October 15, 2023
We are excited to bring to you the second half of GA 190, presented as one collection entitled The Spiritual Background of the Social Question. Given the poor quality of the manuscript, we hand-typed five of the translations made in 1954. The translator is unknown, except for Lecture V as indicated.
The message of Rudolf Steiner's address to the Anthroposophical Society in the spring following the end of World War I seems even more applicable to our current times. He offers a stern warning about the increasingly chaotic state of humanity and the need for personal and social transformation on a very deep level. This is no homecoming speech putting challenging times behind. Rather, it is a call for mankind to awaken from its dream-like state and evolve by spiritualizing our inner thinking, feeling and willing. Only by transforming ourselves can we then reflect that inner state outward through our actions to develop a necessary threefold social organism with the separation of the social realms of spirituality, rights, and economics.
We encourage you to read the lectures themselves to gain a full grasp of the profound teachings given by Dr. Steiner. Merely to entice you to read further, we offer what we view as some key points here.
Mankind has fallen into a state of confusion brought about by materialistic thinking and lack of connection with supersensible life. This is the principal sickness of our time. Scientific concepts are nothing else than scientific absence of thought. Such dead thinking about the material world without spiritualization results in superficiality and thoughtlessness. Nature and Natural Science contains no thoughts. Truthfulness demands something quite different than blind acceptance of authority and is being avoided by people who refuse to see reality.
- We as human beings must actively choose to develop ourselves. We no longer continue to automatically develop past age twenty-seven. At that age, people face a crisis in which they must actively choose to develop further. Avoidance of the opportunity to evolve results in an inner desolation of people who deliver themselves to possession by a materialistic, Ahrimanic nature. We are still living in a time in which Ahriman “plays ball with men, while he lulls them into illusion about what really is to come to pass.”
- Our inner states of being are reflected in our speech, art, literature, education systems, and other social structures. The Social Question is also a spiritual question. Just as each individual person must “cross the threshold” to the spiritual world by developing their own thinking, feeling and willing, society must do the same. Mankind must develop a Threefold Social Organism “to rise up above the mere babel of words which often rules the present time.” Steiner explains: Individualism must rule in the spiritual organism. Democracy must rule in the rights/state organism because this has to do with the relationships among people. Socialism must rule in the sphere of the economic organism because this has to do with how people associate professionally — association that arises in connection with production and consumption. But the three independent members must appear separated in their characteristic qualities and yet operate in synergy as Individual-Social-Democracy.
- Those who retain an old soul-culture fall prey to decay and unhealthy decadence while others choose to evolve. So it is that people can develop to live side by side "like two alien races, perhaps with even stronger points of difference than between two alien races." In favor of a three-fold society, Steiner foretells that the outdated views of the world such as the enforcement of different territories and cities by bygone royalty "will be the ruin of humanity."
- Mankind is living mostly out of the Ahrimanic metabolic (imaginative-bodily) lower system rather than the heart (inspirational-psychic) and head (intuitive-spiritual). “When one says that the soul is out of order in this or that person, it is, in reality, his stomach and intestines which are out of order. All that people call ‘soul-life’ is, basically speaking, only a verbal expression for events in the metabolic system.”
- The Spirit can be reached only by genuinely putting the will (metabolic/imaginative-bodily functions) into thinking (head/intuitive-spiritual functions), so that "thinking becomes an act like any other, like hewing wood." He says that the will to activity is lacking in men today, the will to real inner activity. Our task is not to merely talk about Spirit but rather to "really to plunge down into practical life, to understand how practical life must be handled."
He closes, "Therefore, to an ever greater extent, you must really avoid turning away from life, must to an ever greater extent seek really to understand life, to look into life; otherwise the same phenomena of which I have spoken will happen again and again. Examples can be given by hundreds and thousands."