The Rudolf Steiner Archive

29. Spiritual Life, the Legal System, and the Economy

[ 1 ] Within the contemporary social movement, there is much talk of social institutions, but little talk of social and antisocial people. Little attention is paid to the "social question", which arises when one realizes that social institutions receive their social or antisocial character from the people who work in them. Socialist thinkers believe that in the administration of the means of production by the communities they must see that which will satisfy the demands of large sections of the people. They presuppose without further ado that in such an administration human cooperation must be organized in a social sense. They have seen that the private capitalist economic order has led to unsocial conditions. They believe that when this economic order has disappeared, its anti-social effects must also have ceased.

[ 2 ] Certainly, the modern private capitalist economic system has caused social damage on the broadest scale. But is it somehow proven that these are a necessary consequence of this economic order? By its very nature, however, an economic system can do nothing other than place people in situations in life through which they produce goods for themselves and others in an expedient or inexpedient manner. The modern economic order has placed the means of production in the power of individuals or groups of individuals. The technical achievements could be utilized most expediently through the concentration of economic power. As long as this power is only exercised in the field of the production of goods, it has a substantially different social effect than when it spills over into the legal or spiritual sphere of life. And in the course of the last few centuries this encroachment has led to the social damage which the modern social movement is pressing for the elimination of. He who owns the means of production gains an economic superiority over others. This led to the fact that he found in the administrations and people's representations the forces that helped him, through which he could also obtain other social supremacies over those economically dependent on him, which also have a practically legal character in a democratic state order. Economic supremacy also led to a monopolization of intellectual life among the economically powerful.

[ 3 ] It now seems to be the simplest thing to eliminate the economic supremacy of individuals in order to eliminate their legal and intellectual supremacy. One arrives at this "simplicity" of social thought if one does not consider that in the combination of technical and economic activity offered by modern life lies the necessity of allowing the initiative and individual ability of individuals to develop as fruitfully as possible in the operation of economic life. The way in which production must be carried out under modern conditions makes this necessary. The individual cannot bring his abilities to bear in economic activity if he is bound in his work and in his decisions to the will of the community. However dazzling the thought may be: the individual should not produce for himself, but for the whole; its correctness within certain limits should not prevent us from recognizing the other truth, that no economic decisions can originate from the whole which can be realized in the desirable way by the individual. Therefore, a realistic way of thinking cannot seek the cure for social damage in a new organization of economic life, through which social production takes the place of the management of the means of production by individuals. Rather, the aim must be to prevent the damage that can arise from the exercise of the initiative and efficiency of individuals without impairing this exercise. This is only possible if the legal relationships of people engaged in economic activity are not influenced by the interests of economic life, and if what is to be achieved for people through spiritual life is also independent of these interests.

[ 4 ] It cannot be said that the administrators of economic life can, in spite of their being taken up by economic interests, maintain a sound judgment of legal relationships; and since they know the needs of economic life well from their experience and their work, they will also be able to best organize the legal life that is to unfold within the economic cycle. Those who hold such an opinion do not take into account that a person can only develop the interests of a certain area of life from within that area. From economic life he can only develop economic interests. If he is also to develop legal interests out of it, these will only be economic interests in disguise. Genuine legal interests can only develop on ground where legal life is cultivated separately. On such a ground, one will only ask about what is right. And if legal regulations have been made in the sense of such questions, then what has arisen in this way will have an effect on economic life. There will be no need to impose restrictions on the individual with regard to the appropriation of economic power; for this power will only lead him to perform economic services according to his abilities, but not to acquire legal advantages through them.

[ 5 ] The obvious objection is that the legal relations are revealed in the intercourse of economic men, that they cannot therefore be grasped as something special apart from economic life. Although this is theoretically correct, it does not necessarily mean that economic interests are also decisive for the regulation of legal relationships in practice. The intellectual manager of a business will have to have a legal relationship with the manual workers of this business; this does not mean that he, as the manager of the business, has a say in determining this relationship. However, he will have a say and use his economic superiority in the process if economic cooperation and the regulation of legal relationships take place on a common administrative basis. Only if the law is organized on a basis on which there can be no question of consideration for the economy and the economy cannot gain any power over this legal system will the two be able to work together in such a way that people's sense of justice is not violated and economic efficiency is not turned from a blessing into a blessing for the whole.

[ 6 ] If the economically powerful are able to use their power to gain legal advantages, resistance to these advantages will develop among the economically weak. And when this resistance has become sufficiently strong, it must lead to revolutionary upheavals. If the existence of a special legal basis makes it impossible for such legal advantages to arise, such upheavals will not be able to occur. What continually takes place from this legal basis will be an orderly acting out of the forces that accumulate in people without it and lead to violent discharges. Whoever wants to avoid revolutions must think of the establishment of a social order through which happens in the flow of time what otherwise wants to take place in a world-historical moment.

[ 7 ] You will say that the modern social movement is not initially about legal relations, but about overcoming economic inequalities. To this objection it will have to be replied that demands which live in men are by no means always correctly expressed by the thoughts which consciousness forms of them. These conscious thoughts are the results of what is directly experienced. But what brings forth the demands are deeper connections of life that are not directly experienced. Whoever thinks of bringing about states of life through which these demands are to be satisfied must try to penetrate into the deeper connections. An examination of the relationship between law and economics in modern times shows that the legal life of mankind has become dependent on the economic life. If one were now to strive to eliminate the economic inequalities that have arisen in the wake of this dependence in an external way by a unilateral change in economic forms, similar inequalities would have to arise in a short time if the new economic forms were again given the opportunity to create their own legal forms. Only if one brings about conditions of social life through which legal requirements and interests can be experienced and satisfied independently alongside economic requirements and interests will one really come close to what is forcing its way to the surface of modern human existence through the social movement.

[ 8 ] And one will have to approach the relationship of spiritual life to legal and economic life in the same way. Under the conditions that have arisen in the course of the last centuries, the cultivation of intellectual life could only exert its effect on political, legal and economic life to a very limited extent. One of the most important branches of the cultivation of the humanities, education and teaching, developed from the interests of the state's legal power. People were educated and taught in accordance with the needs of the state. And economic power was added to that of the state. Those who were to develop their abilities as human beings within the existing teaching and educational institutions had to do so on the basis of the economic power arising from their circle of life. Thus those spiritual forces which were able to work within the political-legal and economic life became in their character completely an imprint of this life. A free intellectual life had to refrain from bringing its achievements into state-political life. And it could only do so in economic life to the extent that the latter was still independent of state-political life. Within the economy, the necessity of allowing the capable to come to the fore is evident, because its fertility dies off if the incapable, but economically powerful by virtue of the circumstances, rules alone. If, however, the tendency of many socialist thinkers to administer economic life according to the political-legal model were to be realized, then the cultivation of free intellectual life would be completely pushed out of the public sphere. But an intellectual life that has to develop apart from political-legal and economic reality becomes alien to life. It must draw its content from sources that are not vitally connected with this reality; and it then shapes this content in the course of time in such a way that it runs alongside this reality like an abstraction that has come to life, without producing an appropriate effect in it. In this way two currents arise in spiritual life. The first draws its content from the demands of political, legal and economic life that arise from day to day and seeks to make arrangements that result from these demands. It does not penetrate to the needs of man's spiritual being. It makes external arrangements and forces people into them without listening to what the inner human nature has to say. The other is based on inner needs for knowledge and ideals of will. It shapes these in the way that the person's inner nature demands. But these insights come from contemplation. They are not the reflection of what is experienced in the practice of life. And these ideals have arisen from ideas about what is true, good and beautiful. But they do not have the power to shape the practice of life. Consider what the merchant, the industrialist, the civil servant, apart from his practical life, experiences inwardly as his ideas of knowledge, his religious ideals, his artistic interests, and what ideas are contained in the activity which is expressed in his bookkeeping, or for which education and teaching prepare him as a condition of his office. There is an abyss between the two intellectual currents. It has been widened in more recent times by the fact that that mode of conception which has its full justification in natural science has become decisive for man's relation to reality. This mode of conception is based on the recognition of laws of things and processes which lie outside the sphere of human activity and effectiveness. As a result, man is to a certain extent only a spectator of what he perceives in the laws of nature. And when he brings the laws of nature into effect in technology, he only becomes the initiator of what is brought about by forces that lie outside his own being. The knowledge through which he acts in this way has a character different from his own nature. It reveals nothing to him of what lies in the world-processes in which his own being is interwoven. For such knowledge, he needs a view that combines the extra-human and human worlds into one.

[ 9 ] Modern anthroposophically oriented spiritual science strives for such knowledge. It fully recognizes the importance of the scientific way of thinking for the progress of modern humanity. But it is clear that what is conveyed through scientific knowledge only grasps the outer human being. It also recognizes the nature of religious world-views; but it realizes that in the course of modern development these world-views have become an inner matter of the soul, beside which external life proceeds without being shaped by them through human beings.

[ 10 ] In order to arrive at its insights, however, spiritual science makes demands on man for which he initially develops little inclination for the reason that he has become accustomed over the last few centuries to living in life practice and inner soul life as two separate areas. This habituation has given rise to a view that currently expresses disbelief in any endeavor that seeks to gain a judgment on the social organization of life from spiritual insights. One has in mind what one has experienced as social ideas born out of a spiritual life alien to life. When we speak of such ideas, we are reminded of Saint Simon, Fourier and others. The opinion that one has gained about such ideas is justified because they are developed from a direction of knowledge that is not experienced in reality, but is conceived. And from this opinion has arisen the generalized opinion that no kind of mind is capable of producing ideas that are so related to the practice of life that they can be realized. From this generalized opinion have arisen the views which, in their present form, more or less point back to Marx. Their proponents think nothing of ideas which are to be active in bringing about socially satisfactory conditions, but maintain that the development of economic facts must lead to a goal from which such conditions result. To a certain extent they want to let the practice of life take its course, because ideas are powerless within this practice. One has lost confidence in the power of spiritual life. It is not believed that there can be such a kind of spiritual life that overcomes the alienation from life that has become generally accepted in recent centuries. However, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is now striving for such a kind of spiritual life. It seeks to draw from sources that are also the sources of reality. The forces that are at work in the innermost human nature are the same forces that are at work in extra-human reality. The scientific mode of conception does not descend to these forces by intellectually processing its experiences gained from external facts into laws of nature. But even the worldviews based on a more religious foundation no longer connect with these forces. They take up the traditions without penetrating to their origin within man. Spiritual science, however, seeks to reach this origin. It develops methods of cognition through which it descends into the shafts of the human inner being, in which the extra-human events continue into the human inner being. The insights of this spiritual science represent reality experienced within the human being. They coalesce into ideas that are not conceived, but are saturated with the forces of reality. Such ideas are therefore also capable of carrying the power of reality within them if they want to give direction to social will. It is understandable that one is initially suspicious of such spiritual science. But one will only have this distrust as long as one does not recognize how it is essentially different from the current of science that has developed in more recent times, and which is generally assumed today to be the only possible one. If one struggles to recognize this difference, then one will no longer believe that one must avoid social ideas if one wants to shape social facts practically; rather, one will become aware that one can only gain practical social ideas from a spiritual life that can take its path to the roots of human nature. One will see through how in recent times social facts have become disordered because people have tried to master them with thoughts from which the facts have continually slipped away.

[ 11 ] A spiritual view that penetrates the essence of man finds impulses to act that are also directly good in the moral sense. For the impulse to evil arises in man only by silencing the depths of his being in his thoughts and feelings. Therefore, if the social ideas are gained through the spiritual conception meant here, they must by their own nature also be moral ideas. And since they are not only conceived ideas, but experienced ideas, they have the power to seize the will and to live on in action. Social thinking and moral thinking merge into one for a true spiritual view. The life that develops such a spiritual view is inwardly related to every life activity that man develops even for the most indifferent practical action. Therefore, social attitude, moral drive and practical life behavior are interwoven in such a way that they form a unity.

[ 12 ] Such a way of thinking, however, can only flourish if it develops in complete independence from powers that do not originate directly from spiritual life itself. Legal-state regulations of spiritual cultivation deprive the forces of spiritual life of their strength. On the other hand, a spiritual life that is left entirely to the interests and impulses within it will reach into everything that man accomplishes in social life. - It is repeatedly argued that people would first have to become completely different if social behavior were to be based on moral impulses. In doing so one does not consider what moral impulses atrophy in man if they are not allowed to arise out of a free spiritual life, but are given such a direction through which a political-legal social structure can have its predetermined areas of work taken care of. A person educated and taught in a free spiritual life will, however, bring into his profession many things on his own initiative that have a character determined by his nature. He will not allow himself to be inserted into the gears of society like a wheel into a machine. But in the end, what he brings to the table will not diminish the harmony of the whole, but enhance it. What happens in the individual places of social life will be the outflow of what lives in the spirits of the people who work in these places.

[ 13 ] People who breathe in a spiritual atmosphere formed by the kind of spirit characterized here will animate the institutions demanded by economic expediency in a sense that satisfies social requirements. With men whose inner nature is not at one with their outer activity, the institutions which are believed to be made to satisfy these demands will not be able to have a social effect. For it is not institutions by themselves that can have a social effect, but socially minded men in a legal organization created out of the living interests of right, and in an economic life that produces in the most expedient manner the goods that serve the needs.

[ 14 ] If the spiritual life is a free one, which develops only out of what it has in itself as impulses, then the legal life will flourish all the better, the more insightfully men are educated for the regulation of their legal relations out of the living spiritual experience; and then the economic life will also be fruitful to the degree that men are made capable for the same through the cultivation of the spirit.

[ 15 ] Everything that comes about in the social coexistence of human beings in terms of institutions is originally the result of the will borne by the intentions. Spiritual life has worked in this coming into being. Only when life becomes complicated, as has happened under the influence of the technical mode of production of the new age, does the will borne by thought lose its connection with the social facts. These then take their own mechanical course. And man seeks for the content through which he satisfies his spiritual needs in the withdrawn mental angle. From the course of facts, over which the spirit-born will of individuals had no power, have come the conditions which the modern social movement strives to change. Because the spirit working in legal life and in the economic cycle is no longer the spirit in which the spiritual life of the individual finds its way, the latter finds himself in a social order which does not allow him to develop legally and economically as an individual. - People who do not see through this will repeatedly object to a view that seeks to divide the social organism into the independently administered areas of spiritual life, the rule of law and the economic cycle, saying that this destroys the necessary unity of social life. To them it must be replied: this unity destroys itself in that it wants to preserve itself by itself. For legal life, which develops out of economic power, undermines this economic power in its work, because it is perceived by the economically weak as a foreign body in the social organism. And the spirit that becomes dominant in a legal and economic life, when these want to regulate their own effectiveness, condemns the living spirit, which works its way up from the wellspring of the soul of the individual, to powerlessness in the face of practical life. If, however, the legal order is created in an independent area from the legal consciousness and if the spirit-born individual will is developed in a free spiritual life, then the legal order and the spiritual power work together with the economic activity to form a unity. They will be able to do this if they develop in independent spheres of life according to their own nature. It is precisely in their separation that they will take on the trait of unity, while formed out of an artificial unity they become alienated.

[ 16 ] Some socialist thinkers will dismiss a view such as the one described above with the words: Economically desirable conditions cannot, after all, be brought about by the subdivision of the social organism, but only by a corresponding economic organization. Whoever speaks in this way does not take into account that in the economic organization people are active who are endowed with will. If you tell him this, he will smile, for he takes it for granted. And yet he is thinking of a social structure in which this "self-evidence" should not be taken into account. The economic organization should be governed by a common will. But this must be the result of the individual wills of the people united in the organization. These individual wills will not come to fruition if the will of the community comes entirely from the idea of economic organization. They will, however, unfold in an undiminished way if, alongside the economic field, there is a legal field in which no economic aspects are decisive, but only those of legal consciousness; and if, alongside both, there is room for a free spiritual life that follows only spiritual impulses. Then a mechanically operating social order will not arise, to which individual human wills could not be adapted in the long run; instead, people will find the possibility of continually shaping social conditions from their socially oriented individual wills. In the free spiritual life the individual will will receive its social direction; in the independent constitutional state the socially-minded individual wills will give rise to the justly-working community will. And the socially oriented individual wills, organized by the independent legal system, will produce and distribute goods in the economic cycle in accordance with social demands.

[ 17 ] Most people today still lack the belief in the possibility of establishing a socially satisfactory social order on the basis of individual wills. This belief is lacking because it cannot arise from a spiritual life that has developed in dependence on economic and state life. A way of thinking that does not develop in freedom out of the life of the spirit itself, but out of an external organization, does not know what the spirit is really capable of. It seeks guidance for it because it does not realize how it guides itself when it can only draw strength from its own sources. It wants the guidance of the spirit to emerge as a side effect of the economic and legal organization and does not take into account that the economy and legal system can only live if the spirit that follows itself permeates them.

[ 18 ] Social reorganization requires not only good will, but also the courage to oppose disbelief in the power of the spirit. This courage can be enlivened by a true conception of the spirit; for it feels capable of producing ideas that not only serve an inner soul orientation, but which, as they arise, already carry within them the seeds of the practical shaping of life. The will to descend into spiritual depths can become so strong that it contributes to everything a person accomplishes.

[ 19 ] When one speaks of a conception of the spirit rooted in life, it is also understood by many as if one meant the sum of the impulses to which a person is urged when he moves within the familiar paths of life, and who considers any intervention from the spiritual side in the familiar to be an idealistic eccentricity. However, the view of the spirit meant here should not be confused with abstract spirituality, which is unable to extend its interests into the practice of life, nor with that school of thought which actually denies the spirit immediately when it thinks of the practical orientation of life. These two conceptions do not realize how the spirit rules in the facts of external life; and they therefore feel no real need to penetrate consciously into this rule. Only such a need, however, is also the generator of that knowledge which sees the "social question" in the right light. The present attempts to solve this "question" appear so inadequate because many still lack the possibility of seeing what the true content of the question is. The question is seen to arise in economic areas; people are looking for economic institutions that are supposed to be answers. The solution is believed to be found in economic transformations. It is not recognized that these transformations can only come through forces that are liberated from human nature in the revival of independent spiritual and legal life.