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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 231 through 240 of 482

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171. Goethe and the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century: Fifteenth Lecture 29 Oct 1916, Dornach

It is true that today, and for a long time, there have been many people who know that social conditions in the world have become such that the rest of life has also become the same, and that many things need to be tackled in order to give life, especially the social structure, a new shape.
Jaurès, the socialist, who was certainly one of the most honest of the ambitious personalities of the present, was intensively concerned with all the fundamental questions of social life in the present. And it can be said that he gathered together for his understanding everything that a person today can gather from knowledge of nature, from history, from social observation, in order to arrive at views on what needs to be done to solve the issues facing people today in a practical way. Jaurès was not one of those superficial people who develop a social system out of a few subjective ideas they happen to like, a system they then want to impose on the world.
174a. Central Europe Between East and West: Eighth Lecture 20 May 1917, Munich

Freedom is only the basis in the interaction between soul and soul, that on which it depends. And the fundamental nerve of freedom is, namely, freedom of thought. If we come to understand this second link of humanity, the soul alongside the physical, then we will no longer confuse freedom and brotherhood, but will say: brotherhood is necessary because people must establish a social order in the sense of brotherhood. A social structure in the sense of brotherhood must come about, and until people are seized by right, practical ideas of brotherhood, they will not be able to find state structures in which people can live together reasonably.
But if that were the case, an organism with living things coming out everywhere, then that would be an organism with which we can compare the whole social life on earth. But that means that the entire life of man cannot be absorbed into the state order at all.
206. The Development of the Child up to Puberty 07 Aug 1921, Dornach
Translated by Hanna von Maltitz

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] If we want to fathom the meaning of the materialistic age we need to research how the combination of important fundamental forces add up to the development of mankind. Next we need consider human evolution from a specific angle today.
This education however is necessary in the human race; without it humankind will enter more and more into social chaos. The actual results—it is like I said yesterday—the actual results of intellectualism and materialism in science, the actual outcome of our present day scientific leaning is a social condition which is chaotic and rising in such an alarming manner in Eastern Europe.
This is essentially what must penetrate present day humanity because with the schooling of natural thinking developed over the last decades, it is impossible to also accomplish the most essential social concepts which we need. Something must live in the social concepts which recognise morality at the same time in its cosmic implications.
70b. Ways to a Knowledge of the Eternal Forces of the Human Soul: Ways of Knowing the Eternal Powers of the Human Soul 10 Jan 1916, Zurich

Of course, dear attendees, I can only mention the very most fundamental principles here; everything else can be found in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in the second part of my so-called “Occult Science”.
One also learns to recognize that the one who, for example, wanted to criticize that a wise providence did not do as well as he thinks in his [own] wisdom, even without the basis of pain, [to be able to evoke the corresponding , one recognizes that this demand is about the same as if someone wanted to demand of the mathematician that he should work towards the fact that one should not look for 180 degrees in a triangle in its three angles. This is connected with a law, with inner laws. But these laws are now being learned. And so, by acquiring a new research of the inner soul life from the ideas about pain and death, one has brought out of thinking and will those entities of the soul which, by living in them now, show one how one is in the spiritual world, what is beyond birth - or let us say conception - and death in man.
Therefore, the spiritual researcher completely agrees with the natural scientist – and it is a fundamental error to repeatedly state some kind of contradiction between natural science and true spiritual research.
67. The Eternal human Soul: The Historical Life of Humanity and Its Riddles 14 Mar 1918, Berlin

Just at this example, one also sees how narrowly that which history should teach is associated with the judgement of the social or other world relations, so that you can expect from a consideration of the historical life of humanity that also some light falls on the judgement you have to exert for the social and economic living together of the human beings.
There he says to himself, you have to look at the soul development in such a way that you describe it social-psychologically. This arises to him from a necessary way of thinking of modern time to take the social life, the common being together of human beings into consideration. He says this to himself on one side. Now he has no possibility to look at the social in the soul life or at the mental in the social life following a set pattern. He turns to the psychologists, asks how the psychologists look today at the single individual souls.
4. The Philosophy of Freedom (1964): The Idea of Freedom
Translated by Michael Wilson

[ 35 ] Acting out of freedom does not exclude the moral laws; it includes them, but shows itself to be on a higher level than those actions which are merely dictated by such laws.
Thou kindly and human name, thou that dost comprise all that is morally most lovable, all that my manhood most prizes, and that makest me the servant of nobody, thou that settest up no mere law, but awaitest what my moral love itself will recognize as law because in the face of every merely imposed law it feels itself unfree.”
For the laws of the state, one and all, just like all other objective laws of morality, have had their origin in the intuitions of free spirits.
174b. The Spiritual Background of Human History: Seventh Lecture 12 Mar 1916, Stuttgart

This adaptability, this receptivity, is to some extent the first fundamental characteristic of the Russian people. A second fundamental characteristic is a certain dislike on the part of the Russian people for what we call the permeation of life with intellectuality. The Russian person does not like to be constrained by many precisely defined laws in social life. He demands, as it were, a kind of arbitrary existence of the ego. That the intellect spans a network of legality and that the individual then strictly adheres to such forms of intellect in social life, that is what the Russian man, at least practically, does not want to understand, even if he sometimes goes into it theoretically.
The fact that the Russian people have a certain aversion to intellectualism will make it possible to create certain social institutions with the Russian people that will only be possible if the aforementioned marriage really takes place.
32. Collected Essays on Literature 1884-1902: Ludwig Jacobowski's Bright Days 19 May 1900,

This diversion of the individual experience into the general is a fundamental trait of Jacobowski's personality. It works in him like a natural process of life in the human organism.
The way in which an artist who is capable of such things relates to life phenomena that appear new and “modern” in his time is evident in the part of “Leuchtende Tage” entitled “Großstadt” (Big City). Here, a spirit speaks of the social life of our day that does not see it in the perspective of the moment, but rather in the perspective that arises from the contemplation of the great laws of the world.
The serious play of the imagination will seek eternal laws even where they do not impose themselves in reality. But it is precisely this universality that prevents symbolism from being exaggerated in a one-sided way.
51. The History of the Middle Ages: Lecture IV 08 Nov 1904, Berlin
Translator Unknown

Together with the land, the jurisdiction and the police authority would be transferred. King's law and the law of the small vassal came into being. As the result of this innovation we see the development of a powerful official class, not on a basis of stipend, but of land owning.
Thus we see the accomplishment of important spiritual and social changes. This alone, however, would not have led to an event which proved to be of the greatest importance, a material revolution: the founding of cities.
The spiritual content of Mohammedanism is, essentially, based on simple monotheistic ideas confined to a divine fundamental Being, whose nature and form is not closely investigated, but to whose will men surrender, because they have faith.
303. Soul Economy: Body, Soul and Spirit in Waldorf Education: Education Based on Knowledge of the Human Being II 25 Dec 1921, Dornach
Translated by Roland Everett

Spencer had already formulated his most important and fundamental ideas before Darwinism spread. So-called Darwinism aptly demonstrates how scientific, intellectualistic thinking approaches questions and problems that result from a deep-seated longing in the human soul.
One can truly say that Darwin observed the data offered to his sense perceptions with utmost exactitude; that he searched for the underlying laws in a very masterly way; and he considering everything that such observations could bring to his powers of comprehension.
Can we walk this path without damaging our personal life, on the one hand, and shunning a social life with others, on the other? Anthroposophy has the courage to say that, with the ordinary established naturalistic approach, it is impossible to attain suprasensory knowledge.

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