibility of bringing about any kind of recovery within Europe, and especially in Central Europe, will simply fade away. It is absolutely necessary, first of all, to realize that we are going to our doom at a tremendous speed, even if, from time to time, one thing or another can help us to overcome this doom.

Above all, we must agree – and we want to do that now on the basis of a specific question – on the necessary prerequisites for today's, let's say agitation, or whatever you want to call it. You see, our discussions arose from an idea, I said. The idea was to gather about fifty prominent people here with whom an understanding could be reached about the methods and, in particular, the basis of a corresponding agitation. Because without a thorough agitation being carried out over a large territory in the near future, we will not make any headway on such a comprehensive issue as threefolding must become.

Now, you are about to vote on the fate of the Upper Silesian territories, and we can only discuss some of the things that should actually be done here with all our might in the next few days in principle in the few days that we are allowed for this particular question.

The first thing that is necessary today – that we cannot express in public, if we want to be effective, with these words, with which I want to express it now, but that we must have in mind when choosing our words, in our choice of the material we present – that is the conviction that the old configurations of public life cannot be taken up by anyone who really wants to heal the conditions of civilization. We must be convinced that all the questions: could one perhaps compromise with this party, with this professional association and the like, by leaving this party, this association in its views, in its habits of thinking and feeling? that all these questions should be answered by us in the negative. When the Anthroposophical Society began its work, I always heard from the most diverse sides: Yes, in Munich people are like this, you have to proceed like this; in Berlin people are like that, you have to proceed like that; in Hannover and elsewhere, you have to proceed differently again. All that is nonsense, it really has no significance. The only thing that is of significance is that we are clear about what must be created and what must be reshaped, and that we have the will to bring this new creation to the people, so that we make ourselves as understandable as possible with regard to this reshaping, not only intellectually but also emotionally.

The second thing is, I would put it this way: I say that today we need substance in our agitation material, real content. What have people actually been working with, one might say, for centuries, when they have been engaged in political or social or any other kind of agitation? They worked with slogans, with phrases, and one name they invented for these phrases was: ideals. They worked with ideals in their sense. Now, with ideals, if they contain what has been called such in the last centuries and especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, one can people, can inspire them, can lead them to jumping around and making crazy gestures, but you can't achieve more objective results with such enthusiasm built on mere words. And achieving results is what matters today. But we can only achieve results if we say: We live today in a social order where, I would say, the downfall is also tripartite.

The downfall is tripartite and at the most important points it also shows, I would say, the disorganized - I cannot say: organized - structure of the downfall. We are experiencing a decline in our spiritual life, which has finally led, on the one hand, to the ecclesiastical confessions and, on the other hand, to what has gradually emerged from the ecclesiastical confessions, but today does not really know what it stands for and where it wants to go when it is on fire, that is our school life. These two aspects of intellectual life, our church and school life, are one element of the decline. They are intimately connected with a further element, from which both church and school life are basically fed: they are connected with the national principle. For from the depths of the national element emerges everywhere that which one wants to carry into the school system, that which lives in the school system. And on the other hand, even if they want to be international, the creeds, for the most diverse territories of today's world, are oriented towards nations.

Another thing is the legal-state, the political, which is sailing everywhere into decline. The point here is that one should finally abandon that, one might say, harmful covering of circumstances, which today, at least in the central regions of Europe, still remains as an old habit, not at all as what it was before. But one must at least look at such a thing clearly enough to see clearly. Today, no one has any idea how corrupt this political life of modern civilization actually had become before the catastrophe of 1914. You see, one can give many examples of this. Let us look at just one. Within Germany and the neighboring areas, there are still a number of people who, as you may know, do not consider a certain individual named Helfferich to be a complete pest in all the areas in which he was active. One need only recall, for example, that shortly before the outbreak of war, this individual Helfferich gave a speech in which he said: What some claim, that Germany could be starved in a subsequent war, seems to me to be mere theory. Because if such a war breaks out, so many powers will be involved that one must already have a great mistrust of the entire German diplomacy, if one imagines that one would then have everyone against them. But such mistrust, that contradicts my understanding. That is more or less what this individual Helfferich said shortly before the outbreak of the war in 1914. Now, there is so much intellectual perfidy in a statement like that – I say perfidy because it crosses over from the intellectual to the moral plane at the same time – that such a statement, when properly considered, should make it clear to us the corruption in which modern civilization is steeped.

Just imagine what is meant by this statement: If what many predict comes to pass, namely that Germany will be blockaded from all sides in a coming war, then one cannot have confidence in German diplomacy. Now, however, one must have this confidence! Imagine a person saying that we must have this trust. That means we have to pull the wool over people's eyes, because he knew that this trust was not possible. Today we have to realize that if we want to continue working with nothing but unrealistic ideas, we will not be able to make any real progress. Even words such as 'radical' and 'non-radical' have basically lost their value today, because it is important to express certain things more radically than before. Above all, it is important to really show people in all concreteness what is leading to the harm of humanity. We must come to very sharp characteristics not only of the existing conditions, but also of the personalities, then only we can work thoroughly. And if one considers such a question from this point of view, such as the Upper Silesian voting question, then one must first be seized by one thought: How should one behave in relation to the vote as such: German or Polish? That is the first question that arises: German or Polish?

Today, we must try to look at such questions from a certain objective human point of view, not from a point of view that flows only from the old habits of thought - even if they are those that we call national. And to the extent that we succeed in doing so, we will make progress.

And so, as far as possible in this short time that can be devoted to our understanding, I would like to show you, from individual things, from which the reasons and convictions should emerge today, that, from an objective human point of view, point of view, whether German or Polish, is an equally great misfortune; an equally great misfortune for the population of Upper Silesia, an equally great misfortune for Poland, an equally great misfortune for Germany, an equally great misfortune for Europe, an equally great misfortune for the whole world. I would actually like to show you that, objectively, the question of German or Polish cannot be posed at all for the population of Upper Silesia and that it is a matter of recognizing that for a small population complex it is a matter of life and death today to arrive at an approach to judgment such as that of the threefold social organism, namely, to stand out from everything that has provided a basis for judgment up to now.

When we raise such questions, we must be able to perceive that laws prevail in all social, political and economic activity, that arbitrariness alone does not prevail in them, that these laws will be realized, that voting can only be done within these laws. You can vote on whether to put an oven door on this or that side of the oven; and you would do well to consult with people who understand such matters about such questions. But you cannot vote on whether, when you have put wood in the stove, you should light the wood with a match or with a piece of ice. No, the question of the development of the will must be brought into the right relationship to the necessities of existence. Therefore, one cannot speak out of the blue of the will, out of the nebulous and indefinite, nor can one cause a small group in a particularly exposed position to make their decision out of this. One should not shrink from saying, today, when everything is done out of the old habits of thought, that this will certainly lead to destruction. Today we should not shrink from telling the people the truth, even if it seems insane to them. That is what it is all about: telling the people the truth. If we are to discuss this question, we must speak from the starting-points from which the forces at work can be seen.

You see, the study of the Polish character in particular makes it very easy to see how impossible it would be to simply infiltrate the Polish element in such a strategically exposed territory. And if you look at the relationship of the Upper Silesian territory to the Polish territory, then you already have the other relationship, the relationship to the Prussian-German territory.

It is not enough to judge the Polish element as a people and within European politics, for example, based on the few observations that have been made with this or that Poland, or to treat and view it according to how one or the other action that originated in Poland has played out in history. All this is not enough. Rather, one must be clear about the significant role that the Polish people, if we may use the term, have played within what is, after all, an extensive European territory. This role that the Polish people have played is, after all, very characteristic of the development of other political conditions within Europe, and the Polish element plays a very, very intense role in the political conditions of Europe.

If you look at Poland, it is basically very exposed to both Western and Eastern influences, and it shows such internal peculiarities, this Polish people, that you can say: What was already present in other places has found expression in the Polish nation in a very special way since the 15th or 16th century. One cannot look at Poland without seeing, on the one hand, the ancient cultural, political and spiritual traditions of the East in its East, and how in this East, while Poland is undergoing all kinds of vicissitudes, modern Russian culture is gradually emerging. One cannot judge this Poland otherwise than by taking into account how, in its south, out of medieval conditions, this Austria, now on the verge of extinction, is prepared for disintegration, and how then, in the end, the German Reich, destined for a short existence, emerged in its west.

You see, what Poland is experiencing within European life is actually connected with all these things. If we look back to the beginning of the sixteenth century, to the end of the fifteenth, we see conditions on the soil of what later became Germany that have not actually been directly continued. We need only recall names such as Götz von Berlichingen, Franz von Sickingen, Ulrich von Hutten, and so on, and we see conditions that existed at that time and that have not been continued. What were these conditions based on? They were based on the existence of a certain feudal caste, even if this feudal caste could, of course, also produce such strong, in some respects admirable personalities as those mentioned, even if this feudal caste was based on an ignorant, more or less uncivilized large peasant population. And that this feudal caste worked in such a way that basically the great landowner always lives in the midst of the other, ignorant peasant population, and that the great landowner also exercises the administration and basically exerts his corresponding pressure on the spiritual life, has given the social life in Central Europe its structure. But this structure was eliminated in Central Europe at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century, so thoroughly that one can say: Within the German-speaking areas, this structure was eradicated down to the deepest levels of sentiment, and in its place came that which had first worked its way up in the territorial principalities and then welded itself together into the German Reich: namely, the military and bureaucratic organization of the social organism. Thus, from the feudal-aristocratic element, which could only be built on the broad basis of an uncivilized peasantry, it spread from the territorial principality on a military and bureaucratic basis. And within this Central Europe, most pronounced in Prussia, it became an attitude; it was not something that was merely superimposed on the social order, but it became an attitude.

Surely one cannot imagine two greater opposites. A clever man is placed in the old chivalrous Götz von Berlichingen society, and he has to occupy himself in some way. How does he occupy himself? He acts in such a way that he judges, for example, on the basis of his knowledge of human nature, that he sets up the school on the basis of his religious ideas, that he imagines that one speaks according to common sense over a certain district, which is not too large. That is how the German-speaking world was organized until the 16th century; then it was reorganized, then came the civil service and the military, and if you imagine the kind of person who could not have existed until the time of Götz von Berlichingen, then it is the Prussian reserve lieutenant. So, the psychological possibility of existence for him has only been created since the 16th century. And isn't it true, Reserve-Lieutenant, that the civil and military natures are united? This was not only enforced in Central Europe in those areas where it could be understood, but also in those areas where it could not be understood. For example, our history is written in such a way that this attitude lives in it, and our history is taught in schools in such a way that this attitude is inherent in it. But because this transformation could not reach the lowest, innermost structure of the soul because of the German national character, in principle territorial principalities arose, not a complete Caesarism, which was first attempted in the 19th century through the war, the 1870 war, but which could not be carried out.

Because of the most diverse historical circumstances, which would go too far to discuss today, the great wave to view everything political, state-legal and military and to shackle economic life with the state element, because this wave went over Central Europe, that is why it became so in Central Europe.

Now, if you look at Russia, you also have in its social structure what was suddenly abolished in Central Europe at the beginning of the 16th century. You have the broad, uneducated, uncivilized peasantry, which is to be administered somehow, which is to be somehow incorporated into a social organism. There, too, the conditions already exist as they did, for example, in Central Europe until the 16th century; but there is no replacement through individualism. Everything is rapidly drawn into tsarist centralization, so that what existed in the territorial principalities of Europe as something between Caesarianism and the uncivilized people does not exist in Russia, and everything tends to make the individual, whether he is destined to it or not, simply an official or a soldier, since the central power is the decisive factor for him. In various ways, on the one hand in Russia, on the other hand in German Central Europe, that which is actually the organization of the people is being abolished. On the one hand it is driven into Caesarism, on the other hand into the territorial principality.

And a third is Austria, Austria, which is growing out of patriarchal relationships altogether, which live on as family traditions within a princely house. This Austria is gradually being pushed to combine the most diverse peoples purely from the point of view of Roman centralism, which wants to administer, which then takes on somewhat democratic airs, but which wants to administer the people in a medieval Spanish way.

In these three currents, you have the Polish element, which basically opposes all three and which, in a rather strange way, turns against all three currents out of what I would call an inner disposition. The Polish element adopts from the West everything that leads to modern aberrations: parliamentarism, the school system and the like. It adopts, I might say, everything that leads to a certain analytical element in life, to the element of judgment and discernment. From the East it adopts the synthetic element, life in grand concepts and ideas. You see, in a sense, analysis in the Polish element becomes sloppiness and the Eastern synthesis becomes, in a sense, fantasy. Certainly, these two currents are always present: from the western element, from orderly analysis, sloppiness; and from the eastern element, fantasy, enthusiasm and also untruthfulness; for untruthfulness is only the dark side of the oriental synthesis, and sloppiness is only the dark side of pedantry. When pedantry goes so far that it can no longer be followed, then it lapses into its opposite element, into sloppiness. In Austria, there was no lack of stringent regulations for all aspects of life; the essential thing was that no single regulation could be observed, because, firstly, they all contradicted each other and, secondly, because there were so many that no one could deal with them all.

How did it come about that this Polish identity emerged in Europe, when everything around it was so very different? How did it come about that this Polishness tenaciously developed its own character? This simply came about because, when the great wave of Russianness, with its natural plans for conquest, poured over Europe, it was necessary for the others, who were also considered – I cannot present it in detail now, but it could be presented – to always react to this Russianness in an appropriate way. Above all, it was necessary for the Prussian and Austrian empires to react to the Russian element in the 18th century. From a certain point of view, it is easy to reproach the Prussians and Austrians for dividing Poland with Russia; but one does not consider that if they had not divided, Russia would have taken everything alone. No, things must be considered objectively. Prussia and Austria participated in the partition of Poland because they could not allow Russia to take Poland alone, which would certainly have happened otherwise. Well, so this Poland was divided.

But in this divided nation, there lived on, strongly on, that with which Europe, the German element, had broken in the beginning of the 16th century: the feudal element of the nobility with the broad base of the uncivilized peasantry. What had also been broken in Russia on the surface all lived on in Polishness. In its social structure, Polishness basically preserved the Europeanism of the 15th century, which actually still had an ancient element in it, had Greekness in it. We admire Greekness, but the greatness of Greekness is based on the fact that it developed to its highest degree in the 15th century. If we saw clearly, we would say to ourselves: We rightly admire this Greekness in what history has brought forth from it; but on the other hand, we say wherever we can: We have achieved the greatest progress in Europe by overcoming, bit by bit, what we were, that which could only be built on the basis of a rural proletariat. Development in Europe up to the 15th century was still oriented towards Greek culture, so that we say of this 'Greek Europe': that is what does not allow for a dignified existence. A certain upper class, which emerged in Poland, also retained this Greek attitude internally, namely, to live in an aristocratic upper class with a simple, uncivilized peasantry that was not differentiated to the extent of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. And so it was divided up, this Polish nation. Because, if you think about it, only the upper class of the Poles thought correctly. They began to hate Russia, Prussia and Austria terribly. But now, within this Polish element, there were people who did not matter at all, the completely uncivilized lower class with no urban or intellectual background. And you see, some of them went to Russia, some to Austria; that is, to Russia, where the Poles were within Russian territory, and to Austria, where the Poles were within Galicia. And some went to Prussia, where the Poles were in Silesia and Posen. The Polish upper class did not change, but behaved in the new circumstances as it could, adapting as little as possible to the circumstances, especially the political ones. By contrast, the lower class adapted in a most remarkable way. Of course, what has emerged from the lower class is what we must look for today as a new ferment, that is, what has emerged from the lower class that was below the surface of the Polish aristocratic element. You see, it is curious that this lower class has only acquired a certain structure under the conditions that arose from the partition of Poland. Through the structure that was in Russian Poland, the lower class incorporated an intellectual element in the most eminent sense, an intellectual element that aims at deepening thought and deepening scholarship through a certain religious element. In Russia, until the revolution, religious life was not distinguished from scientific life. The merging of scientific thoughts, the insights of sensory life, into large synthetic, comprehensive ideas is what has passed from the East through the Russian element into the Polish element. Without this influence from the spiritual side of social life, people like Slowacki, Dunajewski and so on are, I believe, inconceivable. On the other hand, in the part of Polish life that was influenced by Austria, this underclass took on the legal, political and constitutional aspects of Austria. And that is the reason why the finest political minds and speakers emerged from Austrian Galicia, and basically from Polish Galicia, such as Hausner and Wolski. These people could never have emerged within the Polish nation if this Polishness had not been absorbed from the neighboring areas, where one could take from the Russian the synthetic and from the Austrian the basis for constitutional, political thinking. A person like Hausner, who played such a great role in the 1870s and 1880s – he was a deputy from a Polish-Galician town – such a figure, or his parliamentary colleague Wolski, they are completely oriented towards what one might call “political minds”, not people who can necessarily manage, but who see through circumstances in a wonderful way.

You see, that is the problem: people are talking about political conditions everywhere today without having any substance in their speeches. We have to deal with what has happened. When I designed the agitation course, I did not think that individuals would be trained in speaking, but that material would be provided for agitation, and it is from this point of view that I am speaking now.

What happened in 1918, what has happened through the events since 1914, you can basically find it prophetically expressed in the Austrian parliament at the end of the 1870s. It is true that at that time, people like Hausner and Wolski spoke of the downfall of Austria, of the inability to deal with the proletarian question and other questions. In short, everything that has become reality was spoken of in the Austrian parliament at the time. The people were mistaken about almost nothing, except with regard to two things: with regard to time and with regard to present possibilities. They saw time distorted in a fantastic way everywhere. Take a person like Hausner. In a speech he once gave a magnificent exposition of how the moment Austria marched into Bosnia the foundation was laid for the downfall. What others only grasped later, Hausner had already put forward in the 1970s. But he was wrong about the time frame. He thought it would happen in ten years. This stems from the eastern element; even the sober Hausner has this element within him, this fantasy. He sees the right thing, but he sees it distorted in time. He predicted for the next decade what would take another two, three, four decades. And then Hausner once gave a critique of Germanness with a complete misunderstanding of the present moment, because if you read the speech he gave in around 1880, if you read it, it doesn't fit the circumstances of that time at all; but it describes with a certain sensitive cruelty what it is like today. People were mistaken there, but it is true that one can say that Poland has been particularly stimulated from the east for great, synthetic thinking, and particularly for political-state life, which has indeed been mastered in a magnificent way by people like Hausner and Wolski, from Austria. And that is why one must also believe – and this is absolutely true and is also evident in reality – that those parts of Poland that came to Prussia at that time have received their special impetus for the development of economic life, and that therefore the key to dealing with the parts of civilization that came to Prussia from Poland must lie in dealing with economic life. The Poles have been especially endowed by Prussia in economic life, by Austria in political life, and by Russia in religious-spiritual life.

We have here a threefold structure that shows itself in such a way that the Poles have been endowed by Russia for great spiritual ideas. Study what is called Polish Messianism, study the reflections of Slowacki, but also study what Poles speak so casually, and you will find that this impulse comes from the East. But study that which lives in the Poles, that which makes them politicians, that which basically makes them take part in every conspiracy and the like, and you will find that they have taken it from Austria. And you will find that they have taken the economy from Prussia.

But with all this it is not possible to rebuild some Poland, to build a Polish state. It had to fragment Europe in such a way that a certain population took something different from Russia than from Austria, namely the spiritual, and from Austria something different than from Prussia, namely the political, and from Prussia the economic; it had to arise from the fragmentation. It is true that the appropriate talents could be acquired in these three fields, but it would not become a unified state. It could be built up but would fall apart again and again. There would never be a Poland in reality for any length of time, because there could not be one, because at the decisive moment Poland would have to be divided in order for the Poles to develop their talents. So, this Poland will not exist and to speak of Poland today is an illusion and one should do everything to popularize such ideas, as I have now hinted at the impossibility of such state structures as they are being sought today as a unified state. Today we should be planting in people's minds the realization that to say: 'to be Polish' is to court misfortune. It must come out of the Polish into the general human, then these things, which have developed historically in the threefold order, will bear fruit. Let us look at it from the opposite point of view: the Poles received their great synthetic ideas from Russia; so they must have given the Russians to them. But the Russians no longer have them; they have sailed into Bolshevism. They were not strong enough to build an organism. They live in a social organism that is completely passing over into destruction. This was especially characteristic in Austria, in this most remarkable parliament of the world in the 1870s, where people like Hausner, Dunajewski, Dzieduszycki and the like lived. Old Czech Rieger and Gregr also lived there, for example. But people like Herbst, Plener and Carneri also lived there – that is, Germans. The most eminent Czechs, the most eminent Poles, the most eminent Germans all lived there. The situation with regard to the Germans was similar to that with regard to the Poles. There we have another example of how the lower classes among the Czechs developed into fine politicians by living in Austrian conditions. In Austria, one becomes a fine politician and develops a sophisticated understanding of political conditions. But that starts with the Germans in Austria. And a person like Otto Hausner, with his subtle grasp of politics, with his accurate predictions of Austria's downfall, he once said: If we continue in this way, then in five years' time - he is exaggerating, of course - we will no longer have an Austrian parliament at all. It was only later that he said, but it was correctly predicted. People like them have only become possible alongside the Germans of Austria, who actually adopted this form of parliamentarism from the West and transplanted it into Central Europe; it has become fashionable. But the Germans in Austria are the ones from whom the others have learned this fine, sophisticated view of political life. But they themselves behave as clumsily as possible in this regard. It is characteristic that what the others learn from them and what becomes significant for them, they behave with clumsily. At the moment it enters the minds of the others, it becomes significant for European life as a ferment. The Germans had to rely on holding on to the territory they inhabited. They could not do that. The Poles did not need to hold on to any territory, because they had none. They could develop ideas as such. As for the Germans, they could not do anything with ideas, they gave them to others, and there they worked in such a way that they undermined their own social organism.

Let us now turn to the third element: in Germany, economic life really did develop. It can be said that economic life in Central European Germany has progressed beyond everything else that has developed in the world. Enormous economic conditions developed there. But they grew into the airy and could not hold themselves. Poland could learn a lot from it, but the Germans could not continue to operate in this way. They steered into disaster. This would have been the case even if the war had not come.

So we have a threefold division of European decline: from the spiritual side in Russia, from the legal and political side in Austria, from the economic side in Germany. The only way to counter this is to develop a threefoldedness of the rising, that is, a fully conscious grasp of the threefoldedness of the idea.

And now one should imagine: There is a territory that is supposed to decide today whether it wants to belong to the one that cannot found a state, Poland, or whether it wants to become a member of the tripartite Europe that brought together all the elements that were heading towards decline: Austria, Prussia-Germany and Russia. It is supposed to decide whether it wants to belong to one of these three members, in this case to Germany. Should such a decision not be the occasion to reflect on what constitutes our salvation today, by saying: We do not care about what has happened in Europe, but we want to incorporate into the moments of development what must come anew? It may be possible to talk cleverly and consider what I have said here to be unwise, but no reasonable Europe will be able to emerge from what is simply said. Therefore, it is necessary that we base ourselves on positive, real conditions. That is what I wanted to say to you today.

I regret that we cannot negotiate for a longer period of time. I can only give you a few suggestions from a variety of points of view regarding our specific problem. This afternoon, we will then address the individual questions that our friends have to ask.

Yesterday, more out of a certain historical context, I tried to make it clear to you the futility that exists under present-day conditions in a vote such as that on the Upper Silesian question. But this futility can still confront us from various other sides. It is already the case that all people who think today in terms of the old conditions have terrible illusions about the future of European life. Today, one actually lives only on illusions. And those of our friends who now propose to work for an improvement of conditions must realize that we can only make progress to the extent that we succeed in creating enlightenment relatively quickly, and not only enlightenment out of the small circumstances, but enlightenment out of the very comprehensive world circumstances, which today actually also play a role in the circumstances of the smallest territory. We will hardly be able to tie in with existing institutions and the like. We will only have to approach people who are inclined to take up our ideas, so that we have more and more such people and can then do something with them. And we must try to make it clear to these people that they must behave in such a way, even within the present circumstances, as is in line with our ideas. For, you see, if we have established yesterday that basically both the German and the Polish side actually have no future within the old and also the desired state structures, then on the other hand we can also realize that this hopelessness also exists for other reasons. Of course, Upper Silesia is part of the whole European situation. The special situation is only this, that in a certain sense it has to decide its fate today. This must be taken into account. Wherever there are decisions to be made, the big issues must be brought into play.

Let us look at the situation in Europe today from a different point of view than we did yesterday. You see, the economic situation in Europe is such that Central and Eastern Europe are heading for rapid decline in relation to everything that has developed from their old conditions. The old economic foundations, but above all the state and intellectual foundations, cannot be used as a basis for further work in Europe. Those who are concerned with public affairs today may have some idea of the horror of this decline, but they have illusions. One of the main illusions, especially among the people of Central Europe, and it is no different for those in Eastern Europe, is the belief that an understanding with the Anglo-Saxon world or with the Western countries in general is possible under the old conditions. Such an understanding is simply not possible, and such an understanding must also trip up a vote like the one on the Upper Silesian question. It must trip up this impossibility. You cannot simply vote on the conditions that are now being created by, let's say, the statesmen and economists of the former Entente. What ideas can a person, who basically thinks half-way - after all, people hardly ever think in black and white - what ideas can such a person have about a possible restoration of the economic and other European conditions? He can say: the first thing that is possible would be a large foreign currency loan to be obtained through America, that would be large advances. As you know, such things are being discussed today. Large advances, loans, which could only come from America, would be given to the Europeans, perhaps guaranteed by the individual states that want to consolidate in this way, and economic life would be able to be revived through such a valuta loan. Europe would again be supplied with raw materials and foodstuffs, and it might be possible to improve the economic conditions in Europe over a period of 30, 40 or 50 years. This idea is the result of superficial thinking. No government in America will be able to overcome the resistance that is rooted in the conditions in Europe. The states of Europe are not in a position to offer sufficient guarantees, even if small-scale measures are taken. But such measures cannot be taken under these circumstances. It is inconceivable that anything could be achieved in this way. One could still imagine that, on a smaller scale, individual people in neutral or Entente countries or in America would be approached, who, on the basis of trust, would in turn grant individual loans to individual economic figures in European countries. But such action would be possible only on a very small scale under the existing conditions, for the people who could be found in the neutral or in the Entente countries to grant such loans would be so few that an improvement of the European situation through this smaller of the two means could not be considered at all. So people fall prey to all kinds of illusions. They virtually omit intermediate steps and think of organizing a kind of world economic federation, which is to develop from the idea of the League of Nations. They think that in a kind of world state, all economic life would be nationalized, so that the individual liabilities in the defeated countries would not come into consideration. Now, of course, that is a terrible utopia, because it has been shown, of course, by what has happened with regard to the effectiveness of the League of Nations, as uncovered by the assembly in Geneva. And to pin one's hopes on such a League of Nations, oriented as it is towards the economic side, is something quite utopian today. What is at issue today is to look more deeply into the forces that are driving the development of humanity and to try to arrive at measures that can really help and must work. Such measures can only be derived from the threefold social order, and as soon as we entertain illusions that something can be done without it, we are simply collaborating in our own destruction. Just consider what it means if, for example, the population of Upper Silesia votes to join Prussia-Germany. This means nothing other than that this population surrenders itself and its territory to a larger area, which, if it continues to work as it has done so far, must inevitably fall back into barbarism. It cannot be a matter of joining a territory that has not already shown that it has overcome the old conditions. This is certainly not yet evident in the influential circles in Prussia-Germany, but the opposite is the case. So let us look at the facts quite objectively: joining Prussia-Germany means completely surrendering to impossible conditions.

For you see, here we come to the other illusion which the best people on the Entente side have - and we want to look into this. There are people like Keynes, who has a certain following, or Norman Angell, who also has a certain, even very large following. What do these people think? They think that the Treaty of Versailles must be revised, that it cannot continue on the basis of the existing treaty. But why do they think that? They think this: Europe has so far been in economic contact with the rest of the world. If Europe falls back into barbarism and its economic life disintegrates, then, so these people think, especially Norman Angell, the economic life of not only the Entente states, which of course will disintegrate, but also of America, will disintegrate, because the European markets will no longer exist. They say that the countries of Europe are needed on both sides of the Entente and in America in order to engage in fruitful economic relations with them. You see, the best minds of the Entente are judging from these foundations. It can be said that very significant things have been said in this direction in recent months, and that the number of people who are convinced of the impossibility of the Versailles Treaty and all that it entails is increasing. But they are wrong, they live in an illusion, they also judge from existing habits of thought and feeling. One must not retreat from cruel truths in a sensitive way. It is simply not true that the Anglo-Saxon population depends on economic relations with Central and Eastern Europe. At most, it depends only on reorganizing its entire economic life, making it a self-contained economic entity, and then it can continue to exist quite well, even if so many people die of hunger in Europe. These are well-intentioned statements, but they are not true. It would perhaps take fifteen to thirty years before the economic life in the countries outside Central and Eastern Europe could be reorganized in such a way that it could exist in itself; the real possibility of such a reorganization certainly exists. If one were to proceed as these people imagine, then whatever anyone in Central or Eastern Europe does, based on the old assumptions, would ultimately lead to the Western world being supported by way of a detour through barbarism. There is basically no other way to see it from the old assumptions.

One could imagine that a majority, particularly in America, would work towards simply abandoning Europe to its fate and turning the western part of the world into a closed economic area. But one would absolutely surrender to this state of affairs if one were to join the existing conditions in Central Europe by voting. By joining Poland, one would not be doing anything different. The prospect has already been anticipated with what has just been said. One would also do nothing other than surrender oneself to the thinking of the Entente. Poland may be the Entente's protégé, but that would not help it in any decisive case; it would be at the mercy of the ruin of European conditions, or it would be drawn into the catastrophic events that I am about to mention.

So, a plebiscite that goes both ways is an absurdity. We must first of all keep this sentence very clearly in mind: such a plebiscite is an absurdity. We will discuss the conditions under which it could take place in one case or the other later on. We must be quite clear about the fact that we cannot keep up the world of the past with the ideas of the past. This is particularly evident from the things I tried to describe yesterday. Poland, I said, has retained what the rest of Europe has in a sense overcome: a kind of aristocracy. Under this aristocratic rule, the lower classes developed, drawing their impulses for their cleverness and energy, I would say, from a threefold structure: namely, from Russia, the spiritual; from Prussia-Germany, the economic; and from Austria, through Galicia, the political and state-related. This lower class has, so to speak, worked its way into the bourgeois currents that had the upper hand in Europe for a time, so that what had developed in Poland from the lower class, together with that of the rest of Europe, has worked its way into the bourgeoisie. But today it is blunt in its effectiveness, just as the bourgeoisie is blunt in general.

Now, there is simply the broader background today, and this broader background confronts us today in an illusion, in a real illusion. It confronts us in the West more as a bourgeois labor movement, in the center of Europe as more or less social democracy nuanced in this or that way, and the further east we go, the more it confronts us in the form of Bolshevism. We must be clear about the living conditions of Bolshevism in Russia. Incidentally, the Silesian voting area is very close to these living conditions of Bolshevism, and we must be completely clear about them.

You see, Bolshevism stems from the fact that the upper classes, be it the nobility or the bourgeoisie, have not found any way in modern times to expand their thinking to the same areas where labor has been expanded and where, above all, human will has been expanded. They continued to work with the old ideas, expanded the commercial and economic aspects, and involved the broad masses of the population, but they took no steps to meet the needs of this broad mass of humanity in any way other than through the old state relationships. And unfortunately it must be said that even today this is not happening, because it is not happening in the only way it could happen. This must be our main concern. For it is a characteristic example of how leading personalities have been brought to what is actually stirring and moving in the broad masses of humanity. It has not happened in a reasonable way. Ludendorff himself says in his memoirs that he provided the leaders of Bolshevism in Russia; he says it was a military necessity for him, and the politicians would have been obliged to avert the dire consequences of this necessity. So he does not deny that he provided Bolshevism in Russia with its leaders; he only says that the politicians were not clever enough to make up for the great folly he committed. Such things are possible today and are accepted. Thus, the leading personalities were supplied to Bolshevism, not from the most ancient state conditions, as Ludendorff thought, but from a rational cooperation of people who know something about the course of humanity and of those people who want to be led, but do not want to be led within the old conditions, but want to be led to new conditions. This is something that must be thoroughly recognized. Since the world war, it is no longer true that only the old proletarians make up this broad lower class. Members of all former classes belong to this broad lower class. And this fact is still not taken into account today either. They do not yet realize that those people who have retained something of their pre-war intelligence must be approached primarily with sensible ideas, so that more and more of the leading intelligentsia can be introduced into the world in a reasonable way. That is the most important question today: that the eyes of those people who have retained some of their intelligence be opened so that they become the right leaders. Without this we shall make no headway. You see, two things are impending. One has already been hinted at earlier: the reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe is impossible on any other foundations than those of the threefold social order; it is impossible for the people of Central and Eastern Europe, but also impossible for the people of the Entente. The people of the Entente and America could only do something if there was a significant reduction in wages in Europe compared to America. But the American proletariat would immediately oppose this, and perhaps the English proletariat would not allow it either. Any action in this direction would itself promote the revolution in the Western countries. And that is what must be held out to humanity: that the Bolshevik revolution will also take hold in the Western world, coming from the broadest lower classes, not from outside but from within. No matter how many blockades the leading personalities in the West of today erect against the Bolshevik contamination of the West, what comes from the East through the transmission of Bolshevism is not the main thing for these Western countries, but what rises from below is the main thing; that is the essential.

Now there are already a number of people today – and their number will grow rapidly – who realize that it is quite impossible to avoid revolution if one continues to work in the old way. And just as they told the people in the old sense: we have to make a war to defeat the revolution in our own country, it means nothing else, but that it must be worked towards, especially among the people of the West who understand in the old sense, the Second World War. There is no other way than to work towards the Second World War in order to avert internal Bolshevism in the West. This Second World War is all the more certain as, in the East, as soon as things are taken to extremes, understanding can never be gained for the economic measures of the West. In the East, the way of thinking that is emerging today in Russia will even combine with the religious ideas of the East, and an atmosphere will arise over the whole of Asia, to which the Japanese population and their rulers are extraordinarily suited, so that the East-West tension will fall into the economic turmoil of the future. The Second World War, which must develop between Asia and America and what lies in between, must develop out of economic reasons. You hear how the call sounds from the lower classes: world revolution! This idea of world revolution can only be shrouded in a fog by unleashing this second world war catastrophe. There is no other way.

Now we are living towards such a time when the conflict between America and Asia will become stronger and stronger. Of course, the nations that lie in between will be drawn into this conflict. You can be quite sure that Asia, with the Japanese in the lead, will be in the same position as Central Europe was in relation to the Entente, with regard to what comes from the West. The East may indulge in a great confidence of victory for a time, but just as America was decisive in Europe, it will also be decisive in Asia. But the Ludendorff will be found in the East, which will send the necessary leaders to the West to contaminate the West with Bolshevism, that is, in this case, with Asia. It will also be found among the Japanese. And then you have the one thing for which the mood exists in the broadest sections of society, you have simply created that through the Second World War. The America in which a Lenin is at work, as Lenin is now at work in Russia, must be before one's eyes. One must not close one's mind to these perspectives, one must realize that the causes of the present plight lie in economic decline, that the effects lie in the barbarization of humanity. There is only one fact that can be set against this, and that is this, which may perhaps be said in our context here, but which should permeate all our work. However, it should perhaps not be made into a subject of agitation, because the moment it is made into one, it will be immediately killed off in this world-historical moment.

You see, there are people all over the world who, simply because they have come to an end with current economic, state and spiritual thinking, are beginning to seriously consider this threefold order. The fact that, for example, the translation of the “Key Points of the Social Question” into English has been met with a strong reaction is full proof of this. And if we were strong enough to work with the necessary momentum, then, if we could take advantage of the fact that the “Key Points of the Social Question” have been discussed in the English newspapers, we would be able to develop a very effective agitation while the mood is still warm. But what we lack are personalities, a sufficiently large number of personalities who could work effectively for our cause. This led me to point out as early as the spring of 1920 that we would first need fifty people here in Stuttgart to discuss among themselves and with me everything that is necessary to bring to the people. That is what it is about today. There is no other way to educate a sufficient number of people. But for that we need a sufficiently large number of enlighteners who speak out of the underground. Because you can be sure: if you educate in what we have discussed here today and yesterday, it works; it just needs to be brought to the people on a sufficiently large scale. It is not enough for us to spread it with a group of ten; we have to be able to spread it with hundreds of agitators. It is necessary that we have more and more such personalities.

Thus, as I said, in the lower classes there is growing understanding of the whole world, which is moving towards barbarism; but there must be leaders, leaders who, through their inner quality, can thoroughly understand what is contained in the threefold order; these leaders can only come into existence in Central Europe. That is the paradox that stands before humanity today: that in those areas that are most oppressed, most defeated, there live the people who can most understand the way out of the turmoil of humanity. In this respect, we in Central Europe have been sorely tried enough. Consider this: since the first half of the 19th century, the idea of an initially idealistic organization of the German people arose from the best qualities of the German people. What has asserted itself as the striving for unity, especially since 1848, arose from the finest qualities of the German people in Central Europe, which was absolutely precious in the cultural development of humanity. And that has a certain quality in itself to which one must appeal. It has the quality in itself that it is not despised or hated by any people on earth, but on the contrary is accepted by everyone, even by the Poles, when it appears in the quality in which it appeared in Germany at the time as a political idea. For there were some among those people, who were later ridiculed in so-called realistic Germany as the forty-eight idealists, who expressed certain qualities best of all. On the other hand, there is everything that has happened in Central Europe in recent decades, both in Austria and in Germany. There, things have developed that fundamentally contradict the German essence, and it is these that are hated and reviled throughout the world. As long as people in Central Europe do not realize that Central Europe must work from those foundations that lie in the spiritual, that Central Europe, by virtue of its entire historical mission, cannot rely on power relations but only on spiritual ones, as long as that remains the case, the impulse is not given for some developed Central Europe, but only for the downfall of the entire civilized world. In this respect, we can actually look back to Fichte. I will draw your attention to just two points in Fichte, to the last words he uttered in his “Speeches to the German Nation”, in which he calls on the Germans to reflect on their own qualities, to work from within, because by doing so they will look up to the world above. And on the other hand, he admonished the Germans to renounce naval supremacy. Read in the “Speeches to the German Nation” how strongly Fichte advised against striving for any kind of naval supremacy. Fichte scorns the so-called freedom of the seas. That was based on a deep instinct.

And you see, the moment you touch on these things, you also have to point out that this is where the lever for change lies. Read the important hint that was not understood at the time, like the whole writing was not understood, the important hint that I tried to give in my “Thoughts During the Time of War,” namely that the German people are innocent of the war. Read this important note and read the title on the cover, that the writing is addressed to Germans and to those who do not believe they have to hate; because I knew very well: only such people can understand it. But such people did not come forward at the time, although I was urged to organize a second edition of this writing. Of course I refrained from doing so, because basically only those people who believed they had to hate the Germans responded to it. In Germany, people kept quiet about these things. The book would only have gained significance if it had been fully taken in its factual basis. That is why it had to be removed from the book trade. I wanted to evoke a certain mood among those who are German and believe that they do not have to hate Germans, a certain mood that is present in the depths of the soul. If this hatred, as it was meant at the time, had really come to the fore, it would have created an 'atmosphere' at the time; that is, if it had been seen from the outside that such a mood existed, then fortunately it would have had no impact. If such a mood were perceived today, it would still have a favorable effect. Let me say the following, whereby I ask you to consider the words I am about to read to you, especially in the context in which we now find ourselves: “The Germans did not push their government to enter the war. They knew nothing about it beforehand and did not agree. We do not want to hold the German people responsible, who themselves have gone through all the suffering in this war that they did not cause themselves.”

I ask you, is this not completely in line with what I said in the booklet “Thoughts During the Time of War”? But who said these words under pressure from certain people on June 14, 1917? - That was Woodrow Wilson. If you look at it that way, there is the possibility of understanding across the world. We must bear in mind this turn of events, and continue to do so today, that in the moment when something asserts itself in Europe that shows that it has only to do with the factual development of humanity and has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with a connection with old things, that in that moment an understanding can be found with the world from Central Europe. The moment that the self-determination of the people of Central Europe can be invoked, even if only to a limited extent and in relation to a single point, it must become clear that, by the very nature of things, the German people want nothing to do with anyone who with the old rulers, regardless of whether they are old statesmen or industrialists who have sought their profit, regardless of whether they are on the side of Helfferich or Erzberger or on the side of German democracy. Everything that has any connection with what first sailed into the Wilhelmine era must be eliminated. And from the real essence of the German character, to which the Austrian also belongs, that which can be said must be found. For then it will correspond with what those who still reflect on the truth are saying all over the world. Therefore, the greatest impression can be made in the whole international world when some small group says: We want nothing to do with the Prussia that has emerged, we want nothing to do with that which stands under the protection of the Entente, we know that quite different forces can arise from the subsoil we want to take the position of threefold social order, we do not want only a sham autonomy, as it would emerge, we want a real, true autonomy and will provisionally establish ourselves within this true, real autonomy, we make the vote a protest against the fact of the vote. This is the necessary consequence that arises from the facts of history, as well as from those of current international relations.

Of course, one can say in response: Such a thing today only results in sitting on the ground between two stools. It would not have that effect if it could be sufficiently popularized, and so quickly that it would at least emerge as something clearly audible by the time of the vote in Upper Silesia. It is only by such means that we can advance our movement. The only thing we are faced with is that we are not in a position to get to the point, by the day of the vote, where what would arise as a protest against the facts of the vote itself could somehow be realized. Then, in the first place, working in this area would become extremely difficult. For those who propagate our ideas will find just as little support in Prussian Germany as in Poland. So they have nothing to lose that they would not lose anyway, whether one or the other comes about. It is only possible if a sufficiently large number of people hurl this protest into the world. Then this protest would be just as effective today as if Kühlmann had simply stood up in the German Reichstag at the right time and presented the whole threefolding prospectus against Wilson's ideas. For in the future, it will not be compromise victories that are important, but standing firm on something that one brings out of the matter itself. And if only a relatively small number of people – thousands, of course, would be needed – were to call out to the world: We, as Upper Silesians, see the connection between the one and the other as nonsense – that would be heard throughout the world and would become a factor throughout the world, because it would be favored by the fact that it occurs in connection with the plebiscite. We must endeavor to ensure that what we have to say is not only published week after week in the Dreigliederungs-Zeitung, where it can be as spirited as possible, but only spreads out in decreasing waves, but we must ensure that wherever important things happen in the world, threefolding has a voice, so that it is not always standing aside from events, but really seeks out the moments when something can be done, because humanity is simply hypnotized by the things that happen. Do you think that the Entente will look favourably on the threefold social order if we spread the word about it here? No, their eyes are hypnotized by something like the Silesian voting question. What a few thousand people say, they will see in it what they would otherwise overlook.

These are the things we must take into account here in the present moment. Of course, if it is not possible to get a sufficiently large number of people to vote for it, then under certain circumstances our friends might have no choice but to say: Threefolding will eventually come out of its birth pangs and into effectiveness , and out of necessity the German people might yet develop an understanding for the threefold order; so we will provisionally vote in favor of annexation to Prussia-Germany, but in the hope that this Prussia will sink. But that is only a substitute; with it we would resign ourselves to what we are suffering. What we have to do is win people who can be active in our movement, who can be active in the sense of our threefold social order. And in this direction – it must not be concealed – we have not been effective enough.

Wherever we need supporters who can work, we lack them today. The people we do have are certainly energetic workers, but they are actually needed everywhere. For them, the day should perhaps have not 36, but 64 hours or more. The few people who are really working effectively within our ranks are also aware of this. We need more and more personalities, and if we succeed in attracting more and more such personalities, then we will indeed come to a propagation of the threefold order in Central Europe, so that something can be done. But we should not let such a favorable moment pass by unused, when we could show the world what threefolding means. The world would then take an interest. If what the Upper Silesian appeal is on our part were to become known, the world would take an enormous interest in the threefold order, and we must bring this about; it cannot be taken further at present.

This is what really needs to be emphasized, what those who have now set out to work among the Upper Silesian population for the propagation of our cause must write into their hearts. You cannot say that you should spread the threefold order in general; that has not been possible from the start. You see, I once managed, with threefolding in the background, to get someone to work extremely hard to establish a proper press service in Zurich during the so-called World War I. I was able to make it clear to someone that nothing can be achieved from the old press conditions. The matter had progressed so far that one Tuesday - I have to tell this story over and over again - I was told that there was every prospect of my being able to move to Zurich in the next few days to set up the press service there. The next day came the refusal from the great headquarters, which was, of course, almighty, with the information that there were so many people within Germany waiting for such a position that an Austrian could not be chosen. Well, one need only reflect on such things to get a sense of how, since all the words that have been coined earlier by the idealism of our time no longer have any meaning, how one must look at things when they become clear from the threefold order. If only once the call can sound in the appropriate way somewhere, then it will work.

You see, you must be clear about this: until now, the obstacles to human progress have consisted in the fact that the spiritual movement has been tied to external power relations and external constellations for centuries. Just think that all bourgeois progress, and connected with it everything we have achieved in the arts and sciences, is simply connected with the development of cities, and that it is because cities have become leading that the whole upsurge of the last centuries has come about. In the end, people were no longer able to have the leading coming from the cities. They turned to the old state, which was now supposed to take the lead. This will always fail, regardless of whether it is undertaken by social democracy or by Bolsheviks or undertaken by any intellectual people, it will always fail because of the world's peasantry. In this direction, for example, particularly interesting studies can be made in Switzerland. When the people in Switzerland came very close to a kind of revolution, it was the peasantry that opposed it. Switzerland owes it entirely to the peasantry that the threatened revolution did not break out. Here one can clearly see the contrast between the broad peasantry and what stands out in individual cultural layers: these were the cities, the state and so on. Only in Russia did things turn out differently. The 600,000 people who are now truly steeped in Bolshevik labor in Russia are not what makes the difference; rather, what makes the difference is that the entire broad mass of the peasantry is attached to Lenin and that this entire broad mass believes it has a prospect of getting land. The peasantry believes that only if Lenin remains can it be treated in such a way. If Lenin falls, they will not get the land.

What is the only solution to the great cultural question of the future of humanity? Of course, this culture depends on the existence of spiritual leaders. These spiritual leaders had to, one could say, had to withdraw until now due to special power constellations, withdraw into castles, then withdraw into the cities, had to withdraw into the state, because there was no mood to create an organization that is leading as such through its recognition. And the only way to create such an organization, one that is independent of all other social institutions, is to have the source of higher cultures recognized by itself. And between this spiritual organism and the broad economic organism, the state-legal organization will then stand in, just as the rhythmic system stands in between the head and metabolism systems. The only solution to the questions of the future is an institution of spiritual life that works directly through it. You can see how I have worked towards this in my “Key Points of the Social Question”. The moment one allows oneself to be pushed back by the objection that one wants to create a spiritual aristocracy, one does not understand the matter. The creation of this spiritual organization alone leads forward. After all, such an organization is, in keeping with the old conditions, the Catholic Church. It is independent of urban development and so on, but today it no longer has a mission, that is over. The fact that it can be organized into a great sham power is because it has such an institution, which is independent of external power relations. Therefore, such a spiritual organization must be created that is simply not dependent on anything other than itself. Understanding must be awakened for this. And if we find the right ways, this understanding can be awakened; for it is no longer the pre-war proletariat that makes up the broad layer, but other classes have already been pushed down, and our task today is to win them over, regardless of their class position, not only by preaching these ideas, but also, when it comes to concrete things, by acting on them.

Question: The Key Points appear to be logically self-contained, but the criterion of whether something is realistic or not cannot be found in them.

Rudolf Steiner: It would be particularly good if the friends would speak out more clearly on this point. You must bear in mind that political economy as such is actually a very young form of thinking, hardly a few centuries old, and that in the realm of economic life, everything up to the great utopians has actually taken place more or less instinctively. Nevertheless, these instinctive impulses that people had were something that became reality.

To gain a more precise understanding, consider the following. Today, people often say: What we can think about the economy actually arises from economic class antagonisms, but also from the economic mode of operation, and so on. I don't even want to look at the most extreme view, as Marx and his followers advocate. Even economics teachers who lean more towards the middle-class view speak of the fact that everything actually arises from the economic fundamentals as if by automatic necessity. Nevertheless, when people discuss the individual concrete things, it is the case that the concrete institutions that have come into being to produce today's economic life are nothing other than the results of medieval thinking itself, certainly in connection with the various realities. But just consider what form was given to the Roman concept of property, which was a purely legal category, and what was created economically through this concept. It can be seen that these things were not treated scientifically, but that the legal categories, which were already conceived economically as legal, had a formative effect. Now the mercantilists and so on have come, who were not creative people, who were theoretical people. For example, it may be said that the advisers of Emperor Justinian, who created the Code of the Corpus Juris, were much more creative people than the later teachers of political economy. These people actually created not only a Justinian Code in our present sense, but in the further course of medieval development we see the opposing impulses developing precisely on the basis of what was laid down in this Justinian legislation.

And so we have come to the new era, to people whose thinking is no longer creative in an economic sense, but only contemplative. This contemplation really begins with Ricardo. Take, for example, the law of diminishing returns. This is a law that is just right, but absolutely not in line with reality. For practice will continually show that, if all the factors that Ricardo took into account are taken into account, what he called the law of diminishing returns will indeed follow, but the moment more intensive cultivation techniques are introduced, this law is thwarted. It does not hold true in reality.

Take something else, something more trivial. Take Lassalle's “iron wage law”. I must confess that I feel it is a certain scientific carelessness that one still finds stated that this law has been “overcome”, because things do not prove true. The fact of the matter is this: from Lassalle's way of thinking and from the view that labor can be paid for, nothing more correct can follow than this iron wage law. It is so logically strict that one can say: If one thinks as Lassalle had to think, it is absolutely correct that no one has an interest in giving the worker more wages than are just necessary to enable him to make a living. He will not give him more, of course. But if he gives him less, the worker will wither away, and the one who pays the wages must atone for this. It is basically impossible to get by without theoretically admitting the iron wage law. Even within the proletariat itself, people say: the iron wage law is wrong, because it is not right that in recent decades wages have been maintained at a certain minimum, which would also be their maximum. Yes, but why is Lassalle's iron wage law wrong? If the conditions under which he formulated it had continued – I mean the conditions from 1860 to 1870 – if the economy had continued to be run under the purely liberalistic view, the iron wage law would have become reality with absolute correctness. This did not happen. A reversal of the liberalist economy took place and today the iron wage law is constantly being amended by making state laws that effect a correction of reality that would have emerged from the law.

So you see, a law can be right and yet not in line with reality. I don't know of anyone who was a greater thinker than Lassalle. He was just very one-sided. He was a very consistent thinker.

When you are confronted with a law of nature, you can see it. When you are confronted with a social law, you can also see it, but it is only valid as a certain current, and you can correct it. Insofar as our economy is based purely on free competition – and there is still a lot that is based only on free competition – the iron wage law is valid. But because it would be valid under these conditions, there must be corrections with social legislation, with a certain working hours and so on. If you give entrepreneurs a completely free hand, the iron wage law applies. Therefore, there can be no purely deductive method in economics. The inductive method is of no help at all. It has followed Zyjo Brentano. We can only observe the economic facts – she says – and then gradually ascend to the law. – Yes, we don't come to any creative thinking at all. This is the so-called newer political economy, which calls itself scientific. It actually just wants to be inductive. But you won't get anywhere with it.

In economics, you absolutely need a characterizing method that seeks to gain the concepts by starting from different points, holding them together, and allowing them to culminate in concepts. This gives you a specific concept. Since you can never see the full range of facts, but only have a certain amount of experience, it will probably be one-sided in a sense. Now go through the phenomena again with the concept and try to verify it. You will see that this is actually a modification. In this way, by characterizing, you arrive at a concept that you modify by verifying, and you then arrive at an economic view. You must work towards views.

I would now like to work out such a conception in the lectures of the National Economy Course by showing you what always intervenes in the formation of prices. The method in economics is a highly uncomfortable method because in reality it amounts to the fact that one must compose the concepts out of an infinite number of factors. They must work towards economic imaginations! Only with these can you make progress. When you have them and they come into contact with something, they modify themselves, whereas it is not easy to modify a fixed concept.

You know what is known as Gresham's Law: good money is chased away by bad. If bad, under-value money, money minted at below its face value, is in circulation somewhere, it drives out money with good fineness, and that then migrates to other countries. This law is also an inductive law, it is purely an empirical law. But this law is such that one must also say: It is valid only as long as one is unable to secure the significance of money. The moment you are able, through entrepreneurial spirit, to secure the right of money, it would be modified. It would not die out completely. There is no economic law that is not valid up to a certain point; but they are all modified. That is why we need the characterizing method. In natural science, we have the inductive method, which at most comes up to deductions. But in general, deductions are much less important in natural science than one might think. Only induction is of real significance here.

Then you have pure deductions, which are found in jurisprudence, for example. If you want to proceed inductively, you introduce something into jurisprudence that destroys it. If you introduce the psychological method into jurisprudence, you dissolve jurisprudence. In that case, every human being must be declared innocent. Perhaps these methods can be introduced into reality, but then they will lead to the undermining of the legal concept that exists. So it may well be justified, but it is no longer jurisprudence.

In economics, you cannot get by with deduction and induction. You could only get by with deduction if it were possible to give general rules to which reality itself would yield the cases. I will mention only those who want to proceed purely deductively, albeit with a main induction at the beginning. Oppenheimer, for example, puts a main induction of history at the top with his settlement cooperatives and deduces an entire social order from it. Well, many years ago, Oppenheimer was already the settlement man and said: Now that I have got the capital, we will establish the modern cultural colony! – I replied: Doctor, we will talk about it when it has been destroyed. It had to fail because it is impossible, within the general economy, to establish a small area that would enjoy its advantages through something else, so that it would be a parasite within the whole economic body. Such enterprises are always parasites. Until they have eaten enough from the others, they remain - but then they perish.

Thus, in economics, you can only characterize by thinking your way into the phenomena. This also arises from the cause, because in economics, one must continually work into the future on the basis of the past. And as one works into the future, human individualities with their abilities come into play, so that basically, in economics, one can do nothing but stand on the quivive. If one intervenes in practice, then one must be prepared to continually modify one's concepts. One is not dealing with substance that can be plastically formed, but with living human beings. And that is what makes political economy a special kind of science, because it must be imbued with reality.

Theoretically, you will easily be able to see this. You will say: It is then extremely inconvenient to work in economics. But I do not even want to accept that. Under certain circumstances, as long as you still stand on the point of view that you want to write dissertations, for example, you can gain a great deal by following the relevant literature of recent times on some subject and by comparing the individual views. Particularly in economics, there are the most incredible definitions. So just try to compile the definitions of capital from the various economics textbooks or even larger treatises! Try to put them in a row, eight or ten of them! One comes to mind right now: “Capital is the sum of the produced means of production.” I have to say, I don't understand why the adjective is there. The opposite: unproduced means of production – you could also think of something under that, for example, nature, so the soil, and that is what the person in question will mean. But then, of course, he is unable to somehow justify how the soil can be capitalized after all. It is capitalized after all. So there is actually no way out, and that is based on the fact that one has such concepts, one must seek them out and must try to somehow enrich them. The concepts are all too narrow.

If you think that the realistic will be difficult for you in these considerations, I would like to say: the realistic could actually be easy! You say that the “key points” are logically self-contained. They are not, neither the “key points” nor the other things! I must emphasize that I did not want to be purely economic, but social and economic. This, of course, conditions the whole style and attitude of these writings, so that they cannot be judged purely economically. At the most, only individual essays in the three-folding writings can be judged in this way. But I certainly do not find them logically self-contained, because I was careful enough to give only guidelines and examples or, in fact, only illustrations. I wanted to create an awareness of what can be achieved by someone managing a means of production only for as long as they can be present; then it must be handed over to someone who can manage it themselves. I can well imagine that what is to be achieved in this way could be achieved in a different way. I just wanted to give guidelines. I wanted to show that a way out can be found if this threefold structure is properly implemented, if spiritual life as such is actually liberated, if the legal system is placed on a democratic basis, and if economic life is based on the factual and technical, which can be represented in the associations. And I am convinced that in the economic sphere, the right thing will happen.

I say that the people who are in the association will find the right thing. I want to count on people, and that is the realistic thing to do. A treatise on the “concept of work” would have to be written in such a way that you really find the concept of work in the economic sense. This concept must be freed of everything about work that does not create value, and not just economic value. So that must be eliminated first. Of course, this only leads to one characteristic. And it is this characterizing method that is important. Of course, this must be said methodologically.

Question: To what extent is inspiration necessary for economic knowledge?

Rudolf Steiner: What is meant is that this inspiration, if one takes the matter seriously, is actually not that extraordinarily difficult. It is not a matter of finding supersensible facts, but of making inspiration effective in the economic field, so that it cannot be particularly difficult.

The way in which labor is limited would require me to show that a person can perform work without it having economic value. That is a truism. A person can exert himself terribly with talking, and yet no real economic value comes of it. Then I would show how labor, even when it begins to have an economic significance, is modified in its value. Let us assume that someone is a woodchopper and performs a labor that actually creates value, and someone is a cotton agent, has nothing to do with woodchopping, but gets nervous just from his work, so that every summer he spends a fortnight chopping wood in the mountains. Here the matter becomes more complicated, because the agent will certainly be able to utilize the chopped wood, and he will receive something for it. But you must not evaluate what he receives in the same way as you evaluate the woodcutter's work. You must assume that if he does not chop wood for 14 days in summer, he can work far less as an agent in winter. In this case, you have to consider the support he receives from this work. The economic value of the wood chopped by the cotton agent is the same as the value of the wood chopped by the woodchopper; but the economic effect of his work, which falls back on his activity, is now essentially different.

If the value of the agent's chopping wood lies in the fact that it has an effect on his agency, then I have to investigate whether it is also true where someone stands on a treadwheel and climbs from one step to another, thereby making himself thinner. This is an effort for him, but there is no effect on the national economy. It is true, but I have to distinguish here whether the person in question is a rentier or an entrepreneur. The latter becomes more efficient as an economic value creator.

You have to gradually work out the matter in a characterizing way and then, if you go on and on and on, you get a direct value of the work and an indirect, reflective value of the work. In this way you arrive at a characteristic of the concept of labor. With this you can go back again to the ordinary woodchopper and compare what the woodchopping of the cotton agent means in the economic process with that of the professional woodchopper. In this way you can go from one level to another and you have to look everywhere to see how the concept works. That is what I call realistic. They have to show how the work is realized in the most diverse areas of life. Like Goethe with the concept of the primal plant: he of course drew a diagram, but meant a continually changing one. Economic concepts must be subjected to constant metamorphoses in life. That is what I mean.

Of course, you won't have much luck with such concepts. Teachers today do not accept this; they want a definition. But I have not found that the concept of work has been clearly defined in economics. One should characterize it, not constantly speak negatively about it. In economic debates, for example, I have found that work cannot be decisive for the price because it varies among individuals according to their personal strength. Negative instances can be found. But the positive is missing, that one advances to characterizing work in such a way that it actually loses its original substantial character and gets its value from other positions in which it is placed. When one begins to characterize in this way, then the substance is lost; in the end one gets something that plays entirely within the economic structure.

Labor is the economic element that originally arises from real human effort, but which flows into the economic process and thereby acquires the most diverse economic value in the most diverse directions. One should speak of the processes that lead to the evaluation of labor in the most diverse directions.

Inspiration is based on the fact that one comes up with how to progress from one to the other. It depends a little on the spirit that one finds just the right examples.

Question: Isn't a generic term necessary after all? Even with the characterizing method, isn't there a need to place emphasis on the causes by which the observed effects came about?

Rudolf Steiner: As far as the matter of effects is concerned, I agree that one must return to the causes. But just as in certain fields of nature it is the case that one finds the causes only by starting from the effects, so it is even more the case in the field of economics that knowledge of the causes is of no help if it is not gained from the effects. For example, the tremendous effects of a war economy are there. If one did not know them as effects, one would not evaluate the cause at all. It is therefore important to acquire a certain sense of the quality of the effects in order to be able to ascend to the causes. Certainly, in practice one will have to ascend to the causes. But that is what economics is based on for the practical. You learn to evaluate the effects, and by seeing the aberrations of the effects, you come to know the causes and then improve the causes. It is of little use to just get to know the causes. You have to get to the causes in such a way that you can say: I know them by starting from the effects. - An insight of such tremendous significance as the language center in the left hemisphere is, is only recognized from the effects: lost language - left hemisphere paralyzed. You first recognize the effect. Then you are led to examine the matter at all. So this recursive method is necessary.

Question: I cannot look at everything from an economic point of view that has to do with art and religion or even sport. Some of it can be viewed from an economic point of view, but not the whole?

Rudolf Steiner: I drive through an area and find extraordinarily artistic buildings in this area - I am, of course, describing an utopia. This is not just an artistic view. These artistic buildings are only possible on the basis of a very specific economic situation. If I drive through an area where there are a great many art buildings, I will immediately get an idea of how it is managed. If, on the other hand, I drive through an area where even so-called beautiful buildings are tasteless, I will get an idea of the economic situation of the area in question. And if I find only utilitarian buildings, I will get an idea of the economic situation of the area in question. Where I find artistic buildings, I can conclude that higher wages are paid there than where I find no artistic buildings. I cannot imagine that anything could be considered uneconomical. Everything, even the most exalted things, must be considered economically. If an angel were to descend to earth today, he would either have to appear in a dream, in which case he would change nothing; but as soon as he appears to people while they are awake, he would intervene in economic life. He cannot do otherwise.

Objection: I admit that it can be viewed from an economic point of view – but only if you want to! But it can also be viewed from other points of view.

Rudolf Steiner: You are entering a circle. All that can be said is that it is necessary to base the consideration on the economic point of view for the time being. This has only a heuristic value, a value of research and investigation. But if you want to find an exhaustive, realistic political economy, you will not be able to avoid characterizing the economic effects from all sides. You have to characterize what influence it has on the economic life of an area, whether it has a hundred excellent painters or only ten. Otherwise it is hard to imagine that economic life can be encompassed. Otherwise I would not have insisted so strongly on this emphasis. Precisely by emphasizing it, you always end up with definitions that basically do not apply in some area, or that have to be stretched to breaking point. It is actually impossible to define the income that a person should have by pointing out, for example, that he is entitled to “what he produces himself”. There is even this definition: someone is entitled to what he produces himself. It seems quite nice to make such a definition. In a certain field it is correct. But the sewer cleaner could not do much with it. The point is that in economics one should not single out one phenomenon from the sum total of phenomena, but should go through the whole sum. One must be aware: I start thinking economically because I can help those who cannot do so. But one must also be aware that economic thinking must claim to be quite total, to be a very comprehensive kind of thinking. It is much easier to think in legal terms. Most economists think in very legal terms.

Question: Opinions on what is “normal” in economics are so divergent that it is impossible to know what is normal?

Rudolf Steiner: I have no desire to compete with these notions of “normal” and “abnormal”. There is a saying: there is only one health and countless illnesses. - I do not recognize that. Every person is healthy in their own way. People come and say: There is a heart patient who has this and that little defect, which should be cured. - I have often said: Leave the little defect to the person. — A doctor brought me a patient who had injured his nasal bone so badly that he now has a narrowed nasal passage and gets so little air. The doctor said, “That needs an operation, it's a terribly simple operation.” I said, “Don't do the operation!” He has a lung that is so constructed that he is not allowed to get more air; it is fortunate for him that he has a narrowed nasal passage. So he can live another ten years. If he had a normal nose, he would certainly be dead in three years. So I don't attach much importance to 'normal' and 'abnormal'. I only understand the most trivial things by them. I very often say: a normal citizen. Then people will understand what I mean.

The question is asked about the value of statistics.

Rudolf Steiner: It is true that statistics can be of great help. But the statistical method is applied externally today. Someone compiles a statistic about the increase in house values in a certain area and then about those in another area, and puts them side by side. But that is not good. It only becomes reliable when the processes themselves are examined. Then we shall know how to evaluate such a figure. For there may come a time when a series of figures is special simply because an extraordinary event has occurred in the series. ...

Question: Does inspiration also occur when collecting numbers?

Rudolf Steiner: Inspiration also occurs in that when you have a series, a second series, a third, then you find out - now again through the spirit - which facts, if you look at them qualitatively, are modified in the first series by corresponding facts, say in the third series. As a result, certain numerical values may cancel each other out. In the historical method, I call this the symptomatological consideration. One must have the possibility to evaluate the facts and, if necessary, to weigh the contradictory facts correctly against each other.

Economics in particular is sometimes practiced in an extremely unobjective way. One has the feeling that statistics are handled in such a way that, for example, the balance sheets of the finance ministers of the various countries are drawn up from a party-political point of view. Where one wants to prove a certain party line, the numerical data is actually used, which can just as easily prove another. There is no use other than to be impartial in one's soul. Something elementary and original comes into consideration. In all the science that deals with the human being - yes, even if you want to list a science that leads you to learn how to treat animals, to tame them - your concepts must prove to be modifiable. And this is even more true in economics. That is where inspiration comes in. You have to have that. Don't hold it against me if I say it dryly.

I am convinced that many more of today's students would have this inspiration – for it is not something that floats terribly in nebulous mystical heights – if it were not actually expelled from them at school, even at grammar school and secondary school. We have the task today, when we are at university, to remember what was driven out of us at grammar school in order to enter into a living practice of science. Today it is practiced terribly dead. It happened to me in a foreign country that I spoke with a number of economics lecturers. They said: When we want to visit our colleagues in Germany, they say: Yes, come, but not to my lecture, visit me at home! - Today one really needs an unbiased insight into these things. ... This economics has particularly declined recently. It is really all connected with the fact that people have lost this creativity of the spiritual. Today, people really have to be pushed in the face if they are to believe a fact.

Now you can read articles in the newspapers about the spiritual blockade in Germany. Of course, it has been there for a long time. If we want to deliver the magazine 'Das Goetheanum' to Germany today, we have to deliver it at a cost price of eighteen marks per copy! Think of the technical and medical journals! They are impossible to obtain. Think of the consequences for culture! This is also an economic issue. Germany is under an intellectual blockade. ... The withdrawal of these journals is directly what should lead to the dumbing down in Germany. ... In Germany it has an economic character, in Russia it has already taken on a state character, you can no longer read anything that is not sold by the Soviet government itself. People become a pure copy of the Soviet system. At best, you can smuggle a book here or there.

Question: Is it not useful when observing the economic effects not to start primarily from the statistics, but from the observation of the facts that are available?

Rudolf Steiner: This approach is needed even when consulting statistics. Statistics only enable us to prove things in figures. It is clear that if you come to Vienna now, you only need to walk the streets and gain experience. You only need to look at the apartments your acquaintances lived in ten years ago and those they live in now. And so on, piece by piece. You can make such observations of the most terrible kind. You can see for yourself that an entire middle class has been wiped out, which basically only lives – yes, because it has not yet died. It does not live economically, because if you see what it lives on, it is terrible. You will start from there, but the number can still be extremely important to you as proof.

You have to have a certain “nose” for it; because if you can prove things in figures, the numbers will in turn take you a little further. For example, the devaluation of the crown in Austria: it is indeed laughable how little the crown means today, but not any old value can be reduced without something being taken away from others. If you now look at the victims of the currency, they can be found among those whose pensions and similar income have been devalued. Here you can follow the calculation, and the strange thing is that the calculation could no longer be right for Austria today, let alone for Russia. Austria should have the right to devalue the crown even further, since everything has already been exhausted, and yet it does not explain the state bank default. Of course, this can only be achieved by the blockade that has been brought about in some way. The moment you lift this blockade, people will have to take very different measures. ...

Question: Can the state, as long as there is wealth, seize this wealth by increasing the money supply?

Rudolf Steiner: The state can certainly survive by increasing the money supply, but when the point is reached that the rent has been used up, if it is not artificially maintained, it could actually no longer survive economically, even if it continues to produce banknotes, because the further production of banknotes would lead to a doubling of the rent, which would lead to an increase into infinity. The state must increasingly shut itself off.

Question: Does the state not live off the economic capital itself, which is invested in the enterprises?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, but off what is a pension in it.

Question: Yes, I mean, it sucks out the capital. The capital decreases?

Rudolf Steiner: To the extent that capital takes on the character of a pension. Because when the state absorbs it, it takes on that character. The state can certainly live, but it can no longer do economic work. That is no longer economics. It can only live off what has already been earned; it only draws on the old. It lives dead off the pension. In Austria, the point should have been reached long ago where the pension is dead. In Germany, it is still a long way off. It certainly could not go on in Austria if certain laws of compulsion did not exist, for example with regard to rent. They actually pay nothing – I think about twenty-five cents for a three-room apartment. The only way things can be maintained is by having certain things for free. In Germany, it is also the case that you may only pay a tenth for your apartment. It is only because of such things that things can be maintained in a certain social class that can afford to pay up to that point. In Austria, a certain social class has deteriorated to such an extent that it can no longer even pay the twenty-five cents. People who had an income, let's say, of three thousand crowns could live on it under certain circumstances; today that is a little over an English shilling. No, you can't live on that!

Today, economic phenomena are so terrible that people might start to take notice and realize that we should actually study the economic laws in such a way that it would help in a practical way. This attempt failed in 1919; but at that time the amount of foreign currency was not as high as it is today.

We could address the question: What does economic thinking mean? - Then: How do you arrive at a concept of work in an economic sense? - And then it would be good if someone were to continue to discuss the terms that I have already used in their own sense, quite freely. It would also be good if someone tried to work out the concept of entrepreneurial capital: what pure entrepreneurial capital is. If you want to characterize entrepreneurial capital in terms of its concept, you have to contrast it precisely with mere bond capital.

Walter Birkigt: Work in the economic sense would be human activity in terms of its economic efficiency. In the field of physics, we know exactly that physical work is determined by its mechanical effect. Is every economically useful service already work? No – value can only come into being through the consumer in the final analysis. If work is done that acquires real value in an economic context, then it can be spoken of as economic work.

Rudolf Steiner: I would just like to make a small suggestion by asking Mr. Birkigt how he would react if, let us say, these arguments were discussed and the question arose: If I in some way combine the work within the economic organism or process with the physical recording of the work, what would happen if one now looks more closely at the concept of physical work? – Certainly, everything you have said is correct, but when the physicist draws up a formula for his work, he will introduce the concept of mass. This is because physical work, an energy, is a function of mass and velocity. You will easily find an analogy for the latter in the economic process. But the strange thing about the physical formula for physical work is precisely that the concept of mass is introduced, which can be determined physically by weight. So in the physical concept of work we have “weight”, which we can only replace by “mass” and “speed”. Now the question would arise as to whether it is necessary, if we stick to your analogy, to introduce something like the concept of mass or the concept of weight into the economic approach. If we were to do that, we would have to seek out precisely that in the economic process which would correspond to mass. So I think this question could be raised in the discussion.

Objection: The problem of the essence of work involves recognition on the part of the buyer. The entrepreneur presupposes this idea of recognition. The fact that the purchase of any goods comes about is recognition.

Rudolf Steiner: Since your concept of recognition is not entirely in the economic field, but more in the philosophical field, it is necessary - so that you can somehow justify that this concept has an economic value - that you give it an economic significance. Because in the recognition as such - when the housewife, for example, first sees that she can use something well - there is hardly more than a judgment. The economic aspect only begins when she can now buy it. It could very well be that the thing is excellent, but for economic reasons, because it is too expensive, it cannot be bought. So mere recognition may be a philosophical category. But it would only become an economic category if it were able to place itself in economic life. And that is why the concept of economic action would clarify.

Question: What is the relationship between the verification of an economic act and recognition?

Rudolf Steiner: “Recognition” as such can hardly be an economic category. This may be because recognition must be subjective. Of course, something subjective already plays a role in economic categories. But then one must show the way in which it becomes objective. Suppose, for example, that two housewives have completely different recognitions of a thing, and for the sake of argument this can lead to a yes to an economic success and a no to an economic failure. The economic aspect would be found where the reasons lead to success in one case and to failure in the other, because recognition can only be a philosophical concept. Of course, recognition can slip down into the [private] economic sphere, but then it must also slip over into the national economy.

Remark from a participant: By economic action, I understand an anticipation of the physical expression of a verification, presenting itself as an initiative.

Rudolf Steiner: We are perhaps dealing here with something quite different from what might have emerged from the discussion. We want to move here in economic thinking. This formula does not prove to me that you have entered into economic thinking with this matter. The formula is, of course, worthy of all recognition, but it is actually more the formula of an economic philosophy that strives, even in a somewhat scholastic way, to find the concept of economic action in order to metaphysically justify economic action before the entire world order. If that is what you are aiming at, then you may take this path; then it will be very interesting to talk about it. But if you ask yourself whether it is not important today, for example, that a number of people, who are now the people of today, bring something out of thinking into the economic sphere that could help economic life, then it is not easy to see what could actually be gained by such a formulation.

Of course, it could be gained that people learn to think better, but we are faced with the necessity to make the national economy as such really fruitful. In science and medicine, after all, it does not depend very much on whether one has a methodology. There this is actually more of a technique in the treatment of methods, research instruments and so on, but the methodology itself has no extraordinary value. In economics, it certainly has an extremely high value, because what we think about things has to be put into practice in economics. Otherwise it is just what Brentano pursues in his way: purely empirical. It does not become practical. Today we need an economic way of thinking that can be put into practice. And that is why it would be extremely interesting to go through the definition word for word. But it is more in the realm of economic-philosophical thinking than of economic thinking.

Mr. Birkigt's discussions were aimed at extracting the concepts of work in such a way that someone who wanted to clarify in an association how one or the other work is to be evaluated can benefit from it. That was your tendency, and that should be our tendency today, if we were stuck inside an association, be it as any kind of worker, so that we would somehow have a basis for evaluating things in their economic process.

Note: economic work is any human activity that directly or indirectly produces value.

Rudolf Steiner: I think that if we want to develop a practical economic way of thinking, we will have to take something else into account. Let us take a scientific analogy to clarify this: the overall process in the human organism is not at all understandable if we only look at ascending processes, processes that run in one direction. You only get a real understanding of the total process when you also look at the catabolic processes. For example, we have catabolic processes in the bones and nervous system; we have catabolic processes in the blood as well as distinct anabolic processes. We can even say that we have anabolic processes in the human organism, starting with lymph formation, through lymph formation to the generation of venous blood. Then we have the processes associated with breathing. These are processes that represent a kind of unstable equilibrium between anabolic and catabolic processes. And the processes that take place in the nerves and bones are distinctly catabolic. Devolutions as opposed to evolutions! We only gain a real understanding when we organize our concepts in such a way that we understand the liver process, for example, as a combination of anabolic and catabolic processes. Someone may come along and may have a mere theoretical interest, who then also subsumes the catabolic processes under the anabolic processes. He says: Physically, the human being develops to a certain degree through anabolic processes. Then he begins to build up spiritually, that is, differently. Now, then we come from one sphere into the other and retain only the abstract web of concepts and thereby learn to understand nothing. We learn to understand the effectiveness of the spirit in the human organism only when we know that the spirit begins to work when there are no anabolic processes; when we know that there is no anabolism in the brain, but catabolism, and that it is only in the catabolism that the spirit asserts itself. Then I have a kind of comprehension through which I enter into reality. If I hold on to a conceptual direction in the abstract, step by step, purely dialectically and logically, then I do not arrive at any practical understanding.

Thus it is necessary in economics to take into account not only the formation of value, but also its devaluation; that one also speaks, to a certain extent, of real destruction. I have done that. Consumption is where it begins, but there is still a mental process in which devaluation also takes place.

They said that when I tear down a house, it also has value. Because at this point, the demolition of the house means that something productive is being created for someone. Certainly, you can see it that way if you stick to the abstract development of concepts. But in practice, it has a meaning where I compose the economic process out of the creation and devaluation of value. And then it must be clear, of course, that work is important not only for the production of values, but also for the destruction of values. Without going into this, I cannot get an adequate concept of work. If work were not also there for destruction, it would not be possible to do any economic activity at all. You have to bring this into your concept.

I believe that it will be of great importance, even in the near future, to recognize what is to happen economically in the direction of value creation and value destruction. Because if values arise that are not destroyed in the appropriate way, even though they are there to be destroyed, this also disturbs the economic process. The process is disturbed by overproduction. The process is disturbed simply by the fact that, figuratively speaking, there is too much in the stomach of the economic system.

Question: Must we not understand the concept of work in such a way that work is an activity that comes into consideration for a closed economic organism?

Rudolf Steiner: What comes into consideration here is that things are taken up as realities. Undoubtedly, the process of creating too much shielding can be a destructive one; but in terms of work performance, it is a constructive process under all circumstances, as long as we remain at work. On the other hand, the destructive process of destroying screens is not opposed to this. Under certain circumstances, destruction is not achieved by what you would define as work. But in any case, one cannot call the process of creating too many screens a destructive process if one wants to think about the matter in terms of work.

We must be aware that in the economic view we are to characterize, that is, we should try to get a concept by defining it from different sides in order to gain a truly descriptive judgment. We have no use for an abstract definition. A concept of work has been established: work is human activity in terms of its economic efficiency, in short, economic activity of man. But how does such a definition of work in the economic sense differ from the definition of work in the physical sense? In such an economic definition, we have nothing real in it. When the physicist defines physical work by means of a formula, by means of a function, and in it has the mass and the speed, then you have something real in it; because the mass can be weighed. If the physicist wants to define the speed, he draws up a definition. The definition serves only as a means of communication. The physicist is fully aware that he is only pointing to what is to be considered. For only he has a concept of speed who knows it from observation. What he defines is the measure of speed. And so the physicist will never believe that he is giving any real explanation when he gives this explanation. But he is of the opinion - whether rightly or wrongly, I will not investigate - that he is giving a real explanation when he explains labor as a function of mass and speed. In doing so, he is getting at a real explanation.

When I do this in economic life, it is because I am approaching the story at the right point. So, for example, if I give my explanation of value at a certain point in such a way that value is produced, value arises, value is a function of labor and a natural object, a natural being, or of mind and nature, then you have labor in the change that is taking place there. This is, of course, a qualitative change, whereas the moving body undergoes a change of location. What the physicist has as a measure is the real substance of nature. However, I am basing a definition that does indeed meet the requirements of such a real definition in physics. I am not doing anything special for economics when I try to define labor in itself. Above all, I must realize that labor as such only becomes an economic category when I bring it into function with the natural product. When you make such definitions, you get into a way of looking at things that is actually quite striking later on. For example, you know that during the reign of classical physics, the physicist always defined labor as a function of mass and speed. In contrast to modern conceptions of ions and electron processes, this working definition completely loses its meaning, because the concept of mass is dropped. We are only dealing with acceleration. In this way, the physical process emancipates itself from what is ponderably present as mass in it, just as capital emancipates itself from the nature it works on in my book and enters into a function of its own.

So you enter a realm that actually justifies itself from all sides. That is the peculiarity of realistic thinking: you think more than you have in definitions. I would like to point out that nowhere, when I speak of economics, do I try to grasp a concept where it cannot be grasped. I cannot grasp “mass” in physics either, but only its function. “Mass is the quantity of matter”, that is also only a word definition! Nor do I want to see the terms nature, labor and capital defined one after the other as economically significant, but rather to be grasped where the realities are: not nature, but nature that has been worked; not labor, but organized labor; not capital, but capital directed by the human spirit, set in motion, set in motion in the economy. I believe that touching things where they are is necessary in economics today!

Question not noted.

Rudolf Steiner: I would just like to point out that the distinction between mental and manual work is not really justified. If one wanted to try to define the thing mental work and the thing manual work, one could not really find anything other than a slow transition from one pole to the other, but no real contrast. Physiologically, there is no real contradiction either. That things have been viewed incorrectly can be seen from the fact that people have always been mistaken about the recuperative effect of gymnastics. Today we know that gymnastics does not represent the recuperation that was attributed to it in the past. The student does not work more through so-called mental work than through gymnastics, which lasts the same amount of time. Of course, it is always a matter of thinking about things in a fruitful economic way.

Question about the relationship between economic and biological thinking.

Rudolf Steiner: The economic entities are, in their reality, as they once were, already very much analogous to the biological entities. You can verify this very well if you try to determine the economic value of a job, for example, a printer's job. Let us assume that a poet fancies himself to be an extraordinarily great poet and manages to get his poetry printed, whether through patronage or financial support or something similar. And now the paper workers, the typesetters, a whole range of people are working on the realization of this volume of poetry, who, according to the Marxist concept, are doing decidedly productive work. But let's assume that not a single copy is sold, but that they are all pulped. Then you would have the same real effect as if they had not been made at all. Basically, you have expended labor completely uselessly in this case. Now, however, you would first have to examine whether this is seven-eighths stupid, as the Marxists say, or whether it does not have a meaning after all. And then you will notice that the biological point of view offers a certain analogy. You can say: In biology I can observe the whole being from beginning to end and have it before me, whereas in economics I only have to do with tendencies and the like. But now I ask you whether you have more than tendencies in the whole of nature, when you consider that not all herring eggs become herrings, but that countless herring eggs, compared to those that become herrings, are simply destroyed? However, the question arises as to whether these destroyed eggs mean nothing at all for the whole process of nature, or whether they only take a different direction in the whole biological process. That is the case. There could be no herrings and many other sea creatures if so many herring eggs did not simply perish. Now, you are still not on the basis of a real observation when you say: Well, eggs are perishing there - and so on. You are still obliged to say: I have an evolution in front of me. The egg has come into being and perishes through something. The whole herring also came into being and perishes through something. The processes only take on different directions, and the herring merely continues the tendency of the egg. Nowhere can you somehow say that the herring has a greater right to cease to exist than the egg. And now you have an analogy with perishing labor, with perishing economic entities.

You can come up with countless analogies between economic and biological thinking. This is only not noticed because we have neither a proper biological nor a proper economic thinking. If biology were to begin to develop a real thinking, it would become very similar to economic thinking. You need the same abilities to do real biology as you need to do real economics.

Question: What is the justification for printed poetry that is then trampled on again, compared to herring eggs?

Rudolf Steiner: The matter may be as follows. If the people who are employed were not kept busy, these people would naturally have to find something to do elsewhere. And if they had to find something to do elsewhere, then under certain circumstances not enough would be derived from human activity. Human activity, like herring eggs, must also be diverted under certain circumstances, and this diversion also has an economic effect. It is easy to say that sleeping is rest, and living is activity. From a certain point of view, however, sleep is much more necessary for life than waking. It is the same with this activity. Of course, you can say: I want to use it in a more useful way; but it is questionable whether it is more useful when it comes to umbrellas that are produced too much. First of all, these are stopgaps, albeit in an inappropriate economic process, to eliminate work that would have a disruptive effect. The matter would turn out differently if one were to think in a healthy economic way. If one were to think in a healthy economic way, one would have to expend a colossal amount of cleverness - but here we go beyond the usual economic consideration - in order to utilize the surplus working hours that arise for those people who cannot work for themselves. So, it is actually the case that if one were to think in a healthy economic way, something would immediately arise that you would probably welcome with joy. But people cannot imagine that it would be necessary to teach those who are unable to work for themselves, who are unable to occupy their time, what it means to save time. For it would hardly be necessary for a person who works eight or nine hours today to work more than three or four hours longer. If people thought in terms of economics in a sensible way, they would need to work much less than they do now. And then the time saved would simply correspond to the time it takes for the herring eggs to hatch. Now people waste so much on work that has to be done again anyway.

Note: When one speaks of biological thinking, one has a certain limited object of perception about which one thinks. When thinking economically, one has to designate through thinking what one is thinking about economically.

Rudolf Steiner: You only have a limited object of perception in biology to a certain extent. You do not have this with world structures that are observed under a microscope, for example, or where you observe individual phenomena as emerging from a larger context. You can say that you have a manageable object in a drop of blood. But the moment you look at it under the microscope, you see more – five to six hundred red blood cells in one cubic millimeter, and they are all active. This is certainly visible to the eye through the microscope, but it looks damn similar to what you see when you look at a limited economic process somewhere. Imagine you are standing in front of a stall at the fair and see how the stall-keeper is standing there, how his wares are lying; there are the customers, he hands over the goods, they put down the money, ... if you now imagine, you manage to be such a giant - how you can think of all this as something very dense and cohesive, then there is no real difference. I can understand the economics of a limited area just as relatively. If I look at the booth owner with everything that goes with it, it is only relatively different from, say, when the British sell opium in China and I look at everything that goes with it. I can't find why you don't have an object.

Question: I just don't know where political economy begins and ends.

Rudolf Steiner: We also don't know where biology begins. It is another thing to ride the comparison to death. I just mean: What makes it possible to understand the nature of living things, the same in the conception makes it possible to understand economics. Only one thing is necessary. What you say may apply: when you look at a natural object, the object comes to you, whereas in economics the subject must come to the object to some extent. In economics, you have to have what I called spiritus yesterday. So biologists can really have very little spiritus and only work with the methods. But to think economically, you will need some spiritus.

Question: It seems to me that the economic process has come about without thinking in economic terms; that thinking must first become economic. Whether the economy is healthy or unhealthy is irrelevant. In this respect, I will be able to speak of an object in economics in the same way as in natural science.

Rudolf Steiner: Mr. G. is right: the difference is that in economics it is necessary to start from a certain subjective grasp of what is happening in the world. But in economics this subjectivity is in turn easier than in biology. In biology, you are always on the outside, of course, as a human being – since you are not a cockchafer when you study it – and you have to stand on the outside, whereas you are only on the outside to a much lesser degree when you look at something economically. You can still muster enough humanity to understand the worker well, to understand the entrepreneur as well. That is the general human element, and it replaces what is external observation in biology. In this respect, Mr. G. is right. But on the other hand, I believe that Goethe, for example, gave such a good definition of the dark side of the concept of trade because he did indeed go very far in his biological approach. Thus, Goethe sometimes expresses remarkably apt economic views. This has something to do with his morphological-biological approach. In biology, nature plays the role of someone who pushes you when you don't have the spirit yourself. In economics, you have to apply the spirit yourself.

Objection: There are theorists who say that there is no such thing as a national economy because there is no economy. Spann expresses this.

Rudolf Steiner: He is much admired and is considered a special luminary in Vienna by very clever people. I have not studied him enough to have too much of an opinion about him, but what very clever people say about him has not particularly convinced me. But it would only be a clever dialectic to say that there is no economy. There are also people who say that there is no life, only mechanism.

We should now look at specific aspects. Someone should try to show more specifically where economic processes of exploitation and devaluation are necessary.

Note: The concept of recognition is again put forward for discussion and again characterized by Rudolf Steiner as unsuitable for economics.

Rudolf Steiner: The concept of recognition leads into economic philosophy, not actually into economics as such. Furthermore, our aim must be to find such views in economics that can be carried through, if possible, by always changing themselves, through the whole of economic life. With the concept of recognition, you will hardly be able to cover all economic elements without greatly expanding this concept. You can always do that with concepts. Let me give an example: How would the concept that was formed yesterday be shaped if we were dealing with the fact that a completely unknown Rembrandt was found somewhere in a floor drain, if it were a matter of estimating the economic value of this Rembrandt, of which one can speak with certainty. I do not mean how it would be done at all, but how it would be with the concept of recognition.

Note: The representative of the concept of recognition blames the “political” for bringing about recognition of anti-social processes - for example, undeserved economic gains.

Rudolf Steiner: If we have the opportunity to implement the threefold social order properly in reality, then the concept of the “political” as you have developed it no longer applies. For the political is essentially given in the legal, so that the political would then be completely absent from the economic, and one could not bring about a “recognition” through some kind of political behavior.

But the question remains: what then is the “political”? The political is actually an extremely secondary, highly derived concept. From a purely economic point of view, there is no reason to be political. In the example you gave, with the entrepreneur who expects 200,000 marks and then, if he gives 80,000 to the workers, takes in 500,000 due to brisk business, there is no need to drift into the political. Let's assume the following: With the extra money that has been generated, the entrepreneur can openly stand before the entire workforce and say: I expected to generate two hundred thousand marks. But three hundred thousand marks more have been generated. We have founded the business under these conditions, that two hundred thousand are worked out. These three hundred thousand have been worked out more. I find it more correct for these and those reasons for the totality of the economic organism in which we stand, to found a school, for example, with these three hundred thousand marks, than to distribute it to you. Do you agree? - There you have a form in which the economic process remains the same, but you do not need to take any political factor into account.

In world history, the political is a secondary product. This is based solely on the fact that the primitive, perhaps highly unsympathetic but completely honest power relations have gradually taken the form of war among people. It cannot be said that war is the continuation of politics only by other means, but politics is modern war transferred into the spiritual. For this war is based on deceiving the opponent, on creating situations that deceive him. Every stratagem in war, everything that is not a direct open attack, is based on deceiving the opponent. And the general will ascribe to himself all the greater credit the better he succeeds in deceiving the enemy. This, transferred to the spiritual, is politics. You will find exactly the same categories in politics.

When talking about politics, one would like to say: We should strive to overcome politics in everything, even in politics. For we only have real politics when everything that takes place in the political sphere takes place in legal forms. But then we have the constitutional state.

Question regarding the tailor example.

Rudolf Steiner: The only reason for this deception is that the quota that is formed by a single suit is an extraordinarily small one and it would therefore take a very long time before this small quota is visible in the tailor's balance sheet in such a way that he would actually perceive it as a loss. The point is that the division of labor makes products de facto cheaper. If you work for a community under the influence of the division of labor, your own products also cost you less than if you worked for yourself. That is precisely what makes the division of labor so cheapening. If you break it at a certain point, you make the item in question more expensive, which you have prepared yourself. Of course, a single quota for a single suit that a tailor makes for himself would not make much of a difference. On the other hand, it would be noticeable if all tailors did it.

With a more extensive division of labor, no one will prepare anything for themselves anymore, except in agriculture. If a tailor actually makes his own suit and he wants to draw up a completely correct balance sheet for himself, then he would simply have to include his own suit in this balance sheet at a higher price than the market price. So he has to set his expenses higher than the market price. It does not matter so much whether he actually buys the suit or not.

It is, of course, a self-evident prerequisite that it is not other tailors from whom one buys the clothes, but that they are traders. The price of a suit from a trader is cheaper – otherwise the division into production and trade would make no sense – than the price could be if the tailors in question worked without traders. So the tailor has to set the price a little higher when he works without a dealer, because the dealer simply brings it to market cheaper than the tailors themselves could sell it. At most, you can still make the objection – which might be justified under certain circumstances – that you say: the significantly cheaper price of the goods sold without the dealer would be that the tailor, if he had to get the goods from the dealer, would then have to factor in his travel costs. You would find that by including the trade, these ways actually come cheaper. By simply comparing the producer and dealer prices, you can never find out whether the suit is more expensive or cheaper.

Question: The price of one suit should put pressure on the other suits. Why would the other suits become more expensive?

Rudolf Steiner: It exerts a downward pressure on prices in that it removes one suit from the sum of all suits that traders deal in, and that it deprives traders of the opportunity to make a profit on this suit, so that they have to demand a higher profit on the other suits. What the traders demand as a higher profit causes prices to rise among the traders, but among tailors it exerts a downward pressure on prices.

Question: The question now is whether this price pressure makes up less than the trade route brings him in price increases.

Rudolf Steiner: You will not find that anywhere. Try to solve the problem. This is a task that can be posed directly: to what extent does trade reduce the price compared to the seller's own sale? This posed directly as a dissertation task would be important. You would see: if fifty tailors make their way and have to calculate these ways, it actually costs more than if the traders make the ways.

Objection: You say of the suit that the tailor keeps for himself: When it goes through the shop, it becomes cheaper. Now, in the case of the suit that he keeps for himself, the entire expense of the shop, of arranging the transaction, is saved.

Rudolf Steiner: That would make a difference if trade did not reduce prices. But since trade reduces prices, it does not matter that the suit stays at home.

Note: Let us say the cost price is one hundred marks. When trade is added, the suit costs one hundred and twenty marks. The dealer reduces the price to one hundred and ten. If the tailor does not bring his own suit into circulation, he saves the ten marks.

Rudolf Steiner: But in this case, you have to look at the overall balance sheet that arises from traders and tailors as something very real economically. You would have to examine how this individual item appears in the overall balance sheet. You can't find it by just comparing the individual balance sheet items. You have to see it in the overall picture. Then you would see: because economic division of labor means a fructification of labor, if I go back to an earlier state in a perfectly economically divided labor, I harm myself with the others. One is so interwoven with them that by going back to an earlier stage one also harms oneself. The deception arises from the fact that it is difficult to grasp the terribly small quota. But I only need to set up the progression: if you think that all tailors make their own suits and that they would now form an association, then what would have to be entered differently in the balance sheet as a joint item would mean something.

Note: in the ready-to-wear industry, this is already more apparent.

Rudolf Steiner: That is absolutely certain. Of course, we then have to examine the underlying causes. It will be a terribly small item if it is only a matter of the division of labor between the producer and the dealer. On the other hand, the item becomes very, very considerable if there is a further division of labor, if the tailor otherwise no longer makes whole suits at all, but only parts of them. Then, if he wants to make a suit for himself, it will cost him much more than if he buys it somewhere. I said that it is a radical example that is only significant in terms of principle. But what later emerges with a further division of labor also applies at the very beginning of the division of labor.

Question: Why can't this be applied to agriculture?

Rudolf Steiner: I did not say that. I said: It is becoming less and less the case that people produce for themselves, with the exception of agriculture, where it is obvious that the farmer provides for himself. In agriculture, where so many corrections are made to the general economic process anyway, it really does not matter that much whether the farmer takes his cabbage from his own land or buys it. If, however, in the sense of the threefold order, there were a real economic relationship between agriculture and non-agriculture, then it would also be relevant for agriculture. The fact of the matter is, however, that basically all kinds of underground transfers take place and as a result the relationship between industry and agriculture in terms of prices is completely undermined. This will be discussed in the next few days. But if we were to examine the overall balance of an economic area by balancing agriculture and industry against each other, it would emerge that, under current conditions, substantial amounts flow from agriculture into industry, simply through underground channels. But if, under the associative system, there were just as many or at least approximately as many workers in one sector as prices would allow, then we would have a very different distribution of urban and rural areas. We underestimate what it would mean if the associative being were to be realized. That is why it is not very easy to answer the question: why is the “Coming Day” not an association? Simply because it is not powerful enough to have a certain influence on the economic process. For that, the association must first reach a certain size. What does the “Kommende Tag” want to do today between employers and workers that is much different from what usually happens? That would only be possible in one case - I once said this at a company meeting - namely if all the workers of the “Kommende Tag” decided to leave the trade unions. Then you would have the beginning of a movement that, as such, would gradually get the ball rolling from the other side, the workers. But as long as the workers simply take part in the strikes in exactly the same way as the other workers, it is quite impossible to talk to the workers in the ideal way.

Above all, the associative nature of the human being would cause a whole series of factories to migrate from the city to the countryside, and similar things would arise as a necessary consequence of the associative nature of the human being. It is not for nothing that we have villages and village economies. In the primitive economy, the village economy is the only economic form. Then it moves on to the markets. These terms are much more correct in economic terms than one might think. As long as the market is there and villages around it, the market, even if it is based on the principle of supply and demand, means something that is much less economically harmful – if there are no scoundrels, which is a personal matter – than when the city economy is added. This radically changes the entire relationship between producers and consumers. Then we no longer have villages that regulate their market by themselves, but we have opened the floodgates to all the possibilities that arise when the relationship between consumers and producers is no longer clear, when it becomes mixed. And that is the case when people live together in cities.

The relationship between producers and consumers cannot be overseen other than by forming associations. But then the conditions that arose under the hive change. For the associative being is something that not only organizes, but also economizes. It would arise under the associative being that from each individual link - on which the interaction of the three links of the social organism is based - the health of the other arises at the same time.

Over longer periods of time, but still not too long ago, it would become apparent that in cities, administrative officials and centralized schools, and so on, would essentially be together, that is, essentially spiritual life and legal life, while economic life and legal life would be decentralized together. So the coexistence would also be spatially divided, but not in such a way that one would now have three completely different links, but so that the cities would essentially represent a confusion of spiritual life with a more centralized, a larger horizontal administration. And smaller administrations in the circle of economic enterprises would be more decentralized. This would require that the traffic conditions would be much more effective than before. These are not so far advanced only because one does not need traffic for production when the producers are scattered around the cities.

It is not at all easy, my dear audience, to talk about threefolding because there is so much intuition involved. If you describe to someone today what is happening, they will say: Prove it to me! No one can prove to me, even theoretically, that he will be hungry tomorrow. Nevertheless, from experience we know that he will be hungry tomorrow. And so, with correct economic thinking, correct economic foresight also arises. You must see that as something real, what is meant here by actual economic thinking, that one begins to develop such thinking that is really productive itself. Otherwise, I could ask you: what economic value does economics have? - A merely contemplative one has a very different economic value - it is essentially a consumer - than a real one; it is essentially a producer.

Question: Tailors lower the price of their product when they supply themselves by dividing the work. Does this also apply to a button or another sub-product?

Rudolf Steiner: As a boy, I lived in a village where there was a shoemaker – Binder was his name. He rejected any exchange between himself and his customers that he did not take care of himself. He brought every single pair of boots he made to me, my father, my mother, himself. What does the whole pair of boots consist of? In this case, it consists of the tubes — the tubes were so long —, of what is at the top, of the instep, of the sole and of the cobbler's work, which he had to do for us. All of this belongs to the pair of boots. It makes no difference whether you speak of the tube or the sole or the cobbler's process. The division of labor first occurred when the part that made up the process was removed. This is most radical in the case of the tailor, because it is not so easy to see what is involved. When I put on the boots, I knew that I was walking on the path the cobbler had made!

Question: If I make the button myself, will I also be expressing the price?

Rudolf Steiner: In that case you will also, under certain circumstances, lose the most; because you cannot use it at all!

Interjection: I would like to assume that I need it.

Rudolf Steiner: Then the question arises as to why you need the product. If you change it in such a way – it can be a small or a large change – that it acquires a reality value, then perhaps you will lose nothing.

Remark: I need it for consumption, that is, for destruction.

Rudolf Steiner: In agriculture, other adjustments occur. If the division of labor were carried out, it would also apply there. But you will hardly have the opportunity to utilize what has been produced under the division of labor if you retain it, in such a way that it produces a reduction in costs.

A loaf of bread is still very close to agriculture. Nevertheless, we have had a rather disastrous experience with this loaf of bread. We induced a member of our society, with quite good intentions – it was before the war – to produce hygienic and otherwise good bread. And this bread was then only given to our members; others did not take it. The bread became so expensive that it simply could not be sold.

Note: That was high-quality bread.

Rudolf Steiner: If the price difference had only been justified by the quality, then it could have been justified. But the price difference was much greater, only partly due to the fact that the general production was subject to the principle of a more extensive division of labor than that of our member. And he produced in such a way that he did not distribute his production among as many people as the others; so he produced much more expensively.

Question: What about fashion pieces?

Rudolf Steiner: But here we are now in the aesthetic field, no longer in the economic field. I did not want to touch on the question of whether it might not be extraordinarily good if the division of labor were avoided in certain fields. I am even opposed to the division of labor being carried out in all areas, but not for economic reasons, but for reasons of taste. I find it even horrible when the division of labor is carried out down to the last detail, for example, in human clothing. But here we have to say: we must of course assert the free spiritual life, which would naturally cost us something at first. It would make some things more expensive, but there would be a balance, even though some products that are not included in the division of labor become more expensive. Please do not misunderstand me as wanting to be a fanatic. ...

Question: What if there are significantly more traders than are economically justified?

Rudolf Steiner: What I have said is based on the premise that there are just as many traders as are economically justified. We are not dealing with a straightforward progression, but with a maximum-minimum direction. At a certain point in the number of traders, we have the most favorable influence of the merchant class. Below and above that, it is unfavorable.

Question: Is the number determinable?

Rudolf Steiner: If there is any rational economic activity at all, then the number of traders can be determined, as can the number of producers. Today, you have the principle of rational economic activity nowhere. People do not consider how an enormous amount of unnecessary work is done. Just think of the printing press. If you were to spare all this unnecessary work, then you would get an approximation to the natural numbers everywhere. Sparing unnecessary work already provides a reduction of the natural numbers of the people employed in a sector. Today, the fact is that the merchant class actually consumes more than the producers themselves. At least for Germany.

There must be a certain number of traders for each article. But you will also have to bear in mind that sometimes even the merchant class is masked. It is replaced by something else, by the most diverse things. Just think how much of the merchant class, for example, can be replaced by setting up large bazaars. This creates a completely different economic category.

Question: Can we still speak of value when a thing has fulfilled its purpose? What about when the thing first enters the economic process? Does the demolition of a house mean devaluation through human labor? Does this devaluation have any meaning or not? Can we only speak of devaluation through human labor when new values are not created?

Rudolf Steiner: Please express your views on this! Topics will arise, for example, coal and lignite. Someone might come up with the idea that coal, as a substance, is simply a more valuable object than lignite. But then he would have to defend his “thesis.” The other thesis would be the somewhat daring one that mechanical work generally does not have the effect of increasing costs. The esteemed audience will have this or that objection. Then the question of valuation and devaluation is not exhausted by citing exceptional phenomena, such as submarines, but it would be a matter of having to bring about economically necessary devaluations through work in the continuous process of the national economy.

Various interposed questions.

Rudolf Steiner: The question is whether or not one can speak of appreciation and depreciation through work, even in a purely economic sense. If machines are devalued, then in economic terms this would be consumption. The question is not whether the goal of a work is depreciation, but whether depreciations are necessary in the economic process, and these can only be achieved through work.

X: The devaluation of values through work occurs for the purpose of subsequently placing higher values in the place (intermediate values).

Rudolf Steiner: This example can be given. However, it is not absolutely flawless. A much simpler example is an everyday one: if you wind thread onto a spool through work, you have created a product. It comes about through the work that is done, namely the twisting. If I continue the work, I have to unwind again. Work is actually necessary here. In the case of intermediate operations, it is necessary that the work created in the process is dissolved again.

Question: Would the same apply to the transfer of products?

Rudolf Steiner: It would at least take place if you move one orbit to another position. You have to devalue the first value in order to give the second the correct value. If you have an orbit here and you want to put it here, then you have carried out such a devaluation by rearranging it. And such things can be found everywhere. These would be devaluations that become necessary and that require work to be carried out. You just don't usually notice them. But they are everywhere. You just have to take the coal shoveler who shovels the coal for the locomotive. The stoker has to shovel it out again. If you just want to grasp the concepts, you can say: it's a continuous process. But that wouldn't be enough. You would have to calculate, since the continuous process cannot be directly achieved here, what the continuous process would cost if I had prepared the coal everywhere, in contrast to what it costs if I always carry out a sub-process and then have to destroy it again.

Question: Would the packaging industry also be an example?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, certainly. A very striking example where you really cannot use the concept of utilization and also not that of mere consumption through wear and tear, as in the sharpening of razors. A valuable product is destroyed, and that is a necessary economic task. Consumption consists only in blunting. But to devalue it completely, work is necessary.

Question: Collecting, selling, melting down and reusing scrap iron – can the melting down also be called a revaluation?

Rudolf Steiner: This is the same as recycling waste. You would not call that a devaluation.

Note: But one process is complete!

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, and then I discover that I can re-use what is present as a natural product. The criterion must be that human labor is necessary to bring about a devaluation process.

Melting down iron is not really a process of degradation. Of course, things can be ambiguous. They can be understood in different ways. They could also be understood as a product of devaluation.

Question: Devaluation through war – shells turned into powder?

Rudolf Steiner: For those who are not the victors, this is a devaluation.

Question: Can what happens to war equipment even be addressed as value creation in the economic sense?

Rudolf Steiner: This can only become economic in its consequences. The war industry is not value-creating as long as it is only for stock. In that sense, it is actually a form of labor, but one cannot say that it is a necessary form of destructive labor.

Note: What is consumed beyond normal needs, implements of war and so on, results in a shortfall, for example, after the war is over.

Rudolf Steiner: It must be borne in mind that the abnormal consumption that occurs here has a certain similarity to the consumption of rentiers in an economic community. This consumption is a given. If one wants to justify it - today one fights against it - then of course there is a certain justification for all things. The consumption of the rentiers can be justified if the land production yields a greater yield than can normally be consumed by the rest of the population. In order to establish economic equilibrium, the consumption of the rentiers is good under certain circumstances. And from this point of view, there is an economic justification for the armed forces. This justification lies in the fact that people say: the things are there and they can be produced. There would be no economic equilibrium, so many would remain unemployed if the military were not there to consume without actually producing. For it does not actually produce anything.

Question: Shouldn't the military be viewed in a similar way to the winnowing of wheat or something similar?

Rudolf Steiner: This view is to be found in the school of Rodbertus. Defense is counted among the productive factors. The question is whether we are thinking of an economy under certain conditions or without these conditions or with other conditions. If we were to imagine that defense by a military force were not necessary, it would be dropped. But the fire engine cannot be dispensed with because it corresponds to a necessary consumption, like breakfast. Those who consider the military to be absolutely necessary must regard it as a necessary consumption. But this is where the possibility of a discussion about the consumption question begins. We know people who consider the strangest things to be absolutely indispensable. The concepts of use play a role in the evaluation. And they are unstable.

Question: Mechanical work, for example, water power through turbines, saves human labor. Is the assessment made as if the mechanical work were done by human labor?

Rudolf Steiner: Imagine a scale with unequal arms. If I have a large load on one lever arm, I then have to shift the weight on the other. In this way, I can keep a very large weight in balance with a very small weight here purely through the position. This is how it is with the economic distribution of such things as you have called 'mechanical work'. The work that has to be done only decreases in the same proportion as here with the scales. But you will always find a certain amount of work that has actually been done, even with mechanical work. You cannot simply get something from nature without further ado. If you just want to put a stone on something to make it do work, you have to at least fetch it. You always have to put in a little human labor. But these things do not belong in the national economy at all, where the ratio of labor expended to the output is functionally determined by the circumstances.

Question: But mechanical work in itself does not make the products more expensive?

Rudolf Steiner: If you look at the work in its entirety, then you have to calculate a quota everywhere.

Question: How does devaluing work fit into the economic process?

Rudolf Steiner: If you have a continuous economic process in which you have to devalue – let us assume you have such a large shaving shop that you have to employ a special worker to sharpen the razors – then of course you have to account for this worker's work in a different way than you account for the work of the people who are sharpening the razors. Of course, on the surface it also looks like work, but in the economic process it is different, namely negative.

Question: What happens in the case of devaluation work? It is a gift because it has no equivalent value.

Rudolf Steiner: Only the signs of the value change. It is the same everywhere. If you have a value creation that you describe as positive (+) in the ongoing economic process, then you have to describe the devaluation as negative (-), while if nothing happens you have to insert zero. Note: When a new machine replaces a process, the product becomes cheaper simply because labor is saved. Whether it is value-forming or devaluing work, it makes no difference.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, the thing is that you can always bring out the same result. But it still remains a division into value formation and devaluation. It is self-evident that if you draw a sum from it, a positive sum results if a machine is to be used at all. ... The only question is whether it is necessary to expend labor on dissolutions, that is, on devaluations of values that have already come about in the economic process.

Question not noted.

Rudolf Steiner: It will be necessary, so that no unclear concepts remain, to discuss the cup of tea, the drinking of which is said to be economic work.

Objection: I cannot accept that as work. The criterion of labor is missing.

Further remark: When one takes in food, one first creates the values within oneself that are capable of producing further work, just as when one creates machines that are intended to produce values.

Rudolf Steiner: But it is not possible to include what happens in a person in the national economy. That would lead to the Marxist theory.

The Lord must have thought of something else. You do realize that drinking a cup of tea could provide economic value, that is, economic work.

Note: If a spiritual worker is supported with economic values, the immediate success will be that he can eat and become spiritually active or refreshed. The consequence will initially remain within his personality; but it does not stop there. The consequences radiate out into the economic process. These would be the consequences emanating from the subject.

Rudolf Steiner: But these cannot be readily incorporated into the economic process unless something is added. Because you cannot regard drinking a cup of tea as productive. The cup of tea would only be economically relevant if you wanted to produce something, you would drink a cup of tea in addition to your usual food and thus be able to work more than you would have worked without the cup of tea. The question would then be whether this could be seen as an economic service.

Note: The fact that I consume tea means that tea can be picked in the colonies. I actually devalue by creating the possibility for new economic values to be generated.

Rudolf Steiner: If you want to determine economic values in a positive sense, you come to a different level when you discuss the question of the extent to which consumption is necessary to continue the economic process. That is a question that actually has nothing to do with the economy as such.

Note: I would like to put the devaluation that occurs when the cup of tea is drunk so that one can work again on the same level as the example of the doctor and shoemaker. The tea picker applies labor. I drink the tea. The tea picker serves to enable me to work again.

Rudolf Steiner: If we put the question this way, then tea picking turns the natural product tea into an economic value. That is the creation of an economic value. But will an economic value arise or disappear in the same sense when the tea is drunk?

X: It will disappear, will be devalued.

Y: I would like to say that it is revalued.

Rudolf Steiner: This translation cannot actually be carried out; because then you would have to describe every consumption, every use, merely as a conversion.

Remark: conversion into energy.

Rudolf Steiner: Then we go from the economic realm into the realm of natural science. There you are engaging a natural process that no longer belongs to the economic realm.

Take the process of drinking tea! You drink the tea up. Now you have this value, which has been produced, made to disappear from the economic process. There is no question about that. Now, for my sake, you will even be strengthened by the tea – I will make this assumption – and do an economic job. This in itself is not yet value, but it is value when you apply it to a natural product. And only now does the economic formation of value begin again at the moment when you approach the natural product. The question of whether you have become stronger or not does not arise in the formation of value, but the formation of value only begins after you have become stronger. So, what happens in you when you drink tea, even if you become an athlete by drinking tea, is not what you contribute to the economic process.

This natural process must be excluded in the same way as the value of land. Of course, you can include it, and then it is analogous to including earthworms in the economic process without human labor being used for it. When the earthworms go through the field, they make the field fertile. You cannot include this in the economic process. Just try to follow this in the further results. You will also see: if you were to be strengthened by consumption, it would be seen as value-forming. Then you would enter into an economic order in which work alone would be value-forming. It is only in connection with nature or the human spirit.

It is not possible to arrive at a political economy if one includes processes that lie in human beings or in nature in the political economy.

Question: How do you want to look at the gift?

Rudolf Steiner: I may speak of a devaluation in the gift, because as long as I only have human abilities in mind for which I can use the gift, I am not yet speaking of economics. First, when I give a scholarship, I let this value disappear into the economic process until it comes up again.

Note: One can almost see how the gift continues to work.

Rudolf Steiner: What continues to have an effect depends very much on such factors, which absolutely elude any accounting approach. Otherwise, for example, you would have to use diligence in economic terms. But diligence would be a fictitious value in economic terms, not only a fictitious value, but even an impossible value.

In the moral sense, if I had, say, a workshop, I would reprimand my workers if they were lazy; in the economic sense, I would only reprimand them if they did not produce anything for me. In the economic sense, I am only concerned with what they produce. Morally, I am concerned with whether they are hardworking or lazy.

Question: Can we only speak of work in an economy based on the division of labor?

Rudolf Steiner: We can only speak of economic work when reciprocity begins for one another in the work.

Question: Can we speak of work in the primitive economy?

Rudolf Steiner: We can only speak of work in primitive societies if we consider that the father does a certain job, that he consumes and his wife, sons and daughters also consume, the daughters do different work and so on, in other words, work for each other.

Question: So how do we even arrive at a concept of work?

Rudolf Steiner: It is very easy to form a concept of work in the economic sense. It exists when we have a natural product that has been transformed by human activity for the purpose of being consumed.

Question: Does it matter whether it is consumed or not?

Rudolf Steiner: It must at least be made consumable, because then it has value.

Question: Do you always have to look at the natural product or the object when a value is created through spiritual organization of work, or do you have to see if there is an object on which the organized work has been applied?

Rudolf Steiner: You cannot look at an object, because in the context in which you are dealing with it, a lasting object is not there. The mind can only be used for the organization and structuring of the work. Then, under certain circumstances, you are not dealing with an object.

Question: Then it does not fall within the concept of work?

Rudolf Steiner: That is a secondary concept. Work is the human activity that is expended to make a natural product consumable. That is work in the economic sense. You must now understand this as a final concept. Now the spirit can take over and organize this work. But in the process, what you now want to grasp as a coherent economic process can simply move away from the natural product. It can consist in mere structuring, in mere division of labor.

Question: But what if devaluation is added through labor?

Rudolf Steiner: Devaluation is only negative for the value. In terms of making it fit for consumption, you are not going back. You are only going back in terms of assigning value.

Remark: In terms of making consumption possible, there is indeed a decline from a higher process to a lower one.

Rudolf Steiner: First you wind the spool. This requires work. You have created value here. And now you unwind the spool. You destroy the value. But if you look at the matter, you will find that a consumable product has been created up to the point of destruction, and afterwards the end goal of the work is once again a consumable product. The work consists of making a natural thing consumable. They have just switched on a sub-consumption. They need so and so many such processes to have them consumed by other processes. In this consumption, where the devaluation must take place, a necessary work is done.

Note: Useless labor must be designated as labor because its product has been brought to the point where it can be consumed.

Rudolf Steiner: If you want to have the concept of economic work, then you have to define it that way, but the concept of economic work is not yet a value. Only work is defined. The point in economics is not to apply economic work, but to produce values.

X: The teacher also does work.

Rudolf Steiner: That is the question. It is not so easy to answer.

X: I am talking about free spiritual activity.

Rudolf Steiner: This belongs to the realm of devaluation, but not devaluation through work.

A: But in the future he is the producer. For this purpose he does 'work.

Rudolf Steiner: This gives us the opportunity to pursue the concept of work ever further. Of course, teaching must be described as an economic value to the highest degree, but the question is whether, if we begin to imagine the concept of work in the economic process, we can still hold on to anything if we call teaching work. Of course, work is already being done as the teacher speaks, walks around, wears himself out. A kind of work is being done. But that is not what flows into the economic process. What flows into it is his organizing activity, which is not even related to what he does as work. That is why work as teaching is so different. A fidget can do a lot of work by fidgeting. Another can do a lot of work by cutting. But the one who teaches with a certain calm pace will also do a job. But that is not what goes into the economic process, but rather his free spiritual activity.

Note: In the performance of work, too, there are those who work hard and achieve little, and those who work little and achieve much.

Rudolf Steiner: Here we already have work that liberates itself relatively. On the one hand, we have work that is actually bound to the object. This work becomes increasingly free of the object. In the case of free spirituality, it is completely detached from the object. And what the person in question “works” is irrelevant. For the economic process, the work of the teacher is not what comes into consideration in the economic process. His capacity, his education, everything else is taken into account economically, except for the work he does.

Question: Why is free spiritual activity devaluing?

Rudolf Steiner: It is devaluing in the sense that it cancels out the values that are formed on the one hand. The Romans had a very fine, instinctive sense of economics - it was just right for a different national character - in that they did not just talk about bread, but about bread and games. And from their point of view, they included both bread and games in what should be included in the social organism. They said to themselves: Just as, when I produce a loaf of bread, it in turn must disappear – it must really disappear – so the labor that is there for the production of bread must actually disappear again in the social process through the labor that is used to perform the play. It is a mutual consumption, as everywhere where there is an organism, there is a mutual building and breaking down. So it is here too. So you can actually see how the mental activity that is carried out on the other side does not continue the process, but takes it backwards. That is why I have always drawn it as a cycle. Nature, labor, capital. Nature, labor, capital returns to itself and the whole process is suspended when it has come back to nature.

Question: Can private economic activity also be included in the concept of the national economy?

Rudolf Steiner: You have to! Within the private economy, certainly.

Objection: I think I cannot include private work in the concept of the national economy.

Rudolf Steiner: That comes from the fact that there is a lack of clarity in the word. The lack of clarity lies in the fact that one already calls a national economy a summary of private economies. One should have a superordinate concept.

Question: Is work only the activity that is to be directed at a very specific object in order to make it consumable?

Rudolf Steiner: That is the case. In economics, one does not have the task of simply, I would like to say, forming abstract philosophical definitions. Under certain circumstances, this is something that one can well impose on oneself as a philosophical pastime or as a form of training. But in economics, the aim is not to create correct terms, but terms that can be applied. People like the economist Lorenz von Stein have created wonderfully astute terms; but a whole host of terms are only of interest to economic philosophers, so to speak. They have no economic application.

X raises the problem of exchange rates and their fluctuations for discussion. He suspects that certain personalities are behind this.

Rudolf Steiner: This does exist and is one of the partial causes. It is very difficult to say that something is the main cause, because this has changed a lot at different times. But the most diverse causes converge in the foreign exchange conditions. The main cause of the more recent foreign exchange losses is the discrepancy that has arisen between the gold and paper currencies in one's own country.

It is essentially the case that the gold currencies no longer play a decisive role in countries with weak currencies. On the other hand, in countries with a sound currency, the cover is still there, which naturally means that those countries that have gold currencies are in a significantly different credit situation than the others. First of all, the foreign exchange question is a credit question. Then, of course, when something like the credit damage of an economic area occurs, one can also use such a cause to go further. You can drive down credit again on the stock market. In addition, there are the rather senseless ventures in one's own country. There is no question that at present there is no reason for the fall of the German mark to the extent that it actually occurred, but that speculation in one's own country, which sells abroad and thereby adds to the situation, plays a significant role. All this then causes the foreign exchange to start rolling downhill. Then it is the same as in Austria. It is difficult to say what else contributed in Russia. In Austria and Germany the thing started from the decrease of the gold stock, from the decrease of the credit conditions, from speculation in one's own country. In Germany there is speculation on exports, in Austria there is speculation right now in such a way that the foreign stock is held back, making it even more expensive, so that in Austria the crown is being pushed down by francs, dollars and so on that are in the country. This could not have happened if the currencies of high value had not already risen. Then it could even continue in its own country, and as a result this matter could reach immeasurable proportions. But it was the beginning of the evil that German gold was collected to such an extraordinarily strong extent during the war and transferred to the state, which ensured that the gold came out of the country. There is no gold among the people at all. That is the essential thing. Today, the Reichsbank's gold holdings can only be compared with the population's total gold holdings before the war.

Of course, other factors have been added, but they cannot be grasped at all. It only takes a certain currency to be retained in a country for the exchange rate to be affected. Depending on the value of the foreign currency, an acceleration or deceleration can be initiated; after that, the currency of the country with little foreign currency sinks and falls. From this point of view, it is easy for certain individuals to damage the other state. It is difficult to determine how much of the country's debt stems from its own actions. It will be a considerable sum that has been gambled away by the speculation of certain people.

Question: Some say that the blame for the foreign exchange crisis lies in the change in the balance of payments of the poorer countries in relation to the other countries. In the case of Germany, this deterioration was mainly due to expenditure abroad, without any equivalent value coming in. This creates a balance in favor of the Entente. That is the decisive factor.

Rudolf Steiner: This could never have led to such a devaluation of the currency as occurred in Germany and Austria. The opinion that the discrepancy between gold currency and paper money is only on the surface is not correct because the fact simply exists that before the war paper currency was covered by gold currency. That is a real economic fact. And now this comes into consideration, that as long as there is essentially gold coverage for the paper currency, essentially no inflation takes place. That is how it is connected. When the gold is gone, inflation sets in. And then you can, with that senseless inflation, which was only possible because people did not feel the need to still count on the gold standard, make money as cheap as possible, of course. So because we have the gold standard because of England's power, one of the causes that first comes into play and then undermines credit is essentially the soaring price of gold when it is not there. And then, when the matter comes to credit money, the balance of payments begins to play its role. The matter must first get off the ground.

The cause of the devaluation of the currency lies before the war. You will remember that during the war it was always said that Germany would perish because of her lack of money. That could not happen during the war. But when the war was over and when the borders opened up a little economically, what was developed during the war came into consideration. That was what started the avalanche. Then all possible causes worked together. The balance of payments should only be invoked after the balance sheet figures have been made into named figures. As long as they are mere balance sheet figures, the balance of payments cannot be invoked. It must first mean something, not just a difference.

X: Gold just migrates abroad and has a devaluing effect as long as the gold standard exists.

Rudolf Steiner: Given our current economic circumstances – with the gold standard being the underlying factor – there is no doubt that countries that do not have any gold are essentially dependent on countries that have a gold reserve for the valuation of their products, and the value of money then depends on this. The matter can be understood quite well from the tremendous upheavals in the world; but the effects are so tremendous that one would still like to find “very secret causes”. But precisely this devaluation of the currency is not as hidden as one would always like to say; rather, it is based on the fact that, curiously enough, people today are such that they cannot evaluate events at all.

I often said after the war was over: Those who look at things in the right way will find that we have lived through as many centuries since 1914 in terms of changes that have occurred as we have lived through years in time. And actually, it seems like an anachronism that certain things have remained the same. You get the feeling that after five or six hundred years, the language would have changed; it's like an anachronism that people still speak essentially the same way as they did in 1914. But this has not made a very strong impression on people.

When you look back in history, you usually overlook larger periods of time. Just try to study the fluctuations in grain prices in 15th/16th century England, for example, and you will see that even with changes that did not occur so tumultuously, there are fluctuations in grain prices of up to twenty times the usual price. From this you can see how things that have happened in life since 1914 must actually be valued. People do not believe this because they have no sense of the qualitative side of life. People only noticed when what later happened became apparent – because money is an dishonest companion – when money was exposed. People only have an instinct for appreciating their wallet. It is only when things show up there – after all, people only think in terms of money – that they notice it in the exchange rate plunge. But if we now look at life qualitatively – please take Russia, take a whole complex of Russian life, permeated with the attitude from “Father Czar” to Lenin – what do you have to interpose in terms of metamorphosing forms? Basically, even the Russian devaluation of currency is only a kind of barometer for what has otherwise happened in life. So it is not so inexplicable. It is just the effect of a terrible and will become even more terrible. But the matter is simply understandable from the course of the other events.

Question: Do we already have a world economy today?

Rudolf Steiner: You can't formulate the thought that way. You have to take the state before the world war first. This was to a high degree a yielding of events to a world economic process. You only need to take international check transactions to have a yardstick for the high degree to which the world economy had already been achieved. People's thinking did not keep pace with the emergence of the world economy. They still stuck to the formulations of the national economy. It would not have been possible to keep up with the facts if people had kept up with the thinking, that all the torment of humanity through all possible customs barriers would have emerged even before the war. This was already in line with the Versailles world upheaval. People did not want to catch up with the thinking. They wanted to correct the facts. They opened a customs barrier somewhere at the border when something was wrong. But the situation is such that we had already achieved a high degree of world economy, despite all the tariff barriers. When there is already a high degree of world economy, the price you pay when you take the tram from Dornach to Basel depends on the conditions in America. Everything has gradually been incorporated to a high degree into world economy prices. So that was already there. In terms of its real value, much of it had simply been priced into the world economy to a high degree. Now, suddenly, the barriers caused by the war, which necessitated economic intercourse that was not in line with what had already emerged.

And since people still have not begun to think in more modern terms, an attempt was made at Versailles to correct things in the old style. The dismemberment of Austria was a mistake at any price, for example, the loss of the Austrian steamship industry, the price of coal, nothing. This only led to chaos, this desperate attempt to use old ideas to control the facts, while the world economy was already in place to a high degree. With limited thinking, one could say that national economies would arise again. But that is not the case. The fact that foreign exchange rates fluctuate so much proves that there is a world economy: because all kinds of goods from all over the world are in Austria, and so you can influence the world economy with them. These are things that prove that it is no longer possible to simply ignore the world economy.

Question: If America gives Russia loans to help Russia rise — by building railroads and so on — the result will be that the money will be put into Russia and that the Americans will simply have the title to the property without any way of getting it back.

Rudolf Steiner: If America were to decide to make this monetary contribution, in whatever form, it would be a gift. The great loan that has taken place must give rise to a gift. But America will not make up its mind to help Europe until Europe offers guarantees that it will not get involved in further military or economic entanglements. The only reason why America is not helping - for America would benefit from doing so because its own economy would become healthier - is that Europe presents a picture that says: what I put into it is lost. People in America are afraid of every loan. It will not come about unless Europe gradually comes to the point where, I might say, more personal credit would be given again. You can see from this how easy it would be, in principle, to help Europe, if only it were thought that the prospects had opened up at that moment, even if only seemingly, because Rarhenau was not an able man and Wirth was not either. But if, especially in the Entente and the defeated countries, new people came into the leading positions who had nothing to do with the pre-war situation, and if all people disappeared from public life who still represented the names of the past, then Europe would be helped at that moment: Europe would have personal credit. Things are so that the real credit no longer exists, that the personal credit must raise the real credit again. Then it could come to a slow ascent. If once Krone and Mark would rise a little, then there would be a completely different mood again, then there would be all kinds of causes that would only then emerge to further rise. But the moral level has sunk so far.

Objection: A survey of the causes of the suffering caused by the lack of foreign currency yielded the most contradictory answers.

Rudolf Steiner: The solution to this question lies not in the fact that everyone was wrong, but that everyone was right; namely, everyone hit on certain partial causes from their own circle of experience. This is borne out by the necessity of associative life. In economic life, there is no possibility for anyone to make a comprehensive judgment. So most people were right. But the one who seems to me to have been most right, in pointing to the deepest cause, albeit in matters akin to morality, was Edison, who was able to think entirely in economic terms and who said: The main thing lies in the principles according to which you select the people you take into the business. The shrewd businessman asks people to be hired questions that have nothing to do with the management. They will find their way into the management if they are only otherwise capable: That's why, as a businessman, I ask them questions that prove to me whether they still know what they learned at school, for example, or have forgotten it. If the person I ask tells me absolute nonsense, then the answer to my question is that I consider him to be not open-minded enough. Edison asked a whole series of such questions when he wanted to hire someone. If you approach the matter so practically, it makes a difference whether I hire someone who cannot tell the difference between wheat and rye and have him at the office desk, or someone who can distinguish between the two. And this is what people do not believe today. People believe that you can be a very capable accountant without knowing what a sunflower is. That is cum grano salis speaking. But what Edison gave as a suggestion seemed to me to be an extraordinarily apt one. It is economical, it shows how far the mind is taking hold of labor.

Question: What do current economic necessities demand of those who believe they have to found a new economy?

Rudolf Steiner: To a large extent, I try to give you partial answers to this question every day. For what is most important is to really grasp this transition of the national economies into the world economy, which has been taking place for about fifty years, and to stop working with the old economic categories. Instead, we need to understand how certain things have to be created today that were not there before and that can only be created out of thinking.

Take earlier economies, and you have them simply existing side by side. The even earlier state of affairs was where the economies were completely divergent. This economic state of affairs existed in the time when some areas were still simply to be conquered. It does not depend on the distances. You can imagine uncultivated France and the migrating Franks who found the empty areas. This gives rise to completely different economic conditions than if one came into a relatively closed area with more culture. The Visigoths had a different fate from the Franks because they moved into an area that could not be economically improved. And the greatest example is precisely for these disparate national economies, which then interact, the relationship between England and India, and its colonies in general. Here, dissimilar national economies have been incorporated into a common territory, either by conquest or by peaceful conquest. That is the first condition. The second is when the territories border on each other and are independent national economies. And the third is when a closed territory is created in such a way that nothing can coexist in the economic sense – for we are not talking about completely deserted lands. Now we must be aware that we are in the midst of a tremendous upheaval, and that the most important thing is the global challenge of the world economy, to which we must adapt. This understanding of all things in the national economy is what matters.

You have a very interesting example of how little people know about this in the book by Spengler, “The Decline of the West”, which also has an economic chapter. Spengler really speaks in excellent aperçus, but has no idea what things are really like. His concepts do not correspond to reality anywhere. In the economic field, it is particularly bad now, in the second volume, because Spengler has a relatively good insight into how certain ancient economic areas operated. He thus understands the peasant natural economy extraordinarily well on the one hand, and on the other hand, he also understands modern economic life quite well. He differentiates there – and this is Spengler's coquetry! — the Faustian from the Homeric. Now, the tremendously significant thing is that even a man as brilliant as Spengler cannot possibly realize that what has once been overcome apparently still enters into what comes later, so that all that he describes as ancient economics is, after all, right among us as a field.

Where we are dealing with what I have called purchase money, what Spengler attributes only to antiquity intrudes everywhere, except that the form has changed somewhat. He believes that whereas in his opinion money was once material money, today it is only functional money, while our money today must be based on the fact that the relationship between material money and functional money is being seen through: He throws around terms that have been so coquettishly tailored that they do not adequately describe reality. That is why there is something brilliant about Spengler's concepts. The dazzling effect and, on the other hand, the confusion caused by the way he mixes up the terms – it is indeed a danger for those who are not immune to this confusion. Our task is to think about the conditions as they are required.

We have this threefold coexistence: the very ordinary conquest and the coexistence of economies and the original natural economy, which is hidden by the fact that we use money for everything. There is this dispute between nominalists and materialists. The former are of the opinion that money is only a sign, that is, that the material it is made of has no value at all, but only the number on it; while the materialists are of the opinion that it is the material value that essentially constitutes the money. People argue about such things, whereas the fact of the matter is that in the one area, where we are still more concerned with agriculture and related matters, the materialists are right with regard to the function of money in the economy, whereas in industry and in the free life of the mind the nominalists are right; for there money plays the role that the nominalists ascribe to it. And then we have the interplay of the two. We have to grasp such things! People fight for things that are far too simple, while we have a complicated life.

Objection: But now we would have to rename our economics course to a “course in world economic theory”!

Rudolf Steiner: Well, the names remain. You see, there was even a time when morality was considered an economic matter. In the first and second Christian centuries, morality was considered an economic matter.

Question: I cannot understand the reciprocal movement of natural product – labor – capital and so on. The means of production has already undergone a transformation.

Rudolf Steiner: But the reversal does not refer to the fact that the means of production is produced, but that it produces. The transformation only takes on significance at the moment when the means of production ceases to be a commodity. It remains a commodity until the moment when it can be transferred to production. Where it begins to produce, the flow of national economic activity changes for the means of production. From that moment on, it is removed from the context in which it was, where it was a commodity. In the “key points” I have stated that it begins to be very much like nature because it can no longer have a price. It is just as much a part of the economic process as mere nature. So it moves back to nature again.

Question: Is this reflected in the balance sheet?

Rudolf Steiner: You mean this disappearance of value? It only appears in the balance sheet in abnormal cases. It only appears when someone, let's say, sets up a business, so to speak, brings about a sum of means of production, then goes under, and another takes it over, who is more skillful and succeeds. Then, when you put these two balances together, the one of going under and the one of continuing, you will find that a partial phenomenon of devaluation has been brought about. Through going under, the second - simply through the process of going under - has bought the sum of the means of production more cheaply than he could ever have had them otherwise. As a result, he has received a part as a gift. So that this could then be expressed in the balance sheet. If you were now to follow the consequences of such a process in the further course of the new balance sheet, you would have in it a much cheaper work, that is, one that has partly passed over without cost. In this way it could already be proved arithmetically.

Note: These are of course exceptions. Today, the abnormal is normal.

Rudolf Steiner: But this must gradually lead to monstrosity, because the means of production are directly transferred into pensions, while the land rent only arises when I invest the capital in it.

Question not noted.

Rudolf Steiner: You must not forget: if you put capital into a business, it means something essentially different economically than if you do not have the capital in the business. A completely different agent is at work when you have it in it than when you do not have it in it, although not having it in it is basically also only an illusion. Things lead to such illusions. You may ask: where, then, is the capital, say, the loan capital, that is not invested in enterprises? It is only present as production and land rent. And if someone wanted to have some money for themselves, they would have to withdraw it completely from the economic process for a while, thereby creating tension, and give it away again at a different value. They would come off badly because the money is progressively devalued – otherwise it is inconceivable that the process would occur radically, and that shifts the circumstances.

If we took a healthy approach to the economy, the right conditions would arise. Today, it is often comical to see how the wage issue, for example, is handled: people demand higher wages, which in turn lead to more expensive production conditions. Then the wages are not enough again. People demand higher wages again, and so it goes, and no one knows where it will end. These things make people see sand in their own eyes. Whereas in an associative economy, if we keep to the term 'wages', which is not correct, wages arise that can arise. Wrong wages do not arise.

Question: Why do wages have to 'arise'?

Rudolf Steiner: Try to examine the following: a worker receives an average of, say, two francs a day. Now you can say: that is a very low wage. - How can this wage become a very high wage without it being more than two francs?

Comment: By making the products cheaper.

Rudolf Steiner: Then you will get the final values first. Then you will see that everything I have said comes out. You do not have to keep putting the cart before the horse. You have to ask the question like this: We will leave him two francs. But under what circumstances will two francs be a wage twice as high as today, or three times as high? You have to start from the dynamic conditions. You always start from the static. Then you want the stationary things to cause movement. It is indeed: if I put five cents in my pocket, nothing in itself, but only something in relation to the whole economy.

Question regarding the depreciation of money: Will it gradually lose its value? Also as purchasing power?

Rudolf Steiner: As purchasing power, it has the same value until the end. This question is more a technical one of commerce, a question of how. The gradual erosion of money is not easy to imagine. It would require an extraordinarily bureaucratic apparatus.

I emphasize that I do not want to proceed programmatically, but only to say what is. For my insight is that we cannot create a paradise on earth by economic means. That would not work; instead, we can only create the best possible state of affairs. Now, one has to ask oneself why we have sunk below the best possible state. It is because the individual factors of the national economy cannot assert their true value at one point or another. It is possible today for a person who works in a spiritual way to be paid in a way that is not at all necessary for the national economy as a whole. He is either paid too high or too low. Both occur. But if he is paid too little, he immediately gives rise to an unhealthy change in prices as a result of his low pay. The same applies if he is paid too much. Corrections must be made to this, and it is only a matter of – without taking Foerster's things into consideration – which factors in economic life make this rearrangement, this circulation possible. So a circulation in which the tolerable mutual prices emerge, not only for goods, but also for the intellectual organization, and also for the necessary free intellectual life.

It follows directly from this that money must become old. The only question is how this can be done technically. And you would not be able to gradually wear out the money in any other way than by attaching coupons to the notes that have to be torn off at certain times, and by an official authority. This would result in a very complicated bureaucratic apparatus. But it is really never a matter of bringing about the erosion through such external signs, but rather that the real course of things brings about this value by itself. This happens when you simply give money, all kinds of money, more or less the character of a bill of exchange, that is, I mean the character of a bill of exchange in that there is an expiry date. Of course, this cannot be calculated in abstracto, but only approximately at the outset, assuming a specific moment. Then one must correct until the matter comes to a possible deadline.

Then it would be a matter of finding out what was needed for the global economy, which, after all, was already there for what was basically a very extensive local economy. This is the practice of the jubilee year in the Old Testament. It is something very similar to the aging of money: the remission of all debts. With a radical reduction of all debts, all economically harmful assets or capital also disappear. After all, you probably remember how long it was until a jubilee year – every seventy years. Now this jubilee year, compared to what would be necessary today in terms of the global economy, was determined a priori by simply defining the age of the patriarchs. I can't remember right now whether it is in the Bible, but in any case, the custom was originally to determine the human age because it was correctly calculated: if you take the course of an entire human life, it contains everything that is there in the form of gift capital in youth, then in loan capital and in trading capital, i.e. circulating capital. It was assumed that a person has the right to consume in his youth what he will later earn as a mature person, and then earn a little less when he approaches the end. In those days, this was seen as a kind of borrowing.

Now, you see, that was a priori; it would not look the same in the world economy. The time periods would be considerably longer. But it is also clear that when this gradual depreciation of money occurs, it occurs in mutual transactions themselves, because the initial year would be on the banknote. In real economic circulation, the money will then have a lower purchasing power, but a lower utilization power for all organization: the further it advances, the lower its utilization power. So that it can gradually change into gift money due to the decrease in its utilization power, and that it then changes back into young money, which can simply be reissued on the transition path. This must be brought about only through the associations. Thus labor has its highest value for products that are as close as possible to natural products, even though the worker does not get more than anyone else according to the price formula; but labor then has the highest value there in the national economic process. Only part of it goes to the one who works; the other part goes into the economic process without remainder. They have deprived the individual of the opportunity to enrich himself.

Question: How can money be used differently if it has the same purchasing power as young and old money?

Rudolf Steiner: If you start a business with young money, you are now in a position to invest in that business for a long period of time by putting young money into it; whereas with old money you could not invest in the business for a long period in the same way.

Question not noted.

Rudolf Steiner: You mean: once I have bought my means of production, then instead of money I have the means of production, and the money that I now give away is then in the hands of someone else. The money that has gone into production must of course remain there. But under certain circumstances this money can be transformed – it would not be transformed if the person concerned can consume it – but what is in it in production is a question of commerce. This will not be very bureaucratic, because the associations can ensure that within the enterprises, which are based on the same principles, nothing but money of a certain age is used. So the money is absorbed into the means of production. The other measure, that the means of production lose their value when they have become means of production, comes to help with this. These two things combine into one. Today you have it the same way, only disguised. The money that is lent for production does not go back, gets stuck in production. It is only held by the fact that the means of production can be sold again. Thus it is continually rejuvenated. But if the means of production cannot be sold, the money remains in its old age. You have to think in real terms, then the question will never arise: how do you make the money keep its age in there? Rather, you will say: that must happen - so the measure must simply be taken! This is an outwardly technical question. Of course, you could say this: there would be a certain possibility that such things would be circumvented by speculation; but speculation would certainly have much less ground in such a community than in one that gives money an indefinitely long value. In reality, money does wear out after all. Otherwise, that Pomeranian countryman could be right who says to himself: How big are the Prussian national debts? I want to invest a small capital in interest and compound interest, and that would be able to cover the Prussian national debt after so and so many years. This could never come about because all those who would be obliged to pay for this sum, which after all needed the appropriate cover, would perish. In some way or other, the guarantors would disappear, and the Prussian state would not get a penny of it for centuries.

So you see that pure money does indeed wear out. It is only a matter of taking these things into reason, which take place in reality and cause damage by not being in reason. That is why I can say: I only look at the real, not at an agitative being-shoulding. Because the things are there! It is a matter of asking: How can we rehabilitate the world economy?

Question: What is the relationship between state and money?

Rudolf Steiner: Through what I described yesterday, a Reichsbank, a state bank, would be impossible. The result would be a banking institution between those who have received gift funds and those who, through work, namely soil work, create new goods in their beginning. This rejuvenation would pass from the state to the economy. And that is what constitutes the further necessity. By passing over to the economy, this measure to make money young again would be linked to other economic measures, not to state measures. And as a result, quite different value relationships would emerge than now under the fiscal element. We would have something that already exists. After all, things are only hidden by the fact that they do not take place in the right place. We would have transferred a fiscal measure into an economic one. The tax authorities would have less opportunity to proceed economically than an economic association.

Question: What would be the nature of a different monetary basis?

Rudolf Steiner: It would be created by the fact that everything that is paper money, a money surrogate, would become very similar. The great differences of today are only caused by arbitrary measures. So the state banknotes and all other types of money surrogates would become much more similar to each other. One would have a unified currency, and it would be fairly unimportant what it was made of, because it takes on a purely nominal character at the end of the process; and by being reduced to its basic elements, it takes on a metallic character, which is what it should have to begin with. Currency would be something that is in a constant state of flux, but it would be fully adapted to the peculiarities of the economic process.

Question: Didn't you once praise the useful means of production as a monetary basis?

Rudolf Steiner: Let us ask ourselves: What determines the value of a particular currency over such a period of time during which this change takes place? It is determined by the available usable means of production. Suppose there is very little usable means of production available; then the thing will have to be converted very quickly. Money will accumulate everywhere, purchasing power will decrease everywhere due to the limited means of production, and so on. But if there are many usable means of production, the circulation will be different, and thus this money will have an increased value. In this way, we get the currency out through the usable means of production.

Question: Would something stable have to be taken as the substance, like gold?

Rudolf Steiner: As far as I can see, the real substance of money would be basically unimportant, so that you could put the year, which would then become the value, on paper as well. I cannot see that it would then be necessary to introduce such a currency as gold. It would only be possible to the extent that specialized economies were formed. But to the extent that a world economy actually exists - it is realized to the extent that the economy emancipates itself - it is possible to make money out of any material. What does money become as a result of what I am saying? Money becomes nothing more than the bookkeeping that runs through the entire economic area. If you wanted to introduce a giant accounting system that is not necessary, you could book all of this back and forth of money quite well in a corresponding place. Then the items would always be in the corresponding places. What actually happens is nothing more than tearing the item out of the relevant place and giving the person the appearance, so that the accounting system migrates. In a fluctuating sense, money is accounting. I cannot see that it should have any other than a decorative value, whether you make it out of this or that.

Objection: Gold would provide a certain standard.

Rudolf Steiner: That cannot be the case, and if it is the case, it is evident in this bookkeeping itself. The essential thing is that all monetary transactions are transferred to bookkeeping. Instead of transferring an item from the assets side to the liabilities side, you transfer the money.

Objection: It should not be gold because the devaluation could be avoided by withholding the gold at the end.

Rudolf Steiner: If there is a buyer for the gold. That would have to be the case, that is, the purchase would have to be advantageous. Then you would have to do the unnecessary calculation on top of everything else. Yes, that wouldn't help you at all. If, for example, you made a piece of jewelry out of it, you would be able to cheat with it.

These things must be considered for the purpose of economics itself. If you consider these things together, you will be able to evaluate what is currently only done on the basis of partial observation and inadequate speculation in the treatment of economics. There are always inadequate methods and insufficient observations.

Question: Which capital arose first in economic terms, commercial capital or industrial capital?

Rudolf Steiner: First, of course, commercial capital, historically, and in fact, trade itself is the very first work of exchange that has to be done. If you go back to primitive village conditions today, you have relatively little industrial capital. The village craftsmen do not earn proportionately more than the farmer. On the other hand, the people who trade earn something. This enables them to borrow. And then it goes further. Because capital does not arise if it is not usable. In fact, industrial capital arises only in third place. This is so much connected with habits that rational reasons cannot be found.

Question: Should Switzerland go to the national economy or the world economy? - Is there not a tendency in many countries to go back to the national economy?

Rudolf Steiner: You said that Switzerland had moved too early into the world economy because it had been shown that it had not done well? You cannot say that because Switzerland was unable to test the world economy in a natural way. What you now call the “goodwill” of neighboring countries has been brought about in an unnatural way by the war. If it had been able to continue to develop as it had until 1914, it would not have suffered to that extent, but would have continued to develop. Of course, the same damage would have occurred, which gradually became apparent at the time and which meant that one would have had to sail peacefully into the associative. As things stand now, it must be said, very little depends on Switzerland. For now we are dealing in the world with the tendency towards a world economy, but with its continuous disruption by the political intentions of the national economies, which have coincided with national aspirations. What is disrupting the world economy today is political intentions. Politics has begun to want to reduce everything back to the national economy. We cannot use Switzerland as an illustration here, because it is politically too powerless. Every now and then Switzerland is allowed to have a say when it is known that it will say what is wanted – Switzerland also says what is wanted.

So Switzerland cannot be held up as an example, but America, which is decidedly leading to an economic design and to an inhibition of the world economic design - it could also be that it would be very difficult to overcome this tendency of America towards an economic design. On the other hand, in a country organized like England today, which basically has only a pseudo-national economy and in reality a world economy, the tendency towards a world economy could develop. Because here you have England, over there India, South Africa, Australia, and so on. What is economically connected is basically spread all over the world. Thus England does not have the economy of the whole world at the same time, but it has the economic needs that are necessary throughout the world, which it must synthesize into something that must qualitatively take on the spirit of the world economy. That is what must necessarily lead to the world economy in the course of economic development. And in time, North American politics will have to submit to it as well; for the economy will simply make its very powerful demands on the hard heads of the people, and they will have to submit to the world economy. England could not make any progress if it continued to work in the merely economic sense. So you have to look for the real antagonism between England and America. Switzerland is not at all decisive.

Question: I cannot imagine how the stone in the crown of England could be explained in terms of its value only by human labor, not by its rarity.

Rudolf Steiner: The point is that economic values arise only when human labor or the human spirit is expended. This is the only way that economic values arise in the context of the division of labor. If you are now required to declare the value of this stone in the Crown of England, you must say to yourself: If it is possible to extract values from the ongoing economic process that the individual appropriates, then the value that has been generated can indeed be retained by the person in question. So if anyone wants to keep a million under our current circumstances, they can. He can accumulate the million. Then, for all I care, he can put this million in his stocking. He can now replace this putting-in-the-stocking with the other action of artificially attaching to some product, which is rare, the same value as to his money – and letting it pass into circulation. Then, by attaching this value to the thing purely conventionally and merely by his fiat, by his spiritual organization, he has attached this value to this object that he particularly likes. It is what has happened, merely under the influence; one cannot perhaps call it spiritual deeds, but spiritual measures are taken. The concept of rarity dissolves economically into the economic concept of spirit.

Objections are raised against the threefold order: It is said to be impossible to carry out the separation of the three limbs. The task of the threefold order could be not so much to build up as to separate negatively where harmful influences of the three areas on each other exist, and to leave the work at that. Especially with regard to the limitations of the three areas, one could not imagine anything. Economic life would be limited to what is called technology.

Rudolf Steiner: The thinking of the people who make this objection is not sufficiently developed. This is the main problem: our present-day educational institutions do not develop thinking enough. People can only form concepts that they store neatly next to each other. But the same thing happens in the human threefolded organism. If you take the optic nerve, it belongs to the nervous-sensory system; but it could not exist, of course, if it were not nourished, especially during sleep, by the nutritional system, by the metabolic system, if, that is, nutritional processes did not take place in it and if the inhaled air did not continually pass through the spinal canal into the optic nerve and a circulatory process did not also take place there. So that in the human organism something belongs mainly to the sensory nervous system or to the nutritional or rhythmic system.

The same applies to the social organism. It is necessary that the other two systems play a part in the economic organism. But in spite of all this, it remains true that essentially the sensory-nervous system is located in the head, and that head nutrition and head breathing are effected by another instance. It is precisely by creating these three instances that this interaction will exist in the right sense. I have always objected to the use of the word 'trinity'. The question is: how should the three elements, which are present in any case, relate to each other in a natural way so that they can work on each other accordingly? The spiritual organism will essentially be based on freedom. But of course the economic life will also have to have an effect on the spiritual organism, otherwise the professors would have nothing to eat. But this will have just the right effect if it comes from a different source, so that it becomes necessary to develop an economic organism in one direction and a spiritual organism in another direction, and then the state-judicial “organism”. Objections are raised only by those who imagine this threefold division as a division. It is well known that this has happened quite a bit. I found one commentator saying that he had given lectures on the three parliaments in the social organism. Anyone who imagines it this way imagines an impossibility, because there can only be a parliament in the state, not in the free spiritual life. There can only be the individual individuality, which creates a network of self-evident authority. In the economic sphere, there can only be associations. In parliament, all the functions will converge, and the right measures will be taken between the individual links of the social organism.

Question: In the tenth lecture, the pursuit of profit was compared to mass in the physical sense. Can the analogy be extended to allow work to be a function between commerce and the pursuit of profit?

Rudolf Steiner: According to the physical energy formula, \(e = \frac{m \cdot v^2}{2}\). In a similar way, economic energy would be formulated: the possible profits, which would be multiplied by a function of the speed of circulation: \(e = g \cdot f\) (circulation). The pursuit of profit must be multiplied by the speed of circulation, and then you get the figure for the work. This applies to the individual product. If you have a certain profit on it and you multiply it by the speed of turnover, you will have the amount of work. This amount of work is zero if you need to multiply the profit by zero, that is, if you sell immediately: \(0 = g \cdot 0\).

Question: Does the value of the stone in the Crown of England correspond to the tension between it and the need for luxury?

Rudolf Steiner: You explain the matter just like this, only through a different course of events: For the tension that arises through consumption is always the tension between the processing of natural products and the value that labor acquires through the spiritual organization. With something like the stone in the Crown of England, one cannot really speak of its value in a one-sided way. I beg you: what is it actually worth? It is only of value in a very specific economic order, and one that is permeated by a certain spirituality, through opinion, that is, through the spirit. It cannot be said that it has “this value” in itself, but only that it is worth something through the opinion attached to it. If, by buying it for what the seller asks for it, one were to put the seller in a position to have worked as much as he can get through what he receives, then something like an avalanche would have created an entire organization of labor. Just as in physics you need not take into account anything other than the mutual relationships when you allow a small snowball to form an avalanche – then you do not need to change the formula – so in the same way you do not need to change the formula in the economic consideration by the mere fact that such special circumstances arise under which, purely externally viewed, facts are created like this, that a rare product is equivalent to a huge amount of work. This is only possible in the context of the national economy.

What makes it difficult to fully understand spiritual science, as it is meant here, is that it not only has to think in a different way than ordinary consciousness about certain life riddles – about life riddles that very many people believe to be inaccessible to human knowledge altogether, some even believe to be outside of the real. But spiritual science comes to a way of thinking that is different in its kind, in its whole form, than the thinking of ordinary consciousness. Spiritual science comes to a thinking that, in the way it was indicated in the last two lectures I gave here, must first be unfolded out of ordinary consciousness, just as the blossom must be unfolded out of the plant that is not yet flowering. It can be said, however, that the development of human spiritual culture in the nineteenth century and up to our time has given rise to many ideas and conceptions that are on the way to this spiritual science. Even if the corresponding endeavors within the modern development of the spirit radically differ from this spiritual science, they nevertheless make demands for the knowledge of certain life and world riddles that are on the way to spiritual science. And here particular attention may be drawn to an idea which has been much discussed lately within certain circles, not only those circles in which it has been popularized by Eduard von Hartmann, the well-known philosopher, but also within other scientific circles. I am referring to the idea of the unconscious or, as one might perhaps better say, the subconscious in human mental life.

Let us see what is actually meant by this unconscious or subconscious. Even though it is interpreted in the most diverse ways by the most diverse people, what is meant ultimately comes down to the fact that in the depths of the human soul there is something that actually constitutes the basis of this human soul, but which cannot be reached with the ordinary consciousness of the day, nor with the ordinary consciousness of science. So that one can say: Those who speak of the subconscious or unconscious in the human soul speak of it in such a way that one can see that they are convinced that the actual essence of the soul cannot be grasped with everything that the human being can bring into his ordinary thinking and feeling, into the penetration of his will impulses into everyday and also into ordinary scientific consciousness. It may be said that, in so far as this conception has been characterized here, spiritual science can fundamentally agree with it. But it is the fate of spiritual science, as it is here meant, to agree with many a direction in world-conception from a certain point of view, but to have to take the paths indicated by these world-conceptions in a different way from that in which they do so. And here we come to something that the representatives of the subconscious or unconscious believe, but in which spiritual science must fundamentally differ from them. These representatives of the unconscious believe that what lies unconsciously for ordinary consciousness down in the depths of the soul and constitutes the actual essence of the human soul must remain unconscious or subconscious under all circumstances, and can never rise up into ordinary consciousness. This is why Eduard von Hartmann, who, as I said, has made the unconscious most popular in the last half-century, is also of the opinion that one can learn just as little about the nature of the soul as about the nature of nature itself through direct knowledge, through experience, through observation. He believes that one can only draw conclusions about the unconscious or subconscious and only hypothesize about it, that one can draw such conclusions from observations arising from the ordinary world, from everyday experiences or from science, and then hypothetically form ideas about what the world of the unconscious or subconscious looks like. Spiritual science cannot go along with this. And that it cannot do so, those revered listeners who were at the last lectures will have been able to deduce from them. For it was characterized there how spiritual science comes precisely to the realization that this unconscious or subconscious does indeed rest in the depths of the soul for ordinary knowledge, but that it can be brought up under certain circumstances. It can be brought up when that consciousness comes to development in man, which, as I have shown in my book 'The Riddle of Man', can be called the seeing consciousness, in the further development of Goethe's words 'contemplative judgment'. With these words about the 'contemplative judgment', Goethe gave a significant, a momentous suggestion. This stimulus could not be fully developed in his time simply because spiritual science was not as advanced as it is now. But spiritual science regards it as its task not to create all kinds of fanciful images in a nebulous, enthusiastic way, but to develop on serious scientific ground precisely what Goethe stimulated with his very significant words about the power of contemplative judgment. The way in which the human soul comes to this power of judgment or to the consciousness of direct perception is described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in other books of mine to which I must refer here. But what underlies this power of judgment will, I hope, emerge from a certain point of view, especially in today's lecture.

If spiritual science is compelled to follow the paths taken by the representatives of the unconscious in a different way from them, on the other hand it is in complete agreement with the scientific results of modern times. And here too, it is in a position to follow the path that this scientific research takes, but in a different way than the research itself; precisely because it is more in harmony with nature than the scientific view often is with itself.

As for the question of the actual nature of the soul, the scientific view is that this soul, as the human being experiences it in his ordinary consciousness, is entirely dependent on the human bodily organization. And as I have often indicated here, it would be a futile effort to resist this view of the dependence of the soul life, as experienced by man, on the bodily organization, from whatever point of view. Nothing seems clearer, even if natural science still has a lot to go through in this way, than that it has shown in a subtle way, even if the main points were known long ago, how the course of all human life clearly shows this dependence of the soul in its development on the bodily organization. One need only point out the many delicate facts, and it can be seen how, from childhood on, the human being develops organically as a living being, and how the development of the soul goes hand in hand with this development, how the soul life grows along with the development of the organs that natural science, with a certain justification, attributes to the soul life as its tool. And if we add the fact that the soul life is undermined by undermining the health or the organic connection of certain parts of the body, it becomes clear from all this how right the scientific world view is in this area. It can also show us how, with the gradual decline of the forces that permeate the human body, with aging, these soul forces decline in exact parallel to the bodily organization. Only dilettantism could, in principle, raise any objection to this view, which is put forward by the scientific world view. Those who believe that spiritual science does not reckon with the results of natural science do not judge this spiritual science, as it is meant here, in itself, but the false image that they build of it out of their imagination, and which they then find to be little in agreement with the natural scientific results of recent times, which rightly appear true to them. Spiritual science is therefore entirely based on the results of natural science. But I would like to add that spiritual science is in harmony with these results in a much deeper sense precisely because of its insights, than natural science itself can carry out. This can be seen in particular when one looks at a school of thought about the soul that is confused by many people with what is meant here by spiritual science. All kinds of unclear mystical ideas and experiences of people have to be pushed aside when one criticizes spiritual science, and one then confuses this spiritual science with these unclear, confused mystical ravings.

When one studies in depth, especially from the point of view of spiritual science, what has been called mysticism through the ages, something very remarkable emerges, not in all cases but in many. One can come to the most esteemed mystics and clearly see in them how the newer natural-scientific world view is right when they often do not attach much cognitive value to these mystical endeavors for the actual riddles of the soul and humanity. What is interesting and extraordinarily attractive is certainly what mystics have experienced when properly observed. And it is not the study, the objective, good consideration of mystical experiences of different times that should be objected to here, but rather the principle of the matter; that should simply be characterized. Mystics try, which is again a correct way in the sense of spiritual science, as I just characterized it, through what they call “union of the soul with the world spirit or with the divine” — as one wants to call it — to undergo a deeper experience, an experience that leads them beyond the reality of the senses, allowing them to be one with the spiritual-divine, and thus, as it were, elevating them out of the transitory into the sphere of the eternal. But how do they usually try to do this? Well, if you really study mystical development, you find that they try to do it by refining their ordinary everyday consciousness, by deepening it in a certain way, warming it through and glowing through with all kinds of inwardness, but by remaining within this ordinary consciousness. Now, spiritual science knows precisely from its insights that the scientific view is correct, that this ordinary, everyday consciousness is entirely dependent on its tools, on the life of the body. So if you delve into the ordinary, everyday consciousness in the mystical sense, however inwardly and finely you do it, but you stop at it, then you achieve nothing more than something that is dependent on the bodily organization. There are mystics who, through great poetic beauty, through wonderful flights of fancy, through a remarkable intuition for all kinds of things turned away from the world, can uplift the human heart and refresh the human soul to such an extent that I might say they amaze one through these things. But in the end one must always awaken from this amazement with the feeling: yes, what is the whole thing after all, if not a more intimate, often, one might say, refined imagining and thinking that is bound to the bodily organization; only now it is not bound in the same way as man is bound to it in everyday life, but is connected with the finer, more subtly developed powers of the bodily organization. One can find amiable, respectable mystics, of whom one must nevertheless say: their mystical experiences are nothing more than refined, or let us say spiritualized passions, affects, feelings, which are, however, similar to the passions, affects, feelings of ordinary life. Such mystics have only brought their bodily organization, through all kinds of ascetic means or through all kinds of predispositions, to the point that this bodily organization may express itself in quite different ways than is the case with ordinary people, but in the end it is still the bodily organization. Often one can see from the most sweeping expositions and effusions of such mystics that although they have turned away from the ordinary life of the senses of the day, from standing in the outer world, they have brought into this life of the senses, into the ordinary life of passion and affect, only what their imagination is able to experience. Therefore, the scientifically minded person will, with a certain right, call the experiences of such mystics abnormal, because they differ from ordinary experience. He may call them unhealthy, but he will also be right in saying that they prove nothing against the dependence of the human soul-life on the bodily organization, even if it occurs in a mystically refined way. In a sense, the bodily organization has only been trained so that what would otherwise appear in brutal sensuality is expressed in the soul in spiritual images, in metaphors, in symbols, behind which images, metaphors, and symbols, however, the connoisseur can find nothing but a refined expression of the ordinary life of passion.

In contrast to this, spiritual science says, and it is in complete agreement with the advocates of the subconscious or unconscious: however mystically refined ordinary consciousness may be, however much this ordinary consciousness 'spiritualized' - as it is often called - so that it brings a feeling of union with the spirit, within this ordinary consciousness one does not enter into that sphere which one actually seeks when one wants to speak of the deeper soul mysteries of man. In particular, the trained observation of the spiritual researcher shows that everything that a person can have and store in his soul in his ordinary experiences, which he makes into a memory, is tied to the physical organization. So that with everything that a person experiences within himself when he delves into his memories, he does not come out of this bodily organization, and one may say: a real spiritual scientific self-observation shows precisely that the more faithfully the experiences are retained by the memory, the more the activity of the memory is bound to this bodily organization. Therefore, spiritual science must resort to completely different methods than those used to develop ordinary consciousness. Even if this ordinary consciousness can summon up particular fidelity for memory in that the bodily organization functions well and experiences can be faithfully recalled even after a long time, spiritual science must take different methods than those known to ordinary consciousness. And I have already pointed out in the last lectures what arises as an observation of thinking itself, and I will only repeat it from a different point of view.

Ordinary thinking, I said, is indeed the starting point for all spiritual scientific research, and only he finds this starting point who, through a true observation of this thinking, already realizes how true and real it is that this thinking already leads beyond the sensual-physical, that it itself is already a spiritual thing. But one cannot stop at this point. One cannot stop at the recognition that this thinking, as it arises in ordinary life, is a final thing. Even then it is not a final thing when it has apparently spiritualized itself the most, namely in the memory representations. That is why I said: All that a person can think, feel and want in ordinary life does not lead to a knowledge of the nature of the soul when it is observed, when it is experienced. Rather – and this is only one of the many measures that must be taken in the intimate life of the soul, others can be found in the books mentioned – the human being must develop his thinking and unfold his imagination in such a way that he is no longer present with his personality, or let us say with his subjectivity, in this thinking; for he is present as long as consciousness is ordinary, and there his physical organization is involved. If we only develop ideas and seek out ideas that can be retained and reappear with our thinking, we only achieve what is accomplished through the tools of the bodily organization. Therefore, as I have said, one must develop this thinking in such a way that one is no longer present during this development. But for that one needs patience and persistence, not the belief that the great questions of the world can be decided in the twinkling of an eye, that one only needs to approach them in order to get behind these world riddles or to form an opinion about them; something quite different is needed for that. To do that, we need the secrets of the entire human life. We need patience to develop such inner methods, the life of which cannot be taken in an instant, but which can only develop if we leave them to the development they can experience in the course of human life.

I have indicated that this is called a “meditative life”: when one introduces certain ideas, preferably ones that one can survey precisely so as to avoid any unconscious or other reminiscences of life from emerging, into one's soul, into one's consciousness, and really lives through these ideas on all sides with a calm consciousness. If one does not merely observe how, in ordinary consciousness, these ideas, as they are, can be brought into memory again, if one does not merely pay attention to how they remain, as one might say, true to their own form, but if one reaches to let these ideas out of ordinary consciousness, so to speak, by no longer being present during their development. For if one has only enough patience and persistence, one will always find that the images descend into the depths of human consciousness, where, to put it trivially, one no longer knows anything about them; then one will be able to experience how they emerge again into one's memory. At first spiritual research cannot do anything with all this. But another thing takes place. For the one who develops his inner soul life in the sense of the books mentioned, it shows that the ideas on which consciousness has rested in a corresponding way do indeed emerge as memories again after months or years, just like the others. but these ideas are encountered again in a way that a faithful memory does not show, but rather in such a way that they have now shaped not his physical but his mental life, in such a way that they have made it different in a certain area. These images do not resurface in the same form in which we let them down into the subconscious, but they do resurface and announce themselves in such a way that one must say: they have not worked in what is your personal, but in what is below the conscious personal, they have unfolded their power there and now appear in a substantially different form. Therefore, one can say: When the idea that one has had, that one has kept faithfully, that one has faithfully reawakened, once again encounters what has become of it, without us being there with our consciousness, what has resulted from it through working in some hidden sphere without our knowledge, this encounter between the ordinary consciousness and the images that arise from the subconscious, transforms the former so that one can see its effect on the human soul. This encounter shows how man is involved in a completely different sphere of life than that of physical-sensory reality, how truly unconscious or subconscious things live in the depths of the soul life, but how it can be brought up through appropriate methods, and how it penetrates into consciousness differently than it does in ordinary memory.

Spiritual science therefore takes the view that through appropriate treatment of our soul life, the unconscious can move into the conscious, but should only move up when it has achieved its work, its development, in the unconscious. But in this way spiritual science comes to what is called the seeing consciousness. For here a real experience is undergone that may be compared to the transition from ordinary dream-life to waking consciousness. In dream-life, what do we experience? We experience the subjective pictures of the inner man, which, while dreaming, we take for reality. When we wake up, we know from our direct contact with external reality that the dream has only brought us images, and these images – as closer observation shows – arise from our organic interior, showing this organic interior in symbols, but arising from us. And no one will be tempted to believe that in a dream one can become aware of what a dream actually is; no one can dream what a dream is. On the other hand, if one moves out of the dream into ordinary consciousness and tries to explain the dream from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, one comes to its fantastically chaotic pictorial nature. It is the same when one moves up from ordinary consciousness to the seeing consciousness in the way described. In the same way as one comes out of a dream into physical-sensory reality, one passes from external physical-sensory reality into what might be called — the word is debatable — higher spiritual reality. One awakens into another world, a world that now throws light on the ordinary physical-sensory world just as the world of ordinary consciousness throws light on the world of dreams. In this way, spiritual science not only comes to think differently about the riddles of the world and the soul, but above all it comes to the realization that in order to enter the spiritual worlds, a different consciousness from the ordinary consciousness must first be brought out of the depths of the soul. Today I can only present certain results and their consideration, but in many lectures here, a great deal of justification has been said about these results and it can be found in the relevant literature.

With reference to, I would like to say, the most immediate science, just as it agrees with natural science, this spiritual science must now also again differ from mere natural science. This spiritual science, as it wants to appear today, stands fully on the basis of the same scientific conscience, the same scientific attitude as natural science of modern times. But it cannot stop at the kind of thinking that natural science develops. Therefore, as things stand today, the spiritual scientist will have a good foundation above all if he has developed his thinking, his imagination, his feeling about the world based on the most rigorous scientific ideas, and these are today those that are permeated as much as possible by mathematics, the ideas of the physical, the chemical, and even the mechanical. One day it will be different when the biological sciences, physiology, will have progressed as far as the inorganic natural sciences have. But the spiritual researcher cannot stop at thinking about the world as natural science does. He can only discipline his thinking by training it in the strict thinking of science. And when he has trained himself, I might say, to allow himself nothing in his thinking but what can stand the test of the scientific attitude of mind, he will have created the best foundation for himself as a spiritual-scientific researcher. It therefore turns out that this spiritual science must in many ways be compared with what has occurred with the rise of the newer scientific way of thinking. I have often pointed out how, with the Copernican world view, people had to learn to think differently with regard to the external world, how what Copernicus asserted must initially have seemed absurd to people because it contradicted the statements of the external sense world. When objections are raised against spiritual science, in particular, on the grounds that it contradicts the statements of the external sense world, then it must be pointed out again and again that, for example, astronomy has made great strides through Copernicus precisely because it did not stick to what the external senses show, but boldly transcended them by taking what the external senses show to be mere appearances. If the inner nerve of such a change were recognized in the field of natural science, then people would be much less likely to raise unintelligent objections to spiritual science, as still happens quite often today. But today I want to bring up another point in which spiritual science must recognize itself as similar to the progress of natural science in the Copernican worldview. Copernicus had to turn thinking about the planetary world, one might say, completely upside down, in order to take account of what had to be taken into account. Here the earth stands still, the sun revolves around it – so the ordinary sensory consciousness told people. Even if the Copernican world view must undergo some revision if we are to make progress, we cannot think in such a way as to imagine the Earth at the center of the planetary system and the Sun orbiting around it; rather, we must turn the fact, which presents itself as an apparent fact to the senses, completely upside down: we must place the Sun at the center of the planetary system and let the planets orbit around the Sun. It is well known how certain circles did not accept the Copernican world view for a long time. Just because it has become so customary today, one no longer reflects on the grotesque that it must have appeared to many people to whom it came from other points of view. One had to develop completely new ideas; one had to get used to having different ideas than those that one had had for centuries for ordinary thinking.

Now it is somewhat more difficult in the field of spiritual science to see the analogy in its own field, but only because it is today in the same position as the Copernican world view was at the time of its appearance. The ideas that spiritual science must develop are quite unfamiliar today, and they must take a similar path with regard to a certain point in human soul life, I would say, to the path taken by the Copernican world view. What appears to be clearer for the ordinary soul life, for ordinary observation – as clear as the fact that the sun revolves around the earth is for sense perception – than that the human being is born with his soul, goes through his life, that his soul or its ego changes gradually in the course of this life, accompanying this life, that when the person turns 7, 13, 15, 18, 20, 25 years old, it has accompanied the person through the years of this life. In a sense, as if it were walking through life from birth to death, one sees the soul being as if it were accompanying it. Spiritual science shows it completely differently. Spiritual science shows the remarkable fact - which will be further explained in the following lectures - that what we call the soul, to which the idea of immortality is linked, does not at all undergo the course of life in the usual sense. Just as the sun does not move in the usual sense in its heavenly course around the earth, so the human ego or the human soul does not travel the path from birth to death. The matter is completely different. It only looks different because we are not accustomed to observing it in this way. The matter is completely different:

We remember ourselves in later life back to a certain point, which lies a few years after our birth. Up to this point, the I or soul-being accompanies its development alone. Then it remains — if I may use the expression, it is correct — in time, remains in time like the sun in space, and the course of life does not take the I with it, but moves on, just like the planets around the sun, while the I or soul remains at rest at the point I have indicated. The course of life radiates that which flows in it back to the soul that remains dormant. The only reason the idea is so difficult is because it is easier to imagine rest in space than in time. But when one considers that for certain circles the Copernican view of the world only became acceptable in 1827, one can indeed also assume that spiritual science can take its time until people are able to imagine that resting in time is just as possible as resting in space. One can say: the soul remains in itself, and life continues until death, in that the experiences only reflect back onto that which remains at the aforementioned point in time. But there is something else connected with this: that what we actually call the soul does not emerge at all in those events and facts that are related to the life of the body, that the soul in its actual essence remains within the spiritual. It does not enter into the ordinary course of life because this course of life flows into the sensual-physical event. The soul remains behind, holding back in the spiritual. Now, in the ordinary course of life, with the ordinary course of life between birth and death, consciousness proceeds in such a way that it appears in accordance with the physical tools. But the deeper, the true soul essence does not pour into this physical being as such, but remains in the spiritual. But this already indicates that knowledge and understanding of this soul-life cannot be acquired in the ordinary course of life, dependent as it is on the outer world. Such knowledge and understanding can only be attained when, in the manner described, the consciousness is set aside, when — to repeat this example once more — the thought that has remained in the consciousness now encounters the thought that is working subconsciously. But then the significant thing happens that gradually this subconscious work pours out over the entire human life, insofar as it has been lived through, and that the person, in his inner experience, really knows himself at the starting point of his life on earth, at the boundary up to which his memory reaches, knowing himself as standing within the spiritual life, but raised out of the time in which the ordinary consciousness runs. Therefore, no mysticism that is as I have characterized it, and that seeks to bring about a deeper experience than the ordinary into the consciousness that runs in time, can reach the soul being. Rather, this soul essence can only be reached when time itself is transcended, when the soul moves up into the realm that emerges before memory takes hold, or perhaps it is better to say: when the human being, with his inner experience, moves up beyond this point in time, develops the soul in order to find the soul there, as it is in its inner essence.

All these are difficult ideas, but the difficulty does not lie in the fact that the human soul could not carry them out, but only in the fact that people have become accustomed to thinking differently over the centuries. Therefore, man must not seek union with the spiritual through the ordinary consciousness, in the sense of ordinary mysticism, when he wants to develop spiritual-scientific methods. Rather, what he seeks must be the object itself. He must approach it with the awareness that it is actually something foreign to ordinary life, that it remained standing before this ordinary soul life occurred. Then, when a person recognizes his inner soul being in this way, then basically he only has the soul in such a way that he now knows: this soul has cooperated by passing through the birth with the powers that it already had in the spiritual, in the shaping of the entire life down to the bodily organization, by combining its power with what the person has attained through physical inheritance. In this way, the human being arrives at the immortal soul.

For spiritual science, the question of the riddle of immortality changes in relation to the form that one otherwise gives to this question. One always thinks, when one raises this question, that one can answer it if one puts it this way: Is the soul, with its ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, such that it retains any of it as something immortal? The way this thinking, feeling and willing is in ordinary life is precisely because it has to make use of the bodily instruments. When these bodily instruments are discarded as the soul passes through the gate of death, the form of thinking, feeling and willing naturally ceases to be an inner experience that can be reached by ordinary consciousness. On the other hand, there is something in every human being that is hidden from ordinary soul observation, just as things are hidden that can only be explored through natural science about nature, but which can be achieved in the manner outlined above, and which remains, so to speak, at the gateway of memory. It can absorb the events of the ordinary course of life by reflecting them back. And when what is contained in this ordinary life, what is bound to the bodily tools, is taken from the person when he passes through the gate of death, that which has never left the spiritual world will also pass through the gate of death. That which carries itself through has not developed within the ordinary consciousness, but has developed in the subconscious, and can only be brought up in the way described.

Thus the question for spiritual science changes in such a way that the spiritual researcher shows, above all, the way to find the true soul being, and by showing this way, its true nature reveals its immortality as a truth. Just as there is no need to prove that the rose is red when someone has been led to the rose and is looking at it, so there is no need to prove by means of all kinds of hypotheses and conclusions that the soul essence is immortal when one shows the way by which man finds the soul being so that he sees: the mortal works out of itself, it is the creator of the mortal, the mortal is its revelation – if one can show immortality as a property of this soul being, just as one shows the blush as a property of the rose. What matters is that the question changes completely when spiritual science in its real form approaches this mystery of the soul.

What has only been hinted at here will, one might say, be clarified a little by sidelighting if one takes a look at something that plays such a significant role in human life, but which, as has been said many times, seems completely inaccessible to most philosophers of thought and scientific observation: if one takes a side glance at what is called human destiny. In the succession of events that befall man, human destiny appears to many as a mere sum of coincidences; to many it appears as a predetermined necessity, as a necessity of Providence. But all these ideas approach the riddle of destiny from the point of view of ordinary consciousness. And no matter how mystically deep these ideas are, one does not come any closer to such riddles through them. That is why I showed last time, with reference to the question of fate, how one prepares oneself in the right way to approach this question of human destiny. It must be repeated once more from a certain point of view, so that the question of the forces of fate can be discussed more precisely. I said: When a man, as a spiritual researcher, devotes himself inwardly to certain developments, one kind of which I have shown in the development of thinking, this inner development means for him a real raising of himself out of ordinary consciousness; not merely a mystical deepening of this ordinary consciousness, but a raising of himself, an ascent to that which does not enter at all into ordinary consciousness. Then much patience and perseverance is needed to carry this inner development further and further. It need not in the least impair the outer life. Those people are poor investigators of the spirit who, through spiritual research, become useless and impractical for ordinary life. They show that they are basically still materialistic natures. For anyone who is torn out of the ordinary life, who is torn out of the firm footing he has in life, out of life's duties and tasks, in short, out of the practice of life, by some kind of spiritual research, shows that he has not grasped the essence of true spiritual research; for this proceeds in the spiritual, in that which cannot at all come into direct conflict with ordinary life. And anyone who believes that he can, let us say, starve himself up into the spiritual world, or can enter the spiritual world through some other external, material means, shows that, despite seeking the spirit, he is steeped in materialistic ideas. But when a person follows the path of true spiritual research or even just true spiritual science, by penetrating and absorbing into his soul what spiritual research brings to light, then at the right moment what the person experiences inwardly gradually becomes for him an inner question of destiny, an inner turning-point of destiny. He experiences an inner permeation that carries him into the spiritual sphere so vividly and intensely that this experience, which takes place without any impairment of the outer experience, becomes a turning point in destiny that is greater and more significant than any other turning point in destiny, no matter how significant it may be. Indeed, the significance of being inwardly absorbed in spiritual science is precisely this: that it can become a turning point in a person's destiny. This does not mean that a person needs to become indifferent to other fates for his soul; a person can fully feel what happens as outer destinies, not only for himself but also for others, when he has also experienced the higher turning point in destiny, which happens purely inwardly. He who becomes indifferent to outer life and outer fate, and who would dull his compassion and sympathy for the outer world and men, is not on the right path. But for those who, as may happen in the case of good education, find themselves standing in a spiritual world while fully immersed in social life, it may happen that a point in time comes when, having inwardly found the way to that which does not enter into the sensual world, perceives this inner experience as a turn of fate that is greater and more intense than the most terrible fate or the most joyful turn of fate that can otherwise befall him in life. But the fact that such a turn of fate can occur deepens the mind and internalizes the human soul; it equips it with powers that always rest in the soul but are not usually brought up.

Above all, the soul is prepared in one way: when the soul has experienced a destiny purely inwardly, so that it now faces this destiny only with the inwardly experienced powers of the soul, the human being becomes so intimately acquainted with the greatest twist of fate that he gains a measure of knowledge for outer fate. We need a yardstick for everything in life. The yardstick for judging fate is acquired not by looking at the dark course of fate through all kinds of speculation and fantasy, but by looking at a clear course of fate, such as one experiences when one has developed one's inner soul life step by step to such an extent that one has seen it all. One sees: This is how it has become over the years. We have gradually created for ourselves an inner, true, self-disclosing conviction of the spiritual world in which we live and weave and are. When we are present at the turning point of fate, it does not confront us as something that remains dark and in which we can only rejoice or suffer, but it confronts us in bright inner clarity. And when we have developed in our soul the forces that confront us in bright inner clarity, only then are we able to illuminate with inner light that which remains dark, and then we are also able to look at the course of external fate. These events of outer destiny are dark for ordinary consciousness. But ordinary consciousness has become a seeing consciousness for the study of the question of destiny precisely by allowing such a turn of destiny to occur. For the question of destiny, this consciousness has made itself a seeing consciousness. Only through this does one acquire what is necessary to approach the fateful question in such a way that it can receive a certain enlightenment in the sense in which it is meant to be. But this shows that, however much one observes fate with the ordinary consciousness, all statements about this fate remain, so to speak, hypothetical or an empty, fantastic assumption. For it is precisely shown that fate, as it appears externally to the ordinary consciousness, only appears in its revelation, in its penetration into the ordinary consciousness, but that this fate works on the human soul in the subconscious, so that this human soul, which never steps out of the spiritual world, as I have indicated, lives in the subconscious in the stream of fate. It lives in the stream of fate in such a way that its entanglement with fate is no more apparent to the ordinary consciousness than what surrounds a dreamer as physical reality in the outer world is apparent to him.

When the observing consciousness trains to develop the powers of consciousness that are necessary for this, then one is able to look at the question of fate with completely different spiritual eyes – to use Goethe's expression. The soul then comes to look at the connections that are entangled in what we call a turn of fate quite differently than one looks at them in ordinary consciousness. One only recognizes what one must direct one's attention to in the question of fate when one is prepared for it by being inwardly moved by a purely spiritual turn of fate. Let us take any turn of fate that may easily confront us in our outer life. As a typical example of what happens in our outer life, one could tell the following story, which may well have happened in this way: A person is fully prepared, let us say, for some outer profession, for some outer work. His abilities show that he could fully rise to this work, that he could be of great use to the world, to humanity, by doing his outer work. Things have, so to speak, progressed so far that the position to which the person in question is to be appointed has already been chosen. Everything is prepared, the person himself is prepared, those people who can give him the appropriate position have become aware of what he can achieve; everything is prepared. There, just, I would like to say, before these people meet the document that he is transferred to the position, some accident occurs that makes him incapable of filling this position. — There we have a typical twist of fate. I am not saying that the person in question must die immediately, but in the ordinary course of life he would be unable to achieve what had been well prepared from all sides. A blow of fate strikes this person.

Now, when you look at the human course of life in the ordinary consciousness – even if you think you are doing it differently – you do it in such a way that you look at what preceded some fact in the course of life. You look at the world in such a way that you always string together effect and cause and again effect and cause, that you always go back from the later to the earlier. Now, when a person is prepared to recognize this turn of fate that can teach us something, it now shows that we are dealing with a confluence of two series in this turn of fate. Here in the cited typical example, on the one hand we are dealing with the fact that a person has become something through which he has also forced events in the external world to be directed towards him. Another series of events comes, which crosses this first series of events. When one observes such processes of fate, one learns to recognize that it is right and excellent in the highest sense to regard the human course of life in the same way as natural processes, by seeing how the later follows from the earlier. But one also learns to recognize that this consideration is only a highly one-sided one. One learns to recognize that if one wants to consider existence in its entirety, one cannot and must not consider only the continuous, growing, ascending currents of events, but must also consider the descending current, the current that always intersects, crosses, and destroys the ascending current. Then, through the meeting of the two currents, one arrives at the point where the spirit reveals itself. For man has not become another by experiencing a crossing of what he has become on the one hand; two currents of life have come together, but man has not become another. And precisely this, that one encounters with one's soul powers this crossing of the two streams of life, shows one how, at the moment when something is to work on the human soul in accordance with fate, it must withdraw precisely from the outer life. In this way one enters into the inner life of the soul, which does not, however, arise out of the outer life of the senses. By seizing existence where it not only reveals itself, but where it disappears from outer manifestation, one finds the way into the realm from which the soul never emerges, and in which fate works on it.

And now, when you have taken your meditations this far, you realize that it is absolutely in the nature of the soul that fate should relate to the soul as I have just shown. For let us assume that the human soul, in full consciousness, with fully developed ideas, would approach the chain of fate in the same way as it approaches external sensual reality and explains it in scientific terms. What would be the consequence? It would follow that the soul would remain inwardly dead, that it would inwardly face fate, I would say, so calmly, not to say indifferently, as it faces the statements that science makes. But that is not how the human soul faces fate. I am not merely developing ideas of expediency here. Anyone who goes into the methods of what is presented here will realize that I do not fall back into teleological or purposive ideas, but that I pose the question this way: What is necessary for the nature of the soul? —, as one might ask: How is the root necessary for the entire life of the plant?

Insofar as the soul is involved in fate, it does not experience this fate through cognitive ideas, but rather it experiences it in such a way that affects, sensations, feelings of joy, feelings of suffering arise in this soul, and that not so clear ideas hover over these sensations as one otherwise has in cognition. But if such clear ideas were to hover above it, they would be ideas that operate only in the sphere of ordinary consciousness, that is, in the sphere that is bound to the body. Precisely because the experience of fate is set apart from these ideas, which are bound to the body, because the experience of fate is driven by sensations and feelings, by the progressive or conflicting impulses of the will, this experience of fate remains in the subconscious or, better said, is guided down into the subconscious. In this way, the experience of fate works on the soul outside of consciousness, just as the experiences of the external world around the dreamer take place without them penetrating into his consciousness, at least not directly.

The way in which a person experiences his sufferings and joys is what causes his fate to be channeled into the deeper subconscious regions of the soul life, into those regions from which the soul life never emerges at all. So that in the course of life, a person is driven by his fate below the threshold of ordinary consciousness. But down there, where consciousness, which is in the ordinary life and directed towards the ordinary life, does not reach, there is order; down there the experiences of fate shine back onto the soul, which has remained before the boundary of feeling. There, fate itself is continually working on our soul, so that the way in which man is involved in his fate can be understood just as little by ordinary consciousness as what is happening in the room in which one is dreaming can be understood by the dreaming consciousness in terms of external, sensual-physical events. Fate connects with the soul below the threshold of consciousness. But then it becomes apparent how this fate may be constituted, that it is intimately connected with the soul, that it is precisely the worker on the shaping of our soul life. One of the workers is the one who ensures that what we go through in the course of our lives between birth and death is carried over to the soul, which goes through birth and death in repeated lives on earth, so that this soul is carried through this entire life, which goes through repeated lives on earth, through accomplishments, through forces, through effects that do not reach into ordinary consciousness. There we see the connection between human destiny and the human soul. There we arrive through destiny itself at the subconscious, eternal foundations of the human soul. And only where immortality reigns, there does destiny also reign in its true form. And it is carried there by the fact that in ordinary life we are so at its mercy that we do not penetrate it cognitively. Because we live through it emotionally, fate itself is carried to the region where it can work on the immortal part of the soul.

In this way, fate proves itself – and this may sound pedantic, almost philistine – as the great teacher throughout our entire life. But it is so. Fate carries us forward. And what individuals who have been prepared by a particularly predisposed course of life feel about the coherence of the human destiny is true. I would like to read you an example of this verbatim. In his later years, Goethe's friend Knebel was led to ideas about fate that truly did not arise from speculation or philosophical fantasies, but that, I would say, radiated up from what otherwise takes place in the subconscious life of the soul when fate works on the soul. Knebel says:

This did not come about through speculation, through philosophy about fate, but is a result that the soul itself has brought up from the region where fate works on it. Therefore, as a rule, only people who are fully involved in the events of life, not only their own lives, but who also live with compassionate sympathy for the fate of many people at a certain point in their lives, will see such an insight into fate shining forth from the depths of their soul.

Now, questions of science, including spiritual science, do not depend on any external events – questions of science, questions of knowledge follow their course. Rather, the outer life, in many of its peculiarities, is guided by what science brings to light. But on the other hand — and this can also be observed in natural science — certain external circumstances contribute to the fact that insights can only be properly appreciated and accurately observed by people. One need only recall how the transits of Venus, which only occur twice a century, have to be awaited before they occur, how the external circumstances have to arise for a particular insight to arise in a certain field. The same may be true of questions of spiritual science as they relate to the life of the soul. And although this does not properly belong to spiritual science, the intuitive perception of our fateful time can be directed to how our time in particular, in the deepest sense of the word, brings to people in their soul what spiritual science is able to give.

The old Heraclitus, the great Greek philosopher, from whom individual but deeply significant rays of his research have been penetrating through all times since his life, once said, pointing to the dream life: In relation to the dream world, every human being has his or her own world. The most diverse people can sleep in one room, and each can dream the most diverse dreams; there everyone has their own dream world. The moment they wake up, they are all in a common external environment. This common environment evokes a large soul picture, they are in unity. In spite of everything that can be said against it, for that is only seemingly, what can be said against it, people are in an even greater, more meaningful unity when they look at what the seeing consciousness brings out of the spiritual world. People come together here, and it is only an illusion if one believes that one person asserts this and the other that. One may calculate correctly and the other incorrectly, but the method of calculation remains correct. In a higher sense, people find unity when they advance into the realm of intuitive consciousness and enter the spiritual world. But external circumstances can also lead people to a certain unity in life. Then these experiences can be a stimulus for that which strives towards the unity of life: for spiritual science. And in our time we are living in a fateful event that unites people in a completely different way – let us say now, because it is of immediate concern to us – the people of Central Europe, when they are united from outside in a different way. Shared experiences of fate, which one person experiences in one way and another in another, flow over human souls, flow over human bodies, flow over human lives. This can be a stimulus, and hopefully will be a stimulus, to steer people out of the difficult, fateful time and also towards the difficult paths of spiritual science. And one may think: Even if spiritual science always has an important message for people in relation to the eternal questions, in our time, when so many destinies are being decided, when fate is so terribly questioning before the whole soul of time, the questions of fate and soul arise in a particularly profound way. Spiritual science, because it appeals to that which not only stands in life but, because it remains in the spiritual world, carries this life through the human course of life, spiritual science can give people special strengths, special powers, to all twists of fate, with the awareness of what fate means for immortality, for eternal life, to find oneself through life in an appropriate way, to await what will be born out of this fateful time. If one learns to understand fate, then one also learns, when necessary, to confront fate with true, not with deadening, calmness of soul, with that calmness of soul that is strength. And the soul often works more powerfully in its calm than it can when it is carried on the waves of external life, itself rocking up and down with these waves.

And perhaps it is precisely this awareness of the stillness of the soul in our life cycle, however abstract this idea may still seem today, that is capable of merging with the fundamental forces of the human mind, and there it can become a great, not blunting, but invigorating motivator for this human mind. For, as the present study of the question of immortality and fate shows, it is just as incorrect to say of someone who has a magnet in front of him: this is a piece of iron in the shape of a horseshoe and nothing else, and you are a fantasist if you believe that there are special powers in it, as it is incorrect to call someone who cannot immediately demonstrate the powers by attracting iron, but only asserts them, a fantasist. if you believe that there are special powers in it, just as it is wrong to consider someone a fantasist if they cannot immediately demonstrate the powers through the attraction of the iron, but only assert them. It is therefore wrong to consider someone a fantasist who speaks of the outer life that takes place in the physical senses in such a way that this life is not only that which it appears to the outer senses, but that it is permeated, illuminated and glowing with the spiritual in which the soul is rooted and moves. For the word of Heraclitus remains true – let me conclude with this – affirming, if correctly understood, that which is the innermost nerve of spiritual science, affirming that only he knows the world who is able to see through the spirit in the light of the mind:

“Eyes and ears bear witness to what is going on in the world, witnesses to people. But they are poor witnesses to those people whose souls do not understand the language, the true language of the eyes and ears.”

Spiritual science seeks to speak the true language of the eyes and ears and thus to find the way into that which the ordinary consciousness of eyes and ears is unable to show; into that from which life itself springs and weaves. Therefore, the human being will work best when they are aware that they, as an eternal being, not only come from this eternal source of life, but are always within it.