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The Tension Between East and West
GA 83

7 June 1922, Vienna

6. Individual and Society

The lectures that follow will be based directly on the observations I have made already. I do not mean by this that we can say anything of consequence about present-day social life just by thinking out social reforms from first principles, in an abstract and Utopian manner; but rather that the spiritual philosophy expounded here could, if transformed into impulses of the whole man, into a human attitude of mind, provide a framework within which we could understand social life and shape social forces. The succeeding lectures will have to demonstrate that a philosophy of this kind, orientated towards the spiritual, does not remain at the abstract and Utopian level, but instead is peculiarly well equipped to deal with immediate concrete reality. Today, however, I want to establish a link between the lectures I have given already and those I have still to give.

Anyone who has taken in the full significance of my lectures so far will agree that what has been expounded has not implied a conception of life for the hermitage, for contemplative existence in a quiet cell. The conception of life proposed has its social side too—it is one that leads not only into spiritual worlds as such, but also into the world of spirit and soul that surrounds us directly in our fellow-men. It is, of course, easier to speak of social questions today if you are identified with a particular political party. Then, you have a platform, you have ready-made ideas, and can say: This is our age! These are its needs! But we here certainly cannot start from any of these ready-made political programmes. In the first place, I am fully convinced that—to speak somewhat sweepingly—there is actually no party that is entirely mistaken in what it asserts. The only thing is that the parties usually fail to recognize the limits beyond which their assertions cannot hold. On the other hand, I do not believe that any party is completely right; in a sense, it must always be mistaken as well. The only thing is that, given the particular way men look at the world, we can understand this mistakenness well enough. A tree, too, can only be photographed adequately from several sides. All the claims normally made by political parties seem like photographs of life from different sides. Yet people treat these various standpoints exactly as if someone were to look at a photograph of a tree, taken from the right, and say: “This picture is completely wrong,” knowing only the view from the left. Thus, all the objections from a certain standpoint to the views put forward here are familiar to me, and if I had to expound them all, it would not, given the philosophy of life I am advocating, prove a very difficult task.

I must say this in advance, in order to show that it is only by approaching social life and social problems from the most varied directions, as is attempted in the lectures that follow, that we can form a life-like picture of them.

There is much talk nowadays of social needs. Looking back over the history of humanity with an open mind, however, we observe that this has been true for only a relatively short period of man's development. There have, of course, always been social needs and social endeavours. That they should be formulated, almost as an abstract theory, however, is a feature of very recent times alone. And when we try to discover why it is that almost everyone these days is talking about social needs, we realize that there has been no period perhaps with such strong anti-social impulses as ours.

When the urgent necessity of life presses and misery knocks at our door, we do meet the challenge to produce positive social impulses. But when people speak of social needs, they really mean something different; they mean man's feeling that he is not simply a separate being, but that he must move among other men, and work among and with other men, and that he exists for his own satisfaction and the good of others. In this respect, the men of earlier epochs were actually much closer to one another, paradoxical as it may sound, than we are today. And this was only natural, because we nowadays live in a historical epoch which, as the preceding lectures have already indicated, has summoned particular powers from the depths of man's nature, especially within the civilized world. These powers are specially adapted to the purposes I have described, but are less well suited to arousing in man the social instincts and social impulses that were present, if in a form no longer appropriate to the present time, in earlier epochs.

Looking back over man's development, we see that, in the course of three or four centuries, there has emerged from within the human soul a capacity, a soul-power, which we can regard as intellectual—the power of reason, of a more or less rational view of the world. This view has been splendidly successful in the field of natural philosophy. It can carry men a tremendously long way towards developing their intercourse, their traffic with external nature. But the problem arises whether this power, which represents the glory and triumph, so to speak, of very recent times, is also suited, as it stands, to facilitate the intercourse of man with man. Only a clear view of this problem can, ultimately, throw light for us on the social needs of recent times. These needs, as they are ordinarily formulated, can only express a superficial outlook, symptomatic of something lying much deeper in man. This is what stands out above all for a spiritually scientific approach.

Again, when we look with an unprejudiced eye at the way in which social configurations and groupings arose in earlier epochs and indeed, fundamentally, still arise today—right down to cartels and trusts—we must conclude: the dominant forces in them are ultimately not intellectualized ones, not those of a rational attitude to life, but are instincts, unconscious feelings. And if we were to create social configurations by means of the intellectualized power that reveals itself so splendidly in natural philosophy, they would probably have only very slight viability. For, after all, it is not without significance that this power of the intellect has shown itself to be particularly important in the observation of inanimate nature, and that a man who desires only natural philosophy and does not wish to move upward to an outlook on things in accord with spirit, finds himself faced by an insoluble riddle when he has to move over from the inanimate to the animate. It is not surprising that what is of great importance, precisely because of its inner structure, for the inanimate, the dead, is not as powerful and fruitful in relation to something that is not only alive, but must also develop into human social configurations informed by spirit.

We can say, therefore: In certain subconscious regions of the soul, the forces that have been formative in social configurations are still present. On the other hand, man owes two of his strongest and socially most effective impulses to the characteristics of the present epoch. And for these he has to find the proper place in social life as a whole.

One of the most important social questions of today became apparent to me thirty years ago, when I was trying to look at the problem of man's freedom within his social life. The experience of freedom is really just as old as intellectual life. Only when intellectual life raises man to the apprehension of pure thought, by which he then comprehends natural phenomena, does he become conscious of his freedom. To all mental activity, earlier ages added something that resulted simply from organic processes and had its roots instinctively in the unconscious regions of will or else unconsciously in the life of feeling. To perceive something as clearly as is possible when thinking rises to distinctly apprehended and mathematically formulated laws; to comprehend something so clearly that we are present in it with our entire substance: this has only been possible to man since he raised himself to the pure thinking that inspired Copernicus, Galileo and their successors to modern scientific research. The experience of freedom is thus explicitly connected with something that leads away from the instinctive forces that previously formed society.

If we are approaching the problem of freedom with complete seriousness, however, we are cast for a moment, by this discovery, into a kind of emptiness, which we experience with all the terror that emptiness, or rather nothingness, does inspire in men. What we discover is that, in earlier epochs, when mankind was more naive about the life of the soul and had not attained to the consciousness that prevails in modern times, there could exist attitudes that were more imaginal and did not inhabit pure, abstract thought. But we need such imaginal attitudes if we are to take our place within the complicated social life of man. The things that enable us to find our place in the world can never be determined by abstract thought.

Now, in the last few days I have shown how the development of spiritual science takes us from abstract, dead thought once again to vital thought, by which in fact we can penetrate not only into inorganic, lifeless nature, but also into the forms of living nature and into the heart of spiritual worlds. By understanding this most modern development, man thus re-approaches, with his consciousness, what in earlier epochs existed in an instinctive way. I know that many people today still shrink back when they are told: that which operated instinctively in earlier epochs, fertilizing the imagination from the unconscious, can be raised into consciousness by a development of the soul such as I have described. Immediately, people suspect that behind this demand there lurks a kind of philistinism and pedantry that would translate naïveté into self-consciousness. People will continue to shrink back from this path into consciousness so long as they do not realize that the naive experience that was originally instinctive to man is to be restored, despite the consciousness of vital thought. But this vital thought then also introduces us to the shifting concepts that play their part in social life.

Let me refer to just one example of this today, by way of introduction. People at present talk a very great deal about capitalism and the function of capital in the social order. There are countless definitions of capitalism, often politically coloured. Yet this absence of unanimity obscures another point. We must clearly understand that the function even of something that forms as much a part of the social structure as capitalism cannot be comprehended in sharply delineated concepts. Instead, we require those vital concepts that the nai've, instinctive life of the soul once had and the conscious life of the soul can again acquire today. People need only look, for example, at what capital meant in Central Europe, in Germany, where a particular social development began later than it did in England, and what it means in England itself. In England, simply because of the existence of earlier stages in the country's economic life, when this development did set in commercial capital was available to create something which, in Germany, had to be effected by raising capital in other ways. If we look at the rôle of capital in Central Europe and then in England, we very soon find that our concepts, intended as they are to comprehend social life even in its individual configurations, cannot be sharply delineated. We need, instead, concepts that take hold of immediate reality at a particular point, yet remain elastic, so that they can move on from this point to other configurations of the social structure. And since we live in an age that is specifically educated to intellectualism—which subsists only in sharply delineated concepts—it is necessary for us, if we are to reach an understanding of social needs, to find our way out of intellectualism into the world of vital thought. This in turn can transform itself into social impulses such as arose from instincts in the earlier stages of human development.

The philosophy I am here advancing is specifically intended not to be something theoretical. It is often accused of dogmatism; accused, when it has to pronounce on social life, of looking for Utopias (which are also dogmatic). The charge is without foundation. The point of this philosophy is not at all what people mean by any particular concept; it is a definite attitude to life as a whole, physical, mental and spiritual—an attitude directed towards apprehending this life in its individual concrete forms in accordance with reality.

Thereby, however, a certain perspective on extremely important social needs of our age is opened up:

When we contemplate human life itself by means of a spiritual outlook such as I have been developing, we find that, like the historical development of humanity in general, the life of an individual human being is subject to certain changes. The resulting phases, which are apparent even to a casual observer, reveal their true nature only when we can see into their spiritual ramifications. It then appears, for example, that neither the infant in its first years of life, nor the child of primary school age, nor even the adolescent below the age of twenty, lives fully within the intellectualized mode of thought that has emerged in the course of man's development. In the last analysis, we only comprehend intellectualism with an inner sympathy in the more mature period of our twenties, when we begin to experience it as a kind of mental bone-system. Until then, we actually feel, if only instinctively, as if our life still had to solidify within us along lines which eventually result in this mental bone-system. Yet our entire social life, which understandably is shaped by adults, is permeated by the influence of intellectualism, in spite of the fact that intellectualism itself cannot be socially creative. It floods into areas where the instincts have become uncertain. We thus have in our present-day social pattern an inorganic combination of the instincts, grown uncertain, with an intellectualism that seeks to enter social life but does not really fit into it.

The end-result of this is that we form ideas of what is going on in social life which are quite unlike the forces that are really present. Nowadays, we speak in rather inexact terms, for the most part, about what governs society. We, mankind that is, have educated ourselves, in these three or four centuries, to cast everything into intellectualized moulds. As adults we can do this, but not while we are children or while we are young people.

Youth develops powers other than intellectual ones. The infant develops first the powers which make it, I would say, a single sense-organ, similar to what I have called a “spirit-organ,” but at a more material level. Its whole being is engaged in perceiving its environment, and it transposes what it perceives into its own movements. It is an imitator. This imitation, which pervades the life of the child's psyche, is quite certainly nothing intellectualized. Next, the child enters an age—say from second dentition to puberty—in which it is called upon no longer to imitate, but to absorb the opinions and convictions proffered by the adults round about.

Please do not think that the man who wrote The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is saying what he has to say now out of any reactionary instinct. What I have to say is in accord with a law of man's development. From second dentition to puberty, the young person evolves from within his being the need to listen to some person of natural authority and to what he or she offers him. Anyone who can look at life impartially will agree how fortunate it was for his inner harmony of soul throughout life if, at this age, he was able to look up to this or that person of authority with a proper respect. He did not now imitate this person; the relation was such that he felt: through this human individual is revealed to me what I myself ought to be and want to be; I listen to what he or she says and absorb the opinion into my soul.

The genuine psychologist will even discover something further. People continue to insist that, at this primary school age, a child should only take in what it already understands. In this way, only this one stage in the child's development is catered for. Not only this, but endless trivialities are piled up in an effort to present the child solely with what, it is believed, he “already understands.” The child certainly understands more than many people believe: not through intellectuality, however, but through its whole being. There is another point, too. We may reach the age of thirty, forty, fifty or sixty, and then something shoots up from the depths of our soul which is a reminiscence from our eighth year, let us say. We took it from authority; we absorbed it with respect. At the time, we did not understand it in an intellectual sense; but we came to feel at home in what we thus absorbed with our whole being. It was then drawn down into the depths of the soul. Decades later it reappears. We have become more mature. Only now do we understand it and bring it to life. It is enormously important to us in later years to be able to revive in this way what we have carried with us since childhood. This is something quite different from living among mere memories, untransformed.

This, too, then, can result from a vital art of education—one that seeks to give the child of this age, not sharply delineated concepts but vital ones. The former, it is true, have their uses in life. To the child, however, their effect is as if we seized his hand and clamped it so that it could not grow, had to remain small, and could not take on different shapes. We must move forward to an education which transmits vital concepts that will live on with the child as his limbs do, and are accordingly not sharply delineated but have an inner growth. Only then shall we give the child not only the right joy in life, but also the right strength in life. When the child experiences the sort of thing I have just indicated quite naively in his soul, his understanding and comprehension is not intellectualized. He is taking something from a respected authority, something that will instil in him vital powers.

Next, there follows an age when, essentially, all we can do is to approach the world with our concepts (which do not immediately take on sharp contours) all informed by the capacity for love. With this, we penetrate into things so as to emerge, sometimes, with quite illusory but all the more potent ideals, which fire our love.

Only when we have passed through all these can we move, without damage to our humanity as a whole, into the intellectual phase. Yet the material that in many cases the old generation nowadays presents to the young is really something appropriate only to a later age. It is no accident, therefore, that young people often fail to understand us as teachers: it springs from their very nature.

Older epochs developed in social life forces by which the old could be understood by the young in a quite different manner from today. Hence the social gulf that has opened between age and youth. It can be understood by those who comprehend our age as we must if we trace the development over the last three or four centuries. Not only through spiritual profundity, but through the animation of our spiritual life, we must restore the adult's capacity to reach complete understanding with youth.

But bridging the gulf between generations is only one side, only a very small area in fact, of present-day social needs. It can be brought about only by an extension of man's whole inner experience. Only those who strengthen the present intellectualized life of the soul by vital thought and spiritual vision, or at least accept the results of such thought and vision—for they too vitalize the whole soul—will regain the ability to look fully into the child's life. They will thus be able to draw out of the child's life itself the powers by which we can reach an understanding with him. But in indicating the gulf that has opened between age and youth in our time, we also indicate the whole series of gulfs separating man and man, man and woman, and class and class in our time. For just as merely intellectualized life separates us from the child, so too it ultimately separates us from other men. Only through vital thinking, which re-approaches certain instinctive conceptions of the cosmos, can we establish our position in the social order as firmly as the man of instinct did, to make social organisms possible for the first time. We find, too, that only through what we achieve with an empty consciousness—when we are inspired from the spiritual world with what spiritual entities reveal—can we really understand other people and see across the gulfs of class and sex.

This is the second stage in living together in society. The first is that of discovering imaginatively our own position. The second is that of finding a bridge across to someone else, someone who lives in a different social constellation. Nowadays, this is made very difficult for mankind; for when we take up a position in social life in line with our feelings, our judgment is not ultimately based on reality. In the last analysis, it is precisely when we think that our judgments are most in accord with reality that they are furthest away from it. You can see this by observing how even outstanding personalities today, who take up a position in life and would like to manipulate life, are fundamentally incapable of matching up to reality.

Let me give an example—not in order to say anything for or against the person concerned, but simply to characterize the phenomenon. A particularly striking personality among those socially active in recent times was Rosa Luxemburg. In personal acquaintance, you found a woman completely endowed with social graces: measured in movement and mode of speech, restrained in each individual gesture and phrase. A certain gentleness, even, certainly nothing tempestuous, was in her personality. Yet when you heard her speak from the platform, her way of speaking was ... well, I will quote an actual example. She would say, for instance: Yes, there were times when man believed he originated from some spiritual world or other, which had placed him within social life. Today—she said—we know that man once clambered about in the trees like an ape in an extremely indecent fashion, without any clothes on, and that from this ape-man there developed those who today occupy the most varied positions in society. And this was delivered in a manner that was fired, I would say, with a certain religious impulse. Not, indeed, with the fire of immediate personal impact, but in a manner that large proletarian masses can best understand: with a certain measured dryness, so that it could be received too with a certain dryness of feeling and yet call forth, for all its dryness, a certain enthusiasm. This because people felt: at bottom, then, all men are equal and all social distinctions are swept away! But none of this was spoken from an involvement in social life itself. It emerged from theory, though one that believed itself to be true to life. It created a reality that is ultimately no reality, no fruitful reality that is.

The standpoint of most people in social life today is like that of Rosa Luxemburg: they speak about society without the power in their words that comes from life itself, from experience of the social aspect of man. To speak of society is possible if, with the old instinctive power of looking at social forms, we can find our own place in life and also a bridge to men in other walks of life, other classes, or other generations, and to individual human personalities. This was achieved in earlier epochs out of extraordinarily deep-rooted human instincts.

These powers of cognition become conscious as man develops into the spiritual organism or “sense-organ” he becomes as a human whole, in the way I have described. As a result, he can live by choice, free of the body, in the spiritual world.

For sympathy with the other person is always an unconscious or conscious extra-physical experience of his being. It is dead theory to think that we look at someone, see that he has an ear shaped so, a nose, a face shaped so, and, knowing that we too have such a nose and a forehead shaped thus and so on, and that we have a self, assume unconsciously that the other person also has a self. This is not what we do. Anyone whose mind can take in what happens knows that we have an immediate perception of the life of the other person. This immediate perception, we might say, is simply the act of seeing, raised to the spiritual level.

Certain theories in present-day philosophy have even discovered this fact. Spiritual science shows that, by bringing the power that operates unconsciously and instinctively up into consciousness, man can project himself into the other human being: only thus can he really place himself within the context of social life. With the intellectualism attained at the educational level in human development to which we have been raised—or rather, with what can grow out of that intellectualism—we can point to this self-spiritualizing development of the human soul; and when this is possible, social perspectives too can be gained. Certainly, it is only by apprehending the spiritual in this way that we can gain the strength to cast aside old fears and achieve an immediate experience of the impulse of freedom in man.

Now the soul can only really apprehend this impulse of freedom out of a full human life. That this is so, I should like to illustrate once more with an educational example.

What, precisely, is the basis of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was created from a view of life in accord with the spirit? It seeks to act as a social organism in the life of today in a way that present-day forces themselves require. Its aim is therefore certainly not to inculcate a philosophy in any way. It would be an entirely false conception of the principle of the School to think that it sought to impart to the children any particular philosophy of life. A conception of the world and of life that is held to be in accord with the spirit exists in fact for the staff. And what, in this conception, is not theory but life may also come out in the skill and tact of the teacher, and in everything that he does, in all the work of instruction and education.

The isolated statements that are often made about the teaching methods at the Waldorf School really miss the point. They may well lead someone or other to say: Of course, there are other methods of instruction and education with the same aim. In terms of abstract principles, it is true fundamentally to say that what can be stated about the methods of the Waldorf School is also found elsewhere. What is important in the Waldorf School is the immediate life that flows from a conception of the world which creates life and not merely concepts.

What does this achieve? Well, it is difficult to describe life in sharply outlined concepts. I shall therefore explain what I mean in this way: quite certainly, there are on the staff of the Waldorf School some teachers who are not unusually gifted; we can say this without hurting anyone's feelings. But even if the widest range of physical, mental and spiritual talents were represented in the teacher, we should still have to say: among the children he has before him, there may be some who will at some stage in life develop talents that go far beyond those the teacher himself possesses.

We must therefore create educational methods by which we can handle the children at each age not only in such a way that they acquire the talents we have ourselves, but also that they develop any latent talents we do not have at all. Even if no geniuses ourselves, we must place no obstacle in the way of the child's development towards genius. It is all very well to go on declaiming that the child's individuality must be developed, and that “education is a drawing out and not a putting in.” You can say this, and as an idea it all sounds wonderful, and you think of it as something fruitful in life. But what people often mean by it is simply that they will develop in the child what they think is capable of becoming something individual, but not anything that goes beyond the individuality of the teacher himself.

In the Waldorf School, everything is directed towards education in freedom. Man's inmost spiritual element remains essentially undisturbed by the Waldorf School. It is not disturbed, any more than a plant placed in the ground and allowed to develop freely in the light and air has all kinds of stakes applied to it, training it into a set shape. A child's spiritual individuality is something completely sacred, and those with a genuine experience of human nature know that it will follow, of its own accord, the influences exerted on it by everything round about. The teacher thus has to set aside what can hinder this tenderly protected individuality in its development. The hindrances, which can result from the physical, the mental and even the spiritual sphere, can be discerned by a genuine knowledge of man, if it is developed on the pedagogic and psychological sides. And when we do evolve such a knowledge, we develop a fine sense for any impediment to the free development of individuality. There is no need for violent interference. Any alien shaping of the personality should be avoided. When we see that there is an impediment we must set aside, we set it aside. The individual will know how to develop through his own power, and his talents may then go far beyond what the teacher possesses.

Here is true respect for human freedom! This freedom is what enables man to find within him the impulses that lead and drive him in life. In earlier periods, as he instinctively grew into his social environment, man absorbed from it something that then operated within him as moral and religious impulses. This process has been paralysed, I would say, by intellectualism. What can consciously produce the social impulses that were once instinctively attained, has still to be developed.

Two things thus confront modern man. On the one hand, he must now seek his ethical and religious impulses in his own personality, finding them only among his soul's innermost powers. On the other hand, in the course of the last three or four centuries intellectualism has come of age, so much so that it is now regarded as the sole authority. Yet it can afford no such direct spiritual experience, but only observe the life of nature and classify it.

We are thus confronted by what we as humanity can achieve—magnificent as it is—within natural processes. And here humanity as a whole is productive. We can see this productive aspect emerging in the last three or four centuries in the splendid instances of co-operation between natural observation and technology. Anyone who can follow what man achieves by understanding nature can also see how he has advanced technologically. You need only look at a straightforward example—how Helmholtz, let us say, a genius in some respects, invented his ophthalmoscope.

To appreciate this, you must take into account the fact that his predecessors—as if impelled by scientific progress—were already close to the discovery, and he had only to take the final step. We might say: scientific thinking as such enters into man and leads him onward. Subsequently, he is productive in the field of technology. For what he extracts from nature serves him as an inspiration. Right down to the most recent discoveries, we can follow how, in anyone who becomes a natural scientist, what he absorbs impels his spirit from one technical advance to another, so that the inspiration of nature still goes on. There's inspiration for you!

Modern man lacks such inspiration, however, when he comes to the ethical, the volitional, the religious—in short, to everything that starts from the soul yet leads at last to social forms and life. What we need here is a force that will operate in the spiritual sphere as purely natural inspiration does in our external technology. In the latter, we have gone an incredibly long way. What we have achieved there, we, the men of modern times, must pay for in the sense that our purely spiritual life has languished for a while, sustaining itself on old traditions, in the religious as well as the moral and social sphere. Today, however, we need to be able, out of the human personality, to arrive in the full experience of freedom at immediate moral impulses. Because we are faced with this social necessity, I was able, in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, to show that there must be such a thing as moral intuition. And, as I indicated then, the real moral impulses that man can find to give him ethical and moral strength, which operate more individually now in modern life, can only derive from a spiritual world. We are thus forced to rise to spiritual intuitions precisely because in our contemplation of the outside world we do not attain anything spiritually productive.

Anyone who can consciously experience the technical age from within is especially inclined to say, on the other hand: faced by the need to stick close to the ground in technology so as to survey its inanimate substance, we cannot, from what technology gives us, gain moral impulses as earlier men could. They beheld the spiritual in storm and wind and stream and star and experienced it as natural forces. We cannot do this, because our knowledge of nature has had all this refined away from it. We can only gain our moral world, therefore, by intuiting it in a directly spiritual and individual manner.

For this, however, we require a vital spiritual force within us. And this force can follow, I believe, if we are steeped in the implications of the philosophy of life I have put forward here. As a philosophy, it certainly does not wish to lay down the law in ideas and concepts. It seeks rather to present ideas and concepts only in order that they may become as vital within us, on the spiritual plane, as our life's blood itself, so that man's activity, not only his thinking, is stimulated. A philosophy of life in accord with spirit thus reveals itself as a social as well as a cognitive impulse.

In consequence, we may perhaps be justified in saying: present-day social needs, as they are often formulated in public life today, appear, to those who can dispassionately perceive the true nature of our times, to be symptomatic. They are symptomatic of the loss of the old instinctive certainties of social life and of the necessity to establish, consciously, a spiritual life that will give the same impulses as did the earlier instinctive one. Because we can believe that such a stimulation of man's innermost vital powers really corresponds to the social needs of today, we would wish, in this age of severe social tribulation, to speak of the age and its social needs in this sense.

Sometimes, today, people feel that the immediate distress of the day, the misery of the moment is so great that, fundamentally, we ought to devote ourselves exclusively to it, and look for wider horizons only when some relief has been afforded close at hand. Of all the objections put to me since, at the instigation of a circle of friends, I have been trying to speak about social life once more and to take an interest in various things connected with it, I have felt most strongly the force of the countless letters sent to me, especially two years or so ago, saying: “What is the point of all these social ideas? Here in Central Europe the most urgent thing is bread.” This objection was made over and over again. We can understand it. But in another sense we must also understand that the earth is incapable of withholding its fruitfulness at any period, if only men can find a social organization that will enable the earth's gifts to flow into society and there be distributed.

It is thus, I think, right to believe that to devote oneself to the immediate situation is a loving and noble task—in which no one is impeded by reflections such as I have set forth here. Yet, equally, it must be said: for the moment, what can be done in this way may be good; yet on the other hand, men must gain an understanding of society as soon as possible, in order to prevent the factors that bring men into such distress and misery from recreating themselves.

That we cannot get by in the social sphere with the old Utopian and intellectualized formulations should have become apparent to people when many of those who, only a short while before, were speaking with incredible confidence of what social life should be were then called upon to do something. Never was there a greater perplexity in a society than among those who reputedly knew with absolute certainty how social configurations should be organized, if only the old regime could be cleared away as rapidly as possible.

Experiment in this direction has indeed created, in Eastern Europe, the most terrible forces of destruction. And for men today to believe that, without fundamental social thought and feeling and experience, simply by continuing the old formulations, they can arrive at anything but destructive forces, is an illusion. The spectre of Eastern Europe gazes threateningly across to the West. Its gaze, however, should not leave us inactive, but should be a challenge to us to seek at every moment for vital social forces and a vital formulation of social needs, now that the abstract and Utopian ones have revealed their unfruitfulness.

How this can be achieved will be shown more fully in the lectures that follow. I have tried today simply to provide an introduction showing that, behind explicitly formulated social ideas, there lies something more profound, something that is linked with a transformation of the whole life of the soul.

In very recent times, this is beginning to be understood even among a wide circle of the working class. Anyone who looks about him knows that social needs, and in particular our reactions to them, are in the midst of a profound transformation. The unfruitfulness of the old slogans is already more or less recognized. And already it is being emphasized in many quarters that we must move to a spiritual sphere, and that moral and religious impulses must once again pervade social life. We have not yet, however, evolved the life we really need.

Our age thinks itself extremely practical and realistic, and does not know how theoretical it is in fact—especially in determining social needs. Our task today, we may perhaps observe in conclusion, cannot really be to set up completely new social or other ideals. We are not short of abstract expressions of ideals. What we need is something different: experience of the spiritual, not merely excogitation of the ideal. What we need is spirit, not in concepts merely, but with such vitality that it goes with us like a human companion in all our doings.

In apprehending the spirit as something vital in this way, we shall also be able to rise to something socially effective. On this point, we may say: today, we need not merely a formulation of ideals and social needs. We need something that will give us strength to follow the ideals, and give us inner life to make these ideals incandescent; something that impels our will to wholehearted enthusiasm, fruitful to the world, for ideals and for the life of the spirit.

Die Zeit und Ihre Sozialen Forderungen

Meine sehr verehrten Anwesenden! Die Vorträge, die ich im folgenden halten werde, sollen durchaus auf dem Boden der Betrachtungen stehen, die von mir hier schon angestellt worden sind: nicht, als ob über das soziale Leben der Gegenwart dadurch etwas Erhebliches gesagt werden könnte, daß man sich in irgendeiner abstrakten utopistischen Weise aus Ideen soziale Reformen ausdenkt, sondern in dem Sinne, daß ich meine, die geistige Weltanschauung, die hier entwickelt worden ist, könne, wenn sie sich in Impulse des ganzen Menschen, in menschliche Gesinnung verwandelt, Richtlinien und Orientierungen abgeben zum Verständnis des sozialen Lebens und auch zur Ausgestaltung sozialer Triebkräfte. Die nächsten Vorträge werden uns allerdings zu zeigen haben, wie eine solche auf das Geistige ausgehende Weltanschauung nicht im Abstrakten und Utopistischen stehenbleibt, sondern wie sie gerade dazu veranlagt ist, in die unmittelbare konkrete Wirklichkeit einzugehen. Heute möchte ich aber die Brücke schlagen zwischen den Vorträgen, die ich schon gehalten habe, und denen, die ich noch gedenke, hier zu halten.

Wer den ganzen Sinn der bisherigen Vorträge ins Auge faßt, der wird sich schon sagen müssen, daß mit dem, was hier ausgeführt worden ist, nicht irgendeine Lebensauffassung für die Einsiedelei, für ein beschauliches Leben im stillen Kämmerlein gemeint war, sondern daß eine Auffassung des Lebens, die auch ihre soziale Seite hat, angedeutet werden sollte, die gewissermaßen hineinführen kann nicht nur in die geistigen Welten als solche, sondern auch in die Geistes- und Seelenwelt, die uns unmittelbar in unseren Mitmenschen umgibt. Es ist heute allerdings leichter, über soziale Fragen zu sprechen, wenn man sich irgendeiner Parteirichtung angehörig fühlt. Da hat man gewissermaßen seine Programme, da hat man die festgeprägten Ideen und kann sagen: Das ist die Zeit! Das sind die Forderungen der Zeit! - Aber von einer solchen festgeprägten Parteischablone kann hier ganz gewiß nicht ausgegangen werden. Denn erstens bin ich voll davon überzeugt, daß es.eigentlich — es ist das etwas radikal gesprochen - keine Partei gibt, die nicht in irgendeiner Weise mit dem, was sie behauptet, recht hat. Es handelt sich nur darum, daß die Parteien gewöhnlich nicht die Grenzen desjenigen erkennen, bis zu dem hin sie eben irgend etwas behaupten können. Andererseits glaube ich auch nicht, daß irgendeine Parteirichtung wiederum vollständig recht hat, vielmehr muß sie in einem gewissen Sinne wieder unrecht haben. Nur handelt es sich auch da wiederum darum, daß man dieses Unrecht ganz gut verstehen kann, eben aus der besonderen Natur menschlicher Weltbetrachtung heraus. Man kann ja auch einen Baum nur von verschiedenen Seiten aus richtig photographieren, Alles was gewöhnlich als Parteirichtungen geltend gemacht wird, kann einem doch vorkommen wie Photographien des Lebens von verschiedenen Seiten aus. Dann kommen die Menschen zusammen und benehmen sich eigentlich so mit ihren verschiedenen Standpunkten, wie sich andere benehmen würden — allerdings auf diesem Gebiete gibt es das nicht —, die die Photographie eines Baumes von rechts sehen würden und sagten: Ja, das ist eine ganz falsche Aufnahme. - Sie kennen nämlich nur die Aufnahme von links. So ist mir auch alles, was von einem gewissen Gesichtspunkt aus gegen die hier vorgebrachten Anschauungen eingewendet werden kann, voll bewußt; und wenn es darauf ankäme, alles Gegnerische auszuführen, so würde das gerade vom Gesichtspunkt der hier vertretenen Weltanschauung aus gar nicht so außerordentlich schwerfallen..

Das muß ich vorausschicken, damit eingesehen werden kann, wie man nur dadurch, daß in den folgenden Vorträgen versucht werden wird, von den verschiedensten Gesichtspunkten aus dem sozialen Leben und den sozialen Problemen näherzukommen, zu einer lebensvollen Auffassung in dieser Richtung kommen kann.

Von sozialen Forderungen wird in unserer Zeit sehr viel geredet. Aber wenn wir unbefangen das geschichtliche Leben der Menschheit betrachten, dann finden wir, daß das im Entwickelungsgang der Menschheit erst seit einer verhältnismäßig kurzen Zeit der Fall ist. Gewiß, soziale Forderungen, soziale Bestrebungen hat es immer gegeben; daß sie in einer formulierten Weise, ich möchte sagen, zur abstrakten Theorie formuliert, auftreten, das ist im Grunde genommen ein Charakteristikon erst der allerneuesten Zeit. Und wenn man versucht dahinterzukommen, warum eigentlich heute fast jeder Mensch von sozialen Forderungen redet, so sieht man, daß vielleicht keine Zeit so starke antisoziale Triebe hatte als gerade die unsrige.

Gewiß, wenn die unmittelbare Not des Lebens drängt, wenn das Elend an unsere Türen pocht, dann finden wir uns aufgefordert zu sozialen Impulsen. Aber wenn von sozialen Forderungen die Rede ist, meint man doch eigentlich noch etwas anderes, meint man die Gefühle, die Empfindungen, die in dem Menschen leben können in bezug darauf, daß er nicht nur ein abgesondertes Wesen ist, sondern daß er sich bewegen muß unter anderen Menschen, daß er unter und mit anderen Menschen arbeiten muß, daß er sich selbst zur Befriedigung und anderen Menschen zum Heil da sei. Und in bezug darauf standen sich eigentlich die Menschen verflossener Zeitepochen, so paradox das heute klingt, im Grunde genommen näher, als sie sich heute stehen. Und das im Grunde genommen mit Recht! Mit Recht deshalb, weil wir in unserer Zeit in einer geschichtlichen Epoche leben, die — das haben die vergangenen Vorträge schon angedeutet —- besondere Kräfte herausgeholt hat aus den Untergründen der menschlichen Natur, insbesondere innerhalb der zivilisierten Welt, Kräfte, die nach der dargestellten Seite hin besonders tauglich sind, die aber weniger dazu tauglich sind, innerlich im Menschen die sozialen Instinkte, die sozialen Impulse lebendig anzuregen, die doch, wenn auch in einer für die heutige Zeit nicht mehr angemessenen Art, für frühere Zeitepochen vorhanden waren.

Wir schauen auf eine menschliche Entwickelung zurück, die hinter uns liegt: in drei bis vier Jahrhunderten hat sich die menschliche Fähigkeit, die menschliche Seelenkraft aus dem Innern der menschlichen Seele heraufgerungen, welche man als die intellektuelle, als die Kraft des Verstandes, der mehr oder weniger vernünftigen Weltenbetrachtung ansehen kann. Diese Weltenbetrachtung hat ihr Großartiges geleistet auf dem Gebiete der Naturanschauung. Sie kann den Menschen ungeheuer weit führen, wenn es sich darum handelt, seinen Umgang, seinen Vekehr mit der äußeren Natur zu entwickeln. Aber die Frage entsteht, ob es denn möglich sei, daß diese Kraft, die, ich möchte sagen, den Glanz, den Triumph der neuesten Zeit bildet, unmittelbar auch geeignet sei, den Verkehr des Menschen mit dem Menschen zu vermitteln. Eine klare Einsicht in diese Frage kann im Grunde genommen allein auch über die sozialen Forderungen der neuesten Zeit aufklären. Diese sozialen Forderungen könnten nämlich so, wie sie gewöhnlich formuliert werden, nur eine Art Oberflächenanschauung, gewissermaßen nur das Symptom sein für etwas viel tiefer im Menschen Liegendes. Das kommt insbesondere für eine geisteswissenschaftliche Betrachtung in Frage.

Wenn wir aber wiederum mit unbefangenem Blick hinschauen auf die Art und Weise, wie soziale Gestaltungen, soziale Menschenzusammenhänge in älteren Zeitepochen entstanden sind, ja, wie sie im Grunde genommen vielfach noch heute entstehen, bis zu den Kartellen, bis zu den Trusts hin, so müssen wir doch sagen: die beherrschenden Kräfte sind darinnen im Grunde nicht die intellektualistischen, nicht die der vernünftigen Betrachtung des Lebens, sondern sind Lebensinstinkte, sind innere, unbewußte Empfindungen. Und sollten wir aus dem, was sich so großartig als die intellektualistische Kraft in der Naturanschauung erweist, soziale Gestaltungen vollziehen, so würden sie wahrscheinlich nur eine sehr geringe Lebensfähigkeit haben. Denn es ist doch nicht bedeutungslos, daß diese Kraft des Intellekts sich besonders bedeutsam erwiesen hat in der Betrachtung der leblosen Natur und daß der Mensch, der nur Naturanschauung haben will, der nicht bis zu einer geistgemäßen Betrachtung der Dinge heraufrücken will, vor einem ihm unlösbaren Rätsel steht, wenn es sich darum handelt, mit seiner Anschauung aus dem Leblosen in das Lebendige heraufzudringen. Von dem, was geradezu durch seine innere Artung für das Unlebendige, für das Tote, seine große Bedeutung hat, darf es nicht verwunderlich sein, wenn es nicht dieselbe Tragkraft, dieselbe Fruchtbarkeit haben kann für das, was nicht nur lebendig ist, sondern was sich als seelenhafte soziale Menschengestaltungen herausbilden soll.

Und so können wir sagen: In gewissen unterbewußten Seelenregionen walten die Kräfte, die wirksam waren in den sozialen Gestaltungen; aber auf der anderen Seite verdankt der Mensch der heutigen Zeitepoche mit ihren besonderen Eigentümlichkeiten zwei der stärksten sozial wirksamen Impulse. Und gerade für diese zwei starken sozial wirkenden Impulse muß er die Eingliederung, die Orientierung suchen innerhalb des ganzen sozialen Lebens.

Mir trat eine der bedeutsamsten sozialen Fragen der Gegenwart vor die Seele, als ich vor dreißig Jahren den Versuch unternahm, das Problem der Freiheit des Menschen innerhalb des ganzen gesellschaftlichen Lebens der Menschen ins Auge zu fassen. Dieses Freiheitserlebnis ist eigentlich im Grunde genommen so alt wie das intellektuelle Leben. Indem das intellektuelle Leben den Menschen heraufhob bis zum Ergreifen des reinen Gedankens, durch den er dann auch die Naturerscheinungen erfaßt, wird er sich erst seiner Freiheit bewußt. Ältere Zeiten haben in alles Gedankenleben noch irgend etwas hineingemischt, was nur Ergebnis organischer Vorgänge war, was in den unbewußten Willensregionen instinktiv oder auch im Gefühlsleben unbewußt wurzelte. So klar, so durchsichtig hell etwas zu durchschauen, wie das im Denken der Fall ist, wenn das Denken sich aufschwingt zu klar erfaßten, mathematisch formulierten Naturgesetzen, etwas so klar zu erfassen, zu ergreifen, daß man mit seiner ganzen Wesenheit darinnensteckt, ist dem Menschen erst möglich geworden in der Zeit, als er sich zu dem reinen Denken erhoben hat, das Kopernikus, Galilei und ihre Nachfolger zu der neueren naturwissenschaftlichen Forschung inspiriert hat. So hängt gerade das Freiheitserlebnis zusammen mit dem, was herausführt aus den instinktiven Mächten, die früher sozial gestaltend waren.

Damit aber ist man, wenn man nun im vollen Ernste an das Freiheitsproblem herandringt, für eine Weile wie in eine Art Leerheit geworfen, die man empfindet, wenn man eben damit ernst macht — mit allen Schauern, die das Leere, ich möchte sagen, das Nichts überhaupt nur dem Menschen einflößen kann. Man kommt namentlich auf folgendes: In früheren Zeitepochen, wo die Menschheit in bezug auf das Seelenleben naiver, wo sie nicht bis zu der Bewußtheit heraufgekommen war, die in der neueren Zeit waltet, da konnten Anschauungen leben, die mehr bildhaft waren, die nicht im reinen, abstrakten Gedanken verliefen. Solche bildhaften Gedanken aber braucht man, wenn man sich hineinstellen will in das komplizierte soziale Menschenleben. Niemals kann das, was uns dazu führt, zu verstehen, wie wir unseren Platz in der Welt finden sollen, ausgemacht werden durch einen abstrakten Gedanken.

Nun habe ich in den Vorträgen der letzten Tage auseinandergesetzt, wie die geisteswissenschaftliche Entwickelung von dem abstrakten, toten Gedanken wiederum hinführt zu dem lebendigen Gedanken, durch den man ja tatsächlich nicht nur in die unorganische, leblose Natur eindringen kann, sondern in die Gestaltungen der lebendigen Natur, in das Innerliche auch der seelischen Welten. Damit aber nähert sich der Mensch, indem er diese allermodernste Entwickelung ins Auge faßt, mit seinem Bewußtsein wiederum dem, was einstmals, in früheren Zeitepochen, in instinktiver Art vorhanden war. Ich weiß, daß heute noch viele Menschen davor zurückschaudern, wenn man ihnen sagt: was unbewußt gewaltet hat in früheren Zeitepochen, was aus dem Unbewußten heraus die Phantasie befruchtet hat und so weiter, das kann durch solche Seelenentwickelung, wie ich sie geschildert habe, ins Bewußtsein heraufgehoben werden. Und gleich wittert man, daß dann hinter einer solchen Forderung etwas stecke wie eine Art Philistrosität, eine Art Schulmeisterei, welche die Naivität überführen will in Bewußtheit. Man wird nur so lange vor einem solchen Wege in die Bewußtheit zurückschaudern, so lange man eben nicht weiß, daß jenes Erleben in der Naivität, das zunächst den Menschen instinktiv eignete, wiederum hergestellt wird, trotz der Bewußtheit des lebendigen Denkens. Aber dieses lebendige Denken führt uns dann auch hinein in die fluktuierenden Begriffe, die sich im sozialen Leben abspielen.

Dafür möchte ich zunächst heute nur einleitungsweise auf eines hinweisen. Man redet zum Beispiel in der Gegenwart außerordentlich viel von Kapitalismus, von der Funktion des Kapitals in der sozialen Ordnung. Es gibt unzählige Definitionen von dem, was Kapital ist. Oftmals sind diese Definitionen sehr parteimäßig gefärbt. Aber hinter dieser Verschiedenheit der Definitionen des Kapitals steckt noch etwas ganz anderes. Man muß sich nur klar sein darüber, daß auch das, was so in der sozialen Struktur der Menschheit lebt wie zum Beispiel der Kapitalismus, in seiner Funktion eben nicht mit scharf konturierten Begriffen erfaßt werden kann, sondern daß man gerade dazu jene lebendigen Begriffe braucht, die einstmals das instinktive naive Seelenleben hatte und die heute wiederum das bewußte Seelenleben bekommen kann. Es sollen sich die Menschen nur einmal umsehen, was zum Beispiel Kapital in Mitteleuropa, in Deutschland bedeutete, wo eine gewisse soziale Entwickelung später eingesetzt hatte als in England, und was Kapital in England bedeutet, wo, als eine gewisse soziale Entwickelung einsetzte, einfach durch die vorherigen Stadien des ökonomischen Lebens Handelskapital da war zur Begründung desjenigen, was in Deutschland ohne Handelskapital, durch andere Kapitalschöpfungen geleistet werden mußte. Schaut man auf das hin, was die Rolle des Kapitals in Mitteleuropa war und was sie in England war, dann findet man sehr bald, daß man mit seinen Begriffen, die das soziale Leben, auch in seinen einzelnen Gestaltungen, umfassen sollen, nichts scharf Konturiertes haben kann, sondern daß man etwas haben muß, was die unmittelbare Wirklichkeit angreift an einer Stelle, welche in der Idee selber innerlich elastisch ist, so daß es sich fortbewegen kann zu anderen Gestaltungen derselben sozialen Struktur. Und weil wir in einem Zeitalter leben, das geradezu auf den Intellektualismus hin erzogen ist, der nur in scharf konturierten Begriffen leben kann, ist notwendig, daß wir, um zum Verständnis der sozialen Forderungen zu kommen, uns aus dem Intellektualismus heraus zur lebendigen Gedankenwelt finden, die sich dann wiederum in solche sozialen Impulse umsetzen kann, wie sie in älteren Epochen der Menschheitsentwickelung aus den Instinkten kamen.

Die Weltauffassung, die hier gemeint ist, soll eben nicht irgend etwas Theoretisches sein. Man wirft gerade ihr oftmals Dogmatismus vor, wirft ihr auch, wo sie über soziales Leben reden soll, vor, daß sie nach Utopien ausschaue, also nach Dogmatischem. Alles das ist unbegründet. Denn worauf es ankommt, ist gar nicht das, was man in den einen oder anderen Begriff faßt, es ist eine bestimmte Einstellung auf das Gesamtleben, auf das physische, das seelische, das geistige Gesamtleben, eine Einstellung auf die Fähigkeit, dieses Gesamtleben in seinen einzelnen konkreten Gestaltungen wirklichkeitsgemäß zu erfassen.

Dadurch aber eröffnet sich auf wichtigste soziale Forderungen unserer Zeit eine gewisse Perspektive: Wenn man mit den Mitteln einer geistigen Anschauung, wie ich sie entwickelt habe, das menschliche Leben selber betrachtet, dann findet man, daß auch das einzelne individuelle Menschenleben, wie die Entwickelung der Gesamtmenschheit in der Geschichte gewissen Phasen unterworfen ist. Und diese Phasen, die auch einer Oberflächenbetrachtung vor Augen liegen, enthüllen sich in ihrem Wesen erst, wenn man in die geistigen Zusammenhänge hineinschaut. Da zeigt sich zum Beispiel, wie weder das Kind in den ersten Lebensjahren, noch auch das Kind im volksschulpflichtigen Lebensalter, noch auch eigentlich der junge Mensch vor dem zwanzigsten Lebensjahr mit innerer Hingabe voll in dem lebt, was als intellektualistische Denkweise heraufgekommen ist in der Entwickelung der Menschheit. Im Grunde genommen erfassen wir in uns den Intellektualismus erst aus einer inneren Sympathie, wenn wir in das reifere Lebensalter der Zwanzigerjahre getreten sind. Da beginnen wir, den Intellektualismus wie ein inneres seelisches Knochensystem zu empfinden. Bis dahin fühlen wir eigentlich unser Leben so, wenn auch instinktiv, als ob es sich erst innerlich in einer gewissen Weise erhärten sollte nach solchen Richtlinien, die dann als dieses seelische Knochensystem auftreten. Aber unser ganzes soziales Leben, das in begreiflicher Weise von den Erwachsenen gestaltet ist, ist durchdrungen von dem, was nun doch in einer gewissen Weise von diesem Intellektualismus beeinflußt ist, wenn auch der Intellektualismus selber nicht sozial schaffend sein kann. Er strömt hinein in das, was unsicher geworden ist in den Instinkten. Und so haben wir in unserer heutigen sozialen Gestaltung ein unorganisches Zusammenwirken der unsicher gewordenen Instinkte und desjenigen, was an Intellektualismus in das soziale Leben hineinwill und doch eigentlich nicht hineinpaßt.

Aber das bedingt, daß wir uns im Grunde genommen von dem, was eigentlich vorgeht im sozialen Leben, Ideen machen, die ganz anders sind als das, was als Kräfte in der Wirklichkeit vorhanden ist. Wir sprechen heute zumeist in ziemlich uneigentlichem Sinn von dem, was sozial unter den Menschen waltet. Wir haben uns als Menschheit in den drei bis vier letzten Jahrhunderten dazu erzogen, alles in intellektualistische Formen zu prägen. Das können wir als erwachsene Menschen, aber das können wir nicht, solange wir Kinder, solange wir Jugend sind.

Die Jugend entwickelt ganz andere als die intellektualistischen Kräfte. Das Kind entwickelt zunächst die Kräfte, ich möchte sagen, durch die es ein einziges Sinnesorgan ist, ganz ähnlich dem Sinnesorgan, das ich als Geistorgan geschildert habe; nur ist es das Kind auf mehr materielle Weise, Es nimmt als ganzer Mensch seine Umgebung wahr und prägt, was es wahrnimmt, in seine eigene Bewegung um. Es ist ein Nachahmer. Diese Nachahmung, die das ganze seelische Leben des Kindes durchpulst, ist ganz gewiß nichts Intellektualistisches. Dann tritt das Kind ein in das Lebensalter, etwa vom Zahnwechsel an bis zur Geschlechtsreife reichend, in dem es angewiesen ist, nicht mehr nachzuahmen, wohl aber das aufzunehmen, was als Meinung, als Überzeugung ihm von seiner erwachsenen Umgebung gegeben wird.

Glauben Sie nicht, meine sehr verehrten Anwesenden, daß derjenige, der die «Philosophie der Freiheit» geschrieben hat, vor Ihnen aus irgendeinem reaktionären Instinkt heraus das sagen wird, was er jetzt zu sagen hat. Was ich zu sagen habe, entspricht einem Gesetz der Menschheitsentwickelung. Von dem Zahnwechsel bis zur Geschlechtsreife entwickelt der junge Mensch aus dem Innern seines Wesens heraus das Bedürfnis, hinzuhören auf das, was ihm selbstverständliche Autorität sein kann und was ihm durch die selbstverständliche Autorität gegeben wird. Wer das Leben unbefangen zu betrachten weiß, kann sich schon sagen, welches Glück es für seine innere Seelenharmonie durch das ganze Leben hindurch ist, wenn er gerade in dem eben angedeuteten Lebensalter so recht verehrungsvoll zu dieser oder jener Autorität hinaufsehen konnte, die er jetzt nicht nachahmte, die ihm aber so gegenüberstand, daß er sich sagte: Durch diese menschliche Individualität offenbart sich mir das, was ich selber sein soll, was ich selber sein will; ich höre hin auf das, was der oder die meint, und nehme die Meinung in meine Seele auf.

Für einen wirklichen Psychologen stellt sich sogar das Folgende heraus: Man kann lange wettern, daß das Kind in diesem volksschulpflichtigen Lebensalter nur aufnehmen solle, was es schon versteht. Dann sorgt man eigentlich nur für dieses eine Lebensalter des Kindes, abgesehen davon, daß unendliche Trivialitäten aufgehäuft worden sind in dem Bestreben, an das Kind immer nur das heranzubringen, von dem man glaubt, daß das Kind «es schon versteht». Das Kind versteht zwar mehr, als mancher glaubt, aber es versteht nicht aus der Intellektualität heraus, sondern aus dem ganzen Sein heraus. Und da kommt das andere noch vor: daß man dreißig, vierzig, fünfzig, sechzig Jahre alt ist und irgend etwas aus den Untergründen der Seele heraufdringt, was eine Reminiszenz ist aus dem, sagen wir, achten Lebensjahr. Da hat man es geholt von einer Autorität; man hat es aufgenommen aus der Verehrung heraus, man hat es damals nicht im intellektualistischen Sinn verstanden, man hat sich aber eingelebt in das, was man so mit seinem ganzen Menschen aufgenommen hat. Dasjenige, in das man sich so eingelebt hat, ist in die Tiefen der Seele hinuntergezogen. Nach Jahrzehnten taucht es auf. Man ist reifer geworden. Jetzt versteht man es, jetzt belebt man es erst! Es bedeutet ungeheuer viel für das Leben im späteren Alter, wenn man in dieser Weise das, was man seit seiner Kindheit in sich trägt, zu neuem Leben heraufholen kann. Das ist etwas ganz anderes, als in bloßen unverwandelten Erinnerungen leben.

Dieses andere nun kann begründet sein auf einer lebendigen Erziehungskunst. Auf einer Erziehungskunst, die dem Kind in jenem Lebensalter nicht scharfkonturierte Begriffe geben will, sondern lebendige. Jene sind ja für gewisse Zwecke des Lebens gut. Dem Kinde gegenüber nehmen sie sich aber so aus, wie wenn wir seine Hand ergreifen und sie einpressen würden, daß sie nicht wachsen kann, daß sie klein bleiben muß, daß sie nicht verwandelte Formen annehmen kann. Erst dann, wenn wir zu einer Erziehungskunst vordringen, die lebendige Begriffe übermittelt, die mit dem Kinde weiterleben, wie seine Glieder mit ihm weiterleben, die also nicht scharf konturiert sind, sondern die innerliches Wachstum haben - erst dann geben wir dem Kinde nicht nur die rechte Lebensfreude, sondern auch die richtige Lebenskraft. Wenn das Kind solches erlebt, wie ich es eben angedeutet habe, als etwas ganz Naives im Seelenleben, so ist das nicht das intellektualistische Verstehen und Begreifen. Es ist das Hinnehmen von einer verehrten Autorität, was uns Lebenskräfte bringt.

Und dann beginnt nach dieser Zeit das Alter, wo wir im Grunde genommen nicht anders können, als so an die Welt herantreten, daß, ohne sogleich in scharf konturierte Begriffe zu gehen, darin Liebefähigkeit lebt, daß ein Eintauchen in die Dinge so lebt, daß wir uns manchmal recht illusionäre, aber um so kraftvollere Ideale herausholen, die unsere Liebe befeuern.

Erst wenn wir das alles durchgemacht haben, gehen wir ohne Schaden, möchte ich sagen, für unsere volle Menschheit in das intellektualistische Lebensalter. Aber was heute vielfach die älteren Generationen der Jugend als Lehrgut überbringen, das ist eigentlich etwas, was erst einem späteren Alter angemessen ist. Und so stehen wir heute als Lehrer der Jugend oftmals so gegenüber, daß sie uns nicht bloß aus irgendwelchen zufälligen Anlässen, sondern aus dem Innern ihres Wesens heraus nicht verstehen kann.

Ältere Zeitalter entwickelten im sozialen Leben Kräfte, durch die der Alte den Jungen in einer ganz anderen Weise verständlich war, als das heute der Fall ist. Daher hat sich diese soziale Kluft aufgetan zwischen dem Alter und der Jungend. Derjenige begreift sie, der unsere Zeit so erfaßt, wie sie erfaßt werden muß, wenn man auf das Werden in den letzten drei bis vier Jahrhunderten hinsieht. Und nicht nur durch eine geistige Vertiefung, sondern durch Verlebendigung unseres Geisteslebens müssen wir wiederum jene Fähigkeit erlangen, durch die sich der erwachsene Mensch mit der Jugend voll verstehen kann.

Das aber ist nur eine Seite, nur ein ganz kleines Glied sogar innerhalb der sozialen Forderungen der Gegenwart: daß die Kluft zwischen den Generationen überbrückt werde. Sie kann es nur durch eine Erweiterung des ganzen inneren menschlichen Erlebens. Erst derjenige, der das heutige intellektualistische Seelenleben innerlich zu dem lebendigen Denken und zu dem geistigen Schauen erkraftet, oder wenigstens die Ergebnisse dieses Denkens und Schauens hinnimmt, denn sie beleben auch die ganze Seele, erst der findet wieder die Möglichkeit, voll in das kindliche Leben hineinzuschauen, um aus diesem kindlichen Leben selbst heraus die Kräfte zu suchen, durch die man sich mit ihm verständigen kann. Aber wenn man auf so etwas hinweist wie auf die Kluft, die sich zwischen Alter und Jugend in unserer Zeit aufgetan hat, weist man zugleich auf das hin, was überhaupt an Klüften waltet zwischen Mensch und Mensch, zwischen Mann und Frau, zwischen Klasse und Klasse in unserer Zeit. Denn ebenso wie uns das bloße intellektualistische Leben trennt von dem Kinde, So trennt es uns im Grunde genommen auch von dem anderen Menschen. Man sieht erst, wenn man das lebendige Denken entwickelt hat, das wiederum gewissen instinktiven Erfassungen des Weltendaseins ähnlich wird, daß man durch dieses lebendige Denken wiederum so fest seinen Standpunkt in der sozialen Ordnung finden kann, wie ihn einstmals der instinktive Mensch gefunden hat, so daß die sozialen Organismen möglich waren. Man findet auch, daß man erst durch das, was man erringt, indem das Bewußtsein leer wird, indem man also hereininspiriert erhält aus der geistigen Welt, was geistige Wesenheiten offenbaren, in die Lage kommt, den anderen Menschen wirklich zu verstehen, hinüberzusehen über die Klüfte der Klasse, über die Klüfte der Geschlechter.

Das ist die zweite Stufe des sozialen Zusammenlebens. Die erste Stufe ist, daß durch das Imaginative — wie es früher das instinktive Sich-Hineinstellen in die Umwelt war — der eigene Standpunkt gefunden wird. Die zweite Stufe ist, daß man die Brücke hinüber findet zum anderen Menschen, zu dem Menschen, der in einem anderen sozialen Zusammenhang drinnen lebt. Heute ist das der Menschheit außerordentlich schwer gemacht; denn im Grunde genommen urteilt man nicht aus der Wirklichkeit heraus, wenn man sich aus seinen Empfindungen heraus hineinstellt ins soziale Leben. Man urteilt im Grunde genommen gerade dann, wenn man glaubt, am wirklichkeitsgemäßesten zu urteilen, am wirklichkeitsfremdesten. Man muß nur einmal gesehen haben, wie sich heute selbst führende Persönlichkeiten ins Leben hineinstellen, dieses Leben meistern möchten, aber im Grunde genommen doch an die Wirklichkeit dieses Lebens nicht heranreichen.

Ich möchte ein Beispiel anführen, weder um für, noch um gegen die Persönlichkeit, die ich anführen will, Stellung zu nehmen; nichts soll für oder gegen gesagt werden, nur die Erscheinung soll charakterisiert werden. Ich möchte hinweisen auf eine besonders markante, radikal wirkende Persönlichkeit des sozialen Wirkens in der neuesten Zeit, auf Rosa Luxemburg. Lernte man sie als Persönlichkeit kennen, so hatte man einen Menschen vor sich, der einem eigentlich vollständig mit bürgerlichen Allüren entgegentrat: gemessen in der Bewegung, gemessen in der Redeweise, durchaus in jeder einzelnen Bewegung, in jedem einzelnen Worte maßhaltend. Es waltete sogar eine gewisse Milde, nicht irgend etwas Stürmisches, in dieser Individualität. Hörte man sie aber vom Podium aus reden, dann sprach sie so - nun, ich will ein konkretes Beispiel anführen —, daß sie etwa sagte: Ja, da hat es Zeitalter gegeben, in denen der Mensch glaubte, er stamme aus irgendwelchen geistigen Welten her, diese geistigen Welten hätten ihn in das soziale Leben hereingestellt. Heute weiß man von dem Menschen, so sagte sie, daß er einstmals in höchst unanständiger Weise, unbekleidet, wie ein Affe auf den Bäumen herumgeklettert ist und daß sich aus diesem Affenmenschen heraus diejenigen entwickelt haben, die heute in den verschiedensten Positionen des sozialen Lebens drinnenstehen. Und das wurde vorgebracht in einer Weise, die, ich möchte sagen, von einem gewissen religiösen Impuls durchglüht war, allerdings nicht mit dem Feuer der unmittelbaren individuellen Wirksamkeit, aber so, wie gerade große proletarische Massen das am besten verstehen konnten: mit einer gewissen gemessenen Trockenheit, so daß es auch aufgefaßt werden konnte mit einer gewissen Trockenheit der Empfindung und daß es trotz der Trockenheit dieser Empfindung eine gewisse Begeisterung hervorrief, aus dem Grunde, weil gefühlt wurde: Da sind ja im Grunde genommen alle Menschen gleich und alle sozialen Unterschiede sind hinweggefegt! — Aber das, was so gesprochen worden ist, ist nicht aus einem Drinnenstehen im sozialen Leben gesprochen worden. Es ist gesprochen worden aus der Theorie heraus, die allerdings glaubte, lebensvoll zu sein. Es erzeugte, möchte ich sagen, eine Wirklichkeit, die doch im Grunde genommen keine Wirklichkeit, namentlich keine fruchtbringende Wirklichkeit sein kann.

Wie diese markante Persönlichkeit Rosa Luxemburg stehen im Grunde genommen die meisten Menschen heute im sozialen Leben: sie reden über das soziale Leben, ohne daß in ihren Worten die Kraft pulsiert, die aus dem unmittelbaren Leben heraus kommt, aus dem Miterleben des Sozialen im Menschen. Das kann man, wenn man mit der alten instinktiven Kraft des Anschauens der sozialen Gestaltungen seinen Platz im Leben und weiterhin die Brücke zu den Menschen anderer Stände, anderer Klassen, auch anderen Lebensalters hinüber und zu den einzelnen Menschen, den menschlichen Individualitäten findet. Das war in älteren Epochen durch außerordentlich tiefliegende menschliche Instinkte gefunden worden.

Sie werden Erkenntniskräfte, bewußte Erkenntniskräfte, indem sich der Mensch hinentwickelt zum Geistorganismus, zum «Sinnesorgan», das er als menschliche Totalität wird, wie ich es geschildert habe, wodurch er dann mit seinem Willen selber in der geistigen Welt leibfrei darinnenlebt.

Denn das Hinüberleben zum anderen Menschen ist immer ein unbewußtes oder bewußtes leibfreies Erfühlen dessen, was der andere ist. Es ist eine graue Theorie, wenn man glaubt: wir schauen den Menschen an, schauen, wie er ein so geformtes Ohr, eine so geformte Nase, ein so geformtes Gesicht hat, und weil wir wissen, daß wir auch so eine Nase und eine so und so geformte Stirne und so weiter, daß wir ein Ich haben, so schließen wir durch einen unbewußten Schluß, daß der andere auch ein Ich habe. Das tun wir nicht. Wer den Tatbestand seelisch überschauen kann, der weiß, daß es sich, wenn wir einem anderen Menschen gegenüberstehen, um ein unmittelbares Wahrnehmen dessen handelt, was in dem anderen Menschen lebt. Man möchte sagen: die unmittelbare Wahrnehmung des anderen ist nur der Sehakt, ins Geistig-Seelische hineingesteigert.

Darauf kommen sogar gewisse Gestaltungen der heutigen Philosophie. Geisteswissenschaft zeigt, daß, indem in bewußter Weise die unbewußt, instinktiv wirkende Kraft aufgefunden wird, der Mensch sich hinüberlebt in die andere menschliche Individualität und sich erst dadurch voll in das soziale Leben hineinstellen kann. Dann aber, wenn wir einmal mit dem auf der Erziehungsstufe der menschlichen Entwickelung, auf die wir gehoben sind, erreichten Intellektualismus, oder vielmehr durch das, was aus ihm herauswachsen kann, auf eine solche sich vergeistigende Seelenentwickelung des Menschen hinweisen können, dann können auch soziale Perspektiven gefunden werden. Allerdings, erst wenn man in dieser Weise das Geistige erfassen kann, kommt man mit einer Kraft, die den früheren Schauder hinwegschafft, zu einem unmittelbaren Erleben des Freiheitsimpulses im Menschen.

Nun ist dieser Freiheitsimpuls auch nur aus dem vollen Menschenleben heraus von der Seele wirklich zu ergreifen. Daß er nur aus dem vollen Erleben heraus zu ergreifen ist, möchte ich an dem einen Beispiel der Erziehungskunst wiederum veranschaulichen.

Worauf ist denn eigentlich die Waldorfschule in Stuttgart, die aus einer geistgemäßen Welt- und Lebensanschauung heraus geschaffen ist, gebaut? Sie will gerade als eine soziale Einrichtung in das gegenwärtige soziale Leben sich so hineinstellen, wie es die Kräfte der Gegenwart selber erfordern. Daher ist sie durchaus nicht darauf gebaut, in irgendeiner Beziehung eine Weltanschauungsschule zu sein. Das wäre eine ganz falsche Auffassung des Prinzips der Waldorfschule, wenn man glauben wollte, daß den Kindern dort irgendeine Weltanschauung beigebracht werden solle. Eine Welt- und Lebensauffassung, die als eine geistgemäße vertreten wird, ist eigentlich für die Lehrerschaft da. Und das, was an dieser Welt- und Lebensauffassung nicht Theorie, sondern volles Leben ist, kann sich auch ausleben in der pädagogischen Geschicklichkeit, in dem didaktischen Takt, in all dem, was der Lehrer ausführt, in dem ganzen Wirken des Unterrichtens und des Erziehens.

Auf das, was oftmals in einzelnen Sätzen über die Waldorfpädagogik gesagt wird, kommt es gar nicht an. Diesen einzelnen Sätzen gegenüber können einzelne Menschen ganz gut sagen: Ja, das wollen diese und jene Unterrichts- und Erziehungsmethoden auch. Es ist auch im Grunde genommen, wenn man auf abstrakte Prinzipien sieht, so, daß man sagen kann: Das, was man in abstrakten Sätzen in bezug auf Unterrichts- und Erziehungsmethoden der Waldorfschule sagen kann, findet man sonst auch. Worauf es hier ankommt, ist das unmittelbare Leben, das aus einer Leben erzeugenden Weltauffassung herausfließt und nicht aus einer bloß Begriffe erzeugenden Lebensauffassung.

Was wird dadurch erlangt? Nun, es ist schwer, scharfumrissene Begriffe hinzustellen, wenn man Leben schildern will. Daher will ich mich durch das Folgende ausdrücken: Es kommt auch ganz gewiß unter den Personen der Lehrerschaft der Waldorfschule vor, daß solche darunter sind, die nicht immer außerordentlich genial sind — man kann das sagen, ohne irgend jemandem nahezutreten. Aber wenn auch die verschiedensten Stufen der körperlichen, seelischen, geistigen Fähigkeiten im Lehrer vorhanden sind, so muß man doch wiederum sagen: Unter diesen Schulkindern, die der Lehrer da vor sich hat, könnten doch solche sein, die einmal Fähigkeiten im Leben entwickeln werden, welche weit über das hinausgehen, was der Lehrer selber an Fähigkeiten hat.

Man muß also eine Pädagogik ermöglichen, durch die man nicht nur die Kinder in jedem Lebensalter so behandeln kann, daß sie einmal zu den Fähigkeiten kommen, die man selber hat, sondern daß sie eventuell ungehindert Fah1gkelten entwickeln, die man selber gar nicht hat, die in ihnen veranlagt sind. Man muß also, wenn man selbst auch nicht genial ist, der Entwickelung des Kindes zur Genialität kein Hindernis entgegensetzen. Man kann lange deklamieren, man solle die Individualität eines Kindes entwickeln, nicht irgend etwas in es hineinpfropfen, sondern alles aus dem Kinde herausholen - man kann das sagen, und wenn man bloß auf das Begriffliche hinsieht, so klingt es wunderschön, und man glaubt, es sei etwas Fruchtbares im Leben. Allein oftmals meint man doch mit dem, was man so sagt, nichts anderes als: man entwickelt das im Kinde, wovon man meint, daß es seine Individualität sein könne, und das werde keine über die Individualität des Lehrers hinausreichende Individualität sein.

In der Waldorfschule ist alles auf Erziehung in der Freiheit veranlagt. Das, was das innerste Geistig-Seelische im Menschen ist, wird im Grunde genommen überhaupt durch die Waldorfschulmethode gar nicht angetastet. Das wird ebensowenig angetastet, wie man etwa bei einer Pflanze, die man in den Boden setzt und durch Licht und Luft sich dann frei entwickeln läßt, allerlei Stöckchen anbringt und sie hineinschnürt in die Schablone. Die geistig-seelische Individualität des Kindes ist ein Heiligstes, von dem derjenige, der die wahre Menschennatur erkennt, weiß, daß es ganz von selber den Impulsen folgt, die die Umgebung, die alle Welt auf es ausübt. Daher hat der Lehrer hinwegzuräumen, was diese mit heiliger Scheu behütete Individualität in ihrer Entwickelung hindern kann. Die Hindernisse, die vom Physischen, vom Seelischen und auch vom Geistigen ausgehen können, kann man in einer echten Menschenkunde durchschauen, wenn man diese Menschenkunde nach der pädagogischen und psychologischen Seite hin entwickelt. Und gerade wenn man eine solche Menschenkunde entwickelt, lernt man mit feinem Sinn beobachten, wo irgendein Hindernis der freien Entwickelung der Individualität da ist. Man braucht da nicht grob hineinzugreifen. Man vermeidet eine fremdartige Gestaltung dieser Individualität. Indem man sieht: da ist ein Hindernis, das muß man hinwegräumen, räumt man es hinweg. Dann weiß die Individualität sich durch ihre eigene Kraft zu entwickeln in einer Weise, die in ihren Fähigkeiten weit über das hinausgehen kann, was der Lehrer in sich hat.

Das heißt aber wirkliche Achtung gegenüber der menschlichen Freiheit haben! Diese menschliche Freiheit bedingt, daß der Mensch die Impulse, die ihn leiten und treiben im Leben, in sich selber findet. In älteren Zeiten hat der Mensch, indem er sich instinktiv in die soziale Umgebung hineingelebt hat, aus seiner Umgebung etwas aufgenommen, das dann in ihm als moralische, als religiöse Impulse gewirkt hat. Das ist, ich möchte sagen, herabgelähmt in seiner Tragkraft durch den Intellektualismus, Was in Bewußtheit wiederum zu denselben sozialen Impulsen hinführt, die einstmals auf instinktive Weise erlangt worden sind, das muß erst entwickelt werden.

Dadurch aber sieht sich der moderne Mensch vor zwei Dinge gestellt: auf der einen Seite davor, daß er nunmehr seine sittlichen, seine religiösen Impulse in seiner eigenen Individualität suchen muß, daß er sie nur da finden kann, wo seine Seele ihre ursprünglichsten eigenen Kräfte entwickelt; auf der anderen Seite, daß im Laufe der letzten drei bis vier Jahrhunderte gerade der Intellektualismus großgezogen worden ist, so großgezogen, daß er als die einzige Autorität gilt, der nun nimmermehr ein solches unmittelbares geistiges Erleben geben, sondern nur auf das natürliche Leben hinschauen und es ordnen kann.

So stehen wir auf der einen Seite vor dem, was wir als Menschheit - allerdings in großartiger Weise — innerhalb des Naturgeschehens mit unserem Verstand vermögen. Da ist die Menschheit als Ganzes auch produktiv. Wir sehen dieses Produktive der Menschheit seit drei bis vier Jahrhunderten herauftauchen in den großartigen Übergängen, die gefunden worden sind zwischen der Naturanschauung und der Technik. Wer da verfolgen kann, was der Mensch durch die Fähigkeit der Naturerkenntnis erlangt, der sieht auch, wie die Menschheit in technischer Beziehung vorwärtsgekommen ist. Studieren Sie einmal ein einfaches Beispiel, sagen wir, wie der in gewisser Beziehung geniale He/mholtz seinen Augenspiegel gefunden hat.

Wenn sie das verstehen wollen, müssen Sie berücksichtigen, wie seine Vorgänger schon nahe daran gewesen waren — wie gestoßen durch den naturwissenschaftlichen Fortschritt —, wie er nur den allerletzten Schritt zu tun brauchte. Man möchte sagen, das naturwissenschaftliche Denken als solches hält seinen Einzug in den Menschen und führt ihn weiter. Dann ist der Mensch auf dem Gebiet der Technik produktiv. Denn es lebt in ihm, was er aus der Natur heraussaugt, selber als eine inspirierende Gabe. Man kann bis in die jüngsten Entdeckungen hinein verfolgen, wie, wenn jemand Naturwissenschafter wird, dann das, was er aufnimmt, gewissermaßen seinen Geist stößt von Technizismus zu Technizismus, so daß die Inspiration der Natur nun weiterwirkt. Da ist eine Inspirationskraft!

Diese Inspirationskraft fehlt dem modernen Menschen da, wo das Ethische, das Willensgemäße, das Religiöse, kurz, alles das, was, von der Menschenseele ausgehend, zuletzt doch zum sozialen Gestalten und sozialen Leben führt, in Betracht kommt. Hier brauchen wir wiederum eine Kraft, die auf geistig-seelischem Gebiete geradeso wirkt wie die rein natürliche inspirierende Kraft in unserer äußeren Technik. In unserer äußeren Technik haben wir es außerordentlich weit gebracht. Was wir da errungen haben, das müssen wir als Menschheit der modernen Zeit damit bezahlen, daß eine Weile zurückgeblieben ist das rein geistige Leben, sich genährt hat von alten Traditionen sowohl in religiöser wie in moralischer und sozialer Beziehung. Wir brauchen aber heute die Möglichkeit, aus der menschlichen Individualität heraus in vollem Freiheitserlebnis zu unmittelbaren moralischen Impulsen zu kommen. Weil wir vor dieser sozialen Notwendigkeit stehen, war es mir auch möglich, in meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit» darauf hinzuweisen, daß es so etwas geben müsse wie eine moralische Intuition. Und ich habe dazumal schon angedeutet, daß das, was der Mensch an wirklichen, nunmehr im modernen Leben nur individueller wirkenden, moralischen Impulsen finden kann, die ihn sittlich und moralisch erkraften, nur aus einer geistigen Welt heraus kommen könne. So also stehen wir gerade dadurch vor der Notwendigkeit, zu geistigen Intuitionen aufzusteigen, daß wir in unseren Betrachtungen der Außenwelt zu etwas geistig Produzierendem gar nicht kommen.

Wer sich in bewußter Weise gerade in das innere Erleben des technischen Zeitalters hineinzustellen vermag, ist vielleicht am allermeisten geneigt, auf der anderen Seite zu sagen: Indem wir in die Notwendigkeit gestellt sind, um das Unlebendige der Technik zu überschauen, am Boden dieses Technischen zu kleben, können wir aus dem, was uns Technik gibt, nicht so moralische Impulse holen, wie es der ältere Mensch konnte, der in Sturm und Wind und Fluß und Stern ein Geistig-Seelisches sah, das er wie Naturkräfte empfand. Wir können das nicht, weil wir eine von alledem gereinigte Naturerkenntnis haben. Wir können daher unsere moralische Welt nur gewinnen, wenn wir sie in freier Intuition unmittelbar geistigindividuell erfassen.

Dazu aber brauchen wir eine innere lebensvolle Kraft des Geistigen. Und diese lebensvolle Kraft des Geistigen, ich glaube, sie kann gegeben werden durch das Versenken in die Ergebnisse jener Welt- und Lebensauffassung, die ich hier entwickelt habe. Diese Welt- und Lebensauffassung will eben durchaus nicht sagen: das ist so und das ist so in Ideen und Begriffen, sondern will Ideen und Begriffe nur bringen, damit diese etwas so Lebendiges in uns werden, auf geistige Art, wie das Lebensblut selber, so daß die Tätigkeit des Menschen angeregt wird, nicht bloß sein Denken. So erscheint das, was als solche geistgemäße Welt- und Lebensauffassung entwickelt werden kann, durchaus zugleich als ein sozialer Impuls neben einem Erkenntnisimpuls.

Das wird vielleicht dazu berechtigen, zu sagen: Die sozialen Forderungen der Gegenwart, wie sie im öffentlichen Leben heute vielfach formuliert werden, nehmen sich für den, der die ganze Signatur unserer Zeit unbefangen ins Seelenauge zu fassen weiß, so aus, daß sie eigentlich Symptome sind, Symptome dafür, daß die alten Instinktsicherheiten des sozialen Lebens verloren sind und daß wir vor der Notwendigkeit stehen, ein geistiges Leben in bewußter Weise zu begründen, das wiederum dieselben Impulse gibt, die einstmals das instinktive Leben alter Zeitalter gegeben hat. Weil man glauben kann, daß ein solches Anregen der innerlichsten seelischen Lebenskräfte des Menschen wirklich den sozialen Forderungen unserer Zeit entspricht, deshalb möchte man auch in dieser Zeit der schweren sozialen Prüfungen von der Zeit und ihren sozialen Forderungen in diesem Sinne sprechen.

Manchmal hat man schon in der Gegenwart das Gefühl: Ach, die unmittelbare Not des Tages, das Elend des Augenblicks ist so groß, daß man im Grunde genommen sich einzig und allein diesem widmen, und erst dann, wenn in dieser Beziehung ein wenig Abhilfe geschehen ist, nach weiteren Perspektiven ausschauen sollte. Von all den Einwendungen, die mir gemacht worden sind, seit ich auf die Aufforderungen eines gewissen Freundeskreises wiederum versucht habe, über das soziale Leben zu sprechen, mich an allerlei zu beteiligen, was mit diesem sozialen Leben zusammenhängt, habe ich am besten die zahlreichen Briefe verstanden, die immer wieder und wiederum, insbesondere vor zwei Jahren, an mich gekommen sind, des Inhalts: Was wollen eigentlich alle diese sozialen Ideen? Hier in Mitteleuropa handelt es sich zunächst um das nackte Brot! Immer wieder war dieser Einwand da. Man kann ihn verstehen. Aber in anderer Beziehung muß man auch das begreiflich finden, daß ja die Erde an Fruchtbarkeit in keinem Zeitalter den Menschen das, was sie geben kann, vorzuenthalten in der Lage ist, wenn die Menschen nur jene sozialen Gestaltungen finden, durch die das, was die Erde geben kann, in der richtigen Weise in diese sozialen Gestaltungen hineinfließen und innerhalb dieser sozialen Gestaltungen erarbeitet werden kann.

Deshalb erscheint mir auch die Meinung berechtigt, daß es gewiß ein außerordentlich Liebes und Gutes ist, wenn man sich der unmittelbaren Lage des Augenblicks widmet, und daran wird niemand durch solche Betrachtungen gehindert, wie sie hier angestellt worden sind. Aber ebenso wie das gut ist, muß gesagt werden: Für den Augenblick mag gut sein, was da getan werden kann, aber es muß auf der anderen Seite so schnell als möglich dazu kommen, daß man soziales Verständnis habe, damit nicht wiederum die Bedingungen sich neu erzeugen, durch die die Menschen in solche Not und in solches Elend hineinkommen.

Daß da mit den alten utopistischen und intellektualistischen Formulierungen des Sozialen nicht ausgekommen werden kann, das hätte sich den Menschen zeigen sollen, als manche von denjenigen, die vor kurzem noch mit einer unglaublichen Sicherheit von dem sprachen, was da sein sollte im sozialen Leben, dann hingestellt worden sind vor das, was sie nun tun sollten. Wahrhaftig, eine größere Ratlosigkeit im sozialen Leben war kaum jemals vorhanden als unter denen, die scheinbar am allergewissesten gewußt haben, wie die sozialen Gestaltungen zu formulieren wären, wenn man nur das Alte so schnell als möglich hinwegräumen könnte.

Das Experiment, das in dieser Richtung liegt, hat ja im Osten von Europa in die furchtbarsten Zerstörungskräfte hineingeführt. Und es ist Illusion, wenn die Menschheit heute glaubt, daß sie ohne ein gründliches soziales Denken und Fühlen und Erleben, durch bloße Fortsetzung der alten Formulierungen, in etwas anderes hineinkommen könnte als in Zerstörungskräfte. Das Gespenst des europäischen Ostens ist das, was drohend herüberschaut nach dem Westen. Aber dieses Schauen sollte uns nicht untätig sein lassen, sondern uns auffordern, in jeder Stunde nach lebendigen sozialen Kräften, nach einer lebendigen Formulierung der sozialen Forderungen zu suchen, da ja die abstrakten und utopistischen sich in ihrer Unfruchtbarkeit erwiesen haben.

Wie das im einzelnen geschehen kann, das werden die nächsten Vorträge zeigen. Heute wollte ich nur eine Art Einleitung geben, die zeigen soll, daß hinter dem, was in ausgesprochenen Worten als soziale Ideen charakterisiert wird, etwas Tieferes liegt, etwas, was zusammenhängt mit einer Umgestaltung des ganzen Seelenlebens.

Das hat man in der allerneuesten Zeit bis weit in die Proletarierkreise hinein zu begreifen begonnen. Und wer sich umsieht, der weiß, daß die sozialen Forderungen, und namentlich die Empfindungen ihnen gegenüber, in einem ganz wesentlichen Umgestaltungsprozeß sind. Die alten Schlagworte werden schon mehr oder weniger in ihrer Unfruchtbarkeit erkannt. Und vielfach betont man es jetzt schon, daß zu Seelischem übergegangen werden müsse, daß wiederum moralische und religiöse Impulse das soziale Leben durchpulsen müßten. Aber man hat noch nicht das Leben, das man wirklich braucht.

Unsere Zeit glaubt, recht wirklich und realistisch zu sein, und weiß gar nicht, wie theoretisch sie im Grunde genommen ist, theoretisch ganz besonders dann, wenn es sich um die Aufstellung der sozialen Forderungen handelt. Das — es darf vielleicht zum Schlusse ausgesprochen werden — kann heute eigentlich nicht die Aufgabe sein, unmittelbar neue soziale oder überhaupt andere Ideale aufzustellen. An abstraktem Aussprechen von Idealen haben wir keine Not. Was uns fehlt, ist nicht dieses abstrakte Hinneigen zum Idealismus. Was wir brauchen, ist etwas anderes: das Erleben des Geistigen, nicht bloß das Erdenken des Ideellen. Was wir brauchen, ist, daß wir den Geist nicht bloß in Begriffen haben, sondern in solcher Lebendigkeit, daß er, ich möchte sagen, wie menschliche Wesen unter uns in all unserem Tun herumwandelt.

Wenn wir so den Geist als etwas Lebendiges begreifen, dann werden wir auch aufsteigen können zu ihm als einem sozial Wirksamen. Demgegenüber dürfen wir sagen: Wir brauchen heute nicht bloße Formulierung von Idealen und sozialen Forderungen. Wir brauchen etwas, was uns Kraft gibt, den Idealen zu folgen, was uns inneres Leben gibt, diese Ideale zum Glühen zu bringen, etwas, was unseren Willen erregt zum vollen, für die Welt fruchtbaren Enthusiasmus für die Ideale, für das geistige Leben.

The Times and Their Social Demands

Ladies and gentlemen! The lectures I will give in the following are based entirely on the considerations I have already presented here: not as if anything significant could be said about contemporary social life by devising social reforms in some abstract, utopian way, but in the sense that I believe the intellectual worldview that has been developed here can, when transformed into impulses of the whole human being, into human sentiment, provide guidelines and orientations for understanding social life and also for shaping social driving forces. The next lectures will have to show us, however, how such a worldview based on the spiritual does not remain abstract and utopian, but how it is precisely predisposed to enter into immediate concrete reality. Today, however, I would like to build a bridge between the lectures I have already given and those I still intend to give here.

Anyone who considers the whole meaning of the lectures given so far will have to admit that what has been presented here is not some conception of life for hermits, for a contemplative life in a quiet little room, but that a view of life that also has its social side should be suggested, one that can lead not only into the spiritual worlds as such, but also into the world of spirit and soul that immediately surrounds us in our fellow human beings. Today, however, it is easier to talk about social issues if one feels affiliated with a particular political party. There, one has one's programs, so to speak, one has fixed ideas and can say: This is the time! These are the demands of the times!" But such a fixed party template certainly cannot be assumed here. For, first of all, I am fully convinced that, actually—and this is somewhat radical to say—there is no party that is not right in some way in what it claims. It's just that parties usually don't recognize the limits of what they can claim. On the other hand, I also don't believe that any party is completely right; rather, in a certain sense, it must be wrong. But again, it's a matter of understanding this wrongness very well, precisely because of the special nature of human worldview. After all, a tree can only be photographed correctly from different angles. Everything that is usually asserted as party lines can seem like photographs of life from different angles. Then people come together and behave with their different points of view as others would behave—although this does not exist in this field—who would look at the photograph of a tree from the right and say: Yes, that is a completely wrong shot. — They only know the shot from the left. So I am also fully aware of everything that can be objected to the views presented here from a certain point of view; and if it came down to it, it would not be particularly difficult to refute all the objections from the point of view of the worldview represented here.

I must say this in advance so that it can be understood how, simply by attempting in the following lectures to approach social life and social problems from a wide variety of viewpoints, one can arrive at a lively conception in this direction.

There is a great deal of talk about social demands in our time. But if we take an unbiased look at the history of humanity, we find that this has only been the case for a relatively short time in the course of human development. Certainly, social demands and social aspirations have always existed; but the fact that they appear in a formulated way, I would say, formulated into abstract theory, is basically a characteristic of the very recent past. And if we try to understand why almost everyone today talks about social demands, we see that perhaps no other era has had such strong antisocial impulses as our own.

Certainly, when the immediate necessities of life press upon us, when misery knocks at our doors, we find ourselves called upon to respond with social impulses. But when we talk about social demands, we actually mean something else, we mean the feelings, the emotions that can live in people in relation to the fact that they are not just isolated beings, but that they must move among other people, that they must work among and with other people, that they are there for their own satisfaction and for the salvation of other people. And in this respect, people of past eras, as paradoxical as it may sound today, were actually closer to each other than they are today. And rightly so, in fact! Rightly so, because we are living in a historical epoch which — as previous lectures have already indicated — has brought out special forces from the depths of human nature, especially within the civilized world, forces that are particularly suitable for the side described, but which are less suitable for stimulating the social instincts and social impulses within human beings, which, although no longer appropriate for the present day, were present in earlier times.

We look back on a human development that lies behind us: in three to four centuries, the human ability to draw the human soul power from within the human soul has emerged, which can be regarded as the intellectual, as the power of the mind, of a more or less reasonable view of the world. This view of the world has achieved great things in the field of natural philosophy. It can lead people a tremendous way forward when it comes to developing their interaction and communication with the external world. But the question arises as to whether this power, which, I might say, constitutes the glory and triumph of recent times, is also directly suited to mediating human interaction. A clear insight into this question can, in essence, only be provided by the social demands of recent times. These social demands, as they are usually formulated, could be only a kind of superficial view, in a sense only the symptom of something much deeper within human beings. This is particularly relevant for a spiritual scientific consideration.

But if we take an unbiased look at the way in which social structures and social relationships arose in earlier eras, and indeed, as they still arise in many cases today, right up to the cartels and trusts, we must say that the dominant forces within them are not intellectual ones, not those of a rational view of life, but rather life instincts, inner, unconscious feelings. And if we were to create social structures based on what proves to be such a magnificent intellectual force in the view of nature, they would probably have very little viability. For it is not insignificant that this power of the intellect has proved particularly significant in the contemplation of inanimate nature, and that the person who only wants to have a view of nature, who does not want to advance to a spiritual contemplation of things, is faced with an unsolvable mystery when it comes to advancing with his view from the inanimate to the animate. It should come as no surprise that something which, by its very nature, is of great significance for the inanimate, for the dead, cannot have the same carrying power, the same fruitfulness for that which is not only alive, but which is to develop into soulful social human formations.

And so we can say: in certain subconscious regions of the soul, the forces that were effective in social formations prevail; but on the other hand, human beings owe two of the strongest socially effective impulses to the present era with its special characteristics. And it is precisely for these two strong socially effective impulses that they must seek integration and orientation within the whole of social life.

One of the most significant social questions of the present day came to my mind thirty years ago when I attempted to address the problem of human freedom within the whole of human social life. This experience of freedom is actually as old as intellectual life itself. As intellectual life elevated humans to the point of grasping pure thought, through which they then also comprehend natural phenomena, they first became aware of their freedom. In earlier times, everything in intellectual life was mixed with something that was merely the result of organic processes, something that was instinctively rooted in the unconscious regions of the will or unconsciously rooted in emotional life. To see something as clearly and transparently as is the case in thinking, when thinking soars to clearly grasped, mathematically formulated laws of nature, to grasp something so clearly that one is immersed in it with one's whole being, has only become possible for humans in the time when they rose to pure thinking, which inspired Copernicus, Galileo, and their successors to newer scientific research. Thus, the experience of freedom is connected precisely with that which leads out of the instinctive powers that were formerly socially formative.

But when one approaches the problem of freedom with complete seriousness, one is thrown for a moment into a kind of emptiness that one feels when one takes it seriously — with all the shivers that emptiness, I would say, nothingness can instill in human beings. One comes to the following conclusion in particular: in earlier epochs, when humanity was more naive in terms of its spiritual life, when it had not yet reached the level of consciousness that prevails in modern times, views could exist that were more pictorial, that did not run in pure, abstract thought. But such pictorial thoughts are needed if one wants to immerse oneself in the complex social life of human beings. What leads us to understand how we should find our place in the world can never be determined by abstract thought.

In the lectures of the last few days, I have discussed how spiritual scientific development leads from abstract, dead thought back to living thought, through which one can actually penetrate not only inorganic, lifeless nature, but also the forms of living nature, the inner life of the soul worlds. But by contemplating this most modern development, human beings are once again bringing their consciousness closer to what was once present in earlier epochs in an instinctive way. I know that even today many people recoil when they are told that what ruled unconsciously in earlier epochs, what fertilized the imagination out of the unconscious, and so on, can be brought into consciousness through the kind of soul development I have described. And immediately one senses that behind such a demand lies something like a kind of philistinism, a kind of schoolmasterliness that wants to transform naivety into consciousness. One will only shy away from such a path to consciousness as long as one does not know that the experience of naivety, which was initially instinctive to human beings, is being restored, despite the consciousness of living thought. But this living thought then also leads us into the fluctuating concepts that play out in social life.

To illustrate this, I would like to point out one thing by way of introduction today. For example, there is a great deal of talk at present about capitalism, about the function of capital in the social order. There are countless definitions of what capital is. These definitions are often colored by party politics. But behind this diversity of definitions of capital lies something else entirely. One must simply be aware that even that which lives in the social structure of humanity, such as capitalism, cannot be grasped in sharply defined terms, but that one needs precisely those living concepts that once belonged to the instinctive, naive soul life and that today can once again become part of the conscious soul life. People need only look around to see what capital meant in Central Europe, in Germany, where a certain social development had begun later than in England, and what capital means in England, where, when a certain social development began, commercial capital was simply there, thanks to the previous stages of economic life, to establish what had to be achieved in Germany without commercial capital, through other forms of capital creation. If one looks at what the role of capital was in Central Europe and what it was in England, one soon finds that with concepts that are supposed to encompass social life, even in its individual forms, one cannot have anything sharply contoured, but that one must have something that touches on immediate reality at a point that is internally elastic in the idea itself, so that it can move on to other forms of the same social structure. And because we live in an age that is downright educated towards intellectualism, which can only live in sharply defined concepts, it is necessary that, in order to understand social demands, we find our way out of intellectualism into a living world of ideas, which can then in turn be translated into social impulses such as those that came from instincts in earlier epochs of human development.

The worldview referred to here is not meant to be anything theoretical. It is often accused of dogmatism, and when it is supposed to talk about social life, it is also accused of seeking utopias, i.e., dogmatism. All of this is unfounded. For what matters is not what one conceives in one term or another, but a certain attitude toward life as a whole, toward physical, soul, and spiritual life as a whole, an attitude toward the ability to grasp this life as a whole in its individual concrete forms in a realistic way.

This, however, opens up a certain perspective on the most important social demands of our time: If one considers human life itself with the means of a spiritual view, as I have developed it, one finds that the individual human life, like the development of humanity as a whole in history, is subject to certain phases. And these phases, which are also apparent on the surface, only reveal their essence when one looks into the spiritual connections. For example, it becomes apparent that neither children in their early years, nor children of compulsory school age, nor even young people under the age of twenty, live fully and with inner devotion in what has emerged as an intellectual way of thinking in the development of humanity. Basically, we only grasp intellectualism within ourselves out of an inner sympathy when we have entered the more mature age of our twenties. Then we begin to feel intellectualism as an inner soul structure. Until then, we actually feel our life, albeit instinctively, as if it first had to harden internally in a certain way according to guidelines that then appear as this soul skeleton. But our entire social life, which is understandably shaped by adults, is permeated by what is now, in a certain way, influenced by this intellectualism, even if intellectualism itself cannot be socially creative. It flows into what has become uncertain in our instincts. And so, in our current social structure, we have an inorganic interaction between instincts that have become uncertain and intellectualism that wants to enter social life but does not really fit in.

But this means that we basically form ideas about what is actually going on in social life that are completely different from the forces that are actually present in reality. Today, we mostly speak in a rather inauthentic sense about what prevails socially among people. Over the last three to four centuries, we as humanity have trained ourselves to shape everything into intellectualistic forms. We can do that as adults, but we cannot do it as long as we are children, as long as we are young people.

Young people develop forces that are quite different from intellectual forces. Children first develop forces, I would say, through which they are a single sensory organ, very similar to the sensory organ I have described as the spirit organ; only the child is more material in nature. It perceives its surroundings as a whole human being and transforms what it perceives into its own movement. It is an imitator. This imitation, which permeates the child's entire emotional life, is certainly not intellectual. Then the child enters the age of life, roughly from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, in which it is instructed to no longer imitate, but rather to absorb what is given to it as opinion and conviction by its adult environment.

Do not believe, ladies and gentlemen, that the author of The Philosophy of Freedom will say what he now has to say out of some reactionary instinct. What I have to say corresponds to a law of human development. From the change of teeth to sexual maturity, young people develop from within their being the need to listen to what can be a natural authority for them and what is given to them by that natural authority. Anyone who knows how to view life impartially can already tell themselves what a blessing it is for their inner harmony throughout their entire life if, at the age just mentioned, they were able to look up with such reverence to this or that authority, which they did not imitate, but which stood before them in such a way that they said to themselves: Through this human individuality, what I myself should be, what I myself want to be, is revealed to me; I listen to what he or she thinks and take that opinion into my soul.

For a real psychologist, the following even becomes apparent: one can argue at length that children of compulsory school age should only absorb what they already understand. Then one is actually only caring for this one age of the child, apart from the fact that endless trivialities have been piled up in the effort to always teach the child only what one believes the child “already understands.” Children understand more than many people believe, but they do not understand through intellectuality, but through their whole being. And then there is the other thing: that you are thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years old and something rises up from the depths of your soul, which is a reminiscence from, say, the age of eight. You got it from an authority; you absorbed it out of reverence; you didn't understand it in an intellectual sense at the time, but you became accustomed to what you absorbed with your whole being. What you became accustomed to sank into the depths of your soul. After decades, it resurfaces. One has become more mature. Now one understands it, now one brings it to life! It means an enormous amount for life in later years when one can bring what one has carried within oneself since childhood to new life in this way. This is something quite different from living in mere unaltered memories.

This other thing can now be based on a living art of education. An art of education that does not seek to give the child sharply defined concepts at that age, but rather living ones. The former are good for certain purposes in life. But in relation to the child, they are like taking hold of its hand and pressing it so that it cannot grow, so that it must remain small, so that it cannot take on new forms. Only when we advance to an art of education that conveys living concepts, which live on with the child, just as its limbs live on with it, which are therefore not sharply defined but have inner growth – only then do we give the child not only the right joy of life, but also the right vitality. When the child experiences what I have just indicated as something completely naive in its soul life, this is not intellectual understanding and comprehension. It is the acceptance of a revered authority that brings us vitality.

And then, after this period, we enter an age where we basically have no choice but to approach the world in such a way that, without immediately resorting to sharply defined concepts, the capacity for love lives within us, that an immersion in things lives within us in such a way that we sometimes draw out ideals that are quite illusory but all the more powerful, ideals that fuel our love.

Only when we have gone through all this do we enter the intellectual age without damage, I would say, to our full humanity. But what the older generations often teach young people today is actually something that is only appropriate for a later age. And so today, as teachers of young people, we often find ourselves in a situation where they cannot understand us, not just because of some random circumstances, but because of something deep within their nature.

In earlier times, forces developed in social life through which the old understood the young in a completely different way than is the case today. This is why this social gap has opened up between the old and the young. Those who understand our time as it must be understood when looking at the developments of the last three to four centuries will comprehend this. And it is not only through intellectual deepening, but also through the enlivening of our spiritual life that we must regain the ability through which adults can fully understand young people.

But that is only one side, only a very small link even within the social demands of the present: that the gap between the generations be bridged. It can only be done through an expansion of the whole inner human experience. Only those who strengthen today's intellectualistic soul life inwardly to lively thinking and spiritual insight, or at least accept the results of this thinking and insight, because they also enliven the whole soul, only they will find the possibility again to look fully into the life of a child, in order to seek from this child's life itself the forces through which one can communicate with it. But when one points to something like the gap that has opened up between old age and youth in our time, one is at the same time pointing to the gaps that exist between human beings, between men and women, between classes in our time. For just as mere intellectual life separates us from children, it also separates us, in essence, from other human beings. Only when one has developed living thinking, which in turn resembles certain instinctive perceptions of the world's existence, does one see that through this living thinking one can once again find one's place in the social order as firmly as instinctive man once did, so that social organisms were possible. One also finds that it is only through what one achieves by emptying one's consciousness, that is, by receiving inspiration from the spiritual world, what spiritual beings reveal, that one is able to truly understand other people, to see across the divides of class and gender.

This is the second stage of social coexistence. The first stage is that through the imaginative — as it used to be the instinctive immersion in the environment — one's own point of view is found. The second stage is that one finds the bridge to other people, to people who live in a different social context. Today, this is made extremely difficult for humanity; for basically, one does not judge from reality when one places oneself in social life based on one's feelings. Basically, one judges most unrealistically precisely when one believes one is judging most realistically. One only has to see how even leading personalities today want to put themselves into life, want to master this life, but basically do not come close to the reality of this life.

I would like to give an example, neither to take a position for or against the personality I am about to mention; nothing is to be said for or against, only the phenomenon is to be characterized. I would like to point to a particularly striking, radical personality in social activism in recent times, Rosa Luxemburg. When you got to know her as a person, you found yourself face to face with someone who actually approached you with completely bourgeois airs and graces: measured in her movements, measured in her speech, restrained in every single movement, in every single word. There was even a certain mildness, not something stormy, in this individuality. But when you heard her speak from the podium, she spoke in such a way—well, I'll give you a concrete example—that she said, for example: Yes, there have been ages in which people believed that they came from some spiritual worlds, that these spiritual worlds had placed them in social life. Today, she said, we know that humans once climbed around in trees in a highly indecent manner, naked, like monkeys, and that those who today occupy the most diverse positions in social life developed from these ape-like humans. And this was presented in a way that, I would say, was imbued with a certain religious impulse, not with the fire of immediate individual effectiveness, but in a way that large proletarian masses could best understand: with a certain measured dryness, so that it could also be understood with a certain dryness of feeling, and that despite the dryness of this feeling, it aroused a certain enthusiasm, because it was felt that Basically, all people are equal and all social differences have been swept away! — But what was said in this way was not spoken from within social life. It was spoken from a theory that certainly believed itself to be full of life. It created, I would say, a reality that, basically, cannot be reality, namely, a fruitful reality.

Like this striking personality, Rosa Luxemburg, most people today basically stand in social life: they talk about social life without their words pulsating with the power that comes from immediate life, from experiencing the social in human beings. This can be achieved by using the old instinctive power of observing social structures to find one's place in life and continue to build bridges to people of other social classes, other classes, other ages, and to individual human beings, to human individualities. In earlier eras, this was achieved through extraordinarily deep-seated human instincts.

They become powers of knowledge, conscious powers of knowledge, as human beings develop into spiritual organisms, into “sensory organs,” which they become as human totalities, as I have described, whereby they then live in the spiritual world without a physical body through their own will.

For the transition to another human being is always an unconscious or conscious bodiless feeling of what the other is. It is a gray theory to believe that we look at a person, see that they have an ear shaped in such a way, a nose shaped in such a way, a face shaped in such a way, and because we know that we also have a nose like that and a forehead shaped in such a way and so on, that we have an I, we conclude unconsciously that the other person also has an I. We do not do that. Anyone who can grasp the facts spiritually knows that when we face another human being, it is a matter of directly perceiving what lives in the other human being. One might say: the direct perception of the other is only the act of seeing, intensified into the spiritual-soul realm.

Certain forms of contemporary philosophy even arrive at this conclusion. Spiritual science shows that by consciously discovering the unconscious, instinctive force, human beings can live their way into other human individualities and only then fully enter into social life. But once we can point to such a spiritualization of the human soul through the intellectualism achieved at the stage of human development to which we have been raised, or rather through what can grow out of it, then social perspectives can also be found. However, only when one can grasp the spiritual in this way does one arrive at a direct experience of the impulse of freedom in the human being, with a power that dispels the former shudder.

Now, this impulse of freedom can only be truly grasped by the soul out of the fullness of human life. I would like to illustrate once again with the example of the art of education that it can only be grasped from a full experience.

What is the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was created from a spiritual worldview and outlook on life, actually based on? As a social institution, it seeks to position itself in contemporary social life in a way that is required by the forces of the present. Therefore, it is by no means built on the idea of being a school based on a particular worldview. It would be a completely false understanding of the principle of the Waldorf school to believe that children there should be taught any particular worldview. A worldview and outlook on life that is represented as spiritual is actually there for the teachers. And what is not theory but full life in this worldview and outlook on life can also be lived out in pedagogical skill, in didactic tact, in everything the teacher does, in the whole work of teaching and educating.

What is often said about Waldorf education in individual sentences is not important at all. Individual people can easily say in response to these individual sentences: Yes, this is what these and those teaching and educational methods want too. Basically, when you look at abstract principles, you can say that what can be said in abstract sentences about the teaching and educational methods of Waldorf schools can also be found elsewhere. What matters here is immediate life, which flows from a life-generating worldview and not from a mere concept-generating view of life.

What is achieved by this? Well, it is difficult to come up with clearly defined concepts when describing life. Therefore, I will express myself as follows: It is certainly the case that among the teaching staff at Waldorf schools, there are some who are not always exceptionally brilliant — one can say this without offending anyone. But even if the teacher has a wide range of physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities, it must be said that among the schoolchildren the teacher has in front of them, there may be some who will one day develop abilities in life that far exceed the teacher's own abilities.

It is therefore necessary to enable a pedagogy through which children of all ages can be treated in such a way that they not only attain the abilities that one has oneself, but that they may also develop unhindered abilities that one does not have oneself, but which are inherent in them. Even if one is not a genius oneself, one must not hinder the development of the child's genius. One can talk at length about how one should develop a child's individuality, not graft anything onto them, but bring out everything from within the child—one can say that, and if one looks only at the concept, it sounds wonderful, and one believes it to be something fruitful in life. But often what you mean by saying this is nothing more than: you develop in the child what you think could be its individuality, and that will not be an individuality that goes beyond the individuality of the teacher.

In Waldorf schools, everything is geared toward education in freedom. The innermost spiritual and soul aspects of the human being are, in fact, not touched at all by the Waldorf school method. They are touched just as little as when, for example, you plant a seed in the ground and let it develop freely through light and air, rather than attaching all kinds of sticks to it and tying it into a template. The spiritual and soul individuality of the child is a sacred thing, and those who recognize true human nature know that it follows entirely of its own accord the impulses exerted on it by its surroundings, by the whole world. Therefore, the teacher must remove anything that might hinder the development of this individuality, which is protected with sacred reverence. The obstacles that can arise from the physical, the soul, and also the spiritual can be understood through a genuine study of human nature, if this study of human nature is developed from an educational and psychological perspective. And it is precisely when one develops such a study of human nature that one learns to observe with a keen sense where any obstacle to the free development of individuality exists. There is no need to intervene harshly. One avoids imposing an alien form on this individuality. By seeing that there is an obstacle that must be removed, one removes it. Then the individuality knows how to develop through its own power in a way that can far exceed the abilities of the teacher.

But that means having real respect for human freedom! This human freedom requires that people find within themselves the impulses that guide and drive them in life. In earlier times, by instinctively living into their social environment, people absorbed something from their surroundings that then acted within them as moral and religious impulses. This, I would say, has been crippled in its carrying power by intellectualism. What in consciousness leads back to the same social impulses that were once acquired instinctively must first be developed.

This, however, confronts modern man with two things: on the one hand, that he must now seek his moral and religious impulses in his own individuality, that he can only find them where his soul develops its most original powers; on the other hand, that over the last three to four centuries, intellectualism has been cultivated to such an extent that it is regarded as the sole authority, which can no longer provide such direct spiritual experience, but can only look at natural life and organize it.

So, on the one hand, we are faced with what we as humanity are capable of achieving with our intellect within the natural world, albeit in a magnificent way. Humanity as a whole is also productive. We have seen this productivity of humanity emerge over the last three to four centuries in the magnificent transitions that have been found between the view of nature and technology. Anyone who can follow what humans have achieved through their ability to understand nature can also see how humanity has advanced in technical terms. Consider a simple example, say, how the in some ways ingenious Helmholtz discovered his ophthalmoscope.

If you want to understand this, you must consider how close his predecessors had already come — as if driven by scientific progress — and how he only had to take the very last step. One might say that scientific thinking as such finds its way into human beings and leads them forward. Then human beings become productive in the field of technology. For what he draws from nature lives within him as an inspiring gift. One can trace back to the most recent discoveries how, when someone becomes a scientist, what he absorbs pushes his mind, so to speak, from technicism to technicism, so that the inspiration of nature continues to have an effect. There is a power of inspiration!

Modern man lacks this power of inspiration where ethics, the will, religion, in short, everything that originates in the human soul and ultimately leads to social organization and social life, comes into play. Here we again need a force that works in the spiritual-soul realm just as the purely natural inspiring force works in our external technology. We have made extraordinary progress in our external technology. What we have achieved there, we as modern humanity must pay for with the fact that purely spiritual life has lagged behind for a while, nourished by old traditions in religious, moral, and social relationships. Today, however, we need the opportunity to arrive at immediate moral impulses out of human individuality in a full experience of freedom. Because we are faced with this social necessity, it was also possible for me to point out in my Philosophy of Freedom that there must be such a thing as moral intuition. And I already indicated at that time that what human beings can find in real moral impulses, which now only have an individual effect in modern life, and which strengthen them morally and ethically, can only come from a spiritual world. Thus, we are faced with the necessity of rising to spiritual intuitions precisely because we do not arrive at anything spiritually productive in our observations of the external world.

Those who are able to consciously place themselves in the inner experience of the technological age are perhaps most inclined to say, on the other hand: Since we are forced to overlook the lifelessness of technology and stick to the ground of this technology, we cannot draw moral impulses from what technology gives us, as older people could, who saw in storms and wind and rivers and stars a spiritual-soul element that they perceived as natural forces. We cannot do this because we have a knowledge of nature that has been purified of all this. We can therefore only gain our moral world if we grasp it directly in our spiritual individuality through free intuition.

But to do this, we need an inner, life-giving spiritual force. And I believe that this life-giving spiritual force can be given by immersing ourselves in the results of the worldview and outlook on life that I have developed here. This view of the world and of life does not want to say: this is so and that is so in ideas and concepts, but wants to bring ideas and concepts only so that they become something so alive in us, in a spiritual way, like the lifeblood itself, so that human activity is stimulated, not just human thinking. Thus, what can be developed as such a spiritual view of the world and life appears at the same time as a social impulse alongside an impulse of knowledge.

This may justify saying that the social demands of the present, as they are often formulated in public life today, appear to those who can grasp the whole signature of our time with an unbiased eye of the soul that they are actually symptoms, symptoms of the fact that the old instinctive certainties of social life have been lost and that we are faced with the necessity of consciously establishing a spiritual life that in turn provides the same impulses that once provided the instinctive life of ancient times. Because one can believe that such stimulation of the innermost spiritual life forces of human beings really corresponds to the social demands of our time, one would also like to speak of time and its social demands in this sense in this time of severe social trials.

Sometimes, even in the present, one has the feeling that the immediate needs of the day, the misery of the moment, are so great that one should devote oneself solely to them and only then, when a little relief has been provided in this regard, should one look for further perspectives. Of all the objections that have been made to me since I tried, at the urging of a certain circle of friends, to talk about social life again and to participate in all kinds of things related to this social life, I have best understood the numerous letters that have come to me again and again, especially two years ago, with the content: What do all these social ideas actually want? Here in Central Europe, it's first and foremost a question of bare bread! This objection came up again and again. One can understand it. But in another respect, one must also find it understandable that the earth, in terms of fertility, is not in a position to withhold from people what it can give them in any age, if only people can find those social structures through which what the earth can give can flow into these social structures in the right way and be worked out within these social structures.

That is why I also consider the opinion to be justified that it is certainly an extraordinarily loving and good thing to devote oneself to the immediate situation of the moment, and no one is prevented from doing so by considerations such as those made here. But just as this is good, it must also be said that what can be done may be good for the moment, but on the other hand, social understanding must be achieved as quickly as possible so that the conditions that cause people to fall into such hardship and misery do not arise again.

The fact that the old utopian and intellectualistic formulations of social issues are no longer adequate should have become clear to people when some of those who, until recently, spoke with incredible certainty about what should be in social life were then confronted with what they should now do. Truly, there has hardly ever been greater helplessness in social life than among those who seemed to know most certainly how social structures should be formulated, if only the old could be cleared away as quickly as possible.

The experiment in this direction has led to the most terrible forces of destruction in Eastern Europe. And it is an illusion if humanity today believes that, without thorough social thinking, feeling, and experience, by merely continuing the old formulations, it could enter into anything other than forces of destruction. The specter of Eastern Europe is what looms menacingly over the West. But this view should not leave us inactive; rather, it should urge us to search at every moment for living social forces, for a living formulation of social demands, since the abstract and utopian ones have proven to be fruitless.

The next lectures will show how this can be done in detail. Today, I just wanted to give a kind of introduction to show that behind what is characterized in words as social ideas lies something deeper, something that is connected with a transformation of the whole soul life.

This has recently begun to be understood even in proletarian circles. And anyone who looks around knows that social demands, and especially the feelings toward them, are undergoing a very significant process of transformation. The old slogans are already being recognized more or less as fruitless. And it is already being emphasized in many quarters that we must move on to the spiritual, that moral and religious impulses must once again permeate social life. But we do not yet have the life we really need.

Our age believes itself to be quite real and realistic, and does not realize how theoretical it actually is, especially when it comes to setting social demands. That — and perhaps this can be said in conclusion — cannot really be the task today to immediately set new social or even different ideals. We have no need for abstract expressions of ideals. What we lack is not this abstract inclination toward idealism. What we need is something else: the experience of the spiritual, not merely the conception of the ideal. What we need is not merely to have the spirit in concepts, but in such liveliness that it, I might say, walks among us as human beings in all our activities.

If we understand the spirit in this way as something alive, then we will also be able to rise to it as something socially effective. In contrast, we can say that today we do not need mere formulations of ideals and social demands. We need something that gives us the strength to follow the ideals, that gives us inner life, that makes these ideals glow, something that arouses our will to full, fruitful enthusiasm for the ideals, for spiritual life.